Monthly Archives: August 2018

Alka Kashyap

The recent Supreme Court ruling that permanent commission be granted to women in the Indian Army has sent a wave of jubilation across the country. What a proud moment for our diligent and hard working ladies breaking new barriers with this landmark judgment.

Once again the age old mores and restrictive conventions have proved redundant in the face of progressive thinking. From time immemorial women have been subjugated as part of ‘tradition’. But what good is tradition which shackles the free spirit of womanhood and makes her feel inferior to the menfolk?

Society has often failed to acknowledge the mind and heart of the “thing of beauty,” it has extolled. The irony was that women were worshipped as a deities and in real life tethered as slaves.

Remembering guru nanak dev ji’s words

Way back in 1499 , Guru Nanak Dev ji hailed the innate strength of women. He said , “ It is from a woman from where we come and it is from her that leaders and kings are born. Then why denounce her?” There is a lot that the custodians of social order could have learnt from his teachings.

Only those women stood out in history who dared to perform as efficiently as men. Rani Laxmi Bai was the undisputed epitome of bravery in the nineteenth century. She broke into the male bastion and shone like a beacon, much before society came to recognise women as a source of great tenacity. As the world gaped at her, Laxmi Bai unflinchingly decimated the enemy camp.

words that stoked the fires of freedom

The twentieth century saw the unbridled charm of Sarojini Naidu, a poetess par excellence who worked relentlessly for the emancipation of both men and women. She empowered the freedom movement by her writings and proved that a pen is mightier than the sword. Her efforts were lauded and she won the coveted sobriquet, ‘Nightingale of India’.

The world was once again witness to brave heart Kalpana Chawla exploring the vagaries of the unknown universe. The astronaut brought glory to our country, even at the cost of her life.

don’t let fear bind women in chains

It is sad when we commit a self goal by putting down our own women as weak and incompetent. When we say women cannot step outside after dark , or they cannot enter all fields of work or temples , or when they work for lesser wages. How can a nation progress by subduing almost half the ratio of its population?

If there is an iota of truth in the saying, ‘behind every successful man there is a woman’, then they deserve a bigger applause.

It is also heartening to see women are taking the road less travelled nowadays, choosing careers in mechanical engineering, forensic science and becoming cab drivers and even wrestlers.

We have certainly started recognising their true abilities even though we still need to clear a few cobwebs from our minds.

A lot has still to trickle down to the grassroots level. Till the day our house help stops taking the domestic violence meted out to her. Till the humble secretary stands up against the lecherous intents of her male bosses. Till the time a movie actress stops compromising for a role and works for lesser remuneration. Till the time there is resistance to female infanticide, sexual harassment and dowry.

It is then that we are likely to stop celebrating Women’s Day and change it to ‘humans day.’

HT Correspondent

letterschd@hindustantimes.com

Srinagar : Two Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militants were killed in a gunfight with security forces in south Kashmir’s Bijbehara on Friday night, police said.

The militants, identified as Naveed Bhat alias Furqan of Qaimoh and Aaqib Yaseen Bhat of Qaimoh, were killed in Gund Baba Khalil, Sanga. Police recovered an AK 47 rifle and pistol from them.Director general of police Dilbag Singh said, “The militants killed in the encounter were affiliated with LeT. They were involved in seven cases. Both joined the militant ranks in the last two years.”

Police also arrested Hizbul Mujahideen commander Junaid Farooq Pandit of Hamray: “He was tasked with carrying out selective killings. A pistol was recovered from him.”

On Wednesday, three Hizbul Mujahideen militants, including a commander, were killed in a gunfight with security forces in south Kashmir’s Pulwama district. The slain militants — Jehangir Wani, Raja Maqbool and Sadat — were all locals. Wani and Maqbool were residents of Tral while Sadat was from Bijbehara, Anantnag.

On February 5, two militants of HM and LeT were killed at Lawaypora on city outskirts in a shootout with security forces, in which a CRPF man was killed.

