As the showers of metal pellets
were unleashed upon protesters, bystanders and homebound schoolchildren,
hospitals in Kashmir began to resemble scenes from the great wars of the 20th
century. Rows of beds with blindfolded boys and girls on them, parents waiting
anxiously, doctors and paramedics in attendance around the clock. On occasion,
police and spies also infiltrated the wards to compile profiles of the injured,
in order to place them under surveillance after their release. The wounded were
brought in by the dozen, like birds in the hunting season.All of this was
incomprehensible, even to longtime observers of violence in Kashmir. One of the
largest military forces on the planet could not be waging a war against
seeing.Perhaps a few aberrations, a crowd-control tactic gone woefully wrong –
one hoped so, but the numbers kept piling up, eye after mutilated eye popping up
on the screens of phones and computers, as journalists began to publish their
reports.
As none of the powerful men who run Kashmir from Delhi expressed qualms about
the blinding of children, it became clear that in its hubris the Indian state
had decided that snatching vision from a few hundred young people was a fair
price to pay for keeping Kashmir in check. Perhaps itself blinded by a strain of
arrogance peculiar to occupying powers, it continued to pummel a subject
population into submission.
Two-and-a-half decades of rebellion in Kashmir have hardened the indifference of
India’s political and intellectual classes to the human cost of the country’s
repressive tactics in the valley. Amid rising nationalist fervour, any sense of
the basic rights of a suffering population has been eroded or vanished entirely.
The hostility now appears to be total, unbridgeable, and for those on the
receiving end, unbearable. Powerful TV studios urge the state to be more
aggressively macho, while actively suppressing or distorting news from Kashmir.
One prominent newspaper ran an online poll about the continued use of the
pellets that had wounded and blinded so many Kashmiris – a clear majority voted
in support. Eminent columnists speak calmly of the need for “harsh love” toward
civilian protesters to rationalizethe state’s ruthless response. The protocol
for the use of these crowd control weapons is to aim at the legs to disperse
demonstrators. But it seems that the paramilitaries and the police have been
deliberately firing into faces. Some may only have minor wounds, some will
suffer limited loss of vision, some will lose one eye, some both, and some will
be impaired for life, but the pitiless assault on protesting adolescents forces
us to ask one question: is the Indian state happy to blind a generation?
Kashmiris have become accustomed to the violence inflicted on them – as they are
to the indifference of the world – when pellets were first sprayed at protesters
in the heated summer of 2010, most people processed this as nothing more than a
new misfortune; just another element of the war in Kashmir. If one were to draw
a diagram of the assaults inflicted on Kashmiri bodies over the decades, hardly
a single part would remain unmarked: in the 1990s, when the violence was at its
worst, the eyes were spared; now they seem to have become a favorite target.The
victims of such tactics, consciously and not, cultivate reserves of tolerance
for pain, but also a capacity to remember.
DG ISPR condemned the violations of ceasefire by India along the Line of Control
in his message issued on the social media as Kashmiris on both sides of the Line
of Control as well as all across the world observe Black Day on Friday to mark
the illegal occupation of Jammu and Kashmir by India.
The occupied valley is one of the most militarized regions in the world, as
India has stationed about half a million soldiers in the disputed
territory.Villages in south Kashmir, particularly Shopian, Pulwama and Anantnag
have become the centrepoints of independence movement since July 2016, after the
killing of young rebel commander Burhan Wani.Wani’s killing in a gunfight led to
widespread protests in the region for five long months, during which over 100
civilians were killed, and hundreds lost their eyes to the pellet guns fired by
forces.Nearly 70,000 people have been killed in the uprising and the ensuing
Indian military crackdown.Pakistan’s desire for peace should never be mistaken
as its weakness. “For a normalized Indo-Pak relationship, all issues including
the core issue of Kashmir between the two nuclear countries need to be resolved.
India needs to behave like a responsible country, stop atrocities on both sides
of the Line of Control and also discontinue interference inside Pakistan through
state-sponsored terrorism.” Pakistan has long been a target of Indian supported
terrorist campaigns since its independence.
China had never accepted the British-negotiated boundary agreements in
northeastern Kashmir. This remained the case following the communist takeover in
China in 1949, although the new government did ask India—without success—to open
negotiations regarding the border. After Chinese authority was established in
Tibet and reasserted in Xinjiang, Chinese forces penetrated into the
northeastern parts of Ladakh. This was done mainly because it allowed them to
build a military road through the Aksai Chin plateau area (completed in 1956–57)
to provide better communication between Xinjiang and western Tibet; it also gave
the Chinese control of passes in the region between India and Tibet. India’s
belated discovery of this road led to border clashes between the two countries
that culminated in the Sino-Indian war of October 1962. China has occupied the
northeastern part of Ladakh since the conflict. India refused to negotiate with
China on the alignment of the Ladakhi boundary in this area, and the incident
contributed significantly to a diplomatic rift between the two countries that
began to heal only in the late 1980s. In the following decades, China worked to
improve its relations with India, but there has been no resolution to the
disputed Ladakh frontier.
United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights who expressed serious concern
about the situation in Kashmir and proposed on September 13, 2016 that ‘an
independent, impartial and international mission is now needed crucially and
that it should be given free and complete access to establish an objective
assessment of the claims made by the two sides. We place the trust in the
statesmanship of the Excellency, as the Secretary General of the United Nations
that you will not countenance any attempt to ignore the wishes of the people of
the State of Jammu and Kashmir and bypass the expression of those wishes.
(Author is freelance columnist from Peshawar)