Saima Bhat
SRINAGAR
On August 15, 2016, Mohammad Riyaz (not his real name) of Ganderbal’s Kurhama was stunned to see army storming his house “to throw out all electronic appliances”, one by one.
Smashing windowpanes was just a routine since 2010, but this time it was different.
Minutes before the attack, Riyaz, 23, a graduate, heard the assaulting army men, “See how big their houses are? And how many facilities they have, yet they are protesting.”
And with that, he says, army started smashing all electronic appliances, like refrigerators, TV, washing machines, computers, laptops.
“And then,” he says, “they attacked bikes and cars.”
Since 2010, Riyaz’s father, a baker by profession, has replaced the windowpanes four times. “Think of the costs of replacing 120 windowpanes for four times and that too for a labourer.”
With Kashmir witnessing raging protests after the rebel commander Burhan’s Wani killing on June 8, the intensity of state force has only increased. But in the face of the escalating backlash, many Kashmiris have turned ‘creative’.
Last year, Riyaz’s eldest sibling got married. They got new windowpanes, but soon after marriage, they opened the panes back and covered windows with polythene, again. “Besides, we keep hiding our movable electronic devices as soon as protests break out in our areas, but that’s not possible for bigger appliances,” says Riyaz.
On August 15, when army men went berserk in Ganderbal, Riyaz says, some of his neighbours managed to lock down their gates. But that too couldn’t help them. “Army got their Casper vehicles and sped up it in reverse gear and hit their gate with a bang. Then, they collided their vehicles with our cars and bikes in the compound and badly damaged them.”
Many eyewitnesses say that army didn’t even “spare women” who were rescued by SHO Tulmulla. “But that SHO,” he says, “was himself beaten.”
“Army men even stole gold jewellery and clothes from my house,” says another eyewitness from Tulmulla Ganderbal, who called the incident as ‘malicious’.
Earlier similar incidents were reported from Khrew area where the army during a nocturnal raid “savagely” thrashed the locals and ended up killing a lecturer. Besides the reports of force storming the residences to beat inmates and damage things almost pour daily during the current civil uprising.
The police have filed an FIR 48/2016 in which they are investigating four different contentions: beating up people, a letter shot by RR saying their local deployment came under heavy stone pelting (the letter came two days after the case was filed), wounding of two local cops and damage to government property.
“It is a gradual process,” a top policeman posted in Ganderbal said. “Investigation is a gradual process.”
Around 40 kilometers away in Budgam, Rukaya, a mother of three daughters, along with her carpenter husband, managed to reach her parent’s house in Barzulla on August 20, when Kashmir was continuously simmering under curfew.
“We left at 5 O’clock in the morning and reached Barzulla around 4pm. It was not safe to stay there as army enter our houses any time of the day or night, ransack houses and even loot golden ornaments from females.”
As army higher ups couldn’t be contacted for comments, the anxious Rukaya says, “We thought our priority is our daughters—so, we preferred to leave our house and save our daughters first.”
