Friends are reporting that Indian police are opening fire on unarmed protesters. At least nine have been killed in 10 days:
6 in Assam
1 in Lucknow
2 in Mangalore

 

 

The comment about the Indian protests by Indian activist Kanhaiya Kumar was removed since a Kashmiri friend informed me that he campaigns for Kashmir as an ‘integral part of India’. Recently, I also unfriended two Palestinians who do impressive work but who smear the Syrian Arab Spring & the Palestinian refugees tortured to death in Assad’s gulag as all terrorists. It’s not that I’m constitutionally intolerant but that I am unwilling to accept political betrayals of such consequence & that have created such suffering. There is more than enough compromise with war, occupation, & genocide. My belief is that we stand four-square with the oppressed & accept no compromises on their behalf. Period.

When I first started writing about Kashmir, I had a few hundred more Indian friends, including around Palestinian solidarity. They went ballistic & began hijacking & sabotaging every post I wrote in support of Kashmir, even about labor strikes. When people go nuts with the bitch & the whore language against me & even worse against Kashmiris to press their political views, something other than reason is operating. It was like arousing a nest of hornets or some elemental hatred. I had to block their asses because it was clear they wouldn’t stop lashing out until stopped. It must be terrifying for Kashmiris to be around that in India. That kind of stuff isn’t natural to human beings. We’re taught it. I know that from indoctrination in the US against Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, & against every people the US has gone to war against. We’re told, ‘They aren’t like us. They don’t have the same respect for human life’. Once you see through that crap, there’s no going back. These protests in India, like the Civil Rights & antiwar movements in the US, can be the beginning of the end for trash hysteria about Kashmiris, Muslims, Sikhs, immigrants & refugees. That depends a lot on how we build support.

Kashmiris are extending solidarity with Indian protesters despite being ignored & vilified as terrorists & separatists by most Indian progressives & socialists for 72 years. They are doing so because they, better than anyone, understand the character of Indian fascism. Nothing happening in India comes as a surprise to them since they have sustained the same & worse for so long. Still, they are responding not with spite but with active solidarity.

It’s true, as some have said, that there is no equation between the struggle against fascism in India & the struggle for self-determination & independence in Kashmir. No political equation except the monumental struggle against the common enemy of Indian fascism. If the Modi regime succeeds in establishing fascist rule in India, it will significantly weaken & set back the Kashmiri struggle for a long time. There is no percentage in using spite as a political guide. Solidarity is the iron law of social transformation & Kashmiris have never required prodding to express it with all the oppressed.

Kashmiris have long been the vanguard in educating about the character of Indian fascism since they’ve experienced it up close & personal in its most violent forms. They should be respected by the Indian movement as part of the leadership in turning back the tsunami of Indian fascism precisely because of their knowledge, their experience, & their undaunted commitment to freedom despite the brutal occupation. In that way, finally the grip of corrupt political forces can be broken & a nationally coordinated anti-colonial movement for Kashmir can be built.

(Photo is placard at Indian protest via Scroll)

Not sure exactly what is meant by ‘They’re turning India into Kashmir’. Could be an expression of finally grasping the savagery of the occupation & acknowledging what Kashmiris have been saying for over 72 years. Could be an expression of ‘why are they treating us like Kashmiris when we’re nothing like those terrorists & separatists’? That’s why the well-honed polemical & educational skills of diaspora Kashmiris remain so critical: to clarify the common struggle against Indian fascism without compromising the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination & independence from India.

The crisis of capitalism is so severe in its barbaric phase that the images of Guernica are daily life for billions of human beings. In such times, there is no retirement age for standing in resistance.