Indian nationalist journalist Aarti Tikoo Singh is sulking & vituperating up a storm today because she & Modi fanboy Ravi Batra got their asses kicked at the US House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Kashmir. They both tried to associate India’s occupation & the Kashmiri struggle against colonialism & occupation with the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’. Singh tried to make the case that the occupation was in the best interests of protecting Kashmiri women from ‘Pakistan-sponsored terrorists’. As Ilhan Omar put it in her questions, Singh was trying to make a feminist case for the occupation. Saving Muslim women has become a banal axiom of the ‘war on terror’. Who can ever forget the nail salon in Kabul used to justify the now 18-year war against Afghanistan or how that rubbish is used to discredit the Syrian Arab Spring?
Unfortunately for Singh, Angana Chatterji is an authoritative Indian feminist & Nitasha Kaul an authoritative Kashmiri feminist, both with substantial academic & historic writings on the issue of women’s rights & considerable knowledge of the human rights crimes committed against Kashmiri women & children. They did not hesitate to bring up the leading role played by Kashmiri women like Parveena Ahangar in the struggle against human rights crimes by the Indian Army. Omar, Chatterji, & Kaul made chopped liver out of Singh’s nationalist lies & she will just have to live with the shame. Next time she pokes her snout out from under her rock to blame terrorists rather than the Indian Army for the violence against Kashmiri women, there are legions of other Kashmiri feminists & their allies waiting to take her on.