Development challenges in Naxal-affected areas
By Santosh Mehrotra
This short note summarises the analysis and recommendations of the Expert Group’s report to the Planning Commission. In Section I it asks the questions: What are the underlying factors and context for the support for Naxals? Why has a dead movement risen again, and why is it spreading rapidly (71 districts in 2001 to 212 now)?

Deprivation turns people to Naxalism, says Government report
Exclusive excerpts
Poverty, inequality breed radicalism Widespread discontent among the people has plagued the Indian polity for sometime now. It has often led to unrest, sometimes of a violent nature. Over the years, statutory enactments and institutional mechanisms for addressing the various aspects of deprivation have been brought into being.

Public outrage at activist’s murder
By Parvinder Singh
The murder of food rights activist Lalit Mehta, who was campaigning to make the national rural employment guarantee scheme more effective in Jharkhand, has spurred a larger civil society campaign against corruption and non-implementation of the scheme that guarantees 100 days of work to every poor rural household.

UN opens new chapter in lives of the disabled
A report by Combat Law team
The January-February 2008 edition of the Combat Law was a Disability Special and covered several issues related to persons with disabilities. Some of the articles touched upon the subject of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that had been adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 2006.

Operation Grab-Back: Heeding Medha’s Cry
Elisabeth Abeson interview Medha
Gathering thousands of people from India’s struggle movements is no small task. Battling agenda could conceivably result in organised defiance gone amuck. Yet, this did not happen at the seventh biannual convention of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM).

A voice of conscience
Combat Law Bureau
In a landmark order, Delhi High Court ensured a second postmortem on the body of Hasib Qureshi, a victim of death in custody in Bareilly District Jail. Justice Vipin Sanghi had first declined to order another postmortem on the body as he felt that the matter fell under the jurisdiction of Allahabad High Court.

Incarcerated land and people
By Sanjay Kak
Kashmir remains one of the most underreported stories in the world. This is not because of just neglect, or a natural silence. It’s very carefully constructed. And the silence is paradoxically constructed out of a lot of noise.

Orphaned souls cry for help
By AR Hanjura
For past 18 years, Kashmir is in a state of armed conflict and unrest. And this has inflicted a devastating impact upon the civilian population, particularly women and children as they get both directly and indirectly affected.Numerous crackdowns, search operations, bomb blasts, cordon offs, crossfire, armed showdowns and killings have not only worsened the human rights situation in Kashmir, but also shattered its economy.

Enforced disappearances
By Mir Hafizullah
In past the Indian army faced armed insurgency on two occasions one in 1947 and another in 1965. In the last case too, a sizable number of armed insurgents infiltrated in Kashmir and were given shelter by unsuspecting innocent villagers. The Indian army was given charge to flush out the militants from the areas they have made their hideouts. While facing the armed insurgents, some encounters occurred at different places but no civilian was harmed nor the people were tortured or made to disappear or killed in fake encounters.

A tale of anguish and courage
By Tanveen Kawoosa
The 100-km drive up from Srinagar to the hill town –Uri was ridden with anguish and delight, horror and ecstasy. As we sped on the rough terrains into the small hamlet called Chandanwari, whizzing by was the stunning natural splendour of dramatic hills, dry stream beds, and serpentine dusty rocky trails. It was a dreamland straight from the pages of fairytales.

Impossibility of justice
By Ashok Agrwaal
This article summarises a monograph by the author, to be published shortly by the South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR). Deaths in custody/disappearance from custody are endemic in India and, have been so throughout its independent history.

Try out participatory justice
By Haley Duschinski
Since late 2003, India and Pakistan have been pursuing a composite dialogue at the high governmental level to resolve a number of contentious issues between the two countries, including the long standing dispute over Kashmir.

Maimed, mauled by military-militia
By Amrit Dhatt
Kashmir Question… Kashmir Problem… Kashmir Issue. Political analysts and journalists have used such phrases with so much ease and regularity over the years that they have begun to become clichés.

Captive State in a free subcontinent
By Dr. Abdul Majid Siraj
A train of unfortunate legal signposts marks the political course taken by Kashmir ever since the historic decolonisation of South Asian subcontinent. It started in 1947 when the British made a precipitous exit with imperfect decolonisation of the Princely India.

Growing up in a valley of fear
By Feroz Rather
About two decades ago, in 1989 to be exact, I was sent to school in Kashmir. My school nestled amid willows and springs. It is precisely the year when a massive rebellion betook the entire Valley. And a whole new generation right from kindergarten hit upon the idea of self-determination.

