Headlined “In Kashmir, Abuses Bruise Hopes for Peace”, John Lancaster’s report in the Washington Post starts with a story of a doctor in a Kashmiri village who alleged that he was brutally tortured by Indian security forces. Using this story as a backdrop, Lancaster goes on to question the Indian government’s sincerity on moving the peace process forward.
The fault, according to Lancaster, is India’s insistence on holding General Musharraf to his (unkept) promises of putting a stop to jihadi terrorism in Kashmir. That a ‘peace process’ can go ahead even as jihadi terrorists continue their violent campaign is a contradiction in terms.
Another example of the article’s anti-India bias - India’s insistence on a passport for passengers on the bus between Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir. He conveniently forgets to mention that this proposal was first put forward by India and it was Pakistan that brought in the issue of travel-documents.
The article goes on to describe a gruesome account of torture, but only scratches the surface on the suspects’ links.
After being arrested on Aug. 4, Mir said, he was taken to an interrogation center in Srinagar and accused of giving money to a militant group. Mir acknowledged that he might have done so inadvertently; a few weeks before the arrest, he said, a stranger in a suit and tie dropped by his clinic and asked him to hold a bag of cash for one of Mir’s patients. Mir said he thought little of the request at the time but later learned that the patient had been arrested for working with the militants.
“They said, ‘You must be a middleman,’” he recalled of his interrogators, whom he identified as members of the Jammu and Kashmir police. [Washington Post]That itself suggests a potential involvement, sufficient enough for investigation. The methods used by investigators, of course, were quite unsuitable to be mentioned in polite conversation. But while Lancaster shows no lack of verbosity in describing the torture, he is not quite that enthusiastic to leave the question of guilt unaddressed.
As hard as he tries to portray the suffering of the tortured innocent, it is hard not to conclude that John Lancaster’s sympathies lie firmly with terrorists and their supporters.
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