Pulwama attack fallout: Supreme Court directs states to take action against assault on Kashmiris 

The Supreme Court of India.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court, on Friday, directed chief secretaries and director generals of state police forces to take “prompt and necessary” action where incidents of threat and violence against Kashmiris were reported following the Pulwama terror attack.

The states directed to take action includes Maharashtra, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana, Meghalaya, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand, along with the Delhi Police commissioner, in order to prevent incidents of “threat, assault and social boycott” of Kashmiris.

The bench, comprising Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Sanjiv Khanna, said, “The chief secretaries, the DGPs and the Delhi Police Commissioner are directed to take prompt and necessary action to prevent the incidents of threat, assault, social boycott etc against Kahsmiris and other minorities.”

The bench will stick to its earlier decision where it had asked the states and Union territories to appoint a senior police officer as nodal officer in each district to deal with the cases of mob violence. In addition, it had also sought immediate setting up of a nationwide helpline number and a website containing contact details of the nodal officers appointed in politically-sensitive districts.

Ten more incidents of assaults have taken place in various states after filing of the petition and necessary directions be issued urgently to stop them.

The petition had said, “These incidents are a part of organised hate campaign against Muslims and Kashmiri, most cases which are fabricated and the hysteria that now surrounds India has been engineered to gain political mileage. The extremist groups have led vigilante mob attacks across the country to enforce nationalism by leaders of various groups who claim to promote and instigated hate crimes”

There have been reports of attacks and threats against Kashmiris in parts of India. Recently, protests against Kashmiri workers in an Uttar Pradesh sugar mill prompted the Kadhmiri workers to flee. There have also been reports of assaults, like the one in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal, against Kashmiris.

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