By Ishfaq Ahmad Shah It is 9.30 pm on Sunday. Srinagar is tense. An 18-year-old boy has died after a teargas canister, reportedly fired by government forces, hit his chest. In the interiors of the city, some people are protesting. Pro-freedom songs are being blared through the public address systems of mosques. Night curfew is
One hour 15 minutes. With Kashmir under its longest ever continuous spell of curfew, for many in Old Srinagar City their lives depend on what they can make of that time. Srinagar sees the first light of day at 5.15 am; by 6.30 police and paramilitary personnel are manning every street, lane and bylane of
By Prem Shankar Jha For the first time since 1990, the anger in Kashmir and support for azadi from India is stretched across society in the Valley. Srinagar airport felt normal when eight of us – journalists and social activists – arrived on August 18. Planes were flying into the airport every hour from different
By Goldie Osuri Goldie Osuri is the author of Religious Freedom in India: Sovereignty and (Anti) Conversion. The growing pockets of solidarity expressed for Kashmiris are heartening, as is the solidarity for Palestinian struggle. The India and Israel alliance has been described as a full-blown romance, but the ongoing siege of Kashmir makes this a
By Ashutosh Varshney A few years ago, I met someone whose organisation rescues animals forsaken on Indian streets and provides them shelter. “Which animals needed most help”, I asked. Stray dogs would have been my best guess. But I learnt that cows far outnumbered dogs in his nationwide shelters. “We Hindus are supposed to protect
For days after the killing of Burhan Wani, every TV channel rang with acrimonious debate. Wani was described by India as a terrorist and by Pakistan as a martyr. The media resounded to argument and indignation. The number of dead and injured continued to rise relentlessly. Among the earliest to be killed was Yasmina of
By Amitava Kar The turbulence following the July 8 killing of Burhan Wani by Indian security forces is a blow to peace in the long-troubled region claimed by both India and Pakistan, where an insurgency movement peaked in the 1990s, then dwindled, but never completely melted away. Can deep loss, once it finds utterance, be
We the undersigned, in United Kingdom and internationally are deeply concerned about the armed violence perpetrated by the Indian state through its 700,000 strong army on civilians in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir since the 8th of July 2016. More than 47 people have been killed on the pretext of crowd control since then. More
By Ishaal Zehra While it’s been four years that the United Nations has asked India to repeal the controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the Indian Army has continued with its horrendous practice of killing innocent, un-armed Kashmiris taking the death toll to 64 in a recent strife that hit the valley of Kashmir after
Kashmir Case: A Story of Letters and Telegrams By Sohail Parwaz The miseries and sacrifices of Kashmiris have different angles. It has been covered by the writers, researchers and the historians in different ways. Thousands of books and papers have been written about the gruesome tales. Amongst them few have taken pain to cover and