Omar Abdullah keeps coming to Delhi every now and then and the reasons are not hard to find.With total anarchy in Kashmir he seeks his little spa in Delhi,eases himself off by transfering his worries to whoever cares to carry the cross of Omar's blunders.
But yesterday was different.
For once he had an agenda.He was here,we are told, to push for removal of AFSPA or as the bleeding hearts would say,to make it more humane.Humane being the key word here.Now imagine here is a country beset with insurgency and here is an army which is fighting the likes of Lashkar and Jaish not to mention Hizbul and others and is expected to be "humane".It reminds me of Mark Antony's famous lines(from Shakespare's Julius Ceaser) '"we are so meek and gentle with these butchers".They who trade in death and their sympathesizers seek a humane face of the enemy!
It makes for an interesting reading as to how our neighbours in the subcontinent are handling their insurgencies.The Srilankan army simply bulldozed the LTTE into submission without a care in the world about collateral or any damages whatsoever.The country that is so worried about India's human right excesses in Kashmir uses air power,artillery,infantry and navy wherever needed to quell its insurgencies and after doing all this have the gall to lecture us on our human rights.
The argument for removal of AFSPA is that things have improved in Kashmir and hence it is no longer needed.Well have they?
The Army has made it clear time and again they do not wish to enagage themselves in counter insurgency operations yet it is being extensively used to do so.Now let us understand what it means to take off AFSPA and ask army to enagage in counter insurgency operations.They will have to seek a warrant from local police everytime before they have to raid a hideout or act on a tip off.What a dumbhead one has to be to believe that the terrorists meanwhile would munch biryani and wait at the "appointed spot" till the time army gets a search warrant.
The army's record in counter insurgency has been close to impeccable.It has instituted enquires and initiated action against its own people found to be guilty of any form of human rights violations.A concerted and orchestrated campaign has been unleashed by the separatists and the bleeding hearts to tarnish the image of the army.The NHRC and other institutions of the State have found that less then 0.02% of the complaints of human right violations carried any weight and the rest have simply been unsubstainted and baseless.Now this new demand of setting up "greviance cells" would simply mean that more unsubstantiated complaints would be lodged and then used by the bleeding hearts and some sections of the media to simply cast more aspersions on an institution that makes us all proud.
While we understand that the Manmohan Singh government wants to be seen as doing "something" to "assuage" the feelings of the "alienated" Kashmiri Muslims but pray what an Eid gift would it be to tie the arms of your armed forces behind their backs and make them sitting ducks so that the "alienated" population armed with stones,bullets and Islamic venom could tear them to shreds and we here in Delhi would await for the bleeding hearts to give us character certificates for good human rights record.
"Roots In Kashmir" is an initiative launched by us, the Kashmiri Pandit Youth, to reclaim our Roots that identify us. Even though we have been hounded out of our homes and hearths in the Kashmir valley, our "Roots" are very much anchored in the Vitasta Valley. This is an initiative to protest and raise the general awareness of public to a level where our "fight for our roots" is felt, heard and acted upon. rootsinkashmir@outlook.com
Showing posts with label Disappearances of Kashmiris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disappearances of Kashmiris. Show all posts
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Instigated violence....
We had never had any doubts about where it all came from but here is the proof from one of the channels which is arguably pro-separatist. Listen to how Geelani's hounds want more "martyrs".
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/kashmir-intercept-10-15-people-more-must-be-martyred-36362
Monday, February 22, 2010
The Exiles Dreaming of a return to Kashmir-Andrew Buncombe(in THE INDEPENDENT-UK)
The exiles dreaming of a return to Kashmir
The 400,000 Hindus driven out by Muslim extremists 20 years ago hope talks beginning this week will bring them a step closer to going home. But does it suit the Indian government to prolong their misery?
By Andrew Buncombe
Like all the others, Mharaj Kak remembers the date and he remembers the threat that changed their lives forever. He had been living with his extended family in Srinagar, their city-centre home, a five-storey wooden house in the centre of the city built by his great-grandfather.
"It was the night of 19 January 1990 when the mullahs told us all to leave the valley," he said. "We had to leave everything. There was a mass exodus. From all the mosques, there was this message sent throughout the valley that the Kashmiri Pandits had to leave immediately, or we would be killed."
