Sreelatha Menon: Deathly custody

Jammu and Kashmir is moving towards normalcy." That is what Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad would want the world and himself to believe. He said at a recent conference of journalists in Srinagar that the media didn't report positive things, which was not good for the development of the country.

And the good news, he said, was that in the last 10 months, there had been no custodial death in Kashmir.

However, all one needs to do in order to hear stories of custodial deaths and cases of custodial disappearances is to meet college students in Srinagar. These are students from villages, sent to the city by frightened parents. If they stay in the village, they may be picked up and killed, they say.

In December 2006, recounts one of these teenagers, 18-year-old Parvez was picked up from Mazdugh village in Baramullah. He was kept in an Army lock-up for two days and his body handed over to his parents, recalled Javed, a neighbour now studying in a Srinagar college.

Another student recalled that in August this year, in Kupwara town's Malik Mala area, the Army brought two men and shot them down in front of a house. A woman in the house who saw this was also shot. The bodies vanished. These are people brought from one place and shot in another. No one knows them and they are lost to their families forever, says Shoaib Malik of Kupwara.

The students bristle with anger as their memories are made of 20 years of wrongs done to their family members and neighbours.

Shoaib stares into the vacant as he recalls how some armymen pumped 32 bullets into his uncle's body right in front of his eyes. He was ten. Now, he is 18, sent to study in a city college.

The chief minister is lying, say the youths. Custodial deaths are not being reported from villages as the villagers are afraid to complain or go to court, say the youths from Baramulla.

For those who think peace comes when militancy ends, here is what the youths of Kashmir have to say: If there was peace, there would be no militancy. How does one explain this?

And how will peace come? It will come when people have no grievances, when parents' complaints about missing children are heard, when justice is done.

Mir Hafizullah, legal advisor to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), says, "No one can understand the Kashmiri mind. Every Kashmiri wants one thing most of all, irrespective of whether he wants independence or not. That the wrong-doers be brought to justice. He could be a soldier or a militant. Anyone who kills an innocent man has to be punished." As Shoaib says, "I can never forget, I will never forget."

And as Parveena Ahangar, president of APDP, says, "We will never give up our fight till they give us justice." Ahangar's 18-year-old son disappeared in 1990 and she has been searching for him since. Ahangar does not say who she is fighting. There are no bomb blasts in Srinagar. But there is no peace either. And when there is no peace, there is militancy every where, in every pair of eyes, in every thought, as they militate silently against the injustices perceived by them. These are injustices that no one has even begun to address.