Losing Our Intellectuals- Killing A Nation

 

 

A nation builds on the power of collective efforts of a society that are shaped by the directions of its intellectuals. The foundations of a society that are conceptualized and build by intellect are the ones which sustain the ravages of time and the erosion of social incumbency. Hordes of doctors, engineers, lawyers and bureaucrats may be tagged intellectuals by common lexicon, but in reality the ones who work for the continuity of a set social order often oiling their own gears & purses by their professional positions they hold are no real intellectuals. The real intellectuals are the ones, who stand up for cause, speak for a positive change, hold the hands of downtrodden and the deprived: often getting into a collision course against the social oligarchs, seeking with an unconstrained vision. Fortunately for a society intellect is not inherited down the family, unfortunately for the intellectuals they often become victims of the countervailing forces of venality and nepotism. A vibrant society must have mechanisms of intellectual peace and social safety accorded to that peace, in order to thrive. And if you want to destroy a society top down, it is this intellectual peace that is targeted, this social safety that is nullified.

Kashmir conflict has held a no bars policy of killing, erasing: traumatizing a society repetitively. All sections of society having been targeted generally, the erasure of our intellectual class has been selective and systematic. When they kill the intellectual they just don’t kill the human, they intend to kill the process of change associated with him, the thought of resistance, they try to subdue the efforts of social rebuild and renaissance. The killing of an intellectual is the murder of a voice ; silencing the agent of change. The intellectuals and thinking minds of a conflict zone have always to walk on a thin line in the middle of extreme forces, often running the risk of antagonizing either or both: a formidable task. All along the decades of conflict there has been a widespread feeling that Kashmir is witnessing a deliberate attempt to destroy its intellectual life, to create a thought vacuum and to neutralize any efforts of positive social and political change. The killing of every intellectual is followed by the blame games of state and non state forces, and in none of the circumstances has follow up justice been dispensed. The state takes a lame refuge in its preoccupation with the law and order, the ‘in the greater interest of national security’ repertoire, while the non state forces take refuge in ‘state stronger and more reachable than us’ and ‘state out to defame’; thus both shredding any accountability and blame. In the friction of this conflict it is the society that gets crushed, pulverized and ground. 

The killing of Maulana Showkat today at Gawkadal is another ghastly reminder of the intent of the extreme forces of this conflict. We shall soon have the blame game running full steam, but none of the rants of these blaming opponents can and will repair the loss to our society, nor is there any hope of dispensation of justice.  By erasing the thought leaders and social torch bearers of Kashmir, these extreme forces are forcing intellect desolation and inanity on us where in the society is left in disarray with blanked out social progression paths. This is nothing short of forcing an intellect holocaust on Kashmir. Maulana Showkat’s social contribution is well established; his efforts to improve the education standards of Kashmiri’s led him to work for the creation of the Trans World Muslim University in Kashmir under the aegis of JAH, which was to work under the guidelines of the western educational policy. His killing follows the irreparable loss of leading minds of Kashmir over these years, who have been eliminated under the cloak of Kashmir conflict by internecine and slaughterous forces, who disregard all rules of engagement and human cost in this blind war.

The killing of Dr. Guru (1^st April 1993), an intellect, a reformer and a visionary whose bullet ridden body was found abandoned. The tragedy followed the funereal procession of Dr Guru, when Indian security forces fired on the funeral and killed Ashiq, brother in-law of Dr Guru (who was holding the coffin) on way to his burial. The blood soaked dead body of Ashiq had to be picked by his own father in the middle of Barzulla chowk, the crowd of mourners having been dispersed by the unprovoked firing. How heavy a burden of a fathers shoulder! 

Jaleel Andrabi (killed on 8^th March 1996) was taken away by forces personnel on the Indira Gandhi road; his dead body was later dumped with torture marks all over it. The case against the killer Major (who is also accused of killing 11 persons including Andrabi) has been proven in the court, the culprits arrest ordered: but that is where it stands till now, justice beyond a court order has eluded for want of state action and will. 

Dr. Farooq Ahmad Ashai, (killed in 1993) a noted orthopedic specialist and a human rights activist was killed by gunshots from a CRPF bunker in Barzulla, targeted at him. A void unfilled, a gap open left in our society.

Pandit Hriday Nath Wanchoo (killed in 1992) who voiced concern about human rights in Kashmir and had filed numerous writ petitions against custodial deaths was shot by assailants silencing one more sane voice from Kashmir. The writ petitions consigned to quiescence and muteness, the voice having been subject to a permanent lull.

Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq (killed 21 May 1990) and Abdul Ghani Lone, (killed 21 May 2002) were two towering political voices from Kashmir who were shot and killed, forcing contraction of sane political discourse in Kashmir. In none of the case was any justice dispensed.

The list seems unending, all major faculties, all schools of thought of our society having been trampled, decimated. I quote from one of my earlier blog

 “In his rage the imposer had also felled many mind humans, scholars, intellects who were guillotined for their thoughts, decimated for their value. They were made extinct to make this nation deprived of a road direction; the imposer uprooted the milestones, the path markers of the nation. We were being robbed of our guiding minds.”

In their fight for annexing our land these forces have murdered our bodies, killed our souls and guillotined our intellect. The real intent of these killings being to dismantle the holding pillars of our society, fragmenting us into smaller and divided units, making of ease the trampling efforts over us. This forced hollowness on our society aims at making us collapse from within, create delusions and speedup our extinction. 

How many more to this unending list, till our society realizes the oblivion and desolation that we are being forcefully herded into? Expecting justice from any of the forces, the state or the non state is self deceit. Both the state and the non state cherish our body count, build on our misery and capitalize on our disarray. If we don’t speak up against this felony of thinking minds, this forced annihilation and carnage now; we may not retain the faculties and prowess to speak up again. 

We can live as a lemming’s society and collectively, silently walk to our destruction or we can speak up, condemn and speak for justice in one voice and be heard. But the time to speak up is now.

"I know that they pursue me and will kill me. It is a matter of time; I will be killed in a month or two or less ... but I prefer to die for my ideas than on a bed of illness or aging." Lounes Matoub, the Algerian singer, poet and intellectual days before his assassination.


The killers may have physically killed these scholars and intelligentsia but they could not silence their thoughts, could not erase the ideals they stood for and cannot falsify the truth they believed in.

Saadut

Srinagar

Friday, 08^th April 2011

 

Source : Speaking Mind

Kashmiri Abused By Indians

India’s Kashmir admission: too little, too late

-Photo by Dilnaz Boga/Dawn.com

The news that the Jammu & Kashmir State Human Rights Commission has officially acknowledged mass graves holding more than 2,000 bodies – 574 of them now identified as local residents, i.e. not foreign terrorists – is welcome but leaves a bitter taste. It’s good that the Indian establishment can allow such an admission, but so what? That’s surely little consolation to the many “half-widows” of Kashmiris “disappeared” by Indian forces.
We could argue forever – and have been – about what Kashmir’s political status should be, or who is most to blame for the massive death and destruction wrought there over the past two decades. But morally honest Indians can’t avoid India’s culpability.
Indian-held Kashmir was the scene of an important early chapter in my political education. I first went there in 1994, initially lured by the romance of seeing the landscape, and meeting the people, that V.S. Naipaul had memorably written about in the brilliant middle section of his 1964 book An Area of Darkness. I spent many weeks in the Valley on several visits that year and the next. I put much of what I learned in Kashmir into the early chapters of my book Alive and Well in Pakistan because, while Kashmir is no more clearly part of Pakistan than of India, I wanted to show that, borders and Lines of Control notwithstanding, in truth the subcontinent is a seamless whole. I also wanted to do justice to the way my interest in Kashmir had led to my longstanding interest in Pakistan.
I spent a lot of time on the ground in Kashmir with Kashmiris in 1994 and ‘95, and I listened not only to Kashmiris’ stories but also to their opinions and to what they said they wanted. Maybe because of my own provincial background, I’ve never appreciated the presumption that the naïve or wishful perspectives of people from small, neglected places should be considered somehow less valid than the views of people who hold power – unless it’s true that might makes right, which it isn’t.
“We are hungry for peace,” a young Kashmiri told me. “But at the same time, we want to live with honor.” The Kashmir problem was “not a law and order problem,” another insisted. “It is the deserved rights that we want. No Kashmiri will believe any Indian, ever again.” Said the human rights activist Jalil Andrabi: “We thought that if people of Romania can go out on the streets and get rid of a dictator, why can’t we go out on the streets in Kashmir?”
“We have to think about the future of our country, the future of our children,” a businessman told me. “We don’t want to become another Afghanistan. My son, he was three when militancy started. Now he is almost in his eighth year. So good years are passing by, they are not coming back.” That was more than 15 years ago, so that man’s son – if he’s still alive – is now in his early twenties.
Jalil Andrabi made a strong impression on me. He was a likeable and impressive young lawyer who, with colleagues in the Kashmir Bar Association, traveled to remote villages; painstakingly documented atrocities committed by Indian forces, and filed usually fruitless writs in the High Court. It broke one’s heart to think of the effort they put into raw documentation, the naming of persons and putting on record of events that otherwise would have been forgotten by all but the obscure sufferers themselves.
“What we believe is that human rights are guaranteed to every human being who is born on earth,” Andrabi told me. “India recognizes this right, under Article 21 of the Constitution of India.”
The last time I saw him was in his office, on the dingy upper floor of a dusty building in Srinagar. I had come because he wanted to give me some documents. He gave me a Pepsi and prevailed on me to stay for a few minutes. I asked him why he did what he did. He felt compelled to do it, he said; it had to be done; truth and justice had to be served, however ineffectually. Otherwise, he said, he could not have lived with himself.
I felt too tired to take notes – I was leaving the next morning and had many things on my mind – and among my many regrets is that I felt too distracted and rushed to stay longer with Jalil Andrabi that day. His words brought to mind something the American writer Wendell Berry once wrote: “Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
Jalil Andrabi was kidnapped in murky circumstances on March 8, 1996. Later that month his body was found floating in the River Jhelum, its eyes gouged out. I was in Bangkok, where I was living at the time, when I heard the report of his death on CNN.


