ALI SUKHANVER
Most of us are misguided when we are ruled and governed by the gods of our wishes and desires. Desires and wishes push us into a blind alley with no way out particularly when they are not supported by logic and wisdom. Same thing is happening there in the paradise like valley of Indian Occupied Kashmir. There is no concept of a normal life in that valley; every day is a day of bloodshed; every night full of incidents of rape and molestation. You would find countless mothers waiting for their disappeared sons and daughters waiting for their fathers whose names are in the long lists of missing persons. Certainly if the police stations are asked about them, they would say, “The disappeared and the missing ones were all terrorists. They were militants; we too are searching for them.” But matter of the fact is that they are neither the disappeared ones nor the missing ones, they are simply the murdered ones. If some day the international peace-keepers start excavating the valleys of the Indian Occupied Kashmir, they would find thousands of unmarked graves and unidentified dead bodies hidden under the rotten leaves and in the depths of stagnant water ponds. Two things are the least important for the Indian soldiers deputed there in the Indian Occupied Kashmir; life of the Kashmiri people and honour and chastity of the Kashmiri women. In short it is their hobby to play with these two. The people of Kashmir are so helpless that they have no power and force to save themselves from these atrocities. All they could do is to gather at some place and raise slogans in protest against the cruelties of the Indian forces. This situation of helplessness is no doubt very painful and agonizing for the Kashmiri youth. Some of them come forward and add aggression to this protest movement. Burhan Wani was also one of such youngsters who could not bear this sight of helplessness of their people. The Indian forces labeled him as a terrorist though he was simply a social media activist. The Indian government blamed that he was a Commander of Hizbul Mujahidin, a Kashmiri militant group. He was kidnapped and then killed in a fake encounter with the Indian security forces on 8 July 2016. That time his age was just 22. His people worship and praise him like a hero because he fought for them with his words. His death anniversary is observed every year not in Jammu Kashmir but also in every part of the world where lives even a single Kashmiri. Last July, a protest rally was organized by the Kashmiri people living in Birmingham to commemorate the martyrdom of Burhan Wani with the permission of the local city council. It is an old tradition of UK that it always stands with all the crushed ones; the government of UK as well as the people feels pride in supporting all those who have been deprived of the basic human rights; same tradition was followed when Kashmiri people asked for permission of organizing a protest rally on Wani’s first death anniversary. India, through its foreign office in UK tried to do all possible for stopping that rally but could not succeed. Even this year, a very successful rally was organized again. The India authorities in UK were well aware of the fact that like 2017, in 2018 too, the lovers and followers of Burhan Wani would again stage a protest at his death anniversary. So to stop them from doing so, India’s deputy high commissioner in UK Dinesh Patnaik wrote a letter to the city council. The letter said, “We have no objection to peaceful events on political issues but take serious objection to any effort to glorify terrorists.” He further said, “Would any council give permission to glorify terrorists who commit acts in the United Kingdom, such as the person who committed the Westminster Bridge attack last year.” But his plea and arguments could not be entertained. Earlier the minister of state for home Kiren Rijiju also expressed his concerns over anti-India forces functioning in Britain during his meeting with the security minister Ben Wallace in January. Here it is something very strange that the government of India exerted all its pressure on the local council of Birmingham for stopping the Kashmiris from protest on Wani’s brutal murder but it could not control the protest of the local Kashmiris. Indian authorities are misguided by their own designed notion that protesting voices could be crushed by use of force. If such voices could have been crushed by use of force, the valley of Kashmir would never have given birth to immortal characters like Burhan Wani.