Our job is very difficult here: CPRF soldiers react to colleagues’ heckling in Kashmir

CRPF personnel maintain vigil during repoll in Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency in Budgam district of Kashmir on Thursday.(PTI Photo)

New Delhi: A series of videos purportedly showing local mobs heckling and roughing up CRPF personnel might have outraged many but security forces say they exercised maximum restraint to avoid civilian casualties.

“Goli chala dete toh kya hota aap samajh sakte hain (You can very well understand if the jawans had opened fire in that situation),” said a CRPF jawan from Uttar Pradesh standing guard near old Srinagar’s grand mosque Jamia Masjid. He does not want his name published as he is not authorised to speak to media.

The walls and shop shutters next to him are dotted with anti-India graffiti like “Go India go back” and “India your game is over”. It’s a Friday afternoon and the troopers posted in the vicinity of the mosque are on high alert – at any point of time a large crowd of stone-pelters can come out of the labyrinth of narrow alleys and charge at them.

A video clip that showed some men assaulting Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel on their way to poll duty in Srinagar on April 9 has gone viral. Jammu and Kashmir police registered an FIR on Thursday on a complaint filed by the CRPF and the government has launched a probe.

The state police chief SP Vaid on Friday lauded the restraint and patience shown by the CRPF personnel.

“Our job, as you can see, is very difficult here in Kashmir. The mobs charge at us, we try to restrain as much as possible and as a last resort we use pellets or bullets,” another CRPF man, a native of Madhya Pradesh and posted in the old part of Srinagar, said.

“When we retaliate, say use pellets, we are criticised by sections of society. But people do not understand how we are targeted by stone-pelters,” he added.

A senior officer of the force, stationed in Srinagar, explained that CRPF soldiers facing stone-pelters during protests is a routine affair but the manhandling happened because they were outnumbered in the remote area of Budgam district.

“Generally, whenever jawans are posted it’s with sufficient strength and no one dares any sort of heckling or jeering. But in this case, due to the heavy requirements of election duty, at this location jawans were outnumbered by the mob,” he explained.

Another soldier from Bihar, on duty in a Srinagar street, said, “If I go alone in uniform into a sensitive locality here in the old city I can be attacked and heckled and jeered. What the jawans in the video face is the unfortunate reality here.”

“In the complex geopolitics, we paramilitary personnel are stuck in between.”

Source: Hindustan Times