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Journalism of Courage
Nobody will be spared, said the inspector general of police, Kashmir Zone. Nobody will be spared, intoned the director of the Central Bureau of Investigation. But a year and a half after this newspaper broke the story of Srinagar’s sex abuse scandal, several powerful men in the highest echelons of government, administration, and security forces implicated in it have been spared, or worse, protected by the J&K government.
The Jammu and Kashmir High Court has not minced its words of reprimand by terming this a “mix of humiliation, torture and treachery”. The court was understandably agitated, considering that many of the women drawn into the sex racket, often by extremely underhand means, were mere adolescents; considering, too, that those who patronised it were people meant to protect the citizen and ensure the functioning of the law. The original scandal has, in fact, been compounded by the continuing scandal of administrative and political apathy in bringing the guilty to justice in a case that has excited strong passions in the state and brought large crowds on to the streets of Srinagar. It is such deliberate inertia on the part of those in power that has over the years created and deepened the alienation of the people of the region and allowed separatist groups like the Dukhtaran-e-Millat to pour scorn on the criminal justice system and government.