So the Hindus of Kashmir, better known as the Kashmiri Pandits, were forced to flee the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountains in which their families had lived for centuries, driven out by Muslim extremists, and sometimes the Muslim neighbours they had lived alongside for generations. In just three months, more than 400,000 Hindus were scattered across India and beyond. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, and only about 60,000 stayed behind.
Two decades later, the government of India says it is determined to help those who want to return to the homes they were forced to leave. But the Pandits say the government does little but talk. It has provided no security, no homes, no livelihoods and put in place none of the confidence-building measures vital for them to feel able to make the journey back to Kashmir, they say. Even now, many are still enduring lives of quiet misery in inadequate refugee camps.
They believe that while the plight of the Muslim population of Kashmir, living in one of the most heavily militarised places on earth, continues to garner international attention, they have become the forgotten, overlooked people of history. Some even believe the Indian government has deliberately kept them impoverished to allow it to claim it is not just Muslims who have suffered in the struggle over Kashmir.
Ramesh Kumarana hung on until October 1990. By then, the threats and violence by militant groups such as Hizb-ul-Mujahideen came almost daily. One of his brothers was killed. He and his family had no alternative but to flee south. Today, the college-trained pharmacist who once ran his own business in Srinagar is among the Pandits who run tiny clothes-shops at a scruffy market in the centre of Delhi. To supplement his income, he sells bags of Kashmiri walnuts. He shrugs helplessly as he points to the way in which he is now forced to support his wife and two children.
"I am ready to go back to Kashmir, my heart is there," he said, standing next to his shop with his smiling 12-year-old son, Mohit. "It is my birthplace and I want to go back there. But my son was born in Delhi, it's my responsibility to take care of him. I visited Kashmir in 2003. They said, 'You can come but you are a tourist and you must then go back to India'. They called us 'Indian dogs'."
More than 60 years after Partition, the issue of Kashmir still burns like spilt acid, an enduring irritant to peace inside India and beyond. In 1947, Kashmir's Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, surprised most observers when he decided that his Muslim-majority state should join the Hindu-majority India rather than the new state of Pakistan. And still the competing claims on the region continue to pull at the geopolitical fabric of South Asia. When Indian and Pakistani officials meet this week for resumption of talks halted after the Mumbai attacks of 2008, Kashmir will be among the first subjects raised.
Yet the issue that has largely dominated talk of Kashmir for the past two decades, since the Indian government responded to the militancy with one of the largest counter-insurgency operations in history, has been what sort of autonomy the valley could be afforded. During two decades of violence that has claimed at least 70,000 lives and created a population that suffers from record levels of anxiety and mental health problems, little thought appears to have been given to how the Pandits might fit in. Even now, much of the energy of the authorities appears to be taken up by an amnesty plan to allow militants who have crossed the de facto border, the Line of Control (LoC), into Pakistan-administered Kashmir, to return to their families.
The Indian authorities, which pay grants of about £50 a month to those forced to leave, insist they are working to help the Pandits. A spokesman for the federal Home Minister, P Chidambaram, said he was too busy to speak on the issue, but last November, while visiting new flats built for Pandit refugees in Jammu, he vowed: "Kashmiri Pandit migrants will be consulted on every issue regarding their return to the valley."
The attitude of the state government, headed by an energetic Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, may be more forward-leaning. In an interview, he outlined several steps already taken to help Pandits return; 3,000 government jobs had been set aside and temporary accommodation built at two locations in the valley.
"I don't think my administration sees this issue any differently than the rest of the right-thinking people in the valley," he said. "We think the valley is incomplete without the Hindu Kashmiris. It has been the endeavour of governments since 1996 to create the circumstances to bring them back."
Asked whether the security existed for them to return, he added: "The proof of the pie is in the eating. There are still Kashmiri Pandits who never migrated and who have lived alongside the majority population."
Indeed, the antagonism between the Hindu and Muslim population that forced the Pandits to flee did not always exist, and few could have imagined the nature of the violence that erupted after the summer of 1989. Certainly, the two communities did not inter-marry, but they shared customs and traditions and were largely tolerant of each other.
The British writer, Justine Hardy, notes in her recent memoir on Kashmir's descent into violence, In the Valley of Mist: "The poetry of the valley's past is that it was heaven on earth, a place of such gentleness that those who lived there did so in harmony, most particularly the Muslims and Hindus, the doors of their homes open to each other, their festivals shared, some of their saints interchangeable."
