Why is 13-yr-old Andleeb no more?

Arun Joshi

ANDLEEB, true to her name (which means bulbul), was chirping in her village until Saturday morning. Then, she lay silent as if in deep sleep. That the 13-year-old will wake up and move around with her lilting voice remains an illusion. She is no more.

She fell to bullets along with two others at Havoora village in Kulgam when the Army opened fire to quell a violent mob armed with stones, “petrol bombs and some men with guns”.

The image of her lying dead will haunt for a long time. This is how children in a conflict situation die quite often.

What exactly was the situation that invited such lethal action – this question and many more will remain unanswered. Andleeb’s death is one such tragedy for which the real-time truth is not known. In such situations, truth acquires many faces.

Kashmir has become a theatre where children of common people, soldiers, policemen and militants become casualties of the conflict or they are rendered orphans.

Andleeb, lying in her tiny grave, would never know why she was killed. Her fault was that she was born in Kashmir where life has lost meaning.

Contradictory versions about the situation in which the Army opened fire in the village in Rudwani – a hub of militants in Kulgam in south Kashmir — have confounded the tragedy of the little girl. The locals would like the world to believe that the soldiers ransacked their houses and when things became intolerable for them, they started protests and the Army opened fire. This is a typical narrative that is put in the public domain by the resistance camp in Kashmir.

The argument runs that ransacking of houses and damaging of property by soldiers are a norm in Kashmir. Soldiers are accused of doing so without any provocation.

No one dare contradict them because that is considered “treachery”. Moreover, there can be no other justification for the “martyrdom”. And, Andleeb is now one of them.

The Army’s fierce contesting view that its men came under a life-threatening situation and had to open fire for the “safety of own troops” is taken with a handful of salt by the conflict-ridden Kashmir. The truth lies in between these two versions.

The inquiries into such cases in the past have been inconsequential. The eyewitnesses retreat to their own safety. The case will remain open for eternity.

And, the Army has a protective shield of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. But that will not offer an escape route from the horrors and sorrows left in the trail. There is a need to introspect ways of dealing with the extremely provocative situations.

The truth of the moment is that Andleeb is no more. She would be a “martyr” for a few weeks and the human rights groups through their “remote monitoring” will list her tragedy to fill in the blanks in their reports that are lost in the blame game by the sides involved in the conflict.

The human rights violations must be probed to the logical conclusion. It will serve the interests of all, including the Army. There also is a need for fair atmosphere to prevail for investigation. Neither bullets nor stones will deliver justice ever.