Kashmir

Yasin Malik's Speech in Condolence meeting for Maulana Showkat

2011-04-10T23:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1574429574524&oid=193796440470&comments

BJP R-day flags, activists ‘stone-pelters’

2011-01-24T20:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/bjp-rday-flags-activists-stonepelters/741339/
Bashaarat MasoodTags : Tricolour at Lal Chowk, BJP, Bharatiya Janata Yuva MorchaPosted: Mon Jan 24 2011, 01:43 hrsSrinagar:In what could prove an embarrassment for the BJP, the police said that two of its activists arrested on Saturday, ahead of the party’s planned yatra to hoist the Tricolour at Lal Chowk, are known stone-pelters.
“We arrested six BJP activists. Two of them turned out to be listed stone-throwers,” Senior Superintendent of Police, Srinagar, Ashiq Bukhari told The Indian Express.
Denying that the men belonged to the party, the state president of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha Shamsher Singh Manhas said: “We are for the integrity of the state. The police are baffled by our programme... now they are inventing these stories. We have no idea about the people arrested by the police. We have been informed only about arrest of three activists.”
Incidentally, BJP state vice-president Sofi Mohammad Yousuf had confirmed the arrest of the six party activists, calling it an attempt to foil the party’s Republic Day programme. “We were making preparations for the welcome of BJP activists visiting Kashmir. When our activists left home, some of them were arrested,” Yousuf told The Indian Express.
Of the six alleged BJP activists, held from Srinagar for “violating” prohibitory orders, were 22-year-old Wasim Hassan and Imtiyaz Ahmad, 24, both residents of downtown Srinagar, a stronghold of separatists.
Sources say that Hassan, a resident of Qamarwari, and Ahmad of Nawab Bazar were involved in stone-throwing during the June uprising and that police are investigating cases against them.
Inspector General of Police, Kashmir, Shiv Murari Sahai confirmed the same.

Rude little patriots

2011-01-24T19:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Rude-little-patriots/Article1-653574.aspx

Indrajit Hazra

Kashmir is the last bastion of the BJP. On paper, everything seems kosher. If Srinagar is as much an integral part of India as, say, Itanagar, surely there’s nothing wrong in the Indian tricolour being hoisted by patriotic hokeys at Lal Chowk this Republic Day. Or is there? As always, there is

something the BJP, in its finite wisdom, can learn from my late grandmother, a liberal Hindu who would have been at ease with the party president’s avuncular style. Despite her progeny straying considerably from her cultural mores, they did respect her wish of not consuming alcohol in her presence. She didn’t mind people drinking; she just felt uncomfortable about alcohol being consumed in front of her.

If the BJP was a member of my grandmother’s household, I fear that this is what would have happened: citing the undeniable fact that alcohol consumption isn’t banned in our country and certainly not in the privacy of homes, the party would have plonked their choice of poison and would have knocked back a few in front of my grandma. Essentially, it would have been a rude gesture carried out just to make a larger — correct — point.

The problem isn’t that the Indian national flag is being raised in the Valley on January 26. Plenty of tricolours are raised there that day officially and unofficially without a murmur. But the fact is that it’s the BJP doing it and telling everyone, “Look, look! We’re raising the flag in Kashmir. Top that Mother India-lovers!”

In the world of symbolism that we live in, how something is done matters as much as — if not more than — what that something is. And unlike the expired charms of gung-ho Hindutva, the touchy-feely patriotic buzz gained by raising the national flag is hardly the stuff of any radical ideology. Also, such a gesture is popular, non-exclusionary and in-sync with the ‘Jai ho!’ bonkers crowd that is young India’s version of ‘Inqilab zindabadwallas!’

All self-respecting Kashmir experts pooh-pooh any comparisons between Northern Ireland’s historical relations with London and the Kashmir Valley’s relations with New Delhi. They are right to do so as the two ‘disputes’ are very different in nature, origin and trajectory. But I can’t help but think of the BJP’s Tiranga Yatra bearing a strong resemblance to the ‘Orange march’. The ‘Orange march’ is a commemorative walk undertaken in various parts of Britain and Commonwealth countries to mark the victory of William of Orange, a Protestant, over James II, a Catholic, in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. It’s a harmless show of pride in Protestantism and the fact of Northern Ireland being part of Britain.

But during the ‘Troubles’ of the 1970s, an ‘Orange march’ in Catholic-majority, London-owned Northern Ireland became something more than the equivalent of a mobile satsang event. It took on the flavour of conflicting ‘nationhoods’ — between Northern Ireland and Britain, despite the former being a ‘disputed’ part of the latter according to Irish separatists.

The marches were fine when they usually passed through Protestant-dominated parts of Northern Ireland. But when passing through ‘Catholic’ localities, people — who would have otherwise been sitting at home watching the telly and without much of an opinion on whether London or the Irish Republican Army should be in charge of their town — turned into abusive onlookers. In the late 1990s, in the Catholic-majority locality of Drumcree in the Northern Ireland town of Portadown, riots broke out when the Orange Order was banned from walking down a particular street. The ban in such ‘contentious’ areas is still in place, although tensions have subsided.

It’s too late for our very own Orange Order boys to be dissuaded from marching to Lal Chowk. But a ban on their Boy Scouts sojourn would be exactly the kind of thing that would make an LK Advani out of Nitin Gadkari. It’s bad manners, impolite and the worst kind of short-term politics. But if the BJP wants to carry out their patriotic task that’s the equivalent of glugging a bottle of beer in front of my grandma’s face, we need to ensure (with yet another layer of security) that no one in the Valley takes these merry, patriotic attention-seekers to heart.

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A selection from the comments section of the Hindustan Times:

Indrajit, you got it all wrong, Pal! The vast majority of so-called intellectual Bengalis are now-a-days "leftists" and supporters of separatist flock!!! This "intellectual trash" made out of the author's inebriated state is simply a goobledegook. All the morons like MMS, PC and OA and the likes of the article's author are behaving and supporting Pakistan and the J&K separatist goons. It is disgraceful that India's misguided souls are trampling the achievements of hundreds of thousands of patriotic Indians who sacrified their lives to gain freedom and liberty for all Indians. In this context, all the anti-India activities being pusued by newphytes of separatists - both in GOI and outside - are disdainful.

The patriotic people of India are the guardians of tri-colour, and if need be, they should throw out these rascals, even by undertaking the means that have been demonstrated by the people of tiny Tunisia.

Jai Hind.

Height of Stupidity ... Piece of Waste ... till the time u r alive Pakis dont need Kasabs nd all... thnx for being a traitor...

Everyone knows their affiliations and they don't hide it. It's time you took Samjhauta express to your land of dreams!

How and why I became a stonepelter

2011-01-24T19:41:00.000-08:00

Note from Kafila:

Given below is a note written by a Kashmiri student from downtown Srinagar who calls himself ‘Kale Kharab’, meaning ‘hot headed’. Taken from his blog, the note reads like a personal manifesto, a statement of purpose, a testimony more telling than what the most patient interviewer can elicit. This note gives you more insight into what is happening in Kashmir than a lot of what you may have read or seen on TV news about the killing of 115 protestors across Kashmir in 2010 by Indian forces. This testimony, written early on during the uprising, on 30 August 2010, shows how irredeemably India has lost the plot in Kashmir all over again, with a new generation of Kashmiris.

http://stonepelter.blogspot.com/

by KALE KHARAB

I am from downtown srinagar born in 1991. I was admitted to one of the best school of valley. As a child I had dream to became engineer. Whenever somebody used to ask me about my aim I would proudly say engineer. As I started to grow up I started to became familar with many words which everyone used to talk about that among them few were “azadi” (freedom), “hartal” (shutdown) but I was unable to understand the meaning of these words. I loved the word hartal as it was holiday, so I always wished for hartal. As I grew up I came to know about mujahids. I used to listen stories of mujahids. I would oftenly ask my elders to tell me about mujahids. They told me stories of many mujahids like Issac, Ishfaq, Jan Malik which I liked to share with my friends.

Even I was named after a shaheed mujahid (martyr fighter) who was killed before few weeks I was born. Then came 2007. Once I had to visit Nowahatta. It was month of Muharram. There was heavy stone pelting going on. I found it very intresting. I saw youth pelting stones and shouting freedom slogans. Initially I was afraid to go in front and pelt stones on Police and CRPF.

I used to think they are some angels fighting on the front. Days passed. Now I too had gathered guts to pelt stones on the frontline. It was now 2008 I was busy with my exams. I heard about Amarnath Land Row. Things started changing very fast I had never seen kind of hartals (shutdowns) before. I had never seen kind of stone pelting before. It was totally new expirience to me.

Now tear gas shell wasnt shot anymore, now bullets were fired directly. I saw many boys hit by a bullet and dying on spot. I was disturbed by this. I asked my grandfather once why they directly shoot on us. His answer was “cze chuk mangaan azadi” (u are asking for freedom). This answer changed my mind. I started realizing neither we are part of India nor India considers us their part.

Now I started reading history about our freedom struggle. I came to know about many things about the Kashmir struggle. Now I started reading newspaper, magazines very keenly. I started observing everything about the poltical system. I wept when I read about Gawkadal, Zukura, Hawal, Bijbihara, Sopore, Kupwara massacares. I too wanted to became mujahid.

i once joked with my mother that i will become mujahid, her answer was painfull, first give me poision then you will become mujahid.

Came 2009 I again started to remain busy with my studies but whenever there was stone pelting in Nowahatta I used go there and pelt stones. stone pelting for me now, has become a reactionto the attrocities and d illegal occupationof india. i do it for a cause.

I was once caught by police and was put in custody I was also beaten but that also couldn’t break me. When I was released I again started pelting stones. A policemen in custody told me why you pelt stones, do you think you will get freedom by pelting stones. If it is the case I am also ready to pelt stones, he said.
but still it is the only thing which makes me feel that gun or bullet cannot supress my thoughts
my sentiments and to live in occupied i want to be free…..

I am happy when I pelt stones because I want to take revenge for every innocent killing. I know my stone wont harm them but remember it is not stone it is my feelings. I pelt stones because we are oppressed.

It was june 2009 shopian rape and case occured. it was unbearable to hear rape and murder case of a girl and her sister in law. Tears rolled from my eyes when i read story of asiya in newspaper. once again hartals, stonepelting emerged with more boys felling to bullets to a response for protesting for justice from brutual indian militiary.

I watched a press confrence of omar abdullah on news channel promising to bring culprits in front of people and punish them in 24 hors. Honestly i was happy with his promise i saw a hope in him in bringing justice to the duo.

But nothing happened instead of justice their relatives were beaten. This made me more agressive i wanted to take revenge, i wanted to punish murderers. More ever i considered cm for all this because his behivour made me much agressive much angry against india and their brutuallity here.
After one month of continous hartals(strikes) life was back to track. Again we started to remain busy with our studies.

But i always used to think why didnt the duo got justice i once had seen news of a 14 year old girl from delhi who was killed by unknown person in her bedroom. But Police wasnt able to solve the case. It was then handed over to CBI who arrested the culprits in few weeks.

But in case of kashmiri CBI solved the case differntly they didnt arrested the culprits but made a funny story of the victims that they died due to drowning in stream whose depth was hardly upto knees. This clearly showed policy of india in kashmir.

But whom could i ask these questions why didnt they get justice? why they shoot us if we protest for seeking justice? these questions always were in my mind. By pelting stones i dint got answer but i was happy i felt i am taking revenge by pelting stones but wat else i could do who was their to listen me. I felt stasfication by pelting stones by pelting stones i wanted to say them give us justice leave our kashmir let us leave in peace let us live in place where no mother has fear that her son may return dead. these are not stones these are my feelings.

Came 2010 it was january once i saw wamiq farooq Wamiq was neigbour of one of my relatives residing at rainawari area of srinagar. wamiq was very good boy he used to offer my times prayers. He used to call me baya(brother).

After few weeks on one friday evening i heard that a boy has been martyred after hitting by tear gas shell but i didnt know unfortunately it was wamiq the same guy whom i had seen before a day. when i woke up next morning i saw a picture of boy whose identity was yet to be revealed in newspaper. After few minutes i got call from my cousin that wamiq has been martyred. for few minutes i was totally freezed i wasnt able to speak. a boy hardly 13 was no more. You can understand how it feels when you hear death of person whom you know.

Wamiq was like my lilttle brother i had never thought a innocent young boy will fell prey to their brutuallity. Once again hartals(strikes), and stonepelting emerged with more boys getting injuried and martyred. Indian occipatinal forces were responding with more brutuallity i agree with thier brutiuality because they are occupatinal forces their cruelity and brutuality is not a surprise to us but i was surprised by the role of jammu and kashmir police our local police they are playing absurd role. One fails to understand the cause of their cruelity and brutulity, Is it they want to show more loyality to india or they are killing their brothers for money. what ever the reason is but the way they behave with their own countrymen is painful. Maybe they have became blind because of power goverment has given to them.

Wamiq’s death gave brith to a powerfull revolution. The revolution which shaked the existance of indian rule in kashmir. Now india started to show their milittary power to unarmed civillians. The way they deal with protests is answer to those people who call india integral part of kashmir.

India has started to engage its every front to curb this revolution from politically to techinically even media is being used to curb this revolution.

Streets of kashmir have become red with the blood of innocent people. Jehlem has become red with blood of innocent people.

I know one day may be i will also fell to their bullets even i am mentally prepared for that because i have attained extreme limit of stone pelting. But remember my death will give brith to hundreds of kale kharab (hotheads). As i became kale kharab (hothead) after death of innocent boys from last three years. 65 death have alredy given brith to hundreds of kale kharab (hot head) who are ready to fight till their last breath. These kale kharab (hothead) are present at every corner of kashmir. What ever will the future of present intifada but the struggle to free kashmir will continue even if takes 100 more years. Next generation will produce more dangerous kale kharabs (hot heads) to free kashmir.

Kale Kharab arrested (from comments section of Kafila):

Student held for radical talk on facebook (Daily Rising Kashmir reports)

Srinagar, Jan 17: A 12th class student was taken into custody for allegedly espousing the separatist cause on a social networking site, Facebook.
Official sources said Irfan Ahmad Bhat was picked up for questioning by special investigation team of police from Ganderpora locality of downtown Srinagar on weekend,” official sources said today.

Hailing from Nageen locality, the youth was being questioned by the police’s cyber cell for his alleged role in establishing an “anti-national” group and espousing separatists cause on Facebook social networking site.
“Bhat is being interrogated for his role in establishing a group on Facebook by the name of ‘’Kalekharab’,” a senior police officer said.
Kalekharab, which means ‘hot headed’, is one among the hundreds of pages which have sprouted on Facebook and vow support for independence of Kashmir.
Earlier, also police arrested scores of youth for supporting stone pelters on the facebook.

Kashmir: A Time for Freedom

2010-10-02T01:25:00.000-07:00

http://kafila.org/2010/09/27/kashmir-a-time-for-freedom/

by ANGANA CHATTERJI

“Freedom” represents many things across rural and urban spaces in India-ruled Kashmir. These divergent meanings are steadfastly united in that freedom always signifies an end to India’s authoritarian governance.

In the administration of brutality, India, the postcolony, has proven itself coequal to its former colonial masters. Kashmir is not about “Kashmir.” Governing Kashmir is about India’s coming of age as a power, its ability to disburse violence, to manipulate and dominate. Kashmir is about nostalgia, about resources, and buffer zones. The possession of Kashmir by India renders an imaginary past real, emblematic of India’s triumphant unification as a nation-state. Controlling Kashmir requires that Kashmiri demands for justice be depicted as threatening to India’s integrity. India’s contrived enemy in Kashmir is a plausible one – the Muslim “Other,” India’s historically manufactured nemesis.

What is at Stake?

Between June 11 and September 22 of 2010, Kashmir witnessed the execution of 109 youth, men, and women by India’s police, paramilitary, and military. Indian forces opened fire on crowds, tortured children, detained elders without explanation, and coerced false confessions. Since June 7, there have been 73 days of curfew and 75 days of strikes and agitation. On September 11, the day of Eid-ul-Fitr, the violence continued. The paramilitary and police verbally abused and physically attacked civil society dissenters. Summer 2010 was not unprecedented. Kashmir has been subjected to much, much worse.

The use of public and summary execution for civic torture has been held necessary to Kashmir’s subjugation by the Indian state. Militarization has asserted vigilante jurisdiction over space and politics. The violence is staged, ritualistic, and performative, used to re-assert India’s power over Kashmir’s body. The fabrications of the military — fake encounters, escalating perceptions of cross-border threat — function as the truth-making apparatus of the nation. We are witness to the paradox of history, as calibrated punishment — the lynching of the Muslim body, the object of criminality — enforces submission of a stateless nation (Kashmir) to the once-subaltern postcolony (India).

Kashmir is about the spectacle. The Indian state’s violence functions as an intervention, to discipline and punish, to provoke and dominate. The summer of 2010 evidenced India’s manoeuvring against Kashmir’s determination to decide its future. The use of violence by the Indian forces was deliberate, their tactics cruel and precise, amidst the groundswell of public dissent. This was the third summer, since 2008, of indefatigable civil society uprisings for “Azaadi” (freedom).

What is the Indian state hoping to achieve? One, that Kashmiris would submit to India’s domination, forsaking their claim to separation from India (to be an independent state or, for some, to be assimilated with Pakistan), or their demand for full autonomy. Or, that provoked, grief-stricken, and weary, Kashmiris would take up arms once again, giving India the opportunity to fortify its propaganda that Kashmiri civil society dissent against Indian rule is nurtured and endorsed today by external forces and groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan. If the latter transpires, India will manipulate this to neutralize Kashmiri demands for de-militarization and conflict resolution, to extend its annexation of Kashmir, and further normalize civic and legal states of exception.

If India succeeds in both provoking local armed struggle and linking Kashmiri resistance to foreign terror, it will acquire international sanction to continue its government of Kashmir on grounds of “national security,” and “have proof” that Kashmiris are not organically debating India’s government of them, but are pressurized into it by external forces. India can then reinforce its armed forces in Kashmir, presently 671,000 strong, to prolong the killing spree.

Such provocation as policy is a mistake. Such legitimation of military rule will produce intractable conflict and violence. All indications are that Kashmiri civil society dissent will not abate. It is not externally motivated, but historically compelled.

Dominant nation-states overlook that freedom struggles are not adherent to the moralities of violence versus nonviolence, but reflect a desire to be free. Dominant nation-states forget that the greater the oppression, the more fervent is resistance. The greater the violence, the more likely is the provocation to counter-violence.

Whether dissent in Kashmir turns into organized armed struggle or continues as mass-based peaceful resistance is dependent upon India’s political decisions. If India’s subjugation persists, it is conceivable that the movement for nonviolent dissent, mobilized since 2004, will erode. Signs indicate that it is already slightly threadbare. It is conceivable that India’s brutality will induce Kashmiri youth to close the distance between stones and petrol bombs, or more. If India fails to act, if Pakistan acts only in its self-interest, and if the international community does not insist on an equitable resolution to the Kashmir dispute, it is conceivable, that, forsaken by the world, Kashmiris will be compelled to take up arms again.

Misogynist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba, al-Qaeda, or the Taliban are mercenaries looking for takers in Kashmir. By the Indian state’s record, there are between 500-700 militants in the Kashmir Valley today. These groups have not been successful because Kashmiris have been disinterested in alliances with them, and not because the Indian army is successful in controlling them. This time, an armed mobilization by Kashmiris would include an even stronger mass movement than that which occurred between 1990 and 2004/2007, led by youth whose lives have been shaped by the two-decade long violence of militarization.

Who wants that? Can the South Asian Subcontinent, already nuclearized, survive that? India is accountable to keep this from happening. Not through the use of unmitigated force, but through listening to the demands for change made by Kashmiris.

Will to Power

This summer, India’s violence on Kashmir was threaded through with strategic calculation. The police, military, and paramilitary have, without provocation, brutalized widespread peaceable protests across Kashmir that were dissenting the suppression of civil society by Indian forces. Hostile Indian forces acted with the knowledge and sanction of the Government of India and the Government of Jammu and Kashmir. The repeated repression by state forces provoked civilians, whose political means of expression and demands have been systematically denied, to engage in stone pelting. The conditions of militarization prompted them to be in non-compliance with declared, undeclared, and unremitting curfews. In instances, civilians engaged in acts of violence, including arson.

Each instance of civilian violence was provoked by the unmitigated and first use of force on civilians and/or extrajudicial killings on the part of Indian forces. Peaceable civilian protests by women and men dissented the actions of Indian forces. Individuals, caught in the midst of the unrest, or mourning the death of a civilian, were fired upon by Indian forces, leading to other killings by Indian forces, more civilian protests, greater use of force by the police and paramilitary, use of torture in certain instances by Indian forces, more killings by Indian forces, larger, even violent, civilian protests, and further state repression.

In Summer 2010, dominant discourse focused on the use of stone pelting and on the instances of violence by youth in Kashmir as the reason for armed action on the part of the state. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh focused on the need for efficient tactics in “crowd control.” India’s elite intelligentsia, inculcated into “rational” conduct, and no longer outraged by suffering, assessed the costs and benefits of militaristic violence.

Civil society demonstrations in Kashmir are not a law and order problem, as they have been reported. Stone pelting, and incidents of arson and violence, are not causal to the violence that is routine in Kashmir today. Stone pelting does not seek to kill, and has not resulted in death. Pro-freedom leaders (termed “separatists” by the Indian state) have emphasized nonviolent civil disobedience, and have appealed to civil society to not engage in violent protests in reaction to the violence and killings by Indian forces.

Indian potentates disregard that suppression acts to catalyze the resistance movement in Kashmir. The Government of India continues to monitor the resistance movement, shifting the boundaries of acceptable practise of civil liberties. Kashmiris are allowed to protest in New Delhi, while in Kashmir sloganeering (“Go, India, Go Back,” “Indian Dogs Go Home,” “Quit Kashmir,”) is met with force. When Masarat Alam Bhat, a rising pro-freedom leader, issued an appeal to Indian soldiers in July to “Quit Kashmir,” Indian authorities banned its circulation.

Acts of violence by protesting civilians increased as military violence continued into September. On September 13, crowds in Kashmir torched a Christian missionary school and some government offices while protesting the call to desecrate the Qur’an by Florida Pastor Terry Jones. On September 13, 18 civilians were killed by the Indian forces in Kashmir (a police officer also died). Provocation is easy in a context of sustained brutality. Provoking Kashmiri dissenters to violence serves to confirm the dominant story of Muslims as “violent.” Yet again, several pro-freedom leaders condemned the attack on the Christian school and renewed their call for nonviolent dissent.

On September 13, the Government of India stated its willingness to engage with Kashmiri groups that reject violence. New Delhi did not apply the same precondition to itself. Nor did it acknowledge that pro-freedom groups have repeatedly opposed the use of violence in recent years.

The Kashmiri Muslim is caricatured as violent by India’s dominant political and media apparatus. There is a refusal to recognize the inequitable historical-political power relations at play between Muslim-prevalent Kashmir’s governance by Hindu-dominant India. The racialization of the Muslim, as “Other” and barbaric, reveals the xenophobia of the Indian state. Distinctions in method and power, between stone pelter and armed soldier, between “terrorist” and “freedom fighter,” are inconvenient.

The Indian state’s discourse is animated by the prejudice that Kashmiri inclinations to violence are subsidized by Pakistan. Such misconceptions ignore that while Kashmiris did travel to Pakistan to seek arms training, such activity was largely confined to the early days of the armed militancy, circa late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Pathologies of “violent Muslims” legitimate the discursive and physical violence of the Indian “security” forces, which is presented as necessary protection for the maintenance of the Hindu majoritarian Indian nation.

