Human Rights Watch and the Intifada in Kashmir

There is a groundswell in the resentment of the ordinary Kashmiri against the Indian security forces. The Shaikh Abdullah family misled them twice. The last time it was Dr Farooq Abdullah who espoused the minimum agreed agenda of the NDA government dominated by Hindutva party, BJP. The National Conference was a part of it. The pogroms of Muslims in Gujarat 2002 shocked the Kashmiris tremendously but what shocked them more was how Farooq and his son did not react to events in Gujarat as strongly, immediately and categorically as they should have representing the popular sentiment of the people of Kashmir valley in particular.
But the genocide in Gujarat came too close to the 9/11 in America and so the NDA’s toeing George Bush’s line crowded out the kind of concern the world and particularly the west shows to the gross violation of human rights. Even Britain did not react as firmly as it would do. The Prime Minister of the time, AB Vajpayee went even further and remarked in the Goa conclave of his BJP party that the Muslims do not live in peace with their neighbours and it is their violent nature that is responsible. However, when the Commissioner of UNO Human Rights Commission wanted to visit Gujarat the Prime Minister sent Justice Verma of NHRC and the Attorney General Soli Sorabji to prevent her visit and request her not to go public about Gujarat. The British High Commission also recorded that the mass murder of Muslim was carefully planned and even if the Sabarmati train was not burnt the extremists of Hindutva would have found out another alibi to attack the Muslims. What the British High Commission recorded did not translate into any kind of condemnation or raising the issue of the human rights violation in India because PM Tony Blair ala Vajpayee had jumped on the bandwagon of the Bush government in their misconceived war on terror which turned out to be a war on the Muslims.
The Kashmiris were very much disturbed by all these. In the present worsening situation in the valley they are outraged by among other things, genocidal tendency of the security forces, gang rapes of the Kashmiri women and the humiliation of the Kashmiri men in the presence of their women. This last is having a disastrous effect on them because they feel that what the security forces did in Gujarat they are doing the same in the valley.
Many Americans are now waking up to the stark truth that under George Bush the war on terror was in fact war on Islam, witness what President Obama is saying currently and what George Soros has been saying. Soros wants to make Human Rights Watch a global organization with an overwhelming concern for South Asia. This is a belated recognition that India did get the kind of attention because of the twisted perception of Bush administration when it came to human rights violation in the country.
The unfolding scenario in the valley is truly horrifying. The Kashmiri men are paraded naked in full view of their woman. The security forces beat them mercilessly and goad their private parts with batons and then hit them in the crotch. Many a time the victims have their hands tied behind and are stark naked and thus unable to even a reflex protection gesture of their private parts or head or any other parts of the body. This kind of genderised humiliation is calculated to show that they are impotent before the security forces that have also subdued their women to watch their helplessness.
The death toll of the boys has gone to 70 with no end in sight. Why only the young boys some of them even as tender as 8 years old are picked out and shot at? Is it not an attempt to debilitate the next generation of the Kahmiris?
What NDA government did under Vajpayee is being repeated today with the home minister Chidambrum expressing doubt that the victims caught on cell phone camera are genuine because 'people seen in it have not spoken up'. First the government tried to erase the videos of naked parades of torture and humiliation and then the denial!
The cumulative effect is that the loud protest of the people is rising in a crescendo and the word that stands out loudest in the melee is freedom, azadi! In 22 years of protest it was a watershed when even on Eid for the first time the sound of azadi rings the air in the valley from the Eidgah to the Lalchowk. It is time to ponder why the hawk Yasin Mallik and the dove Umar Farooq Mirwaiz come together in determination.
Can the Human Rights Watch hear the shouts?