Between questions and answers

Making the announcement, Farooq Abdullah told the local people, “I have initiated an inquiry… Now it is you people who have to come forward and narrate the whole truth.” The people have spoken. Families identified two of the bodies as Zahoor Ahmad Dalal and Juma Khan. The government has said that it will accept identification subject to DNA tests. Hopefully the tests will be conducted at an independent laboratory. But, don’t hold your breath. Tests, inquiries and investigations have historically been the stuff of sarkari cover-ups. Mostly they take so long that everyone forgets about them and their ‘conclusions’ are buried with the truth.

The problem goes beyond the confusion of identifying the enemy. These killings are just another illustration that the security forces in Kashmir, as elsewhere in India, act with impunity. If they are in uniform they are above the law.

Already the "facts" of what happened on Monday in Brakpora in Anantnag are being manufactured. Some news reports said that security forces fired at unarmed demonstrators who were shouting slogans against the police and the government. Other reports spoke of "retaliatory fire", but said that the security forces fired at a crowd that was throwing stones. A third set of reports, quoting the official press statement, spoke of civilians getting caught in the cross-fire as police fired "in retaliation to gunshots fired by militants in the procession". In the absence of credible information do we believe the security forces simply because they are an arm of the State and are defending our territory against the enemy? Or, do we believe the local people who, like us, are citizens of this country? When the residents of Anantnag and the surrounding villages first challenged the army’s killing of the `militants’, a spokesman for the Army’s 15th Corps told journalists “Genuine terrorists have been killed.”

The truth is that we are used to having the authorities twist facts. DNA tests or no DNA tests, the exhumation of the five bodies, apparently recovered from one militant hide-out that the army blew up, but buried at three different locations, tells its own story. And in Kashmir, nothing illustrates this economy with the truth better than the turn-out for the last general election. Independent reports from across J&K spoke of people being forcibly taken to polling booths by the security forces. Despite this New Delhi maintained that there had been a “free and fair” election.

Take a completely different situation, outside Kashmir, like a rail accident: the official number of casualties announced is always far lower than the actual number. Or look at the annual budget: each year finance ministers tell us that state expenditure will fall and the national coffers will be heavy with tax revenue. We are quite happy disbelieving the government when it tells us how many people died in a train crash, or when it tells us it will be able to balance its account books. Yet, we are extremely uncomfortable and hesitant in questioning anything the government says about Kashmir. But, the fact remains, every time a government lies to us it shows its contempt for the people of India and the Constitution it claims to defend. And, every time we fail to ask questions we show our contempt for the idea of democracy.