I have spent considerable time between July 2006 and July 2010 learning about Kashmir, working in Kashmir. In undertaking the work of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir, I have travelled across Kashmir’s cities and countryside, from Srinagar to Kupwara, through Shopian and Islamabad (Anantnag), with Parvez Imroz, Zahir-Ud-Din, and Khurram Parvez. I have witnessed the violence that is perpetrated on Kashmiris by India’s military, paramilitary, and police. I have walked through the graveyards that hold Kashmir’s dead, and have met with grieving families. I have sat with witnesses, young men, who described how Indian forces chased down and executed their friends for participating in civil disobedience. I have met women whose sons were disappeared. I have met with “half-widows.” I have spoken with youth, women and men, who are enraged. I have also spoken with persons who were violated by militants in the 1990s. Peoples’ experiences with the reprehensible atrocities of militancy do not imply the abdication of their desires for self-determination. The Indian state deliberately conflates militancy with the people’s mass movement for liberation.

I have met with torture survivors, non-militants and former militants, who testified to the sadism of the forces. Men who had petrol injected through the anus. Water-boarding, mutilation, being paraded naked, rape of women, children, and men, starvation, humiliation, and psychological torture. An eagle tattoo on the arm of a man was reportedly identified by an army officer as a symbol of Pakistan-held Azad Kashmir, even as the man clarified the tattoo was from his childhood. The skin containing it was burned. The officer said, the man recalled: “When you look at this, think of Azaadi.” A mother, reportedly asked to watch her daughter’s rape by army personnel, pleaded for her release. They refused. She then pleaded that she could not watch, asking to be sent out of the room or be killed. The soldier pointed a gun to her forehead, stating he would grant her wish, and shot her dead before they proceeded to rape the daughter.

Who are the forces? Disenfranchised caste and other groups, Assamese, Nagas, Sikhs, Dalits (erstwhile “untouchable” peoples), and Muslims from Kashmir, are being used to combat Kashmiris. Why did 34 soldiers commit suicide in Kashmir in 2008, and 52 fratricidal killings take place between January 21, 2004 and July 14, 2009? Why did 16 soldiers commit suicide and 2 die in fratricidal killings between January and early August in 2010?

Laws authorize soldiers to question, raid houses, detain and arrest without chargesheets, and prolong incarceration without due process. They blur distinctions between military/paramilitary, “legality”/“illegality.” Citing “national security,” Indian forces in Kashmir shoot and kill on uncorroborated suspicion, with impunity from prosecution. Yet, revoking the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, for example, will not stop the horror in Kashmir. India’s laws are not the primary contention. India’s political and military existence in Kashmir is the issue. Legal impunity is the cover for the moral impunity of Indian rule.

Is the military willing to withdraw from Kashmir? Since 2002, the Government of India has procured 5 billion US dollars in weaponry from the Israeli state. Authoritarian alliances between once subjugated peoples mark another irony of history. Five billion dollars is a colossal sum for India, where 38 percent of the world’s poor reside. Eight of the poorest states in India are more impoverished than the 26 poorest countries of the African continent. Five billion dollars, in addition to the other monies and resources invested in the militarization of Kashmir, do not evidence an intent to withdraw.

Human rights violations in Kashmir will not stop without removing the military. The military cannot be removed without surgically rupturing India’s will to power over Kashmir.

Inflexible Diplomacy

India needs to make the “Kashmir problem” disappear. India’s diplomacy is directed toward assuming a role as a world power, a world market, and a world negotiator in global politics. India is also seeking a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

What constitutes India’s dialogue with Kashmiris in conditions of extreme subjugation? The Government of India has scheduled a hurried timeframe in propelling Track II diplomacy into success, to secure a proposal for resolution that is acceptable to India and Pakistan, and, ostensibly, to Kashmiris. The terms of reference set by New Delhi exclude discussions of self-determination or heightened autonomy, boundary negotiations, the Siachen glacier and critical water-resources, and renegotiations of the Line of Control.

New Delhi and Islamabad appear to be in collusion. If Pakistan overlooks India’s annexation of Jammu and Kashmir, India would be willing to forget Pakistan’s occupation of another fragment of Kashmir. The Musharraf Formula is no longer acceptable to the Government of Pakistan. Afghanistan is the current priority, not Kashmir. Conversations on the phased withdrawal of troops by India and Pakistan at the border, local self-government, and the creation of a joint supervision mechanism in Jammu and Kashmir, involving India, Pakistan, and Kashmir, are at an impasse.

The Government in New Delhi is looking to neutralize Kashmir’s demand for self-determination or unabridged autonomy, pushing forward a diluted “autonomy,” seeking to assimilate Kashmir with finality into the Indian nation-state. New Delhi is seeking buy-in, which it hopes to push through using the collaborator coterie in Srinagar. Local self-government would be New Delhi’s compromise — a weak autonomy — with a joint supervisory apparatus constituted of India, Pakistan, and Kashmir.

New Delhi hopes that the Kashmiri leadership, including pro-freedom groups, can be restrained, for a price, and weakened through infighting. Certain segments of the pro-freedom leadership have, through history, lacked vision, honesty, and the ability to prioritize collaboration for justice and peace in Kashmir. Certain segments of the religious and political leadership have been unable to collaborate meaningfully with civil society, with observant Muslims and those irreligious, and with non-Muslims. The spiritual commitment to justice in Islamic tradition has receded as religious determinations embrace instrumental political rationality. The determination of what “freedom” is has been deferred since 1931; instead there has been a focus on immediate and small political gains.

This has plagued and rendered ineffectual segments of the complex Hurriyat alliance in the present, which is often unable to capitalize on the exuberant people’s movement on the streets and pathways of Kashmir. Segments of the pro-freedom leadership have focused on New Delhi rather than Kashmir civil society. New Delhi has fixated on enabling this dynamic, using vast resources to create a collaborator class in Srinagar that undermines the will of the Kashmiri people.

While Pakistan’s politicians have pointed to India’s injustices, they have not reciprocally addressed issues in the management of Pakistan-held Kashmir, including the deflation of movements for the unification of Kashmir. The crisis of state in Pakistan, and the role of its ruling elite in vitiating people’s democratic processes, remains a pitfall for regional security.

The logic that Muslim-prevalent Kashmir must stay with secular India or join Muslim-dominated Pakistan is configured by India’s and Pakistan’s internal ideological needs and identitarian politics. Neither is inevitable. Neither speak to the foremost aspiration of Kashmiris.

The Government of India’s “inclusive dialogue” this summer has systematically disregarded Kashmiri civil society demands, thrusting a violent peace brokered by New Delhi’s agents of change. New Delhi has invited various Kashmiri stakeholders from civil society as well. Their articulations, however, have not shifted the agenda, even as bringing people to the table is used to legitimate India’s visage of inclusivity.

What do a majority of Kashmiris want? First, to secure a good faith agreement with New Delhi and Islamabad regarding the right of Kashmiris to determine the course of their future, set a timeframe, and define the interim conditions necessary to proceed. Following which, civil society and political leaders would ensue processes to educate, debate, and consult civil society, including minority groups, in sketching the terms of reference for a resolution, prior to negotiations with India and Pakistan.

Significantly, pro-freedom leader Syeed Ali Geelani’s statement of August 31 sought to shift the terms of engagement, not requiring the precondition of self-determination or the engagement of Pakistan. Unless New Delhi responds, the protests in Kashmir will continue. Geelani’s statement, supported by the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, testifies to this. The mood in the streets testifies to this.

New Delhi’s current approach repudiates what Kashmiris want. The omissions made by New Delhi are roadblocks to constituting a minimum agenda for justice and an enduring and relevant peace process.

The Government of India’s “inclusive dialogue” this summer does not recognize Kashmir as an international dispute.

The Government of India’s “inclusive dialogue” this summer does not include: An immediate halt to, and moratorium on, extrajudicial killings by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police; An immediate halt to, and moratorium on, the use of torture, kidnapping, enforced disappearance, and gendered violence by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police; A plan for the release of political prisoners, the return of those exiled, and contending with the issue of displacement; Agreements on an immediate “soft border” policy between Kashmir, India, and Pakistan, to enable the resurgence of Kashmir’s political economy; Agreements to non-interference in the exercise of civil liberties of Kashmiris, including the right to civil disobedience, and freedom of speech, assembly, religion, movement, and travel.

New Delhi has refused to acknowledge the extent of human rights violations, and how they are integral to maintaining dominion. New Delhi has not explained why militarization in Kashmir has been disproportionately used to brutalize Kashmiris, when ostensibly the Indian forces are in Kashmir to secure the border zones.

The Government of India’s “inclusive dialogue” this summer does not include a plan for the proactive demilitarization and the immediate revocation of all authoritarian laws. Nor does it include: A plan for the transparent identification and dismantling of detention and torture centres, including in army camps; A plan for the instatement of a Truth and Justice Commission for political and psychosocial reparation, and reckoning loss; A plan for the international and transparent investigations into unknown and mass graves constitutive of crimes against humanity committed by the Indian military, paramilitary, and police. Such omissions are a travesty of any process promising “resolution.”

Islamphobia and Realpolitik

New Delhi has been the self-appointed arbitrator in determining the justifications of Kashmir’s claims to freedom. Kashmir’s claims are historically unique and bona fide. History — the United Nations Resolutions of 1948, Nehru’s promise of plebiscite (to rethink the temporary accession determined by the Hindu-descent Maharaja, Hari Singh), Article 370 of the Indian Constitution — is jettisoned by an amnesic India. Official nationalism seeks to rewrite history, affixing Kashmir to India, to overwrite memory. Within the battlefields of knowledge/power, official “truth” becomes the contagion sustaining cultures of repression and mass atrocity, creating cultures of grief.

The Indian state is apprehensive that any change in the status quo in Kashmir would foster internal crises of gigantic proportion in India. Across the nation there is considerable discontent, as dreams and difference are mortgaged to the idea of India fabricated by the elite. Adivasis (indigenous peoples), Dalits, disenfranchised caste groups, women, religious, ethnic, and gender minorities are fatigued by the nation’s deferred promises. Forty-four million Adivasis have been displaced since 1947. Central India is torn asunder, and as Maoists are designated as the latest “national threat,” national memory forgets the systematic brutalization of peoples in the tribal belt that led to a call to arms. Then there is the Northeast, Punjab, the massacre of Muslims in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, riots against Christians in Orissa, farmer suicides, the plight of peasants and Adivasis of the Narmada Valley where dams are not the “temples of India,” but its burial grounds. Kashmir cannot remain India’s excuse to avoid dealing with its own internal matters.

Indian civil society decries that Kashmir is not deserving of autonomy or separation, as it, as an assumed Islamist state, would be a threat to India’s democracy. To assume that a Muslim-majority state in Kashmir will be ruled by Islamist extremists in support of global terror reflects majoritarian India’s racism. Dominant Indian (left-oriented) civil society must rethink its characterization of Kashmiri civil society as prevalently “Jamaati.” Jamaat is Arabic for assembly. “Jamaati” is used by Indian civil society to imply Islamist or fundamentalist. The reference can often be translated as Muslim = Jamaati, and Muslim-observant = fundamentalist.

Indians of Hindu descent largely overlook that India’s democracy is infused with Hindu cultural dominance. Indian civil society assumes that Islam and democracy are incompatible, supported by the inflamed Islamphobia in the polities of the West. Importantly, India forgets that in its own history with the British, freedom fighters had noted that the oppressor cannot adjudge when a stateless people are “deserving” of freedom.

Freedom is fundamentally an experiment with risk that Kashmiris must be willing to take. The global community must support them in making such risk ethical. Jammu and Kashmir is a Muslim majority space. The population of India-held Kashmir was recorded at approximately 6,900,000 in 2008, of which Muslims are approximately 95 percent. Kashmir’s future as a democratic, inclusive, and pro-secular space is linked to what happens within India and Pakistan.

Kashmiris that wish to be separate from India and Pakistan must assess the difficult alliances yet to be built between Kashmir, Jammu, and Ladakh, and between Muslims and Hindu Pandits, Dogra Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, indigenous groups, and others. Then, there is the question of what lies ahead between Indian-held Kashmir and Pakistan-held Kashmir. Minority groups, such as Kashmiri Pandits, must refuse the Indian state’s hyper-nationalist strategy in using the Pandit community to create opposition between Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir, as part of a strategy to religionize the issue and govern through communalization.

Where is the international community on the issue of Kashmir? In present history, Palestine, Ireland, Tibet, and Kashmir share correspondence. In Tibet, 1.2 million died (1949-1979), and 320,000 were made refugees. In Ireland, 3,710 have died (1969- 2010). For Israel, the occupation of Palestine has resulted in 10,148 dead (1987-2010), with 4.7 million refugees registered with the United Nations (1987-2008). In Kashmir, 70,000 are dead, over 8,000 have been disappeared, and 250,000 have been displaced (1989-2010).

During British Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent visit to India, he was asked to refrain from bringing up the “K” word. United States President Barak Obama’s proposed visit to New Delhi in November is already laden with prohibitions. India’s rule in Kashmir and its larger human rights record are among them. As well, right-wing Hindu advocacy groups have been successful in securing the silence of many on Capitol Hill on the issue of Kashmir. The Kashmiri diaspora has been partly effective in bringing visibility to the issue, even as the community remains ideologically and politically fragmented. International advocates have propagated an “economic” approach to “normalcy.” This avoids the fact that militarization impacts every facet of life, making economic development outside of political change impossible.

The United States and United Kingdom have debated the reasons for their involvement in Kashmir. In 2010, as of September 23, 351 soldiers from the United States have died in Afghanistan, while the United Kingdom sustained 92 fatalities. Of paramount concern for both is bringing their forces home without compromising the principles of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) operations in the region. To accomplish this would require that Pakistan move sizeable forces from the Indo-Kashmir-Pak border to the Af-Pak frontier. This cannot be done without cessation in Indo-Pak hostilities, which cannot be achieved without the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. However, Kashmir’s resolution cannot mean a sanction to Pakistan’s encroachment on Afghanistan, which, given the political situation in the region, remains a highly likely possibility. For the United States and India, the containment of China is another issue, also linked to Kashmir.

Kashmiris in Kashmir are caught amidst world events and regional machinations, and the unresolved histories of the Subcontinent. The Indian state’s military governance penetrates every facet of life. The sounds of war haunt mohallas. The hyper-presence of militarization forms a graphic shroud over Kashmir: Detention and interrogation centres, army cantonments, abandoned buildings, bullet holes, bunkers and watchtowers, detour signs, deserted public squares, armed personnel, counter-insurgents, and vehicular and electronic espionage. Armed control regulates and governs bodies. It has been reported that, since 1990, Kashmir’s economy has incurred a reported loss of more than 1,880,000 million Indian Rupees (40.4 billion US Dollars). The immensity of psychosocial losses is impossible to calculate. The conditions of everyday life are in peril. They elicit suffocating anger and despair, telling a story of the web of violence in which civil society in Kashmir is interned.

For India, constituting a coherent national collective has required multiple wars on difference. National governance determines territory and belonging, disenfranchising subaltern claims. Local struggles for self-determination are brutalized to reproduce obedient national collectives. Systemic acts of oppression chart a history, as relations of power are choreographed by nation-states in the suppression of others. Massacre, gendercide, genocide, occupation, function within a continuum of tactics in negation/annihilation.

India’s relation to Kashmir is not about Kashmir. Kashmir’s aversion to being subsumed by the Indian state is not reducible to history. If violence breaks lives, Kashmir is quite broken. If oppression produces resistance, Kashmir is profusely resilient. From Michel Foucault to Achille Mbembe, and so much in-between, we are reminded of the myriad techniques in governance that seek to subjugate, while naming subjugation as subject formation, as protection, “security,” law and order, and progress.

Realpolitik triumphs against a backdrop of persistent refusal. Through summer heat and winter snow, across interminable stretches of concertina wire, broken windowpanes, walls, barricades, and checkpoints, the dust settles to rise again. The agony of loss. The desecration of life. Kashmir’s spiritual fatalities are staggering. The dead are not forgotten. Remembrance and mourning are habitual practises of dissent. “We are not free. But we know freedom,” KP tells me. “The movement is our freedom. Our dreams are our freedom. The Indian state cannot take that away. Our resistance will live.”

(Dr. Angana Chatterji is Professor, Department of Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies. She is Co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir.)

Kashmir: cri de coeur

2010-08-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

http://www.opendemocracy.net/seema-kazi/kashmir-cri-de-coeur
By Seema Kazi (16 July 2010)
8 January: Inayat Khan (16 years) shot dead by CRPF, Srinagar.
22 January: Manzoor Ahmed Sofi (23 years), shot dead by the CRPF, Parahaspora (Pattan).
31 January: Wamiq Farooq (13 years) shot dead by JK police, Srinagar.
31 January: Zahid Farooq (16 years) shot dead by Border Security Force, Srinagar.
13 April: Zubair Ahmad Bhat (17 years) drowned to death by CRPF, Sopore.
11 June: Tufail Ahmad Mattoo (17 years) attacked and killed by JK police, Srinagar.
19 June: Rafique Ahmad Bangroo (24 years) beaten to death by CRPF, Srinagar.
20 June: Javed Ahmed Malla (22 years) shot dead by CRPF, Srinagar.
27 June: Shakeel Ahmad Ganai (17 years) shot dead by CRPF, Sopore.
27 June: Firdous Ahmad Kakroo (16 years) shot dead by CRPF, Sopore.
27 June: Bilal Ahmed Wani (21 years) shot dead by CRPF, Sopore.
28 June: Tauqir Ahmed Rather (9 years) killed by CRPF, Sopore.
28 June: Tajamul Bashir (17 years) shot dead by CRPF, Sopore.
29 June: Ishtiaq Ahmed Khanday (15 years) shot dead by police, Anantnag.
29 June: Imtiaz Ahmed Itoo (17 years) shot dead by police, Anantnag.
29 June: Shujat ul Islam (16 years) shot dead by police, Anantnag.

India’s war in Kashmir has, of late, acquired a particularly deadly edge. During the past six months, a disproportionately large number of teenagers and young men have been shot dead on the streets by the police or CRPF. It is far from clear as to whether all those who died were actually throwing stones. Be that as it may, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his administration have deemed stone-throwing a criminal offence punishable with death or a lifetime in prison. Having ‘legalised’ the repression of dissent, Abdullah, Home Minister Chidambaram, and Home Secretary GK Pillai hold the separatists and ‘anti-national’ forces responsible for the present crisis in Kashmir.

There cannot be a greater folly than to attribute the deep and overflowing reservoir of collective anger and outrage against a twenty-year-old occupation to the Machiavellian powers of a fragmented and fairly discredited separatist conglomerate. In no state, least of all in one that claims to be democratic, can the act of stone-throwing or public protest legitimise a shoot-to-kill policy. As democratic channels for dissent in Kashmir remain blocked, and the institutions meant for the protection of civilians (military and paramilitary) or the enforcement of the rule of law (police) deprive citizens of the right to life, stones, slogans and mass protest are all what the Kashmiris have to oppose and resist a shameful and scandalous state of affairs.

To represent Kashmiri public outrage as a ‘separatist’, ‘anti-national’ conspiracy is an exercise in self-delusion and deceit; it also betrays a profound disrespect for Kashmiri public opinion. Separatist leaders may or may not support stone-pelting but to suggest that all the boys and young men shot dead were part of a grand separatist ploy is, at best, a patently tendentious claim. However unpleasant stone-throwing may be for soldiers or the keepers of law and order, it is, quite simply Kashmiri resistance against a relentless counter-offensive characterised by violence, dispossession and death.

Ever since the eruption of mass rebellion in Kashmir in 1989-90, New Delhi has lacked the moral courage to publicly acknowledge, much less redress Kashmiri grievance. The domestic political consensus on Kashmir has consequently centred on the denial of local Kashmiri grievance and a concerted focus on Kashmir’s external (Pakistan) dimension commonly referred to as ‘cross-border terrorism’. Global, especially Western fears regarding Islamist terror, Pakistan’s own dubious and destructive role in Kashmir, together with the tragedy of 26/11 allowed India to escape local democratic accountability within Kashmir. It has been relatively easy to claim that if at all there is a Kashmir problem, Pakistan and its terror machine are to blame. India’s self-created domestic crisis in Kashmir (that Pakistan subsequently exploited) has been consistently understated or overlooked.

As a result of this political and intellectual dishonesty, the opinion and subjective experience of Kashmiri Muslims is ignored. India could mobilise over 500,000 soldiers to safeguard Kashmir’s territorial frontiers yet betray a cruel and callous disregard for the security, rights or dignity of the people within it. For two long decades, the use of coercive, frequently lethal force, resort to arbitrary detention, custodial death, fake encounters, rape and sexual abuse, extrajudicial killing, torture, and bouts of undeclared curfew has been the standard state response to accumulating Kashmiri grievance. The 2008 assembly elections are India’s answer to awkward questions regarding democracy in Kashmir.

But like any other oppressed people in the world, the Kashmiri Muslims have not been cowed down by force; nor have they ceased protesting India’s democratic deficit in Kashmir. Indeed, it is precisely during these moments that India’s feeble and tenuous claims to democracy and normalcy in Kashmir are forcefully exposed. The stones cast by a young, radicalised generation of Kashmiri boys today symbolise the unequal battle between truth and power in Kashmir. The truth is that the youth who throw stones and the masses of people who march with them raising ‘anti-national’ slogans wish to be rid of Indian hegemony in their contested homeland. They want the security forces withdrawn; those languishing in jails released; the extraordinary powers vested in the military curbed; public accountability for the disappeared; prosecution for those responsible for crimes against citizens; a chance to determine their own political future; a life of freedom and dignity. In short, the truth is that the Kashmiri Muslims vehemently reject their existing relationship with the Indian state.

What is India – the de-facto ‘power’ in Kashmir – doing about this truth? Precious little. Bereft of imagination or morality, the Indian state focuses on the symptom of the malaise: by maligning and thereby de-legitimising Kashmiri public opinion as ‘anti-national, it seeks to legitimise its own authoritarian counter-offensive (curfew, arbitrary detention, a ban on sms and mobile services, restrictions on journalists and the media, restrictions on public mobility, a ban on public gatherings, etc.) that passes for governance and democracy in Kashmir. The possession of superior force and enforced curfew, it is hoped, shall eventually quieten things down. That shall indeed happen, as has happened for the past twenty years: curfew restrictions shall be relaxed, schools shall re-open, people shall go to work, tourists shall throng Dal Lake, and there will be traffic on the roads.

Yet, as ‘power’ well knows, the latent, festering truth of injustice and anger underpinning Kashmir’s deceptive veneer of ‘normality’ can erupt any time with terrifying intensity - with blood on the streets and swarms of stone-throwing and slogan-shouting crowds. As tragic and grievous as the loss of Kashmir’s young men is India’s refusal to concede the truth. Cornered and defensive, lacking the courage and conscience expected of a mature and self-confident democracy, India has no option other than digging in and playing for time. Sadly, neither time nor history is on India’s side. No people have ever surrendered to the untruth of the abuse of power. No state has ever erased a people’s history, memory or quest for justice.

Pushing the Kashmiri to the wall, again

2010-08-08T23:21:00.000-07:00

http://kafila.org/2010/07/29/pushing-the-kashmiri-to-the-wall-again/

By Shivam Vij

[An edited, shorter version of this article by me appeared last week in The Friday Times,Lahore.]

In the first week of June, I sat at a shopfront with a group of shopkeepers of Kalarus, a small town in Kupwara district in north Kashmir. In 1999, they collected money and bought land for a martyrs’ graveyard, one of many such in Kashmir. Whenever the Indian army killed militants trying to infiltrate from Pakistan to the Indian side of the Line of Control, they would hand over the bodies to the Kupwara police, who would give it to these people to bury after the autopsy.

