Just for the record, I don’t apologize for deleting Zionist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, misogynist, Assadist, Hindutva, racist or white supremacist comments. You don’t persuade people with stinking rotten politics on social media any more than you do relatives at family dinners. You post rubbish, I delete it. Amen.
LETTER FROM A KASHMIRI FRIEND TO Shabnam Mayet & Mary Scully:
“Dear Mary & Shabnam
I hope you are well.
I am writing from Indian Occupied Kashmir. I am sure you will understand that I am unable to share my name because I am a Kashmiri residing in India and l will be arrested and charged for speaking against the occupation of my homeland by the world’s biggest democracy. I ask that you share this on any platform that you can.
On 5 August, when India revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir by abrogating Article 370, the entire Kashmiri population was jailed and their internet and mobile connections were disconnected. At that time I was away from my hometown and therefore lost contact with my family and friends. Days passed in a state of terrified waiting. Without any news of home, the knowledge of more and more Indian troops moving into Kashmir and all my dear ones caged and disconnected from the outside world, I could only imagine the worst.
Finally on 31 August I could not take the silence or the waiting any longer booked my ticket home. So there I was at an Indian airport, with a friend wondering why there were only 40 people on an entire flight. We were told to keep the window shutters closed during landing for security reasons. Usually window shutters have to remain open during descent, so this was the opposite of every flight I had ever taken. It felt like even the sky at home was under curfew. I managed to keep the window shutter half open… I wanted desperately to see if my Kashmir looked different now.
As we landed, I saw military choppers and tens of thousands of armed men parading in camouflage uniforms, this was a first in all my years of retuning home. As we disembarked hundreds of military personnel in both uniform and plain clothes were arriving as well, having been brought in from all over India.
With the communication blockade, my cell phone was disconnected along with the internet connection.I walked out of the airport into an eerie silence. A few private cars passed me on the road and I eventually managed to get a lift towards the city. I kept my flight ticket with me, as I had heard that it would be treated as a curfew pass. After 4 hours on a trip that usually takes 50 minutes, I reached my hometown. Home felt like it was burning, there was a complete curfew in place and thousands of armed soldiers on the ground. Sometimes they can bring the prison to you.
I Spent 8 days in Srinagar. I tried to visit both the old city (Rajouri kadal, Gojwara, Nowhatta, Khanyar, Safa kadal, kawdara) and the outskirts. I saw armed men, including Jammu Kashmir Police, stationed every 10 meteres, pellet guns, large-calibre guns, camouflage suits, concertina wires and barricades were deployed to every corner. Kashmiris were invisible, rare sightings on our own streets. People were being warned against gathering for Friday prayers in Jamia Masjid, Hazrat Bal and in the other shrines of Srinagar city.
I was sure to be home by 8 pm daily, as this was when the military temporarily lifted the curfew so the next battalion could start their daily curfew imposition routine. One night as I rode home in complete darkness, I looked up only to find that the road side lights of entire city had been broken. I kept thinking who would do this, my cousin told me that the police and armed forces keep breaking the lights during their night patrols in order to scare us.
I met many people and had many painful conversations about our situation. For the first time in India’s occupation we are numb. We have been betrayed. We are unwilling to accept India’s unilateral revocation of Kashmir’s special status and the house arrest of every mainstream politician under under the guise of security. In this age of super communication and 5G, India has forced us to share our grief the old fashioned way, by letters and landlines.
I spent a week at home. My cousin took me to the airport on his bike, we were stopped 4 times. At one check-point the officer said,”whether you are going to the airport or hospital, we won’t allow you”. An ambulance arrived after us and I saw a patient lying inside. The police officer mocked the patient, saying that he had been paid to lie in the ambulance. The Indian government puts whatever happens in Kashmir on the Pakistani payroll, regardless of whether it is a peaceful protest or stone pelting.
I would have rowed my Shikara to you,
My beloved
But I hope you know,
Our Jehlum is curfewed.
Your Kashmiri Friend”
An updated report on resistance to the Indian Army in the Anchar Soura neighborhood of Srinagar:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/11/kashmiri-suburb-indian-control-anchar-srinagar?
The Houston, Texas ‘Howdy, Modi’ rally on September 22nd which will be broadcast to over 300 million people will include a segment honoring Mahatma Gandhi & Martin Luther King, Jr. India & its Hindutva adherents in the US know the brutal colonial occupation will never ‘win the hearts & minds’ of Kashmiris so it is attempting to hoodwink the rest of the world that Modi, who also fosters caste oppression & Muslim pogroms & disenfranchisement in India, has some kind of political affinities with Martin Luther King, Jr. who fought racist oppression of the Black community. Color that a travesty.
Toronto #StandWithKashmir rally, Sunday, September 15th, 2019.
Tulsi Gabbard, who has long-time public associations with Modi & the Hindutva crowd both in the US & India, was asked about Kashmir. This video is Gabbard at her sleaziest calling it a “complex” issue, “not as clear-cut as this one side versus this one side….there are concerns that should be addressed about human rights violations & civil rights violations.” Concerns like occupation by one-million soldiers, pellet guns, mass rape, forcible disappearance, curfews, mass incarceration & torture, mass graves, extrajudicial executions? No, she ignores that reality & instead makes veiled reference to the Pandit issue & despite her own political history of homophobia, impugns Kashmiris for Indian government policy outlawing homosexuality, brings up the Islamophobic canard about oppressed Muslim women, & refers to Kashmir as a “sovereign country” by which she means Kashmir is a part of India. The girl’s slick. But she is a dirt ball.
Dublin, Ireland #StandWithKashmir rally, September 7th, 2019.
When the UN or some politician refers to Kashmir as a territorial dispute between Pakistan & India, refer them to this photo of a Kashmiri pellet gun victim from September 2016. If it’s a territorial dispute between Pakistan & India, why are Kashmiris being murdered, maimed, disappeared, raped, arrested, tortured by Indian troops?
(Photo from Kashmir News Observer, September 9th, 2016)
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres appealed today to India & Pakistan to ‘resolve the Kashmir issue through dialogue’ to avoid any “potential escalation.” Every time the UN pulls this stunt, it is as an evasion of the real issue. Kashmir is not primarily a territorial dispute between India & Pakistan. It is the struggle of Kashmiris for self-determination against India’s colonial occupation by nearly one-million troops. It is the struggle of Kashmiris against mass rapes, forcible disappearances, pellet munitions & live ammo, curfews, lockdowns, telecommunication blockades, wholesale arrests of young men, mass graves. There is no possible resolution of this dispute without putting Kashmiris at the very heart of it. No one has made that clearer than Kashmiri activists, poets, writers, commentators, artists, stone pelters, protesters.