More Missing People, Crying Mothers

This time, Samjhautha Express. Killing about 70 people on the spot. Another shot at making fear prevail over any attempts towards peace.

[From India eNews: Diaries from Samjhauta: "It was exactly one year to the day that I had boarded the Delhi-Attari Express that would take me onward to Lahore via the Samjhauta Express from Attari. One year hence I cannot but be overcome by emotions to hear the news of the tragedy that took place last Sunday..", writes Rudroneel Ghosh.]

The tragedy, security lapses, images of the suspects, and an image of a BSF man on a horseback alongside the train (that one on the front page of today's The Telegraph) are all over the newspapers and television. And Pakistan and India getting into a word of wars again.

You think it's just the scale of the horror of the incident that makes the media jump on it so happily? I think thats just a part of it.

Now, think Nithari. Another feast that the media has had in recent times, despite the news of the missing children coming out very late. What made it easy meat? Missing children? Skeletons? Crying moms? May be all of that, but looking closer, I see something common: An easy villain.

(Almost every news report related to Nithari had Moninder Singh's photo with it. And for "us" on this side, there is an "easy villain" in ISI every time any act of terror happens in this country. This time it wasn't so easy, as many of the people who died were Pakistanis. Still the media is playing that "Pak hand" card, though in a more subtle way.).

Here's another story that had both missing clildren and people continuously living in fear. And yes, it has crying Mothers too.

Families of missing people from Jammu and Kashmir were on a day-long hunger strike yesterday (Thursday, February 22) in New Delhi.

I heard this from a journalist friend in Delhi. I try googling but can't find anything on it in our leading "National" newspapers. The only news article I could find on this is from "Greater Kashmir", that calls it a "part of a campaign to mobilise public support against human rights violations in the strife-torn state."

"Sixty family members of the missing people, mostly women, arrived here [Delhi] on Monday from Srinagar in a bus to participate in the campaign", goes the news.

[The false encounter killings in Kashmir came to news again recently, with former Superintendent of Police Hansraj Parihar and his deputy in Ganderbal, Bhadur Ram, arrested for allegedly killing five south Kashmir villagers in fake encounters after dubbing them as Pakistani militants, for reward money. I had read that news at a couple of places but all I could find now with Google was a single Indian Express article: "There is a man who says his brother, a Special Police official, was picked up from home, tortured to death and to hide the truth..."

Then a Kashmiri Observer article about a protest strike in Kashmir. And a statement in Peoples Democracy. Is there a filter working inside Google India like, say, the one in China? I am not sure.]