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Kashmir
How Kashmiris are denied their humanity. Alive or dead.
It took me a little while to react. It is not the first time horrific images flicker by from Kashmir. Not the first time seeing these pictures and feeling like a hard punch just hit solar plexus. This is no exception. Nothing new. Brutal as every other day. And then the reaction. Stomach twisting and disbelief pouring in the veins. India already killed the man. Soldiers/police pumped 35 bullets into his body. They did it when he was taking care of his animals. He was carefully closing the door to the sheep shed. Unarmed, alone and most likely still in the pyjama and yet dozens of soldiers emptied their guns in his chest. 35 bullets and nothing will ever be the same. What they did after left me breathless and convinced that humanity is already as dead as the boy on the stretcher. They already killed this young bag-maker and his body is lifted to the sky by friends and family. His body is doing its last journey with thousands of Kashmiris attached to him like a grieving tale. That’s when punch two hits.
Because Saleem Malik is already dead, already killed for no reason. 35 bullets. But I see Indian forces stopping his mother from reaching the body. I see his father beyond this world in grief and tear-gas raining over the lifeless body. The air thick of smoke and the boys navigating stoically to not drop Saleem. They run and try to balance the dead body and it rocks from side to side. His face is pale and the voices urging the tale forward. My throat feels narrow and my mind is full of questions. They already killed him, why attack his funeral procession? Where are the limits? The normal limits that kick in when other humans are injured. The limits that stop us from hurting others and makes it impossible to indulge in acts that of course are crimes when looking at it from a legal angle, and even more so a disastrous collapse if we have our moral glasses on.
Saleem’s body is safe on the shoulders of these young men. They carry him through the tear-gas towards Srinagar’s EidGah. In any other place, regarding any other people, the headlines would not give these images a break and our politicians would condemn strongly in one unison voice. Saleem Malik would be known across the globe and his culprits would be hunted down before dawn. This is where punch number 3 hits. Because instead of condemnations and images flooding the news, there is nothing like that to be seen. Instead we see Indian media frantically pump out the news that militants were hiding in the area and that Saleem could even be one himself. That the family and all witnesses tell that no militants were in the house or even in the area, is brushed under the thickest rug. On social media a large “defence brigade” shout from the top of their lungs that he deserved it, he was a terrorist and many called for more Kashmiris to be killed without hesitation. “-Don’t spare them, even if they are children, women, young or old”, “-Well done our army”, “-They are all terrorists and animals, who deserve no mercy”. These type of messages are flooding Twitter and Facebook. In the rest of the world we hear nothing at all. A young animal lover and son is brutally murdered, to the rhythm of a compact silence. 35 bullets pumped into an unarmed man and the headlines all scream terrorist. They scream terrorist about an unarmed boy lying in a pool of blood, with a mother left with nothing but pain and a billion questions.
This is just one occasion of uncountable amounts of similar attacks by Indian forces on civilians, where no normal restraint is shown, no laws are followed and no remorse is shown. Kashmiris are reduced to some form of nothingness below the value of an animal. It is shocking and it is poisoning our minds to ignore everything that is normal, legal and morally acceptable any other day. It twists our brains to be forced to view the Kashmir issue through the Delhi lens and accept every line that is projected to us from the Indian news desks. Kashmiris are getting humiliated, raped, tortured and killed to the beat of prime time TV and we don’t even blink. Young Kashmiris get their bodies penetrated by hundreds of lead bullets, women and men get tortured in ways we can’t imagine, often with sexual violence involved, but we join the chorus and label them fanatics, secessionists and terrorists. Thousands of Kashmiris wait in vain for their sons, who left and never came back some 20 years ago, men like Saleem are executed in their homes with no mercy, and we listen to the Indian version and jump into the project the blame on the victims bandwagon.
We do so because we are fed the most significant method that exists to sustain the Status Quo.
The dehumanisation is not only seen and used by Delhi against dissident Kashmiris, it is passed on and nestled into our living-rooms, where we swallow the news as pistachio kulfi, with no reflections or fair objections. We buy the already parcelled perceptions and thus the images we produce of Kashmir and Kashmiris are fixed and ready. Our minds are saffronised and almost take the shape of the tricolore, and under that banner we hide the reality on the ground, that has been haunting the Kashmiri people for seven decades. In that fog of deception, we refuse to even give the victims the right to narrate their stories and even their death.
“The words we use about them, the stories we tell about theme, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, the values we place on them (Hall 1997).”Humne kisko thoka? Who did we shoot?
Indian forces shot a young Kashmiri bag-maker, who didn’t only love animals and his family, but also cared for those in need of extra care, like his neighbours autistic son.
Indian forces pumped 35 bullets into a young Kashmiri man and killed not only him, but also all the people that loved him.
Indian forces killed Saleem. With 35 bullets. That is the non saffronised truth.
Fallen Chinar leaves and the art of keep moving on – Kashmir
Geo
- Download the syllabus and get a print out. Read and understand the syllabus because a clear limit is set to each topic, so you need to know when and where to stop.
- Buy the question bank of Anthropology. Start to analyse the percentage of questions coming every year (starting from 2005, as before 2005 the pattern of asking questions was a little different ).
- In paper 1 start with the Unit 1 but only 1.7 (sub unit) The biological basis of life. (This will build the base for the most important Unit 9). Then straight away switch to Unit 9, Genetics. It is the most lengthy part plus quite many questions come from here. Also keep an alternative pattern of completing the syllabus i.e. switch between socio-part and bio-part, or else you will get bored with the monotony.
- Evolution, Unit 1 can be a little boring but its a scoring part. (Take it seriously as most of the students tend to skip a large chunk from this unit).
- In paper 2, Start the way it is but for now leave Unit 3.1 and 3.3, Unit 4 because it deals with the philosophical part plus theoretical part and also breaks the connection with rest of the forth coming topics. If you want you can complete this section at the end (entirely optional).
- Surely make notes of tribal India because in paper 2 the syllabus is scattered and its little difficult to create a linkage.