*Favours migrant status for KPs living in Valley
Neeraj Rohmetra
JAMMU, Nov 8: A high level Civil Society delegation headed by former External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha that recently visited the Kashmir valley for three days and met several separatist leaders including hardcore Syed Ali Shah Geelani has called for judicial inquiry into wanton use of pellet guns and recommended to the State to ban its use immediately even as it called for starting the process of re-opening the Government schools forthwith.
The non-official Committee has also recommended postponement of school examinations to a later date, providing access to text books and teaching material to children in jail and giving sufficient time to them to prepare for exams and shifting minor offenders out of adult jails by lodging them in temporarily designated Juvenile Detention Centres.
The Panel headed by Sinha had its other members including Wajahat Habibullah, former chairman of Minorities Commission, Kapil Kak, Retired Air Vice Marshal, Bharat Bhushan, Editor Catch News and Sushobha Barve, Programme Director, Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation.
A copy of the report, prepared by the Civil Society delegation and accessed by the Excelsior, revealed that Committee had made separate recommendations for Centre and State Governments. It has listed in detail the steps that Centre and State Governments can take to resolve 4-month long unrest in the Kashmir valley.
In its recommendations for the Union Government, the Committee has called for ban on the use of pellet guns with immediate effect as a crowd control measure, which, it felt, will have salutary impact on the Kashmiris. This is not something that should be left to the committees or the security forces, it asserted.
Calling for dispelling the perception that Kashmir and Kashmiris are mere tools to be used for electoral purposes, Yashwant Sinha headed Committee observed that the Centre might reiterate the approach enunciated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that Kashmiris are Indians.
It called for according facilities of migrants to Kashmiri Pandits, who didn’t migrate from Kashmir and continued to reside there despite turmoil.
“Although separatist leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq talked of being prepared for a dialogue (Geelani talked of “unconditional” talks), it was not within the competence of this group of concerned citizens to suggest when or if such a dialogue process should be started.
“However, what we would like to emphasize is that we noted an overwhelming sentiment amongst the Kashmiris we interacted with for setting up a permanent process of dialogue with New Delhi. One of the reasons why so many doors were opened for us by the separatists and ordinary Kashmiris alike was because they saw our visit as a beginning of engagement with ordinary Indians,” the Committee said in its recommendations for the Government of India and pointed out that even the `Agenda of Alliance’ agreed upon between the BJP-PDP coalition Government has also committed itself to a dialogue with all stakeholders.
The Committee recommended that such a dialogue should be initiated at the earliest.
“The Kashmiris we interacted with acknowledged that we had limitations in leveraging the complexities of the Kashmir issue yet there was a consensus that we repeat our visit and continue engagements with them,” it said.
The Committee recommended starting of the process of reopening schools, release forthwith all first time offender school children and minors arrested under Public Safety Act.
They recommended that repeat offenders among minors should be shifted out of adult jails and put up in temporarily designated juvenile detention centres and given psychological counseling.
“Compensation must be announced for the next of kin of the civilians killed and for those wounded in police or action by the other security forces. This money may be transferred as Direct Bank Transfer to designated accounts to prevent extortion and rent-seeking from the suffering families by the State bureaucracy.
“Rehabilitation packages must be announced to ensure the life-time income needs of those permanently blinded by pellet guns,” the report said and also recommended that compensation and free treatment (both in India and abroad, if necessary) at State Government expense for those who have been partially blinded by pellet guns.
“The State does not have a blind school and this may be a means of rehabilitation by the State to provide education for children with blindness or partially blindness,” it said.
The Committee, which was hosted by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and Governor N N Vohra, also favoured ordering of a judicial commission into excesses by the police, especially the wanton use of pellet guns.
“While it is widely accepted that such commissions rarely lead to any conclusions, they serve a therapeutic purpose of allowing people to emotionally express themselves and it also helps to project the State Government as an accountable institution,” it said.
The Group said the Kashmiri separatist leaders think that unless India and Pakistan talk there can be no permanent solution to the Kashmir issue.
“While most of them (separatists) recommend tripartite talks on Kashmir between India, Pakistan and the Kashmiri leadership (without specifying which leadership), others are willing for some other form of dialogue between the three as in Vajpayee’s time.
