Kashmir | News & Discussions.

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

only 2% of Indian J&K want's to join Pakistan. So, Pakistan can forget about Kashmir's accession to it.

That will be determined in a plebiscite - we are willing to let the Kashmiris decide, are you?

 

[SekrutYakhni]

That will be determined in a plebiscite - we are willing to let the Kashmiris decide, are you?

They aren't ready at all. Few good men died when patriotism took over Indian society.


FREE KASHMIR!!!!!!!!

 

[S_O_C_O_M]

Indian army kill more innocent Kashmiris in Occupied Kashmir ​

Written by KMS
Friday, 13 August 2010 13:43

Srinagar, August 13 2010: More Kashmiris got killed by Indian forces in last 24 hours in Occupied Kashmir.

A 10th class student was martyred and a 45-year-old woman was injured when Indian Army opened fire on a group of people coming out of a mosque after offering Fajr prayers at Trehgam town in Kupwara district.

As people were coming out of a mosque at Mirpora mohalla in Trehgam town, CRPF troops opened fire on them in which a boy, Mudasir Ahmed Zargar was killed and a 45-year-old woman, Jana Begum was injured. After the boy's killing, tension has gripped the entire area and people are trying to defy curfew while curfew is in place in Kupwara and Handwara towns as well.



After a one day break of continued curfew and restrictions in Kashmir valley on Thursday, the people of Valley woke up to another day of undeclared curfew and restrictions on Friday. Indian forces have been deployed to thwart the Jamia Masjid Chalo and other protest marches in the occupied territory.

Authorities have also launched a massive crackdown across Chinab valley and Jammu region against those who recently took part in the peaceful protest demonstrations to denounce civilian killings in the Occupied Kashmir.

Dozens of people, mostly students including medical students have been arrested during college and house raids in past few days. Most of the students arrested during the raids belonged to Acharya Shri Chander College of Medical Sciences (ASCOMS) Sidhra. The students’ parents said that their wards were being falsely implicated and the authorities were spoiling the career of Muslim students in the region.

Meanwhile, the Chairperson of Muslim Khawteen Markaz, Yasmeen Raja in a statement, while expressing concern over the attitude of authorities with Kashmiri students, has strongly condemned the arrest of innocent youth and students in Jammu region.

The Executive Director of Kashmir Centre London, Professor Nazir Ahmed Shawl, has said that the UK-based Kashmiris will observe India’s Independence Day (August 15) as Black Day.

Professor Nazir Ahmed Shawl, in a statement issued in London, said that Kashmiris would hold a demonstration outside the Indian High Commission in London. He said, “It is the most appropriate time when world conscience should respond to existing pain in the occupied territory and stand by the side of justice, civil liberties and basic human rights.”

Professor Nazir Ahmed Shawl has called upon all the Kashmiris living in the United Kingdom to massively join the demonstration to express solidarity with the suffering brethren in occupied Kashmir.

Indian army kill more innocent Kashmiris in Occupied Kashmir

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Who was the nawab of Junagarh? Was he a native or foreigner despot whose ancestors invaded at some point?

Why should India allow that despot (as also the Hyderbad Nizam) to continue ruling Indians long after they had no power to do that?

They came by force and they had to be kicked out by force. Nothing wrong in it. If only they were treated much better than what they (and their ancestors) had done here.

As was the Maharajah of Kashmir a despot against whom the Kashmiris had risen up in revolt long before Pakistan intervened. Since India chose to apply the principle of 'popular sentiment' in refusing to recognize the wishes of the rulers of Junagadh and Hyderabad, its refusal to do so in Kashmir is quite patently hypocritical and the major cause for resentment amongst Kashmiris.

India had been unified at several times under great Indian kings and there was the great naqba (I hope you know this word, else ask the Palestinians what they call their 1948 events) when despotic, genocidal, goons and maniacs were let loose. Those invaders plundered, killed, raped and enslaved for a few hundred years (out of the 10,000 years old history of this land).

