After all, for anything done or planned to be done over years in a row, in ordinary course, an analysis is made, a Balance Sheet is drawn and a reckoning is done as to what gains were made or what losses suffered. The militant organisations still active in the UT of Jammu and Kashmir, therefore, must ponder over what they gained or the people gained as a result of a bloodshed of 32 years, violence and destruction which was unleashed at the behest of a belligerent neighbour in Jammu and Kashmir that still acts of sheer cowardice and senselessness – that of killing innocents in cold blood, are still perpetuated by them. A local BJP leader and the elected Municipal Councillor of Tral Kashmir – Rakesh Pandita who had gone to meet his friend in Tral was gunned down and in the process, the daughter of his friend Asifa Mushtaq too was critically injured. Both victims of the dastardly act were taken to a nearby Health Centre where Pandita was declared as brought dead while Asifa is undergoing treatment.
It may be recalled that on June 9, last year, a Congress local leader and a Sarpanch in Anantnag district of South Kashmir, Ajay Pandita was killed. Again, exactly a month later, BJP leader Wasim Bari and his father Bashir Ahmed and brother Omar Sultan were killed by militants after barging into their residential house in Bandipora Kashmir. In the same way, as many as seven BJP activists were killed in Kashmir’s Qazigund, Budgam, Kulgam and Sopore areas respectively. In Budgam in September last year in a militant attack, Chairman of a Block Development Council Bhupinder Singh was killed. In other words, besides other innocents, as many as 12 BJP activists alone were killed in Kashmir during the year which puts questions on the security set up in Kashmir to plug loopholes in the system. Since the security cover has now been provided to most of them, any breach in the security protocol by any of the councillors was ill-advised and fraught with irreversible risk scenario which they should by all means avoid and not move uncovered.
Perhaps, Pandita had overlooked the importance of moving around only under security of two PSOs given to him by the Government that he moved into the house of his friend in Tral in Pulwama without such a security. How the militants got the pointed information and so fast that they perpetrated the asinine act of killing the Municipal Councillor, is for the police and intelligence authorities to look into. Any one getting killed especially the one who is innocent and unarmed, can never ever be justified by any sort of reckoning. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha and other political leaders have condemned the killing of the BJP leader. While it is futile to clarify and stress upon the fact that any political allegiance or following any political ideology can be fought only politically and democratically under the existing democratic system and never through violence, the militants and their outfits must go in for a self introspection about the purpose of such killings except that they themselves, one day or the other, having to face the consequences.
The Lieutenant Governor, while assuring that the killers would never be spared has also told that the terrorists would never succeed in their nefarious plans. We hope that the culprit killers would soon be brought to justice. However, the Inspector General of Police, Kashmir has told that while Pandita had stayed till late hours in his friend’s house without his security cover, an action against his two PSOs too would be taken. That indicates that even if the protected one insists to move about without security cover, he or she should not be allowed to do so by the PSOs.
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