“They called it ‘triangular dialogue’ – presumably one in which India and Pakistan talk to each other and each of them then talks to the Kashmiris also,” it said, adding there was widespread belief that without engaging Pakistan there can be no resolution of the Kashmir issue.
In a separate paragraph on `Basic Findings’ by the Committee, the report said: “across the political spectrum, the Kashmiris we met spoke virtually the same script about the history of the Kashmir issue. They may have varied in the exposition of a particular issue but basically all of them argued for a political solution to what they perceived as a political issue. They made the point that this is the fifth generation of Kashmiris, which was protesting but to no avail.
“Each one spent a considerable amount of time recounting the activities of the security forces which had alienated the population of the Valley. Our interlocutors told us the reasons for the immediate anger and the long term anger which we are quoting below without endorsing them”-
Referring to excessive use of force by security forces, the Committee said the violence which began with the funeral procession of slain militant Burhan Wani has so far resulted in the death of nearly a hundred people.
“The question that most of Kashmiris are asking is why were unarmed people going to offer last prayers for Burhan Wani fired at? They were not carrying any sticks, firearms or grenades that they represented a threat to the security forces. Nor did they attack the security forces. The firing at the funeral processions (there were nearly two lakh people gathered for the funeral and the last Namaz Janaza for Burhan Wani had been offered 40 times) is being seen as action of unaccountable security personnel and is being projected as an example of inhumanity”.
It said the business and trading community has been claiming that in the current situation it is not bothered about profit and loss but human loss and about the worsening situation in the Valley. They want an amicable resolution and end to violence by the security forces, it added.
On use of pellet guns in the Valley during four months of unrest, the Committee said their use for crowd control was the sorest point of all conversation with Kashmiris they met. “They want the pellet guns banned and cannot understand why the Government of India is delaying this decision and why Indian security establishment is reluctant to give up this weapon”.
The Sinha Committee pointed out that the use of pellet guns has led to several people, including children – some as young as 4-years-old – being blinded or partially blinded.
“These weapons, the Kashmiris pointed out, are not used in the rest of India even under grave provocation. They were not used in the Jat agitation in Haryana, the protests against Cauvery water sharing in Karnataka or the Patel agitation in Gujarat. All these agitations had resulted in large-scale damage to public property and in some cases even in gang rape of innocent women as in Haryana. Yet pellet guns were not used against the protestors. The fact that the use of pellet guns was reserved only for Kashmir elicited the most amount of anger against security forces in the people we talked to,” the report said.
Asked about stone-pelting, most Kashmiri leaders denied that youngsters were being paid to throw stones. They claimed that this was being done in ‘self-defence’ by unarmed protesters, the Committee said.
Referring to night raids by security forces, the Committee said these are ostensibly search operations which have resulted in destruction of property at Kashmir homes –windows, doors, and household goods. Apparently electrical and electronic gadgets are destroyed in the name of search operations. This continues even when the search operation yields nothing.
“One explanation we heard of this was that because the security forces get pelted with stones while returning to camp in the evening, they go back at night in anger to take revenge,” the Panel quoted people as having said.
On alleged misuse of Public Safety Act (PSA), the Committee said the PSA is seen as a revolving door process by the Kashmiris to keep people in jail.
“Brought into being to deal with timber smugglers by Sheikh Abdullah, this law, which does not require the victim to be produced before a magistrate and charged for up to a year, is used to keep trouble-makers in jail for longer than a year. As they are released in one case, another one under PSA is slapped on them in a different police jurisdiction,” the Committee observed.
“However, the major misuse of the PSA is against minors. The amended Juvenile Justice Act for the State does not allow the police to arrest minors under PSA. Yet this has happened on a significant scale. The separatist leaders claim the number is about 6,000 while Government sources place the figure at slightly less than half at 2,500. Even this is a large number of children. As there are no juvenile homes or Borstals for confining minors in J&K, they are kept with hardened criminals which can have long term deleterious impact on the minors imprisoned,” the Committee said.
It quoted Kashmir leaders as alleging that people arrested from the Valley are being housed in jails in the Jammu region so that their families cannot get easy access to them. This, they claim, is against a Supreme Court order. Kashmir, they claim, has also become the only State which has run out of jail space and seeking to transfer the overspill to jails in MP and other States, the report said.
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