Unlike in past, it did not invoke names of erstwhile legends and stalwarts of its outfit and instead made a young HM cadre named Burhan Wani its ‘poster boy’. Using his excellent communication skills and charismatic personality, Burhan was able to motivate many young boys to join the HM.
|| K.LEADER DESK
By visiting the Zadoora graveyard in South Kashmir’s Pulwama district to give deceased Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) militant Mufeed Bashir (alias Raqib) a ‘gun salute’, his comrades have demonstrated solidarity and respect for their slain colleague. Earlier during the day, thousands had attended his funeral and gathered at the graveyard to pay homage to him. However, once the crowds had dispersed and the sound of gunshots died down with the HM militants leaving to continue with their ‘armed struggle’, an eerie silence must have descended upon the Zadoora graveyard. And I imagine that this silence would have asked a question – did someone as young as Bashir really deserve to die so soon? This question is not restricted to Zadoora alone and must be reverberating continuously in all graveyards across Kashmir where slain militants are laid to rest. However, the ‘armed struggle’ doesn’t appear to be waning.
On the contrary, it has registered a surge after the HM undertook a recruitment blitz last year with extensive use of social media. Unlike in past, it did not invoke names of erstwhile legends and stalwarts of its outfit and instead made a young HM cadre named Burhan Wani its ‘poster boy’. Using his excellent communication skills and charismatic personality, Burhan was able to motivate many young boys to join the HM. However, while the young Burhan did his job well, someone up in the HM hierarchy took the ‘suicidal’ decision of flooding the social media with group photographs of Burhan alongwith his colleagues dressed in combat fatigues flashing their weapons. Adolescent minds are fired with romanticism and thus easily stirred by rebellious propositions. Therefore, these photographs would no doubt have caught the imagination of young minds and even the JK police admitted that a large number of young boys had joined the HM last year.
However, though the idea of putting group photos of newly recruited HM cadres on social media may have proved to be a boon as far as attracting the youth for joining HM is concerned, it came at a very heavy cost. Soon after the photograph with the faces of eleven HM militants clearly visible went viral on social media, four of them were gunned down by the security forces and that too in just a single week! Fatalities amongst militants cannot be avoided but they can certainly be reduced if very simple measures such as concealing their identity are taken. The killing of four HM militants who appeared in Burhan’s group photo in such quick succession cannot be a mere coincidence. It is no secret that within hours of the group photo of HM cadres appearing on social media, the JK police had identified most of the young boys in the same and once this was done tracking them down must have been a child’s play! Therefore, since four young Kashmiris have lost their lives soon after their photos became public, the HM needs to answer two questions.
The first, who was responsible for posting these photos on the internet, and secondly, what action has the outfit taken against those guilty for this monumental blunder that cost four young lives? Someone in the HM has their blood on his hands!
The ‘armed struggle’ doesn’t appear to be waning. On the contrary, it has registered a surge after the HM undertook a recruitment blitz last year with extensive use of social media.
However, this is not the only issue that which HM needs to explain. Last October, while speaking to News agency, Hizbul Mujahideen’s (HM) chief spokesperson Burhan-u-deen had expressed concern over the large number of HM cadres being killed in encounters with security forces. Admitting that its fighters were being killed on a “daily basis,” he disclosed that the intelligence chief of HM had been directed to “identify and expose those agents who help to kill these innocent militants.” The seriousness the Hizb had then attached to this issue was evident from Burhan-udeen’s warning that “we will teach these agents and informers a lesson.”
He went on to promise that those who had provided information that led to the gunning down of two HM militants in the Drubam (Shopian) encounter would ‘face the music’ in the coming days! The HM hasn’t yet confirmed whether it was able to identify the “agents and informers” in the last year’s Drubam encounter and if they were made to ‘face the music’. However, all this rhetoric about taking action against “agents and informers” is meaningless as Kashmiri youth who have recently joined militant ranks continue perishing at an alarming rate. And as there are no indications that the “agents and informers” of the security forces have suddenly acquired some superhuman capability of sniffing out HM militants, the reason for this obviously lies elsewhere. Lately, whenever one reads about an encounter involving the HM, two things stand out.
The first is that the encounter is brief and secondly, the HM militants killed invariably have only a few months experience of militancy and Bashir, the latest HM militant to be killed too was no execption. He joined the HM in November last year and had been into militancy for just 3-4 months when he was killed. As per media reports Bashir was killed after a “brief gunfight” when he tried to escape the security force dragnet. It is thus evident that of late the HM has started pitting raw militants with virtually no training against very well trained and experienced security forces and this seems to be the main reason why the young HM militants are (in HM chief spokesperson Burhan-u-deen’s words) being killed on a “daily basis!” Paying ‘rich tributes’ to slain HM militants, declaring them ‘martyrs’ and giving them ‘gun salutes’ is all very fine but all these are only superficial actions and cannot absolve the HM leadership of displaying complete lack of concern for the safety of its cadres.
Therefore, rather than lamenting about how HM militants are being killed on a “daily basis,” the Hizb supremo Syed Sallahudin needs to seriously introspect on this grave issue since it is taking a heavy toll of young lives in Kashmir. The parents of newly recruited militants who have been killed in encounters also need to be told by him about the compelling reasons for using newcomers in the ‘armed struggle’ even before they can acquire the basic skills to defend themselves against the security forces? However, whether Sallahudin sahib would oblige is difficult to say. And until the parents of newly recruited deceased HM militants get some convincing answers justifying the death of their sons, the only solace for them would be that the HM gave a gun salute at the grave of their child!
However, while the young Burhan did his job well, someone up in the HM hierarchy took the ‘suicidal’ decision of flooding the social media with group photographs of Burhan alongwith his colleagues dressed in combat fatigues flashing their weapons.
