A NYT report on the recent murders of 35 Hindus in Kashmir draws parallels to an infamous massacre of Sikh men six years ago:
Thirty five Hindus were killed in recent days in two separate incidents in the Indian-administered portion of the disputed Kashmir province… They are particularly worrisome because they are so plainly designed to fuel Hindu-Muslim tensions…Killings targeting Hindu and Sikh villagers had become a routine form of terror some years ago when relations between India and Pakistan were at their worst. The most infamous of these massacres came in March 2000, on the eve of President Bill Clinton’s state visit to India, when 37 Sikhs were murdered in Chattisinghpora village… killings, blamed on both security forces and militants, have hardly vanished. [Link]
But it doesn’t get into the horrific fact that the perps are sometimes from the Indian army. An Indian government report issued last week says that after the Chattisinghpora massacre, Indian army personnel allegedly killed five innocent people in a fake encounter because they were trying to meet a quota for dead militants:
After three years of probe into the killing of innocent civilians on suspicion of being involved in Chattisinghpora massacre of 36 Sikhs in Jammu and Kashmir, the CBI indicted five army personnel for staging a fake encounter to kill the civilians…The 18-page CBI chargesheet said that after the gunning down of Sikh community members, the army unit operating in the area was under “tremendous [psychological] pressure” to show results because there was allegation of inefficiency and ineffectiveness on their part.
The CBI alleged the army personnel entered into a criminal conspiracy to pick up the some innocent persons and stage-manage an encounter to create the impression that the militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora killings had been neutralised. The accused army men also showed fake recovery of arms and ammunition from the five deceased after obtaining signatures of two witnesses on blank papers. [Link]
And in a protest after these staged killings, nine more civilians were killed by live fire. There’s an old saying in business: be careful in choosing what to measure. In the former USSR, numerical quotas alone led to shoddy quality. In this case, a poorly-thought-out work quota, combined with other, more significant factors, may have contributed to egregious civilian murders by the state.
