Kashmir: A merciless artistic polemic by Mir Suhail Qadiri
Daily Archives: February 24, 2020
The recent propaganda tour of diplomats through Kashmir appears to have backfired on India. Several of the 25 diplomats present say the climate for investment in Kashmir (i.e., participating in India’s expropriation & plunder of Kashmir) is unfavorable. Judging by media reports from August through October, many governments & corporations are concerned that India went too far in its complete lockdown & takeover of Kashmir. Not that they’re concerned about human rights or self-determination, but that Kashmiri’s intransigent resistance puts any long-term investments at risk.
Glad I’m not the only one who thinks this former Indian Supreme Court judge is an idiot.
Assadist ‘geopolitical analyst’ Vijay Prashad has spoken & written several times in the past few years about India’s occupation of Kashmir. For some reason, he is seen as an authority when in fact his track record & statements about Kashmir express not so much equivocation as evasion of the issue of colonialism & self-determination. Without once exhibiting any familiarity with the Kashmiri struggle, with Intifada, he’s against the occupation & calls for dialogue between India, Pakistan, & China. At no time does he call for the immediate withdrawal of all Indian troops nor does he ever call for self-determination for the Kashmiri people. As he presents it, Kashmiris are bit players in a territorial dispute, in a larger ‘geopolitical’ dispute.
In an August 2019 interview on RT (before Putin formally endorsed India’s lockdown of Kashmir), the interviewer made a smarmy imputation suggesting the 1977 bombings in Britain were by terrorists trained in Kashmiri Al Qaeda camps. He then asked Prashad, “What is the Al Qaeda dimension to this?” Prashad acknowledged that the majority of Kashmiris have nothing to do with Al Qaeda & then said terrorism is a problem that ‘has to be taken in a very narrow way’, that ‘it’s a police & security problem’–whatever that means. He went on to say the majority of Kashmiris ‘have since 1948 sought some sort of dispensation that allows them to lead ordinary lives’. The ‘some sort of dispensation’ he refers to, so clearly spelled out by Kashmiris, is self-determination & azaadi. Is that so hard for him to say because he does not agree with it? Is he as lost on Kashmir as he is on the Syrian Arab Spring & the US-NATO war in Afghanistan which he said was to ‘bring democracy to Afghanistan by ejecting the Taliban’?
A rightwing swami who heads up a Hindutva group put out a bounty offering Rs 1 lakh (US $1,400) on each of three Kashmiri students in India to whoever cut out & brought their tongues to him. The three young men were recently arrested on sedition charges for social media posts, not unlike how India filed a legal brief against all Kashmiris who use social media, citing them as terrorists.
It’s contemptible enough to support Syrian & Russian scorched earth bombing of Idlib & Aleppo. But it staggers the imagination that Assadists are referring to the flight from that bombing of nearly a million Syrians (who they portray as all terrorists, takfiris, & ISIS) in sub-zero temperatures as “a political conflict, not a one-sided “humanitarian” tearjerker”. That’s how low you go with cynicism in an age of genocide & counterrevolution. That is the political character of Assadism.
The photo is a little Syrian girl–not a takfiri–who was burned & disfigured due to a stove used to heat in the IDP camp where her family fled. ‘A political thing, not a tearjerker’!? Actually, it’s an apocalypse.
(Photo by Ghaith Alsayed)
(The quote is the title of an article by detestable Assadist Helena Cobban)
“To see the face of my 6-month-old baby girl through a WhatsApp video call might lead to my imprisonment in Kashmir. You can never imagine what it takes to be a Kashmiri.”
(tweeted by Sajad Rafeeq @sajadrafeeq)
“To show doctors outside Kashmir the reports of my sister who is diagnosed with cancer can get me in jail.”
(tweeted by AngryKangri @qazizaid89)
Most Assad & Putin propagandists call themselves ‘geopolitical analysts’. Geopolitical means politics as influenced by geography. What the hell does geography have to do with lies & apologia about police states?
People with disabilities have played a frontline role in social struggles for democracy & against inequality around the world from the anti-austerity protests in Europe to the Arab Spring uprisings. Disabling protesters has become a feature of the Kashmiri & Palestinian struggles against colonial occupation. Now, under the PSA, India is arresting many who are unable to participate in protests because of their disabilities. It should be said that disability rights & activists with disabilities are at the heart of the struggles for democracy.
Authorities have accused Shabir Wani, who has a severe bone infection and walks with a heavy limp, of leading a mob armed with stones and wooden stalks after August 5 last year.
https://thewire.in/rights/people-with-disabilities-are-being-detained-under-psa-in-kashmir?