Lets play bowling ball.

#covid_19 #pandemic #fear

By Mir Suhail Qadiri

The remarkable solidarity art of Rollie Mukherjee for Zulekha Adam’s book ‘The Boys of the Cave’ (available on Amazon).

Dear world,

Since you’ve realised what it takes to be in a lockdown with working high speed internet, please remember that Kashmir was in a brutal lockdown for 6 months with complete communication blackout.

It’s fucking hard to survive, no?
but we did, So will you!

regards,

مومن نواز‎

Surgical Strike 0.2

#IndiaFightsCorona

By Mir Suhail Qadiri

Lately, I’ve been reading the biography & poetry of Kashmiri-American Agha Shahid Ali who was raised & educated in Kashmir, came to the US at the age of 27 for further study, & taught here until he died in 2001 from brain cancer at the age of 52. Indian author Manan Kapoor wrote a tribute to Shahid where he described the highly-educated & cultured Agha family & said that Shahid’s “upbringing was absolutely secular”. That stuck out like a sore thumb in the eulogy. What exactly does being ‘secular’ mean? That one is an atheist? That one no longer practices a faith? That he’s a cool guy who won’t blush when you tell him an erotic joke? That he’s a party animal who likes to dance & swill beer with the best of them or that he’d fit right in at a Fifth Avenue cocktail party? When TS Eliot moved from the US to the UK, did anyone write that his upbringing was ‘absolutely secular’? Did anyone even give a damn what Eliot’s religious affiliations were or how absolutely he did or did not adhere to them? Why didn’t he have to prove his bona fides as a cool & secular guy?

Let’s be honest. It’s what you say about sophisticated people who come from Muslim societies to distinguish them from the rabid fundamentalism that Islamophobia ascribes to those societies. Tacitly, it means he came from a Muslim society but he’s no plebeian bluenose. He’s sophisticated & cool, certainly doesn’t read & probably doesn’t believe that Quran stuff nor go to Friday prayers. It’s a way to make Islam seem stodgy & stifling & suggests that religious Muslims are doctrinaire & unreasonable. It’s the notion that you cannot be a Muslim & a reasonable person too.

If we want to talk about secularism & fundamentalism, there’s a whole lot more to learn, especially about hypocrisy, from studying televangelists & their followers in the US than there is from studying poets from Kashmir.

(Photo is Agha Shahid Ali, 1990 by Stacey Chase)

How in the hell could Syrian officials know they have no coronavirus cases in the country? They’ve bombed most of the hospitals in the country where the testing would be done & are bombing refugee camps where the most vulnerable are living in squalid conditions without medical care. Their intrepid propagandist Eva Bartlett is in Aleppo reporting on the Shangri-la it has become under Assad’s dictatorship. Since she traveled from Europe through Lebanon & across the Syrian border without being tested, she well may be ground zero for the coronavirus in Syria, transmitting it through the army she’s embedded with.

It’s unclear why the NY Times dragged out Indian-American Yudhijit Bhattacharjee to write this piece of rubbish about the existential threat of terrorism in Kashmir. It’s unclear not only because our man is mostly a science writer with no apparent credentials in political writing but also because he frames terrorism as part of a territorial dispute between Pakistan & India & completely leaves out the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination & the presence of one-million Indian troops in Kashmir.

As a result of Kashmiri presence on social media, the news blackout that had prevailed for decades was overcome because media had to get ahead of the narrative to serve their own political purposes. Since the 2016 uprising in Kashmir, the use of pellet guns & the lockdown of Kashmir last year until now were treated somewhat honestly in media, including the NY Times. But the grisly & Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ narrative has become indispensable to US, European, & other nation’s foreign policy. This guy’s piece is not just accidental but may signal a shift in media coverage of the Kashmiri struggle. That matters more because of how Kashmiri access to social media is being truncated. We cannot let them hijack the narrative & twist the Kashmiri struggle for freedom into an Indian fight against Pakistani-sponsored terrorism. According to reputable Kashmiri human rights activists, the number of armed militants in Kashmir was under 200 people in 2016 & since then the Indian Army has boasted that hundreds of them were killed in almost daily hunt to kill operations. However many there are, they do not represent the character of the Kashmiri movement which is massive, popular, & unarmed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/magazine/masood-azhar-jaish.html?