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Showing posts with the label Jammu Kashmir

Kashmir - The perennial issue

  (Though published now, this article had been written long before the controversial bifurcation of the State) Mohammed Aslam, holding his 10 day old daughter in his arms, sat on the steps of the hospital reminiscing what has been going on. He remembered his father telling him how his great grandfather had been killed by the Pathan tribals in October 1947. Angered by this, his grandfather joined the Indian Army to fight against the neighbours and was killed in the war of 1971. Following his father, and hoping for an end to the dangerous situation, Aslam’s father too joined the Army only to be martyred in December 1999. Shocked by his father’s death and radicalised by the clerics, Aslam’s brother joined the separatist militant movement. At the age of 30, he was killed in 2017 by the Indian forces. And Aslam sat here, with the lifeless body of his 10 day old daughter who he didn’t even get the fortune of naming, wondering when this saga would end. He wondered if any member of his fam...