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Sobia Nisar
IN the month of June 2010, the entire territory of Indian occupied Kashmir went on boil over the exposure of a fake encounter by the Indian Army at Machil in Kupwara. The rather rare exposure of a routine crime further established the institutionalized phenomenon of fake encounters in IOK, conducted by the Indian Army on the LoC, with persistent claims of foiling infiltration bids from Pakistan. It also brought into sharp focus the harrowing state of human rights violations in the territory and Indian sinister designs to discredit the Kashmiris’ struggle for liberation from India by dubbing it as a terrorist movement. The exposure also unraveled the real truth of Indian negotiating strategy that frames Kashmir Issue as an offshoot of terrorism sustained from across the border.
The episode started in a mundanely routine manner when an Army unit conducting counter insurgency operations claimed that it had shot and killed three so called terrorists while infiltrating across the LoC from Azad Kashmir. Soon after the incident, the relatives of the slain youth, belonging to Nadihal village in Baramula district, raised hue and cry that the killed ‘Pakistani terrorists’ were in fact their loved ones who, days before, had been lured away by soldiers of 4 Rajputana Rifles. The trail led to a graveyard near an Army camp at Kalaroos, Kupwara district, where the Army had clandestinely buried the dead bodies, which after exhumation were identified as of the residents of IOK and not of Azad Kashmir or Pakistan.
The police of the occupied territory was compelled under public pressure to conduct an inquiry. An Army Colonel and two Majors were among 11 people charge sheeted. A designated court in Sopore issued summons to the Army officials to appear before the court. All of them were charged under sections 302 (murder), 364 (abduction), 120-B (criminal conspiracy) and 34 (common intent) of the Ranbir Penal Code (RPC).
The Army was sent three reminders by the police for handing over the custody of the army officials for their interrogation as they claimed there was enough evidence to suggest their involvement in the fake encounter. Army officials had attempted to invoke the Armed Forces Special Powers Act under which no army official is to be handed over to the civilian administration. However, the Kashmiri lawyers argued that since there was a criminal intent, police could act against them. The Army, at the end, declined to handover the culprits to the police or to present them before the court.
Two important points need to be understood. One, Indian army under the shadow of draconian laws, particularly Armed Forces Special Powers Act has been given free hand to go to any extent to terrorize the people of Kashmir. As such, the army personnel have been unleashing death and destruction with impunity and without any sense of accountability. Secondly, the announced inquiries against guilty army men are sheer eyewash. Not a single army man in the occupied territory has so far been punished for human rights violations. Murder of a prominent Kashmiri human rights defender, Jalil Andrabi by Indian troops is a case in point. It has been established that an Indian Army major Avtar Singh was involved in his abduction and subsequent killing in 1996 but has neither been arrested nor punished.
Whenever internal or external pressure mounts, the Indian government announces inquiry against the troops to mislead the world. Machil fake encounter and thousands of such cases related to Indian occupied Kashmir serve as a wake up call for the international community that needs to come out of its slumber and rescue the people of Jammu and Kashmir, without any delay and further destruction.
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