“Look up at the mountain peak,” said one of them, “It is snow clad all twelve months. It is the LoC, 70 kms from here. Do you think anyone would cross that wearing the traditional Kashmiri Khan dress?” And yet, most of the hundred odd bodies in the graveyard had come wearing clothes unfit for snow. And, most of them had so many bullet marks on the face that they were unidentifiable.

This May, however, three bodies came whose faces were not mutilated, only one of them had a bullet mark on the face. They got mug-shots taken and gave them to Kashmiri Uzma, an Urdu daily. Some distance away in Handwara their families saw the photos and went to the police station. These were their missing sons; they had been taken to the LoC to work as porters for the army. This case is by no means an aberration, just that it came to light so conclusively it could not be denied by the authorities.

The ‘encounter’ had taken place at Machhil on the LoC on April 29, bodies exhumed after protests on May 30. This is only one of many encounters at Machhil in 2010, and many more have taken place elsewhere. India had maintained over the past few years that infiltration and militancy were down to record levels as Pakistan had turned off its support to the militant groups. What has changed in 2010? India and Pakistan are talking peace despite 26/11 being just a year old, and there is no change in the prevailing internal situation in Pakistan. This can’t surely be the time when Pakistan will re-open its support for the Kashmir insurgents?

What has changed is that the decline of militancy gave people the space to breath and reflect, and they refused to accept the Indian version that after the defeat of militancy all was over, and that we were now in a post-conflict situation. For the third consecutive summer now, therefore, the people of Indian-administered Kashmir have been taking to the streets, demanding azadi and pelting stones on soldiers and policemen they see as “occupying forces”. This is taking place despite that fact that Pakistan’s hold on even the separatists is at its lowest ebb and India has managed to win over and/or discredit various factions of the Hurriyat Conference. In such a scenario, there has been increasing pressure on Delhi to, at the very least, demilitarise in response to the decline in militancy.

The Indian Army is not only not in favour of repealing or amending the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that gives it impunity in all its actions in Kashmir and the north-eastern states, but has also on record stated its objections to be called back to the barracks. This supports widespread allegations in Kashmir that Indian forces have vested interests in Kashmir; earning monetary rewards and medals for killing innocent people and passing them off as militants is only one of them.

As Kashmir was protesting the Machhil fake encounter, a young boy, Tufail Ahmed Matoo, 17, was killed in Srinagar by the local police. They fired at him from such a close range that he died with a half-inch hole in his skull. He was returning from tuition, and even though the local police were chasing stone-pelters, the precision with which he was killed cannot be a mistake.

Why was Tufail Ahmed Mattoo killed? It may just be police frustration, but conspiracy theorists in Kashmir say it could be a way of diverting attention from Machhil.

Far from offering regret and ordering enquiries into Mattoo’s killing, the state government pretended as though all was fine. Stone-pelters had to be dealt with and such mistakes would take place. That’s when a vicious cycle of protest-death-protest started. In 18 days 11 civilians died, mostly minor boys, one of them 9 years old.

Kashmir’s summer of discontent has to be seen in the context of the post-militancy situation. As India was claiming victory in Kashmir, the people rose in revolt in 2008. 62 innocent protestors were killed. There were protests all summer in 2009 against a double rape and murder case in Shopian, committed allegedly by either the local police or Indian forces. 32 (check) protestors were killed. In Shopian I met one of the members of the local committee asking for justice. They said they did not want to link this to azadi, they wanted justice under Indian laws. But when justice was denied, everybody said the only solution was azadi.

By this summer India has come down very hard on stone-pelters, arresting and killing countless. Protests have been responded to with bullets, curfew, banning media, even arresting those active on the internet. Delhi has made it clear it is not serious about engaging the separatist leadership, even though it has been pretending to be pen to dialogue since 2003. As a result, angry youth are not even in the control of the Hurriyat leaders.

It is clear that Delhi is not going to make any concessions to the people of Kashmir. The troops that Kashmiris see as a problem are for Delhi the solution. The Kashmiri common man feels frustrated to hear about Indo-Pak talks as though the Kashmiri people don’t matter. Not all of the infiltration encounters this summer have been fake, and there are rumours of more Kashmiris trying to cross the LoC into Pakistan. Delhi is pushing people to pick up the gun again, and perhaps it prefers that to non-violent protests for azadi that attract international attention.

Delhi, it seems, prefers to deal with an insurgency. Crushing non-violent protests makes India seem bad even before its own people, and that’s why the disinformation campaign through the Delhi media.

Another round of militancy in Kashmir, however, would mean that India will be able to portray itself as a victim of terrorism, especially if Pakistan re-opens the militant tap to Kashmir after Obama exits the Afghan theatre. It will be easier for India to crush another armed struggle as it is much better prepared to do so now that it was in 1989. Sadly, all signals are that Kashmir is headed for another bloody decade.

Children of the tehreek

2010-08-08T23:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.himalmag.com/Children-of-the-tehreek_nw4646.html?sms_ss=facebook

By Sanjay Kak

When columns of the Indian Army drove through Srinagar on 7 July, rifles pointed out at the city, it was meant as a show of force; to tell its ‘mutinous’ population – and those watching elsewhere – just who was really in charge. Disconcertingly for the Indian government, it has had the opposite effect. Alarm bells have been sounding off: the situation in Kashmir is again explosive; the lid looks ready to blow off.

Although the army has for years virtually controlled rural Kashmir, images of grim-faced soldiers on a ‘flag-march’ in Srinagar carried a different symbolism. For Srinagar has been the exception – the showpiece of ‘normalcy’, of a possible return to the bosom of India’s accommodating heart. Typically, the well-publicised entry of the soldiers was followed by a flurry of obtuse clarifications: the army was not taking over Srinagar; this was not a flag-march, only a ‘movement of a convoy’; yes, it was a flag-march, but only in the city’s ‘periphery’. The contradictions seemed to stem from a reluctance to deal with the elephant in the room: after more than 15 years, the army had once again been called out to stem civil unrest in Srinagar.

When the Indian Army was deployed in Kashmir during the 1990s, the rebellion seemed to be fast spinning out of India’s control. Twenty years later, what has changed? There is now a massive investment in a ‘security grid’, built with more than 500,000 security personnel and shored up by a formidable intelligence network, said to involve some 100,000 people. The armed militancy, too, has officially been contained. Meanwhile, the exercise of ‘free and fair’ elections has been carried out to persuade the world that democracy has indeed returned to Kashmir. (Elections certainly delivered the young and telegenic Omar Abdullah as Chief Minister; but about democracy, Kashmiris will be less sanguine. They will recognise it the day the military columns and camps are gone from the valley.)

Yet July was haunted by echoes of the early years of the tehreek, the movement for self-determination. As a brutally imposed lockdown curfew entered its fourth day, there was no safe passage past the paramilitary checkpoints – not for ambulances, not for journalists. For those four days, Srinagar’s newspapers were not published; local cable channels were restricted to just 10 minutes a day, and still had to make time for official views. SMS services remained blocked the entire month; in some troubled towns, cell-phone services were completely discontinued. But Srinagar still reverberated with slogans every night, amplified from neighbourhood mosques: ‘Hum kya chahte? Azadi!’ (What do we want? Freedom!) and ‘Go back, India! Go back!’

War of perception
The real barometer of the panic in the Indian establishment, though, was not the army’s flag march. It was the frantic speed (and dismal quality) of the attempts to obscure the crisis. In place of politics, it was once again left to disinformation to staunch the haemorrhage. At first, the Home Ministry began with the improbable charge that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba was organising and funding stone-throwing on the streets of Srinagar. This was a rather tame accusation for a militant group whose real signature is the ferocity of its attacks, as displayed clearly in the Mumbai strikes of November 2008. The only people who appeared to swallow this line were the loyal television anchors on the ‘national’ media; but with no real evidence to go on, even they let the mess quietly slide off the table.

Evidence arrived soon enough, when the Home Ministry made available a taped phone conversation between two men described as ‘hardliner’ separatists. As the audio crackled and hissed, television channels provided translations: ‘There must be some more deaths’; ‘10-15 people must be martyred’; ‘You are getting money but not doing enough’. Despite the comic-book directness, it sounded like serious business. In the context of such ‘evidence’, mainstream television channels began parachuting their star power into Srinagar, and the empty, silent city became the backdrop against which they could stage their own spectacle.

The CNN-IBN correspondent, happily embedded inside an army truck as it made its way through Srinagar, was extolling the impact of the flag march (even as an official was busy denying that there had been any such thing). NDTV provided its usual high-wire balancing act, with Barkha Dutt dredging up the ‘pain on both sides’. The grief of the mourning father of 17-year-old Tufail Mattoo, killed when his skull was taken apart by a teargas shell, was weighed against a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) commandant ruing the damage to his truck’s bulletproof windscreen. But such expedient journalism paled before far more damaging hubris. While these ‘national’ reporters had the run of curfew-bound Srinagar, they omitted to mention that their Srinagar-based colleagues – local, national and even international journalists – had been locked in their homes and offices for three days.

While the spin generated by New Delhi probably has an impact on the middle-class viewer of the mainstream Indian media, it has little effect on people in Kashmir. On the ground, they continue to make sense of their own reality. The inability, or refusal, to comprehend this has become endemic to all arms of the Indian state. An exaggerated, even fluid, notion of reality takes its place, in which perception is everything. This was underlined forcefully in June when the chiefs of the army, navy and air force announced the new ‘Doctrine on Military Psychological Operations’, a policy document that aims to create a ‘conducive environment’ for the armed forces operating in ‘sub-conventional’ operations such as Kashmir and the Northeast. The doctrine reportedly provides guidelines for ‘activities related to perception management’. Manipulating the output of a few dozen newspapers and television channels is certainly hard work, but nothing compared with the much harder task of understanding – perhaps even accommodating – the aspirations of Kashmiris.

Out of touch
The intensity of the crisis did help in one way, though: it forced some candour out of the familiar faces of Kashmiri politics. (These are the visible ones, called up in times of crisis to represent Kashmir on television. The invisible ones were, as usual, already in detention.) Mehbooba Mufti of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) admitted on television that mainstream (or pro-India) political parties have lost all credibility, and now have no role to play in stemming the anger in the streets. When asked why politicians were not taking out ‘peace marches’, former separatist and now ‘mainstream’ leader Sajjad Lone bluntly said that all of them ran the risk of being lynched by the people. Meanwhile, all the oxygen was taken up by discussion of the survival of Omar Abdullah’s government, something that mattered little to protestors.

Amidst the baying chorus of TV panellists outraged by the gall of ‘stone-pelters’, many have forgotten that in 1991 it was precisely such public demonstrations – and civilian casualties at the hands of the CRPF – that finally triggered a full-fledged armed militancy. In recent weeks, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s language has shown how out of touch he is, joining the talk of ‘miscreants’ with his comments about ‘frayed tempers’ and waiting for ‘tempers to cool down’. Across the board, this disconnect with the structures of electoral politics helped to put the elections of two years ago in some perspective.

In 2007, I finished a documentary film on Kashmir, which had tried to pull back from the quagmire of everyday events to understand the inchoate ‘sentiment’ for azadi. Quite by coincidence, the film arrived at the very moment that the constructed ‘normalcy’ of Kashmir was about ready to be shown off: tourists were flowing in, more than 400,000 people had taken part in the pilgrimage to the Amarnath shrine, and elections were being discussed. Screenings of the documentary in India were often met with raised eyebrows, with people incredulous that such sentiments could survive the weight of the cast-iron security grid – and, of course, the passage of 20 years. Yet things can change in a day, and so they did.

In early summer 2008, isolated protests broke out over the acquisition of land for the Amarnath Shrine Board. This eventually turned into the most formidable upsurge of the past decade, with peaceful demonstrations of up to 20,000 people at a time. The cascading protests carried on for several months before being curbed, but not before more than 60 people lost their lives to the bullets of the security forces. In the summer of 2009, Shopian district was shaken by the rape and murder of two young women; once again, mostly peaceful protests paralysed the valley, and Shopian town was shut down for an unprecedented 47 days. The cycle of street violence in 2010 too began several months ago, with the uncovering of the Machil killings, where soldiers of the Indian Army (including a colonel and a major) were charged with the murder of three civilians, presenting them as militants for the reward money (see accompanying story by Dilnaz Boga). Protests led to the killing of protesters, which has led to more protests, and more killings.

New front
What do Kashmiris want? Most of all, even before azadi, they want justice. As they watched the Indian Army columns moving through Srinagar last month, Kashmiris would have been reminded that the protests this summer started with the Army in the killing fields of Machil. But like the Shopian incident, Machil too has begun to be edged off the burner, and forgotten, as have the hundreds of such killings that civil-society groups have painstakingly tried to resurrect. So, just as elections cannot be confused with democracy in Kashmir, an elected government is no substitute for a working justice system. Meanwhile, the prolonged use of the Public Safety Act, and the dangerous license of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, is slowly wearing thin for the young. This July, as the numbing news of young Kashmiris being shot in street protests started pouring in, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, told the press that ‘the baton of the freedom struggle has now been passed on to the next generation’. He could have added that, over twenty years, the baton might also have moved from the armed militancy and the ‘separatists’, straight onto the street.

As the taped phone conversation provided by the Home Ministry was being celebrated on TV, in only a few hours a more accurate translation of what was actually an innocuous conversation was burning through the Internet. This phone ‘evidence’ evaporated under the heat of scrutiny, its effects felt even in Delhi newsrooms. Such a speedy deconstruction of a suspect claim is only the latest in the deeply political use of the Internet by young Kashmiris. These are children of the tehreek, born and brought up in the turmoil of the last two decades. They have not, and probably will not, become armed mujahideen. But thousands are out on the streets, throwing stones, occasionally drawing blood, often taking hits, but in any case successfully paralysing the increasingly bewildered security forces. What armed militant could achieve more?

So will the Internet be the next threat for the Home Ministry? Will they accuse the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen of supporting the Facebook chatter about the ‘intifada’ in Kashmir? And after that? Already, young Kashmiris on social-networking sites are reporting phone calls from belligerent police officers, threatening them with serious charges including ‘waging war against the state’. Reports said that Qazi Rashid, the young mirwaiz of south Kashmir, has been accused of ‘instigating violence and justifying stone-pelting’ – through Facebook.

-- Sanjay Kak is a documentary filmmaker based in Delhi. His latest documentary, Jashn-e-Azadi (2007), is about Kashmir.

Kashmir Comes to Jantar Mantar

2010-08-08T23:14:00.000-07:00

http://kafila.org/2010/08/08/kashmir-comes-to-jantar-mantar/

By Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Last evening I went to Jantar Mantar after many years. It is a road I pass often, looking at the sad and melancholic little protests that line the kerb, whispering to an indifferent Capital the million mutinies of our banana plantation republic.

Last evening was different. There were perhaps four to five hundred people, many, but not all Kashmiri, men and women, who had gathered to protest against the wanton destruction of life in the Kashmir valley by the security apparatus of the Indian state in the last few weeks and months. 45 civilian deaths in 8 weeks signals a state losing its head. Especially when the deaths occur when the police and paramilitaries fire live bullets on unarmed or stone pelting mobs. When stones, or unarmed bodies are met with ammunition, you know that the state has no respect whatsoever for bare life. That this should happen in a state that calls itself a democracy should make all of us who are its citizens reflect on how hollow ‘democracy’ feels to the mother or friend of a young boy or girl who is felled by a ‘democratic’ bullet.

Protests in Delhi often have a routine, scripted quality. But this one was different. Professor S.A.R Geelani was level headed and dignified, as he spoke to the assembled, visibly upset young men and women, introduced each speaker in turn and appealed to people to stay calm, and not get provoked.

I don’t think that there has been a public gathering of young people from Kashmir in such numbers in Delhi, and the occasion had a cathartic, almost therapeutic character, as if the acknowledgment of each others presence could also make it possible for many amongst those gathered to say what needed to be said, loud and clear, in public, what they had only kept as a secret in their hearts.

As a citizen of the Indian republic, I can only hang my head in shame at the venality of the state, and at how it openly sanctions the murder of Kashmiri men, women and children on the streets of the valley. Even a leading member of the Israeli military establishment (not known for their kindness towards occupied Palestinians) has recently admonished India’s hard-line militarist mandarins in Kashmir on the appalling conditions that they administer in Kashmir.

I stood in silence at the meeting. Listened to the slogans, the chanting, the statements, some made by friends like Sanjay Kak, others by people I do not know personally, but whose work and politics I have an interest in, even if I do not agree with, such as the poet and ex-political prisoner Varavara Rao. I met some old friends, talked quietly to strangers, and felt a momentary twinge of pride in Delhi, at least about the fact that so many of us were reclaiming a space on Jantar Mantar, for once to break the enormously deafening silence about Kashmir in a public and peaceful manner.

There were different kinds of slogans that were heard. Most resonant of all was the slogan that has now become the signature of all protests in Kashmir, ‘Hum Kya Chahtey – Azaadi’ (‘What do we want – Freedom’) which speaks to the wide spectrum of sometimes disparate political currents and opinions which is together only because of one common objective – rightful anger at the continued occupation of Kashmir by the armed might of the Indian state. Some slogans stressed the unity of all Kashmiris – be they Pandit, Muslim or Sikh. Occasionally, the air did reverberate with slogans that some might interpret as having a more secterian tinge – the ‘Nara e Taqbeer – Allah o Akbar’. But the vast majority of slogans had simply one motif – ‘Azaadi’. Sometimes spoken with joy, sometimes with anger, sometimes as a lament, sometimes with hope – with the vowels elongated to mean a myriad complexities that are rendered unspoken by the simplifying violence of the occupation.

Many speakers, including Professor Geelani, and men and women people from the crowd, repeatedly made appeals not to ‘communalize’ the issue, and the same people who said, ‘Allah o Akbar’ also immediately switched to slogans emphasizing Kashmir’s secular fabric, and called for Pandit-Muslim-Sikh unity in Kashmir.

I did not feel perturbed by the airing of the ‘Allah o Akbar’ slogan, as I am not when I hear people say ‘Vande Mataram’ or indeed, ‘Jai Shree Ram’. I am not a believer, and the fervent expression of belief on the part of those who do believe, neither enthuses, nor disturbs me. In each case, I am more interested in what lies behind the passion. And I believed that what lay behind the passion last evening, despite the anxiety on some of the faces in the crowd, was an appeal to the divine as the final arbiter of justice and peace in a deeply violent and unjust world. I can understand what motivates people to make that claim, even if I cannot make it myself, especially in a situation, where all appeals to mundane, worldly power, seem to have exhausted themselves. A situation where stones are met with bullets and grenades can make even the most sceptical of us lose faith in the grace of the mortals who rule, ultimately, only with the force of arms.

Perhaps, not airing such slogans would have been tactically more intelligent. But I did not get the sense that those who had gathered in Jantar Mantar last evening had come to score intelligent and sophisticated political points. They had come to express their anger and their sadness, they had come to cease, for a brief moment, to be the anonymous, anxious Kashmiri in Delhi who is always worried about being labelled a ‘terrorist’ by a prejudiced neighbour, a callous policeman or a random stranger. They had come to be themselves, to mourn, and to tell the world of their mourning. I can only feel grateful that they could gather the courage to do this. There is an urgency, as Sanjay Kak reminded the gathering for forging an intelligent politics in response to what is going on in Kashmir, and that politics must not rest only on the engine of pain and anger. I totally agree with this, at the same time, I also know, that without an occasion like what we witnessed yesterday, when Kashmiris can openly express their desire for liberation and their anguish in the heart of India, in the vocabulary and language that has sustained their struggles over the past decades, it will not happen. I remain hopeful that it will.

Some speakers, including Varavara Rao, Mohan Jha (from Delhi University, I hope I got his name right), Sanjay Kak, and a sikh gentleman from Amritsar whose name escapes me, spoke of the fact that there was a great deal of solidarity in India for the just demands of the Kashmiri people. The occasion did not, at any instance, degenerate into a vulgar clash of competing nationalisms.

Outside the perimter of this protest, stood another – a small group of people associated with organizations that claim to represent the Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora, who were ‘protesting’ against the protest. I recognized a face in this crowd, I follow his self-righteous online outpourings quite regularly. Some of the speakers, including Mr. Geelani, alluded to them, saying that they shared in their pain, and even invited them to come and address the gathering. They however, remained aloof. Holding their placards, with their claim to monopoly of the pain and anguish of Kashmir. Ther stirred to life, when Sanjay Kak, spoke, heckling him, in a now familiar and churlish manner. I felt sad to see them, because they could make claim to suffering only as a means to divide people, not bring people together in solidarity.

Just before I left, a young woman who had recently come to Delhi to study, spoke eloquently about what it means to have lost a childhood in Kashmir, to have seen brothers and friends shot. I do not know who she is, and I could not catch her name, perhaps it was ‘Arshi’, but I wished I could apologize to her personally, because I know that her childhood has been robbed by people speaking in the name of the state that claims my fealty.

The occupation of Kashmir by India and Pakistan is an immoral and evil fact of our times. The sooner it ends, the better will it be for all of us in South Asia. True ‘Azaadi’ in Kashmir, for all its inhabitants, and for all those who have been displaced by more than twenty years of violence, can only help us all, in Delhi, and elsewhere, to breathe more freely.

The last option : A stone in her hand

2010-08-08T23:07:00.000-07:00

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/The-last-option-A-stone-in-her-hand/articleshow/6272689.cms
By Sanjay Kak

On a summer morning this July in Srinagar, teargas from the troubled streets of Batmaloo began to roll into the first-floor home of Fancy Jan. The 24-year-old went to draw the curtains to screen the room from the acrid smoke, her mother told a reporter later, then turned away from the window, and said: "Mummy, maey aaw heartas fire (my heart's taken fire, mummy)". Then she dropped dead, a bullet in her chest, the casual target of an anonymous soldier's rifle. Fancy Jan was not a 'stone-pelter'. She was a bystander, like many of the 50 people killed in last two months. She is not the first woman to be shot by the security forces in 20 years of the troubles. But her random death, almost incomprehensible in the presumed safety of her family's modest home, coincides with a vigorous unsettling of the way women have been represented in this conflict.

Until the other day, Kashmiri women were little more than a convenient set of clichés, shown as perpetual bystanders in houses that overlook the streets of protest. When seen outside of that protected zone, they were cast as victims, wailing mourners, keening at the endless funeral processions. For an occasional frisson there is the daunting image of the severely veiled Asiya Andarabi, chief of the Dukhtaran-e-millat, a women's group whose high media visibility seems inversely proportional to the modest numbers who adhere to their militant Islamic sisterhood. In black from head to toe, Andarabi always makes for good television, her arms and hands concealed in immaculate gloves, only her eyes showing through a slit. For the Indian media her persona insinuates the dark penumbra of Kashmiri protest, signalling the threat of 'hardline' Islam, a ready metaphor for 'what-awaits-Kashmir-if...'

But now an unfamiliar new photograph of the Kashmiri woman has begun to take its place on newspaper front pages. She's dressed in ordinary salwar-kameez, pastel pink, baby blue, purple and yellow. Her head is casually covered with a dupatta and she seems unconcerned about being recognized. She is often middle aged, and could even be middle-class. And she is carrying a stone. A weapon directed at the security forces.Last week, in a vastly under-reported story, a massive crowd stopped two Indian Air Force vehicles on the highway near Srinagar. At the forefront were hundreds of women. The airmen and their families were asked to dismount, and move to the safety of a nearby building. Then the buses were torched. This is not a rare incident: women are everywhere in these troubled times in Kashmir, and not in the places traditionally assigned to them. They are collecting stones and throwing them, and assisting the young men in the front ranks of the protestors to disguise themselves, even helping them escape when the situation gets tough.

