Amit Shah gets home: Kashmir, NRC could top his agenda

Zero tolerance towards terrorism and checking illegal immigration will be the focus areas for Shah.

Narendra Modi's number two man, Amit Shah, is India new home minister. Zero tolerance towards terrorism and checking illegal immigration will be the focus areas for Shah, who may also take some tough actions such as implementing the NRC across the country and annulling Article 35A in Jammu and Kashmir. 

The BJP in its manifesto had said it was "committed to annulling Article 35A" of the Constitution of India as the provision is "discriminatory against non-permanent residents and women of .. 

In Kashmir's Soibugh

In Kashmir's Soibugh, armed forces' assault on protesters leaves five youths injured

Seventeen-year-old Danish Bashir Hajam had his arm wrapped in a cast as he lay in a bed at home. The boy said he had fallen unconscious at an army camp at Dharmuna in the central Kashmir area of Budgam after he was hit with gun butts. He was picked by the armed forces last Friday during the protest taken out by youths over the death of Ansar Ghazwatul Hind (AGH) militant commander Zakir Musa in an encounter. Danish was among the five who were injured in the army assault with one of them grievously wounded.

A Class 8 student Fazil Fayaz Malik was wounded in the head and underwent surgery, his family members said. The picture of the boy on a ventilator has gone viral in Kashmir drawing widespread condemnation by netizens.

Fazil's uncle, Abdul Rehman Malik, said that he was forcefully slammed against an electric pole by the personnel of the Dharmuna camp, due to which he received multiple injuries to the head. "He was picked up by the army at around 5 pm and army personnel didn't release him even after we went to the camp thrice on Saturday. He was handed over to us by another army unit at HMT in Srinagar. He was a like a corpse and unable to speak. He made only gestures suggesting that he was hit in the head," he said, at his green-walled home in Soibugh's Hathharan.

Danish Bashir Hajam. Firstpost/Ishfaq Naseem

Local neighbours and relatives have been visiting the house to enquire about Fazil's condition. The family members say that his condition has not improved all that much. "We took him straight to a hospital in Srinagar from where he was referred for a specialised treatment to Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), but he has not been discharged from there as his condition continues to be grim," he said.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Budgam, Amod Ashok Nagpuri, said that the police has registered a case and the boys who were injured, were picked up during the clashes with armed forces. "As per an initial assessment, it appears that some of the injured were involved in stone-pelting," he said. After the incident was reported, the army said in a statement that it was "ascertaining the details".

Danish's medical report reveals that he during the attack by the armed forces, he suffered "nasal bleeding" as well. "I was hit by the gun butts in the back as well as on my arms. One of my arms has been fractured," he said. He added that after he was picked up by the army, he was handed over to the police by the forces following which he was released on bail by a local court from the juvenile home in Srinagar.

The court of the Juvenile Justice Board, Budgam, released Danish on Tuesday with directions to the in-charge of the observatory home at Harwan that "the person in charge of the juvenile shall ensure the continuation of the studies of the juvenile with periodical reports to the board about his welfare. The concerned in-charge of the educational institute shall also inform the board through the probationary officer about the performance of the juvenile." The order added, "The person in charge of the juvenile shall ensure that the juvenile does not expose himself to physical or moral or psychological danger."

Following the bail order, he was released late last night and after his medical check up at a hospital in Srinagar, he has been advised to attend to the follow up checkups at the SKIMS Hospital, Bemina.

Local residents of Soibugh said that the army concentration was heavy in the area even as no militant was active there. "The only militant who is active from Soibugh is Syed Salahudin, the Hizbul Mujahideen commander, but he is in Pakistan now. We have a large camp at Shareefabad in Soibugh and within a distance of two-and-a-half kilometres, there is another camp at Dharwan. There is too large a troops concentration in the area," said Mohammad Ashraf, 42, a local resident of Soibugh.

A local, Faheemad Banoo said that her son Raqib Rashid was also assaulted six months ago by armed forces personnel and he was "punched and jabbed and had received injuries all over his body". She added, "The youths of the area often get framed in false cases."

