Monday, December 28, 2009

Blowing the Shopian case out of the water

If this does not convince Indians that half the politicians and many of the Govt. officials in Jammu and Kashmir are involved in treason, I'm not sure what will.
Praveen Swami who has been following the Shopian case over the last year brings to the front real investigative journalism and a detailed analysis to expose the Shopian case for the sham it is. For those who have not followed this case, here's the primer. Two ladies were found dead under suspicious circumstances. The Kashmiri parties like PDP and others ran a shrill campaign that the ladies were raped and killed by "Hindu" fundamentalists.
The article analyzes the reports filed by the AIIMS and Forensic labs and exposes the sham act of protest without evidence by the Kashmiri politicians and the support shown by the Kashmiri Govt. doctors in their post mortem reports.
Inside the bodies of the victims, AIIMS forensic experts found several pieces of evidence suggesting drowning. Pin-sized petechial haemorrhages were found on the membranes of their lungs and bronchi. Larger patches of Paltauf’s haemorrhages — bluish-red areas found in the lungs of about half of all drowning victims — were also visible. Doctors also discovered accumulations of fluid within the alveoli, suggesting pulmonary oedema, another sign of drowning.


reathtaking incompetence may have played a role. Shopian doctors Bilal Hassan and Nazia Hassan ruled out drowning as a cause of death, claiming to have carried out a flotation test using samples of lung tissue from a victim.

All in all it exposes where the loyalties of the J&K politicians and Government officials and largely the incompetence of mainstream Indian media for not exposing the truth in this case. Kudos to Praveen and cHindu for their expose of this case.

4 comments:

kuttychathan said...

Hope that Praveen will do a similar investigation into the source of funds and the activities of Teesta Setelvad and her organisation

cbcnn_Pilid said...

Good post and an excellent piece by Praveen Swami. It shows the cynical game played by Kashmiri politicians and the weakness of the Omar Abdullah government. What is worse is the support these groups have received from so-called Indian intellectuals. Swami talks of holding civil rights groups to account but does not elaborate. I suspect that is in response to this report written following an 'investigation' carried out by a band of self-appointed human rights guardians - the language and arguments made here are remarkably similar to what secessionist groups and Islamists assert (by the way, some of these are big names in Indian and international academic circles and carry considerable influence). Folks who write this kind of political critiques do not appear to either know much about the science of forensic medicine nor care about the proper interpretation of the specific facts of the case. They are however well-versed in the politics of the question and cleverly substitute the hard work of criminal investigation with the sort of political judgments that attract immediate media attention.

cbcnn_Pilid said...

Here is the latest EPW editorial once again alleging a government cover-up 'to hide the truth and shield the guilty' in this case. This view is once again based on the same IWIJ report. Barring the question of location of the bodies at different times, Swami's article refutes the remaining allegations but that does not appear to have prevented the Indian 'intellectuals' on the Left from throwing their weight behind the secessionists' conspiracy theory. The question of truth does however depend on which of the witness testimonies one believes. Human rights groups want to cast the CBI in the role of the evil agency that coerced these witnesses to recant or depose falsely; the CBI argues that the testimony of witnesses alleging a police cover-up is incoherent and contradictory and was the result of coercion by the Kashmir bar association.

kuttychathan said...

On another issue... a British citizen has been executed in China on drug trafficking charges. Our chindu is pretending as though such an incident has not happened. When those involved in Indian Parliament attack case were sentenced to death, chindu wrote an editorial demanding the abolition of capital punishment. I would like to know whether chindu's views extend to China also.