[Reader-list] More Missing People, Crying Mothers..

[Sudeep K S]

This time, Samjhautha Express. Killing about 70 people on the spot.
Another shot at making fear prevail over any attempts towards peace.

The tragedy, security lapses, images of the suspects, and an image of
a BSF man on a horseback alongside the train (that one on the front
page of today's The Telegraph) are all over the newspapers and
television. And Pakistan and India getting into a word of wars again.

You think it's just the scale of the horror of the incident that makes
the media jump on it so happily? I think thats just a part of it.

Now, think Nithari. Another feast that the media has had in recent
times, despite the news of the missing children coming out very late.
What made it easy meat? Missing children? Skeletons? Crying moms? May
be all of that, but looking closer, I see something common: An easy
villain.

(Almost every news report related to Nithari had Moninder Singh's
photo with it. And for "us" on this side, there is an "easy villain"
in ISI every time any act of terror happens in this country. This time
it wasn't so easy, as most of the people who died were Pakistanis.
Still the media is playing that "Pak hand" card, though in a more
subtle way.).

Here's another story that had both missing clildren and people
continuously living in fear. And yes, it has crying Mothers too.

Families of missing people from Jammu and Kashmir were on a day-long
hunger strike day before (Thursday, February 22) in New Delhi.

I heard this from a journalist friend in Delhi. I try googling but
can't find anything on it in our leading "National" newspapers. The
only news article I could find on this is from "Greater Kashmir", that
calls it a "part of a campaign to mobilise public support against
human rights violations in the strife-torn state."

"Sixty family members of the missing people, mostly women, arrived
here [Delhi] on Monday from Srinagar in a bus to participate in the
campaign", goes the news.

[The false encounter killings in Kashmir came to news again recently,
with former Superintendent of Police Hansraj Parihar and his deputy in
Ganderbal, Bhadur Ram, arrested for allegedly killing five south
Kashmir villagers in fake encounters after dubbing them as Pakistani
militants, for reward money. I had read that news at a couple of
places but all I could find now with Google was a single Indian
Express article: "There is a man who says his brother, a Special
Police official, was picked up from home, tortured to death and to
hide the truth..."

Then a Kashmiri Observer article about a protest strike in Kashmir.
And a statement in Peoples Democracy. Is there a filter working inside
Google India like, say, the one in China? I am not sure.]

   -sudeep

[also posted, with links to the refered articles, on
http://sudeepsdiary.blogspot.com ]