Another ‘winning the hearts & minds’ moment in Kashmir: an Indian paramilitary soldier standing guard over empty streets with razor wire barriers while Kashmiris are on lockdown in their homes.
(Photo from August 14, 2019 by Dar Yasin/AP)
See how India & Modi ‘wins the hearts & minds’ of Kashmiris! Not unlike Hitler, Stalin, Assad, Suu Kyi & the generals before him.
(Indian Army patrols in Srinagar, August 10, 2019 by Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images)
In a speech today for Pakistan Independence Day, Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan told politicians in Pakistan-administered Kashmir that India’s revocation of Article 370 & the complete lockdown of Kashmir was a ‘strategic blunder’ by the Modi government. That would be a massive understatement. Although there is almost no response from most governments or agencies like the UN, there is an avalanche of media coverage, social media campaigning, political protests, & an emerging unity in action to #StandWithKashmir. In response, all India can do is whimper about ‘fake news’ & demand censorship of critics. Whatever India has planned for Kashmir, they will be forced to retreat by the undaunted struggle of Kashmiris & the emergent international solidarity movement.
Aakash Hassan, the Kashmiri correspondent for CNN & News18, reports that four computers with slow internet speed are the only means journalists are allowed to send stories to the world from Kashmir under siege.
Like Mehbooba Mufti & Omar Abdullah, India is now trying to make a martyr of Shah Faesal who until January of this year was an officer in the Indian Administrative Service in Kashmir–in other words, a collaborator. He was just detained at the Delhi airport trying to fly out & sent back to Srinagar where he was detained on arrival under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a draconian & undemocratic law allowing administrative detention up to two years without charge or trial.
Kashmiri Samreen Mushtaq tweeted: “Indian State be like, “you have signed enough PSAs on our orders to book Kashmiris. Now let us sign one for you.”
“If anything, this phase should show the pro India client regimes/collaborators in #Kashmir how dispensable they are for the Indian State.”
Oxford University students #StandWithKashmir, August 14, 2019.
J&K Police now have to walk back this big fat lie since media on the ground, including Indian media, report they have seen pellet injury victims & we have seen a video where soldiers are shooting at unarmed protesters after last Friday’s prayers. There is even a video on YouTube (which I posted) showing pellet victims in hospital. One Indian reporter just back from Kashmir reported that hospitals are forced to turn away pellet injury victims so that fatality records cannot be kept. India doesn’t ‘win the hearts & minds’ of Kashmiris by locking them in their homes, cutting off all communications, or shooting at them & it does not persuade anyone else in the world of the justice of its barbarism by continually getting caught in monstrous lies.
This article which reports India’s defense of the telecommunications blockade in Kashmir, including the use of phones & internet, has to be read to be believed. ‘Social media had become tools to spread fake news, propaganda, instigate violence & provoke insurgency.’ Anybody ever see a Kashmiri do any of that on FB or Twitter? Did Kashmiris need fake news to protest colonialism & occupation long before the advent of social media? India really has to hire better propagandists since this stuff is pathetic.