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| …and a toast for peace | | |
ABID SHAH
NEW DELHI, DEC 15: Quite a few factors are coming together to cast their shadow over Centre’s initiative to take the heat out of Jammu and Kashmir’s separatist leaders campaign against New Delhi and involve them in meaningful talks in order to bring peace and stability to the Valley.
The impossibility of this again looms large over the Valley in the wake of sharp reaction in Srinagar to the clean chit given by the Central Bureau of Investigation to the local cops held earlier after two women were found dead in Shopian amid allegations of rape and murder against the police.
The State Government that plays its role in concert with that of the Centre unfortunately took the Shopian incident as a mere case to be met by one probe after the other as protests intensified while missing out its socio-political symptoms.
Now they are unfolding like a bombshell. Not just separatists but the main Opposition People’s Democratic Party led by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and her daughter too is blaming the Government for the inadequacies of today’s criminal justice system where photos showing blood smeared face of the victims are being pointed to in order to refute the CBI findings.
Under such circumstances the impunity that somehow the State forces have come to enjoy not just in Jammu and Kashmir but through better part of the country is becoming an issue. In this particular case the argument offered by Government’s detractors is that persons who should have been prosecution witnesses like doctors and lawyers besides a couple of civilians are being put in the dock by the CBI for allegedly trying to put the blame on the cops for deaths that occurred due to drowning.
Whatever may be the truth vis-à-vis the unfortunate end of the two Shopian ladies, the substance of this case has long before been taken over by the symbolic nature that it has been assuming given the rampant incidents of deaths, rapes, and torture in police custody all over the country.
Even as multiple probes in the Shopian case were on another death in a Srinagar police station of a Jammuite rocked the winter Capital of the State; and this, the death of Rajneesh Sharma to be precise, looked like a foil though from a different social and regional denomination to the Shopian case vis-à-vis their victims.
Though two wrongs do not make a right, a surfeit of misdeeds dogs Jammu and Kashmir where police of late have been in the dock for tempering with evidence and changing weapons of offence in as important a case as murder. Sadly, the public response to this has thus far been along the sectarian divide though such incidents cut across this or many other distinctions to recur merrily and haunt not any one social group but citizens in general. The luckier lot seldom realises this until the rot spills over to reach one’s homestead. The recent Amandeep murder case in Jammu can be one such pointer.
And if Amandeep’s tragic end is to be viewed alongside those of Nilofar, Asia, Rajneesh and the attempted murder of Fazal Haq Qureshi, Jammu and Kashmir may look like a paradise for musclemenship where desperadoes have been going about their vicious business with alacrity, often taking cover of lawmen as also laymen, depending upon whichever of them suits them.
Only days before today’s Shopian protests Fazal Haq Qureshi a hawk-turned-dove in Kashmir politics was shot at where it was said that the bullet did hit him but missed its mark that is his peace mission. Laudable though this may sound and more so from the mandarins of Home Ministry here, the question that stares the people in the face throughout the troubled State is as to who is safe when so eulogised a figure as Qureshi could be turned into a bleeding heap of a man right in the summer Capital.
The powers-that-be point to Qureshi’s reluctance to keep armed police guards in the wake of gruesome attempt on his life, but most people who could never imagine the luxury to have armed bodyguards at their beck and call cannot do anything better than to trust their fate.
And amid such lengthening shadows of fear peace, indeed, turns out to be a distant dream. Its talk cannot be a lullaby to turn the people away from the harsh realities around them. They go on holding the police responsible for so many things as shown by their outrage and angry eruptions with a frightening punctuality.
Police on the other hand look to politicos for protection and convenience of keeping a tab over citizens without exceptions. This is what was done through a ban on pre-paid mobile telephones since November 1 this year through a Union Home Ministry order. Ever since the Centre’s fiat has been challenged in the Supreme Court through a public interest litigation by J&K National Panthers Party leader Bhim Singh.
Whatever view the court may take of the Home Ministry move, the fact is that a thick pall of suspicion has been rising over the Valley despite Government as also separatists gearing up to raise the toast for peace.
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