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| Dear woman, thy name is 'fighter'! | | Alleged abuses in Kashmir agitate Supreme Court lawyer | | B L KAK
NEW DELHI, AUG. 21: She is not an ordinary Indian woman. She is reported to be eager, anxious for taking up cudgels with all those who have committed atrocities against Kashmirs. And as she launches a crusade against abuses in Kashmir, she obviously has Indian security personnel, particularly the Army, in her mind. She? She is Sonia Raj Sood, a Supreme Court lawyer.
Sonia Sood has just been quoted by a French wire agency as saying: "My longer term goal is to have some of the Army out (of Kashmir)--and definitely out of the civilian areas". Quite interesting revelation: Just one visit to the troubled Valley of Kashmir by Sonia Sood turned her into a crusader. And she is reported to have epitomized her assessment in two liners: "You may read about it but you only really understand it when you get to Srinagar. You realise that atrocities are being committed against an entire race and...they are being committed by our Army".
Why her crusade? Her reported reply: Pain, suffering and trauma she saw in Kashmir prompted her to launch her own one-woman campaign to persuade Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, to rein in the troops. Since that first trip to Kashmir in February this year, the 40-year-old Supreme Court advocate has criss-crossed India, Pakistan and Britain in a bid to persuade prominent personalities to write letters to the Indian Prime Minister urging him to order a halt to human rights violations there.
Sonia Sood was once married to a Maharashtra "prince" and lived in a "palace" near Mumbai. She has let it be known that she launched her campaign, twisting the arms of colleagues and political leaders until they dashed off letters to Manmohan Singh. Subsequently, in Pakistan, she managed to influence a section of parliamentarians to write to the Indian Prime Minister. Being a lawyer, Sonia Sood succceeded in receivng the support of the Islamabad Bar Asociation.
Later, during her visit to Britain, she got into touch with a string of politicians and lawyers. She was reported to have felt encouraged when members of the All Parliamentary Group on Kashmir in Britsh Parliament threw in their lot as did a host of leading activists, including Tony Benn, from the Thirld World Solidarity group. Sonia Sood's trip to Britain, it was reported, also prompted a spate of letters to Manmohan Singh from civic and religious leaders as well as from top lawyers.
Sonia Sood's next goal is to get leaders in the United States to put pressure on the Indian Prime Minister until he makes good the promise he made during a visit to Srinagar in May that there will be “zero tolerance” for rights violations. Rights groups in Kashmir claim that atrocities are regularly committed by the security forces, but the military denies this and says all complaints are investigated and perpetrators prosecuted.
But Sonia Sood is reported to be of the view that to the contrary in fact very little has been done to halt the abuses. She has also been quoted as saying that "a culture of impunity" has developed in the decades that Indian soldiers have been deployed among the Kashmiris. “When an Army has been in a civilian area for an extraordinarily long time, atrocities will take place,” she has stated, adding: “When a soldier is not allowed to go home for two years, he will look for women there – which means there’s rape all the time". And according to her, other abuses include beating up of locals as well as abductions, imprisonment without trial and extra-judicial killings.
While human rights groups in the Valley put the number of rapes at about 10 a year in Kashmir, Sonia Sood argues that many go unreported for fear of further victimisation and because of the stigma that rape attaches in the Muslim-majority community. |
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