“If you are an Indian liberal, there’s no better time than now to break from the national consensus on Kashmir. The brutal violence that you are seeing inflicted on your own fellow citizens is but only a glimpse and a fraction of what Kashmir has endured, and shall have to endure more of in the days to come. At this moment you are too aware and too alive to the images of state violence and state terrorism that have stunned you in your face, and you know too well the underlying hate and bigotry that makes such violence possible. You find it impossible to condone it, or to look away from it, as is only right – and you want to fight it to death. The traditional media is only showing this blindingly obvious reality in frames of half-truths and half-lies, balancing narratives between sufferers and victimisers, ‘both sides’, as they say. But you still know, and you can’t unknow. This is the state, this is what the state has always been, away from the media glare, doing what it takes. The time to condone and ignore is well past in the face of brute facts. You have come across the worse face of you and you can’t excuse it any longer. Plausible deniability, innocence, charades of democracy and secularism can’t be maintained anymore with a poker face – meet yourself in the eyes. If this is what your worse face can do to your own brothers and sisters who fight for a shade under your flag, imagine what it has the potential to do and what it has already done to those who don’t want this flag imposed on them. Your only choice is between approving of such genocidal violence or standing up against it. Your only choice is between standing with the fascists or standing with the people’s right to self-determination. And not just in Kashmir. There’s no middle ground, it can’t hold. It’s time you found yourself some courage.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
W.B Yeats”

–written by Burhan Qureshi, December 23, 2019