Anil Penna
NEW DELHI, Jan 29 (1994): Indian authorities have ordered a probe into the alleged slaying of 22 people by army troops in the Kashmir border town of Kupwara, as concern mounted in New Delhi over the fallout from the incident.
A magistrate will investigate Thursday’s shooting deaths and fix responsibility, the Kashmir state government announced Friday, as the defence ministry sought to absolve the army of blame.
“We are upset,” a senior state official, B.R. Singh, told The Times of India newspaper in the Kashmir summer capital of Srinagar after returning from a visit to curfew-bound Kupwara.
“The army authorities have assured us that action will be taken against all those found guilty,” Singh said, describing it as a “bad incident.”
Local officials and witnesses said troops fired indiscriminately into the main market in the north Kashmir town, angered by a Moslem guerrilla ambush on an army convoy. Twenty-two people including three policemen were killed.
But the defence ministry said here Friday that the casualties were the result of a firefight deliberately triggered by Moslem guerrillas to discredit the army ahead of the United Nations human rights convention in Geneva.
Moslem militants are fighting for an end to Indian rule over Kashmir, the country’s only Moslem-majority state, where thousands of army and paramilitary troops have been deployed.
Thursday’s shooting was the first major incident of the year related to the four-year-old Kashmir insurgency, which has claimed more than 8,000 lives, and aroused serious concern in the federal government, officials said.
Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao held an urgent hour-long meeting with his Home Minister Shankarrao Chavan, Minister of State for Internal Security Rajesh Pilot and top home ministry officials here Friday.
Chavan later left for Jammu, the Kashmiri winter capital, armed with “new directions” from Rao to deal with the situation, the officials said.
The Kupwara incident is expected to be used by Pakistan to highlight alleged human rights abuses by Indian troops in the Himalayan territory at the Geneva conference.
Human rights groups have often accused Indian security forces of using excessive force, shooting suspects in cold blood and going on the rampage and killing at random following Moslem militant attacks.
Pakistan is to move an anti-Indian resolution at the meeting where Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is to make her government’s case on the issue.
Pakistan has claimed Kashmir since the state’s Hindu maharajah joined India following the subcontinent’s independence from British rule in 1947. The two countries have fought two wars over the dispute since then.
Relations between the neighbours have steadily gone downhill since the eruption of Moslem militancy in the Indian-controlled southern two-thirds of Kashmir.
New Delhi accuses Pakistan of arming and training the Moslem guerrillas, a charge Islamabad denies while describing the secessionist campaign as a legitimate struggle for self-determination.
The Kupwara incident and the UN conference follow Pakistan’s cool response to peace proposals India unveiled last week, calling for measures to keep the Kashmir frontier tranquil and a “no-first-use” nuclear promise.