J&K human rights groups

J&K human rights groups release report documenting decade-long torture of civilians by security forces

The list is long: 432 names. All of them were subject to varying degrees of torture, even waterboarding and shocks to the private parts, in the last decade or earlier by security forces in Jammu and Kashmir and some in New Delhi's Tihar Jail. Those who survived bear the painful physical and mental aftermath.

The question of Kashmir evokes more nationalistic fervour than perhaps any other issue in India. Yet the same people who clamour that it is our “atoot ang” (inseparable limb) are blind to the torture and mayhem unleashed on its citizens. After the indiscriminate use of the pellet gun in 2016, which killed many and injured thousands, including children, there was a brief outrage. Often, the exile of Kashmiri Pandits and their deaths by armed groups is used to counter the narrative of human rights violations. And so the suffering in Jammu and Kashmir — either of the Pandits or the Muslims, both characterised by a lack of investigation and apathy — oscillates for credibility between arguments and counter-arguments of who has been victimised more.

Despite all that is already known about the deplorable human rights situation in the state, a new report “Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir”, launched on 20 May, by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCSS), must make the rest of the country take a hard look at what is going on there. Though that would be expecting too much. The cover page says it all — with a picture of Qalander Khatana from Kalaroos, Kupwara, whose legs were amputated as a result of the torture he underwent.

This report is the tip of the iceberg and there could be tens of thousands of cases, says Shazia Ahad, an activist from JKCSS. Torture is the most underrepresented human rights violation in Kashmir and there is complete silence over it, even in the local media. The main reason for this report is to break that silence. The activist hopes that more people will come forward to tell their stories and there will be pressure on the Indian government from the international community.

This is the first comprehensive report on torture since 1990, in Jammu and Kashmir, which has testimonies of 432 victims recorded over a period of 10 years. The findings provide a face to the many who survived brutal torture, and the case studies are exceedingly shocking and point to the fact that India is on par with other nefarious centres of torture in the world, for instance, Guantanamo Bay and the erstwhile CIA’s black sites.

Representational image. Reuters

Cases of torture are rarely registered or punished and reports on human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir tend to be wilfully ignored or flatly denied by the government and security forces. In February 2018, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs informed the Parliament that since 1990 the Jammu and Kashmir Government had sought the sanction of the central government for prosecution of members of the security forces in 50 cases [which is needed under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act]. The central government refused to sanction prosecution in 47 cases, while decisions remained pending in relation to three cases as of April 2018.**

Take the case of Saqib Ahmad Bhat, a student and resident of Khudwani, Kulgam. He was arrested in June, 2017 and allegedly tortured for nine days, with electric shocks at Reshipora police station and then the Special Operations Group (SOG)(of the Jammu and Kashmir police) at Camp Cargo, Awantipora before he was released on 13 October, 2017. He was among those sexually harassed as well, the report said. He named his alleged perpetrators: all belonging to the security forces — the Indian army, the SOG, the police and the Central Reserve Police (CRPF).

Mehmood Ahmad from Lathung, Surankote, was studying to be a laboratory technician when he was arrested in August, 2002. He was part of the team that had won a cricket tournament against the SOG but the SOG labelled the team anti-national. He was blindfolded and taken to a ‘safe house’ in Jammu (undesignated places, run by SOG, which are not police stations and are purely meant for interrogation and torture), the report said. Along with eight cricket team members, he was kept there for 25 days and tortured severely. Ahmad was chained for 24 hours and couldn’t even go to the toilet. Finally, another human rights activist who was also brought to the safe house, helped him to file a case. He and the others were presented in court, where they were released on bail after six months. However, they were rearrested and booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA), with two years in jail. They were in and out of prison until their cases ended in 2017. Mahmood runs a pathology laboratory in Poonch now.