Obviously some weaklings sold themselves to these goons for fear or favor and continue to be their apologists. The rest of us don't miss the wood for the trees. Or to be more specific, those 500 odd years can't negate the 10,000 year common civilization.

It was united under Empires and Kingdoms, much like Ghauri and the other Central Asians did as well. That does not make India a unified nation in the past and it does not make Ghauri and the other Muslim conquerors any more 'invaders' than Maurya and the other invaders who arrived from the East instead of the South, West and North.

Arbitrarily cherry picking who is an invader and who is not is completely dishonest. For a Punjabi or Sindhi any non-Punjabi or Sindhi is an invader, not just the Afghans.

 

[IndianRobo]

More innocents throw stones... Well if only they could be termed Innocents... Iam against Killing them... Return those thrown stones in a Fashioned manner

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Read the book "The story of civilization" and more specifically "Our Oriental heritage". Read about the Muslim invasion of India and what it entailed. It was all chronicled by the historians who accompanied the invaders.

That will tell you the difference if you have the eyes to see it.

To see what? Invasions of various regions have occurred throughout history, and they occurred in the territories and Kingdoms comprising the region of India as well. An Arab is no more or less an invader for Punjabis than is a Bengalis or Maratha.

Ever thought why it is only the convert like you who deny this history, even though you guys have started claiming IVC for the last few years (while trying to deny the obvious links it has to the Indian civilization even now).

I would suggest you read V.S. Naipaul's excellent book "Among the believers". I read it some time back and it describes this phenomenon very well. I have to admire the perceptive power and observation of the genius.

The IVC was always claimed by Pakistan, just required more people to get in touch with our history and take an interest in it.

There is no such thing as an 'Indian civilization', except that invented by Indian hacks and their apologists.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Phone Cameras Fuel Kashmir’s ‘Intifada’​

By ROBERT MACKEY

Graphic images of Kashmir’s bloody protests have been remixed to the beat of the American rap song “Stone in My Hand” and posted online to inspire resistance to Indian rule of the disputed province.

Updated |1:40 p.m. As my colleague Lydia Polgreen reports, in Kashmir, India faces “an intifada-like popular revolt against the Indian military presence,” in which images of stone-throwing youth are celebrated on Facebook pages and in YouTube videos.

As was the case in Iran, short video clips of protests by Kashmir’s mainly Muslim population and clashes with Indian security forces, often shot on cellphones and passed from device to device or posted on the Web, have been used by activists to document their own struggle and to inspire more resistance.

In a documentary for the BBC World Service last year on the role of new media in Kashmir’s revolt, Suvojit Bagchi explained that in 2008 Kashmiris were galvanized by video showing the final agony of a cellphone salesman named Shaheed Tanveer who was shot and killed during a protest that summer, a year before Neda Agha Soltan became an icon of Iran’s protests.

This graphic footage of Mr. Tanveer’s last moments — and the wounding of another man who survived — was shot by a 15-year-old boy on his phone and uploaded to YouTube:

In a harrowing part of his documentary for the BBC, Mr. Bagchi showed the video of Mr. Tanveer’s death to his mother, who was seeing it for the first time. Despite the shocking nature of the images of her son, she said after viewing them that she wanted them to remain online: “The video should stay on the Internet. Why should we erase it? The world should know about the atrocities in Kashmir.”

Mr. Bagchi also explained that all the Kashmir’s video bloggers he met, who were mainly English-speaking children of the province’s educated upper class, said that their movement began with an edit of images of the protests set to music — the song “Revolution” by the Irish singer Chris de Burgh — which was uploaded to YouTube early in 2008.

As Emily Wax reported from Kashmir for The Washington Post, one of the videos rallying protesters this summer was made by a young Kashmiri with a computer degree who “edited a powerful video to the lyrics of the Everlast song ‘ Stone in My Hand‘ and posted it on YouTube, prompting police to launch a manhunt for him.” Soon enough, Ms. Wax reported, “The lyrics — ‘I got no pistol, ain’t got no sword. I got no army, ain’t got no land. All I got is stones in my hand’ — became the anthem of Kashmiri youth and is hummed on the streets here.”

