By Bangladeshi photographer Gmb Akash who captures the beauty of human beings as no other.
We do not forget those countless Kashmiri activists & their supporters who over the past few years have been locked out of social media either for several days or weeks or permanently. Syed Ali Geelani, a leading figure in Kashmiri & human rights politics, was himself permanently locked out of FB in 2016. Social media has become a lifeline for the oppressed & it has been very hard for those thus silenced. That of course includes all of Kashmir repeatedly having the internet snapped for the past several years & now shut down completely for two months. We should take a moment to honor them & the contributions they have made. They were only silenced because they spoke the truth & would not bend the knee to genocide.
India speaketh rubbish:
“Because I don’t allow news about my crimes against Kashmiri people to come out of Kashmir, whatever comes out has not been authorized by me & is therefore fake news or terrorist (or separatist or Pakistani) propaganda.”
#StandWithKashmir
–Indian activist Satyadeep Satya before Facebook locked him out for 30 days
From the NY Times, September 30, 2019: read it as a tribute to Kashmiri Intifada.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/world/asia/Kashmir-lockdown-photos.html?
Front page of the NY Times, October 1st, 2019: just to give credit where credit is due, the extensive coverage of Kashmir in international media would likely not be happening were it not for years of campaigning by Kashmiri activists on social media to break the news blackout which has always prevailed about the Kashmiri struggle. Those activists, now forcibly silenced, changed the narrative from Kashmir being a territorial dispute between India & Kashmir to the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination against Indian colonial occupation.
There will be attempts, subtle at first, then more aggressive, to move the narrative from Kashmiri self-determination back to India’s struggle against “radical Islamic terrorism” in Kashmir. It is entirely due to the work & groundwork laid by Kashmiri activists that such a shift in narrative will be difficult to execute. Though they cannot hear us, we honor the work of those activists who helped pioneer social media as a venue to campaign against war, occupation, genocide.
(Photo is screenshot of October 1, 2019 NY Times)
Cardiff, Wales, UK #StandWithKashmir rally on September 28th, 2019.
As India in Kashmir, so goes Israel in Palestine.
Long live Kashmiri & Palestinian Intifada.
(Photo is from 2016 but Palestinians continue to be shot down in the streets by Israeli occupying troops)
#58thDayOfSiege #FreeKashmir
When retired Indian Supreme Court justice Markandey Katju said (in 2012) ’90-percent of Indians are idiots’ who don’t have enough brains in their heads to resist incitement to communal conflict, he was speaking from a position of stinking elitism & mendacity. Ninety-percent or more of Indians sustain brutal oppression, maliciously orchestrated by the state, because of caste, class, gender, religion. There’s no reason to go all mushy-brained or sentimental about the downtrodden who engage in violence against others but a well-heeled, well-educated Brahmin accusing them of idiocy is hardly an analysis of the problem worth taking seriously.
Katju is all over the place politically & for several months has been drawing a comparison between the US war against Vietnam & India’s occupation of Kashmir. That’s a problematic analogy because Vietnam had both regular forces & a guerrilla army experienced for 40 years in the war against French colonialism before the US invasion. Kashmir has no army & no guerrilla force except a handful of isolated, poorly armed & untrained operatives on the run. He opposes the occupation but his reasoning can hardly be called coherent. If you read Katju’s comparison, it lends itself to justifying the occupation, if not genocide, by claiming all Kashmiris will become guerrillas, that a “large-scale guerrilla war is bound to emerge.” Maybe he ought to take a closer look at the history of the Kashmiri struggle & stop making glib analyses based on prejudice.
India admits to arresting 144 children out of the 13,000 they are accused of kidnapping in nighttime home invasions. The children, some as young as nine, are accused of stone pelting or rioting. Although the Indian Supreme Court finds these arrests legal, they are in fact a violation of international law & constitute egregious abuse of children.
An NDTV report on the arrest of Kashmiri children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDYNmGShhQw
(Photo is Indian soldiers assaulting a Kashmiri boy, one restraining him & one kicking him. Photographer & date is unknown.)