In Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, Indian paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) along with Police provided special weapon training to terrorist gang raised in the name of Village Defence Guards (VDG) by the Modi regime across Jammu region.
More than 300 VDGs have been trained by the the Indian paramilitary force in just a small town, Kalakote, of Rajouri district, over the past few weeks.
A special campaign was launched in different areas including Tatapani, Broh, Sialsui, Potha and Solki of the town for recruitment of the Village Defense Guards, who are responsible for killing of many innocent Muslims in the past, then euphemised as Village Defense Committees.
It is worth mentioning here that Al Jazeera, an international English channel, in its latest report released in the second week of March 2023, has said that revival of the terrorist gang, VDGs, refutes the justification by the Indian government for revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in 2019.
The Modi government, the report added, while abrogating the Kashmir’s special status argued that the move would wipe out armed resistance in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. However, after three years of the New Delhi’s unilateral action, the same Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is “reviving a civilian militia, called the Village Defence Guards (VDGs) in the region’s southern Jammu area””.
First established in 1995 in the districts of Jammu area, the VDGs, then known as Village Defence Committees, were tasked with targeting pro-freedom people in occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
“Demands to disband the civil militia grew in the early 2000,” the Al Jazeera report said and added that since 2019, the VDGs have been formed along the lines of Salwa Judum, a notorious militia group created at the turn of the century in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, where the Maoists led a resistance movement of the Indigenous people resisting a corporate takeover of their lands and resources.
The TV report said, “Since January, hundreds of civilians from Dhangri and other villages around Jammu are being trained and armed by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) paramilitary group.”—KMS