The government's narrative of 'miscreants', of anomie and drug-fuelled teenagers working as Rs 200 mercenaries for the Lashkar-e-Toiba, has, meanwhile, started to appear faintly ridiculous. A more reasonable explanation is being proffered to us now: it's anger, we are told, the people of Kashmir are angry at the recent killings, and that's why the women are being drawn in. That is true, but only partially. For this is no ordinary anger, but an old, bottled-up rage, gathered over so many years that it has settled, and turned rock hard. That accumulated fury is the stone in her hand. To not understand this, to fail to reach its source — or fathom its depth — is to be doomed to not understand the character of Kashmir's troubles.

Two events will provide useful bookends for this exercise. In February 1991, there was an assault on Kunan Poshpura village in north Kashmir, where a unit of the Indian Army were accused of raping somewhere between 23 and a hundred women. And then, a troubled 18 years later, the June 2009 rape and murder of two young women in Shopian, south Kashmir. In the case of Kunan Poshpura, bypassing a judicial enquiry, the government called in the Press Council of India to whitewash the incident, allowing its inadequate and ill equipped two-member team to summarily conclude that the charges against the army were "a massive hoax orchestrated by militant groups and their sympathizers and mentors in Kashmir and abroad". The travesty of the investigations into last year's Shopian incident involved innumerable bungled procedures, and threw up many glaring contradictions, till the government of India roped in the CBI to put a lid on it. They promptly concluded that it was a case of death by drowning. (In a stream with less than a foot of water) The case remains stuck in an extraordinary place: charges have been filed against the doctors who performed the post-mortems, against the lawyers who filed cases against the state, against everybody except a possible suspect for the rape and murder, or the many officials who had visibly botched up the investigations.

In the absence of justice, the space between Kunan Poshpora and Shopian can only be filled with the stories of nearly 7,000 people gone missing, of the 60,000 killed, and the several-hundred-thousand injured and maimed and tortured and psychologically damaged. The men of this society took the brunt of this brutalization. What of the price paid by the women? It's when we begin to come to terms with their decades-long accretion of grief and sorrow, of fear and shame, that we will begin to understand the anger of that woman with the stone in her hand.

The current round of protests will probably die down soon. The mandarins of New Delhi will heave a sigh of relief, tell us that everything is normal, and turn their attentions to something else. But only their hubris could blind them from noticing what we have all seen this summer in Kashmir. This is not ordinary anger. It's an incandescent fury that effaces fear. That should worry those who seek to control Kashmir.

Sanjay Kak is the maker of 'Jashn-e-Azadi', a documentary about Kashmir

Voices of Dissent

2010-08-08T21:08:00.000-07:00

By Mantasha Binti Rashid

What does a democracy mean if the people can not hold their representatives responsible? What does it mean when political dissent is silenced with bullets? What does it mean when the representatives of people by virtue of being people-elected go to any extent to retain power ?

It means that democracy is a sham, a cover up to the same old human desire of power wealth and prestige.
It was today that dissent echoed in the heart of the capital city ,Janta Mantar .People shouted anti-system slogans and demanded freedom. This protest was not any other protest in the protest street but one attended by hundreds of people, many of who had directly come from the valley of Kashmir including bussinesmen and students and others consisted of the Kashmiris in Delhi,from all walks of life.All had gathered in solidarity to express their grief and anger against the innocent killings in Kashmir.In over more than a month forty plus people have been killed in the valley of Kashmir by Indian security forces.These killings took place in the public protests ,one starting with the unearthing of the fake encounter in Kupwara .These incidents are not isolated incidents but need to be looked at all in a queue .A long queue which dates back very long in history and directly began with the partition of India in 1947 when Kashmir was divided too .A part occupied by Pakistan and the other by India and some even by China.

Tonight not just Kashmiris but Sikhs from Punjab ,People from North East ,Tamil Nadu and Maoist supporters are were united in Jantar Mantar against the state oppression and all showed solidarity with the former. All have been questioning the sovereignty of India in their respective states and include people who are faced with injustice ,state terrorism and a curb on their civil liberties and basic human rights. They all questioned state’s brutal ways of curbing and crushing dissent .The posters held by protestors displayed young civilians who have been killed in Kashmir. All in their teens,the youngest nine and the eldest 35!

It was a moment of hungry silence which begged to be fed on slogans, observed for the peace of innocent victims of violence. The slogans like “hum kya chahte aazadi” (we want freedom) echoed in the Cental Delhi .Loud enough to reach the deaf and power loathed ears of the people in authority .Media of the democratic country showed vicarious presence but the television sets showed nothing in the night The arguments on News channels in the evening, nowadays host debates discussing what is the anger of Kashmiris against? What do they want?
When they gathered to say it in their cameras ,they were not reported! I wonder if their cameras ad tapes fed on those voices like the bullets feed on the blood of same race, same people !

Now before the ink which should report this protest in newspapers tomorrow dries up by the fear of authority I thought It is better to pen it down .The timing of the protest was in synchronization with the breaks given to Kashmiris back home in the evening after days of curfew. Curfew which orders “shoot at sight ”.A term like Animal treatment to this treatment will upset the animal rights supporters who will feel insulted .After all they do not let animal,s like dogs, get killed!

This protest also requested the common Indian people to wake up to the killings in Kashmir being carried out by their elected government in Delhi and even damned the state government of Kashmir, the N.C lead coalition with Congress. Name hardly matters as the protestors shouted slogans calling them the stooges of central government. There were a few Kashmiri Pandits who made their presence felt but by standing against the group even after requesting to join the gathering as one people belonging to the soil of Kashmir but by not doing so they made their purpose of sabotaging the gathering very clear although many Kashmiri Pandits were a part of the Kashmiri gathering.

“Kashmir atanqwadi nahi” was one slogan which reverbrated in Jantar mantar along with Allah-hu-Akbar to which some protestors objected saying that it was not a communal but a political problem. Leaving a big question to be answered .If all those suffering are Muslims in Kashmir, can not they use religion to bind them, to come to a platform ,to be one? Is it that they have to be under fear of being called communal even if they scream that god is great in Arabic? Till society does not become secular, a secular state means nothing!

Running out of steam

2010-07-27T23:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Running-out-of-steam/Article1-578631.aspx

Soumitra Das

Journalism is not about patriotism. It is not about ‘my country right or wrong’. Journalism is about the Truth. In India, however, far too often a journalist’s first commitment is to his country rather than to the truth. Nowhere is this more evident than in our reportage on Kashmir and Pakistan. To talk about Kashmir first, we are in complete denial, we toe the government’s line unquestioningly: that everything in Kashmir would be hunky-dory if Pakistan stopped meddling; that Kashmir is actually madly in love with the Indian Army and it is only Pakistan which is holding Kashmiris back from expressing their true feelings about the army, the paramilitary forces and the J&K Police in good measure; that India has done nothing to deserve the violence and turbulence in that state; that the stone-pelters are just paid agents of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba.

What is the truth? The truth could be that many Kashmiris are sick and tired of the Indian security forces; the truth could be that Kashmiris are looking for deliverance from the cycle of brutality in which they are caught. The truth could be that India had for years foisted corrupt and venal regimes in Srinagar through rigging and other acts of skullduggery. The truth could be that India had a chance to redeem itself when it brought in Sheikh Abdullah as chief minister of the state, but apart from fostering yet another political dynasty, the Abdullahs have had little impact on the climate of political feeling in the state. The truth could be that the stone pelters are the vanguard of a ‘revolution’ whose immediate political expression is the rejection of India and everything that India has come to represent in Kashmir.

As far as Pakistan is concerned, our media are even more slavishly patriotic. All the usual clichés and stereotypes are summoned whenever our journalists and intellectuals write on the subject. Pakistan is a rogue nation; it is a failed State; it is almost a criminal enterprise; its democracy is a sham...

Everything we say about Pakistan speaks of our hatred and resentment against the country. And yet, we see that Pakistan does not disappear from the map of the world and definitely won’t in a hurry. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) may not be accountable, but how accountable is India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and the Intelligence Bureau?

It’s also the naivete of it all. I remember a journalist on national TV saying, “We (India) are better than them (Pakistan).” What does that mean? That Pakistan is an Islamic republic and India, even with its pogroms against Sikhs in 1984 Delhi and against Muslims in 2002 Gujarat is a shining example of democracy? It is India, if my figures are right, that has more than 50 per cent of its children suffering from various effects of malnourishment. India’s regular free-and-fair elections may be the only thing that should genuinely make us proud as citizens.

History has been kind to us. It has provided us with a stick with which to beat Pakistan: cross-border terrorism. So, we can use it as a pretext for not talking about Kashmir where our position is weak. Take the ruckus over Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafeez Sayeed. We want him gagged, arrested, tried and, ideally, executed, no matter what the legal position might be in Pakistan. We insist that Pakistan knows everything about Sayeed’s involvement in 26/11 and that Pakistan is resorting to lies and deception to evade taking responsibility. However, now, according to Home Secretary G.K. Pillai’s recent statement, it’s not Sayeed but the ISI “from start to finish”. What is germane is that no court in the world will convict a mass murderer only on the basis of what two major felons have to say about him. Ajmal Kasab’s and David Headley’s statements need corroboration.

There might be another lull in Kashmir, but this storm will continue to rage as long as the security forces continue to treat the local population the way they do. And the media continue to mix up their job of documenting ‘what is’ with ‘what they want things to be’.

Soumitro Das is a Kolkata-based writer

Seven Jewish Children (A Monologue for an Indian Child): A performance for Kashmir (in New Delhi)

2010-07-15T00:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=110098029041444#!/event.php?eid=132814953425573&index=1

Seven Jewish Children (A Monologue for an Indian Child), is a performance adapted from Caryl Churchill's controversial 2009 playlet, Seven Jewish Children : A Play for Gaza, which was written in response to Israel's assaults on Gaza in 2008-'09. The original play, which lasts ten minutes in performance, charts the arc of history of the Arab-Israel conflict over the last seventy years, and in so doing, weaves a tragic melody of loss and remembrance, dispossession and reprisal. This adaptation is being staged in response to the ongoing state-sponsored genocide in Kashmir that is being perpetrated by the Indian paramilitary forces.

Performed by Arka Mukhopadhyay and Qawwali singer Saqlain Nizami, this adaptation uses original text written in response to the ongoing genocide in Kashmir as well as Agha Shahid Ali's lines, and lasts between thirty to forty minutes.

Date : Saturday, July 17th
Venue : Akshara Theatre, Baba Kharag Singh Marg, New Delhi
Time : 9:00 PM

There is no entry fee. However, a collection will be taken for Medical Aid for Palestinians after the performance. Audience members are also requested to bring a candle each for the performance.

Contact: arka.mukhopadhyayAT_THE_RATEgmailDOTcom

An Appeal to join the Candle Light Protest in Kolkata from Concerned Citizens for Kashmir

2010-07-15T00:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php#!/event.php?eid=129173233791446

Tufail Mattoo (17)
Javid Ahmad Maila (18)
Shakeel Ahmad Ganai (14)
Firdous Ahmad Kakroo (17)
Asif Hassan Rather (9)
Ishteyaque Ahmad Khanday (15)
Imtiyaz Ahmad Itoo (17)
Muzaffar Ahmad Bhat (17)
Abrar Ahmad (17)

These are some of the twenty or so civilians killed by the security forces in the past month. The home minister has come out with statements like: “Parents should ensure that their children remain indoors. It is the responsibility of parents,” He further said that the purpose of moving in the Army was to “serve as a deterrent.” The Army would be in Kashmir “as long as it is necessary” to deal with the situation there. Fingers have been pointed at terrorist groups as well as the half-hearted attempts of the ruling NC state government to control the situation. But it is increasingly clear that spaces for civil dissent in Kashmir are few and continually shrinking. The armed forces have been used to crush all forms of civilian dissent in Kashmir and the protests and protesters in the valley are always criminalised more than anywhere else in the country.

No one from the central government has come out with a statement expressing grief at the loss of so many young lives and consoling the bereaved families. And all the while the civilian death-toll is mounting and will continue to do so as long as the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 (AFSPA)—which gives army officers the power to open fire on protesters and anyone else they decide is a potential lawbreaker whilst granting all personnel impunity from prosecution under civil law—remains in force in Kashmir.

Whatever our separate and individual takes on azaadi and armed insurgency, there cannot be any doubt that these killings of unarmed civilians—mostly angry teenagers—by the armed forces in Kashmir are gross violations of human rights and civil liberties. We must come together to

1. express our solidarity with the families of those who have been killed in the recent events and also with those who are protesting against the continued presence and the misconducts of the armed forces in the valley
2. strongly condemn the violence and the role of the security forces
3. insist that the Government of India and the state government take immediate action to prevent further loss of life and property and initiate an impartial investigation into the recent killings
4. demand the immediate repeal of the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 (AFSPA)
5. demand immediate steps for the gradual demilitarization of the valley with troops confined to the border areas

A candle light protest will be held on July 24, 2010 in front of Academy of Fine Arts between 5pm and 8 pm to protest and denounce the killings and human rights violation in Kashmir in the past weeks. We invite you to come and join the vigil and voice your protest. Please forward this appeal to others. We are also sorry about crosspostings, if there are any.

We would also request you to get in touch with us by July 16, 2010 to let us know if you would like to support and participate in the vigil.

Thanks,

Aniruddha, Debjani, Madhura, Parjanya

(on behalf of Concerned Citizens for Kashmir)

About Concerned Citizens for Kashmir: We are a group of citizens who have come together to express our concern over the events in Kashmir and to express our solidarity with the people affected by the 20 years of conflict there. We have no affiliations to any other groups.

Not Crushed, Merely Ignored

2010-07-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n14/tariq-ali/not-crushed-merely-ignored

Tariq Ali on the recent killings in Kashmir

A Kashmiri lawyer rang me last week in an agitated state. Had I heard about the latest tragedies in Kashmir? I had not. He was stunned. So was I when he told me in detail what had been taking place there over the last three weeks. As far as I could see, none of the British daily papers or TV news bulletins had covered the story; after I met him I rescued two emails from Kashmir informing me of the horrors from my spam box. I was truly shamed. The next day I scoured the press again. Nothing. The only story in the Guardian from the paper’s Delhi correspondent – a full half-page – was headlined: ‘Model’s death brings new claims of dark side to India’s fashion industry’. Accompanying the story was a fetching photograph of the ill-fated woman. The deaths of (at that point) 11 young men between the ages of 15 and 27, shot by Indian security forces in Kashmir, weren’t mentioned. Later I discovered that a short report had appeared in the New York Times on 28 June and one the day after in the Guardian; there has been no substantial follow-up. When it comes to reporting crimes committed by states considered friendly to the West, atrocity fatigue rapidly kicks in. A few facts have begun to percolate through, but they are likely to be read in Europe and the US as just another example of Muslims causing trouble, with the Indian security forces merely doing their duty, if in a high-handed fashion. The failure to report on the deaths in Kashmir contrasts strangely with the overheated coverage of even the most minor unrest in Tibet, leave alone Tehran.

On 11 June this year, the Indian paramilitaries known as the Central Reserve Police Force fired tear-gas canisters at demonstrators, who were themselves protesting about earlier killings. One of the canisters hit 17-year-old Tufail Ahmad Mattoo on the head. It blew out his brains. After a photograph was published in the Kashmiri press, thousands defied the police and joined his funeral procession the next day, chanting angry slogans and pledging revenge. The photograph was ignored by the mainstream Indian press and the country’s celebrity-trivia-obsessed TV channels. As I write, the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, and several other towns are under strict military curfew. Whenever it is lifted, however briefly, young men pour out onto the streets to protest and are greeted with tear gas. In most of the province there has been an effective general strike for more than three weeks. All shops are closed.

An ugly anti-Muslim chauvinism accompanies India’s violence. It has been open season on Muslims since 9/11, when the liberation struggle in Kashmir was conveniently subsumed under the war on terror and Israeli military officers were invited to visit Akhnur military base in the province and advise on counter-terrorism measures. The website India Defence noted in September 2008 that ‘Maj-Gen Avi Mizrahi paid an unscheduled visit to the disputed state of Kashmir last week to get an up-close look at the challenges the Indian military faces in its fight against Islamic insurgents. Mizrahi was in India for three days of meetings with the country’s military brass and to discuss a plan the IDF is drafting for Israeli commandos to train Indian counterterror forces.’ Their advice was straightforward: do as we do in Palestine and buy our weapons. In the six years since 2002 New Delhi had purchased $5 billion-worth of weaponry from the Israelis, to good effect.

Demonstrations against Indian security forces escalated in early June this year when it was revealed in the extra-alert Kashmiri press that three young men – Mohammed Shafi, Shahzad Ahmad Khan and Riyaz Ahmad – had been executed in April by Indian army officers. A colonel and a major were suspended from duty, a rare enough event, suggesting that their superiors knew exactly what had taken place. The colonel claimed that the young men were separatist militants who had been killed in an ‘encounter’ near the Line of Control (the border between Indian-controlled and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir). This account is regarded by local police as pure fiction.

An Amnesty International letter to the Indian prime minister in 2008 listed his country’s human rights abuses in Kashmir and called for an independent inquiry, claiming that ‘grave sites are believed to contain the remains of victims of unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other abuses which occurred in the context of armed conflict persisting in the state since 1989. The graves of at least 940 persons have reportedly been found in 18 villages in Uri district alone.’ A local NGO, the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir (IPTK), states that extrajudicial killings and torture are a commonplace in the valley and that Western institutions don’t even try to do anything about this for fear of damaging relations with New Delhi. The figures provided by the IPTK are startling. It claims that the Indian military occupation of Kashmir ‘between 1989-2009 has resulted in 70,000+ deaths’. The report disputes claims that these killings are aberrations. On the contrary, they are part of the occupation process, considered as ‘acts of service’, and leading to promotion and financial reward (bounty is paid after claims made by officers are verified). In this dirty and enduring conflict, more than half a million ‘military and paramilitary personnel [more than the number of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan combined] continue to act with impunity to regulate movement, law and order across Kashmir. The Indian state itself, through its legal, political and military actions, has demonstrated the existence of a state of continuing conflict within Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.’

Public opinion in India is mute. The parties of the left prefer to avoid the subject for fear that political rivals will question their patriotism. Kashmir is never spoken of, and has never been allowed to speak. With its Muslim majority it wasn’t permitted a referendum in 1947 to determine which of the two countries it wished to be part of. In 1984, when Indira Gandhi was the Indian prime minister, I asked her why she had not taken advantage of the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 (when Kashmiris had watched with horror how the Pakistan army treated their coreligionists) and allowed a referendum. She remained silent. I pointed out that even Farooq Abdullah, the chief minister of Kashmir, was convinced that India would win if a democratic election were held. Her face had clouded. ‘He’s completely untrustworthy.’ I had to agree, but her refusal to contemplate the Kashmiri self-determination promised by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was troubling. These days the very suggestion seems utopian.

The Abdullah dynasty continues to hold power in Kashmir and is keen to collaborate with New Delhi and enrich itself. I rang a journalist in Srinagar and asked him about the current chief minister, Omar Abdullah, a callow and callous youth whose only claim to office is dynastic. ‘Farooq Abdullah,’ he told me, ‘is our Asif Ali Zardari when it comes to corruption. Now he’s made his son chief minister so that he can concentrate on managing his various businesses.’ The opposition isn’t much better. Some Kashmiris, the journalist said, call Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the effective leader of the opposition, and his cronies ‘double agents. That is, they are taking money from Pakistan and India.’ He is the 12th ‘mirwaiz’, the self-appointed spiritual leaders of the Muslims in the Kashmir Valley, and is adept at playing both sides. ‘Mirwaiz’s security outside his house is provided by the Indian state,’ a friend in Srinagar told me, ‘his wife is Kashmiri American, he lives very comfortably (without any source of income) and he is engaged in secret talks with India, news of which is constantly leaked. Furthermore, he also makes an annual pilgrimage to Pakistan to keep that channel open as well. He hangs out with “separatists” in Kashmir who are open to being used by both India and Pakistan, for a good price of course. The Indian authorities do not have to do much to crush Kashmiris while there are people like Mirwaiz. So, all in all, our leadership is working against us. India has always used this to its advantage.’

The Zardari government is silent on the issue of Kashmir and there has been little media reaction in Pakistan to the recent killings. For the ruling elite Kashmir is just a bargaining counter. ‘Give us Afghanistan and you can have Kashmir’ is the message currently emanating from the bunker in Islamabad. Zardari, it’s worth recalling, is the only Pakistani leader whose effigy has been burned in public in Indian Kashmir (soon after becoming president he had seriously downplayed Kashmiri aspirations). The Pakistani president and his ministers are more interested in business deals than in Kashmir. At the moment this suits Washington perfectly, since India is regarded as a major ally in the region and the US doesn’t want to have to justify its actions in Kashmir. Pakistan’s indifference also suggests that Indian allegations that recent events in Kashmir were triggered by Pakistan are baseless. Pakistan virtually dismantled the jihadi networks it had set up in Kashmir after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan not long after 9/11. Islamabad, high on the victory in Kabul, had stupidly assumed that they could repeat the trick in Kashmir. Those sent to infiltrate Indian Kashmir were brutal and mindless fanatics who harmed the Kashmiri case for self-determination, though some young people, tired of the patience exhibited by their elders, embraced the jihad, hoping it would bring them freedom. They were wrong.

As Indian politicians stood on the battlements of the Red Fort in Delhi to celebrate Independence Day in August 2008, Kashmiris began a mass campaign of civil disobedience. More than a hundred thousand people marched peacefully to the UN office in Srinagar. They burned effigies, chanted ‘Azadi, azadi’ (‘freedom’) and appealed to India to leave Kashmir. The movement was not crushed. It was merely ignored. Nothing changed. Now a new generation of Kashmiri youth is on the march. They fight, like the young Palestinians, with stones. Many have lost their fear of death and will not surrender. Ignored by politicians at home, abandoned by Pakistan, they are developing the independence of spirit that comes with isolation and it will not be easily quelled. It’s unlikely, however, that the prime minister of India and his colleagues will pay any attention to them. And just to show who’s master, the Indian army flag-marched through the streets of Srinagar on 7 July in an awesome show of strength.

8 July

The dead are:

11 June: Tufail Ahmad Mattoo, 17, killed in teargas fire in Srinagar.

19 June: Rafiq Ahmad Bangroo, 27, beaten by members of the Central Reserve Police Force near his home in old Srinagar on 12 June, died of his injuries.

20 June: Javed Ahmad Malla, 26, died when mourners, returning from Bangroo’s burial, attacked a CRPF bunker, causing its occupants to open fire.

25 June: Shakeel Ganai, 17, and Firdous Khan, 18, killed when the CRPF fired at protesters in Sopore.

27 June: Bilal Ahmad Wani, 22, died following CRPF fire in Sopore.

28 June: Tajamul Bashir, 20, killed in Delina; Tauqeer Rather, 15, killed in Sopore.

29 June: Ishtiyaq Ahmed, 15, Imtiyaz Ahmed Itoo, 17, and Shujaat-ul-Islam, 17, died after being shot by police in southern Anantnag.

5 July: Muzaffar Ahmad Bhat, 17, died in CRPF custody in Srinagar.

6 July: Fayaz Ahmad Wani, 18, shot by the CRPF during Bhat’s funeral procession in Srinagar; Fancy Jan, 25, the first woman to die, killed when a bullet hit her as she watched events from a window in her house; Abrah Ahmad Khan, 16, killed during protests over Wani’s death.

STATEMENT by IPTK

2010-07-07T04:11:00.000-07:00

http://kashmirprocess.org/reports/militarygov/20100629_Statement.html

International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (IPTK)
http://www.kashmirprocess.org

STATEMENT: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Srinagar, June 29, 2010

Military Governance in Indian-administered Kashmir

The People's Tribunal feels morally obligated to make this statement today. Sustained alliances between local communities and IPTK have enabled us to bear witness to the escalating conditions induced by militarized governance, and the severity of psychosocial dimensions of oppression in Indian-administered Kashmir. From our work since being instituted in April 2008, from the reports and briefs we have authored, investigations we have undertaken and are in the process of completing, we find it ethically imperative to comment on the direction in which the Governments of India and Jammu and Kashmir, and the Indian Armed Forces, appear to be headed, and the consequences they will likely effect.

