This interview of Shashi Tharoor, an internationally prominent Indian politician, by Mehdi Hasan about the occupation of Kashmir is from nearly two years ago but it is still useful for understanding how nationalists justify the barbaric occupation by claiming they are fighting Islamist terrorism.
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An undercover cop with a gun assaulting & arresting an unarmed protester after Friday prayers today in Srinagar: we aren’t told what the young man’s alleged offense was but there need not be a criminal action for a Kashmiri to be assaulted or arrested. Protesting, even if you are not a stone pelter, is the offense punishable by pellet guns, live ammunition, incarceration.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
(Photo by Basit Zargar)
Life under Indian army occupation in Kashmir: they strew the streets of Kashmir with razor wire to prevent protests & obstruct free movement, thus endangering small children, animals, & unarmed protesters.
Razor wire has a history, most prominently in war. It has been commonly used in wars since WWI. But it was also used at prisons & mental hospitals to prevent escapes. Imagine that wire intended to inflict serious cuts on human beings was used against those with mental illness who were sane enough to want out of prison-like hospitals! They use razor wire to fence out war refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, & Iraq along the eastern borders of Europe; they top barricades with razor wire in North Africa to keep African refugees from crossing over. Israel uses razor wire on its apartheid wall & deranged xenophobes are calling for the barrier wall along the US border with Mexico to be constructed of razor wire to inflict maximum harm as part of Trump’s zero tolerance savagery. The primary purpose of barbed wire is to prevent safe passage by human beings. It is a scourge to human freedom & must be taken down wherever it is put up.
(Photo by Aasif Shafi)
It’s not a good thing Colin Kaepernick is in the Nike ad campaign. He’s associated with principled political protest against racism & injustice & Nike is still associated with sweatshops & child labor using brown-skinned people & dirt cheap wages for expensive shoes, beatings & humiliations. Nike is using Kaepernick to improve its image since there are still protests against them for sweatshops. Might be useful to educate Kaepernick on Twitter since he truly is a model for us all.
The Bombay High Court & other agencies of the Indian government are issuing directives to media & government officials to stop using the term “Dalit” which in the Indian caste system designates a person of the lowest, untouchable caste. The term was popularized by B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), himself a Dalit & an Indian scholar, jurist, principal architect of the Indian Constitution, economist. politician considered a founding father of India, & a social reformer who campaigned against the systematic & violent oppression of Dalits. Use of the term Dalit is similar to the term Black in the US which came out of the Black power, Black is beautiful movement of the late 1960s & early 1970s. The awkward use of the term African-American is almost certainly intended to distance Blacks from association with Black political power. It’s likely the move against the term Dalit & attempts to replace it with Scheduled Caste is also an attempt to neutralize its associations with resistance to oppression & the growing movement against caste oppression.
It’s a curious phenomenon all around the world that oppressed groups must grapple with their proper names–from what they prefer to be called formally to the hundreds of insulting terms intended to humiliate & demean them. The most prominent example of that now is the Rohingya struggle to be called by their proper name rather than Bengalis. Black Americans have had several proper name changes from Negro to Black to African American, with hundreds of racist terms. The same is true for Hispanics & Native Americans. Native American tribes have gone through a process of reclaiming their original tribal names since European colonizers renamed them precisely to take away their identity. This struggle over the names of oppressed castes is part of that phenomenon as are the hundreds of demeaning terms for women & girls. Those that have the problem with identity are the oppressors. It’s not certain how much of this is a psychological device to manage their own savageries but it is also a conscious political weapon to strip the oppressed of their identity & thus control them.
Indian activist Satyadeep Satya made this caustic observation about the move to eliminate the term Dalit from Indian media & government communications: “They want to ban the oppressed from being called the Oppressed because if oppression is called by its name, law & order, unity & integrity, harmony & peace…everything gets disturbed. After all, identifying oppression as oppression is the first step of resistance.”
One hopes that those who carry on banal disputations against identity politics will consider how similar their ideas are to oppressors who attempt to strip us of our proper names, our identity, & thus our dignity. The struggles of the oppressed over their identities are among the most important struggles in the world today.
