The skull of a secondary school student Tufail Ahmed Mattoo is split open by a randomly fired police teargas canister in downtown Srinagar. Matto was not part of any protest but returning home from a tutor’s class on a fateful Friday afternoon. A couple passing through the area takes him to a city hospital where doctors declare him brought dead.
For days, the police tries to delude and even plays trick with his parents and others by claiming that it appeared to be a case of murder pointing finger of suspicion at the couple which had dropped him at the hospital gate. But the autopsy report exposed the lie the police authorities were struggling hard to market.
The June 11 incident triggered street protests which soon gripped other parts of the Kashmir Valley as more people began to fall to the bullets fired by trigger-happy CRPF and local policemen to quell stone-throwing mobs and even peaceful protests. Initially, it were the habitual rock-throwing youth, some of them reportedly funded by a mainstream Opposition political party desperately struggling to bring down the Omar Abdullah government or, at least, unsettle its functioning were in charge of the display.
But soon the intimate and perpetual “azadi” sentiment once again came in the open and the manifestation was only seized by the separatists to stage a comeback. The unrest began to be referred as “Kashmir Intifada”, in a nod to the earlier uprisings of Palestinian rock-throwing youth against the Israeli forces. In fact, the response the picketing in Srinagar and the towns of Sopore and Baramulla, mainly on Fridays and Sundays, would evoke from the security forces, mainly CRPF, was labelled by the separatist groups as “replica of Zionist tactics”. They would often publicly refer to India’s growing military ties with Israel to back up their charge that what the people of Kashmir live through is actually a replication of Muslim antagonistic connive being executed by “enemies of Islam”. The government, both in Srinagar and New Delhi, failed to rise to the occasion and handle the situation in a fashion which would have proved the separatists wrong.
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‘Queen irked over Games corruption’
London : The British Queen is said to be furious over allegations of corruption involving a UK-based firm and the baton relay of the Games, a media report said.
The baton relay, which was launched in London in October 2009, has been sullied by claims that it has been used by the UK-based Indian-owned firm, AM Films, to cash in on the Royal brand, the Sunday Express reported.
—PTI