Saturday 7th Dec, 2024
Let’s get some of the least contestable facts out of the way. First, the current phase of troubles started with the security forces killing Burhan Wani, which was an inevitability.
From the day he picked up arms against the State and began preening on social media, he was a dead (if very young) man walking. That he survived so long is a marvel of his luck, and also skills. Usually, you won’t survive more than a year after making it to the armed forces’ ‘A’ list of wanted men.
Do I have sympathy for him? I’d grieve for any dead countryman, but I’d sympathise with him only to the extent that he was allowed, probably even encouraged, to take such a disastrous path by friends and family.
Even the manner of his killing is irrelevant. Once you take to arms and start killing, to complain about being killed extra-judicially would be chutzpah.
Sad, therefore, that a fellow Indian had to die this way, but it was a death he chose. It’s sadder that he took dozens more, civilians and in uniform, with him.
The next incontestable fact for me, and a very vast majority of fellow Indians, including, I dare say, on Jawaharlal Nehru Campus campus, is that Kashmir, or more specifically the parts that are today in India shall (and must) remain an inalienable and inseparable part of the Republic.