While the whole world has been grappling with COVID-19, it is business as usual for Pakistan that has been busy exporting terror into India from across the border. The recent Handwara encounter in which five of our bravehearts from the Indian Army and J&K police attained martyrdom will remain etched in India’s consciousness for a very long time to come.
Among those who laid down their lives for the safety and pride of the motherland were Colonel Ashutosh Sharma, Major Anuj Sood, Naik Rajesh, Lance Naik Dinesh, and J&K Police Sub-Inspector Sageer Ahmad Pathan. It was a colossal loss for the Indian Armed Forces in which officers of the rank of Major and Colonel gave the supreme sacrifice for the country in an anti-terror operation.
The last time India had lost such high-ranking soldiers due to Pakistan’s nefarious terror designs was in 2015. The Indian Army had lost two Colonels in a year - Colonel M N Rai who died while fighting terrorists in the Tral area of south Kashmir and Colonel Santosh Mahadik who was martyred in an encounter in Kupwara.
The Handwara operation has an extraordinary significance because it happened at a time when India was in a state of an unprecedented health emergency. A nation of 1.3 billion engaged in a collective fight against the coronavirus pandemic ended up mourning the death of its sons sworn to protect her. It happened because our fearless soldiers put their lives on the line to save civilians who were held hostage by terrorists in a house at a village in the Rajwar forests of the Handwara area in Kashmir. One of the terrorists was a Pakistani national and Commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba while the other was a local resident as per media reports.
On May 2, 2020, Colonel Ashutosh Sharma and his team led a joint cordon and search operation along with JK Police after receiving intelligence that terrorists had held around 11 civilians, including women and children, captive in a house and were using them as human shields. Colonel Sharma and his men successfully managed to extricate the civilians from the house. However, during the process, a fierce gun battle transpired between the terrorists and the five-member team in which the two terrorists were killed but the encounter ended up claiming the lives of the gallant Indian soldiers.
The Handwara encounter is the truest and the boldest reflection of commitment, selflessness, and magnanimity of our security forces. Despite being at the receiving end of attacks, harassment and stones pelted by Pakistan sponsored anti-India Kashmiri seditionists, the Indian Army is always at the forefront of protecting average Kashmiris whenever there is a crisis - be it a natural disaster like the 2014 Kashmir floods or a terror-related situation such as Handwara. Therefore, the least that our bravehearts deserve is a unanimous voice coming from the political class and the civil society across the nation that backs their efforts in the valley instead of encouraging a pseudo-liberal agenda that only advocates the human rights of the seditious elements in Kashmir while ignoring the same for the Armed Forces.
Let alone an unambiguous backing of our forces, the political opposition in India spearheaded by the Congress party overtly criticised the removal of Article 370. Elected representatives of the Congress and many other left-leaning leaders tried to internationalise Kashmir on the floor of the Parliament in their bid to extend a counter-narrative to Modi’s historic step. It is this brazenness for cheap political gains that serves as an impetus for the anti-India brigade and then the mess is for the Army to clean up due to which they often end up losing their lives.
More recently, the Pulitzer controversy has turned out to be one of the more visible straws in the pack of Congress’s growing separatist tendencies exemplifying the party’s conscious choice to encourage separatism. This has put the Gandhis in the same bracket as the Abdullahs and the Muftis of Kashmir. By congratulating the Pulitzer winning Indian photographers of the Associated Press and thereby automatically endorsing the outrageous citation of the photographs that mentioned Kashmir as a disputed territory under siege and Burhan Wani as a “rebel” rather than a terrorist - Rahul Gandhi made it abundantly clear that he subscribes to the Pakistani stand that challenges Kashmir being an integral part of India.
There cannot be a greater insult to India’s sovereignty by Rahul Gandhi and therefore the Congress party that considers itself to be the principal opposition party in the country and a political entity that carries the legacy of being the “supreme contributor” in India’s freedom struggle. When a party that owes allegiance to the Indian constitution resonates the line on Kashmir taken by the Pakistan army and the ISI, not only does it cast a shadow on its loyalty towards India but also poses threat to the country’s internal security because of the motivation it supplies to the radicalised forces in the valley.
The fact of the matter is that ever since Narendra Modi took over the reigns of the country from the UPA in 2014, a rapidly growing crescendo of nationalism has created an atmosphere of desperation in the anti-Modi camp. Through the abrogation of Article 370, the Modi government established an unequivocal stand that anything which challenges the integrity and sovereignty of India will be nipped in the bud.
But the united Modi-baiters comprising of the Congress, the Communists, the pseudo-secular lobby, Kashmiri separatist voices, and the foreign-funded anti-India human rights NGOs hold an opposite position with regards to Kashmir. The lobbyists have been left exposed on more occasions than one consistently for several years through their strategic silence on the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits in the 90s by Islamic Jihadists, a blatant soft-corner for the stone-pelting brigade of Kashmir that glorifies terrorists and attacks our security forces while conveniently referring to them as misguided youth and victims of the state’s apathy, or more recently by their unabashed and scathing criticism of the revocation of the discriminatory and draconian Article 370.
After the dreaded Hizbul Mujahideen commander Riyaz Naikoo was eliminated by the forces on May 6, 2020, in the Beighpora village of the Pulwama district in Kashmir, stone-pelters and vandals got a new lease of life as they attacked the security personnel and damaged their vehicles. For one of the most wanted terrorists in Kashmir who would soon have completed eight years of his association with the Hizbul Mujahideen, the terror apologists showcased such enormous display of sympathy and solidarity that even the COVID scare could not stop them from gathering in large numbers and engaging in violence.
Again it was the Army that was targeted for merely performing its duty of neutralising a terrorist who had been wreaking havoc in the valley, especially after the killing of Burhan Wani in 2016 post which Naikoo had become the commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen. The western media and the leftist media groups in India flagrantly indulged in glorifying Riyaz Naikoo, calling him a “farmer’s son” and a “mathematics graduate” who once taught poor students free of cost. It is disheartening to imagine how all this must weigh on the psyche of the Indian Armed Forces who are in the line of fire in Kashmir on a daily basis.
In light of all that has been analysed above, it is clear that there are two simultaneous battles that India is currently pitted against - one on the ground involving the seditionists in Kashmir and terrorists from across the LoC, and another against terror-sympathising fake narrative creators that are parasitically thriving in India. But the pertinent question is that while the fight against Pakistan sponsored terrorism in Kashmir in the post Article 370 era continues relentlessly, can India afford to let go in vain the ultimate sacrifices that our braveheart soldiers make day in and day out to combat terror? Is it not time India assured its Armed Forces that the country stands behind them unconditionally and with utmost gratitude?
If it requires a severe reprimand or introducing a law against all those who for their vested political or other interests take a line that contradicts the actions of our security forces or challenges Kashmir’s belongingness to India - then so be it.
Has some human rights activist asked the UT administration about any follow up on the encounter under section 174.
ReplyDeleteHad this been done lots of skeletons would come tumbling out.
Too many gaps in the narrative and too many dots not connecting.