When Satya Pal Malik, who is an appointed Indian governor of J&K said, “It was necessary for the government to impose restrictions primarily to ensure that militants & terrorists are handicapped in their movements & don’t succeed to create fear and terror,” he was using Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ rhetoric to justify India’s barbaric siege & blockade.
By most reliable estimates, including from knowledgeable & respected Kashmiris like human rights leader Khurram Parvez, there were about 200, no more than 250, armed militants remaining in Kashmir in about 2016. Since the military crackdown on the 2016 uprising, India has been on an almost daily campaign of hunt to kill operations ostensibly to wipe out armed resistance. Though stone pelters & unarmed protesters often got the worst of these operations in injuries, deaths, livestock killed, homes vandalized & razed. According to figures from Indian officials & media, Indian occupying forces killed 213 Kashmiri militants in 2017, 222 in 2018, & 113 so far in 2019. That’s more than double the amount of militants that operated in all of Kashmir. Something’s not adding up to the truth.
Whatever one thinks about guerrilla warfare as an effective strategy, it is not armed militancy that the Indian Army is attempting to destroy in Kashmir. It is the considerably more powerful unarmed, massive popular resistance to colonialism & occupation, the undaunted demand for #azaadi that India is trying to destroy first through the occupation using pellet guns & hunt to kill operations & now through genocide & ethnic cleansing.
#StandWithKashmir