Tasveer Hussain died in 2003 as a result of torture in Jammu and his is one of the few cases where the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) passed an order on a complaint from his brother Mohammed. The SHRC in its ruling observed that, “This is a brute type of Human Rights Violation committed by Taranveer Singh Randawa or Captain Toor [from Poonch].” The SHRC recommended the government pay a compensation of Rs 1 lakh and give job benefits under government rules to the next of kin. A case was registered against Captain Toor which was transferred to Crime Branch Jammu for further investigation.

*

The 560-page report says that 238 of 432 victims were given electric shocks during detention; 127 of them reported that the shocks were administered to their genitals. During the Cordon and Search Operations (CASO)s in the 1990s, the armed forces would carry a portable battery along with them and it was used to administer shocks to people who were tortured during these operations. At least 24 of the 432 cases were subjected to waterboarding: Jan Mohammad Parray from Doda said that water was poured on his face, which went in through his nostrils. Mohammad Altaf Sheikh from Srinagar said that during torture, his face was covered with a cloth and a bucketful of water was poured over it. Mohammad Ramzan Shoosha from Sopore said that he was gagged and a bucketful of water was poured on his face. About 101 victims said that their head was dunked in water repeatedly. Often, this water would be filthy or mixed with chilli powder. Abdul Rashid Dar from Pulwama said that he was arrested by the Border Security Force (BSF) in 1992 and taken to a nearby river in Nilora. Here, they took his shirt off and put his head in and out of water for two hours.

The report noted that one of the least vocalised aspects of torture in Kashmir is the widespread use of “sexualised torture and humiliation techniques such as stripping, parading people naked, photographing them, electric shocks to the private parts, and forced sexual acts including rape and sodomy." About 190 people were stripped naked, foreign objects like rods, petrol, chilli powder and needles were inserted into the rectum of 23 of the victims, two of whom were Muzaffer Ahmed Mirza and Manzoor Ahmad Naikoo, causing multiple ruptures to their internal organs. While Mirza died after a few days in hospital of a ruptured lung, Naikoo had to undergo five surgeries. A cloth had been wrapped around Naikoo's genitals and then set afire.

Others, like Mohammad Ahsan Untoo, who is a prominent human rights activist from Kashmir, said in his testimony that he was sodomised when he was detained in Tihar Jail in Delhi. On 27 October, 2009, 11 boys between the age of 13 and 19 were arrested in Srinagar on the charges of throwing stones. During their detention, the boys were forced to sodomise each other. Not only did the perpetrators watch the whole incident, they even recorded it on their mobile phone, verbally abused the victims and spat on them.

The report records the case studies of 24 women, of whom twelve had been allegedly raped by Indian armed personnel. A bride from Anantnag was travelling to her husband’s house on 18 May, 1990, along with her aunt and some other relatives. They were stopped by BSF personnel and indiscriminately fired upon, in which one person was killed. The bride and her aunt were dragged into the nearby field and gang raped. A case was registered at Dooru police station against the BSF personnel which was closed for some reason. Cases involving rape rarely get punished, for instance, the Kunan Poshpora case.

However, the number of women on record is not proportionate to the actual number tortured, as the victims were reluctant to speak up. Of the cases documented, 27 were minors (one girl, and the rest boys). The report points to “the arbitrary detention of minors under the Public Safety Act which has seen an unprecedented increase in numbers since the onset of the non-violent mass uprising of 2008. These arrests are usually made on the charges of stone throwing.”

According to the data obtained through a Right to Information Act application, 623 juveniles were arrested for stone-throwing and lodged in the Srinagar juvenile home between 23 September 2011 and 21 April 2017. They comprised nearly 50 percent of the total 1,086 detentions. Since 2008, at least seven minors have died due to custodial torture and another six have died due to beating by the state forces, the report said. However, in 2012, the Jammu and Kashmir State Assembly amended PSA to prohibit the detention of people under 18 years of age.