 
Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com


Source ; Dawn Media Group

Justice buried for fake encounter victim

Mufti Islah, CNN-IBN
Updated May 25, 2008 at 12:53am IST

 

Click to play video

Srinagar: Near the Line of Control in Kashmir, security forces are everywhere, a check post is always around the corner, a barbed wire fence never too far away. In a state where people are always looking over their shoulders, it can be fatal to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In her 56 years, Jana Begum has seen tragedy over and over again. She says 10 years ago two of her sons were picked up near Kupwara by the State Task Force and the Border Security Force.
After a painful search, a policeman told Jana that her sons had been shot dead, and buried in a graveyard in Regipora.
The shock killed her husband. Another of Jana's sons went missing from Deoband in 2002. She says that he too may lie in an unmarked grave, and every visit to the Regipora cemetery stirs up old fears.
"Nobody gave me any answers. I went everywhere, but nobody would tell me anything," Jana Begum says.
A few maize orchards away from Jana's house in Lolab, Wali Mohammad still mourns the loss of his son Farooq, killed in August 2003.
Farooq was allegedly taken from a bakery in Srinagar by the Army, and then shot dead, and passed off as a militant. When Wali learnt that his son was buried in a grave in Srinagar, he went to court and won an order of exhumation. It's been five years, but the tears still come easily.
"Why was my innocent son killed? There are so many cases like this here," Wali Mohammad says.
Jana and Wali say their battle with the government isn't over yet. Once a month, they assemble at a park in Srinagar with some of the other families of those who've disappeared - to remember, to grieve, and to protest, against a government they say is not doing enough.
Like Wali, many relatives dig up bodies from unmarked graves themselves, looking for clues, hoping their loved ones are alive, or hoping for proof they're dead.
For Sudesh Kumari, though, closure came through an anonymous letter written by an Indian soldier.
When Kumari's husband Bhushan Lal was picked up with three other men by army men in Srinagar in April 2004, the family didn't know where to look. But a week later, they received a letter that confirmed their fears.
"My daughter keeps on saying when will daddy come. When I ask her what are you going to do to daddy she says everyone's daddy calls them and I too want to speak to him over phone and tell him to give me school fee and uniform," Sudesh Kumari says.
The family is pained and furious. Furious that their slain loved ones did not get decent last rites according to Hindu customs rather than cremating, they were buried somewhere in the foothills of Lolab valley.
Sudesh Kumari's neighbour Bali Ram has also seen tragedy firsthand. He says his brother Ram Lal was picked up by the Army as well, leaving him to care for his young nephews.
"I have been taking care of the children. The government should think of his children. We are starving," he says
Like Jana Begum, Wali Mohammed, Sudesh Kumari and Bali Ram, many of the families whose relatives have gone missing are desperately poor.
And the loss of a young working family member often pushes them further into poverty. But what they want more than anything else, they say, is the truth to be told - that their sons and husbands were not militants. And until then, justice for them will also lie buried.
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Source; 
 

Indian Army War Crimes in Indian Held Kashmir

Indian Army soldiers accompanied by a senior officer are shooting from point blank an unarmed man in Pulwama district on July 8, 2011. This is the clear evidence of the war crimes committed by Indian soldiers in Kashmir. An unarmed man is clearly seen waving his hand and he can be heard shouting in pain underneath the rubble of the destroyed house. The residential house was bombarded by Indian soldiers using mortars and rockets. This in in clear violation to Geneva Conventions and a war crime to kill a wounded civilian or combatant.

Is there anyone even champions of Human Rights to Question them? Where the hell is Pakistani media???