The audacious terror attack at SMHS hospital in Srinagar on Tuesday where terrorists killed two policemen and freed a fellow Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist underscored a dark feature that Kashmir has become a more violent and dangerous place where even hospitals also figure as targets.
This attack is much more serious and alarming than the usual encounters and clashes because the terrorists have touched a new low in choosing their targets at places like hospitals.
It is a cumulative effect of pro-militancy narrative and actions of the past few months where some of the elected representatives called slain militants as “our children and martyrs…” They were not countered, instead their leaders tended to speak for the lawbreakers and made security forces a scapegoat of the deteriorating situation in Kashmir.
The contradictory impulses of the ruling coalition partners — the PDP and the BJP — in Jammu and Kashmir have inevitably helped extremists and terrorists to expand their murderous campaign to the hospital premises.That poses a serious danger for other such institutions, which the militants may very well use as the killing fields once they have succeeded in striking and killing in a hospital that is located in the heart of Srinagar city.
This calls for a serious review of the security situation and undertaking measures that could make life of policemen, patients and visitors in hospitals and other such places safer. Public safety should have been prioritised, but the reverse was at work. That might have emboldened the militants to strike in a hospital and kill the policemen on Tuesday.
The Jammu and Kashmir Government lacks clarity in its policy in dealing with the situation and the Centre is no less guilty. For the past few years, it is not clear how militancy has to be checked. There has been talk of “finishing the terrorists” and at the same time there is a loud drum beat of reaching out to them through the dialogue. Neither of the approaches is working.
The atmosphere has become more ambiguous when leaders shield militants and their actions as manifestation of their anger, frustration and alienation from the system. Central leaders have added to the confusion by claiming that the situation in Kashmir is being handled in a perfect manner.
Terrorists take advantage of it — the evidence lies in the death of the two policemen now buried, while Pakistani terrorist Naveed Jatt, who apparently feigned medical problem, is a free bird now.
Those shielding the militants and their sympathisers cannot fault the outside world which may now view Kashmir as a more violent and dangerous place.
Militant attack on hospital a new low in Kashmir valley
