Blood stained epitaph Major Avatar Singh’s brutal end in the US leaves behind a mysterious long trail of mayhem in Kashmir.
There is poignant irony to the brutal ending of the blood-stained tale of Major Avatar Singh who was wanted in the gruesome murder of Jaleel Andrabi. Singh, living as a fugitive in far away America, shot dead four of his own family members, on Saturday, just as the Kashmir Valley was preparing to remember and pay homage to the youthful martyrs of 2010 summer uprising. Yet another dark chapter of Kashmir’s contemporary history has been consigned to the limbo, like the mysterious case of theft and intriguing recovery of the Holy Relic from the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar in 1963.
About a year before he took his own life and brutally killed his wife and three children, Major Singh, in a rare press interview re-published in Kashmir Times on Monday, hinted at deeper conspiracy behind Andrabi’s murder and threatened to expose it if and when forced to account for his involvement in the crime. ‘They will not allow me to live till then’, he feared. Obviously, the stress and strain of living as a fugitive were getting the better of Major Singh’s endurance. Earlier last year his wife had lodged a police complaint in America that he had been ill treating her and their children. All this was happening across the oceans even as the judicial process here was moving at less than snail’s pace.
Three or four facts support Major Singh’s allegation of a wider conspiracy behind Andrabi’s murder in 1996. The cloak and dagger game was being played by intelligence agencies in connivance with higher ups within the establishment. Firstly, he was allowed to roam freely in Punjab for more than five years and shielded against the arrest warrant against him issued by the J&K High Court in 1997-98. Secondly, Major Singh was provided with necessary official documents and his escape to the US was facilitated by government agencies who were fully in know of his criminal involvement. Thirdly, one of the alleged Ikhwani accomplices in the Andrabi murder case, Sikandar Ganie, had been shot dead in custody to erase the trail. It was another Ikhwani, Umar, who eventually spilled the beans when things got hot for him. Fourthly, Justice Bilal Nazki was summarily transferred out of J&K soon after he ordered the setting up of a special investigation team (SIT) of the state police to probe Andrabi murder case.
Put together, these closely linked incidents lead to the inevitable conclusion that Major Avatar Singh was not acting alone and that he was a link in a long chain. Involvement of persons at higher levels as well as that of shadowy ‘intelligence’ agencies in those dark deeds stands out as a sore thumb. The game, in fact, continues unabated, notwithstanding official acknowledgement that the ground situation in Kashmir had vast improved.
Merciless killing of nearly two hundred young boys during 2008 and 2010 popular uprising and stonewalling of attempts at enforcing accountability in such cases shows that, in effect, nothing really has changed since Major Avatar Singh and his gang of Ikhwanis patronised by the establishment kidnapped and murdered Jaleel Andrabi in March, 1996. Major Avatar Singh’s brutal end in a far away land, 16 years later, has actually blown the cover off. More skeletons are likely to tumble out.
For the aggrieved Andrabi family, Major Avatar Singh’s violent end is a mixed bag. On the one hand, fate had caught up with the most wanted fugitive but on the other it had to be at the expense of four more innocent lives—that of his own family. Also, Major Singh’s trial in a court of law would have exposed the whole trail as he had threatened to do, ‘if I am let to live’. The culture of impunity and unaccountability under the protective umbrella of ultra-constitutional black laws is leaving behind an unending trail of ‘Andrabis’ and ‘Avatar Singhs’ across the landscape.