Conflict Resolution?
The Government of India has recently called for "creative solutions" to resolve the "Kashmir problem." If we map the events of the past six months inside Indian-administered Kashmir, the approach of the Indian state is aggressively militaristic. While commitments to political diplomacy frame relations between New Delhi and Islamabad, in Indian-administered Kashmir, there are no such engagements with civil society or with the pro-freedom leadership. There is no acknowledgement of civil society's insistent demand for the right to self-determination.

Indian-administered Kashmir is not a "problem" but a conflict zone. India's militarization is aimed at territorial control of Kashmir, and control over key economic and environmental resources in the region, including those of the Siachen glacier. The Government of Kashmir is unable to prevail politically or exercise control over the Indian Armed Forces. India's political dominance hinges on its ability to possess Kashmir. Institutions of democracy -- the judiciary, educational institutions, media -- are neutralized by the Government of Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian Armed Forces as they function in tandem, continuing "military governance." State violence seeks to undermine people's capacity to resist and solicits collaborators.

The predominant reality in Kashmir is that of militarized governance. The pervasive presence is that of the military and paramilitary, whose xenophobic and forceful infiltration into every aspect of economic and civic life is palpable. Armed forces are present at educational institutions, hospitals, shopping complexes, cafes and hotels, sporting events, playgrounds, and bazaars. They monitor people as they enter mosques and shrines. They also collaborate with Hindu nationalists in instituting "self-defence" campaigns and militias, such as forming the 100 Village Defence Committees announced in May 2010, promoting militarized Hindu nationalism.

Zero Tolerance?
Human rights violations in Kashmir are a means of maintaining military governance. The Omar Abdullah Government has repeatedly promised "zero tolerance" for human rights violations. Zero tolerance? What we have witnessed is "zero tolerance" for nonviolent civil society dissent, as security forces brutalize people on the streets chanting "Go India, Go back," chanting "India, Quit Kashmir." On June 24, 2010, Chief Minister Abdullah stated that separatist/pro-freedom leaders were instigating youth to violence, following which security forces ensued repression on political leaders calling for peaceful protests. Crowds marching to Sopore on June 28 to protest and mourn the death of three youth killed by the paramilitary were met with force. Police used tear gas and opened fire on the protesters and journalists, killing one person. In Delina, a nine-year boy was killed by security forces. Condoning and rationalizing the deplorable actions of the CRPF and police, the Home Secretary of India, G. K. Pillai, characterized civilians fired upon by security personnel as people who were culpable as they violated curfew and attacked police posts. This further evidences the patronage that the security forces enjoy from highly placed government officials, and emphasizes the state's view that civil society resistance to militaristic governance is criminal behaviour.

From the actions and statements of security forces and politicians in power, it appears that all civil disobedience is being defined as anti-national, as equivalent to "terrorism." Peaceable protests are fired upon, as security personnel repress women and men participating in them. Stone pelting, a means of dissent in Kashmir, is termed violent. Stone pelting, Kashmir youth state, is an expression of rage by a subjugated people whose political means of expression and demands are systematically limited. Stone pelting, Kashmir youth say, cannot be compared to the brutish techniques of domination used by the state.

Pro-freedom leaders have been placed under innumerable house arrests. Even elected officials are prevented from staging public protests, such as an MLA and his with approximately 100 co-workers, who were stopped from protesting during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Srinagar. In 2008, the Prime Minister had stated that elections in Kashmir would render separatist leaders irrelevant, as elected officials would speak for the people. Ironic.

There appears to be no governmental interest in acknowledging and responding to the actions of the military and paramilitary. People, including minors, and political leaders that participate in resistance are booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA). Undeclared curfews permit security forces to operate without noting cause or prior warning. In November 2009, Lt General, B.S. Jaswal, characterized civil disobedience in response to calls given by dissenting political leaders as "agitational terrorism" prompted by "terrorists." During the pacific resistance of 2008 and 2009, protests had also turned lethal as security personnel fired into crowds. Cyber resistance then was termed "cyber terrorism," and monitored.

Real violence in the present -- bullets, torture, landmines, injuries, arrests, human shields, molestations, sexualized violence, forced labour, detentions, disappearances, murder -- is virtually monopolized by the military and paramilitary in Kashmir. The list of perpetrators is long.

Killings Without Accountability?
Between January-June 2010, reportedly 40 civilians have been killed (25 of whom were killed by security forces), 107 persons identified as militants have been killed, and 57 soldiers have been killed (of the 57, 28 soldiers were killed by militants, 14 committed suicide, 2 died in fratricidal killings, 7 died in grenade/mine explosions, and 6 were killed by unidentified gunmen). Those killed by the Central Reserve Police Force and police were all young men, all Muslim.

Over 20 persons have been killed in "encounters" in just April and May 2010; each reported as "infiltrating" militants. Only four deaths have been investigated, all found to be fake encounter killings. Reportedly, 335 militants were killed in 2008 and 236 militants were killed in 2009. There are no systematic investigations into alleged "encounter" killings. Promises made about inquiries and commissions are not honoured, as, for example, in Machil, where, after the three fake encounter killings, a Divisional Inquiry was promised but not authorized. In 2008, 367 Habeas Corpus Petitions were filed in the High Court at Srinagar, 272 petitions filed in 2009, and 159 petitions filed between January and mid-May 2010. International human rights law argues that a state must respect the right to life. The Indian Armed Forces repeatedly break this covenant in Kashmir.

Some fake encounter and other killings have taken place around high-profile talks. Military and state discourse use these killings to hype fear of armed militancy and infiltration, stating that militants, scattered all over, seek to target Hindus, requiring hyper-vigilance on the part of security forces. The actions of the state and the military and paramilitary are calculated to provoke and inflame. The armed struggle in Kashmir of the 1990s abated, again becoming nonviolent resistance between 2004-2007; even as cross-Line of Control (between India and Pakistan) movements, infiltrations, and insurgency into Indian-administered Kashmir are significant issues. The Indian state, however, exaggerates these realities by linking Kashmiri civilian resistance to "foreign terror," to enable Indian's administration of Kashmir to proceed with impunity.

The Government of India has stated that Pakistan does not want peace, and might encourage militant attacks. Does India want peace in Kashmir? Is India willing to recognize what "peace" will require, and take those steps?

Military Governance?
The Indian state does not define the present as a time of conflict inside Kashmir. Yet, the Armed Forces have become increasingly more powerful and entrenched in Indian-administered Kashmir. Both New Delhi and the Omar Abdullah Government appear unwilling, or unable, to control the military and paramilitary. Is the military more powerful in Kashmir than the civil administration?

Military-talk and dominant political speech state that the Indian Armed Forces are in Kashmir to protect citizens, and justify civilian suffering and killings as collateral damage in a war on terror. Akin to the George W. Bush era in the United States, this war of "good" against "evil" makes critique or dissent impossible without disagreement becoming affiliated with what is "evil," "dangerous," and "anti-national." There is no way out of the contradiction that India's military is the protector of Kashmiris who are also potential enemies, as long as military suppression of Kashmiris is understood as crucial to defending India.

Questions regarding the Indian armed forces in Kashmir, with fifty-six soldiers committing suicide in Kashmir in 2008-2009, and fifteen instances of fratricidal killing, are muffled.

The PSA, the Disturbed Areas Act, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) are security related legislation in contravention of international humanitarian laws that guarantee immunity to army and paramilitary forces. On February 26, 2009, soon after assuming office, Chief Minister Abdullah stated that AFSPA should be revoked. The armed forces challenged his authority, declaring such intent as "regressive," stating "any move to revoke AFSPA in Jammu and Kashmir would be detrimental to the security of the Valley and would provide a boost to the terrorists." Dialogue with the Indian state and Kashmiri pro-freedom leaders regarding autonomy and the revocation of AFSPA were electoral promises made by the current Chief Minister. To revoke AFSPA would be to interrupt not only legal, but political, impunity. Kashmiris are now being told that it is better for their security to amend, not revoke, AFSPA.

International Community
Kashmir is a laboratory of violent experiments conducted by Indian military and state institutions. The sustained militarization in Kashmir is not called "military rule" by the Indian state and international community. Civil society in Indian-administered Kashmir remains "under the authority of the hostile army," whose reach and power "has been established and can be exercised," (Hague Convention, Laws and Customs of War on Land [Hague IV] Article 42, 1907).

India's militarization is portrayed as an "internal" matter, refusing transparency, international scrutiny, and adherence to international humanitarian law of conflict and war. In the face of the Indian state's violations of international humanitarian law, of protocols and conventions, and perpetration of crimes against humanity, there is a deafening silence on the part of the international community. The Kashmir conflict, like other international conflicts, requires urgent attention and resolution. There is, at present, no monitoring, no sustained visibility, no engagement that can produce ethical and viable results.

That Kashmiris must be an integral part of any resolution repeatedly escapes the international community, and India and Pakistan. If the current situation continues, and nonviolent dissent is systemically brutalized, might the Government of India force Kashmiri civilians to perhaps take up armed militancy once again, continuing the cycle of violence? Is the international community not accountable for averting this?

The United States, the European Union, and other nations must recognize that the resolution of the Kashmir issue is directly significant to peace and security in South Asia. Institutions and states participating in military collaborations and exercises on Kashmir must yield to transparent dialogue, and address the difficult questions of conflict resolution.

Recently, the Government of India took issue with the Canadian Government's scrutiny of Indian visa applicants with military backgrounds. In the past, among such applicants, some, for example, have been perpetrators in Kashmir that have sought residency aboard. A scrutiny of certain categories of military personnel travelling aboard is perhaps necessitated by India's apathy in prosecuting perpetrators. The Global North's desire to benefit from India as a vast/potential economic market must not continuously sideline egregious human rights violations.

Concerns
We wish to enter into public record that following the Majils-e-Mashawarat of Shopian's request that IPTK inquire into the death of Ms. Asiya Jan and Mrs. Neelofar Jan in May 2009, to deliver an accurate understanding of the matter and define a mechanism for justice, we wrote Chief Minister Abdullah in January 2010, requesting cooperation and access, which have been denied us to date.

As well, we wish to enter into public record that the Government of Jammu and Kashmir and the Government of India have not undertaken investigations into the findings of BURIED EVIDENCE, IPTK's report on unknown, unmarked, and mass graves in Indian-administered Kashmir, or acted on its recommendations. Such action may have generated constructive interventions into the continuing chain of extrajudicial executions by the Indian military and paramilitary.

From:
Dr. Angana Chatterji, Convener IPTK and Professor, Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies
Advocate Parvez Imroz, Convener IPTK and Founder, Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society
Gautam Navlakha, Convener IPTK and Editorial Consultant, Economic and Political Weekly
Zahir-Ud-Din, Convener IPTK and Vice-President, Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society
Advocate Mihir Desai, Legal Counsel IPTK and Lawyer, Mumbai High Court and Supreme Court of India
Khurram Parvez, Liaison IPTK and Programme Coordinator, Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society

Queries may be directed to:
Khurram Parvez
E-mail: kparvez [at] kashmirprocess [dot] org
Phone: +91.194.2482820
Mobile: +91.9419013553

Age of the stone wars in Kashmir

2010-07-07T04:07:00.000-07:00

Insanity , Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Apply that to Kashmir, and one doesn’t need to be an Einstein to figure out that he had got the equation right, again.

Leave, for argument’s sake, the baggage of history — of events from 1947: the accession , New Delhi’s political machinations , dismissed governments and rigged elections to the eruption of insurgency in 1989 — alone for a moment.

Let us assume , for that moment, that there is utter veracity in the official narrative that but for afew elements, who are being discredited, peace and harmony would be restored in the Valley.

Add the fact that armed militancy has been curbed significantly and a regime, elected via a surprisingly well-attended electoral exercise, is in charge.

Add also the statements emanating from the top echelons of both the central and state governments that there will be zero tolerance for human rights abuses. Given all that, if not perfect, things surely should have been better.

So why did the patent insanity of the last few days occur? Why does it happen repeatedly? Why did, day after day, the police and the CRPF shoot dead youngsters who were out protesting, rioting , against the deaths of the day before?

Continue reading: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Comments--Analysis/Age-of-the-stone-wars-in-Kashmir/articleshow/6117640.cms?curpg=1

Violation of Right to Information

2010-04-16T06:57:00.000-07:00

The government of India has again banned the sms service in Kashmir...

Intifada In Paradise

2010-03-25T02:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=Ne060310intifada_in.asp

Armed with just stones, the protesters in the Kashmir Valley have got the government in a tizzy, reports PARVAIZ BUKHARI

IN A stable political environment, these young boys would perhaps have started a music band or a fan club of some kind to expend their youthful energy. However, in the congested old town area of Srinagar — witness to intense protests in recent weeks — throwing stones at government forces is what occupies the waking hours of groups of young boys. A transition is taking place in the resistance to security forces in Kashmir — from militancy to stone-throwing. Locally, it is referred to as Intifada, the Palestinian mass movement that first began in 1988 and still employs stone-throwing as a method of popular resistance. It is a movement that is giving India’s security establishment sleepless nights.

These days, the slightest provocation — say an alleged human rights violation by the security forces somewhere in the Valley, triggers a stone-throwing protest in urban areas, and increasingly in provincial towns and villages across Kashmir.

For these young people, angered by the status-quo in the Valley which they find unbearable, even their ‘nights out’ are not fun. Rather, it is a precaution against getting picked up by the police, who might have identified them during the protests.

TEHELKA caught up with one such band of youngsters on a chilly evening near the Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. A few of them were students; others work in small private businesses. From the surrounding darkness, they emerged silently in ones and twos to make sure that it was not a police trap. With the typical belligerence of youth, one of them shot off: “We know what journalists are all about. We still came thinking that at least one person should know how we think and feel.” Extremely cynical and skeptical of political leaders — separatist and mainstream — they appear to have divorced hope of any change or a normal life.

This is a generation that grew up amid turmoil in the wake of the armed insurgency, and the crushing military response to it. “Kashmir mein izzat se zinda rehna hai to India se ladtey rehna hai (To live with honor in Kashmir, you have to keep fighting India all the time),” said one of them. In his twenties now, he alleges that as a kid he saw an Indian soldier slit his brother’s throat and kill him. Another brother, he says, was killed when an unknown attacker hit his head with a shovel.

Each of them narrates a different story of brutality they have witnessed from close. Angrily, they talk about experiences, when police and paramilitary forces enter and ransack their homes and “misbehave” with men and women alike. They believe that the only way to keep the security forces away from their area is to turn “themselves into weapons”. “If they catch one of us, ten others will emerge. How many can they catch?” asks one of the youngsters, undeterred.

Security officials feel these protests have become more difficult to deal with than the armed militancy. “It’s part of a combined effort to keep the pot boiling,” says Kuldeep Khoda, the state police chief. As if in response, one of the youths said that the government wants to “brand us terrorists” to justify arrests and killings, and discourage others. “On most occasions, a few of us would throw the first stones. The hundreds who would then follow, did so on their own,” he says.

THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO BRAND THE STONE-THROWERS AS TERRORISTS TO DISCOURAGE OTHERS

In an effort to quell the dissent last year, a Senior Superintendent of Police, Srinagar, invoked Islam to discourage stone throwers. A hadith (instance from the Prophet’s life) quoted by him, triggered an intense media debate on the issue. However, it didn’t achieve any results. “Our clerics and some leaders tell us that stone-pelting is not good. But they don’t tell us how else we can change our situation,” says one of the stone throwers, who appeared from an educated and economically well-off family.

LAST MONDAY, the death of 11-dayold Irfan, amid protests near Baramulla, spread anger, condemnation and gloom across Kashmir. The vehicle in which the family was taking the baby to hospital was stopped and surrounded by “protestors in two vehicles”, police said. “While they were being dragged out, the infant fell from the mother’s lap and was injured,” said AQ Manhas, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police, Baramulla. The baby died before the family could reach the hospital. Police have registered a case of murder but it is unclear who were there in the two vehicles. For the first time, ‘unusually’ according to the police, the protestors used cars.

Meanwhile, the police enquiry on the January 31 tear gas shelling that had killed Wamiq Farooq, a 13-year-old in Srinagar, has raised the temperature even further. The authorities had initially suspended the Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) responsible for the firing. But now it has emerged that the dead boy is also going to be chargesheeted. “It is not that we hold the police officer prima facie guilty. The boy had attempted to attack and murder other policeman earlier — in response to which more tear gas shells were fired. We have submitted a report on this to the court of law,” said Hemant Lohia, DIG, Kashmir.

In response, the government plans to decongest Srinagar’s old city. Sources say, a “package is seriously being worked out”, to resettle multiple families living under a single roof to new areas and provide modern housing. If the plan materialses, it could take away some of the immediate motivations of the stone-throwers in Srinagar. But it will take time. For the moment, the concerns remain. “I also want to do normal things. Why should I have to worry about my folks and they about me all the time,” says one of the stonethrowers, reflecting the complexity of their myriad insecurities.

Letter to Chief Minister Omar Abdullah Re.: Gender Justice in Kashmir

2010-03-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

INTERNATIONAL PEOPLE’S TRIBUNAL ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND JUSTICE IN INDIAN-ADMINISTERED KASHMIR (IPTK)

To: Mr. Omar Abdullah
Chief Minister
Jammu and Kashmir

From:

Dr. Angana Chatterji, Convener IPTK and Professor, Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies
Advocate Parvez Imroz, Convener IPTK and Founder, Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society
Gautam Navlakha, Convener IPTK and Editorial Consultant, Economic and Political Weekly
Zahir-Ud-Din, Convener IPTK and Vice-President, Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society
Advocate Mihir Desai, Legal Counsel IPTK and Lawyer, Mumbai High Court and Supreme Court of India
Khurram Parvez, Liaison IPTK and Programme Coordinator, Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society

Dear Mr. Omar Abdullah:

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we write you on behalf of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir.

We had written you on January 04, 2010, informing you of our decision to pursue an independent and transparent people’s inquiry into the Shopian event of May 2009, addressing the contested social facts, legal and political circumstances of the case, and the investigations of the state that followed. As we had noted, we determined to undertake this inquiry at the request of the Majils-e-Mashawarat of Shopian, on the contention that state institutions, and the investigations authorized by them, have been unable to deliver an accurate understanding of the matter or define a mechanism for justice.

We write you today, as we are yet to receive a response from your office to our request for access to certain documents, sites, and personnel in conjunction with the above inquiry.

We had requested the following:

Physical access to all relevant Central Reserve Police Force and army camps, and police stations in Shopian district.
Access to documents assembled and prepared by the Government of Jammu and Kashmir that form the evidentiary basis of the state’s conclusions on the Shopian event, including forensic reports and the testimonials rendered by security forces and state officials.
Access to police and security forces personnel, and medical personnel that testified to the commission of inquiry headed by Justice (Retired) Muzaffar Jan between May-July 2009.
Access to officers of the Special Investigating Team of police that collaborated with the Jan Commission following its interim report, per your order.
Access to local officers who assisted the Central Bureau of Investigation in its inquiry between September-December 2009.
Guarantee that any witnesses that elect to testify to the IPTK process be permitted to do so without duress, or adverse consequences being threatened or befalling them, from personnel or institutions of the state.

We note the urgency of undertaking ethical and transparent investigations into the Shopian issue, and undertaking requisite reparations and rehabilitation. The events in Shopian must be assessed within a larger context where incalculable gendered and sexualized violences have been perpetrated by the military and paramilitary in Kashmir during the course of the last two decades.

We note that the use of gendered and sexualized violences, including the use of rape, as acts of power, as techniques in torture, and as weapons of war have a complex history in Indian-administered Kashmir in the last two decades. The makeup of this violence has been prolonged and systemic, layered with the formerly violent resistances on the part of groups engaged in militancy, and instances of outside intervention. The state does not accept responsibility that sustained militarization has induced cycles of violence for which the state is as well responsible. The state does not accept responsibility that the states of exception/exemption regularized through the enactment of security related legislation remains in contravention of international humanitarian laws and norms. The ?hyper-masculinization’ of the armed forces, and the celebration of militarization and its concomitant violence, has created multiple contexts wherein its members have perpetrated gendered and sexualized violences on the civilian population of Kashmir.

Women and children, and others, have been victimized by horrific forms of brutality, including individual rape, and gang and collective rape. Other categories of the victimized include women labelled ?half-widows,’ whose male partners are missing. India’s security forces occupy 10,54,721 kanals of land in Jammu and Kashmir, on which, in Kashmir, 671 security camps are located. The structure of the camps maintained by security forces, and their placement, which necessitate forced encounters between local women and the armed forces on a routine basis, have facilitated the perpetration of gendered violence. In a Red Zone, as in Shopian, with the profuse presence of soldiers, women are made extremely vulnerable. Women and children, and others, have been subjected to physical and psychological torture and trauma. Security personnel have searched, detained, leered at, propositioned, extorted, and initiated unsolicited physical contact with civilians. They have psychologically tortured, and sexually assaulted, girls/minors and women. Women who do not utilize the hijab or burkha have been compelled to use the same to shield themselves from the advance of soldiers. Male youth and men refusing to participate in the sexual servitude of women have been sodomized. Victimization and fear have led to social and physical displacements, as in certain villages where parents have arranged marriages for girl children who are forced to relocate to the village of their male partners to escape being targeted.

We write you today noting that you have promised attentiveness to, and accountability for, human rights issues in Kashmir. We write you mindful that conditions for peace and prosperity in Kashmir are linked to the possibility and necessity of justice that addresses crimes perpetrated on the basis of gender during, and as a result of, militarization.

Yours sincerely,

Angana Chatterji, Parvez Imroz, Gautam Navlakha, Zahir-Ud-Din, Mihir Desai, Khurram Parvez

Contact:
Khurram Parvez
Email: kparvez@kashmirprocess.org
Phone: +91.194.2482820
Mobile: +91.9419013553

I am a stone pelter. Who are you?

2010-02-23T23:45:00.000-08:00

http://scarletkashmir.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-am-stone-pelter-who-are-you.html

by Imran Muhammad Gazi

FIRST PERSON

------- and what else can I do to express my resistance against oppression, writes Imran Muhammad Gazi an MBA student.

I have been shot in the ribs. I am on a stretcher in an emergency ward of a city hospital. Who am I? I am a stone pelter from a busy commercial area of Srinagar. This is my comprehensive introduction, no need to have a name, surname, qualification and profession. Just one word sums up my personality” Stone Pelter”. I am not that educated but some of my educated peers tell me I have always been in news right from 1931. You will find me everywhere, i have stood the test of time, leaders have changed slogans have changed but I have not. Yes there was a time when I was sidelined, and gun wielding elders occupied the centre stage.

Situation has changed and I am again in business in urban Kashmir, Ragda 2008 restored my lost glory, you called it a revolution, I watched spell bound vast multitude of people filling the streets of Kashmir, it was on that day at historic Eidgah, the gun wielding elder passed the baton on to me and with a smile on his lip and tear in his eye said” your turn mate”. I still don’t know why those tears in the eyes of the elder, perhaps I am too young to understand this.

You can find me on any street of urban Kashmir, although I have some favourite spots, I love jamia Masjid and Maisuma, old town Varmul, Sopur, and Malakhnag Islamabad to name a few. You can easily recognize me as I am the best dressed youth of my area, trendy jeans, smart sports shoe, whacky jacket and few fashion accessories, they say I buy them from the money I get for stone pelting. My income is being discussed everywhere and there is no unanimity on that it varies from 100 to2500,at times I am afraid that I may be brought under income tax net. My attire has little to do with fashion, and more with the nature of my job, I am supposed to be athletic and nimble footed and I have to mingle with the crowds, hence my attire. Ideal day at work is thrilling and exciting, the suspense, the drama, the surge and the chase is right out of 80s blockbuster Hindi cinema.

