People’s Conference chairman Sajad Gani Lone on Thursday expressed anguish over the rounding up of hundreds of people across the Kashmir valley.
Taking to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) Sajad Lone said, “In the name of OGWs hundreds of people have been rounded up in the last 24 hours.”
He said that, the people who are rounded up are the people who may have had a past in militancy but are now law abiding citizens for the last 2 decades.
“They are grandfathers, fathers and livelihood earners. How can an entire generation be punished and for how long. For a mistake that they made are they going to be punished eternally for all times to come,” Sajad Lone claimed.
What is the concept of reintegration in a conflict, he asked.
Sajad Lone warned that the Macro policing is not the answer. “We are all pained with the incidents of violence. But good policing would mean micro investigation not macro punishment,” he said.
He said that the pattern is not new and this has been the rule for the last 3 decades. All governments are culpable of this crime, But we need a closure, Sajad Lone wrote.
Raising questions on the Over Ground Worker (OGW) list, the former cabinet minister said, “And this OGW list. Who compiled it. A lot of these OGWS have been added to the list in the NC era. They would add anybody who didn’t vote for them especially during 1996 to 2002. ”
If the current administration is revisiting everything done during the previous governmental tenures, he said, adding, “Why not revisit these lists and separate fact from fiction.”
It is a humble appeal, he said.
He demanded that the “macro punishment” should be stopped. “A father or a grand father who is now a senior citizen being hauled to the local police station is a humiliating experience,” he stated.
In his tweet, he further asked, How would you expect the youngsters in the family to react to such events.”
He further added that Kashmiris are exiting a vicious cycle of violence, so these macro policing events are impediments to the exiting process.