[The unrest began
Wednesday night at Dharam village in Ramban district, 150 kilometers (90 miles)
south of Srinagar, the summer capital of the state. Around 9:30 p.m., four
armed soldiers from the Border Security Force arrived at a small madrasa, or
Islamic school, in Dharam, said Afzal Lateef, the 22-year-old caretaker of the
school.]
 |
Channi
Anand/Associated Press
A
villager, shot by Border Security Force soldiers, was taken to the government
medical
college hospital in Jammu city, Jammu and Kashmir, on Thursday.
|
The government in the northern state of Jammu
and Kashmir imposed a curfew on
Kashmir Valley and some districts of Jammu region on Friday after India’s
paramilitary Border Security Force troops and local police killed four
protesters and injured over 40 in the Ramban district of the state.
Internet services were
blocked and mobile phones were jammed for several hours to prevent further
protests on Friday in the troubled region. Authorities have also temporarily
suspended the annual Hindu pilgrimage to the Amarnath shrine in southern
Kashmir.
The unrest began
Wednesday night at Dharam village in Ramban district, 150 kilometers (90 miles)
south of Srinagar, the summer capital of the state. Around 9:30 p.m., four
armed soldiers from the Border Security Force arrived at a small madrasa, or
Islamic school, in Dharam, said Afzal Lateef, the 22-year-old caretaker of the
school.
“Two B.S.F. men stayed
outside and two came inside,” Mr. Lateef said in a phone interview. “They
seemed angry. They shouted at me, ‘You have turned this madrasa into a home for
militants.’ ” Mr. Lateef denied the charges leveled against him by the
paramilitary officers.
“They looked at the
bookshelves in my room and saw the several religious books I had,” Mr. Lateef
recalled. “They picked up a copy of the Koran from a shelf, tore it into pieces
and threw the torn pages onto the floor. Then they stomped over the torn pages
of the Koran with their shoes.”
Mr. Lateef said that
when he protested the desecration of the Koran, the soldiers dragged him out by
his collar, slapping and kicking him. “A Sumo Taxi was passing by and the
driver stopped. The soldiers turned toward the taxi driver and chased him
away,” Mr. Lateef said.
“I called the local
police. The police sent workers from the railway construction project, which is
hardly 100 meters from the madrasa. A group of 10 engineers, crane drivers, and
laborers arrived within a few minutes,” Mr. Lateef said. The railway workers
shouted at the soldiers not to fire.
Seeing the workers
drawing closer, the soldiers left and returned to their camp, he added.
As the word spread,
around 500 villagers gathered at the madrasa. “The women began to cry when they
saw the torn pages of the Koran on the floor, and men were enraged and shouted
slogans,” said Mr. Lateef.
Rafiq Bhat, who lives
in the nearby village of Gool and works as a stringer for The Kashmir Times
newspaper, said the angry, grieving villagers stayed at the madrasa until 3:30
on Thursday morning. The village elders then asked them to return to their
homes and eat the ritual meal before starting the daylong fast undertaken
during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
By Thursday morning,
hundreds of people from the nearby villages had assembled at the Dharam madrasa
to protest. Shyam Vinod Meena, the deputy commissioner who heads the
administration of Ramban district, sent an envoy to the protesters and proposed
talks over the desecration of the Koran.
Altaf Hussain Tragwal,
44, the head man of Dharam, said he led a delegation of 10 people to meet Mr.
Meena. “I told him that the guilty B.S.F. men must be arrested immediately and
a criminal inquiry be ordered against them,” Mr. Tragwal said in a phone
interview. “We were still talking when we heard gunfire.”
Mr. Meena called off
the meeting, called for a team of doctors and paramedics to arrive at the
protest site, and then rushed there to assess the situation. Around 2,000
protesters were walking from the madrasa to the paramilitary camp. “By then
B.S.F. had already opened the fire on the protesters and injured three
civilians,” Mr. Tragwal said. “The protesters didn’t turn back. They continued
walking toward the B.S.F. camp and shouting slogans.”
A little later, Mr.
Meena’s official cavalcade drew closer to the protesters, and the paramilitary
troops and police stopped firing, according to Mr. Tragwal. The protesters
huddled around Mr. Meena and demanded immediate action against the troops.
Mr. Meena promised to
take action after Eid al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, Mr. Tragwal said. “That
agitated the villagers further, and they shouted slogans: B.S.F. hai hai (down
with the B.S.F.), mujrimoon ko saza do (punish the guilty).”
The villagers hurled
stones at the paramilitary camp, according to an eyewitness. As the stones
flew, Mr. Meena left the scene and returned to his office. “I saw armed
policemen take positions behind trees and rocks,” said Mr. Tragwal. “The B.S.F.
threw open the gate of the camp, and soldiers with guns in their hands crouched
and took positions. Then they started firing at the protesters.”
Moments before the
gunfire, Muhammad Aslam, a 44-year-old paramedic who was part of the medical
team that arrived at the protest, recognized Manzoor Ahmad Shan, a political
science teacher, in the crowd. “A police officer raised his pistol and shot
Shan in his head,” said Mr. Aslam. “Shan died on the spot.”
Mr. Tragwal said Mr.
Shan had been facing the protesters and telling people to return to the
madrasa. “A police officer appeared behind him, and he just shot him in the
head,” said Mr. Tragwal.
The paramilitary and
the police opened fire, he said, and the protesters ran for safety. Four
protesters were killed, and more than 40 were injured.
“Keeping in view the
threat to the arms and ammunitions, steps were taken with maximum restraint by
the security forces,” Rajeev Krishna, the inspector general of the Border
Security Force in Jammu, said at a news conference Thursday. Mr. Krishna added
that it was difficult to determine whether it was the paramilitary or the
police officers who caused the casualties.
Sushil Kumar Shinde,
India’s home minister, has ordered an investigation into the shootings.
Most of the injured
were moved to a hospital at Jammu, the winter capital of the state, around 150
kilometers south of Ramban. “They are all bullet injuries,” said Dr. Dara
Singh, the superintendent of Jammu Medical College. “Two boys are going through
an emergency operation right now. They both are hit in the abdomen, and they
have bled profusely.”
Omar Abdullah, the
chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, offered his condolences to the victims’
families. “It is unfortunate that in spite of costly lessons learned in 2008
and 2010, some among us are determined to repeat past mistakes and use force
against unarmed protesters,” Mr. Abdullah said in a statement. “Such incidents
risk throwing the entire peaceful atmosphere in jeopardy.”
The four slain
protesters were buried Friday in Dharam and adjoining villages. “What can I
tell you?” said Shamshada Begum, the sister of Mr. Shan, the teacher. “It feels
like doomsday.”
Mehboob Jeelani is a
Staff Writer at The Caravan magazine in New Delhi.
