by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
Winston Churchill’s observation that America can be depended upon to do the right thing after it has tried all the other alternatives is applicable to most countries.
The government’s latest initiative on Kashmir has come at the end of a similar tortuous route when it tried everything from a “muscular approach”, as the Congress has said, to letting the sword of abrogating Article 35A of the Constitution hang over the state’s head.
Like Article 370, which is anathema to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Article 35A underlines the state’s special status by preventing non-locals from buying or owning property in Kashmir.
But now the government wants to start a dialogue with its critics although, till recently, it appeared that the use of force was its most preferred option.
It isn’t only that the security forces added the pellet guns to their armoury for use against stone-throwers, in addition, of course, to an occasional recourse to real bullets if the situation warranted.
The forces also edged close to violating the Geneva Convention in the infamous incident when they tied a local person to the bonnet of a jeep as the vehicle traversed trouble-prone areas to deter those who were throwing stones.
Unfortunately, this crude display of the innate power of the authorities was acclaimed by, among others, the army chief, while a well-known Bollywood actor wanted a prominent human rights activist, who is a woman, to be similarly strapped to a jeep.
Given this atmosphere of virulence, it would have seemed that the government had only a one-track approach to the situation in Kashmir, which was to cow down the restive population by a formidable show of force.
Yet, as is known, such a blinkered attitude has rarely led to success in insurgency-prone areas, not least because democracies are invariably at a disadvantage when it comes to the use of unchecked power.
The reason is the prevalence of the system of checks and balances which calls for accountability lest any one section of the government cross a given limit.
In Kashmir, for instance, the Supreme Court has questioned the use of pellet guns in view of the danger they pose of not only blinding the demonstrators but also bystanders.
Furthermore, the government’s opponents have called for the withdrawal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in view of the leeway which it gives to the security forces while its inbuilt safeguards against misuse haven’t always been in evidence.
It came as a matter of considerable relief, therefore, when the Prime Minister pointed out in his Independence Day address to the nation that the solution to the problem did not lie in abuses or guns but in embracing the Kashmiris. “Na gaali se, na goli se, Kashmir me parivartan hoga gale lagaane se,” he said.
Now, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has taken the cue from Narendra Modi by appointing an interlocutor for reaching out to the dissenters.
The government, therefore, can be said to be approaching the stone-pelters not with anyone tied to a jeep but on foot with open arms.
This is not the first time, of course, when such a conciliatory approach has been tried when belligerent measures had failed. But this is the first gesture of its kind by the Modi government.
The last intervention by a group of interlocutors took place when Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister.
But its recommendations about reducing the army’s visibility, reviewing the AFSPA, lifting the Disturbed Areas Act and expeditiously probing instances of human rights violations were ignored, as were the suggestions of others like N.N. Vohra, who was appointed in 2003 to investigate the causes of the continuing unrest. Vohra is now the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
It is possible that the change of government because of the departure of Manmohan Singh in 2014 and of Atal Behari Vajpayee in 2004 led to the reports of the earlier teams being mothballed.
Since the present government has at least a year-and-a-half to go, the new man for addressing the longstanding problem — Dineshwar Sharma — will have time on his hands.
But it is not so much the question of time as the sincerity of some of the stakeholders, such as the separatists whose loyalty to the government is under a cloud, which can hinder any forward movement.
Moreover, the differences among them — such as between the hawkish Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the moderate Mirwaiz Umar Farooq — will complicate the task of the official representative.
Thankfully, the government has given Sharma a free hand to choose to whom he wants to talk. But the hyper-nationalists in the Hindutva camp, who include a few television commentators, can queer the pitch for a meaningful dialogue at a time when suspicions are rife.
The prevailing lack of trust between the opposing sides was emphasised by former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha — now a prominent critic of Modi — when he visited Kashmir along with a delegation of “concerned citizens” and noted the “alienation of the masses of people who have lost faith in us”.
Retrieving Kashmir, therefore, from the “mess” which India has created, according to A.S. Dulat, a former Indian spy master, will be a gargantuan task.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
A protest by Kashmiri youth in Srinagar in August. (AP)
By Sarwar Kashani and Rajnish Singh,
New Delhi : The biggest challenge and the top priority in Kashmir are to deradicalize Kashmiri youth and militants and prevent it from turning into a Syria of India, says Dineshwar Sharma, the newly-named interlocutor for talks in Jammu and Kashmir.
An old Kashmir hand, who headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB) for two years from December 2015, Sharma says his mission to bring an end to violence would also include talking to anyone “even a rickshaw puller or a cart puller” who can contribute so that peace is ushered in the state “as soon as possible”.
He says he is personally pained to see the path Kashmiris, particularly youth, have chosen that would only destroy the society.
