• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Emporium Current Essays339It was January 10, 1990. The time was mid-night. An emergency meeting of top Indianleaders concerned with internal and external affairs was being held at Home Minister Mufti Muhammad Saeed's house in New Delhi. The matter under discussion was so graveand urgent that an immediate call from Foreign Minister Inder Kumar Gujral (presentlyIndian Prime Minister) went to wake up Shri Jagmohan who had served as the Governor of occupied Jammu and Kashmir five years ago. He was asked to attend the meetingwhere he was apprised of the grave crisis in Kashmir Valley and told to take, at theearliest, the special plane to Srinagar on his second tenure as the Governor of the state.His departure at break neck speed was arranged in view of grim situation in the Valley.The people of Kashmir had arisen in a spontaneous rebellion against the occupyingIndian authorities. The oppressive state apparatus raised by India through a number of fraudulent means, like state assembly elections, had completely collapsed. Theadministration was paralysed in the wake of repeated strikes and shutdowns and securityforces were on the run under relentless attacks from freedom fighters.In order to retrieve the Valley from such a grim situation, New Delhi chose anexperienced and tested senior civil servant Jagmohan - who besides having an earlier stintas the Governor of the troubled state, had served in the same capacity in New Delhi, Goa,Daman and Dice.I Delhi had placed Jammu and Kashmir under directPresidential rule after dismissing the government and dissolving thestate assembly elected on the basis of 1987 elections. Hence, the newI Governor was armed with extraordinary powers to restore law andI order and normal conditions in the state. One of the firstI appointments of the new Governor was his meeting with theI Commander of the Northern Command Army, Let. Gen. Goginder I Singh, who wanted to have discussions with Jagmohan beforeI returning to his headquarters at Udhampur. He told the Governor340Emporium Current EssaysEmporium Current Essays
 
341that the situation in the Valley was "extremely serious", and blamed the "previousauthorities" for "rapidly deteriorating" situation.But the situation continued to deteriorate even after Jagmohan had taken over in January1990. Almost coinciding with the arrival of Jagmohan, in the Guru Bazar area of Srinagar, three Central Reserve Police personnel has been shot dead. The killings had ledto massive police raids in various localities of the city in which more than 400 youth werearrested. To deal with the deteriorating law and order situation, Jagmohan appointed Peer Ghulam Hussain Shah, a retired Director-General of Police, as one of his advisers. Shah'sappointment was flashed on the local radio. But barely the news of his appointment haddied down, when Shah told the Governor that he could not accept the assignment as thatwould expose hi and his family members to "grave risks". "It was at that moment", writesJagmohan in his book, My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir," that I realised how strong had become the hold of terrorists. Even an officer with Peer Ghulam Husain Shah's background, experience and reputation had to refuse a highly coveted assignment."For the last seven years India has been trying to break the hold of these "terrorists", andfor this purpose more than half a million security forces, including army, have beendeployed. Every conceivable device of oppression and torture lias been used to stem thetide of freedom struggle. Villages are raided and whole areas are cordoned off in Vietnamstyle 'search and destroy' operations. Indiscriminate arrests are made and heuses aretorched. In order to subdue the people, the Indian security forces resort to rape, plunder and custodial killings and the gross abuses of human rights. According to a report, 40,000 people have lost their lives in Kashmir at the hands of Indian security forces and manymore have been injured. The casualties include deaths in police custody andassassinations by Indian agents disguised as freedom fighters.A joint report issued in 1993 by the Asia Watch an the Physicians for Human Rights says:"In their efforts to crush the insurgency, Indian forces in Kashmir have engaged inmassive human rights violations, including extra-judicial executions, rape, torture anddeliberate assaults on health care workers. Indian government workers havesystematically violated international human rights and humanitarian law. Among theworst of these violations of hundreds of detainees in the custody of the security forces inKashmir Such killings are carried out as a matter of policy. More than any other  phenomenon, these deliberate killings reveal the magnitude of thehuman rights crisis in Kashmir" (Human Rights Crisis in Kashmir (1993), p.9, cited inTahir Amin's Muss Resistance in Kashmir (1995), p. 108).A former Chief Justice of Ji'jrnmu and Kashmir High Court, Mr Bahauddin Farooqui,observes:
 
"The abuse of human rights side is unprecedented. We have deait only the tip of the ice- berg. It is difficult to imagine the seal of what is going on ... In theory we are governed bythe constitution, but in practice we are governed by methods unknown to law, unknownto any civilised society" (Tahir Arnin. p, 109).Since the normal political process has remained suspended in the state for the last morethan sev-en years and New Delhi exercises direct powers under tae Presidential rule, theIndian security forces operate with unlinvied power,; under such sweeping laws asTerrorist and Disrupting !<ws as terrorist and Disruptive Act (TADA), the Armed ForcesSpecial Powers Act and the Jammu msd Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act, These draconianlaws were passed hastily ic 1990 by the Indian government and empower the Indiansecurity force* to shoot, kill or imprison anybody without any fear of accountability.Under Jagmolian, the oppression against the innocent Kashmiri people touchedunprecedented heights. A region of terror was let loose against the civilians, involvinglarge scale arrests and indiscriminate killings. Only two days after Jagmohan took over asthe Governor of the state, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) openedindiscriminate fire on a protest procession in Srinagar on January 21,1990, killing morethan 100 people,General Krishr.a Rao who succeeded Jagmohan has proved no less ruthless and arbitraryin continuing with the massacre of the Kashmiri people.-Under his reign, the humanrights situation in the Valley has further deteriorated.Torture of the Kashmiri detainees and custodial deaths have increased. Robet G, Wiking.the author of the book, India, Pakistan and the Kashmir Dispute (1994) quoted a senior civil servant in the state government as saying that ihe custodial deaths occurring inKashmir wee part of a deliberate strategy learned from the experience of the securityforces in (East) Punjab. There, the officer is s»id to have told the author, faked encountershad been widely used by the security forces to conduct summary executions of hard coreSikh militants. It >\as a brutal'device, he admitted, but it had the desired effectJ342Emporium Current EssaysSimilarly a civil libertarian in New Delhi said in July, 1993, that torture was "absolutelyuniversal" in Kashmir. Everywhere in India, the author was told, echoing practically ailIndian and international human rights organisations that have investigated the matter,torture was the normal practice of the country's security personnel; in Kashmir, it wassimply more systematic and extreme.The State of Jammu and Kashmir (occupied) had its distinct regions. The Kashmir Valleywhose area in about 8,639 square miles is inhabited by 3,314,904 people (52.36 per centof the total population of the state). Jammu, with an area of 12,378 square miles has atotal population of 2,718,113 people (45.39 per cent); and Ladakh which has an area of 
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...