Indian army Major Leetul Gogoi with the occupying forces in Kashmir was given a medal of commendation for tying civilian Farooq Ahmad Dar to the hood of his jeep & parading him as a human shield in April 2017. Today, he was taken in by police for questioning after attempting to enter a Srinagar hotel with a minor girl for sex. Police were called in after hotel staff had an altercation with Gogoi for refusing him entry to the hotel. Gogoi was on duty at the time.

There has been some brilliant commentary by Kashmiris, including this by Mohammed Afaaq Sayeed:

“Major Gogoi, hero of nationalist Indians has been caught in a compromising position with a minor girl in a Srinagar hotel.
This amounts to rape as there is nothing called consensual when the girl is a minor.
Let’s see how Mehbooba handles this.
Will AFSPA be invoked ?
or
Will Gogoi be tried under the new anti rape law ?
Let us see.
Ball in Mehbooba’s court. ”

Satyadeep Satya, an Indian supporter of Kashmiri freedom wrote:
“Buying Sex as Cover for Extortion and Rape:
There is no such thing as consent in anything sexual involving a person, adult or minor, from a land under de facto military rule and a combatant of the armed force that enforces military rule — i.e. does not seek the consent of the people it controls with the violence of its weapons and its laws. Occupation is the rape of an entire people. All one needs to find out in any particular case like Major Gogoi’s are the specifics of how the person concerned was rendered totally powerless to deny the officer what he sought — and age is just one of the factors, not necessarily the decisive one. An army officer is potentially dangerous to any Kashmiri, given the range of troubles he can bring upon the person or her dear ones — and hence no Kashmiri, regardless of age, is in a position to actually ‘sell’ him anything, including sex.

To be able to sell something freely requires full freedom to refuse to sell without inviting consequences for oneself. A subjugated people cannot sell sex to those who subjugate them, and what may look like ‘buying and selling’ to those who cannot tell occupier from the occupied is just plunder — the feudal and the colonial rolled into one violent act of extraction. Call it rape or call it extortion.”

(Photo is Leetul Gogoi on left; Farooq Ahmad Dar as a human shield on right)