Even young boys are not spared. A nine-year-old boy, Sameer Ahmad Rah, a resident of Batamaloo, Srinagar, was allegedly beaten to death by the CRPF on 2 August, 2010. According to his father, the CRPF personnel caught Sameer while he was on his way to his uncle’s house. They started beating him with long bamboo sticks and kicked him. The report said, “His head was repeatedly smashed on the right side due to which he fell down on the ground. The troopers then trampled (over) his chest and inserted a bamboo stick into his mouth to take out the toffee from his mouth. When his attackers thought that he had lost consciousness, they threw him into a nearby field full of stones, which caused his death.”

*

Victims have been randomly picked up and tortured, like a 17-year-old boy, who was arrested in May 2017, taken to the Batamaloo police station, and beaten and verbally abused for two days without any reason given. At least 80 had been tortured during Cordon and Search Operation (CASO)s, raids or at checkpoints. In 2017 at least 540 CASOs were carried out in Jammu and Kashmir, which is more than one CASO per day. There were 128 in August 2018. During one such operation, which lasted for three and half hours, a school in Tral area of Pulwama district was cordoned off by the 42 Rashtriya Rifles. The students were paraded before the armed personnel and the school buses were also searched. In 2018, 275 CASOs were conducted in Jammu and Kashmir, the report said.

According to the data from APDP and JKCCS, a total of 4,042 people have been killed between 2008 and 2018 in Jammu and Kashmir, of which 1,067 were civilians, 1,898 militants and 1,077 armed forces personnel. The report said that detention, particularly prolonged, unrecorded detentions for the purpose of custodial interrogation, was a continuing and constant feature of the counter-insurgency policy. Cases of torture which make it to the Jammu and Kashmir SHRC also fail to get any closure. The report says that the Commission’s recommendations are often not implemented. In 2006, the SHRC chairperson justice (retd) AM Mir resigned from his post saying that “SHRC is just an eyewash to befool the international community that human rights of people are being respected. When our recommendations were not implemented, Commission’s credibility got eroded and people lost faith in it.”

In 2017, the government turned down almost 75 percent of the recommendations made by the Commission, only accepting a mere seven of the 44 recommendations for compensation and ex-gratia relief. The state government informed the Assembly in 2018, that out of the 229 recommendations made by the Commission since 2009, only 58 were accepted by the government. As few as 27 of the 432 cases documented in this report, were taken up by the SHRC. Of these cases, 20 were decided in favour of the complainants and six are pending.

During the unrest in 2016, the report said an estimated 8,000 and more civilians were illegally detained, including 582 under the PSA. According to estimates by the APDP, more than 8,000 people have been subjected to enforced or involuntary disappearance since 1990. On 22 June, 2016, the then Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, in her written reply to the state legislative assembly stated that there were 4,587 ‘missing’ persons. She claimed that these ‘missing’ persons had crossed over to Pakistan administered Kashmir for arms training, a claim strongly refuted by the relatives of the disappeared. Instead of probing the cases of disappeared persons, successive governments have repeatedly tried to obstruct inquiry and disseminate false and unverified information as to the whereabouts of the missing, the report pointed out.

*

With laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and the Public Safety Act (PSA) used for prolonged detention, the report points out that “An environment where torture, both against combatants and non-combatants, is carried out with impunity, and irrespective of gender and age, is telling of the widespread prevalence of this practice as a ‘normal’ way of punishing a community to teach them a lesson and coerce them into falling in line.” The government is not keen to repeal or amend AFSPA in Jammu and Kashmir.

In 2017, during India’s Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council, despite the recommendation made by various member countries, India refused to accept the recommendation to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances which it had signed in 2007. More importantly, the report said the Indian government has tried to stop the reporting of human rights violations meted out in Kashmir by banning the entry of foreign journalists into Jammu and Kashmir, which has been denoted as a “protected area” under Foreigners’ (Protected Areas) Order, 1958.

The predictable silence so far on this report from the powers that be indicates that doubtless this document too will gather dust, while the political situation will be in a constant ferment. Torture and death have become part of everyday life in Jammu and Kashmir, with a few human rights groups taking the trouble to address and document it, with little help from the state or the law.

