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| Shopian unifies separatist, Govt lawyers in Valley | | Justice delayed by one day in all courts of law in Kashmir | |
Ahmed Ali Fayyaz
Early Times Report
Early Times Report
SRINAGAR, Dec 23: In two years of the outbreak of armed insurgency in Kashmir valley, High Court Bar Association (HCBA) had excommunicated over a dozen of its members on account of their appointment as Government’s advocates and standing counsels in 1991. Even as few of the appointees mustered courage to join and perform (under Police protection) what a number of the senior HCBA members themselves embraced till January 1990, most of them preferred life to profession. Legal practitioners in the two diagonally opposite camps didn’t see eye-to-eye with each other for years.
Eighteen years down the line, Valley has reached a situation where---for the first time---pro-Azadi HCBA would be publicly in defence of an advocate of Omar Abdullah’s National Conference-led coalition government in the court of law. A former constituent of the separatist Hurriyat Conference and an active organ of the secessionist movement in Kashmir valley since 1990, HCBA has declared to provide defence to all the six doctors and five lawyers who have been charged with making criminal conspiracy and fabricating evidences in the matter of investigation of the death of two young women in Shopian in mysterious circumstances on May 29th this year.
Those enjoying HCBA’s “full moral and legal support” include Government’s Public Prosecutor in the court of District & Sessions Judge Shopian, Sheikh Mubarak, who happens to be a relative of senior NC leader, Sheikh Mansoor, and his son, Sheikh Rafi, of Kachhdora village. Slain legislator Sheikh Mansoor as well as his son have been NC’s MLAs from Shopian. Mubarak had been appointed as PP by Minister of Law & Parliamentary Affairs, Ali Mohammad Sagar, in September---nearly four months after the volcanic “rape-cum-murder” of the unmarried Aasiya Jan and the married Neelofar Jan. According to the CBI chargesheet, Mubarak, his predecessor PP Mohammad Yousuf and President of Bar Association Shopian Abdul Majeed Mir were among five lawyers, six doctors and two civilians who harassed witnessed allegedly for the purpose of implicating “innocent” Police officials in the matter of rape and murder that had never happened.
Love-hate relationship across the ideological divide had shown symptoms of a remarkable change even earlier when Sagar’s establishment appointed one of the senior HCBA leader’s son-in-law as a standing counsel for Omar Abdullah’s government. Even in recent times, acrimony was so deep-rooted that the former HCBA President Zaffar Shah’s presence alongside then Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and a large number of pro-India politicians on occasion of the Golden Jubilee event of Daily Aftab at SKICC would merit a page one number in J&K newspapers.
What Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s PDP did to Hurriyat from 1999 to 2008, Omar Abdullah’s party and government have done to both by playing ‘second-fiddle politics’, intelligently but perhaps dangerously, in the last one year. Jumping into the vociferous crowd, which essentially can not representative of the majority, has given the Chief Minister short term dividend of insulation against the separatist and the New Delhi-backed pseudo-separatist sting.
Political analysts insist that such kind of strategy was fraught with dangerous consequences, as the year 2008 has brought home to Mufti and his PDP. Hardliners like Syed Ali Shah Geelani have been triumphantly referring to the senior NC and PDP leaders’ statements in order to establish that Kashmir was a political problem and, one day in near or far future, it would have to be resolved “in accordance with the UN resolutions and aspirations of the people of the state”. In an oversimplification, they make the point that NC or PDP, both were “India’s night watchmen” who would have to clear out like Syed Mir Qasim did for Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah in 1975. This comes as brazen negation to Dr Farooq Abdullah’s ideology which he retained against heavy odds since 1990.
Remarkably again, Omar’s government put four of its Police officers, including an SP, behind bars for nearly two months in the Shopian aftermath and hired the country’s most expensive lawyers only to ensure that none of the detainees got bail from any court. Thus came a day when the Valley witnessed all from HCBA to Omar government’s advocates to the specially engaged attorneys pushing arguments against the Police officials and holding them guilty of “rape and murder” in Shopian. CBI has obviously failed them all by establishing the reverse.
It has been marked with interest that Omar Abdullah’s government was more loyal than the king in arresting and detaining those held guilty in the same matter by Jan Commission but those indicted by CBI---including a Chief Medical Officer and a Public Prosecutor--- are continuously retaining their positions and postings in the state government.
Meanwhile, work remained suspended today in most of the courts in entire Valley as lawyers stayed away from business in response to HCBA’s call against CBI’s act of “giving clean chit to criminals and framing those who had raised their voices against rape-cum-murder of Shopian”. Groups of lawyers held demonstrations in Shopian and few other towns to assert that they would take the Shopian battle to International Court of Justice.
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