Early Times Report
Jammu, July 18: Situation in Kashmir is going from bad to worse with each passing day. It's not just that uneducated or semi-literate youth are joining terrorist ranks. Things have gone beyond. Even well-educated Kashmiri youth are taking to gun to achieve what they call azadi from occupied forces.
The latest case is one of Abdul Mannan Wani, 26-year-old research student of Applied Geology at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). Wani went missing in January only to appear on social media holding a grenade launcher. The other day, he mailed a letter a news agency in which he described himself "as a former PhD scholar from the AMU and currently a member of Hizbul Mujahideen".
Throughout the letter, Wani talks about "occupation" by India and how it is "manufacturing narratives" and "circulating new discourses" to justify its "military presence and oppressive measures to contain the populace of Jammu and Kashmir".
"Our mission is to liberate our land from foreign illegal occupation and thus to create an environment of peace and justice wherein every thought and ideology would be discussed and debated and people will be given their right to chose whatever they like," Wani's letter said.
Wani also quotes Malcolm X, the assassinated American human rights activist, and responds to a bureaucrat and a politician, without naming them, for their justifications to propagate India's cause and against death.
"We are soldiers. We don't fight to die but to win, we don't feel dignity in death, but we do feel dignity in fighting (Indian) occupation, its military might, its oppression, its tyranny, its collaborators and most of all its ego and if/when we die while fighting all this, we do feel dignity in that death," Wani letter further said.
Not just this. He also quotes NCERT textbook to describe a terrorist as "one who targets civilians indiscriminately to get their demands fulfilled".
All this shows that the causes of the rot in Kashmir are very deeper and that the authorities have to take remedial measures to retrieve the situation and ensure that Jammu and Ladakh, the state's two other regions, remain unaffected.
In the mean time, the Jammu & Kashmir have initiated legal proceedings against a new portal for circulating a letter, which they termed as a "propaganda material". It has acted very promptly. "Police have taken cognizance of the propaganda material circulated by a news portal involving a proscribed organization, Hizbul Mujahideen," a police spokesman said in Kashmir. |