(Photo is protesters holding up picture of B.R. Ambedkar, a champion of Dalit identity)
“WHEN FEAR OF DEATH DIED INSIDE ME
In my childhood days, when I was hardly 4 to 5 years old, Indian occupied forces used to come our home and beats my father on a routine base. One day early in the morning forces comes to our home and dragged my father out and caged us inside our own house and it become a jail for us.
After taking my Abu ji out they start beating him mercilessly with rods and guns in front of us without any reason. He was looking towards us for any sought of help & cries was not less than bullet for us. His yelling was piercing our hearts & killing us inside our home. For sometime we could not do anything for our father but after some time my brave and courageous mom with the help of God mange to comes out and chased those uniformed terrorist single handedly with the help of an axe. I don’t remember exactly whether my mom was successful in liberating Abu or not from the clutches of these terrorist or they had taken him with themselves but what i get from that horror.
“fear of death died inside me”.”
–Mubashir Naik, Kashmir
Rohingya kids at a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: no comment on their beauty necessary.
(Photo by Abul kalam photography)
One doesn’t have to know the social, cultural, or political history of Syria to take a position against foreign military intervention, including by the US. The politics of any country are extremely complex internally & including its relations with other countries & with international power politics. The study of a country, in all of its dimensions, is specialized. If the millions on every continent who protested the Vietnam War waited until they had advanced degrees in Vietnamese politics, there would have been no international opposition to that war whilst the US was raining down napalm & bombs. The same is true of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Syria.
What one has to understand is the character of militarism in the barbaric phase of capitalism. One has to understand the character of US militarism which is rooted in the extermination of the Native American population & proceeds from there to other colonial wars in the Pacific, the Philippines, Latin & Central America, Mexico, Africa, & Asia, culminating in WWI & WWII which were not fought over democracy but over colonial division of the world by European powers & the US. Opposing US military intervention is not some kind of unthinking reflex or knee-jerk anti-imperialism based in rhetoric or sentimentality. It is cynical & contemptuous to suggest that principled antiwar activists do not think through their opposition to every war or that they do not work tirelessly to grasp the complexities. The corruption of the current antiwar movement around the world is not rooted primarily in ignorance about Syria but in political degeneration, a rightward shift among progressives that has been going on for nearly 50 years. If you don’t understand that phenomenon, don’t talk through your ass about the ‘western left’ or conflate that rightwing degeneration with principled opposition to US & other foreign military intervention.
Consistent, principled opposition to militarism apparently seems rigid & doctrinaire to some. They think the bombing of civilians can be humanitarian or that war can just include military targets or that a US-imposed No Fly Zone will really stop Syrian & Russian bombers. They think there is potential in the US Pentagon or Kremlin for spreading justice & democracy in the world. They also grow to old age believing in the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, & Santa Claus or still wake up at night trembling that the Illuminati are taking over the world. Color them delusional.
Three-year-old Alan Kurdi who washed up on the Turkish shore after a boat of Syrian refugees capsized on September 2nd, 2015: his five-year old brother Ghalib & mother Rehanna also drowned. This photo dramatized the crisis of Syrian refugees but three years later there is almost a complete news blackout on the refugee crises in the Mediterranean, Europe, the US, & Australia. It has been reported that conditions in Greek refugee camps are so squalid & overcrowded that children as young as ten are attempting suicide. In France, hundreds of refugee children are living on the streets subject to police brutality & beatings. Across Europe, thousands of unaccompanied children have gone missing from social service agencies, presumably ending up in the hands of traffickers. African refugees continue to drown on the route from North Africa to Spain & Italy & the EU continues to obstruct their safe passage. Nearly a million Rohingya refugees live in overcrowded camps subject to inclement weather & unable to assimilate into Bangladeshi society or move on to asylum elsewhere. In the US, hundreds of the 2,500 forcibly abducted children have still not been reunited with their parents.
The point of reposting this photo of little Alan is not to exploit his suffering but to again highlight the crises of immigrants & refugees & the imperative responsibility of demanding open borders whether refugees are fleeing war, occupation, genocide, or economic plunder.
Immigration is a human right. Asylum for refugees is international law. Open the damn borders.
(Photo by AFP/Getty Images)