@
Joe Shearer Can you add some input to this thread.
To what purpose?
First, as far as this incident - the invasion by the tribal lashkar, and their behaviour during the invasion - is concerned, the facts are clear. They have been recorded again and again, and it is surrealistic to read Pakistani hypernationalists drawing a fine line between rape and murder and simple murder. As if it mattered to the dead, or to the abducted. There is no lack of testimony.
Second, like all other incidents of this sort, one side produces the evidence, the other side then puts out smoke screens and applies whitewash copiously. Both sides have done it. This particular incident is unpleasant reading for the Pakistani members of the forum. Other incidents would make equally unpleasant reading for Indian members; yet others would make unpleasant reading for Bangladeshis, for Sri Lankans, for the Burmese...it goes on.
Third, attempts at covering up the involvement of the nascent Pakistani state are strange to see. It is a struggle against facts recorded in dry, unemotional terms by the Pakistani side itself. Reading Tariq Ali on the subject is a sobering experience; he speaks with the familiarity of the privileged insider about events and personal motives at the highest levels. There is nothing left to cover the nakedness of what happened, not even a fig-leaf.
Fourth, to balance this, the preceding events in Jammu and in Poonch are worth remembering. One school of thought states that this attack was direct retaliation for those incidents, where there was widespread massacre. It is another thing that this attack was bizarre in that it took a vicious toll of those whom it purportedly sought to rescue and to avenge; the community injured and decimated in Jammu and Poonch was sought to be rescued and avenged by being raped and looted and killed, this time by their own supposed rescuers. There was collateral damage among Sikhs and Hindus, and the handful of hapless Europeans caught in the fighting, but the invaders had no scruples about whom they visited their liberation upon.
Fifth, the efforts at justifying these hideous actions based on the prevailing culture of the time make queasy reading. What a specious justification. What flimsy excuses. It is only slightly better than the utterly loathsome attempts at a parochial defence of these acts on the grounds that these were committed by those who won territory for the new state of Pakistan. That defence is shallow and mistaken. The major territorial gains were made further north, and further east, by state forces belonging to a local prince, complete with their own artillery, which swept aside the meagrely armed and equipped state forces of the Maharaja, captured Skardu and Kargil, and besieged Leh, before being thrown back by the Indian Army as it deployed. The tribals gained nothing, only the permanent reputation for foul behaviour that they hold for all time to come. Those who won two fifths of Kashmir for Pakistan were not those raping, looting and killing women and children in Baramula; they were those who fought in Gilgit and Ladakh.
Time people on both sides read their history and refrained from casting the first stone.