Kashmir Children & General Loose Cannon

[loose cannon = “An unpredictable or uncontrolled person who is liable to cause unintentional damage”, like a loose cannon lying on the deck of a rolling ship, which is likely to hurt people randomly]

Before you begin reading, I would request you to think what trauma a child suffers when she is forcibly taken away from her family and made to live in a camp run by usually pitiless government wardens. Of all the acts of crimes of the Trump government, the most heinous was taking away children of illegal immigrants from their parents and putting them in camps. Child abuse has been rampant in those juvenile concentration centres, naturally.

But this note is not about Trump’s America. It’s about Modi’s India.

Let’s check what Modi’s hand-picked super-chief of the three armed-forces, General Bipin Rawat said in New Delhi recently. The Wire (16 January 2020) quotes the general saying, “We have to bring an end to terrorism and that can only happen the way Americans started after 9/11, they said let’s go on a spree on the global war on terror,” he added.

The general seems to be singularly uninformed about recent history. The insane US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq not only destroyed two countries, those also killed millions of local people and tens of thousands of US soldiers. And most tragically for the rest of the world, their so-called “war on terror” turned thousands of ordinary Muslims into terrorists, created millions of refugees, who in turn destabilised Europe. It is accepted now that the rise of the blood thirsty ISIS was a direct consequence of the USA’s colossal misadventures in the Middle East.

In the same article, the Wire adds, “[T]he US is still fighting those wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, almost 20 years after the 9/11 attacks and many experts question the impact it has had on combating terror. Candidates for the US presidential election … are debating ways for the country to exit the region. A recent report said that … the wars have cost the US more than $6 trillion.” (By the way, India’s total budget for 2019-20 is less than $3 trillion. Indeed, we should go on a “spree” like the US!)

But this is an innocent remark compared to what the general said next. He said, “Radicalisation can be countered. We saw it happening in Kashmir… Today, we see that young children are also being radicalised. They need to be identified and then we need to put them in de-radicalisation camps." (Emphasis added.)

Can you believe it? The head of the armed forces in a democratic country is recommending taking children away from their families and herding them into camps under the benign eyes of the ugly Indian law keepers? Under which law of the land can this be done?

How can a senior-most official who has sworn by the Constitution of the Country suggest such egregious violation of human rights? Can you think of anything more inhuman?

Or has this loudmouth jumped the gun and revealed the government’s plans to subvert democracy completely if we allow them to go on?

You can read the entire story by clicking on this link.