GAFAR: A brave man of Kashmir

gafar was the man of his word. He had always been a hard man to convince when it would be the talk of improbity, ignominy, etc. His mind never coerced him to concede the things against his mind. The mind, infused with a full passion for AZAADI, kept battling with brutality. The slogans of Azaadi, he kept chanting all his life. He never said anything awful for the country. He said in his slogans that he wanted freedom from communal bloodshed, cruelty. However, he was shot dead at Lal Chowk in Srinagar.

The strict imprisonment of 10 years in the ill-lighted jails of Kashmir had already deformed his backbone, the swart darkness, and profound reticence made him a mentally-ill man. But dead – no. He had only lost his brawn and was very ill, didn’t insinuate that he couldn’t walk. Besides, he had the cognitive disorder called prosopagnosia by dint of which he couldn’t espy his own relatives, even his own family.

No leader was he — just a plain, ordinary person gifted with knowledge and distinguishability, for the time being, with a resolute life. The cruelty that he feared, for the posterity and against which he fought, was his great care and concern. So, with a painstaking presentiment for the coming future, he tried a lot by leaving no stone unturned, but Allah had wished for something else when in the dim daylight, he was shot deliberately in the chest in the market during the cross firing.

On 18th January 1990, it was 5 O’clock in the evening. A couple of Army vehicles stopped at historic Lal Chowk after getting inputs about the presence of militants in a hideout there. They cordoned off the area and began to search for the militants.

Assuredly, the whole area had been fenced to carry out searches when after an hour, the encounter broke out between the two. So, the civilians who were there began to ensconce themselves. Some of them were shopkeepers, closed their shops within no time. Some of them were the vendors on the pavements, wrapped up their wares. Some of them were pedestrians, some of them were the cyclists, and some, the drivers, all then started moving rapidly so that they could hide at some safe place.

The promiscuous exchange of firing took the life of three persons in which Gafar was the one, who had gone for an evening walk before the encounter and was now returning through the same place and indeed, he didn’t know about the encounter.

It was then, people came to know about his death when the halcyon standing prevailing in the market and everyone fathomed that something had befallen. Noone could guess expressly what had been occurring and how it would come out. It was after a moment later when a boy of 11 namely Nasir, whose face had lost its glamor, and his eyes were brimmed with abhorrence, found the bullet-ridden bodies of three persons.

“I saw,” cried Nasir.

“What did you see?” asked one of the men fearfully from the crowd.

“The three corpses,” replied Nasir, with tears flowing down his cheeks.

They all went around to recognize the bodies in which they certainly found Gafar (a brave man of Kashmir) and other two, the college students, who conclusively fell prey to this bloodshed and along with the death of Gafar, all the hopes of the people of Kashmir were dashed to the ground.