“Today, my mother was brought to court for a hearing. My uncle went there hoping to see her and shake her hand because the bars of prison don’t let you. But they didn’t let him near her. We filed an application, seeking permission for her to keep some books in her cell. The judge after scoffing at it, told her to read her charge-sheet instead, “to kill her boredom in prison.” Indian judiciary has always been a rubber stamp for occupation.”

–Kashmiri Ahmed Bin Qasim whose mother & father are both Indian political prisoners

“The ongoing attempt to redefine Indianness as a sense of collective loyalty towards the ideals of freedom and democracy that found partial expression in the Preamble to the Indian Constitution is the greatest challenge so far to the territorial, ethnic and religious conceptions of India on which is based the terroristic idea that “Kashmir is an integral part of India regardless of what Kashmiris think”.

Anti-fascism in India is a natural ally of Kashmiri self-determination, and the sooner Indians and Kashmiris agree on this as the basis of a larger anti-colonial movement in the subcontinent, the greater are the chances of building freedom and democracy in India and Kashmir.”

–Satyadeep Satya

“India’s chief of defence staff is talking about ‘de-radicalisation camps’ (a euphemism for internment camps) for Kashmiri children. You should be terrified, very terrified, because one day, they will come for your children too.”

–Kashmiri writer Mirza Waheed

“Dapan (it is said)
Before Isaac Newton invented gravity, bhakts could fly. He was being paid by Pakistan, obviously.”

–Kashmiri psychiatrist & poet Mudasir Firdosi

There is a current of academic socialists–some feminists, others who oppose feminism as identity politics–who consider themselves avant-garde thinkers by completely capitulating to patriarchy & misogyny. They write uninformed, smug, elitist, dishonest, incoherent tracts calling for the complete decriminalization of prostitution, no laws against human trafficking for sex or labor, surrogacy. These mostly white, privileged women seem to take pride in flouting feminism in the name of declassed, impoverished, immigrant, Black & brown women even whilst they ignore the voices of those women. They want every part of a woman’s body commodified, including her womb, her vagina, her soul. They want the sacred bonds of a mother with child reduced to a commercial exchange.

To pull this loathsome scam off, these socialists, with their entourage of slobbering halfwitted males, have to keep things ‘theoretical’, can’t actually examine the merciless realities of prostitution, trafficking, surrogacy for women & children, have to deny that children are involved at all. At the bottom of all this is a deep hatred & disrespect for women, especially those who are oppressed. If it’s not good enough for their Ivy League-educated asses or their daughters, it’s not good enough for the rest of us. Even the poorest & most oppressed women have dreams that do not include making themselves or their children commodities in fear for their lives.

Muslims ARE being attacked for their religious identity & for them to assert that in protests is a necessary part of the secular struggle for religious & political freedom. The assertion, including religious chants & symbols, is an expression of pride & defiance in the same way other oppressed groups have always done. Those who are alienated by expressions of Muslim identity & solidarity want to be progressive at the same time that they want Muslims silenced & made invisible.

Reposting this article by Faizaan Bhat about Maqbool Bhat who was executed in a New Delhi jail in 1984 at the age of 46. He is not just a leader of Kashmiri freedom but an inspiration & a giant to all of suffering humanity.

He said: “For us, azadi means not just getting rid of foreign occupation of our beloved motherland but also to remove hunger, poverty, ignorance & disease & to overcome economic & social devastation. One day we will achieve that. Azadi.”

http://www.wandemag.com/maqbool-bhat-ambassador-liberation/?fbclid=IwAR2j5vKLFk1WW3tcOzaHYt9d-1T1Va6Ht_cj0buGDDOze7LLYQs7sxyzDe4

“If you are an Indian liberal, there’s no better time than now to break from the national consensus on Kashmir. The brutal violence that you are seeing inflicted on your own fellow citizens is but only a glimpse and a fraction of what Kashmir has endured, and shall have to endure more of in the days to come. At this moment you are too aware and too alive to the images of state violence and state terrorism that have stunned you in your face, and you know too well the underlying hate and bigotry that makes such violence possible. You find it impossible to condone it, or to look away from it, as is only right – and you want to fight it to death. The traditional media is only showing this blindingly obvious reality in frames of half-truths and half-lies, balancing narratives between sufferers and victimisers, ‘both sides’, as they say. But you still know, and you can’t unknow. This is the state, this is what the state has always been, away from the media glare, doing what it takes. The time to condone and ignore is well past in the face of brute facts. You have come across the worse face of you and you can’t excuse it any longer. Plausible deniability, innocence, charades of democracy and secularism can’t be maintained anymore with a poker face – meet yourself in the eyes. If this is what your worse face can do to your own brothers and sisters who fight for a shade under your flag, imagine what it has the potential to do and what it has already done to those who don’t want this flag imposed on them. Your only choice is between approving of such genocidal violence or standing up against it. Your only choice is between standing with the fascists or standing with the people’s right to self-determination. And not just in Kashmir. There’s no middle ground, it can’t hold. It’s time you found yourself some courage.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
W.B Yeats”

–written by Burhan Qureshi, December 23, 2019

“The vehemence of the demand to prove the anti-CAA and NRC protests as being areligious is almost haunting. This itself justifies the need to assert our Muslim identities while protesting these communal laws that do, indeed, target Muslims. Call for secularity but not at the cost of obfuscating the real targets of this attack.

La ilaha illallah Mohammadur rasoolAllah!

Qalma bhi padhenge, ehtejaaj bhi karenge.
Aur kaaghaz nahi dikhaenge!”

–Aalia Shaikh

Kashmiri Faizaan Bhat interviews Anjum Zamarud Habib, a political leader of the Hurriyat with Syed Ali Geelani, about the role of Kashmiri women in the struggle for self-determination:

http://www.kashmirlit.org/dreaming-of-azadi/?