I dodge shells and bullets, ala Rajnikanth, only difference is there is no retake on the street, either you dodge in first take or you are down in the gutter. Stone pelting used to be an art but with the passage of time it has developed into a science, it is more because of those chocolate pelters, some of whom are students of best schools of Srinagar. Purists moan the adulteration; pragmatists call it the need of the hour. These chocolates talk about projectile motion, angle of projection and range, I don’t get a bit of that. They introduced “sling”, whatever oldies may say it is an effective combat weapon. I have not talked about my adversary ,most of the time it is the “Ponde police” sorry local police, it is an honour to have such an enemy in the battlefield, the most professional and business savvy police force in the world, highly well versed with economics. Such is the level of efficiency that they no longer waste bullets on us but use teargas shells for dual purpose of chasing and killing us, you can not blame them after all world is going through a recession and cost cutting is the mantra. They perfected this technique under there former boss, whose name was a tongue twister for us, we remember him as Asif Mujtabha the paki batsmen. He was a brilliant officer, disciplinarian, had a penchant for cleanliness, smoothly killed almost sixty of us in a span of few weeks, yet you could not see a speck of blood on his hands nor his immaculately worn uniform, as I told u spick and span. He treated us like his kids, ensured we did not suffer any pain or agony, bullets hit us, either on head or chest, he was such a noble loving and caring father. We miss him, they transferred him, must have been promoted, I feel good at least our blood helped someone to make a career.
Why do I pelt stones, this thought had never crossed my mind, I just instinctively new when I had to don the armour and start the battle. It was only after Ragda 2008, I heard some whispers, hushed tones, and few glances of suspicion on the street. I am street smart, I realized I am not the darling of the masses anymore, people who fed me with (Teher) even in the midst of the battle, now hated me. I should have seen this coming, it all started with the fatherly police chief Asif Mujtaba, quoting Hadith against stone pelting, learned man he is, after securing our (duniyah) worldly life, he immediately focused his attention to secure our (akhirat) life here after. We miss him; he was our real benefactor, trying to ensure us peace in this world as well as other world.

A (molvi saheb) priest who calls himself a Puritan, and who lead many processions in Ragda2008, seconded the view and said the hadith is from Bukhari shareef, it was a bolt from the blue (nabi trath) for me, same molvi used to quote Bukhari shareef in 1990s and would read out from Babul jihad (Chapter on jihad) why this hadith was never read to us until now. What had changed, Bukhari Shareef or Molvi Sahib, it was for the first time and not the last time that I have wept, yes warm tears flowed not from my eyes but the stone cold heart of a stone pelter. I wiped my tears, with my rough hands and yes mourning the death of conscience of our Ulema I did what I knew best, yes I pelted stones mocking at the simplicity of the molvi sahib.

A columnist picked up the thread from were the molvi left, writing smoothly with his “LEFT HAND “. He mocked at my lack of education, it is easy to doge the bullet than a writer’s pen I was pinned to the ground, argument lost. There is a saying in Kashmiri (Asoolus kyah kari ghulam rasool).I don’t know the English meaning of this as I am a petty stone pelter. Agreed I am not educated, but my journo brother is, if he is writing today it is because of me who is fighting in the street for the very honour he is trying to defend sitting in his study with a laptop on the table and Coffee Mug in his hand. His colleague who shot frames was shot in broad daylight; he could not get an FIR registered. I did what I knew best, and yes I pelted stones in protest against this cowardice of the police. Street is my school, and this is what I have been taught. Get an FIR registered for your colleague with your university degree in hand and we will talk my brother. Intelligentsia scorn me, to them I am a ruffian, and they refer to me as the lumpen proletariat. They are all learned scholars, poets, linguists, writers; they are mirror of our society.

When I and my friends were slaughtered on the streets some Rahi lost his way in the commotion, and found himself in a hall were some Gyan Peeth award was given to him by someone whose hands were smeared with our dirty blood. He accepted the award with hands folded in benediction, feeling at last he has found his way not knowing Rahi has been lost in wilderness forever. When men of intellect stoop so low I do what I know best, yes I pelt stones in despair. I have one question for all you learned men. Do those Shawls of honour have smell of our blood and warmth of the breath of a dying stone pelter? By the way was it not the proletariat who brought a revolution, an old news paper I found with” Sulla Masala” talks about that.

Enough of arguments, after all I am a stone pelter I can not win an argument with you, for you are learned men. It is clear to me my countrymen that I am an impediment to your progress, it pains me, I don’t want you to be backward, I want you to prosper. What then is the solution? I can not stoop to your level nor can you rise to my level. Don’t you worry I have a solution. Let there be a role reversal for a day, you be the stone pelters and we the perennial stone pelters the target. I will gather all my friends at Eidgah and you stone us to death, we will take all your stones with a smile on our lips and a tear in our eyes, smile we will for your prosperity and tears will roll, for we won’t be there to see the smile on your lips when you achieve your prosperity. Having stoned us don’t you think you won, it is we who have won for once from masters of inaction you have become men of action, and did not we pelt stones all our lives just to make
you act.

One last request my countrymen, please do not make a graveyard for us, for you will make a ritual of visiting it every year along with our respected leaders , who will come separately, as they come to our funerals individually, strange not even our blood unites them. They say unity is possible only on principles, true how can blood of a stone pelter or chastity and honour of a common Kashmiri woman be a principle to unite on, and it must be some high principle. Even if you bury us don’t ever visit our graves for old habits don’t die we will rise from our graves and pelt stones on sight of a Hypocrite. Tell my mother I will miss her, for I had two Homes Street and her lap, and yes her lap was comforting but it was the street that was my calling.

As everything in the hospital room is becoming hazy and death is waiting to embrace me, I remember a couplet by some Iqbal, I read on the back of an auto rickshaw of a fellow stone pelter.

jis khak Ke Zameer Main ho Atish Chinar
Mumkin Naheen Ki Sard Ho Woh khake Arjmund.

Is it true my country………….

(Imran Muhammad Gazi is an MBA Pass-out Kashmir University. Feedback at gaziimran@yahoo.com)

Stone Pelting an act of war: J&K Government

2010-02-16T00:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/stonepelting-an-act-of-war-jk-govt/580232/

The Jammu-Kashmir government has decided to arrest stone-pelters for ‘waging war against the state’, a crime punishable with death or life in jail.

The state has already slapped the Public Safety Act against eight stone-pelters, all between 15 and 18 years old, over the past week while 16 youths from downtown Srinagar are being tried under section 121 of CrPC (waging war against the state). Sources in the state Home Department told The Indian Express that the government was ready with PSAs against “20 more such youths”.

The 16 youths were produced before a Srinagar Court on Monday. Police sought their remand for eight days, which was soon granted by Judge Masarat Jabeen.The boys, the investigating officer told the court, were directly involved in pelting stones at police and security forces.

However, counsel for the accused Rafique Joo said the youths were held in random raids across the city and were not involved in stone-pelting. He opposed booking of youth under Section 121 of CrPC.

J&K first started booking stone-pelters under the Public Safety Act during the 2008 Amarnath land row agitation. The first person to be booked was Nayeem Ahmad of Rainawari, Srinagar. Though he was released shortly after, Ahmad was again picked up in June last year during protests over the death of two women in Shopian.

IGP, Kashmir, Farooq Ahmad said he was not in a position to give “the exact number of youths” booked under PSA or Section 121 of CrPC. “I am out of station and don’t have the exact number,” Ahmad told The Indian Express

Kashmir: News Reports

2010-02-15T03:20:00.000-08:00

DNA

Back to back teen killings have Srinagar on the Edge

Locals blamed the CRPF. They said some vehicles of the central force were passing through the area when the incident took place.Even before the dust could settle on the killing of a schoolboy in the old city, another teenager was killed at Kralisangri-Brain near Nishat, 12 km from Srinagar, on Friday, leading to violent protests in the Jammu and Kashmir capital. Police said Zahid Farooq Shah, 17, was shot at when he was watching cricket. He was first rushed to SMHS Hospital and later to Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences for specialised treatment where doctors declared him dead.The CRPF denied the charge. “None of our jawans opened fire. CRPF was neither deployed nor patrolling the area at the time of the incident,” P Tripathi, spokesman for the force, said.

Washington Post

Teenager dies as protests rock Indian Kashmir

Mushtaq Ahmed, a witness, said paramilitary soldiers charged at a group gathered in a playground in Srinagar, the main city in Indian Kashmir, and began firing as they fled, killing his friend Zahid Farooq Shah, 17.

CNN

Clashes after death of second teenager in Srinagar

The main part of Srinagar remains under curfew-like conditions. Since early Thursday security forces have flooded the streets, most businesses have remained closed, and residents have stayed inside their homes. Police responded to the crowds with tear gas and baton charges to disburse the protesters shouting pro-freedom slogans. While the family of the teen alleged he was shot by Indian security forces from a passing vehicle, police said the boy died from what they called mysterious fire.

Hindu

On Butt's death anniversary, Life disrupted in Kashmir

A shutdown to mark the 26th death anniversary of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front founder Maqbool Butt affected life in the Kashmir valley on Thursday. The police clamped restrictions in many areas of the city to prevent protests. JKLF chairman Mohammad Yasin Malik and 10 others were arrested. “The police raided the house of Mr. Malik in the early morning and arrested him,” a JKLF spokesman said. Shops, business establishments, government offices and banks remained closed in all 10 districts of Kashmir. Traffic went off the road. In Srinagar downtown, the district administration clamped an undeclared curfew in several areas, including Eidgah, Nowhatta, Gojwara, Rajouri Kadal and Rainawari. Thousands of police and Central Reserve Police Force personnel were deployed in the old city. All roads were sealed with barbed wires. The restrictions came just two days after normality returned to the city after eight days of clampdown sparked by the killing of a 13-year-old schoolboy, Wamiq Farooq, and Zahid Farooq (16). The police also arrested JKLF vice-chairman Bashir Ahmad Bhat and six others when they tried to take out a rally from Abi-Guzar in Lal Chowk “Another front leader Mohammad Yasin Bhat was arrested at Nigeen in Srinagar. Two more JKLF activists Hafiz-u-llah Sofi and Mushtaq Ahmad were detained in their homes in Srinagar,” the spokesman said.

Kashmir Ripe for Endgame?

2010-01-14T00:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22745

By Badri Raina

I

I have before me the full text of the report on Kashmir prepared by Beersman Paul, President, Human Rights Council, Geneva, submitted to the Council at its 12^th session, 14^th Sept.,-2^nd October, 2009.

The report, which is titled "Belgian Association for Solidarity with Jammu & Kashmir: Solution Under the Indian Constitution," encapsulates the interactions and findings of Mr.Beersman during his "study tour through Jammu & Kashmir State from June 30-July 27, 2009.

After a brief, factual introductory, Beersman lists the individuals and organizations he interviewed during what must clearly have been an exhausting job of fact-finding, covering all three provinces of the state of Jammu & Kashmir and most shades of opinion, although I do not find any entries either for Syed Ali Shah Geelani (the only separatist leader who holds fast to the objective of accession of the state with Pakistan, via, no doubt the formality of self-determination), for Yaseen Malik (JKLF, who steadfastly espouses "independence" from both India and Pakistan) or any interview with a Kashmiri Pandit spokesperson (remembering that the Pandits, at the other end of the spectrum, want the state's accession to India to be unambiguously cemented.) The text can be accessed at http://basjak.org.

Hereunder is a bullet-point summation of the significant points made by some significant Valley leaders other than those whose allegiance to the accession with India remains firmly in place, often referred to as the "mainstream" parties and political groups. My catalogue is clearly not intended to reproduce the full text of what each individual/organization is recorded to have said in Beersman's report, but to highlight what seem to me the chief concerns of each.

Bilal Lone—member, Executive Council, All Parties Hurriyat Conference, (Moderate; APHC-M):

"I am convinced all these strikes, hartals, shut downs and demonstrations

won't get us anything."

"Unless India and Pakistan move closer, no prospects for Kashmir";

approves of back-channel diplomacy, and states that "Independence

is a far off goal."

Firdous Syed—former member, Legislative Council, surrendered militant:

"alienation of the masses with the system is profound"; the important

question is how to maintain contact with the people; the valley needs

roads, water, electricity.

Hashim Quereshi—J&K Liberal Democratic Party:

"against all hartals as they only harm the common man."

"I oppose Geelani."

"no peace until Kashmir issue is discussed between the three parties."

Azam Inqilabi—of "Mahaz-e-Azadi, member, APHC-M; once founder of the

United Jehad Council (since headed by Syed Salauddin):

"it is time when ossified ideas about the Kashmir tangle should give way

to progressive, futuristic,viable, and practical concept of empowerment of

Kashmiris";

no to "prevarication, procrastination, recrimination, polemics";

opposed to "violent ultra-isms";

"let Kashmir be demilitarized on either side of the LOC, let the two parts

be reunified. . .facilitate the installation of a genuinely elected parliament

where patriotic democrats will determine the nature and relations with the

neighbouring countries, especially India and Pakistan."

"free Kashmir" good for South Asia.

Bashir Manzar—ed., "Kashmir Images":

"victim mentality among Kashmiris always blaming Delhi instead of

analyzing ground reasons":

"Omar Abdullah not close to ground level";

priority—"restore law & order";

chaos: APHC and perhaps PDP (People's Democratic Party led by

Mehbooba Mufti, which argues for "self-rule" without bringing Indian

sovereignty into question) responsible for misguiding young people;

"class war";

Riyaz Punjabi—Vice-Chancellor, university of Kashmir:

"unemployment biggest challenge";

"other challenges": "environment, lakes, water resources, energy";

"militants lost public support': "people want peace, stability,

development & flourishing economy";

"most important aspect (for normalcy) is the return of the Pandits—

part and parcel of Kashmiri society"; "people want them to come back";

"should come back, join the mainstream as part of our society, and work

for peace and progress."

Hemlata Wakhloo—Secretary General, Indian National Congress:

"terrorism must be tackled";

"bring back secularism, mutual respect";

"Pakistan keeping the pot boiling"; "people not with militancy anymore";

no "communal killing since 2005"; random killing of "Village Defence

Committee" members;

Zaffar Iqbal Khan—Sec., J&K State Academy of Art, Culture & Languages;

Member, Working Group on State-Centre relations:

approving of Omar Abdullah government;

corruption is a big problem; govt., should be at doorstep;

"political level to be attended by New Delhi";

M.Y.Tarigami—(CPIM; member, Legislative Assembly):

Pakistan supporting agitation to bring PDP back to power;

political change needed to accommodate "anguished youth";

want opportunities;

"centre must come forward with political initiatives";

"talk to mainstream parties and separatists";

"democratic rights and civil liberties must be safeguarded";

time to "reduce disproportionate presence of security forces without

further delay."

Bhawani Bashir Yasir—Chairman, & former Head of Diplomatic Wing &

Sec., General JKLF, Ammanullah, Founder of Ensemble Kashmir

Theatre Akademi:

"problem will continue until root cause not addressed";

"India and Pakistan are playing with us."

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq—Chairman, APHC-M, and religious head of Jamia mosque in Srinagar:

Only suppressive, military approach in use;

elections made everyone "cheerful";

politicians and bureaucrats corrupt;

security forces receiving better equipment, more money;

"militant organizations receive money from Gulf states and

Moslem world";

Solution through 5 point proposal:

repeal draconian laws;
gradual demilitarization, starting with townships and cities;
encourage people to people contact; leaders of both sides should

sit together;

encourage more trade;
India & Pakistan should jointly start a process reaching out to the

people; revive the peace process

Shabir Ahmed Shah—Chairman, J&K Democratic Freedom Party, member,

APHC-M:

Centre does not want the two APHCs to unite;

political uncertainty; "people are killed, arrested, gangraped";

world order has changed; solutions through "peaceful, democratic means"

"world community must feel our pain."

Dr.Nusrat Andrabi—Member, J&K Muslim Waqf Board:

police should replace CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force);

infrastructure to be built;

environment to be protected;

water problems to be solved;

civil society to be strengthened;

more transparency;

centre must resume dialogue despite bad situation in Pakistan;

some peaceful solution to be found.

Ansari Masroor—President, Itehad -ul-Muslameen; member, APHC-M:

'separatists and authorities have no control over the people";

"agencies not wanting peace are deeply involved in agitations";

too many parties giving instructions;

"these strikes don't suite our struggle."

Five point programme:

India should accept it as a "disturbed area";
stepwise demilitarization & repeal of draconian laws;
free movement along LOC;
people to people contacts;
make borders irrelevant; "Kashmiris should be given chance of ruling themselves without interference from India and Pakistan." 1947 borders to be restored.

Prof. Abdul Ghani Bhatt—Chairman, J&K Muslim Conference; member, APHC-M:

"Geelani and his APHC are extremists";

"we are interdependent and have to create space for others";

"Kashmir problem must be solved. . .ensuring the survival of South

Asian region as a whole";

"our slogan remains azadi (independence)";

Self-governance for J&K;

Demilitarization on both sides;

Irrelevant borders vis a vis people/trade;

Joint management by India, Pakistan, Kashmiris.

Dr.Siddiq Wahid—Vice-Chancellor, Islamic University of Science & Technology, Awantipoora:

media unreliable;

problem rooted in 1947;

bad if opposition practices negative politics;

Omar Abdullah- a "ray of hope";

"see situation/future positively.

Shakeel Qalander—President, Federation, Chambers of Industry:

self-reliance and balance in trade;

"Kashmiri alienation from India is there";

"Abdullah always advocated an independent buffer state."

Mehbooba Mufti—Head, People's Democratic Party:

"fundamental problem is Kashmir issue";

"there are no militants anymore";

So, "security forces should be withdrawn";

"internal and interregional self-rule";

"we want a solution within the Indian Constitution, without

challenging Indian sovereignty."

Feroze Kacho—Executive Director, Kargil Development Project & State Sec.,

PDP:

"PDP closer to the issue of J&K";

Thupstan Chhewang—Ladakh Union Territory Front:

PDP doesn't want Omar to succeed;

India is soft toward Pakistan;

Buddhist minority treated as slaves;

Ladakh must become Union Territory.

Beersman's Conclusions:

It must have seemed to Beersman that extreme positions are scantily reflected in this swathe of opinion, which may be the reason that both the pro-Pakistan Geelani APHC and known pro-India forces, both in the Valley and in Jammu province find small space in his report.

Noting that J&K is at present under the rule of three countries—China controlling Aksai Chin and a territory of 5180 kms ceded by Pakistan, India in control of J&K state, comprising Jammu region, the Kashmir Valley, and Ladakh, and Pakistan in control of Azad Kashmir (POK), Gilgit & Baltistan (Northern Areas), Beersman makes the following concluding observations:

--J&K must remain united within 1947 borders, and a modus vivendi needs to be struck between the Valley and Jammu province;

--that violence stands rejected all across the board;

--"Pakistan should stop cross-border terrorism and cross-border infiltration; stop sending money, ammunition, weapons, stop giving training. . . .As long as Pakistan supports terrorism, openly or covertly, there cannot be peace in J&K; without peace there cannot be a solution."

--priority must be given to the sufferings of Kashmiris; stop violence and deception; "Kashmiris are fed up with violence."

--"common bandits" are "taking advantage of situation"—"abducting people for money, raping, murdering, extorting money from business persons, using mafia practices under the cover of ‘the movement'";

--"it is easy to blame the security forces of all crimes that are committed";

--"composite dialogue must go on";

--who should represent the population?

--"dissident leaders do not have a solution"; "'let a tripartite dialogue start and a solution will emerge automatically' ‘is their view'";

--"The Kashmiri Pandits are the original Kashmiri speaking inhabitants of the valley. They were hounded out of the valley by militancy in 1990: some 500,000. . .fled to safer places. This exodus changed drastically the demographic composition of the population in the valley. After more than 19 years, the return of the Kashmiri Pandits is more and more blurred. Nevertheless, they have their emotional attachment with their birth ground, their roots. They only can return when peace is there and when the rule of law, not the rule of the majority is installed."

--no doubt about human rights violations, both by security forces and militants:

"dissident leaders do not mention and are not critical on human rights violations committed by militants"; security forces should show restraint.

--"terrorism must be tackled. The government must bring back secularism and mutual respect."

--natural for youth in troubled times to be abnormal;

--"construction and reconstruction continues. . .roads, office buildings, medical dispensaries are being built"; "shopping centres, hotels, residential areas, houses, posh villas, etc.,are being built, renovated"; "mobile phone became common good, and is operative in remote areas, and car-park is completely westernized, and latest and most expensive models can be seen."

--Private industry can come up only when peace is restored;

-- the "cry for self-determination by some parties is supported by Pakistan";

"However, accession to Pakistan is (at bottom) the only... option" desired;

"Indeed, according to the Azad J&K, Interim Constitution Act, 1974, Part 7(2), ‘no person or political party in Azad Kashmir shall be permitted to propagate against, or take part in activities prejudicial or detrimental to the ideology of the state's accession to Pakistan."

--"all options should be left open, such as accession to India...to Pakistan, Azadi, total independence, partition";

--"Pakistan has no stand in J&K. Pakistan raided J&K and is at the origin of the de facto partitioning of the state. As early as 13^th August, 1948, the UN Commission for India and Pakistan requested Pakistan to withdraw its troops from the state as a precondition for organizing the Plebiscite. The same Commission in its Resolution of 5^th January, 1949 repeated the request. Until this date Pakistan has not withdrawn its armed forces, and consequently the Plebiscite has not been held."

--"This conclusion is confirmed by the ‘Report on Kashmir: Present Situation and Future Prospects' of Rapporteur, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, Vice Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Union, and almost unanimously adopted by the Committee on Foreign Affairs (March, 2007)."

III

Inference:

The Beersman interviews (of which all are not included here) and his conclusions thereof taken together, alongwith other historical inputs, and this writers's repeated visits to the valley would seem to make the following inferences germane and valid:

--that whatever hopes may have been vested in the praxis of violence on whichever side have come to naught;

--that Kashmiris are truly and finally sickened of killings, whoever be the killers;

--that the longing for peace and stability is a felt one, impelled also by the aspiration among young and talented Kashmiris to make a future for themselves;

--that most hanker for a credible internal democracy, informed by transparent and just governance that can be trusted to redress the groud-level livelihood and developmental needs of Kashmiris;

--that alongwith peace and democracy, the desire to see the back of draconian laws and of the security forces is overwhelming and ubiquitous;

--that most Kashmiris wish to see the LOC made irrelevant for purposes of travel and trade, even as no one argues for any partition or separation on the basis of region, religion or ethnic diversity;

--that most Kashmiris recognize (after Bangladesh and the current turmoil in Pakistan) that religion does not make a viable basis for nationhood;

--that, despite the tragic exodus of the Pandits, they continue to find home and hospitality whenever they visit the valley, and that Muslim Kashmiris would like to see them return, not into sequestered ghettos but as they used to be; just as Muslim Kashmiris also wish to see them assume their allegiance to the valley, sharing the suffering and the risk;

--that most organized groups hold dearly, variously, to concepts like "self-rule" and "greater autonomy" without challenge to Indian sovereignty;

--that Muslim Kashmiris harbour a just grievance about opportunities in the mainland remaining opaque to them because of sectarian politics and prejudice;

There has been some evidence recently that the government of India is beginning to be more accepting of concretizing more fully the "special status" that the state of J&K has under the Constitutional dispensation. There remains a doubt as to how far Pakistan which fully dictates political and administrative functions in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir may stretch itself with regard to according a matching autonomy to territory held by it.

Nonetheless, given the climate of opinion all around, including the global zeitgeist, there is no reason why India should dither from making bold expansions of autonomy in J&K state, coupling those moves with effective and concrete transformations in law and the constitution to ensure that the regions also are accorded internal autonomy in as many functions as feasible by consent.