Today, if it ever thus existed, such a relationship has been destroyed. But there are positive signs: in recent months, several long-closed Hindu temples have been restored and reopened, with the help of the Muslim community, and a key Hindu festival was celebrated in Srinagar for the first time 20 years. A Pandit organisation in the city hopes to reopen 60 more temples in the valley this year. Muslim leaders admit more needs to be done, both in providing homes and jobs and in building sufficient trust to persuade Hindus to return.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, leader of a coalition of separatist organisations, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, said: "The issue of the return of the Pandits is very important. We cannot deny that they had to leave the valley in very difficult circumstances at a time when there was a lot of chaos."
Yet Mr Farooq rejected the idea made by some Pandits that a specially designated area for Hindus ought to be created. "[This is not] a religious issue," he said. "It's not Hindu India versus Muslim Kashmir. And their return to the valley should not be linked to the resolution of the broader issue of Kashmir's future."
Yet for the Pandits, a return to the valley is inextricably linked to the future of Kashmir. Why, they ask, would they return if they felt the future of Kashmir was not safe? SK Dudha, a leading member of the Pandit community in Delhi, said: "The changes have to be made. How else will people go back. There has to be the political will on the part of the government."
In the apparent stalemate, the Pandits feel lost, dreaming of the Kashmir they left and juggling with the challenges of the new lives they have made elsewhere. One of the toughest, they say, is to maintain their culture and language. Their children may be encouraged to speak Kashmiri in the home, but elsewhere they are bombarded with other tongues, other dialects. Already the diaspora has had to forgo its tradition of marrying only within the Pandit caste, such was the concern about the threat to the future of the community.
Occasions at which the community comes together include the religious festivals it has traditionally marked. On a recent afternoon in the Lajpat Nagar neighbourhood of Delhi, scores of Kashmiri Hindus gathered to celebrate perhaps the most important, Shivatri, or the "long night of Shiva". In the centre of the temple, a fire had been built and prayers were said as people placed offerings of rice, barley, walnuts and butter into the flames. Amid the heat and the smoke was Mharaj Kak, the businessman who had pushed his family into a taxi and fled from Kashmir 20 years earlier.
In all that time, he had never returned to Kashmir, to the home his great-grandfather had built which had been taken from him. "What I miss the most," he said, "is that old house and all the memories associated with it".
A valley divided
*For hundreds of years the Kashmiri Pandits lived peacefully as a minority in the Kashmir valley alongside the Muslim majority. Often well-educated, they were regarded as the elite of the region – the name "Pandit" means learned person and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, was one of them.
*However, in 1989 Muslim extremists intensified their armed struggle against Indian rule in Kashmir and violence broke out against the Hindu Pandits. As a result the vast majority of the Pandit population in the area were forced to flee, with hundreds killed in the conflict. In a space of three months, 400,000 were displaced and many ended up in refugee camps around Jammu.
*Only about 60,000 Kashmiri Pandits stayed behind in the region, and many of them have been the victims of violence. In 1998, 23 were massacred by militants in the village of Wanhama, north of Srinagar, and 24 Pandits were killed in their village in 2006 by gunmen disguised as members of the Indian army.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-exiles-dreaming-of-a-return-to-kashmir-1906503.html
The 400,000 Hindus driven out by Muslim extremists 20 years ago hope talks beginning this week will bring them a step closer to going home. But does it suit the Indian government to prolong their misery?
By Andrew Buncombe
Like all the others, Mharaj Kak remembers the date and he remembers the threat that changed their lives forever. He had been living with his extended family in Srinagar, their city-centre home, a five-storey wooden house in the centre of the city built by his great-grandfather.
"It was the night of 19 January 1990 when the mullahs told us all to leave the valley," he said. "We had to leave everything. There was a mass exodus. From all the mosques, there was this message sent throughout the valley that the Kashmiri Pandits had to leave immediately, or we would be killed."
So the Hindus of Kashmir, better known as the Kashmiri Pandits, were forced to flee the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountains in which their families had lived for centuries, driven out by Muslim extremists, and sometimes the Muslim neighbours they had lived alongside for generations. In just three months, more than 400,000 Hindus were scattered across India and beyond. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed, and only about 60,000 stayed behind.
