Shoe Throwing On Independence Day!
By Mustafa Khan
16 August, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Kashmir valley’s crop of grapes of wrath will ferment more discontent than we have seen so far. Bullets and stones will erode whatever democratic pretensions we still have in our repertoire.
How long can we pretend that the minors killed in police firing are guilty of an uprising that is not indigenous? They are now spotted at the forefront of protest marches. Uncharacteristically they are “overgrown children.” They are transfusing the anger and frustration of the last two generations into a new dawn that is unwilling to break the light on the horizon and leaving the rest of the place in utter dark.
And now the minors are joined by the old. Abdulla Ahad Jan who threw his shoe at Omar Abdullah was very distinguished as an individual professional. As a policeman he never was inhibited by the awesome powers of the state or the Ikhwanis, a kind of vigilantes supporting the puppet governments. The Ikhwanis had let loose terror on the native village of Jan, Ajas in the 1990s. They had torched Jan’s house and shot in the arm of his son Showkat and crippled him for life because his father dared to criticize their atrocity. Even Jan’s nephew was a victim. Studying in UP he was suspected to be a terrorist and imprisoned for the past eight years. Jan, Showkat and the nephew are victims of the juggernaut of fighting terror in the valley and elsewhere which has veered off into outlawry. The fault does not lie in the groundlings in the valley but the rulers of Kashmir in Srinager and in New Delhi.
Jan’s reaction was the harvest of the grapes of wrath in the passing summer of discontent in the valley. By calling him a psychopath the authorities have compounded the matter as is common there. It is strange that he had the sanity to find out this weapon to confront the authorities whom the victims view as occupiers of their land ala the shoe thrower at George Bush. Jan had rendered distinguished service as a police man and was awarded rewards and had completed his beat at the house of the state secretary on August 14 and brought home the salary of the month to run the house. How could he have any psychiatric problem?
Psychiatric problems lie somewhere else. Angry protests either in Srinager or Rajkot are symptoms of certain maladies which have infected the polity and have grown a fungal culture of gross violation of human rights in the name of ruling the states. Narendra Modi of Gujarat was also disturbed by noisy protest on the same occasion of unfurling the tricolor for reasons best known to the people unless they are bigoted like him and his counterpart in the valley. Hectoring like “If you have bullets, we have courage" to students cannot be lost upon them unless they are myopic like him. His way of ruling his state did not bring peace to the state in the last ten years as he boasts. He had been involved in the state sponsored pogroms of 2002 and the series of fake encounters since then till today. That cannot be called “war on terror” by any means. It is in fact creating terror. Let alone physical courage what moral courage has he in the face of the ongoing disclosures over Sohrabuddin case to hector that the Centre is weak in confronting terror?
Modi chose to cite the incidents past and present of disturbance of the Independence Day in the Kashmir valley and compares it with his Rajkot celebration which is disturbed by the Congress. How could the so called stone pelters be equated with the Congress workers? Mahagujarat Janata Party and National Students Union of India are not by any standard like the disgruntled populace of the valley. Even on the Independence Day Modi’s vow to fight terrorism is base on what Pramod Muthalik observed on the sacred day to our memory: “there is only one terrorism in India and it is Islamic terrorism.” But what Modi himself told on the night of February 27, 2002 was asking the Hindus in Gujarat to vent their anger on the Muslim for three days beginning with the VHP and BJP call for strike the next day. It was letting loose terror on the Muslims. His ADGP BR Sreeekumar and Hiren Pandya who revealed this secret to the world were the first shoe throwers. Expressing one’s outrage at injustice and falsehood is shoe throwing, be it physical or figurative.
