Political journals learned long ago that lurid or detailed descriptions of torture inflicted on individuals by repressive regimes do not motivate people to activism but overwhelm & demoralize them in the face of such bestial amorality. We faced the dimensions of that problem most recently in Assad’s gulag where 25,000 photos by a military photographer who defected show Auschwitz treatment of thousands of Syrian dissidents. The same barbarism prevails in India’s gulag where thousands of Kashmiris are held as political prisoners, tortured, disappeared, dumped in mass graves.
This article doesn’t describe so much how Indian forces brutalized & executed a 24-year-old working class man named Riyaz Ahmad Thickrey while in custody on spurious charges so much as it describes how little it took for them to arrest him in the first place & the unbearable impact it had on his mother & family. May he Rest In Peace.
Demand the immediate release of all political prisoners, the immediate end to the use of pellet guns, & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Indian troops.
#StandWithKashmir