DSP’s lynching: The rage within

Ishfaq Tantry

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, June 24

Even as the Jammu and Kashmir Police have formed a special team to probe the lynching of DSP Mohammed Ayub Pandith outside Jamia Masjid and arrested three more suspects, the social media in Kashmir is engaged in a fierce debate amidst the outrage.

“I hate this bloodshed, it makes me sick,” wrote Rouf Trumboo, a hotelier. In reply, another hotelier Mushtaq Burza wrote, “This is the result of the gun culture brought in our peaceful lives since the early Nineties. We all are sick of it.”

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Shafqat Khan, the Municipal Commissioner of Srinagar, put a poster on his Facebook wall depicting an ape yelling while pointing towards humans around the cage. “To hell with your Theory of Evolution Darwin, I am not related to these idiots.” He also wrote, “Harsh, but true.”

Columnist A Hussain Talib hoped that humanity would never die. “One proof is in Kashmiri society’s mass condemnation of and remorse for what happened in Nowhatta. The whole Kashmiri society seems to be shaken,” he said.

However, there were some who felt the lynching had a genesis in the years of violence and the “brutal suppression” of the “rights movement”. “You cannot plant nettle and hope for roses,” Athar Zia, a Kashmiri writer based aboard wrote.

“To maintain moral superiority, people will have to speak up against each and every atrocity committed in their name and the tehreek. Otherwise, we will descend into civil war and lose the moral argument,” a separatist leader wrote.