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Poor professor in tears as son rots in Tihar
Writes Subhash Gatade
Professor Sanaullah Radoo, Principal of a Degree College in Sopore still remembers the day when his youngest son Pervez had reached the airport in Srinagar in a hurry to catch the next Spice Jet flight to Delhi ( September 12, 2006).

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Editorial

Letters to the Editor

Twenty-year-long night of long knives
By Sujata Krishnamurthi
Q&A General Sundararajan Padmanabhan assumed charge of the Indian Army, as the 20th Chief of Army Staff, on 30 September 2000. He was commander of the 15 Corps in the Kashmir valley from July 1993 to February 1995. During his tenure, the army made big gains over militants in Kashmir. He was awarded the Ati Vishisht Seva Medal (AVSM) for his services. He takes time off for Combat Law and shares his views about the army’s role in Kashmir in this exclusive interview with Sujata Krishnamurthi

Taking up arms a compulsion not choice’ : Geelani
By Aaliya Anjum
Q&A Leader of separatist movement Syed Ali Shah Geelani justifies his stand on Kashmir on the basis of the two-nation theory opted for in 1947 at the time of partition of India and Pakistan. He spoke to Aaliya Anjum for this exclusive interview for Combat Law in Srinagar. Excerpts:

Amarnath row: Communalists are back to business
By Praful Bidwai
As has been famously said, a week is a long time in politics. Jammu & Kashmir has once again proved the validity of this aphorism with the crisis over the transfer of land to Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB). The week-long protests this triggered not only led to the dramatic collapse of the Congress-People's Democratic Party alliance government, but may have generated major negative changes in the political mood in the Valley.

Inventing a controversy
By Sant Kumar Sharma
An ugly controversy on diversion of land to Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) has led to the ouster of Ghulam Nabi Azad government in Jammu & Kashmir. On July 7, Azad made an emotional speech in state assembly while moving the motion for a trust vote.

Centuries’ subjugation kicks off a bitter struggle
By Farrukh Fahim
The formation of collective consciousness of a common Kashmiri has been determined by number of factors, the most important being the public perception of history. Kashmir’s occupation by Mughals and their successive subjugation by Pathans, Sikhs and Dogras, have left in the minds of a common Kashmiri a memory of continued suppression and attendant economic and political oppression.

Kashmir’s chance for peace
By Sajid Iqbal
Kashmir... Does any other word conjure up such extreme emotions? It conveys beauty, vulnerability, culture and turmoil. Turmoil supersedes the other three in peoples' conscience: the "Kashmir issue" is what everyone must talk about.

International Law and Kashmir
By Sheikh Showkat Husain
Relevance of UN Resolutions on Kashmir has been subject of debate for a long time. Previously it was Indian State that disputed their applicability. Recent postures of Pakistani president have created doubts about commitment of Pakistan to these. Some Kashmiri leaders by endorsing General Musharaff policies have also depicted their non-seriousness with regard to United Nations role regarding Kashmir.

A religious rage or more
By Khalid Wasim Hassan
The right to self-determination is commonly used to justify the aspirations of an ethnic group that self-identifies as a nation towards forming an independent sovereign state. It is not only territorial and political aspects but also the religious and cultural identity of people that influence the nature of these movements.

Press trussed by draconian laws
By Professor SM Afzal Qadri
Press all over the world is considered as the mirror of the society. History acknowledges the contribution of the press in the success of almost all the major struggles and movements of the world. It is the primary responsibility of each member of the press to be unbiased, impartial, and report every event objectively. Any lapse on the part of the press may lead to chaos and confusion in the society.

Disabled at the mercy of fate
By Sajid Iqbal
One the ideal, the other, the heartbreaking reality... Compounding the already abysmal human rights situation in the state of Jammu and Kashmir is the gross neglect of persons with disabilities by society in general and the state in particular. The existing approach seems to be to wish away all forms of disability from fashionable Kashmiri society. The armed conflict in the state has led to an alarming increase in the numbers of the disabled.

Verses beat venom
By Neerja Mattoo
The hopelessness of Macbeth’s words is an apt summing up of the situation in which most Kashmiris in the valley found themselves in the recent past. Writers are supposed to be the voice of those who cannot speak for themselves and thus their work, no matter what flights of imagination prompt it, mirrors the dominant mood of the times.

The forgotten voices
By Amrit Dhatt
South Asia has played host to a great deal of violent conflict predicated on ethno-nationalist lines. While it has been written about extensively, women’s voices and experiences have never been at the forefront. Kashmir, the most well known conflict zone, is one of the longest running conflicts in the world and has an appallingly large record of human rights abuses.

To know is to be
By Suresh Nautiyal
The observation of Lawrence Petters that nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law is enormously complimentary to the Abraham Lincoln’s definition that a democracy is government of the people, for the people and by the people.

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