Toothless Tigers

News Kashmir Exclusive

A nation, society or state cannot progress any further unless it does not have an efficient governance and accountability and to ensure the same powerful commissions and bodies are required.

As a matter of fact, most of the of the bodies, commissions constituted in Kashmir to fight corruption, ensure action against human rights violations and envisage transparency are most of the times either lying headless or for the most of times just  toothless tigers and have been thus more often than not  lying  dormant for a long time .

 

Importantly, often the case is that a number of  constitutional bodies in the state of Jammu and Kashmir  are defunct  because the government  does not appoint their heads and members. Most of the times the vacancies gets created after the term of the statutory heads and members gets expired and are not immediately filled .

Pertinently , the valley of Kashmir on account of lingering political conflict has seen many human rights abuses but most of the times headless and powerless State Human Rights Commission has in a way ensured no justice to victims of injustice.  Resultantly, the word Inquiry has remained  the most abused word in the Kashmir lexicography in the past 27 years of blood drenched history   . In the past three decades every  Government  year after year has ordered  countless inquiries  to probe the violation but these inquiries yielded no fruitful results and have met the same ill fate as was met by inquiries conducted on  previous killings and  atrocities  .

On the otherhand, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir the menace of Corruption is  eating into the very vitals of our society since long. Corruption has been termed by rationale  voices as  mother of all vices. Unfortunately, the malevolence of corruption is very much out of control in the J&K State.

After dropping a bombshell in the year 2005 by ranking Jammu and Kashmir as country’s second most corrupt state, Transparency International (TI) (a Berlin-based international corruption watchdog and a non-profit, non-governmental organisation committed to curbing corruption in various countries), had at time  dubbed the state as ‘alarmingly corrupt’ and concluded that levels of corruption have increased despite state’s disappointing ranking.Even today not much has changed and J&K is considered much corrupt .Commissions, bodies constituted to fight corruption too are toothless.

Bilal Bashir Bhat, a young journalist states – “ A society cannot progress in right direction unless it does not enforce the concept of accountability and ensure justice. All this can be ensured when we have efficient, powerful commissions and bodies who are not just paper tigers but have the power to act against the wrong elements, but unfortunately in the state of Jammu and Kashmir  the defunct nature of these commissions, statutory bodies  means lack of regulation, vibrancy, transparency in the system as a result negatives remain embedded .We need to strengthen all the commissions and bodies to move in right direction.”

The need of the hour as per opinion on ground is to ensure that our commissions, bodies constituted become powerful, enforcing, efficient and not toothless tigers .