‘Wronged’ Valley mothers cry for rights

On a veranda of her small house, grim-faced Fareeda flips through a mound of papers and sobs quietly. Tears flood her eyes as she stumbles on a photograph. She wipes it with her pheran (kashmiri cloak) and hides it back in the paper stack.

For the young mother, this photograph is her most-prized possession because it is of her nine-year-old son, Sameer Ahmad Rah, the youngest victim of five months of unrest in Jammu and Kashmir. He was allegedly beaten to death by security forces on August 2.

“What was his fault? How can a class II student be the enemy of the state?” she cries out loud. Fareeda’s elegy for her son reverberates in her Spartan house in Batamaloo area of Srinagar.

“He was the youngest and most jovial of my three children. Since six months our life has changed completely. Even our food habits have changed. Every time we go to sleep his memories come alive,” she sobs.

Sameer was killed in a stampede during a protest march, police says, a version his family vehemently denies. “It was a curfew and he asked for a rupee from his father to buy some candies. Suddenly, we heard cries of people shouting that a young boy has been killed. We had no inkling that it was our boy,” Fareeda laments.

“We heard he was beaten ruthlessly by security forces during the curfew. He later died in the hospital”, she says.

From a nine-year-old boy to a 60-year-old man, and from a young student to an unmarried woman, the unrest cost 110 lives and most were killed in firing by security forces.

The wounds haven’t healed either at the house of 21-year-old Fancy Jan who was the first woman to be killed in the unrest. Her old mother, Khadija, has confined herself in a small, dark room.

“She was not a stone-pelter or a protestor. She was fixing the curtains of her room when a bullet fired by the forces hit her. She died instantly and with that changed our life. I have not ventured out of my room since she died on July 6”, the old lady says.

This is a trailer of the human tragedy that has unfolded in Kashmir since the unrest began on June 11 with the killing of class XI student Tufail Matoo. On World Human Rights Day, the cries for justice have just become shriller.

“It is not only a denial of justice but those who seek justice are being persecuted”, says Khurram Parvez, programme coordinator, Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society.