12arya
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https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatim...lame-the-army-blame-exploitative-politicians/
For stone-pelter deaths in Kashmir, don’t blame the Army, blame exploitative politicians
The Supreme Court has rightly quashed a police investigation against Major Aditya Kumar who ordered Army troops under his command to open fire upon stone-pelters, resulting in three civilian deaths, in Shopian, Kashmir, earlier this year.
A bench of the SC ruled that an Army officer could not be treated as an ‘ordinary criminal’.
Only too often the Army gets blamed for situations which were created by cynical and exploitative politics which result in creating conditions of social unrest and often violent protests which have to be quelled through the use of armed force by the military.
The duty of the armed forces is to guard the country’s frontiers and defend it from foreign aggression.
But increasingly the Army is brought in to counter internal turmoil – be it in Kashmir, the Northeast, or elsewhere within the country – which the civil administration is unable to handle.
The so-called ‘Kashmir problem’, which has been a bleeding wound for over 70 years and has claimed thousands of lives, has been created by successive political regimes, who have cynically, or ineptly, mishandled it.
True, Pakistan has played a major role in the tragedy of Kashmir by its sponsorship of cross-border terrorism. But the effective way to deal with Pakistan’s covert involvement in fomenting trouble in Kashmir is not through the use of armed force against the civilian population but through a combination of surgical strikes against terrorist camps across the border, and an international diplomatic strategy aimed at putting Pakistan in the dock as a sponsor of terrorism.
The process of ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the Kashmiri people can only be done through a politics of reconciliation and dialogue. The use of armed force against civilians only plays into the hands of Pakistani-backed militants who use incidents like the Shopian firing to recruit local youths to join their unholy war.
Kashmir has been, and continues to be, a failure on the part of the political establishment, and the Army cannot be made the scapegoat. The indiscriminate use of the military force against civilian populations within the country undermines the morale of our soldiers who, constrained to use often lethal force against their compatriots, are made to feel like an army of alien occupation.
As the SC has ruled, in the Shopian case Major Kumar is not the ‘criminal’. Those who ought to face charges of criminal negligence, or bungling, are the politicians who have created the disease of violent dissent of which the many Shopians, in Kashmir and other parts of the country, are only the symptoms
For stone-pelter deaths in Kashmir, don’t blame the Army, blame exploitative politicians
The Supreme Court has rightly quashed a police investigation against Major Aditya Kumar who ordered Army troops under his command to open fire upon stone-pelters, resulting in three civilian deaths, in Shopian, Kashmir, earlier this year.
A bench of the SC ruled that an Army officer could not be treated as an ‘ordinary criminal’.
Only too often the Army gets blamed for situations which were created by cynical and exploitative politics which result in creating conditions of social unrest and often violent protests which have to be quelled through the use of armed force by the military.
The duty of the armed forces is to guard the country’s frontiers and defend it from foreign aggression.
But increasingly the Army is brought in to counter internal turmoil – be it in Kashmir, the Northeast, or elsewhere within the country – which the civil administration is unable to handle.
The so-called ‘Kashmir problem’, which has been a bleeding wound for over 70 years and has claimed thousands of lives, has been created by successive political regimes, who have cynically, or ineptly, mishandled it.
True, Pakistan has played a major role in the tragedy of Kashmir by its sponsorship of cross-border terrorism. But the effective way to deal with Pakistan’s covert involvement in fomenting trouble in Kashmir is not through the use of armed force against the civilian population but through a combination of surgical strikes against terrorist camps across the border, and an international diplomatic strategy aimed at putting Pakistan in the dock as a sponsor of terrorism.
The process of ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of the Kashmiri people can only be done through a politics of reconciliation and dialogue. The use of armed force against civilians only plays into the hands of Pakistani-backed militants who use incidents like the Shopian firing to recruit local youths to join their unholy war.
Kashmir has been, and continues to be, a failure on the part of the political establishment, and the Army cannot be made the scapegoat. The indiscriminate use of the military force against civilian populations within the country undermines the morale of our soldiers who, constrained to use often lethal force against their compatriots, are made to feel like an army of alien occupation.
As the SC has ruled, in the Shopian case Major Kumar is not the ‘criminal’. Those who ought to face charges of criminal negligence, or bungling, are the politicians who have created the disease of violent dissent of which the many Shopians, in Kashmir and other parts of the country, are only the symptoms
I thought the air launched Brahmos is being manufactured in India?