**(Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Kashmir: Developments in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir from June 2016 to April 2018, and General Human Rights Concerns in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights), (UN OCHR) June 2018). 

Zakir Musa

Zakir Musa: Tensions in Kashmir after killing of top rebel

Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir -Tensions have erupted in Indian-administered Kashmir following the killing of al-Qaeda-linked rebel commander Zakir Musa in Pulwama district's Tral area.

Protests and clashes were reported on Friday in many parts of the disputed Muslim-majority region against the killing of Musa, who had left Pakistani-based Hizbul Mujahideen armed group to join al-Qaeda two years ago.

Thousands of people took part in multiple funeral processions for the 25-year-old rebel leader in his home town of Tral.

Fearing an escalation in tensions, the authorities in Kashmir closed down schools, colleges and universities, while mobile internet services were also shut across the Himalayan region to prevent people from mobilising protests.

"The shutdown of internet services, schools and colleges will depend on the situation. We will review the situation in the evening," Dilbagh Singh, the police chief, told Al Jazeera.

In the region's main city of Srinagar, curfew and shutdown remained in place as the authorities prevented people from attending Friday prayers in the city's grand mosque.

"Condemn that for the second time in Ramadan, Jumma prayers disallowed at Jamia Masjid," senior separatist leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said in a tweet.

"Extremely sad that each day Kashmir loses its promising young in one way or the other to the lingering conflict. Urge all the stakeholders to come together to put an end to this daily killing."

Cordon and search operation

A cordon-and-search operation was launched in Tral's Dadsara village on Thursday evening after they received a tip-off regarding Musa's whereabouts, the state police chief Singh said.

Musa, whose real name is Zakir Rashid Bhat, was killed after an 11-hour operation.

"He was affiliated to Ansar Ghawzat-ul-Hind. His burial has been completed and the situation is peaceful as of now," Singh said.

"We are taking all the precautions in terms of law and order. The militant was involved in many terrorist activities," the official added.

The gunfight took place in a two-storey civilian house that was completely damaged.

After the news about the gunfight spread in the region late last night, hundreds of people came out on roads and raised anti-India slogans as the rebels in the region enjoy local support.

"Last evening, when we came to know about the gunfight, hundreds of villagers tried to march towards the site but were prevented by the forces," said Ashiq Ahmad, a resident of Dadsara village. "We have not slept the whole night as the firing and sound of blasts continued till dawn. People were on the streets".

A man uses his mobile phone to take pictures of a bullet-riddled wall of a residential house that was damaged during a gun battle between Zakir Musa and Indian armed forces [Danish Ismail/Reuters]

In a statement, police said Musa was the only surviving rebel from the group of Burhan Wani, a Hizbul Mujahideen commander, whose killing sparked widespread protests in 2016.

More than 100 civilians were killed in deadly protests that continued over four months.

Both of the rebels belonged to Tral village in south Kashmir's Pulwama district, where a suicide attack in February brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.

In 2017, an al-Qaeda-linked propaganda media platform had announced that Musa had left Hizbul Mujahideen and joined an affiliate armed group, Ansar, as its head in Kashmir.

According to police, Ansar had less than a dozen members in the region, most of whom have been killed in the gunfights.

The police chief said that the counterinsurgency operation against the rebel groups will continue. In 2018, a record number of over 250 rebels were killed in the region. So far this year, more than 70 rebels have been killed, most of them in the villages of southern Kashmir - a rebel stronghold.

Musa was an engineering student before taking up arms against Indian rule in 2013 at the age of 19. His killing has put the Muslim-majority region on an edge where residents say could lead to a long spell of tension.

"It serves as an indication that the time is going to be very bad ahead," said Ghulam Qadir, a local resident.

Call of Duty

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a tense and daring reboot of the beloved shooter series

 the slightly off-the-wall Black Ops 4 — which featured a time travel-themed zombie mode and Fortnite-style battle royale — Call of Duty is making the jump back to reality for its next release. Today, developer Infinity Ward officially announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, a reboot of the long-running sub series with an intense focus on gritty realism.

