A picture of a three-year-old toddler sitting on the blood-smeared dead body of his grandfather in Kashmir’s Sopore town stirred anger among social media users, who asked whether playing politics over human tragedies was getting the better of empathy. That set off more arguments and counter-arguments, drowning out saner voices.
A day after a 65-year-old civilian, Bashir Ahmad Khan, was reportedly killed during a shootout between Indian security forces and militants in Sopore on Wednesday, July 1, Special DGP CRPF Zulfiqar Hassan, citing “technical details”, said the elderly person had fallen to the bullets of the militants who had allegedly taken up positions inside a nearby mosque to fire upon a CRPF patrolling party. The officer said it was an “extremely unfortunate” incident that had happened because of the melee. Earlier, Vijay Kumar, inspector general of police in Kashmir, took a similar line in his description of the incident.
Contesting both the CRPF and the police claims, Nazir Ahmad Khan, brother of the deceased, accused the security forces of his killing. “Just give me the chance and I will tear off their claims,” he told reporters. According to Aijaz Ahmad Qudsi, Khan’s nephew, the victim was taken from his car and shot by the armed forces.
“The family is being pressured by the militants to blame it on the security forces,” claimed IGP Kumar, responding to this allegation.
Also read: As Narratives Build Around Civilian’s Death, a Kashmiri Family Grieves
In this haze, it may never be known which bullet actually hit the victim and after a while, Khan’s death will become a mere statistic.
Interestingly, doctors who conducted a post-mortem on the victim’s body have been barred from speaking to the media.
Every moment, every frame throws up a damning question: How does an old man out driving with his toddler grandson end up lying dead, his body artfully arranged in the middle of a street, with the stunned child sitting on his chest? Was Khan killed while driving? If yes, who took him and the three-year-old out and prepared their bodies for a photo shoot? And why?
Who decided to shoot a photograph of the child as he sat petrified, his clothes smeared with blood, on his grandfather’s corpse? Why was this done?
Once again, if at all, the grandfather and his grandchild somehow crawled out at an encounter site, why were they not immediately taken away to make sure no harm came to the child?
Why is a policeman straddled across Khan’s corpse in another photo? How did this happen? If there was a shootout in progress or had just ended, why were the armed forces also busy in an inconsequential photoshoot? Was this, too, a part of the “rescue” ops?
Was the deceased injured at some point – did he need urgent medical help? Was any attempt made to take him to a hospital, to save his life?
Once again, why was his body filmed? By whom?
Why was the grandchild filmed while crying uncontrollably inside a police vehicle? To what end? How was this decision arrived at and who said yes, it’s perfectly alright to record a sobbing three-year-old who had just seen, felt and sat on his grandfather’s dead body? Why not quietly hand him over to his parents, so that he could be protected from further trauma?
In another image, the child is seen not far from a battle-ready, armed soldier. Why wasn’t the child escorted to safety here – he’s perhaps just a few feet away from a gun-wielding trooper – if rescue was of prime importance? And why was this photo taken?
The fundamental question – who took the pictures of the toddler sitting on the bullet-riddled body of his grandfather and why – isn’t too difficult to answer. According to a CRPF spokesperson, there were no photojournalists present at the encounter scene who could have possibly taken the photo of the child.
“Who took the pictures is a matter of the investigation,” Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Sopore, Javaid Iqbal, told reporters.
Also read: As Civilian is Killed in Encounter, Police Place Kashmiri Child at Centre of Propaganda War
From the sequence of events that took place on July 1 during the shootout, it can easily be inferred that the three-year-old toddler provided a readymade prop to manufacture a specific narrative.
“It seems somebody placed the boy on the body (before the picture was taken),” the victim’s elder brother, Nazir Ahmad Khan, told a reporter. He called it “suspicious”.
The photographs, to which the social media websites added a warning label before being seen owing to their graphic nature, were widely circulated by senior police officers and the photographer too is assumed to be someone from the security forces.
IGP Vijay Kumar, while acknowledging that someone from among the security forces had taken the child’s photo, did not comment upon why the photographs were uploaded on social media sites by police officials.