Two decades later, the government of India says it is determined to help those who want to return to the homes they were forced to leave. But the Pandits say the government does little but talk. It has provided no security, no homes, no livelihoods and put in place none of the confidence-building measures vital for them to feel able to make the journey back to Kashmir, they say. Even now, many are still enduring lives of quiet misery in inadequate refugee camps.
They believe that while the plight of the Muslim population of Kashmir, living in one of the most heavily militarised places on earth, continues to garner international attention, they have become the forgotten, overlooked people of history. Some even believe the Indian government has deliberately kept them impoverished to allow it to claim it is not just Muslims who have suffered in the struggle over Kashmir.
Ramesh Kumarana hung on until October 1990. By then, the threats and violence by militant groups such as Hizb-ul-Mujahideen came almost daily. One of his brothers was killed. He and his family had no alternative but to flee south. Today, the college-trained pharmacist who once ran his own business in Srinagar is among the Pandits who run tiny clothes-shops at a scruffy market in the centre of Delhi. To supplement his income, he sells bags of Kashmiri walnuts. He shrugs helplessly as he points to the way in which he is now forced to support his wife and two children.
"I am ready to go back to Kashmir, my heart is there," he said, standing next to his shop with his smiling 12-year-old son, Mohit. "It is my birthplace and I want to go back there. But my son was born in Delhi, it's my responsibility to take care of him. I visited Kashmir in 2003. They said, 'You can come but you are a tourist and you must then go back to India'. They called us 'Indian dogs'."
More than 60 years after Partition, the issue of Kashmir still burns like spilt acid, an enduring irritant to peace inside India and beyond. In 1947, Kashmir's Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, surprised most observers when he decided that his Muslim-majority state should join the Hindu-majority India rather than the new state of Pakistan. And still the competing claims on the region continue to pull at the geopolitical fabric of South Asia. When Indian and Pakistani officials meet this week for resumption of talks halted after the Mumbai attacks of 2008, Kashmir will be among the first subjects raised.
Yet the issue that has largely dominated talk of Kashmir for the past two decades, since the Indian government responded to the militancy with one of the largest counter-insurgency operations in history, has been what sort of autonomy the valley could be afforded. During two decades of violence that has claimed at least 70,000 lives and created a population that suffers from record levels of anxiety and mental health problems, little thought appears to have been given to how the Pandits might fit in. Even now, much of the energy of the authorities appears to be taken up by an amnesty plan to allow militants who have crossed the de facto border, the Line of Control (LoC), into Pakistan-administered Kashmir, to return to their families.
The Indian authorities, which pay grants of about £50 a month to those forced to leave, insist they are working to help the Pandits. A spokesman for the federal Home Minister, P Chidambaram, said he was too busy to speak on the issue, but last November, while visiting new flats built for Pandit refugees in Jammu, he vowed: "Kashmiri Pandit migrants will be consulted on every issue regarding their return to the valley."
The attitude of the state government, headed by an energetic Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, may be more forward-leaning. In an interview, he outlined several steps already taken to help Pandits return; 3,000 government jobs had been set aside and temporary accommodation built at two locations in the valley.
"I don't think my administration sees this issue any differently than the rest of the right-thinking people in the valley," he said. "We think the valley is incomplete without the Hindu Kashmiris. It has been the endeavour of governments since 1996 to create the circumstances to bring them back."
Asked whether the security existed for them to return, he added: "The proof of the pie is in the eating. There are still Kashmiri Pandits who never migrated and who have lived alongside the majority population."
Indeed, the antagonism between the Hindu and Muslim population that forced the Pandits to flee did not always exist, and few could have imagined the nature of the violence that erupted after the summer of 1989. Certainly, the two communities did not inter-marry, but they shared customs and traditions and were largely tolerant of each other.
The British writer, Justine Hardy, notes in her recent memoir on Kashmir's descent into violence, In the Valley of Mist: "The poetry of the valley's past is that it was heaven on earth, a place of such gentleness that those who lived there did so in harmony, most particularly the Muslims and Hindus, the doors of their homes open to each other, their festivals shared, some of their saints interchangeable."
