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The film footage shown by an Indian TV channel says it all. The brutality and arrogance of the military in India is on full display in this sequence showing a young Assamese girl lashing out at an Indian soldier in full uniform and armed to the teeth. The soldier had made lewd suggestions and touched her as she worked in a shop. For a young unarmed girl to retaliate in this way the provocation must have been great.
This is not the first time that such an incident has taken place. The furore over the disgusting incident in Shopian Kashmir has not died down. Two young Kashmiri girls were brutally raped and then killed by Indian soldiers in Indian Held Kashmir as the Pakistanis call the area forcibly occupied by India against a UN Resolution calling for plebiscite and against the wishes of the Kashmiris. The incident provoked a violent outburst in the Kashmir State Parliament from a member who has favored resolution through a political channel. Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan, already alienated from Indians now hate them. There is a long list of rights violations, rapes and unspeakable atrocities committed by soldiers in Kashmir and India's North Eastern States.
India's propensity to use force against its own people over the last sixty years has not only alienated people struggling for their rights but has turned these political struggles into violent freedom and separatist movements. Military forces usually operate with intelligence outfits and local police and politicians get aligned for their own survival and commercial interests. When combined with Draconian laws and marginal central control the result is what we can see---brutalized ill disciplined forces behaving like arrogant occupiers.
The result is predictable. Violent Maoists struggling in north east and Kasmiris fighting for freedom in their home land. Instead of looking inwards, reining in their military and opting for political solutions the Indians look outwards to blame others for totally indigenous origin problems. There have been horrendous incidents of violence as mobs of crazed fanatic Hindoos have burnt Christian alive and in a tleast two cases the involvement of serving military officers with links to radical Hindoo movements has been proven. There is undoubtedly a local Indian link in the Mumbai terrorist attack. India needs to look inwards if it is sincere in the fight against terrorism.
By Rupali Gaurav
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