Oxford University students #StandWithKashmir, August 14, 2019.
Daily Archives: August 14, 2019
J&K Police now have to walk back this big fat lie since media on the ground, including Indian media, report they have seen pellet injury victims & we have seen a video where soldiers are shooting at unarmed protesters after last Friday’s prayers. There is even a video on YouTube (which I posted) showing pellet victims in hospital. One Indian reporter just back from Kashmir reported that hospitals are forced to turn away pellet injury victims so that fatality records cannot be kept. India doesn’t ‘win the hearts & minds’ of Kashmiris by locking them in their homes, cutting off all communications, or shooting at them & it does not persuade anyone else in the world of the justice of its barbarism by continually getting caught in monstrous lies.
This article which reports India’s defense of the telecommunications blockade in Kashmir, including the use of phones & internet, has to be read to be believed. ‘Social media had become tools to spread fake news, propaganda, instigate violence & provoke insurgency.’ Anybody ever see a Kashmiri do any of that on FB or Twitter? Did Kashmiris need fake news to protest colonialism & occupation long before the advent of social media? India really has to hire better propagandists since this stuff is pathetic.
Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior tweeted that legal proceedings were taken by police against “some Asians” (Kashmiris, Pakistanis, & Bahrainis) who protested India’s military siege of Kashmir after Eid prayer. The ministry “urges citizens & residents to not politically exploit religious occasions.”
This is the ministry that brutally repressed the Bahraini Arab Spring uprising with extreme violence, including with pellet guns & with Saudi tanks, with no respect for religious occasions, including attacking mourners at the funeral prayers of those killed by its soldiers & police. It continues to prosecute, torture, & kill those who resist oppression.
Indian activist Kavita Krishnan, economist Jean Dreze, & Maimoona Mollah spent five days in Kashmir on an investigative tour & gave this chilling report:
“We met people in villages all over Kashmir, where little kids have been… there is no other word to use… they have been abducted by the police. They have been picked up from their homes in the middle of the night from their beds and they are held indefinitely, illegally, either in army camps or in police stations. They are being beaten up. Their parents have no way of ascertaining whether their children will disappear or be returned.”
My Twitter wall has been denounced so often & so foolishly in Indian media that one wonders if there isn’t a method to their madness: India’s Home Ministry takes attention away from the telecommunications blockade in Kashmir & makes it all about a handful of writers & activists on Twitter. There are hundreds of Kashmiris outside Kashmir & their supporters posting powerful commentary, videos, articles. They can’t get us all banned but by making a stink about the four of us left, they can draw off fire for their barbarism about 12.5 million Kashmiris unable to even make a telephone call. Or is that to conspiratorial or assuming too much intelligence on the part of Indian bureaucrats?