FAROOQ AHMED winced as he held the X-ray to the light. His right arm was in a sling, his left shoulder swollen with bandages. The X-ray showed the two bones of his forearm with the unmistakable shape of a bullet nestling beside them. “They took it out yesterday,” he said. “Another one went through here.” He pointed to a bloody dressing on his biceps. “The others grazed my shoulder. The doctors told me there were six altogether. It was lucky I managed to duck.”

A 38 year old mechanical engineer in service with the local government of Kashmir, Mr. Ahmed claims to have survived a massacred of Muslim civilians who were caught in the crossfire when two lines of Indian police opened fire on a Kashmiri nationalist demonstration in central Srinagar last Sunday. He said that officers of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) the paramilitary unit mobilized by the central government at times of regional rebellion executed wounded Muslim as they lay bleeding in the street.

There have been many allegations of atrocities during the past few months of separatist upheaval in India’s only Muslim majority state. Many have been inflated. But, educated at university in Srinagar and with a gold medal for meritorious work, Mr. Ahmed is no militant subversive, other wounded patients at Srinagar’s Bone and Joint Hospital confirmed principal aspects of his account, which I tape, recorded at his bedside on Thursday night.

“I was just standing watching the procession (of Muslims demonstrating against India),” he said. “It was curfew time and there were CRPF on both sides of the lane. They should have given a warning, telling people to go back to their rooms. But there was no warning, so people thought the procession was allowed. Then there were two shots in the air, and more shots, shots and shots people were falling down. I also fell down, someone pushed me down. The CRPF took control of the area. There were a lot of dead and injured. But I was safe, no bullet. Then came somebody, they said I was still alive, and that fellow an officer came with a Bren gun, a light machine gun. He aimed at me and started firing.”

Mr. Ahmed leaned back on his pillow and grimaced. “I was fortunate, my back was just touched. Six bullets, kat-kat-kat-kat-kat. But my head was safe, I was conscious also. I saw the bridge was completely full of dead bodies.” He also saw policemen moving among the bodies, firing further shots at the injured. If they saw movement, a leg or a hand or a head, they would fire again and again. They were saying, “So you want Pakistan, you want independence? Go and have independence!” Mr., Ahmed cocked his finger and mimicked the sound of a pistol. Shoom! Have independence. Shoom! And I saw one boy under a stall…and that fellow came and fired there at that boy.”

The engineer estimated that he lay bleeding for 45 minutes before a lorry came to take away the dead.

“Another fellow came to kill me, because he said I was still conscious but the old ones told him, don’t fire don’t waste your bullet, he is going to die very soon. So he left me like that. It was God’s grace.”

When the lorry arrived, Mr. Ahmed was taken for dead and dumped in the back on a pile and of corpses. “I saw they were throwing some dead bodies in the river, there were a lot of dead bodies hanging on the fence, because there was chaos, people running here and there, and some of them wanted to throw themselves in the river for safety. But they died when their bodies fell on the fence.”

Eventually the police put a tarpaulin over the bodies in the lorry. It was driven to the central headquarters of the local Kashmir state police, many of whom are Muslims deeply resentful of the activities of the CRPF. When the tarpaulin was moved one of the supposedly dead bodies gave a cry, and eventually four or five people, Mr. Ahmed among them, were found to be alive and taken to hospital.

Pressed on massacre allegations at a press conference earlier last week, Kashmir’s new government appointed Governor, Mr. Jagmohan said he had no information about bodies floating in the Jhelum River.

(The Independent Jan 28).

Article extracted from this publication >> February 23, 1990