For the second time recently, someone has accused me of allowing expressions of racist hatred toward Indians as a whole, not just the Modi regime or Hindutva nationalists. Solidarity with the oppressed, not social hatred, is the political genre we have come to associate with Kashmiris, including in their polemics, when they have every reason to feel hatred confronted by one-million occupying soldiers shooting down their kids.
When expressing their indignation, often in a second language, rarely do they not distinguish that their anger is toward Hindutvavadis, not toward Indians as a whole who are in their majority oppressed. We are in an educational war against the Hindutvavadis & others are just looking to find fault. In that regard, we might want to keep the cow piss comments to ourselves lest it offend Hindus. But I’ll be damned if anyone can comb through our discussions & come up with more than a reckless formulation to document that racism toward Indians is profligate on this wall.
There are some extremely important developments in the Rohingya struggle for refugee rights in Bangladesh & against a genocidal onslaught in Arakan state, Burma. Because of the crisis in Kashmir, I have been unable to closely follow & report what is going on so I encourage people to follow Rohingya activists, websites, & journals on social media. In the next few days, I will try to do posts about what is going on.
India’s Public Safety Act (PSA) imposed in 1978 allows for administrative detention up to two years without formal charges or a trial. Those arrested, including young boys, can be held in Indian prisons hundreds of miles from their families. Apartheid South Africa had a similar law which it used against anti-apartheid activists & Israel uses a similar law against Palestinians. The PSA is used to incarcerate thousands of activists in Kashmir, especially young boys accused of stone pelting.
This article describes how 63-year-old Mohammad Yaseen Dar was arrested under the PSA because he has ‘been of a fundamentalist bent of mind since his childhood’ & is ‘likely to worsen the prevailing situation’. God bless Mohammad for remaining steadfast since his youth in opposing colonial occupation but one of our demands must be for the elimination of the PSA in Kashmir & the rest of India because it is an arrant violation of the fundamental principles of due process.
On this 61st day of siege & blockade in Kashmir, hundreds of residents in the Soura neighborhood of Srinagar marched to protest India’s brutality. The roads to Soura are barricaded & fortified to prevent Indian forces from kidnapping children.
The ‘war on drugs’ in the US has never been anything but a war on Black youth & a political justification for shooting them down in the streets. It resonates with the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ which has never been anything but a justification for colonial war, occupation, genocide directed primarily at Muslims who stand on the front lines of resistance.
This is a quite good video laying out the basics & which can be used for educating others about the character of India’s colonial relationship to Kashmir.
The reason Hindutvavadis, Zionists, Islamophobes, anti-Semites, Assadists, white supremacists all resort to hateful & irrational tropes, images, mockeries, &, sarcasms is because hate & supremacy are the essence of their politics. They have no rational justifications for war, persecution, & genocide, nothing that can be debated out against the powerful voices of the oppressed. Theoretically & politically, they’re running on empty. That’s why Indian state propaganda is indistinguishable from Hindutva flunkeys shooting their mouthes off on social media. That gives the voices of the oppressed an advantage in winning the hearts & minds of those still uncertain of where justice stands & we should run with that advantage.
As many are pointing out, under the so-called ‘war on drugs’ there are thousands of young Blacks serving life in prison without parole for smoking a joint or other minor offenses. But Amber Guyger, the Dallas police officer who walked into her Black upstair neighbor’s apartment & shot him dead while he was sitting on the sofa eating ice cream received only ten years. She could have received from five years up to a life sentence but with good behavior, she’ll be probably be out in four. Some find it touching that after the verdict Botham Jean’s brother hugged Guyger in forgiveness but not everyone finds forgiveness appropriate when there is such an egregious flouting of justice.
“Gone are the days when a Kashmiri woman was reduced to being an object that “needed to be loved and adored”. A resilient Kashmiri woman somehow just does not seem to fit that hegemonic bill, that fantasy. She is the one who negotiates with militarization on a daily basis. She braves pava sprays and tear gas, she is the one who faces pellets, the one who goes looking for her siblings and children in jails, the one who looks for her husband subjected to enforced disappearance, she is the one who has spent years in jail, she is an academic who has been detained without any charges. What she is not is someone who poses with the utensils in her home after a CASO, or with the remnants of a fighter jet where she further loses her agency. It is nothing but additional violence that a Kashmiri woman must endure in form of a different narrative.”
Sehar Iqbal, a Kashmiri who does scholarship on development economics, wrote this piece about India’s ‘development’ propaganda to justify the current siege & blockade. What India means of course is ‘unfettered exploitation’, plunder, & ecological ruin of Kashmir’s considerable natural resources.