A greatly useful first move would be to send the army back to border areas, and leave the policing of cities and towns to the local police whose efficiency and training could be vastly invested in and upgraded.

A general amnesty for those undertrials against whom, after all, no proof of any substance exists could be another confidence building measure, making sure that work is found for them.

An open and unbiased calling to account of those involved in extra-judicial killings would seem a most restorative step, especially when accompanied by a repeal in most part of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

As Beersman and some of his interviewees have argued, no normalcy can be credible and genuine until as many Pandits return to the valley as want to. Ways have to be conjointly found, in consultation with the people at large, to make this a reality. Even as the Pandits need to realize that their claim to being Kashmiris must remain wobbly till such time as they do not take the plunge to assume the valley again, and do their part to revive traditions of syncretism still lauded the world over.

Just as right-wing Hindutva forces in the mainland need to recognize that the Muslim Indians who stayed back at partition time—or, for that matter, the bulk of ordinary Muslims who fled to the new state of Pakistan—cannot be held responsible either for the Partition or for the mayhem that went with it, Kashmiri Pandits need to understand that the mayhem of 1990 did not involve the general will of Kashmiri Muslims, although they might have done more than they did to meet that mayhem.

But, all in all, the relative performance of the Indian and Pakistani states, the protracted experience of Kashmiris of all communities, the state of dysfunction and regression across the LOC, the complete failure of the politics of violence—with or without cross-border terrorism—the new avenues of advancement of secularism as an idea (in inverse proportion to the disasters wrought world-wide by sectarian/religious ideologies), coupled with the wonderful world of science and technology—all of that makes the moment propitious for all parties to the Kashmir stalemate to push for an endgame.

To my own intuition, permit me to say an agnostic's "amen."

Mass Graves In Kashmir

2010-01-13T23:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.countercurrents.org/angana130708.htm

By Dr. Angana Chatterjee
Dirt, rubble, thick grass, hillside and flatland, crowded with graves. Signifiers of military and paramilitary terror, masked from the world. Constructed by institutions of state to conceal massacre. Placed next to homes, fields, schools, an army practise range. Unknown, unmarked. Over 940 graves in a segment of Baramulla district alone. Some containing more than one cadaver. Dug by locals, coerced by the police, on village land. Bodies dragged through the night, some tortured, burnt, desecrated. Circulating mythology claims these graves uniformly house ‘foreign militants’. Exhumation and identification have not occurred in most cases. When undertaken, in sizable instances, records prove the dead to be local people, ordinary citizens, killed in fake encounters. In instances where bodies have been identified as local, non-militant and militant, it demystifies state rhetoric that rumours these persons to be ‘foreign militants’, propagating misrepresentation that the demand for self-determination is prevailingly external. Mourned, cared for, by locals, as ‘farz’/duty, as part of an obligation,

stated repeatedly, to ‘azadi’. ‘Azadi’/freedom to determine self and future.
On 18 and 20 June, the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir (‘Tribunal’, convened in April 2008, www.kashmirprocess.org) visited Baramulla and Kupwara district to conduct ongoing fact-finding and verification related to mass graves at the behest of local communities. The team comprised of Tribunal Conveners Advocate Parvez Imroz and myself, a staff member, and camera crew.

On 18 June, we visited Raja Mohalla in Uri, Baramulla district, 110 kilometres from Srinagar, where 22 graves were constructed between 1996-1997. Then to Quazipora, where 13 bodies were stated as buried in seven graves in 1991. Then we travelled to Chehal, Bimyar village, Uri, holding 235 graves. We re-met Atta Mohammad, gravedigger and caretaker at Chehal, who testified that these bodies, brought by the police, primarily after dark, were buried between 2002-2006. Atta Mohammad said that the bodies appear in his nightmares, each in graphic, gruesome detail. Terrorised by the task forced upon him, his nights are bereft of sleep. Then we travelled to Mir Mohalla, Kichama, Sheeri, to the main graveyard with 105 graves, stated to hold about 225-250 bodies, buried between 1994-2003, and a smaller graveyard, with nine graves, adjacent to a sign proclaiming it a ‘Model Village’.

On 20 June, we visited the northern district of Kupwara. On the way we witnessed army convoys, including one of 21+ vehicles. Created in 1979 through the forking of Baramulla district, approximately 5,000 feet above sea level, Kupwara borders the Line-of-Control to the north and west. Between Shamsbari and Pirpanchal mountain ranges, it is one of the most heavily militarised zones, about 95 kilometres from Srinagar. Kupwara houses six army camps, as military and paramilitary forces occupy significant land. Seven interrogation centres have been operational with police stations functioning as additional interrogation cells. In Handwara town, a watchtower surveils and regulates movement.

In Kupwara, we visited Trehgam village, holding 85-100 graves, 24 of which are identified, and spoke with community members. Trehgam was home to Maqbool Bhat (b. 1938), founding figure of the Jammu Kashmir National Liberation Front. Acknowledged as Shaheed-e-Kashmir, Bhat is labelled a ‘terrorist’ by certain segments of India. He sought to unite the territories of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir into a secular, sovereign, democratic state. Bhat was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of India and hanged in Tihar jail in New Delhi on 11 February 1984. Maqbool Bhat’s nephew, Parvaiz Ahmad Bhat, reminded us that Habibullah Bhat, Bhat’s brother, was the first case of enforced disappearance before 1989.

After Trehgam, we reached Regipora around 3 pm and stopped for lunch. There, two persons introduced themselves as Special Branch Kashmir (SBK) and Counter Intelligence Kashmir (CIK) personnel, and questioned the Tribunal staff member about our visit. After responding, we proceeded to the ‘martyrs’ graveyard’ holding 258 graves, constructed in 1995. This burial ground is meticulously ordered, each grave numbered. The body of a 20-25 year old youth was buried in the first week of June, reportedly killed in an encounter in Bamhama village.

We stopped at a roadside tea stall to speak with local people about the graves. Four intelligence personnel questioned us, asking we disclose information about those we had visited. Soon, four additional SBK and CIK personnel joined the questioning. Other intelligence personnel made phone calls. By then, about 12 intelligence personnel gathered. Following further questioning we proceeded toward Srinagar. A car followed at a distance.
We detoured to Sadipora, Kandi, where locals stated that around 20 bodies were buried. The graveyard, overrun with wild flowers, is part of a larger ground used during festivals, including Id. Two of four bodies, killed in a fake encounter on 29 April 2007, were exhumed, identified as locals, contrary to police records stating them to be ‘Pakistani terrorists’. Saidipora holds Riyaz Ahmad Bhat’s grave, killed in the encounter, age 19. Police records, per the First Information Report, declared him a ‘Pakistani terrorist’. Riyaz Bhat was identified by Javeed Ahmed, his brother, as a resident of Kalashpora, Srinagar, based on police photographs from the time of death. Ahmed travelled with the Tribunal to take us to his brother’s grave. On his knees Javeed attempted to clear the thick brush. Later, in Srinagar, he testified that Bhat had never been involved in militancy. Javeed spoke of grieving, of imprisonment and beatings at the police station. He asked how he could have saved his brother from death.

After Sadiapora, we were stopped at Shangargund, Sopore, at about 6.40 pm, by three persons in civilian clothing. They forcibly boarded the car. We were ordered to the Sopore Police Station. There we were asked to detail our identity, employment, the purpose of the visit, and to hand over tapes which, the police alleged, contained ‘dangerous’ and ‘objectionable’ material. We stated that the Tribunal, a public process, was undertaking its work peaceably, lawfully, with informed consent, and that we had not visited restricted areas. We stated that the police had no lawful reason to seize the tapes. We were detained for 16 minutes.

After several calls to senior police persons, we were released. A red Indica car followed us to Sangrama. At Srinagar, Intelligence personnel were stationed at my hotel. On 21 June, I was followed from the hotel to the Tribunal’s office in Lal Chowk, where about 8 personnel were stationed the entire day questioning anyone who entered or left the office.

My mother, residing in Calcutta, received a query regarding my whereabouts from the District Magistrate’s Office. I was followed to the Srinagar airport on 22 June, and questioned, asked if I possessed dual citizenship. I do not. I am a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. On 24 June, I arrived in Bhubaneswar to submit a statement to the Commission of Inquiry on the Kandhamal violence against Christians in 2007 in Orissa. There too, Central Intelligence officials persistently inquired after me. In April, after announcing the Tribunal, I was stopped and harassed at Immigration while leaving India for the United States, and again on my re-entry in June.

The targeting of the Tribunal has not abated since the Amarnath issue erupted around 23 June. The volatile proposal to transfer 800 kanals of land to the Shrine Board, revoked on 01 July, was supported by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu militant Shiv Sena. Despite the Sena’s recent call to Hindus to form suicide squads, it faces no sanctions from the state. Kashmiris of diverse ethnicities and religions dissented the Amarnath land transfer. Community leaders in Kashmir explained that their stance against the proposal is not in dissent to Hindu pilgrims, but a repressive state. During the Amarnath land transfer protests, civil disobedience paralleled that of 1989, amid severe repression. On 30 June, in curfew-like conditions, we met with two families in Srinagar who narrated that the police had shot dead their sons. At one place, in the old city, while the men took the body for burial late at night, the police returned and destroyed property and molested women.

On 30 June, at about 10:10 pm, Parvez Imroz and his family were attacked at home by state forces, who fired three shots and hurled a grenade while exiting when family and community interrupted their attempts. Neighbours reported seeing one large armoured vehicle and two Gypsy cars, and men in CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) and SOG (Special Operations Group) uniforms. This murder attempt is an escalation in the forms of state-led intimidation and targeting aimed at Advocate Imroz. It is an attempt to make the Tribunal vulnerable and instil fear in us in an attempt to stop this process.

On 01 July, we met at Khurram Parvez’s home before addressing a press conference. Outside, jeeps with plainclothes men continued their observation, accompanied by a jeep with armed men in uniform.

Later, Advocate Imroz, Khurram Parvez, Advocate Mihir Desai, and I went to the police station to lodge a First Information Report. We were not permitted to do so. For security reasons, Parvez Imroz is not staying at home. Khurram Parvez remains under surveillance.

I must allow for distance before revisiting the graves. On 04 July, sitting on a plane at Delhi International Airport, waiting to take-off, I received a phone call on my India mobile, caller ‘Unknown’: “Madam,we know you’re leaving. Think wisely before coming back”.

Orders to unnerve the leadership of the International Tribunal by the Government of India’s intelligence and security administration appear to be generated at the highest levels. The general policy of surveillance should not be used as a pretext to create obstacles for our work. As India argues for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, the Government of India, as ‘Frontline Defenders’ stated in their recent alert supporting the Tribunal, must adhere to its own repeated commitment to peace in Kashmir and international conventions and laws. It must uphold democratic governance and safeguard human rights.

Advocate Imroz, Khurram Parvez, other members of the Tribunal team, have long experienced injustices for their extraordinary work as human rights defenders. A lauded human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz has survived two, now three, assassination attempts, the first from militants. Since 2005, his passport has been denied. Khurram Parvez lost his leg in a landmine incident. Gautam Navlakha and Zahir-ud-Din have been intimidated and threatened, as has Mihir Desai, in their larger work. It is noteworthy that the Government of India is adding intimidation to the death and rape threats delivered me by Hindu extremists for human rights work.

The work of the Tribunal is an act of conscience and accountability, fraught with the charge of complex and violent histories. Its mandate, in documenting Kashmir’s present, is to chronicle the fabric of militarisation, status of human rights, and legal, political, militaristic ‘states of exception’. The Tribunal’s work will continue through the coming months. We have received extensive solidarity from civil society; victims/survivors, at street corners, from villagers, ordinary citizens, those committed to justice. Each life in Kashmir has a story to tell. The subjugation of civil society has produced magnificent ethical resistance. The state cannot combat every individual.

Nearly two decades of genocidal violence record 70,000+ dead, 8,000+ disappeared, 60,000+ tortured, 50,000+ orphaned,incalculable sexualised and gendered violence, a very high rate of people with suicidal behaviours; hundreds of thousands displaced; violations of promises, laws, conventions, agreements, treaties; mass graves; mile upon mile of barbed wire; fear, suppression of varied demands for participation to determine Kashmir’s future, spirals of violence, protracted silence. Last year, Kashmir’s only hospital with services for mental health received 68,000 patients. Profound social, economic, and psychological consequences,and an intense isolation have impacted private, public, and everyday life. It has generated brutal resistance on the part of groups that have engaged in violent militancy. Repressions of struggles for self-determination and international
policies/politics have yielded severe consequences, creating a juncture at which the failure of governance intersects with a culture of grief.

Torture survivors, non-militants and former militants, that I met with testified to the sadism of the forces. Reportedly, a man, hung upside down, had petrol injected through his anus. Water-boarding,mutilation, rape of women, children, and men, starvation, psychological torture.

Brutalised, ‘healed’, to be brutalised again. An eagle tattoo on the arm of a man was reportedly identified by an army officer as a symbol of Pakistan-held Azad Kashmir, even as the man clarified the tattoo was from his childhood. The skin containing it was burned. The officer, the man stated, said: “When you look at this, think of azadi”. A mother, reportedly asked to watch her daughter’s rape by army personnel, pleaded for her release. They refused. She pleaded that she could not watch, asking to be sent out of the room or be killed. We were told that the soldier pointed a gun to her forehead, stating he would grant her wish, and shot her before they proceeded to rape the daughter. We also spoke with persons violated by militants. One man stated that people’s experiences with the reprehensible atrocities of militancy do not imply the abdication of their desire for self-determination. This, he stated, is a mistake the state makes, conflating militancy with the intent for self-determination.

He clarified that neither is self-determination an indication of allegiance to Pakistan, largely to the contrary.

The continuing and daunting presence of military and paramilitary forces, increased and sophisticated surveillance, merges with pervasive and immense suffering and anger of people in villages, towns, and cities across Kashmir. Parallel to the presence of 500,000 troops and commitment to nuclearisation, official figures state that there are about 450 militants in Kashmir and that demilitarisation is underway. In March 2007, three government committees on demilitarisation resolved that the ‘low intensity war continues’, placing in limbo troop reduction and the repealment of draconian laws -- the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958, imposed in Jammu and Kashmir in December 1990, and the Disturbed Areas Act, 1976, enacted in 1992. Local realities reflect that these laws and the military seek to control the general population with impunity.

Kashmir is increasingly defined as a ‘post-conflict’ zone. ‘Post-conflict’ is not the propagation of tourism toward an overt display of nationalism. Post-conflict is a space in which to heal, reflect, and enable civil society participation in determining peace and justice. The graves speak to those that listen. Those haunted by history are called to remember.

(Dr Angana Chatterji is associate professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal in Kashmir. A shorter version of the article appeared in Tehelka magazine’s recent issue).

The Political Uses of Official History of Kashmir

2010-01-13T23:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.countercurrents.org/junaid020708.htm

By Mohamad Junaid
The newly-formed Institute of Kashmir Studies has provoked a shrill debate among academics, and also in some sections of the civil society. The debate, despite its frequent tumble into abuses and allegations, is only a sign of how the story of Kashmir can no longer be a monologue, but must contend with a democratisation of its recitation. There are many stories of Kashmir now, all vying for validity, but none commanding authority. The history of Kashmir is no longer something which can be imposed from above: its democratisation will ensure that it will always remain in the making, and never find its conclusion. It is being created as it is spoken about.

The postmodern re-evaluation of the nature of history has managed to put the old correspondence theory under a cloud. The earlier emphasis that the past is "out there" for us to discover and reconstruct, unmediated by language, does not hold substance, since it is widely agreed that language is a contaminated medium, facts/evidences are pre-fabricated, and our understanding of the past stands upon layers and layers of narratives; all of which, instead of leading us toward any "basic truth," actually drive us farther away. Kashmir's history, like Kashmir itself, is getting written, written-over, and rewritten. It is not that new irrefutable evidence is emerging, but the realisation has dawned that the version of history, which till now we thought was "the history," is just a story; and, it is possible to have alternative stories.

This present process of history-creation, however, is not taking place in a neutral, fair space. As happens always, the votaries of the official story are afforded a moral high-ground by the state: their version of history is seen to further ostensibly benign values of the state; they do further values, but not always the benign one. Any mark of dissent is branded as malignant and fit case for erasure. Take, for instance, R. K. Bhat's vitriolic response to M. Ashraf's comments (both published in this newspaper) on the institute's vision statement. It would be pointless to decry Bhat, who clearly betrays an ill-intent in trying to noisily silence Ashraf by calling him "rabidly communal," "bigoted," and a supporter of ethnic-cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits rather than engaging in a scholarly manner with some of the pertinent issues that Ashraf raises. Bhat's spat is like a bubble coming out of the gelatinous potage of old hegemony. He is shocked to see someone showing a dare to challenge his history; perhaps this is what has evoked a venomous outburst from him instead of stirring him to be circumspect about his own position. Bhat's statement of the "fact of history" that Kashmir got its name from "Kashyap Muni," repeated ad nausea by others too, will not find the natural acceptance of the yesteryears anymore: from history it has been dethroned and returned to its vague mythic status. It becomes important now to add "it is believed," or, more importantly, "a religious community believes," before we proclaim that Kashmir took its name from a drummed-up sage called Kashyap Muni. Yet Bhat will not delimit his truth-claim. His potage has been solidifying for many years instead of becoming more fluid like the society around him. The arrogant certainty with which he deludes himself is twice removed from present debates about the discipline of history: he not only refuses to accept what he remembers as the history of Kashmir as just another narrative, but on top of that he privileges improbable myths as history. In places with moderately decent academic freedom Bhat would be laughed at, but in Kashmir we have to listen to him.

It is important to keep in mind what Michel Foucault said: hegemonic discourses are hand-in-glove with power, in that they reinforce it. The discourse on Kashmir's past, too, is interminably linked to the power (read continuation of Indian control over Kashmir). As a case in point, the categories through which Kashmir's past and present are viewed are not, and can never be, adequate. Categories like "syncretism" and models like the "cultural mosaic" were constructed in the last few decades and inflicted upon Kashmir's past. I am not arguing this to give any credence to the opposing view point that Kashmir had either a pure Hindu or a pure Islamic past, but to question the uses and abuses of "syncretism" as a category of understanding. Syncretism points to the commonality of some doctrinal elements and not simply to the commonality of everyday life practices. At the doctrinal level, Hindus and Muslims have never shared much, apart from certain universal values which don't amount to much in analytical significance. Of course, the everyday life in Kashmir has been to a great extent marked by hybridity, but that is the case with most other societies, which precludes Kashmir's uniqueness. In his work on kinship relations of Kashmiri Pandits of a southern Kashmiri village, T. N. Madan ignored Muslims who constituted a huge majority of the village, as if there was rigid segregation of the two communities. Well, if Madan couldn't detect any syncretism in the late 1950s how is it that we have suddenly found it now? Syncretism has a political use. Muslim syncretism suits India's 'national integration' project: it softens the Muslimness in Muslims, and reveals a Hindu influence on them, apparently to the formers advantage. It matters little that the same syncretism is not asked of Hindus. The "pure" form of Islam (whatever that means) is naturally assumed to be dangerous, but pristine Hinduism (again a misnomer)—in the way Kashmiri Pandits value caste purity—is seen as unproblematic. Kashmir's syncretism is also called "Kashmiriyat," which is made out to be the dominant feature of Kashmiri society. How is it that a fragile social interaction between 95 percent Muslims and 3 percent Hindus is constructed as the dominant feature of Kashmiri society? Clamouring Kashmiriyatists may erase the socio-economic dimensions of that interaction, but to suggest that everything was hunky dory is to live in a state of denial. For instance, the way Madan "objectively" mentions Muslims (rarely as he does) as performing impure rites for Hindus, as midwives, or tillers of Pandit land, or Muslims in general being "polluting," without pausing for a moment to question why it should have been like that, underscores this point. Similarly, the lack of any major Kashmiri Muslim rebellion during a large chunk of the Dogra period does not indicate that relations between the explicitly pro-Hindu rulers (and the Pandit beneficiaries) and their systematically-impoverished Muslim subjects were harmonious.

Given we have a consciousness to inform our understanding that the official history is used to prop up the state's legitimacy we can unearth its basic components. For instance, the clue to work loose the mainstream Indian discourse on Kashmir is quite starkly presented in Bhat's article itself, when he seeks to find the basis for Kashmir's inclusion in India in Hinduism. Bhat spends almost 90 percent of his piece finding this Hindu connection, while he half-heartedly devotes a small paragraph on 700 years of Kashmir's latest history. My intention is not to suggest that times and societies prior to Kashmiris' transition into calling themselves Muslims cannot be a proper subject of history-writing, but the way emphasis is put on trying to find roots of Kashmir's 'essence' in Hinduism, is at best ridiculous. The same way, what the vision document of the Institute of Kashmir Studies, which Bhat cites, claims—historically Kashmir has been integral part of the cultural mosaic of India and no study of Kashmiri thought and cultural is possible without situating it in the broader perspective of Indian thought and culture—smacks of a brazen attempt to add one more piece of state historians' fantasies to the official, and politically-expedient, history of Kashmir. That "India" as a geo-national construct, and "Hinduism" semiticized to be its religion, being 19th century products of elite, upper caste, imagination should be taken into account before dim-wits are tasked to come up with such half-baked statements.

For other Kashmiri historians who have been contesting arguments such as that of Bhat's for decades now, they too must display caution while claiming to know "facts." The real contest is not about whose facts are right, but about who displays a critical capacity to expose the inbuilt power equations within certain forms of historical narrative. A postmodern consciousness expects us to keep in mind the relativity of our own historical interpretation, and awareness that after all it is just another story. Otherwise, we commit the mistake of seeing the past through our present lenses, like a Bhat or a Madan does, who see Kashmir's past as a history of persecution of Kashmiri Pandits. In Kashmir, though, one needs to acknowledge that the state propagates the official history (which is what the Institute of Kashmir Studies envisions to do), and those people that contest it are either muzzled or marginalized. Kashmir's nonconformist historians are accountable to the most marginalised, yet politically alert, Kashmiris, who have often been bruised by state-sponsored histories; this is what democratisation of history-writing means. People no longer take "facts" without a pinch of salt. Many historians need to catch up with that habit. If that is done, then people like Bhat would need a lot more than an armoury of abusive polemic, and the Indian state much more than the military muscle, to stifle budding challenges to the hegemonic discourse on Kashmir's past and present.

Articles on Elections in Jammu and Kashmir

2010-01-13T23:01:00.000-08:00

Kashmir: Illusion And Reality Of An Inconvenient Truth
by Tariq Shah

We now hear the Indian Prime Minster hailing the Kashmir vote as a ballot for "national integration". People are more interested in development and good governance than Azadi, we are told, while hundreds of reports in the Indian and the international media confirmed by India's own chief election commission-- suggest that people voted not for integration with India but for pani, bijli and sadak, without compromising their aspiration for a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir issue.

That people's participation in the highly controversial election will, at best temporarily, help the Indian propaganda machine, was a foregone conclusion. The cruel joke is that the otherwise prudent prime minister himself unleashed this propaganda. In doing so, he has heaped insult on the intelligence of those who shouted from the rooftops that they did not vote for integration with India but for the realization of their mundane daily needs jobs, water, roads, power, schools, and healthcare.