“I feel the pain and sometimes I become emotional also. I want to see this kind of violence ends as soon as possible from all sides. The youth of Kashmir like Zakir Musa (Kashmir Al Qaeda chief) and Burhan Wani (slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander) get hype when they talk about (establishing Islamic) Caliphate,” Sharma told IANS in an interview, referring to the new-age Kashmir militant commanders.
He said the way youth of Kashmir were moving, “which is radicalization”, would ultimately “finish the Kashmir society itself.
“I am worried about the people of Kashmir. If all this picked up, the situation will be like Yemen, Syria and Libya. People will start fighting in so many groups. So, it is very important that everybody, all of us, contribute so that suffering of Kashmiris end.
“I will have to convince the youth of Kashmir that they are only ruining their future and the future of all Kashmiris in the name of whether they call it azadi (independence), Islamic caliphate or Islam. You can take examples like Pakistan, Libya, Yemen or any country where such things are going. They have become the most violent places in the world. So, I want to see that it doesn’t happen in India.”
The former IPS officer, who led the spy agency’s “Islamist Terrorism Desk” between 2003 and 2005, was named on Monday to open talks in a bid to end the nearly three-decade-old insurgency in Kashmir.
When the IB was investigating the fledgling modules of the Islamic State in Kerala, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh in 2015, Sharma is widely known to have advocated a policy of arresting the problem by counselling and reforming, instead of arresting the potential recruits of the global terror network.
The soft-spoken intelligence veteran is known to have established friendly relationships with arrested militants in a bid to reform them when he was Assistant Director IB from 1992-94 – the time when militancy was at its peak in Jammu and Kashmir.
Serving in Kashmir as an IB man, Sharma was instrumental in the arrest of then Hizbul Mujahideen commander Master Ahsan Dar in 1993 after he broke away from Syed Salahuddin – the Hizb chief based in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
He recalled how he had met Dar in Srinagar jails and how the militant commander asked him to bring his daughter and son to meet him in the prison. “I actually took them to meet him.”
Asked If he had identified the way to reach out to the youth in Kashmir, Sharma said he was still working out the modalities.
“I am open to talking to everybody. Anybody who believes in peace and wants to come and give me some ideas how to go about, I am willing to listen. He can be an ordinary student, ordinary youth, a rickshawwala or a thelawala with some good idea. I will consider that.”
He was asked if he had started reaching out to Hurriyat leaders, who have maintained silence over his appointment even though they had dropped hints in their statements about engaging in “constructive” talks with the government of India after some of their aides were arrested in terror funding case.
Sharma cautiously replied: “Let me see. I am ready to talk to everybody. Anybody who wants to contribute to peace.”
Replying to a query that radicalisation of Kashmiri youth was a more recent phenomenon than the problem of Kashmir itself, Sharma said the state was almost at peace before the 2008 unrest over a land row and the 2016 wave of violent street protests after the killing of Burhan Wani.
“Somehow the minds of youths and students have been diverted somewhere else. That is the point of address. I have seen the violence in Kashmir from very close quarters. I was posted in Srinagar. So the kind of violence I have seen, I am really pained. I am very sad.”
Commenting on the previous attempts by the government of nominating peace emissaries and other initiatives to solve the problem, he said he would “desperately like to try some new ideas”.
“I am studying the reports (of previous interlocutors) but other than that I am trying to see some new ideas.”
Kashmir is not Sharma’s first assignment of brokering peace. In June this year, he was tasked to initiate a dialogue with insurgent groups in Assam, including the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and those representing Bodos.
Asked over any difference between his previous peace brokering assignment and the new one, he said; “The big difference is that there is not any involvement of Pakistan and any third country in the northeast.”
(Sarwar Kashani and Rajnish Singh can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in and rajnish.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Government Jobs, Private Jobs
Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti
New Delhi : Days after naming former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma as its interlocutor for talks in Jammu and Kashmir, the Centre on Thursday said it will expedite development projects to generate more jobs in the troubled-state where some 10 lakh men and women are unemployed.
The decision was taken at a meeting between Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti here.
“It has been decided to fast track projects under Prime Minister’s Development Package (PMDP) by making encumbrance free land available for the infrastructure projects including road, power and health,” a Home Ministry statement said.
The two leaders also decided to “accelerate the development projects relating to additional jobs to Kashmiri migrants, transit accommodations, transfer of cash relief or honorarium through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mode and provide employment to youth of the state”, the statement said.
Sixty-three major development projects have been approved in the state under the Rs 80,068-crore package. Of this, Rs 22,042 crore have been released, according to the statement.
Jammu and Kashmir is one of the states with highest unemployment rate in the country. According to government records, some educated 600,000 men and women have registered for work with employment centres.
However, according to estimates, the actual number of unemployed youth is close to 10 lakh because not all educated youth register themselves and the figure with employment centres doesn’t include those who have not passed Class 10.