The J&K DGP said there were 12 successful anti-militancy operations in J&K in 2020, of which 10 took place in Kashmir:“In both these places, 25 terrorists were neutralised – 21 in Kashmir and four in Jammu,” he said, adding that 240 to 250 militants are active in Kashmir. “The number of listed militants has come down.” He also said three militants had infiltrated the country this year and one of the militants was recently killed in Tral.Apart from the encounters, he said, many terror modules were also busted such as the arrest of three boys involved in the Pratap Park grenade attack, a group of grenade throwers in Sherigadi and the arrest of five persons affiliated with JeM in Srinagar.He said the police had also hit the ‘support structure of militants’ by arresting many ‘overground workers(OWGs)’: “Around 40 OGWs have been arrested. Many youngsters leave home to join terrorists. We have brought eight such youth back to their families.”

We live in an age of dwindling attention spans and shrinking public memory. So, we may have already forgotten that moment from August in 2018 when Farooq Abdullah, the patriarch of Jammu and Kashmir politics, raised both his arms and invited the audience to chant with him: “Bharat Mata ki Jai”. He was speaking at a memorial to commemorate the late Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. For raising these slogans, he was heckled by separatists when he went home to Srinagar. He stood by what he had said.

This octogenarian former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir has, in the past, also told Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani president, where to get off, and passionately opposed the release of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar, during the hijacking of IC-814.

Whatever his other flaws may be — and like dozens of others of our elected representatives, Farooq Abdullah has many — in a state plagued by secessionist and extremist politics, you cannot accuse him of not having stood with India.

It’s now been six months since he, along with other former chief ministers, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, has been arrested. All three face charges under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA).

Enough has been said about the absurdity of using the PSA against prominent mainstream politicians. The dossiers against them are unconvincing, and seem hastily put together. The PSA is obviously an ex-post-facto excuse to keep them and their party workers away from political activity. In one dossier against former Peoples Democratic Party minister Naeem Akhar, the charges include criticism of the home minister Amit Shah. Omar Abdullah is considered a threat to public safety because he is able to get the vote out during the peak of militancy. And that Mehbooba Mufti was “Daddy’s girl” was considered a problem till the police chief explained that this was not part of the final official order, and such language should not have been used in police documents.

A serving government employee I met in Srinagar told me that, with the arrests, Delhi had shown the mainstream politicians “their place”. “Now everyone knows how little they matter. It’s clear that the government in Delhi can just lock them up in a cage whenever they wish.”

But that there is little mass outrage on the streets of Srinagar against the political detentions should not be an I-told-you-so moment for the BJP. In fact it should be a matter of great concern. Most ordinary Kashmirs now believe that elected representatives in the Valley have no authority— and worse — no dignity or standing in India’s political hierarchy. Even those who were once lauded by the BJP, like former civil service exam topper Shah Faesal, have been booked under the PSA. Sajad Lone, who called Narendra Modi his brother, and whose party has been an electoral ally of the BJP, was also locked away.

The Modi government may want to believe that it can foster a new Kashmir polity. But at the moment, the vacuum and messaging has only emboldened the separatists and the jihadis. The abject humiliation of those who have chosen to participate in the electoral process has left the separatists and the jihadis and their supporters with the last laugh.

This has little to do with the worthiness or performance of these leaders. And yes, there may be an element of karmic irony in the detentions, as many Kashmiris point out. The PSA, which permits detention for up to two years without trial, has been weaponised against hundreds of Kashmiris on the watch of administrations helmed by some of the detained leaders. In 2010, when the streets erupted in clashes between the paramilitary and protesters and more than a 100 young men were killed, Omar Abdullah’s government, for instance, used the PSA against more than 600 individuals.

But while that may trigger some petty schadenfreude, it does not in any way make these detentions either morally correct or politically useful from India’s point of view. The government can offer many explanations for its decisions in Kashmir— a complex history, a desire to integrate the country under one law, Pakistan’s patronage of terrorism, the misuse of social media by terror groups — but it cannot find a single rational or intelligible reason to explain the detentions of those who have sworn allegiance to the Constitution. And if, indeed, the situation on the ground has improved enough for foreign envoys to visit, how or why should anyone be scared of normal political activity, including peaceful protests against the abrogation of Article 370?

The prolonged detention of Kashmiri politicians is not just anti-democratic, it is against India’s interests. It is, to borrow from the right-wing, anti-national .

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning author and journalist

The views expressed are personal