Decoding Burhan Wani and Kashmir unrest: Is 'Indian oppression' really to blame?

It has been just over three days since Indian security forces eliminated top terrorist recruiter Burhan Wani. Valiant efforts are already well under way to romanticise and rationalise the Hizbul Mujaheedin commander's crimes and provide a narrative of victimhood to justify the widespread turbulence in Kashmir that has left 23 people dead so far and over 250 injured.

The glorification of Wani, the 22-year-old tech savvy terrorist, is on at full swing. He is being projected as a larger-than-life figure who inspired thousands of oppressed local Kashmiri youths to intifada against the oppressive Indian state using social media tools.

In this avatar, Wani wasn't the terrorist who roamed around with a Rs 10 lakh bounty over his head, having dropped out from school at 15 and becoming a delinquent with a string of police cases against his name; he wasn't instrumental in brainwashing many local boys to take up the gun by glamorising terror through social media; he wasn't the Hizbul commander who released videos warning of attacks if colonies for Sainiks and Kashmiri Pandits were set up in the Valley; he wasn't the terrorist in the 2013 killing of four Rashtriya Rifles men in Buchoo Baala area in his hometown Tral; he wasn't the terrorist to warn the J&K Police of more attacks; he wasn't even the first Kashmiri militant to spring the idea of a Khilafat, an Islamic State, through a Facebook video which became wildly popular. No, Burhan Wani wasn't any of these.

In the sanitised yet glamorised version of Wani, he was just an armed rebel with striking good looks, a Che Guevara prototype if you like, who came from an affluent family and wouldn't have gone into terrorism had it not been for the Indian army's torturous and sadistic ways. Stress was laid on how his father Muzaffar Ahmad Wani, who teaches mathematics, is the principal of a higher secondary school while his mother Maimoona Muzaffar is a postgraduate and how his brother was wronged by security forces.
Source:-firstpost
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