22-year-old soldier sepoy Rajender Singh, who was attacked by a stone pelting mob on the national highway in Anantnag district of J&K, succumbed to his injuries on Friday.
As per media reports, Singh was a part of the Quick Reaction Team (QRT) which was providing security to a Border Roads Organisation (BRO) convoy on the highway. “At around 6pm, when the convoy was passing through the Anantnag bypass tri-junction near NH-44, few youths hurled stones at the vehicle and Singh was injured after being hit by a stone directly on the head. He was provided immediate first aid and evacuated to 92 Base Hospital but unfortunately succumbed to the injury,” army spokesman Col Rajesh Kalia said.
Singh was from village Badena in Pithoragarh in Uttrakhand and had joined the Army in 2016. He is survived by his parents.
Separately, two more soldiers were killed in two separate terror attacks. Lance Naik Brajesh Kumar (32), a native of Nanawin in Una district of Himachal Pradesh, succumbed to his splinter injuries on Friday during an operation in which two terrorists were also killed in Malgunipura, Sopore. He is survived by his wife and a daughter, the spokesman added.
In another incident, Sepoy Ngamsiamliana (23) from Rengtekawn in Mizoram was killed when terrorists attacked an army camp at Luragam village of Tral in Pulwama on Thursday. He is survived by his parents.
Stone pelting is often portrayed as a helpless act of ‘disaffected youth’ by our mainstream media. That this phenomenon, which first originated in the 2008 Amarnath land agitation launched by separatists, is a serious threat to security forces, is often glossed over by left-liberal commentators. No one questions the roots of this rage and fanaticism which drives teenagers and young adults to resort to such deadly violence, with tragic consequences for themselves and the security forces.
Media outlets like The Wire are littered with pieces which look to explain this phenomenon as “Kashmir’s millennials being dissatisfied with both the government and separatists, and hence resorting to stone pelting to save lives of militants” (aka terrorists).
A Shekhar Gupta or Barkha Dutt condemn the use of force and pellet guns to deter these stone pelters, and create false equivalences with Kashmir when street protests break out in other parts of the country.
So what drives someone to pelt stones aimed to kill? The Kashmiri youth today is hostage to a toxic mix of Islamist hate mongering by Hurriyat & Muslim clergy, and anti-national rhetoric peddled by regional parties like PDP & NC (especially when they are out of power) – and all this constantly fanned by the jihad-military complex of Pakistan.
It is just a natural progression of the gradual Islamization of Kashmir that we now have youth ‘icons’ like terrorist Zakir Musa, who took over the reins of terror outfit Hizbul Mujahideen from Burhan Wani, calling for establishing an Islamic caliphate in Kashmir.
When slogans like “Jeeve Jeeve Pakistan (long live Pakistan), Hum Pakistani hein, Pakistan hamara hai (we are Pakistanis, Pakistan is ours), Pakistan se rishta kya, la ilaha illallah (what is our relation with Pakistan? There is no God but Allah)” ring out at public rallies of Hurriyat leaders like Syed Ali Shah Geelani, and when Geelani advises Pakistan(!) to remember it was created to serve Islam and to shun ideas like socialism, nationalism etc, what effect will such rhetoric have on impressionable young minds?
A sting by India Today TV found top Kashmiri separatists admitting that Pakistan has financed mob violence, stone pelting and school burning through hawala channels, and uncovered links between Geelani and 26/11 Mumbai terror attack mastermind LeT’s Hafiz Saeed. Now, even outsiders working in J&K are being threatened to join the stone pelting mobs.
Geelani’s second son lives in New Delhi. Izhaar, his grandson, is a crew member of a private airliner in Bharat, and many of his grandchildren are studying in leading schools of Bharat.
14 properties of Geelani & his kin, worth Rs 150 crore, are under the lens of an NIA probe into terror financing in Kashmir.
Every year, the state spends crores on protection, travel and hotel accommodation of Kashmir’s pro-Pakistan separatist leaders – as per one estimate, in 2014-15, the state government spent over Rs 120 crore on fuel, hotel stay and security of separatists, three times of the Rs 40 crore allocated for integrated child development schemes. When a PIL was filed in 2016 against this abuse of Government funds, a Supreme Court bench of justices Dipak Misra and UU Lalit said the PIL did not deserve to be entertained as the courts must refrain to interfere in such matters which come within the domain of the central government. The court also refused to use the term ‘separatists’ in its order.
This New Indian Express article ‘Separatists keep own kids away from harm’s way’ exposes the utter hypocrisy of these Islamist hate mongers who are driving the valley’s youth into despondency, while safeguarding their own childrens’ future and living luxuriously.
When our intelligentsia lacks the courage to call out the likes of Geelani for the bigoted traitor he is and even in 2017 invites him for seminars & conclaves where he is obsequiously referred to as Geelani ‘saheb’, why are we acting surprised that Kashmir today has plummeted to the depths it has?
On the contrary when Army chief Rawat gives a stern warning to stone pelters and calls them over ground workers of terrorists, he is attacked viciously by Lutyens’ commentators.
It is the unholy alliance between the Islamists of the Kashmir valley and ‘mainstream’ actors sitting in Delhi, which is the bane of Kashmir and so many other areas of our country. These #BreakingIndia forces know that capturing the minds of the youth is essential to further their goals.