L’affaire Waheed Para has demonstrated once again that the onion layers of who is backed by whom in Kashmir are more complex than most locals presume. Perhaps all those layers of intrigue and suspicion about who is whose ‘plant’ or who-or-what has whose ‘back’ are just the leaping convolutions of the Kashmiri mind, with its characteristic wheels within wheels. Imaginary.
The situation here may actually be what it superficially seems: that investigators suspect the youth leader of the PDP of having helped terrorists, but don’t have evidence. If that’s so, it wouldn’t be the first time we’d have seen that well-funded investigating bodies there can be pretty clueless.