Today, if it ever thus existed, such a relationship has been destroyed. But there are positive signs: in recent months, several long-closed Hindu temples have been restored and reopened, with the help of the Muslim community, and a key Hindu festival was celebrated in Srinagar for the first time 20 years. A Pandit organisation in the city hopes to reopen 60 more temples in the valley this year. Muslim leaders admit more needs to be done, both in providing homes and jobs and in building sufficient trust to persuade Hindus to return.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, leader of a coalition of separatist organisations, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, said: "The issue of the return of the Pandits is very important. We cannot deny that they had to leave the valley in very difficult circumstances at a time when there was a lot of chaos."
Yet Mr Farooq rejected the idea made by some Pandits that a specially designated area for Hindus ought to be created. "[This is not] a religious issue," he said. "It's not Hindu India versus Muslim Kashmir. And their return to the valley should not be linked to the resolution of the broader issue of Kashmir's future."
Yet for the Pandits, a return to the valley is inextricably linked to the future of Kashmir. Why, they ask, would they return if they felt the future of Kashmir was not safe? SK Dudha, a leading member of the Pandit community in Delhi, said: "The changes have to be made. How else will people go back. There has to be the political will on the part of the government."
In the apparent stalemate, the Pandits feel lost, dreaming of the Kashmir they left and juggling with the challenges of the new lives they have made elsewhere. One of the toughest, they say, is to maintain their culture and language. Their children may be encouraged to speak Kashmiri in the home, but elsewhere they are bombarded with other tongues, other dialects. Already the diaspora has had to forgo its tradition of marrying only within the Pandit caste, such was the concern about the threat to the future of the community.
Occasions at which the community comes together include the religious festivals it has traditionally marked. On a recent afternoon in the Lajpat Nagar neighbourhood of Delhi, scores of Kashmiri Hindus gathered to celebrate perhaps the most important, Shivatri, or the "long night of Shiva". In the centre of the temple, a fire had been built and prayers were said as people placed offerings of rice, barley, walnuts and butter into the flames. Amid the heat and the smoke was Mharaj Kak, the businessman who had pushed his family into a taxi and fled from Kashmir 20 years earlier.
In all that time, he had never returned to Kashmir, to the home his great-grandfather had built which had been taken from him. "What I miss the most," he said, "is that old house and all the memories associated with it".
A valley divided
*For hundreds of years the Kashmiri Pandits lived peacefully as a minority in the Kashmir valley alongside the Muslim majority. Often well-educated, they were regarded as the elite of the region – the name "Pandit" means learned person and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, was one of them.
*However, in 1989 Muslim extremists intensified their armed struggle against Indian rule in Kashmir and violence broke out against the Hindu Pandits. As a result the vast majority of the Pandit population in the area were forced to flee, with hundreds killed in the conflict. In a space of three months, 400,000 were displaced and many ended up in refugee camps around Jammu.
*Only about 60,000 Kashmiri Pandits stayed behind in the region, and many of them have been the victims of violence. In 1998, 23 were massacred by militants in the village of Wanhama, north of Srinagar, and 24 Pandits were killed in their village in 2006 by gunmen disguised as members of the Indian army.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-exiles-dreaming-of-a-return-to-kashmir-1906503.html
Friday, June 12, 2009
Justice for Nilofer and Asiya
Omar Abdullah-The Apathetic IdiotShopian looks like a ghost town today. There are no people on the streets. The shops are shut wide and the atmosphere of gloom looms large over an otherwise bustling suburb. The rape and murder of two young women has left the town full of bitterness, anger and hopelessness.
There obviously are no two ways about the fact that the ghastly murder and rape should invite severest possible criticism with a strong call for finding the perpetrators of this heinous crime and punishing them in a manner as to make an example of them. But here we are. The young prince dismissed their rape and killing as a simple case of drowning. As a Chief Minister of the State shouldn’t he have been a little more prudent than this clownish dad. He should have at-least bothered to know the depth of the water in Rembyaer Nallah in this season. As someone who has crossed this Nallah even without his knees getting wet I must say that the Chief Minister was at his apathetic and ignorant best. Little did he realise that a man as perverse as Yasin Malik or Bitta Karate is roaming free to commit more crimes.
The day the badly bruised bodies of Nilofer and Asiya were recovered, they bore marks of what seemed like molestation if not rape. Their clothes were torn and bodies disfigured. Yet the Police dismissed it as a case of drowning. Forensic reports now confirm the rape of a pregnant Nilofer and a studious and intelligent Asiya.
Two grown up women drowning in knee deep water!
