Kashmir

How Kashmiris are denied their humanity. Alive or dead.

 

 

Lens Firdous Qadri The Kashmiriyat

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.

Lens Umar Ganie The Kashmir monitor

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.

Lens Habib Naqash/Greater Kashmir

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.

Lens Firdous Qadri The Kashmiryat

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.

Article by:Her name is Bea

Fallen Chinar leaves and the art of keep moving on – Kashmir

November 22, 2017 2 Comments

 The air is crispy and the last leaves are falling on my late Autumn walk. They are falling and it is a time for reflection. A time to wonder where did the dreams we dreamt, the plans we made, the feelings we felt, actually go? A sober reminder to recall and make sense of our actions or maybe the times we chose not to act. Did we manage to climb another step on the expectation ladder? Did we do our obligations? Did we put our bets on the right horse? Did we fight for what we want and what we believe in? Did we care enough about our close ones, or did our priorities float astray to more shallow paths? Did we cherish what makes our hearts beat fast and souls feel fulfilled? Did we feed a homeless or shelter a refugee? Did we struggle for others justice, or did we get caught up in our own spinning wheels? Did we live or did we just breathe? And did we bother about how much oxygen also others are given? 

 

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