Ms. Polgreen points out in her report that Kashmir’s Web-savvy protesters do not seem to conform to the stereotype of uneducated youth described by Indian officials:

Indian officials have tried to portray Kashmir’s stone-throwing youths as illiterate pawns of jihadist forces across the Pakistan border and have suggested that economic development and jobs are the key to getting young people off the streets. But many of the stone throwers are hardly illiterate. They organize on Facebook, creating groups with names like “I’m a Kashmiri Stone Pelter.”

Ms. Wax reported similar findings in her article for the Post. One video editor, she explained, is a 21-year-old who “wears all black, chain-smokes and looks like a Kashmiri James Dean.” She noted, “He has a girlfriend and a $500 cellphone that is also a high-tech video camera and says he has been accepted for a master’s program in London. He, too, is being sought by police.”

Update: In response to a question from a reader who asks what is behind the intensity of these protests, consider a statistic cited by Pankaj Mishra in a review of Basharat Peer’s book, “Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland,” earlier this year: “out of a population of some 7.6 million people, more than 80,000 people have died since an insurgency supported by Pakistan began in 1989.”

Phone Cameras Fuel Kashmir’s ‘Intifada’ - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com

 

[SekrutYakhni]

FREE KASHMIR!!!!

Self righteous Indians!

 

[Future Weapon]

"socom" u don't need to worry kashmir is indian territory and it's our problem that how we solve it.

 

[civfanatic]

Mirwaiz umar Farooqs Rally at Jamia masjid on 13th August

 

[S_O_C_O_M]

"socom" u don't need to worry kashmir is indian territory and it's our problem that how we solve it.

90% of Kashmiris say its Pakistan's problem and future territory.

Face it they HATE Indians/India. You can't even walk alone there without protection of Barathi Army.

 

[EjazR]

IBNLive : Sagarika Ghose's Blog : Pride in Kashmir

If we can have Bihari pride and Marathi pride, why not Kashmiri pride?

Beyond the stone pelters, a new voice is trying to make itself heard in Kashmir. A new century has brought a new generation, a generation marked not by ideology but, like young people all over India, marked by ambition and self assertion. Unless Indian policymakers junk their Islamophobic security centred attitude to Kashmir, we will fail to hear this new voice. The Kashmiri 'intifadah' this time seems not to be totally centred on azaadi. While azaadi may be voiced as a generalised sentiment or as a political lever by the usual political players in the Hurriyat, much of the impetus behind the current youthful rage seems to be not to break away from India, but paradoxically, the urge to belong to India. The urge to be accepted as children of India's economic success not as orphans to be held at gun point behind the barbed wires of mental suspicion.

The teenagers pelting stones at the police are not just the children of two decades of Kashmir violence, they are also children of a globalizing attractive India with its democratic process, its well-advertised progress and its exploding media. They are teenagers active on social networking sites and anxious to be heard in the mainstream media. Observers point to the degree of approval that some Kashmiris have for Atal Bihari Vajpayee for the elections of 2002, JM Lyngdoh who is perceived to have delivered a fair vote and even for Morarjee Desai for the elections of 1977.

There are new role models too. Among today's young Kashmiris, there is 21 year old Pervez Rasool, the Kashmir cricketer who inspite of being wrongfully detained by police during a cricket tournament in Bangaluru, went on to score 50 runs in 47 balls, and smiling broadly raised his bat said, "I am a cricketer, not a terrorist." There is 27 year old Dr Shah Faisal who topped the UPSC examination 2009 and has already chosen to become an IAS officer. There is 33 year old novelist Basharat Peer, whose book 'Curfewed Night' is a best seller at home and abroad. A small flickering flame of young Kashmir's integration with India is has already been lit.

So what then must be the building blocks of a "new" mindset towards Kashmir? The most important building block is to allow Kashmir to have its regional chieftain and allow Kashmir its regional pride. Today chief ministers across India evoke regional pride and regional nationalism. Nitish Kumar is the champion of Bihari pride, Narendra Modi stands for Gujarati asmita, Karunandhi is the leader of Dravida sub nationalism, Naveen Patnaik symbolizes an anti-Delhi, pro-Oriya cause. Across India chief ministers are embodying their regions' culture, renaming their capital cities, indeed chief ministers increasingly stand forth as the champions of region.