The Thursday meeting which began around 11 a.m. and went on for an hour and a half was Mehbooba Mufti’s first with Rajnath Singh after the government on Tuesday said Sharma will have a “sustained” dialogue with “all stakeholders” to solve the problems in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Chief Minister arrived here in the morning along with a team of state government officers, including Chief Secretary B.B. Vyas.
The meeting was also attended by the Minister of State for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir and Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba.
The statement said the government decided to lay “special emphasis” for development of border areas while selecting projects under the Border Area Development Program (BADP).
“It was decided that to ensure safety of the people in border areas, construction of bunkers along the borders will be expedited.”
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Pehlu Khan lynching (file photo)
New Delhi : An independent fact-finding investigation into the lynching of Pehlu Khan, a dairy farmer, earlier this year by cow vigilantes has exposed how police tried to “weaken” the investigation by delaying filing of the FIR and invoking IPC sections of crimes with lesser punishment.
The investigation termed the police action as “monumental inefficiency” or a “deliberate attempt to weaken the cases against the accused gaurakshaks”.
In April, Khan, a dairy farmer from Jaisinghpur village in Haryana, was lynched by cow vigilantes in Behror of Alwar district in Rajasthan. He was returning home after purchasing two cows and two calves from a Jaipur cattle fair.
The murder caught national attention and Khan became the face of protests against the spate of lynchings across the country in the name of gauraksha or cow protection.
The independent investigation also revealed that the accused named in Khan’s “dying declaration” were not arrested and police failed to defend the arrests they made in court, as five of the seven got out on bail.
In July, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked state governments to act against gaurakshaks indulging in violence.
The investigation report states that it has found that “police across the states are openly flouting the Prime Minister’s instructions, especially in the states that are ruled by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), be it Haryana, Gujarat, Jharkhand or Rajasthan.”
The report said that FIR was filed nine-and-half-hours after the incident, though the scene of the crime is only two km from the police station.
“The FIR claims that the police were informed of the attack at 3.54 a.m.” on April 2, but “according to the FIR the attack took place during 7 p.m.-10 p.m. on April 1”, and does not explain the delay, the report states.
Another major finding of the report was the invoking of IPC sections of crimes with lesser punishments among others.
“The FIR does not invoke Sec 307 of the IPC for the offence of “attempt to murder” which provides for imprisonment of 10 years to life. Instead, the FIR invokes Sec 308, which only takes cognisance of “attempt to culpable homicide not amounting to murder”, prescribing imprisonment of three to seven years,” the report said.
Also several sections of IPC which amount to criminal conspiracy, rioting with weapon, promoting religious enmity, which would have made the case stronger were ignored by police, according to the report.
“The pattern of behaviour exhibited by the police reflects either monumental inefficiency or a deliberate attempt to weaken the cases against the accused gaurakshaks, nearly all of whom are said to be connected with the BJP and its affiliates such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal,” the report read.
“Many of the accused have secured bail even though they have been charged with murder, that, too, committed in broad daylight. Their bail is even more surprising as the attackers took pictures and recorded videos of their acts which should anyway nail them without doubt,” it said.
The report states that it is hard to believe that the police could not trace the six accused named by Pehlu Khan in his “dying declaration” for five months after the incident.
“Khan named six of his attackers in a statement given to the police. But none was arrested. Police concluded that none of those named was involved in the attack. Those arrested were not named either in Khan’s statement or in the First Information Report (FIR). They got bail despite being charged with murder,” the report said.
“Their bail is even more surprising as the attackers took pictures and recorded videos of their acts which should anyway nail them without doubt,” the reports read.
The police failed to “defend the arrests” as five of the seven arrested secured bail, the report said.
As a way forward, the investigation suggests that the six men Khan named in his dying declaration should be arrested, a new FIR should be registered, and an investigation ordered into VHP and Bajrang Dal for involvement in Khan’s murder, among other measures.
The report has been endorsed by Alliance for Justice and Accountability, New York, Human Rights Law Network, New Delhi, and South Asia Solidarity Group, London.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday filed a chargesheet against meat exporter Moin Akhtar Qureshi in a money laundering case.
After the chargesheet was filed in the court of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Special Judge Arun Bhardwaj listed the matter for October 25.
The ED arrested Qureshi on August 25 after a case was filed against him last year under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act for alleged illegal forex dealings and tax evasion.
The ED alleged that its investigation had revealed acts of omission and commission on the part of certain public servants holding high offices in collusion with Qureshi, whereby massive illegal money transactions were carried out.
The agency said records from the Income Tax Department had revealed that Qureshi took huge money from different persons for obtaining “undue favours from public servants”. Qureshi has denied the charges.
—IANS
