Terrorists in Kashmir are hurting the cause of Kashmiris
This week seven Hindu and Sikh civilians were killed by terrorists in Kashmir, a region in India which is pre-dominantly Muslim.
In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government took control over the Kashmir administration, suspended civil liberties, placed dozens of moderate Muslim political leaders under house arrest and enabled outsiders to buy property in the region. These actions have been condemned by Indian political parties who oppose the BJP as well as civil liberties groups in India and abroad.
Since the Modi government’s action in 2019, “security forces have been implicated in numerous abuses in enforcing restrictions…including routine harassment and ill-treatment at checkpoints, arbitrary detention, torture and extrajudicial killings,” Human Rights Watch noted.
Also, since 2019, about 80 civilians, almost all of them Hindus or Sikhs, have been killed by terrorists, including 28 so far this year.
Yesterday, the head of a school, Supinder Kour, a Sikh, and Deepak Chand, a teacher who was Hindu, were shot dead by three terrorists who entered the school in Srinagar, the biggest city in Kashmir. There were no students in the building due to COVID-19 restrictions. “Why would someone kill her? She was a teacher,” Kour’s 13-year-old daughter Suljeet told The Guardian.
The Resistance Front claimed responsibility for the attack. It is associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic terrorist group operating in Kashmir. Its leaders are based in Pakistan.
“Kashmiris are caught in unending violence from attacks by militants and abuses by government authorities and security forces,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “The authorities should protect (Hindu and Sikh) minorities in Kashmir and ensure justice for (Muslim) victims of security force abuses.”
Decades earlier, before the violence, Kashmir was a popular destination for foreign and Indian tourists, renowned for its scenic mountains, lakes, gardens and house boats.
The rising terror attacks on civilians are a big blow to those within Kashmir, as well as in India, who are trying to overturn the actions of the Modi government through judicial, political and other peaceful means. Worse, the senseless killings of Hindu and Sikh civilians is being used by the BJP to claim it is the only political party which is protecting Hindus from “genocidal” attacks by Islamic extremists. The terrorists are enabling the BJP to expand its political reach by propagating that it is tackling India’s biggest problem, namely Muslims - and not poverty, not unemployment, not lack of healthcare and not illiteracy. The Muslims, most of whom are poor, uneducated laborers and small farmers, make up only 14% of the country’s population.
Standing outside the school in Srinagar, where the two teachers were killed, Waqar Ahmad, a Kashmiri Muslim told The New York Times, “This is inhuman and barbaric…We are fighting a political fight…Those who killed them are not helping Kashmiris.”
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