As unrest over civilian killings by police and paramilitary rattled Kashmir, the governments in Srinagar and New Delhi blamed elements ranging from opposition parties, and separatists to Pakistan for stoking the fires. Apart from giving a clean chit to Central Reserve Police Force, the Union Home Minister P Chidambaram annoyed many in Kashmir by his comments that Lashkar-e-Toiba was behind the protests.

“The anti-national forces are linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba,
Union Home Minister P Chidambaram on whether the elements he had
blamed for inciting agitation in Kashmir were from Pakistan”.

What they say
Engineer Abdul Rashid,
Legislator
This sort of aggressive and irrational attitude of the Indian leaders will not only add fuel to the fire but further aggravate the peoples’ anger. . .  At a time when whole Kashmiri is mourning the death of about a dozen of children and youth, such aggressive statements from New Delhi add insult to injury. Let Government of India be clear. Does it mean that those kids who got killed in military and police action, belong to Lashker-e-Taiba?
 It’s unfortunate that everything that happens in Kashmir, Government of India sees Pakistani hand in it, which tantamount to ignoring the ground realities of Kashmir. The state is being run at gun point and whole valley has turned into a big prison and population taken hostage by the stiff hand of the government. But they should remember that deployment of army and imposition of curfew will never resolve the problem.

Mufti Muhammad Syed
Patron, Peoples Democratic Party
Linking the genuine anger and anguish among people here with terrorism was nothing short of an assault on their self respect and dignity… It appears disconnect between the union and the state is deliberately being fuelled to push the people to wall and justify the crackdown on unarmed people.
We have been on the receiving end of the antinational label for too long and dubbing an entire people as being vulnerable to inspired influences raises questions not just about this place but the whole idea of India.
Instead of sympathy, what has been promised is more force as if there still were any gaps left in the over militarized place. Unabated human rights violations have caused genuine concern which instead of being addressed politically and with compassion was outsourced to security forces giving rise to a chain reaction of events resulting in death of scores of people including school going children. Bad and insensitive governance only made things worse which could further deteriorate if the response even now is not revised.

Mirwaiz Omar Farooq
Chairman, All Parties Hurriyat Conference
It has always been a wrong strategy of New Delhi. These are not sponsored but spontaneous protests. No sponsored protest can run for more than two decades.
The administration and New Delhi are trying to showcase it as a few cases of sporadic violence. But that’s certainly not the case. New Delhi has always tried to manage the Kashmir issue; never tried to find a solution.
 The guns are not there in the Valley now so it should have been the right time for New Delhi to start a process of finding a political solution to the Kashmir problem. It is not doing so and that’s what makes the youth frustrated, Mirwaiz alleged.

Dr. Sheikh Showkat Hussain
University of Kashmir
They (New Delhi) are cornered and their forces have gone unbridled, which has been confirmed by allegations from state minister Ali Muhammad Sagar and Parliament Member Mehboob Baig. Now they want to justify the killings and use of excessive force on civilians by branding the youth as extensions of Lashker-i-Taiba.
India is getting exposed world over by virtue of their security agencies who are engaged in such human rights violations on unarmed civilian population. International community is watching even UN group present in the state is watching how they are killing people. It is becoming hard for them to befool all the people all the time. So they have devised this strategy to justify the actions of their forces.
They want to tell the world that the people who were killed were not unarmed civilians but the combatants of a militant group.

Sajad Gani Lone
Separatist turned mainstream politician
It would be foolhardy to presume that current turmoil is result of one dimension. This is a multi faceted problem and sincere introspection is needed. They are fixing blame on just one party or one group. May be it is the truth but then this is not the whole truth.
There is no person no group or individual or a leader in entire Kashmir who can create such a situation. The civil strife seems to be entirely leaderless.
 But on the contrary New Delhi is putting blame on one group and they are deluding themselves.
Human Rights violations, some of them completely unprovoked especially the young school boy who was killed with school bag slung around his neck. It all goes into vicious circle and it has gone now out of hand.

Omar Abdullah
Chief Minister
This is not the full story. It is easy to get sucked into believing that it is a simple law-and-order matter. But the situation is more complex than that…  
Security forces are not bursting into people’s homes and killing them. They are dealing with law and order disturbances in which some people have been killed. To quantify this as human rights violations is stretching the definition.

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