Mohammed Yousuf death: This ship too shall sink under sinners’ weight

The ugly scenes witnessed in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly on Monday morning leaves no scope for any future inhibitions. It cannot get uglier and the [dis]honourable members, irrespective of their parties’ lines, cannot stoop to further lows. Witnessing the scenes on national television — the speaker hurling invectives freely while making obscene gestures against a opposition leader and a ruling party member enjoying the status of a minister creating ruckus by tearing down the papers and throwing the files around, and the opposition party member picking a pedestal fan and aiming at the speaker — one wonders whether this democratic institution still needs an outside enemy to disgrace its already smeared image?

Whatever the ruling National Conference does to muzzle the voice of opposition in the assembly, it cannot suppress the growing outcry against the alleged custodial killing of its top fixer, Mohammed Yousuf, 61. Inside the assembly, through brute majority and with the help of a highly-biased speaker who behaves more like a party worker than a dignified presiding officer, the NC may be able to silence the PDP’s demands for Omar Abdullah and state home minster to resign. After discovering the apparent involvement of the chief minister himself, who till other day, was being advertised as the new poster boy of democracy, in a filthy and violent scandal, people in the state are obviously horrified.

It is too early to firmly conclude that the chief minister personally is involved in Yousuf’s death. But it is difficult to gloss over the fact that the blood trail of a NC worker, rumoured to have had intimate relations with both father and son — Union minister Dr Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah — that allegedly led to his death began from the official residence of the chief minister. The IGP crime is reported to have said that, “he was called to the CM’s office at around 5.30 on Thursday evening for investigating a complaint of two NC workers, Mohammad Yousuf  Bhat and Abdul Salam Rishi against Syed Mohammad Yusuf Shah. Shah had already accepted that he had taken money from Bhat and Reshi... I had a brief chat with all the three. Shah complained that he is not feeling well and wanted to go to toilet where he vomited.”

Syed Mohammad Shafi, the brother of the deceased, has alleged that around 3pm his brother was instructed to reach the CM’s residence where “he was hit on his head by someone at the chief minister’s residence resulting in his death.”

The police afterwards said that Yousuf died due to a “cardiac arrest”; subsequently the state government announced a judicial inquiry by a sitting high court judge. As past experience indicates, inquiries and investigations in J&K are not ordered to unearth the truth; these are time-tested dallying tactics to cool-off tempers.  

Eventually, the chief minister may be able to wriggle out of the murder charge, yet he cannot escape the serious allegations of corruption.  Yusuf is believed to have extracted more than Rs1.5 crore from two NC workers Yousuf  Bhat and  Salam Rishi, (Bhat, till the scandal surfaced, was in charge of Omar’s Ganderbal constituency), on the promise of making Bhat R&B minster and Rishi a member of the legislative council. NC minsters defending the chief minister argue that Omar took prompt action after hearing the allegations and instead of being appreciated he is unnecessarily decried.

But the chief minister is not an investigation agency; if he could investigate an alleged crime after the complaint was made to him, why did he straightway not refer the issue to the police? Yusuf was not an ordinary criminal; he was a middleman between the NC high command and aspirants of the lucrative posts. The chief minister not handing him over to police directly only confirmed the dead man’s high flying status.

Not only ministerial posts, party mandates and MLC seats are on sale. For the last three years it was already known that even the prized bureaucratic postings are on sale in J&K. And who knows, it would not have been for the first time when a money dispute was being settled in the official residence of the chief minister?

What went wrong this time is the death of the middleman in the suspicious circumstances, therefore exposing the dirty business. And not to forget the silent ways of nature: Eventually the ship sinks under the weight of the sinners, is the old Kashmiri proverb.