जम्मू कश्मीर के पूंछ सेक्टर जहाँ रूक रूक भारी गोलीबारी हो रही है जिसमे हाल ही में कई सुरक्षा बलों और नागरिकों की जान गई है।

Photo courtesy: ndtv

बीते शुक्रवार सोलह वर्षीय तनवीर की ऐसी ही गोलीबारी में मौत हो गई ।तनवीर के परिजनों ने लाइन ऑफ़ कंट्रोल के पास उनके गांव नूरकोट में अपनी जमीन पर दफनाने का फैसला किया। लेकिन भारी गोलीबारी के बीच उन्हें ये फैसला वापस लेना पड़ा। मामले में दखल देते हुए मस्जिद को सीमा पर जज़्बाती अपील करनी पड़ी कि कुछ देर के गोलीबारी रोक दी जाए ताकि लाश को दफनाया जा सके।

राज्य की विधानसभा के सदस्य जहांगीर मीर के अनुसार मस्जिद ने अपने लाउड स्पीकर से कहा “तुम्हारी गोलीबारी ने एक जान ले ली है। गोलीबारी बंद करो। हमे जनाजे की नमाज अदा करनी है।

Photo courtesy: ndtv

सीज़फायर के उल्लंघन का ताजा मामला पाकिस्तानी सेना की दो हफ्ते की चुप्पी के बाद आया है। इससे पहले भारतीय सेना ने माछिल सेक्टर में मारे तीन भारतीय जवानों के बाद कार्रवाई में आपरेशन चलाया था। पुलिस के अधिकारी ने बयान देते हुए कहा कि रविवार को पाकिस्तान की ओर से बिना उकसावे की फायरिंग की गई जिसमे भारतीय सेना की तीन पोस्टों को निशाना बनाया गया।

Courtesy: Janta ka Reporter
 

The post जब जनाज़े के लिए सीमा पर मस्जिद को लगानी पड़ी गुहार “गोलीबारी बंद करो, हमें दफनानी है लाश” appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
This eye for the camera, embracing foreign dignatires kind of diplomacy conveys not what Modi has in his heart (Mann), but is misunderstood in the language of seasoned diplomacy. Modi’s embracing of Nawaz  Sharif as a long lost cousin conveyed a wrong message to Pakistan and prompted her to attack us at Pathankot and Uri. The language of peace with our neighbour was replaced by the language of confrontation. Overnight, Modi 's Pak policy lay in a shambles .
 
His response to Pathankot and Uri was what he calls a 'surgical strike 'and for which he claims great credit , but which has caused India considerable loss .The only gain of the surgical strike was the killing of 18 terrorists or terrorists in training .But this killing of 18 did not frighten Pakistan into abandoning its policy of attacking and bleeding India .The result has been just the opposite. Since September 29,2016 (the day of surgical strike) there have been 83 violations at LOC and the international border in Jammu and 17 in Kashmir. Six soldiers and a dozen civilians have been killed. One hundred villages near the border have been evacuated displacing lackhs of their inhabitants who have been forced into misery, in the approaching cold, away from their home and hearth.There had  been peace on the border for the last 13 years without a formal agreement  due to a tacit understanding between the countries; due to seasoned diplomacy. Now, even the future of the relations between the neighbours is uncertain and might get worse with less than intelligent –stupid- men occupying sensitive postions in government. Parrikar, the Defence Minister, talks of using nuclear bombs, raising a bogey no sane man would raise. Meanwhile, our Jawans and civilians are being killed without a cause, purpose and goal just because of the flip flop of a prime minister, who just does not know the first principles of how the foreign policy of a nation is conducted.

The post Is Modi’s Failed Diplomacy a Reason for Pakistan’s Ceasefire Violations? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
Just like the arms race between Indian and Pakistan accelerated after the nuclear tests, even though the social indices of the two neighbours are the worst compared to other neighbours in South Asia, consuming invaluable resources which should have been spent on making basic necessities of life available to its citizens, competition in acquiring material for mutual destruction would receive a similar fillip after the Indian surgical strike. It would be underestimating Pakistan if we think that it would be discouraged from carrying out its regular incursions in future because of our surgical strike. The problem with the arms race is nobody knows when it’ll end. With technological advancement more sophisticated and dangerous weapons become available. If one country acquires a certain weapon then it becomes mandatory for the other to acquire something which is of equal destructive potential.
 
