KARACHI: Both the extremists and moderate Kashmiris as well as the victims themselves have confirmed this fact to a foreign correspondent that the Indian Army was entirely responsible for burning down of villages (briefly reported in Friday’s “Dawn”) in Kashmir Valley. However, Indian officials have claimed over the past three weeks that the scorched earth policy was pursued not by the ruthless Indian Army but by the freedom fighters themselves.

In a despatch from Srinagar, Washington “Evening Star” correspondent, Richard Critchfield, who had been in the Valley a few days ago, gave on Thursday a graphic picture of how the helpless Kashmiris were being ruined. In his article “Arson laid to Indian Army”, Critchfield said: “Kashmir — a question that hangs over this fabled vale like snowy Himalayan peaks — is, why Indian troops are being used to silence political unrest among Kashmir’s 2.5 million Muslims.

“A second question being anxiously asked by Kashmir’s moderate Muslim leadership is why Pakistan, by training, arming and infiltrating some 2,000 (mostly Kashmiri) guerrillas into the Valley, has given India the pretext for what they claim is a ‘scorched earth policy’.”

“During the past three weeks”, Richard Critchfield wrote, “Hundreds of Kashmiri houses have been burnt, about 440 in the summer capital of Srinagar alone. ... There are also isolated eye-witness accounts of village looting and rape.

“Indian officials claim Pakistani infiltrators started the fires. But both extremist and moderate Kashmiris, and victims themselves, interviewed while digging in the smouldering wreckage claim that the Indian Army was responsible. Mutual recriminations on who started the fires aside, the practical issue is that majority of Kashmiri people, including some Hindus and Sikhs, as well as Muslims, blame the Indian Army.”

Published in Dawn, September 4th, 2015

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