So if we can have `Gujarati Pride' and `Oriya Pride' and `Tamil Pride' and `Bihari Pride', why can we not have `Kashmiri Pride'? Why should any championing of Kashmiri regionalism immediately be seen as a threat to India and an invitation to Pakistan? Should 'azaadi' even loosely defined necessarily strike fear in the heart of South Block? Why should Omar Abdullah not be allowed to function as a "Kashmiri" chief minister and why should the Centre demand that he remain an agent of New Delhi? Kashmir has a right to its regional aspirations, it has a right to its pride and it has a right to demand that it gets a chief minister who stands up for the interests of Kashmiris vis-a-vis New Delhi. Kashmir needs its Nitish Kumar.

Yet in times of galloping regional sentiment across India, where regional parties are the norm, Kashmir is perhaps India's only state where a single family has sought to monopolise the political space. However committed the Abdullahs may be to their home state, the Kashmiri democratic space has to be widened and other players must be allowed to openly compete for political constituencies. The rise of the PDP and the successful government that Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was able to deliver during 2002-2005 shows what a difference a local chieftain as chief minister can make.

Accusations that the PDP's flirtation with separatist elements may be true, but the slow process of drawing in all sections of Kashmiris into democratic politics is certain to be painful and grimy. Creating Kashmiri pride and a Kashmiri local leader will not be a process that will get approval from safari suit clad babus accustomed to textbook solutions. No doubt, recognizing Kashmiri pride could provide a breeding ground for separatist sentiments. But this is where the political leadership, both at the Centre and in Srinagar, will have to make a leap of faith.

What will this leap of faith entail? The leap of faith entails first, using words like "separatist" and "secessionist" only when there is good reason to do so. The leap of faith entails recognising that Kashmiris-like Indians across the country-- have the democratic right to protest. If the BJP can have a bharat bandh, if Left can hold mass rallies, Kashmiris have every right to take to the streets, raise slogans, stage dharnas, carry out marches, in short do what MLAs across India do. Democracy's central mantra is `shout don't shoot' and the Centre has to recognize that every Kashmiri who shouts is no longer getting ready to shoot. The leap of faith in Kashmir also means that a chief ministers must offer to resign or make amends if he finds he is not popular, as a mark of respect for the people.The leap of faith in Kashmir means not branding every teenage stone pelter as a Lashkar operative and confronting him with overwhelming force. Kashmir is crying not for azaadi from India but azaadi from the old Indian mindset. Manmohan Singh once liberalised our economy. Now he must liberalise our attitudes towards Kashmir.

 

[EjazR]

The Kashmir stories - Hindustan Times

As if they were characters in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, the people of Kashmir, Omar Abdullah's government, and people across much of India view what's occurred in Kashmir from perspectives that make each the victim-hero of their respective versions — the armed forces standing in as India's
victim-hero. This is a recipe for disaster. For it accentuates anger, resentment, even hatred, against whichever party is assigned the role of wrongdoer in each narrative. From New Delhi's perspective, stone-pelting teenagers

are the bad eggs; the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and local police only fire as a last resort to control these wanton lawbreakers. In this narrative, jawans have shown great restraint. Pictures published and telecast across India last month showed jawans cowering as Kashmiri boys assault them.

In the Kashmiri media, on the other hand, pictures of teenagers' bodies, and of their grieving relatives, too get wide display. It's imperative to understand the discourse within Kashmir in order to respond sensibly. In late-June and early-July, the discourse there was full of CRPF jawans and policemen arbitrarily assaulting boys, women, even the aged, tearing up media persons' curfew passes, thrashing boys returning from neighbourhood mosques, breaking windows of homes with lights on during a night curfew and firing indiscriminately to kill. Kashmiris focus on the fact that many of the boys who have fallen to the forces' bullets since June 11 weren't throwing stones. One was going for tuition classes; a 9-year-old had gone out to bring home his mentally unstable brother. While their deaths cause anger, riotous indignation is generated by reports, for example, that three boys killed were dragged from their houses on June 29 to a nearby garden in Anantnag and shot in cold blood.

