"I have just come back from a 3 day reconnaissance, with bare minimum sleep. I am cold and hungry and the people I am trying to protect don't feel they are Indians."
Said a officer friend posted in the valley of Kashmir.
"No, I said, "In fact, they feel un-protected, angry and vengeful. And who can blame them."
We fell into a long silence , with only his angry tired breathing and I knew both of us were thinking of the 27 year old friend we lost a couple of months back. An officer. An only son.
Once he had called in sheer anger to tell me a mob of people had stopped a lone senior officer's jeep, threw stones and spit on him. The officer dint do anything and returned to his company. The humiliation stayed amongst his men for days.
He said the poverty and the absence of economic structures/sources have made them (the locals) mercenaries. They trade information to both sides for money. For stone-pelting even.
He says,What are they to do, when they have a tip that insurgents are in a house. Do we follow SOP or play the angel? How do we know they are not willingly kept there?
I ask him, How, when you guys follow orders that fake encounters like that of Muhammad Shafi , Shezad Ahmad and Riyaz Ahmad happened?
I know I was goading a good man again when I knew he was deeply affected by what had happened. After all, beneath the olive green is a human heart. And death is never easy for anyone.
Shezad Ahmad had a 5 year old child.
Sameer Ahmad, all of 9 years old, died with a half chewed toffee in his mouth.
Tufail Mattoo, 17, was coming from tuition when he took his last breath.
All of these were innocents.
None of them had stones in their hands when they died.
In the screams of "the army is a tyrant" and "the kids take money for stone-pelting" , one burning fact is lost.
The matter wont be solved with guns and stones.
The matter wont be solved with a bunch of ill-fitting interlocutors.
The fact that, beyond the army, CRPF, JKP, separatist leaders, ISI, and stone pelters, there are normal people, who have little to do with power politics. Who just want to have a decent meal on their dinner table. Who want their kids to be educated. Who want their kids to - LIVE. Normally.
Is anyone thinking about them?
[Photo courtesy Fayaz Kabli/Reuters
www.rediff.com]
