CARAVAN: Screams from the Army Post — The Indian Army’s torture and murder of civilians in a restive Jammu
MIR HUSSAIN’S FAMILY was not a wealthy one, and they did not have a large house, but they made do. His eldest son, Noor Ahmed, had joined the Border Security Force—the paramilitary force patrolling India’s porous frontier with its Muslim-majority neighbours—assuring the family a stable income. For everything else, the octogenarian Hussain and his 76-year-old wife, Zainab Bi, depended on their second son, Safeer Ahmed. Safeer spent much of his day managing small-time construction contracts for the panchayat in Topa Peer, a tiny isolated village in Jammu and Kashmir, one of the most militarised regions in the world and mere kilometres away from one of the globe’s most tenuous borders. The jobs were not that glamorous, though, mostly involving getting firewood from the surrounding thick forests, cleaning snow off the sagging rooftop or taking the corn he grew twelve kilometres downhill to the town of Bafliaz, in Poonch district. Hussain is terminally ill, and, when his maladies would get severe, Safeer would carry him on his back down a treacherous path, a three-hour hike, to the nearest hospital.
Caravan- The Indian Army’s torture and murder of civilians in a restive Jammu_compressed