Kashmiris generally don't see stone-pelters as law-breakers but as expressing the community's indignation against such incidents — and others, such as the killing of three boys at Machil a few months ago. They were lured to an army camp with promises of lucrative work, killed and declared to have been militants. Officers of the army unit got cash bonuses worth lakhs of rupees — and a better shot at promotions and medals. The incident is being investigated, but there was enough preliminary evidence for two officers to be removed from their posts.

One reason for the tragic divergence in discourse, within Kashmir and across the country, is 'media management' since the late 90s — by both the BJP and the Congress. Since the space for insightful, critical reporting has shrunk, most Indians react with fear-filled amazement to explosions of public anger. They are unaware of Kashmiris' experience or of shifts in public mood there — alienation caused by the armed forces and their mercenaries from 1994 to 1999, openness between 2000 and 2005 to an autonomous status agreed between India and Pakistan, and increasing anger since 2006 at both the stalling of talks and continued presence of the armed forces in overwhelming numbers. Their presence is experienced as humiliation: being abusively ordered to hold one's ears as a murga in front of one's children or facing barricaded roads and arbitrary searches — apart from much harsher torture of being tagged as suspects.

The result: youngsters who were, at times, even beginning to support India during an India-Pakistan cricket match have picked up stones. In contrast with previous generations, they're articulate — and unafraid. Subliminally at least, many factors form their angst, which is only fuzzily related to what happened in 1947, 1987, or 1990. Many of them have been influenced by the puritanical Islam propagated by televangelists; and they connect, through the Net and mobile phones, to global perceptions about oppression of Muslims. Perceiving armed forces abuse through these lenses, their minds easily leap to the belief that the central forces deliberately kill Kashmiri Muslims — or that the government transferred land to the Shrine Board to re-engineer Kashmir's demography.

A new discourse has developed: India has colonised Kashmir; it robs its water resources and favours Hindus of Jammu (the reverse is believed in Jammu) in recruitment and development activities. This discourse has most impacted the boys of (mainly downtown) Srinagar and some other towns. It also has salience among some rural youth, though the discourse in other rural areas is strikingly different. It's spreading, though — and the Centre's responses only fuel the fire in more young hearts.

Owing in part to compromised institutions, the Centre had no idea of the smouldering ire and misread its dimensions when it burst into flames. Over the past couple of weeks, the Centre has tried to 'handle' this year's uprising through Goebbelsian propaganda; facts were fabricated or exaggerated. Srinagar newspaper offices were starved of electricity and prevented from functioning, local correspondents of some national TV channels couldn't leave their offices even at night, criminal charges were slapped on a couple of them, local reporters were beaten on the streets, and their curfew passes torn up.

Given the already existing divergence of discourse, these tactics are disingenuous at the very least. First, unlike the 1975 Emergency, the internet and mobile phones disseminate information, opinions and rumours far more effectively today than even the media channels that the government suppresses. Second, like the Emergency, the suppression (including suspension of SMS services) causes fresh Kashmiri anger. So does the constructed narratives put out nationally. The most dangerous divergence in narratives is that while Kashmiris believe that stones-for-bullets constitutes a non-violent response, the rest of India sees pictures of security men cowering before violent mobs. If these perspectives finally converge in these boys picking up guns, the fresh insurgency would be far more lethal than that of the 90s.

 

[EjazR]

What is the way forward in Kashmir?
Must watch discussion on ndtv, in Vikram Chandra's Big Fight on July 10, particularly the frankness of a young Kashmiri boy at the end.

Also watch Karan Thapar's discussions with PDP INC and other leaders that raise some very valuable concerns
Is the worst over in Kashmir? - CNBC-TV18 -

 

[civfanatic]

The qauid of Kashmir ....Syed Ali shah Geelani