New Delhi: Son of Kashmiri separatist leader Hashim Qureshi, Junaid Qureshi has reacted strongly to the encounter in which Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani was killed on Friday.
He has urged the Kashmiri youth to rethink the mindless violence that has been inflicted in the Valley in the past few decades.
Junaid said that youth need to understand and need to ask this question to separatist leaders ‘if jihad is so pious then why don't they or their children pick up guns?’
"All the children of these leaders are tucked away in safe environments in schools in Malaysia, America, London or India, and poor people's sons are dying on streets and they are glorifying it. The Kashmiri youth need to understand and need to ask this question to these leaders if Jihad, if this gun is so pious why don't you pick it up, why don't your children pick it up? This bloodshed must stop," Junaid, an Amsterdam-based Human Rights activist, said.
"A youth of Kashmir has lost his life. Many people, many youth in Kashmir, whether justified or unjustified, have a lot of resentment. They are angry, but we can see what it does when you chose violent ways to give vent to your resentment and to your anger. At the end, Burhan Wani met his inevitable fate, he was killed. It's sad to see Kashmiri youth dying like this," Junaid, whose father had hijacked an Indian plane to Lahore in 1971, added.
He also made an appeal to the Kashmiri youth to shun violence and opt for some other civilised way to vent their resentment.
"This young boy (Wani, 22), who is just the age of my brother, could have been a doctor, an engineer, a writer, a poet, or an actor. He could have found so many other ways to give vent to his resentment, and to make an appeal for his genuine demands. But, we must understand and the Kashmiri youth must understand that picking up guns is not the way which will get us somewhere," he said.
"One Burhan Wani died today, another will die tomorrow until and unless we understand that the picking up the gun is not a way out. India has lakhs of army stationed in Kashmir. We have already picked up the gun 26 years ago, what did we achieve? People died. This must end. This violence, this bloodshed must end," he opined.
Junaid said that the Kashmir issue can “only be solved on the table and you have to deserve a place to get to that table”.
“You have to have your arguments ready. You need to give vent to your resentment in some other civilised way," he added.
Burhan Wani (22), Jammu and Kashmir's most wanted local guerrilla commander who became a poster boy of militancy, was killed on Friday with two associates by security forces in Anantnag district.
Wani had last month released a video warning of attacks on separate colonies for Sainiks and Kashmiri Pandits if they were set up in the Valley. The major part of the video message, however, was directed at the Jammu and Kashmir Police warning them of more attacks.
