Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior tweeted that legal proceedings were taken by police against “some Asians” (Kashmiris, Pakistanis, & Bahrainis) who protested India’s military siege of Kashmir after Eid prayer. The ministry “urges citizens & residents to not politically exploit religious occasions.”
This is the ministry that brutally repressed the Bahraini Arab Spring uprising with extreme violence, including with pellet guns & with Saudi tanks, with no respect for religious occasions, including attacking mourners at the funeral prayers of those killed by its soldiers & police. It continues to prosecute, torture, & kill those who resist oppression.
Indian activist Kavita Krishnan, economist Jean Dreze, & Maimoona Mollah spent five days in Kashmir on an investigative tour & gave this chilling report:
“We met people in villages all over Kashmir, where little kids have been… there is no other word to use… they have been abducted by the police. They have been picked up from their homes in the middle of the night from their beds and they are held indefinitely, illegally, either in army camps or in police stations. They are being beaten up. Their parents have no way of ascertaining whether their children will disappear or be returned.”
My Twitter wall has been denounced so often & so foolishly in Indian media that one wonders if there isn’t a method to their madness: India’s Home Ministry takes attention away from the telecommunications blockade in Kashmir & makes it all about a handful of writers & activists on Twitter. There are hundreds of Kashmiris outside Kashmir & their supporters posting powerful commentary, videos, articles. They can’t get us all banned but by making a stink about the four of us left, they can draw off fire for their barbarism about 12.5 million Kashmiris unable to even make a telephone call. Or is that to conspiratorial or assuming too much intelligence on the part of Indian bureaucrats?
This guy is the Joint Secretary of the Parliament of India & he’s stewing because four mostly unknown writers & activists haven’t been banned by Twitter? Who the hell is running India if a Pakistani journalist & three writers, including a woman on Medicare, has them going bananas? No one ever said you had to be smart to be a fascist.
(PS: he apparently has problems with counting too. He listed four, not three.)
Indian Ministry of Home Affairs busted for fake news peddling! After going on Twitter to accuse BBC, Reuters, & Al Jazeera of ‘fabricating’ stories of massive protests in Kashmir & claiming the alleged unrest was a handful of stone-pelting ‘miscreants’, the ministry spokesperson had to walk the fake news back when media came up with incontrovertible photographic evidence. Who the hell is running that ministry that they’re making fools of themselves before the entire twitter-sphere?
A strong polemic by Sidharth Bhatia, editor of The Wire, on India’s tactics to humiliate Kashmiris by this onslaught. As Indian scholar Jairus Banaji has pointed out, however, this siege is not primarily to humiliate but to acquire “unfettered exploitation” of Kashmir by powerful industrial interests closely associated with the Indian government. Humiliation & repression are to serve that overarching purpose. It is not a fait accompli as long as the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination remains undaunted & is supported by an international movement.
An Indian nationalist website called Rightlog reports that four of the eight accounts that India demanded Twitter suspend for ‘spreading fake news’ were immediately bounced. According to Rightlog, which has a flare for fake news themselves, “a motivated cabal of fake news peddlers are doing everything possible to bring India at the brink of a civil war…The Union Home Secretary stated that the closure of these Twitter accounts is an absolute must as they are “spreading rumours & misinformation to disturb the peace & calm in the Valley.”
Who knows if or for how long the four remaining ‘fake news peddlers’ will elude the censors. Marx once said history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. In this case tragedy & farce are going on at the same time. The tragedy is the telecommunications blockade of Kashmir which places unendurable suffering on the Kashmiri people & their beloved outside Kashmir. The farce is in India attempting to silence a handful of writers & activists on social media who oppose that blockade. How pathetic & desperate can ‘the world’s largest democracy’ get?
Muzzammil Ayyub Thakur, director of the World Kashmir Freedom Movement, reports that 90-year-old independence leader Syed Ali Geelani, under house arrest for over a decade, has been taken from his home by Indian authorities. This was confirmed by an official in Kashmir.
The Supreme Court of India ruled today that the Indian Army can continue to rule Kashmir with an iron fist & refused to lift any of the restrictions imposed, including the telecommunications blockade. We need to take this very seriously indeed because if India gets away with this without protests around the world, we can be absolutely certain that other governments will start pulling the same restrictions with us. Democracy is at stake & not just in India.
