Mohammed Ayub Pandith lynching: PM Modi needs to ensure that Mehbooba Mufti walks the talk

The lynching of Jammu & Kashmir police officer Mohammed Ayub Pandith by a mob in Srinagar comes soon after a police party was brutally attacked and killed in the Valley. The earlier incident involved terrorists, and the second one was carried out by a separatist-inspired mob.

In the case of Ayub, none of the so-called respectable members of the community came out at the time of lynching to protect the officer. Not only was the body disfigured, but it took police more than 12 hours to identify him.

With the spate of attacks in the Valley, it’s time the state takes appropriate measures to control both the separatists and the separatist-inspired mobs to ensure peace in the region.

The attacks have been a brazen attempt to target police who are at the forefront of anti-militancy operation. It is an attempt to break the morale of the local population and send the signal that in the guise of a mob, the police and their families would be targeted by the separatists and terrorists.

The problem with this asymmetrical warfare is that the state will have to prove culpability, which in rural areas would become even more difficult in absence of electronic surveillance. The long-term impact of this warfare can be catastrophic. It can impair the ability of the police to live and work with the local population. This needs to be avoided at any cost. The perpetrators of the crime committed in Srinagar must be brought to book. This should be done by avoiding mass reprisal because this is what the separatists want to showcase at international forums. Whoever participated in the lynching must be punished and the message should go out that the cost of such acts would be unprecedented. The justice should be immediate and should not look like retribution.

The more the state compromises with the mob and politicians legitimise street violence with their silence, the more the state will recede in the barracks, leaving civil society spaces dominated by separatists and terrorists. The end result would be that the state would recede to a small space and large tracts of ungovernable land would go under the hegemony of terror-related networks. The J&K Chief Minister who has been talking tough, must act now.  

The people inciting violence through public forums must be brought to book. The comfortable little spaces they have built for themselves must be raided and infrastructure to mobilise and inspire must be dismantled.

The state needs to go after people who have been legitimizing protests in the garb of expression. The culture that says violent protests, maiming of security forces and disruption of civic life is ok needs to come to an end.

PDP fostered the attitude that Kashmir as a state needs some sort of resolution. It peddled the feeling that something more can be achieved which is not available within the confines of the Indian Constitution. This feeling slowly came to acquire an ugly face once the PDP-BJP government came to power in Jammu & Kashmir. It becomes imperative for the message to go out that the state will not buckle under pressure and there would be no compromise.

Lastly, the state needs to go after the leadership network that inspires and provokes people to be violent and aggressive. United States of America went after preachers who have been inciting and radicalizing people across the globe. The J&K government needs to do the same. It needs to go after the heads, who push children in front of the guns so that they can become politically relevant again.

More than the executors, the government needs to round up people who incite and radicalize. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence has been an indication of this resolve. He needs to ensure that it goes down the rank and file of the administration of his government.