The fear of a police-militant nexus may not be playing much on the minds of all the 3,000 VIPs under security cover in J-K, but 28-year-old Qaiser Jamsheed Lone, National Conference legislator from Sogam, says he feels shaky when he boards the official car with his gun-wielding guards. Lone has a personal reason: he has lost two of his uncles including former minister Mushtaq Ahmad Lone to this nexus.‘‘Following the disclosures that the police were hand-in-glove with militants, I feel I should seek a gun for my own protection,’’ Lone told The Indian Express. ‘‘Anything can happen anytime. It is better if one is vigilant,’’ said Lone, who was pitchforked into politics after Mushtaq Lone was gunned down on September 9, 2002. His other uncle, Ghulam Mohideen fell to the same nexus three months later. ‘‘Now that policemen have been found involved, I feel apprehensive most of the time,’’ he says.Lone has other reasons to be scared of. ‘‘I am on the hitlist of a militant outfit. They have threatened us to liquidate our whole family.’’ The family has bid adieu to their ancestral Sogam village and shifted to the high-security Tulsibagh locality in Srinagar. But now this high security has become a reason of concern in itself.The Lones are now a family of widows and orphans. Qaisar Lone is the family’s political heir and there is heightened apprehension about his security. The fear psychosis is so deep-rooted that the family has put an embargo on all its members to step beyond Kupwara township. ‘‘I have never gone beyond Kupwara since the killing of my uncle,’’ he said. Outside Lone’s house, four policemen are on guard duty and their expressions reveal the shock of this startling disclosure of a police-militant nexus. ‘‘It is an embarrasment,’’ one of them says. ‘‘But this nexus is an exception, everybody cannot be part of it’’.
