Suicide of a Kulgam youth is shocking; it should serve as a wake-up call for the government, says Altaf Bukhari

‘Officers responsible for withholding salary should be charged with aiding and abetting a suicide case’

Syed Mohammad Altaf Bukhari, Apni Party President, expressed deep shock and grief on Sunday over a heartbreaking incident in which a 24-year-old youth from Kulgam district recorded a video message to draw government attention to his family’s plight before committing suicide.

In a statement to CT, Bukhari described the incident as “extremely disturbing,” saying that a young man had to give up his life in order to draw the attention of those in power to his family’s plight.

“This appalling incident depicts the level of mental stress and trauma experienced by families whose salaries were withheld by an apathetic bureaucratic set-up, even in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m hoping that the incident serves as a wake-up call for the government,” he said.

He demanded that those officials whose callous attitude resulted in this tragic incident face severe consequences. “The youth took his precious life because his father, a teacher by profession, had not been paid salary for over a year, putting his entire family in a precarious situation. “The officers who stopped his salary should be charged with abetment in a suicide case,” Bukhari said.

He urged the Lieutenant Governor of J&K to order a thorough investigation into the incident on humanitarian grounds and prosecute the officers whose callous attitude forced the youth to give his life.

Bukhari also demanded that the families of teachers whose salaries have been withheld for petty reasons should not be made to suffer, and that the departed should release their salaries immediately before they are forced to resort to such unjustified actions.

“I implore the current administration to take a humanitarian stance and refrain from exacerbating the public’s sense of alienation. The pandemic has already proven disastrous and brought economic depravity to the people, and those in positions of power should not take sadistic pleasure in their people’s misery,” he said.

According to Bukhari, depriving government employees of their salaries for petty reasons is a violation of their human rights as well as the Indian constitution’s labour laws. “By withholding wages, you are not only depriving an employee of his fundamental rights, including a dignified livelihood, but you are also snatching the right to life of his family members whose well-being is dependent on the wages of their breadwinner,” Bukhari opined.

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