THE MURDER MOST FOUL

The gruesome murder of Rajneesh Sharma, a Jammu youth by Kashmir police inside Ram Munshi Bagh Police station in Srinagar is highly deplorable. The boy was taken into custody by the concerned police from his residence at Sarwal locality in Jammu on Sept 30 on a complaint of kidnapping of a Muslim girl Amina from Srinagar whom he had actually married legally and the wedding registered with an appropriate court of law. The body of Rajneesh bore obvious torture marks which incited a wide protest from the people of Jammu. The post-mortem reports also confirm the brutal torture though the final opinion of the experts is awaited.
Such brutal police excesses are not rare in this country but this particular case carries some deeper ramifications. The Muslims in the valley take such an incident of inter-religious marriage a severe affront especially when a Kashmiri Muslim girl chooses a Hindu boy as a life partner. In this case the boy was from Jammu and naturally the tempers ran too high. The worst part of the episode is how the Kashmir police authorities actively initiated action with the arrest of the boy from his residence and ended with his obnoxious murder inside the police station Ram Munshi Bagh. Obviously the action was taken with the active support of the highest civil as well as police authorities with the lone motive of a revenge from the Hindu boy’s adventure alliance with a Muslim girl from Kashmir. The incident clearly reverberates the environment that Kashmiri Pandits faced while in Kashmir in good olden days before 1990. How we had to be in complete subordination to the whims and foibles of the majority community even in the most ordinary activities in life is an example in itself not to speak of such an adventure activity. KPs had not only to bear insults from their Muslim neighbours patiently even during celebrations of some of their religious ceremonies but also become victims of their fury whenever India won a match or a Muslim trader was taken to task anywhere in India for any of his misadventures. There’s usually a mass celebration among Muslims whenever anyone of them enters into wedlock with a Hindu girl with mutual consent as the basic condition for the girl is to convert to Islam and perform marriage according to their custom but conversely the things usually turn explosive if the girl with a Hindu background opts to marry a Muslim boy. The event reflects clearly the biased attitude of the Kashmir administration toward Hindus in the State and how far the authorities can initiate any brutal action against them according to the sweet will of a Kashmir Muslim. The reader can easily imagine that the KPs were forced to leave Kashmir in early nineties especially to make the Kashmir administration clean of all the Hindu and Indian elements and make a smooth way for the Muslim administrators to act clean as suited to their vested interest otherwise in a mixed administration such brutal happenings were almost impossible. It’ll not be out of place to mention that a few partners in the said administration from Jammu have no say in any of the important policy making and their counterparts from Kashmir are bold enough to overpower them or ignore them easily to make a smooth way and take their biased decisions in all matters. It’s gradually becoming open to all Jammuites that the Kashmir administration is bent upon working for the interest of Kashmir Muslim only not for any the people of any other part of the State. The Kashmir Pandit, reputed worldwide for his administrative and academic capabilities is almost completely sidelined and ignored in J&K simply because he has always been a strict adherer of the national interest and is now content with working satisfactorily in the broader echelons of national and international forums.
All the saner elements at the national level generally and State level particularly are out and out to admonish the criminal act of the Kashmir Police and demand an independent enquiry and severe punishment for the perpetrators of the crime.