Delhi and DU is again witnessing another Right wing vs Left wing fight. The issue started with a protest against a two-day seminar organised by Delhi University’s Ramjas College, called “Cultures of Protest”. The members of the ABVP were against the participation of Jawaharlal Nehru University students, Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid Shora at the seminar. According to them, the JNU students were involved in the anti-India sloganeering that took place at JNU last year. The ABVP protest took a violent turn when some of its members allegedly attacked the students who were supporting the seminar. The Delhi University student Gurmehar Kaur took on ABVP saying that she isn’t afraid of them. The post went viral Earlier she had taken the internet with her four-minute silent video, in which claimed that her Kargil war hero dad was not killed by Pakistan but it was War that killed him. ABVP strongly protested against her, and the likes of Virender Sehwag, Randeep Hooda, Geetha Phogat opposed her. With Social media taking sides for and against her the issue became a boiling hot topic for the last one week.
However, she being hailed as the daughter of a Kargil War hero is not true. One of the primary reasons Gurmehar and her video caught people’s attention and went viral was that she said she was the daughter of a Kargil War hero. The entire video is devoid of any spoken word, as Gurmehar talks to the camera with 30 cards. “Hi. My name is Gurmehar Kaur. I am from Jalandhar, India,” she says in the first three of them.
Gurmehar goes on to add in the fourth card: “This is my dad Capt Mandeep Singh.” It also has a photo of the Indian Army officer. And then Gurmehar adds: “He was killed in the 1999 Kargil War.” She then goes on to deliver other pieces of information and opinion, like how she tried to attack a woman in burqa, and how she now wants peace between India and Pakistan. She also says about the attack: “My mother held me back and made me understand that Pakistan did not kill my dad, war killed him.”
While the Indian Army does not provide details of the Kargil War because of its policy of secrecy on all of its operations after 1947, it is common knowledge that the conflict is believed to have begun in early May 1999, with shepherds spotting intruders from Pakistan high in the mountains of Pakistan. It ended on July 26, 1999, with the Indian Army having completed the expulsion of the infiltrators from its side in Jammu and Kashmir.
However according to reports Captain Singh and six others died while trying to repulse an attack on a Rashtriya Rifles post in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kupwara district on August 6, 1999. The report quotes the Battle Casualty Report as saying: “Capt Mandeep Singh was commander of the company which came under anti-national elements’ fire assault on the post. During encounter at approximately 1:15 am on August 6, 1999, he received splinter injury on left infraclavicular region and was declared dead on the spot.”
So, Captain Mandeep Singh was martyred like a hero in the line of duty while trying to protect his country, but it was after the Kargil War. Thus, while Gurmehar is indeed the daughter of a hero who was killed in the line of duty, she is not the daughter of a Kargil War hero.
Info from: ibtimes
Leave a Comment