Even the head of the BJP’s IT cell was quick to pounce upon the opportunity to take a dig at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi: “There will be no Pulitzer award or citation for this picture because it doesn’t suit the macabre narrative ‘Breaking India’ forces peddle on Kashmir… For them Indian Army can be nothing but evil. Even Rahul Gandhi won’t shed a tear, not even for the child!”
The reference to the Pulitzer was because of the official censure the Pulitzer committee generated earlier this year when it awarded three photojournalists from Jammu and Kashmir and referred in its citation to Kashmir as “contested territory”.
It’s not for the first time that a photograph or a video has been circulated on social media websites to give a twist to an incident. On April 12, 2016, a 16-year-old girl, whose alleged molestation by an army man had sparked violence in Handwara, leading to the death of five civilians in police and Army firing, was allegedly filmed inside a police station against her will. The girl, according to Nayeema Ahmad Mehjoor, the then chairperson of the J&K State Women’s Commission (SWC), alleged that she was kept in the dark while the video was shot at the police station in Handwara.
“They (police) told me not to tell the truth to anyone, they slapped me and warned me against revealing my version of the incident. Then the SP of the area came and told me that he will record my statement. I pleaded with him [not to] record and send it to anyone. What I was saying in the video was all what they forced me to say. I was all alone and none of my family members were there when they made the video clip,” she said, according to an India Today report published on May 16, 2016.
Also read: Kashmir: 4-Year-Old Boy Killed in Cross Firing Between Militants and CRPF
Later the video was leaked online and the viral video was allegedly circulated by the army in order to lend credence to their version of the incident. Mumbai-based independent journalist Freny Manecksha wrote how state-directed narrative in militarised zones exploit society’s fault-lines leading to perceptions about a young girl becoming an army informer or of “loose morals” rather than a victim.
In armed conflicts, children are especially vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, but the way Sopore incident has been presented before the world is shocking. Children are not the possessions of parents or of the state; they have equal status as members of the human family.
However, in the absence of a clearly enunciated policy on child welfare, children in Kashmir have become automatic targets of handlers of violence and security forces alike. The involvement of children in acts of violence, e.g. stone pelting, has been a major concern for their parents too, to which the authorities here have not given any thought, thus snowballing into nothing short of a catastrophe whose consequences have been felt far and wide. The heavy-handed crackdown by security forces against stone-pelters have closed all doors for young children to return to a normal life.
The law-and-order apparatus, in the absence of a juvenile justice mechanism, does not make any distinction between children and adults, consequently he finds himself at a dead-end. Some stone-pelters were eventually pushed into the ranks of militancy, obviously due to the government’s failure to rehabilitate and bring them back into mainstream society.
On the contrary, stone-pelting turned into a kind of money-making opportunity for some police officers who allegedly asked their parents for large sums of money in lieu of their release. It has created a vicious circle where one form of violence led to another and out of which there seems no escape. Children were never allowed to break this cycle and with each passing day they entered the vortex of violence more forcefully. A study conducted by the Army last year showed that 83% of youths who took up arms had a history of stone-pelting.
According to UNICEF, the futures of millions of children living in countries affected by armed conflict are at risk, as warring parties continue to commit grave violations against children, and world leaders fail to hold perpetrators accountable.
“Children living in conflict zones around the world have continued to suffer through extreme levels of violence over the past 12 months, and the world has continued to fail them,” Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF Director of Emergency Programmes, said in a 2018 report.
“For too long, parties to conflict have been committing atrocities with near-total impunity, and it is only getting worse. Much more can and must be done to protect and assist children.”
Also read: In Pulwama, an 8-Year-Old Pellet Victim Awaits Eye Surgery
In a report, an associate fellow at Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Khalid Shah, highlights the factors and conditions that encourage children to become tools at the hands of state and non-state actors to achieve their ends. Shah blames it upon the failure of both the state and the society to safeguard the interests of children while living in a conflict zone.
While the larger onus is on the state to build an atmosphere that helps a child undergo a normal developmental process, parents and teachers have an equally important role to help wean the affected children off their addiction to violence. This photograph of a three-year-old child, with its origins unknown and perhaps murky, should prompt us to begin this conversation seriously.