Unfettered powers

Three more persons killed in Kashmir, security forces called them terrorists; families distraught over the loss of their loved ones. It is a story that has repeated itself over and over at one place or the other in Kashmir in last two decades. There are some points that merit consideration even without debating the status of the persons killed by security forces. It is hard to perceive that gunning down of human beings, but not their arrest, it would seem always comes as an instinctive first line of action. Even more disturbing is the use of killing of three human beings as a ruse for the military establishment to launch a tirade against the elected government of the state. Perhaps the military establishment more than anybody else is more interested in preserving its unfettered power through draconian armed forces special act than letting peace descend. The act always sounded an abstract invisible force until one reads lucid description of its unabashed usage by security officials and their minions in ‘Curfewed Night’ by Basharat Peer. It can’t be right when a nick on the face of a person from a shaving razor is enough for security personnel to launch barges into offices. It can’t be civil for dazed individuals to hear veiled threats for their not getting up from chairs upon menacing uninvited entrance of a military officer into their establishments. All under the coverage of armed forces special power act. The powers to be at the moment resemble more like drunken sailors that are lurching from one scandal to another; blissfully oblivious to a fundamental threat to the constitutional rule of law not from the outlaws rather regretfully from the security establishment itself.