Unlike BO4, the new Modern Warfare will indeed have a single-player campaign, and it’s the main focus for the reveal today. As you might guess from the name, it’s not a direct sequel to 2011’s Modern Warfare 3, but instead a soft reboot that kicks off a new storyline with a few familiar, returning characters. The campaign will be split into two halves: in one you’ll play as a Tier 1 operator, a special forces soldier, and in the second part you’ll take on the role of a rebel fighter in the Middle East.

One of the goals of the game, and its dual-perspective storyline in particular, is to show various viewpoints of a conflict. “We are telling a story about modern war in the real world,” says Jacob Minkoff, the single-player design director on Modern Warfare. “If we whitewash it, if we backpedal from it, if we show a world where the heroes fight the terrorists and win, you never see the impact on the average person, the collateral damage, or the morally gray situations that soldiers themselves have to face.”

The shift seems aimed at regaining some of the grit and, at times, controversial appeal of the original Modern Warfare franchise, which mixed action movie theatrics with more politically aware plotlines. Starting with 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the series set itself apart as one willing to take risks, like the disturbing “No Russian” terrorism scene in Modern Warfare 2 that urged players to take part in an airport civilian massacre, or the various instances in which players were put in the shoes of victims of nuclear attacks unfolding in real time.

“THIS MODERN WARFARE HAS A MUCH BROADER VARIETY OF EMOTIONS.”

Call of Duty lost its ability to both shock and impress with its single-player campaigns as years went on and the series jumped further into the future and borrowed more science fiction elements. The scattershot approach ultimately dulled its narrative mode until, with Black Ops 4, Activision and developer Treyarch decided to remove it altogether. But the Modern Warfare reboot is an attempt to reestablish Call of Duty as a vehicle for strong storytelling.

Part of the shift to a more contemporary story means a larger focus on realism in virtually every aspect of the game. Modern Warfare was built using a new, purpose-built engine, and features a frankly absurd level of detail. The game makes extensive use of photogrammetry in particular, a technology that allows artists to scan real-world objects to create virtual approximations. In Modern Warfare, this means that almost everything you see in the game looks lifelike, from guns to brick walls — the team at Infinity Ward even scanned an entire tank into the game.

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This combination of contemporary storytelling and incredible realism can make for some truly tense and uncomfortable experiences. Last week at Infinity Ward, I was able to experience two scenes from the game in a hands-off demo, and both were harrowing. In the first, after a terrorist attack at Piccadilly Circus, a group of soldiers track down the attackers to a small, cramped townhouse in central London. What followed was a methodical killing of everyone in the building. Well-armed soldiers moved through every room and floor, shooting normal-looking folks in bedrooms and kitchens. At the end of the scene, the soldiers are searching for evidence on an upper floor, and you can hear a baby inside of the house screaming in the background.

The second scenario was a flashback, showing the early life of one of the rebel characters. Set 20 years ago, it takes place in a seemingly small Middle Eastern village in the midst of a military attack, while the character controls a young girl following her older brother in search of safety. You mostly hide, sneaking past soldiers through small hidden spaces, but you can’t help but see and hear the carnage around you. At one point, the siblings work together to kill a determined soldier and it’s an absolutely brutal experience, as they use makeshift weapons, including a screwdriver, to take down their attacker. It’s prolonged and exhausting; I felt the tension and I wasn’t even playing.

Of course, the whole game won’t be like this — the developers at Infinity Ward say there will be plenty of more traditional shooter scenarios, in addition to the typical array of multiplayer modes. But according to Minkoff, these kinds of darker, more unsettling moments are necessary for accurately portraying modern conflict. “I do think that the point of art is to hold up a lens to life, and give people a new perspective on it,” he says, adding that “this Modern Warfare has a much broader variety of emotions that it makes you feel.”

We should learn more about the game, including details on the multiplayer component, at E3 next month. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will be launching on the Xbox One, PS4, and PC on October 25th.