Srinagar, June 07: TRUST Ram Jethmalani to stir a hornet’s nest with his comments. The veteran lawyer and Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP has compared the alleged atrocities committed in Kashmir by the state government and the police with those committed in Nazi Germany.
“ Here they arrest people and keep them in jails for 18 years without any trial. I have not seen such a situation anywhere in the world. Such atrocities against people have not been committed even in Nazi Germany,” the former law minister and Kashmir Committee president said in Srinagar on Monday. He is the first mainstream Indian politician to have alluded to the Nazis in this context.
The Kashmir Committee, formed in 2002 to reach out to local separatist leaders, has been recently revived by Jethmalani.
The committee was on a four- day visit to the Valley. During the visit, they met most of the separatist leaders, including Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Shabir Shah. But JKLF chairman Mohd Yasin Malik and chief minister Omar Abdullah refused to give them an audience.
Jethmalani said: “ We were deeply pained to hear accounts of continuing human rights abuses, indiscriminate arrests of innocents and the atmosphere of terror and tyranny under which the people of Kashmir are currently living.
“ We heard alarming reports of bureaucratic insolence, total lawlessness, and virtual breakdown of civil administration, coupled with unprecedented corruption, brazen nepotism and total lack of accountability of government,” he added.
He described detention without trial as a disgrace and called for an end to what he called, “ lawlessness in Kashmir”. “ People are summoned to the police stations without any order and there they are subjected to the worst,” he alleged.
He described the killing of “ innocent people in 2010 as a total disgrace” and called upon the state government to apologise to people. “ They should also come up with generous compensation,” he added.
He ruled out that whatever was happening in Kashmir was New Delhi’s doing. He said New Delhi might be interested in the continuation of Omar as the CM, but it was in no way running the “ sorry state of affairs”. He also asked the state government to stop “ arbitrary arrests and harassment of innocent citizens”.
Thanks Mail today