We are told that weapons are acquired for one’s security. But they actually increase the feeling of insecurity. First we worry only about our security, then we have to worry about the security of our weapons too. For example, countries possessing nuclear weapons have to worry about their security too. It is a matter of grave concern for US that the Pakistani nuclear weapons should not fall in the hands of Islamist extremists.
 
Currently India has created a situation which will trigger another round of arms acquisition between the neighbours. Countries which will benefit are US, Israel, Russia, Britain, France, China, etc., from whom India and Pakistan will buy their arms. The money which should have been spent on education, health care, food security, housing, sanitation, to ensure that no child is malnourished and no women is anemic, will now be spent on purchasing weapons. Hence, even building an atmosphere of war is a crime against the poor people of both countries.
 
Rajnath Singh, India’s Home Minister has declared that the 3,323 km long India-Pakistan border will be sealed. Boundaries are made by humans and they have a history of being ever-changing. People and material will keep moving across India-Pakistan border because people on both sides have relatives and their religious places on the other side. People want to travel across the border. The two countries have cultural affinity. Nowhere else in the world, the language spoken in large part of north India, known as Hindi in India and Urdu in Pakistan, is understood so well as in Pakistan. At a time when European countries have made borders irrelevant we are talking about sealing our borders. West and East Germany demolished the wall between them. We want to build one between India and Pakistan. If there are governments in the two countries in future who decide to make peace then the money spent on sealing the borders will go waste. Hence, the effort should be to open the borders, not seal them. An impregnable border is a sign of animosity, an open border is sign of friendship. Enmity is short term, non-permanent, friendship is long term, stable. Hence the decision of Indian government to seal borders lacks wisdom and is anti-people. It is a waste of public resources. Is there a guarantee that sealed borders will prevent terrorists from invading?

Aerial attacks and through sea, like the one in Mumbai, can still take place. Worse, they can infiltrate borders both physically and mentally. How will the sealed border prevent somebody inside India from being radicalized? We should look for solutions so that terrorists stop coming and people stop becoming radicals. It requires deeper introspection than a symbolic gesture of sealing border.
 
People die in wars. It is not always the terrorists or combatants who die. As we saw in over three months of protests in Kashmir, the bullets of security forces killed children, women and old too. Even the family of soldier doesn’t want him to die. They want to see him return alive. His job is to protect the border. He sacrifices his life in very special circumstances. It is the governments which create situations in which the soldier may have to sacrifice his life or he may remain safe. If the governments are not able to solve their problem with neighbouring countries then soldiers may have to sacrifice their lives. If the governments show a real intent of solving the problem then our soldiers may not be required to risk their lives. War is a sign of failure of the government to solve the problem with neighbours and peace is a sign of success. A government which is concerned about its citizens will never want to go to war. On the contrary, a government insensitive towards its citizens will put their lives in danger.
 
To create war hysteria in the country is not patriotism but anti-national, as it will lead the country to disaster. It is not a sign of a responsible government, a government which thrives on the politics of jingoism. The government and the Bhartiya Janata Party may temporarily gain from the war or building an atmosphere of war, but the citizens stand to lose in the long term.
 
(The author, a former Magsaysay awardee is also Vice President, Socialist Party (India))

The post Warmongers are Anti-National appeared first on SabrangIndia.

With 18 soldiers dying in a pre-dawn terrorist attack in North Kashmir’s Uri area on September 18, 2016, the army’s combat death toll in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is 64 this year (until September 18), the highest since 2010, when 69 soldiers died, according to theSouth Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP).
 
In contrast, civilian casualties along the line of control (LoC)—the de facto border between India and Pakistan in J&K—in 2016 were the lowest in three decades, SATP data reveal. About 800 civilians died every year, on average, between 1990 and 2007.
 

Source: South Asia Terrorism Portal *Note: Upto September 18, 2016
 
Over the last three decades, the 20-year period between 1990 and 2010 was the most violent, while the period after 2011 relatively more peaceful, according to the SATP data.
 
