BY ZAHID RAFIQ
|
IN A congested neighbourhood
of old decaying houses, mourners arrive quietly through narrow muddy
lanes. On the evening of 31 January, suspected militants dragged two
teenaged sisters out of their home in Sopore, Jammu & Kashmir, and
shot them dead in cold blood. This time, there were no cries of revenge
from angry boys on the streets nor demands for investigations. In the
silences and whispers, it seems as if something ominous — rather than
horrendous — has happened.
In Muslim Peer, where most of the residents are
related to each other, the pauses and measured answers of the girls’
relatives are surprising. There is a palpable feeling of fear and also
of an overnight alienation. The victims’ family suddenly feels out of
place after rumours that the girls were not only “immoral” but also
informers for the security forces.
“Why else would militants kill them? Of course,
they had a questionable character too for which they had been warned
before,” is a common refrain in the town located 35 km northwest of
Srinagar.
Akhtara, 18, and Arifa, 16, were beautiful and
poor and often it is a tragic mix, more so when they refused to conform
to the accepted morality of Sopore, a Jamaat-e- Islami and militant
stronghold.
According to locals, the sisters used to roam
around the market at dusk, laughing and chatting on their cell phones.
“Akhtara was warned in April and asked to mend her ways but she
continued to behave improperly,” says a shopkeeper.
|
||
At around 7.45 pm on that fateful day, Arifa
was cooking rice in the kitchen of her 8x10 ft single-room home. Akhtara
was upstairs at her uncle’s place cleaning fish. Their father Ghulam
Nabi Dar, a manual labourer in a ration depot, had gone to the mosque.
Their mother Fareeza, a housewife who can no longer walk because of
arthritis, was sitting with her 15-year-old son Ghulam Jeelani when the
door suddenly opened and three masked men clad in phirans walked in.
“One of them asked my daughter to come out. I
knew something was amiss but I had no idea it would go this wrong,” says
Fareeza. “We all fell at their feet, begging them to tell us if we had
done something wrong. But they said they just wanted to ask a few
questions.”
“Outside, it was like a crackdown,” says a
neighbour. Almost everyone heard the noises but no one came out. “There
were 6-7 armed men who had cordoned off the area. When we tried to open a
window, they warned us to stay inside. We were too afraid to go out,”
says a relative.
The gunmen locked Fareeza inside and went up to
get Akhtara. “Her uncle tried hard to stop them but they hit him and
took the girls away. Some of us followed them but they sent us back
saying they just want to talk to them alone. They said it was better for
us to go home and not make them angry, and we returned,” recalls
Shareefa, their aunt, whom Akhtara used to help with the fish.
Jeelani, who is frail and looks younger than
his 15 years, hovered around, unable to understand what to do.
Sometimes, he hugged his sisters and sometimes begged the gunmen to
leave them alone, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.
|
Fifteen minutes later, gunshots shattered
whatever little hopes the family had left. The bodies were found in
Rahim Sahib neighbourhood. One was riddled with six holes, the other
with four, including one through the head.
“One of the sisters had a broken arm and
another had broken teeth. Their back had been lashed and I couldn’t
count the injuries,” says a relative who gave the sisters their final
bath before burial. Not many people attended the funeral, as it was
almost certain that it was militants who had killed the “immoral girls”.
THE POLICE had given out the
names of two local Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) militants — Muzaffar Naikoo
alias Muz Maulvi and Waseem Ganai — within hours of the killings but the
United Jehad Council (UJC) refuted the police claim and vowed to
conduct its own investigation.
Everyone in Sopore seemed to have known the
sisters or maybe their murder increased their “notoriety”. “They used to
go out to the market at dusk, talk on cell phones on the street and
also roamed around STF (Special Task Force) camps,” was the common
refrain. But no one saw them entering an STF camp and the police say
that none of their informers dare enter the camp through the bus yard.
There’s nothing to prove that the girls were
informers. They haven’t stashed any riches, certainly not in their home.
They don’t have a television or a bathroom.
Akhtara cleaned fish for Rs.4 a kg and used to
work about four hours a day. “Even when she was dragged out, she had
fish scales and stench on her hands,” recalls Shareefa.
Ritual condemnations came from several sides
but no real words of anger or outrage were said. After the UJC denied
any role in the killing, Hurriyat (G) gave a protest call insinuating
that it was the work of State agencies. A day later, LeT posters
appeared all over the town claiming responsibility for the killing. “We
killed the two girls because their behaviour was improper and they were
involved in degraded activities like informing the security agencies,”
the poster read. It also threatened to take action against those who had
started raising questions about the murders. No proofs and explanations
of the girls’ involvement as informers were provided.
As for the mainstream political parties, the
People’s Democratic Party, which acts as human right champions in the
Valley, didn’t talk about the issue for days. The PDP made a passing
reference about it five days later in its angry statement over the
killing of Manzoor Ahmad Magray, 21, by the army in Handwara on 5
February.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah visited Magray’s
family a day after his killing, but bypassed a numbed mother, a
distraught father and hurt brother. However, he was the first to tweet
about the murders but no one from Dar’s house was following him on
Twitter.
|
||
Meanwhile, human rights group Coalition of
Civil Society, which sent its volunteers to the family, said that the
real task was to work beyond statements and make these acts intolerable
in our society.
“If the militants have killed the girls for
promiscuity, then we have a huge task ahead of us because it is not the
job of militants to decide who is promiscuous among us and give
punishments. This is against international human rights principles and
is certainly against Islam,” says Khurram Parvez, a human rights
activist. “And if the girls were informers, we strongly condemn it
because we don’t accept civilian killings and we had got UJC to agree to
it,” he says.
Dar is a broken man and it is hard to imagine
him carrying a load on his bent back as he has been doing for the past
15 years. Fareeza hasn’t moved from a relative’s home where she wails
and sings elegies to her dead daughters. Jeelani roams around the
bylanes like a ghost.
Their 8x10 ft room — with wires hanging from
its low ceiling and the rough cement walls turned black — suddenly seems
to have become big for the family that was always cramped for space.
In a distant corner, Fareeza wails in her
elegy. “We were two daughters and a mother, we used to joke and laugh
together. Tomorrow when everyone will go, who will I talk to? Without
her crutches how will a cripple live, come back my daughter, come back
to me!”
zahid@tehelka.com
No comments:
Post a Comment