Rukhsana Kausar, a 21 year old Cashmere farm girl, heard one night end of September 2009 how someobdy entered her house. She was with her parents and brother in her farm in Jammu when three gunmen, who said they belonged to "Laskhar e Toyba" (the terrorist organisation from Pakistan that executed the Bombay attacks), forced their way in and demanded food and beds for the night, something quite usual for the area.
Her father denied the requests and the men attacked and beat him. But a Cashmere proverb says that the houshold is a castle, and the woman of the house is it´s queen, and young Rukhsana was not disposed to allow intruders in. Hearing how the men beat her father she came out from under the bed where she had hidden, grabbed an axe and attacked the gunmen. She wrought the gun out of the hands of one and shot him several times, the others fled inot the mountains. Later she said she had never fired an assault rifle before but had seen it in films and could not stand by while her father was being hurt. “I couldn’t bear my father’s humiliation. If I’d failed to kill him, they would have killed us,” she said.
On the next day the young farm girl became a national heroine, her attitude explored by the government to the fullest: She received a decoration, got offered a job as Special Agent in the police forces and got promised 4000 USD (in the end she recived just 75).
Rukhsana Kausar, the girl from Rajouri district in Jammu & Kashmir,
who killed a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander in September,
being felicitated by All-India Anti-Terrorist Front chairman M.S. Bitta in New Delhi. About a month later, the farm of Rukhsana was attacked with grenades and burnt to th ground while Rukhsana herself was at the police quarters to pass a quick gun training course before entering the local police force.
Despite the Cashmere goverment offering her a new farm in another area of the country Rukhsana came to the conlcusion that her flirt with fire arms had ended, she renounced her job at the police and stopped posing for press photos with an AK 47.
At a hommage for the terrorism victims of the Bombay attacks, she told press that she did not believe that force could be a solution for the terrorist problem and declared herself to be a fervent follower of Ghandi and his ideas.
Rattler
