[Reader-list] Kashmiri pan Islamists' 'who killed whom' confession moves Barkha Dutt..???..

[Lalit Ambardar]

8-1-2010… “old habits die hard”….she is back at it what she does the best …‘pitching’….Barkha Dutt wants the world to hail the Kashmiri pan Islamists for their confession that ‘they themselves killed their own people’, their culpability in spreading canards all these years to instigate the masses not withstanding. Radia tapes scam was just “an error of judgment” for her wonder BD’s paraphrasing of her position when the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits is also finally acknowledged.Rgds allLA 

 

Barkha Dutt, Hindustan
Times

January
 07, 2011

First Published: 23:13 IST(7/1/2011)

Last Updated: 23:16 IST(7/1/2011)

Many shades of truth

In all the anxiety about Andhra Pradesh, the angst over the corruption churn
and the concern over the possible unravelling of our violence-ridden neighbour,
we have, it seems, forgotten all about Jammu and Kashmir
(J&K). Or perhaps — and this may be why things end up where they do — we
only pay attention to the state in moments of crisis. But, almost on the quiet,
something deeply significant happened in the state this past week.

There was, for the first time, an admission by a Kashmiri separatist leader
of a truth that previously could not — or would not — be spoken. In a
startlingly frank moment, Hurriyat representative, Abdul Ghani Bhat, the
maverick politician who once taught Persian, conceded that two key
assassinations of separatist leaders were the brainchild of men within their
own ranks. For Kashmir watchers, the import of this
utterance was not its content per se (known already to many over the decades)
but that it was said at all, and said out loud.

Both the senior Mirwaiz and, more recently, Abdul Gani Lone, Bhat said, were
killed not by the army or the police or any other security agency, but “by our
own people”. Then he added in his characteristically twisty turn of phrase that
it was time to free the Kashmiri people from “sentimentalism bordering on
insanity” by speaking the truth. We forget that insurgencies are often rooted
not just in history, the alienation of ordinary people and omissions of justice
— but also in the power of the popular narrative. And here, after two decades
of unrest in the Valley, the narrative, as it has been constructed over the
years, was being challenged.

I still remember the exact moment in May 2002 when Lone was killed.
Ironically, it was at a rally in the Eidgah grounds of Srinagar
to commemorate the death anniversary of the senior Mirwaiz who had been
murdered in 1991. I was standing along with other journalists at the base of
the dais, expecting the proceedings of the day to be routine and unremarkable.
Suddenly, towards the end of the ceremony, in the blink of an eye, two gunmen
emerged from within the crowd, charged towards the stage and shot Lone with
brutal precision. 

As people dispersed in panic, the gunmen disappeared into the maze-like
bylanes of downtown Srinagar, never
to be found or identified. This was Srinagar
in the era before mobile phone connectivity, and I ran down the deserted
streets, desperate to find a phone booth to relay the news back home. This was
a watershed in the state’s troubled history. It was clear, even then, that the
70-year-old Lone had been assassinated because he had been publically
supporting a dialogue process and condemning violence as a means of protest.

Later that night, I remember meeting his emotionally overwrought son Sajad
who, unmindful of the consequences, shrugged off the restraint being urged by
the flood of mourners at his house and blamed Pakistan’s
Inter-State Intelligence (ISI) and rival leaders of the Hurriyat conference for
the fact that his father was dead. The next morning, possibly reeling from the
violent backlash his bluntness generated, he retracted his comments and, in an
interview to me, said the remarks were an “emotional outburst.” But in the same
interview he said his father had been murdered by an “ugly convergence of
interests” and it could be the work of “any agency, either from India
or Pakistan.”
Today, after Bhat’s admission, he is urging an end to what he has called
“half-truths” saying that the people have a “right to know who killed whom”.

Indeed. Now, how should we react to the new willingness to call a spade a
spade?

It would be utterly short-sighted for New Delhi
to respond with a gloating, we-told-you-so smugness. The hardline narrative on
J&K questions the liberal media’s nomenclature of ‘moderate separatists’.
But the truth is that at every stage those separatists who have spoken in
favour of reconciliation have paid with their lives. Think of Fazl Haq Qureshi
who went from being an architect of the azadi platform to an architect of a
state’s search for peace. He brokered the first and only dialogue between the
government and the Hizbul Mujahideen in 2000. More recently, as he revived his
attempts at a dialogue process, an assassin’s bullet tore open his skull.

As unpalatable as the sentiment of secessionism may be to strategists in New
  Delhi, there has to be recognition of the risks being
taken by those within the separatist ranks who are engaging with the truth. In
fact, if you chronicle the state’s history, every time governments have failed
to engage with the more moderate voices in the Valley, the radicals have become
emboldened to hijack the agenda.

We must also pause to reflect on the relative quiet in the state since the
summer of unrest last year. The media’s commentary on J&K cannot be
restricted to happily hauling chief minister Omar Abdullah over the coals when
the chips are down, but looking the other way in disinterested silence when
things are comparatively better. Doesn’t the changed environment need
acknowledgment, comment and, yes, debate as well? And no, not because a
political problem can be solved by tourists or trade — it absolutely cannot —
but because the truth comes in many, ever-evolving shades, and it is our job to
reflect all the colours, not just the ones that fit in with our prejudices.

Finally, remember Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece- Rashomon on the nature of
truth? The film depicted how one crime was recounted in widely contradictory
ways by different witnesses. “We all want to forget something, so we tell
stories,” says one character. That may be true, for all sides, across the
divide, in Kashmir.

Barkha Dutt is Group Editor, English News, NDTV n barkha at ndtv.com The views
expressed by the author are personal

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/647590.asp

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