This led to huge protests all over the valley. A simple word of acceptance of the crimecould have avoided all that happened later. The separatists were quick to latch on some food. After all the Young Prince had given them a stick to beat with which they could beat him, the army, the establishment and India. The beastly Mehbooba wasn’t the one to be left behind. Despite the fact that her party-men were beaten on way to Shopian, she looked at it as opportunity she was in no mood to let go off. The sexually frustrated Asiya Andrabi too took to streets with her band of Dark Scary Images. The calls for justice soon got lost in the din of cries for Azadi and removal for AFSPA.
This obviously is no time for politicking. Unequivocally we condemn the State governments handling of this entire episode. What was ideally a law an order problem has now spun into a huge controversy thanks to the kid who our National Media projects as the best thing to have happened to India after the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. Apart from firing the SP of Shopian(who obviously deserves to be fired) the Chief Minister should also have resigned for the way he led Kashmir to one more crisis.
Nilofer’s husband, Shakeel Ahmed has said time and again that he wants justice and not Azadi. Unfortunately what he gets is denials and more denials and now an enquiry commission. The State ought to show its concern for its people irrespective of their political alignments. But then that virtue is lost long time back.
In this hour of grief we are with the family of the victims. May God give them power to overcome this grief .We at Roots in Kashmir will do our best to ensure that the family gets justice. Although we are in exile,yet we mourn alongside the family of the victims.
The need of the hour is that the Chief Minister personally meets the family and apologises for his errant comments and asks the commission to submit a report in a time bound manner and then act fast to punish the culprits of this sick crime. It may not bring them their dear ones back but at-least it would restore the confidence of the people in the State.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
The Missing Finger
The State is a cruel figure. There is no doubt about that. And who would know it better than us, the Kashmiri Pandits, who have suffered brutally at the hands of state apathy and negligence. There obviously have been extra judicial killings in Kashmir both by terrorists and sometimes by Armed Forces too. There can be no denying the fact that many innocent people have lost their lives because of the gun that came to the valley and brought with itself what we all called the Gun-Culture. So many young men disappeared overnight not to be seen ever again. Even their bodies were not found. Their parents with the help of separatist sympathisers and separatists themselves formed a body called ADDP or Association of Parents pf Disappeared People. The distressed parents immediately believed that their sons had been killed by the armed forces. That they could have crossed over to the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, somehow never occurred to them. These naïve Kashmiris must have been so distraught by the sudden disappearance of their loved ones that the moment someone lent them a helping hand they would have no reason not to believe him/her.
I too had believed for a long time that thousands have disappeared in Kashmir till I looked up the website of the ADDP. There are some 75 people (some without photographs) whose names are displayed in the list of the people who have disappeared. But that is the issue. Even if one person is disappeared and not been found, it is serious. The perception in the minds of the parents is that their son has been killed by the security forces. Most of the Indian Media too has lapped up this version without truly going into the details of the persons who have seemingly disappeared. We have therefore been fed by our liberal media that the Indian armed forces are killers at large who pick Kashmiri Muslims at random and then kill them and throw away their bodies. And it is not the usual limousine liberal’s point of view but the average Indian Journo’s story too.
On 27th of March 2009, the armed forces arrested 4 armed terrorists in Kashmir. All of them were indigenous Kashmiris who had disappeared some day keeping their parents in dark about their romantic pursuits across the border. As the Indian Army became more vigilant on the border the Pakistan Government issued them passports and put them on a PIA flight to Kathmandu. They then travelled via train to Jammu and finally were arrested with their new passports.
This news received wide circulation but not as much as the news of their disappearance would have. How hell would have broken loose had someone known that 4 Kashmiri Muslims had gone missing? How Arundhati Roy’s of this world would have written columns in Outlooks asking for government to come clean on the thousands of disappearances? Thousands would have been a synonym for four.
Not that there is no need for an independent enquiry into the disappearances of the Kashmiris but what is equally needed is to make the unfortunate parents of these boys aware of this dimension of the problem. The government must immediately inform the parents of these four men and tell them the true story of their boys so that they are not used by separatists and self serving activists to further their own goals. It will set other parents to think about their missing fingers too.
If the government fails to do so, the day may not be far away when names of dreaded terrorists like Syed Sallaudhin and Mushtaq Latram are also on the list of Disappeared.
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