The year 2012, when 16 civilians and 17 soldiers died, was the most peaceful. After that, the death toll rose.
 

Source: South Asia Terrorism Portal *Note: Upto September 18, 2016
 
A series of infiltration attempts along the LoC were stopped this year, which has seen a “marked increase” over the previous three years, according to an army statement.
 
As many as 31 terrorists were killed along the line of control this year in the course of 17 infiltration attempts stopped by the army, the statement said.
 

Source: Indian Army *Note: Upto August 3, 2016
 
Ceasefire violations along the LoC and the international border—which runs south of the LoC beyond J&K—peaked in 2014 and 2015, IndiaSpend reported in August 2015 and April 2016.
 
Indians—while content with India’s foreign policy with regard to US, Russia and China—are unhappy with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policy on Pakistan, according to a 2016research released on September 19, 2016, by Pew Global Research, a USA-based global research organisation.
 
With regard to security and road infrastructure along the international border in Jammu & Kashmir, 97% of a floodlit fence and 63% of planned roads have been completed, according to this August 2016 Rajya Sabha reply.
 
(Waghmare is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)
 
This article was first published on India Spend
 

The post Army 2016 Death Toll Highest In Six Years; 31 Terrorists Killed appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Uri attacks have inspired some ballistic bombast.

A horrible attack on an Indian Army base in Uri, Kashmir leaving 18 dead and 19 injured.

Social media, with characteristic restraint, decided to demand retribution by asking for more to be killed. Many, many, many more.

Here, an instant classic example:

That's a former Indian Administrative Services officer who works with the Rajasthan government choosing to run a Twitter essentially calling for nuclear warfare. That might be worth underling and putting in bold:
Nuclear warfare.

This bellicosity was not restricted to social media – the television channels certainly got in on the game too – but it thrived online.

Social media by its nature can be both trivial-seeming and more serious-than-you-realise, so it's worth spelling out exactly what is being demanded here: The use of nuclear weapons against Pakistan, a move that would almost certainly result in the use of nuclear weapons against India and kill untold millions.

Let's spell that out even more. There are a lot of nuclear weapons on this planet. 15,375 according to the World Nuclear Weapon Stockpile. India and Pakistan have 250 between them. Even North Korea is believed to have a few. Despite all these weapons out there, using technology that was developed in the 1940s, nuclear bombs have only been used twice.
Two times. Once on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and again on the city of Nagasaki in August 1945. There's a reason the weapons haven't been used ever since, despite plenty of conflicts. There's a reason those two weapons effectively ended the second World War.
That reason is this (warning: graphic images):

More than 1,40,000 were killed in Hiroshima alone, in an attack that destroyed 70% of the city and left parts of it uninhabitable. The physical and psychological effects of the attack would persist for decades. A couple of days later America repeated its experiment, this time with plutonium, over Nagasaki. The results were equally disastrous.

Most of this should be obvious to anyone who has learnt about the horrors of the nuclear bombs, but as we get further away from those fateful days, it is possible that social media warriors have not fully understood exactly what they are advocating. This is destruction on an unimaginable scale.

India choosing to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for Uri – which would already go against the country's stated doctrine of no-first use – would most likely lead to Pakistani retaliation that could leave millions dead, and cause environmental devastation that would "suddenly dwarf any other global problem."

All of this for, as Dixit, says "finishing Pakistan", an outcome that is by no means assured even with the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

None of this is to suggest that India cannot find a response that might be an appropriate way to retaliate after the Uri attacks. India has one of the world's largest militaries and has presumably spent much of its time acquiring equipment and expertise aimed specifically at neutralising Pakistan's capabilities. But to suggest that this retaliation has to be nuclear suggests, at best, a certain level of delusion about India's capabilities (or a level of nihilism that is only appropriate for anyone who spends too much time on social media).

Thankfully, for every bit of such Twitter terror there is a wisecracker who can add some levity in reply.
 

 

The post Keyboard commandos, here’s one simple reason why nuclear war is a bad, bad thing appeared first on SabrangIndia.