[read the rest here: http://www.countercurrents.org/shah080109.htm]

Why People Defied the Election Boycott Call in Jammu and Kashmir
by Ghulam Nabi

The large scale turnout surprised the pro-freedom leadership and pro-Indian parties as well as the state of Pakistan and India. While the Indian state project the voter turnout in favor of Indian state, Kashmir based political parties including the ruling party believes this vote is for development, not for the resolution of Kashmir. New Delhi based news channels and news papers forgot their journalistic ethics which they often do, when it comes to the matter of projecting India as a biggest democracy, and Kashmir as an integral part of India. While some news papers and news channels projected the voter turn out as the defeat of separatist sentiment in Kashmir, while the others wrote Pakistan should stop now taking about Kashmir, as the kashmiris have shown faith on Indian democracy. Indian president in her address to the Nation on the eve of 60th Republic day of India also projected elections in Kashmir as the Kashmiri people’s faith on Indian polity. One wonders how she could forget the protests of hundreds of thousands of people in recent Amarnath controversy when people marched to the streets of Kashmir to demand for Aazadi (independence). On the other hand this was again the time when separatist like Mirvaiz Umar Farooq, first time confessed that the governance and resolution are two separate issues ,alas had separatist leadership realized it earlier we would not have lost hundreds of lives which were killed because they either contested election or casted their vote .

[read the rest here: http://www.countercurrents.org/nabi280109.htm]

A Just Peace In Kashmir? Reflections On Dynamics Of Change

2010-01-13T22:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.countercurrents.org/shapiro070809.htm

By Richard Shapiro

What are the various roles that diverse constituencies must play to facilitate political processes that undo militarization and subjugation in Indian administered Kashmir? How can systemic structures that institutionalize violence, cultural annihilation, economic impoverishment, and political disempowerment be countered through non-violent, ethical resistance? What alliances are necessary to allow hope for overcoming cycles of oppression and breaking with histories of domination? How can international, national, and local actors and institutions work together to disrupt socially unnecessary suffering and ameliorate the conditions of existence? What forces must cohere to enable a just peace to emerge in a democratic Kashmir in the foreseeable future?

Numerous obstacles present tremendous challenges to movements for social justice. The current world order is predicated on systems of inequality that hierarchically divide countries, peoples, cultures, classes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and faith traditions to the benefit of the few and the detriment of the many. Dominant powers prescribe the rules of the game to their advantage and utilize knowledge, technology, and markets to structure social relations in their interests. The new global order presents itself as the best of all possible worlds in which sovereign nation-states organized through representative democracy, rule of law, free markets with government regulation, Enlightenment rationality, and human rights are promised as the solution to the problems of poverty, war, ecological devastation, genocide, and terrorism.

This dominant narrative of progress through the spread of capitalism organized in nation-states and guided by knowledge has attained hegemony as it has captured the imagination of postcolonial nations like India. Postcolonial nations have largely reproduced the structures of colonial oppression and organized themselves to become players in the existing global order as militarized, hyper-masculinized, nuclear powers measuring their worth on the basis of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Emerging middle-classes of massive proportion in postcolonial nations like India buttress this process of nation building that mirrors and enforces dynamics of globalization through the production of unparalleled poverty, massive and multiple dislocations, genocide of indigenous peoples, ecological disaster, and abundant psychological malaise. India is embraced by the international community, meaning largely the United States and Western Europe, precisely because it marches in step with the new world order. India amasses great cultural capital as “the world's largest democracy” in spite of the fact that it is home to 40% of the worlds most economically destitute, and seeks to constitute itself as a nation through policies that disregard the needs of the vast majority of its population.

India is inventing nothing new in its self-constitution as a powerful nation-state. National identity is being fabricated through the equation of India with Hindus, in blatant form in entities like the RSS and BJP, and in more subtle form in the Congress and progressive Indian citizens for whom nationalism linked to 'Hindu cultural reassertion' is an unreflective response to a colonial past. The equation of Hinduism (unity in diversity) and Christianity with tolerance for difference, and Islam with terrorism, backwardness, and fanaticism, functions as a global trope supportive of unleashing disproportionate violence on Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, as well as within the territory of India in Gujurat, Orissa, and in the 'disputed territory' of Kashmir. India forms itself as nation with unexamined Hindu majoritarianism at its base, just as unexamined Christian cultural dominance organizes the United States, rendering explorations of the links between religionization, nationalism and particular secularisms close to impossible. India is also typical in its self-formation as nation in fashioning internal and external enemies as crucial to defining itself, and super-exploiting its most proximate 'others' to fuel its prosperity. European nations had the Jew as internal enemy. The United States is founded on the backs of its twin others - enslaved Africans and massacred Native Americans.

India has as its main 'internal other' the Muslim, who can take no solace in also occupying the role as external enemy in India's dominant narrative. This double site is what the state uses to legitimate the brutalization of the Kashmiri people. Firstly, there is India's need for a majority Muslim state within its borders to legitimate itself as a progressive, pluralistic, secular nation. Without a Muslim majority state within India, India cannot as easily legitimate itself as a progressive member of the new global order. Secondly there is India's need to establish national identities that take precedence over regional, local, traditional identities. As a nation, India is in the process of seeking: (1) to establish territorial dominion over the current boundaries of the nation, (2) attain a monopoly on the means of violence, and (3) organize human and natural resources to enhance the productivity and power of the nation. Every nation that has achieved the normative status of modern democracy has utilized sustained and prolific violence to realize these three imperatives and in the process establish its identity. India is in a very vulnerable moment in this process as is evident from an examination of the myriad territories and forces fighting for autonomy in some form from the Indian state. Part of the strategy to foster national identity, simultaneous to providing very little to the vast majority of its population, and in fact fostering mal-development that impoverishes and displaces poor, rural 'citizens', is to fabricate an 'us' that must protect itself from 'them'. Without internal enemies India cannot unify itself as a nation.

This internal enemy is also resolutely claimed as integral to India. The state and its loyal subjects repeat the same refrain: 'Kashmir is an integral part of India.' 'Kashmir is integral to India.' Kashmir is the other that is integral to the self, a difference that is integral to the identity of India. How then does India treat this other, this integral difference? To debase, devalue, disrespect, destroy the people, culture, history, land, waters, aspirations, imaginations, passions, thoughts, of this other that is claimed as integral to self reveals much about India's current state of existence. What other measure is available to us to assess ourselves as ethical entities than how we treat the other, how we engage the differences to which we are ethically obliged to respond? What nation has satisfactorily answered to this call? If a day arrives when Kashmir is 'a nation unto itself', independent and sovereign, an equal to all other nations, will Kashmir point the nation-state in a new direction? Will the differences integral to Kashmir be respected, affirmed, heard and engaged? Will 'the other' be the call to 'the self' to practice hospitality? Will the Gujur, the village woman who buried loved ones and waits in silence for words of/from other loved ones, the atheist, the ardent believer, the Shia, the Sufi, the pundit, the Buddhist, the differently abled, the homosexual, the beggar, the prostitute, be welcomed as participants in constructing a nation that will be 'a light unto other nations'? Will the other be welcomed without the demand or structural incentive to assimilate, to mirror/mimic dominance to be recognized as human? These questions are too much, perhaps even unfair. Yet, is it not necessary to raise them?

Kashmir occupies a literal and imaginary border as inside and outside of India in ways that structure an impossible predicament. The state (and its elites and middle-classes) does not trust Kashmiris whose allegiance is always presumed to lie with Pakistan as an Islamic Republic, thus denying Kashmiris the rights of citizens of India, while asserting the inviolability of its sovereignty over Kashmir as a secular, democratic nation governed by equality under rule of law. The distrust legitimates military rule organized through special laws as necessary to provide law and order as a matter of internal security. Thus, on the basis of being part of a democratic state, the rights granted citizens of such a state are denied to Kashmiris. Inclusion in nation is coupled with dispossession from historical memory, rights, and life. India legitimates its mistreatment through a logic originating with European nation-states. This denial of civil and human rights, rule of law, and the freedoms of citizenship to Kashmiris is because the state must protect itself from forces within itself that threaten its character as a lawful, democratic nation. India must violate what is most inviolable, through a state of exception (the use of law to suspend law as definitive of sovereignty), to protect itself. The discourse requires the allegiance of the Kashmiri people to India, as proof that Kashmiris are not what the nation suspects - traitors and terrorists, as precondition to access to the rights of citizenship. These same rights of citizenship provided by the nation, while denied to Kashmiris, are used by India to justify its claims to being a legitimate state entitled to act as it does in Kashmir. As a legitimate state, India is predicated on civil rights and rule of law that it may legitimately suspend in the name of national security. Kashmiris must align with India given this legitimacy, while living as subjects without rights in so far as the state defines them as a threat to its sovereignty. India must violate what gives it legitimacy in order to protect itself from the internal enemy integral to it. India must destroy itself to protect itself. The state of exception produces a state of autoimmunity. India is also asserting itself as superior to other regional nation-states, and an emerging player in relation to Western Europe and the United States. Like other powerful democracies, India is entitled to do whatever is necessary to fight terrorism and strengthen itself as a powerful, sovereign, capitalist nation, aligned with the movement of progress (dominance).

Kashmiris are placed in a situation where allegiance to India as prerequisite to participation in a lawful democracy involves allegiance to a state that has no rational basis to demand or expect allegiance from the people of Kashmir. India needs to exaggerate the degree of cross-border infiltration and armed Islamist militancy to rationalize 500,000+ troops, blurred boundaries between police and army, and massive intervention in daily life through systematic surveillance, land seizures, checkpoints, torture, disappearances, gendered and sexualized violence, fake encounter deaths and countless daily humiliations calculated to break the spirit of the Kashmiri people. This reality is currently resisted through mass demonstrations, regular protests, strategic use of elections, strategic boycott of elections, navigating restrictions on 'free press', civil society mobilizations, legal cases, an International Tribunal, and regular acts of dignity, courage, and faith that characterize the present in Kashmir. India demonstrates the persona all too common in the 'league of nations' - to act with impunity and disregard for international law and local demands for justice. India uses this fiction of the Kashmiri as existing in the shadowy space of inside/outside the nation to legitimate an occupation that ignores the historical particularity of Kashmir and the promises made to the people of Kashmir to determine its own future. The plight of Kashmiri pundits also becomes an opportunity for the state to legitimate regularized violence and systematic oppression of Kashmiris. Were all Kashmiris, whether currently residing in the state of Jammu/Kashmir or elsewhere, to be given voice to express their will, free from coercion, retribution, and manipulation, the outcome would not be in doubt.

Kashmir is the longest standing disputed area in the United Nations, the most militarized spot on earth, and a drain on the hopes for prosperity, peace and freedom for people throughout the subcontinent, and the world. There is no moving toward peaceful coexistence between India and Pakistan, no stabilization of the region, no possibility for global nuclear disarmament, no hope for forms of development that prioritize sustainability and cultural survival over militarization, urbanization, and middle-class consumerism, no space for the impossible healing through mourning/memorializing the trauma of Partition, without granting self-determination to the people of Kashmir.

The realization of that which is demanded by rationality in service of justice and emancipation is always against the odds. In relation to Kashmir, a more peaceful future requires at least four interrelated movements: (1) Massive, non-violent, ethical dissent within Kashmiri civil society must continue and expand, attentive to alliances that build stronger relations between men and women, youth and adults, various faith communities, urban and rural, rich and poor, facilitative of inclusive forms of polity that enable a diverse, pluralistic movement for freedom. (2) Leadership must form a unified coalition that activates and learns from the multiple constituencies that make up Kashmiri society. Divergent desires and imaginations regarding the future of Kashmir should be encouraged and discussed, outside the search for homogeneity or conformity. A Kashmir free of subjugation should enable multiple forms of life through participatory democracy, just governance, and economic practice promoting health, education, and individual and collective prosperity. Natural resources, like water, should be both safeguarded, and utilized for sustainable development. Cultural heritage should be understood as an inheritance of all Kashmiris to fashion a unique society nurturing hospitality, innovation, and multicultural polity. (3) Education and mobilization to shift public opinion in India must be undertaken throughout civil society to expand pressure on the Indian state. Citizen delegations from the various states and communities of India must visit Kashmir to learn first hand about the atrocities, resistances, hopes, and concerns prevalent in Kashmir. Such delegations must bring their new understandings to their neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and places of worship to facilitate discussion and reflection that expand the voices of those who demand that illegal and immoral action in Kashmir done in their name immediately cease. Institutions in India must sponsor delegations from Kashmir, composed of diverse peoples who constitute Kashmiri society, to share the realities they have suffered and the need for alliance toward justice. Hindu faith communities must forge relationships with social justice movements in civil society in Kashmir to oppose Hindu majoritarian dominance and insist that the Indian state demilitarize the state of Jammu & Kashmir, become accountable to international agreements, rule of law, and human rights as the first step on the road to affirming the right of Kashmir to self-determination. Universities and the press must play a strong role in addressing the history and present of Kashmir to empower students and the citizenry of India to participate as informed members of a democratic republic, whose resources and conscience are systematically misused and violated by their government. (4) International solidarities from citizens, governmental and non-governmental organizations, students, workers, professionals, public intellectuals, faith communities, and all interested parties must be organized to educate, inform, advocate, and mobilize for the liberation of Kashmir. International institutions must be both utilized and strengthened as legitimate sites able to hold nation-states legally accountable for their actions. Research, education, and publication on the reality of present-day Kashmir and its modern history must be supported by and within universities, think tanks, and civil society forums. Campuses must become sites where students mobilize themselves to exert public pressure to ethically resolve the situation in Kashmir. Resistance in all four 'sites' must struggle to establish alliances, clarify goals, mobilize resources, deconstruct desires, and carve out space where different forms of polity and community, promoting ethical dissent, may live.

To commit to these practices secures no guarantees. The process must draw from the resolve of Kashmiris to struggle for justice and strengthen this resolve through principled alliance that breaks the isolation and despair that accompanies any people subjected to brutal mistreatment. The multiple legacies that inspire and haunt us must become the very sustenance that, through sharing, nurtures our struggle. Allow me to conclude by drawing from a source common to the three Abrahamic traditions, and of universal relevance in the present, Deuteronomy 16:20, Justice, Justice, You Shall Pursue.

Richard Shapiro is Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Articles on Shopian

2010-01-13T22:29:00.000-08:00

Shopian: CBI On A Spree Of Manufacturing Lies
by Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal

It didn’t take a single stroke for the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to demolish the allegations of rape and murder in Shopian as a figment of imagination. It took several months to concoct a suitable story in pursuit of a conclusion that was already being gradually and selectively leaked out to the media in the last few months. The new addition is simply the ‘scientific’ presentation of the medical examination post exhumations, that trashes even the few fragments of evidence pointing to rape and murder in Shopian and jumping to the conclusion of ‘drowning’.

[read the rest here: http://www.countercurrents.org/jamwal161209.htm]

Shopian: Manufacturing A Suitable Story
Fact Finding Report By The Independent Women's Initiative for Justice

The Shopian rapes and murders epitomise the wrongs and injustices perpetrated on the people living in a militarised society. The incident not only manifests the extent of fear psychosis, denial of security and democratic rights to the people, it also demonstrates the abject refusal of those at the helm of affairs to bring the culprits of gross violation of human rights to book. Shopian is not a case in isolation. It is a leaf out of history of human rights abuse and absolute impunity that men in uniform enjoy. The latter have been accused in thousands of cases for torture, humiliation, encounters, disappearances, molestations, sexual assaults and other forms of harassment. Jammu and Kashmir has a long list of rape victims, none of whom has received justice, of missing men whose families wait for them year after year spending their lives in absolute penury and uncertainty, of killed men, orphaned children and widowed wives. Shopian rapes and murders fit into this ugly tapestry of brutalities and violations by men in uniform and a culture of impunity.

The last two decades in Kashmir and other militarised areas of J&K are marked by not just brutalities by security forces but also the unlimited protection these personnel get. Despite massive allegations, with serious evidence pointing out to the same in many of the cases against the security forces, very few cases were ever investigated. In a negligible number of cases, prosecution takes place. In none of them has justice been delivered.

[read the rest here: http://www.countercurrents.org/iwij111209.htm]

CBI’s Mission Kashmir: Manufacturing Consent On Shopian Rapes, Murders
By Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal

The CBI may have succeeded in its mission in Shopian, that of what Noam Chomsky refers to as manufacturing consent about non-existence of any violations in the twin rapes of Asiya Jan and her sister-in-law Neelofar Jan. But this is only as far as the opinion outside Jammu and Kashmir, formed by a consistent over-drive of narration of lies, is concerned.

Within Jammu and Kashmir, especially in Kashmir Valley, the exercise of manufacturing consent, however, has not only met with skepticism but also renewed bout of disappointment and erosion of already fragile confidence of the people in institutions of the State. As Majlis-e-Mushawarat Shopian, spearheading the agitation for justice in the Shopian rapes and murders case for the last nearly five months, has pointed out: “The CBI appears to be completing the unfinished business of agencies previously investigating the crime.”

[read the rest here: http://www.countercurrents.org/jamwal261009.htm]

Arundhati Roy on Kashmir

2010-01-13T22:20:00.000-08:00

Listen to the interview at zmag:

http://www.zmag.org/zaudio/2832

Campaign for the Repeal of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA)

2009-11-11T23:18:00.001-08:00

Interaction with Friends from North-East & Jammu & Kashmir

Venue: All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Ground Floor, 35- 36, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg (D.D.U.), Rouse Avenue (Ahead of Gandhi Peace Foundation), New Delhi 110002; Ph- 2321 7320.

Date and time: 14 November 2009 (04.00 to 6.30pm)

Chair:

Uma Chakravarti

Speakers:

Friends from Jammu & Kashmir and North-East

Other Invited Speakers:

Gautam Navlakha (to be confirmed), Tapan Bose

Organised jointly by:

Campaign for Peace & Democracy, Manipur (CPDM)- cpdmanipur@gmail.com

Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF)- insafdelhi@gmail.com

Saheli, Delhi - saheliwomen@gmail.com

Manipur Student’s Association Delhi (MSAD)- msad.manipur@gmail.com

Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights, Delhi (NPMHR) - npmhrlink@gmail.com

New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI)- secretariat@ntui.org.in ; ntui@vsnl.net

The Other Media- tom@theothermedia.org ; campaigns@theothermedia.org

Manmohan Singh's visit to Kashmir: Reports

2009-10-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

The announcement of the troop movement came as Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who is touring Kashmir said the security of the disputed region must rest in the hands of police.

"The responsibility for maintaining law and order in the state will be increasingly devolved on the Jammu and Kashmir police," he said.

India moved about 4,000 soldiers from its Pakistan border in Kashmir in March. There are an estimated half a million Indian security personnel, including soldiers, deployed in Kashmir.

...

The troops who are being moved out are in the Jammu region and not the Kashmir Valley which is the centre of the revolt.

(read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/10/29/world/international-uk-kashmir-army.html)

Is a blood-splattered chapter in Kashmir’s recent history coming, after 20 long years, to an end? Maybe, maybe not, but at least one man believes change is coming: India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “I believe that a new chapter is opening in the peace process in the state and we are turning a corner," Singh told a news conference in Srinagar on Thursday.

...

The lack of trust is a problem in taking matters forward. “We were open when we entered into a dialogue with New Delhi in the past. All we demanded was that people on the ground should feel a change is taking place. We asked for confidence building measures like the release of political prisoners and repealing those laws that gave unbridled powers to soldiers, stopping human rights abuses, and troop withdrawal. But none of these demands were fulfilled”, said Mirwaiz Unar Farooq, chairman of the moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference.

(read the rest here: http://www.hindustantimes.com/jandk/Is-it-time-to-smile-in-Kashmir/470743/H1-Article1-470688.aspx#at)

When told that Hurriyat (M) chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq in his speech during London conference had justified the use of gun, Prime Minister said, “One should not read too much into the statements made in anger. We will respond favorably to all those, who have good and well being in their hearts for the people of Jammu and Kashmir.”
Expressing his willingness to engage and hold serious discussions with every group provided they shun the path of violence,” Singh said, “We have to carry all stake holders with us to achieve a permanent and peaceful reconciliation in J and K. This will help us concentrate on an ambitious development agenda that will lead to economic revival and reconstruction of the State.”
On Confidence Building Measures and Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Prime Minister said, “I have already maintained that CBMs should move further ahead. It requires cooperation of people and the government of Pakistan. We will be happy to discuss all these issues with Pakistan,” Singh said adding, “I sincerely hope that Pakistan will create an atmosphere in which negotiations can lead to a fruitful result.”
He, however, evaded the query on AFSPA.

(read the rest here: http://www.risingkashmir.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17966&Itemid=1)

Articles on the Amarnath Land Row

2009-10-13T21:58:00.000-07:00

Kashmir: The State Cultivation of the Amarnath Yatra

by Gautam Navlakha

Imagine if a Muslim governor of Rajasthan were to ask to set up an independent Ajmer Sharief Dargah development authority, with say, control over a large part of Ajmer city. What would be the response of Rajasthan's BJP government or the right wing Hindutva rabble-rousers?

...

Significantly, even the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttarakhand on May 1, 2008 limited the number of pilgrims visiting Gangotri and Goumukh to 150 persons per day so as to protect the fragile ecology of the area. Yet, in the case of Amarnath, and despite overwhelming evidence of environmental degradation posed by the huge increase in the number of pilgrims and large number of security forces deployed for protection of such pilgrims, there is no one who dares challenge the SASB's stubborn extension of the yatra. Indeed if the CEO of SASB is to be believed since "the population of India will increase we will have to consider further extension of the yatra period".

(read the rest here: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/navlakha080808.html)

How some faith based land claims are more equal than others

Nothing infuriates people more than double standards and indeed, this is something the BJP constantly plays upon with its accusations of "pseudo-secularism" and "Muslim appeasement". Yet, in at least two recent instances involving religious sites in different corners of the continent – Amarnath in Kashmir and the 'Ram setu' in the south – the appeasement of Hindutva forces at the expense of everything else, including actual Hindu sentiment, is glaring. The mainstream media does it, the political parties do it, and sad to say, the security forces are doing it, with one army officer allegedly saying they could not fire upon protestors chanting 'pro-India' slogans, even as they uprooted rail tracks and smashed public property. Alas, no such qualms were displayed when it came to Kashmiri fruit sellers defying an illegitimate blockade or even wounded people in ambulances. Evidently, all one has to do while abusing the law is wave the national flag, never mind that in doing so one is cheapening the flag itself.

…

It is also instructive to compare Amarnath with the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa, where a faith-based land claim – this time by adivasis and not caste Hindus – has been casually brushed aside by everyone from politicians, to the courts and the media.

(read the rest here:http://gyanoprobha.typepad.com/gyanoprobha/2008/08/how-some-faith-based-land-claims-are-more-equal-than-others.html)

Need to rethink our Kashmir policy

The ongoing turmoil in Jammu and Kashmir is unprecedented in its intensity and mass appeal, and has the potential to recast the State’s existing political realities as well as force a rethink of India’s traditional lines on the Kashmir problem and most certainly give way to newer political realities when all is said and done.

While comparisons are rightly made between the current turmoil in the State and the situation in the early 1990s (minus the militancy), what needs to be noted is that despite all the efforts by the Indian state (and use of all sorts of measures ranging from force to negotiations with the separatists) in the last two decades or so, the dislike, let us face it, that a large number of Kashmiris express for India is real and there for everybody to see. It doesn’t help any more to comfort ourselves by saying that this is only an urban phenomenon in downtown Srinagar and not all Kashmiris share this sentiment. The anti-India agitations in Kashmir have given us, as a nation, an opportunity to introspect on some of our policies towards Kashmir.

(read the rest here:http://www.hindu.com/2008/08/22/stories/2008082254791000.htm)

An immoral and illegal accord
by A.G Noorani

The accord between the J&K Government and the Shri Amarnathji Yatra Sangharsh Samity (SAYSS) on 31 August 2008 is far worse than the order by the J&K Government only three months earlier on 26 May 2008. It grants the SASS concessions beyond what the order did. It is one-sided and marks an abject surrender to violence, blockade and to communal forces. The differences between the order and accord are glaring.

[read the rest here: http://www.countercurrents.org/noorani030908.htm]