Desperate situations
call for desperate measures…
Kashmir has been in the news for some
time now and for all the wrong reasons especially after Burhan Wani, the local
commander of Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) was killed by the security forces. Syed Salahuddin, the chief of HM who
himself stays in the safe havens of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) has threatened
to flood Kashmir with suicide bombers and turn it into a “Graveyard for Armed
Forces”. Interestingly, his family continues
to stay in India and in fact, one of his five sons is a government doctor.
It has been some time but this situation
brings to mind the LTTE problem that Sri Lanka was faced till a few years back.
I remember, in one of our professional discussions in 2007 or 2008, the issue
came up. I had been following the topic closely and having read extensively
about it, saw a very surprising pattern. Every time the SL forces would be on the
up and have the LTTE with their back to the wall, LTTE would announce ceasefire
and agree to talks with the SL government. They would then utilize this time to
regroup, rearm and rebuild their defences only to dump the talks and restart the
business of killing people. I mentioned this in the gathering and stated that
if the SL government does not allow this to happen again and go for the kill
when the LTTE chips were down, they would be able to crush the menace once and
for all. It appears that my advice was heard by the people who mattered in the
SL top brass and they did exactly that. The result was the obliteration of LTTE
with the brutal killing of Velupillai Prabhakaran in May 2009.
A similar situation is faced by India in
Kashmir and they would do well to realize that “Desperate situations call for
desperate measures.” The situation has been handled with kid gloves for far too
long and that, in my opinion, is the main reason for it having gone out of
hand. We have been too soft on terror in the past and the present government
too seem to be headed in the same direction. A major reason has been the
hawkish stance of Human rights groups over violations by security forces. But
the funny part is that we never see them protest when terrorists kill us. Their
tears are solely reserved for the people who play the game of terror and cry victim
the moment a gun is aimed at them. I see a sinister underbelly to this approach
of theirs. I think the government would do well to throw their arguments out of
the window and tell them to shut up unless they applied the same yardstick to both
the sides.
We have seen the people of Kashmir being
rescued out of the devastating floods by Indian Army in 2014 and the same
people throwing stones at them at the next available opportunity. Some people
argue that only a few people are the terrorists while others are peace loving but
the fact remains that the ultras have the tacit support of the majority of
population. Otherwise, they would not have been able to survive and wage this
war against the State for so long. I have no doubts that the people of Kashmir,
by not denouncing terrorists and terrorism, have in a way given a tacit
approval to their methods. Not only this, the way thousands of Kashmiris have
been out on the streets pelting stones on the security personnel on duty in the
troubled areas, prove that they are indeed on the other side of law. Therefore,
they do not deserve any sympathy and the earlier we understood this, the better
it would be for us and the faster we would be able to restore normalcy in
Kashmir.
That brings us to the question, “What do
we need to do?” The answer is very simple; surround the enemy from all sides,
cut their supply lines, ban the media and human rights people from the valley
and start combing operations against the terrorists. Find them and facilitate
their early meeting with the 72 virgins who have been desperately waiting for
them.
Unfortunately, the Modi government has
been very soft on separatists and terrorists and their perpetrators. Mr Modi
himself shied away from naming Pakistan as the mother of all terrorism in South
Asia at the recent G20 Summit. It was a big let-down after his utterances on
PoK and Baluchistan last month. Then yesterday I read that the government has
left the doors open for talks with the separatists. WTH! With this kind of
attitude, we will never be able to defeat the agenda of 
I will reiterate: these are tough times for
India and “Desperate Situations call for Desperate Measures”.
Amen…
