This is the third of a series of fact-finding reports on the recent violence in Kashmir. The fact-finding has been conducted independently by a team of BELA BHATIA,VRINDA GROVER, SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN and RAVI HEMADRI. For an introduction to this series, see here.
Continue reading Report #3: Shooting the Messenger in Kashmir
This is the second of a series of fact-finding reports on the recent violence in Kashmir. The fact-finding has been conducted independently by a team of BELA BHATIA,VRINDA GROVER, SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN and RAVI HEMADRI. For an introduction to this series, see here, and also see the first report.
Guest post by MAHTAB ALAM
Last week, after a gap of almost 12 years, when I was asked by my family members to accompany them to see Chhatth Puja, an ancient Hindu festival dedicated to Surya, the Sun God, I could not resist myself and readily agreed to join them. As a school going boy, I had always enjoyed watching the festival and devotees performing the rituals observed for the Puja in my hometown Supaul, a district of Bihar, which borders the Tarai region of Nepal. In the last 12 years, I couldn’t get a chance to do so due to the mobile nature of work I am involved in. The Puja, most elaborately observed in Bihar, Jharkhand and the Terai regions of Nepal in modern times, and those areas where migrants from these regions have a presence. Chhath, usually observed six days after Diwali, was observed on 12 November this year. Continue reading This Chhath Puja, Ram ke naam: Mahtab Alam
Dear Rohini,
Apologies for taking the liberty of writing a separate post to respond to yours. I am doing so as a separate post not only because this response is rather too long for the comments space, but also because I have been wanting to address the issues you have raised. The issues are not new; I have been hearing them ad nauseaum since 2008, when the Kashmiri demand for independence from India took on a renewed momentum. In your post you bring in various external contexts – such as Rosa Luxemburg and the Sinhala-Tamil conflict. I am grateful that you do so, because it is always useful to learn from history and not repeat history’s mistakes. However, there are other recent histories of conflict and conflict resolution you don’t talk about, but which many Kashmiris are aware of – Kosovo, East Timor, Northern Ireland. Some new countries are being formed as we speak!
Also, there is history and context in Kashmir too, which you don’t go into. Your post talks more about LTTE than about Kashmir. Here, I will try to stick to Kashmir in responding to you.
Continue reading Dilemmas of ‘Right of Nations to Military Occupation’: A Response to Rohini Hensman
Guest post by SAMEER BHAT
Continue reading October 27, 1947: Dakota in my dell: Sameer Bhat
This is the first of a series of fact-finding reports on the recent violence in Kashmir. The fact-finding has been conducted independently by a team of BELA BHATIA, VRINDA GROVER, SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN and RAVI HEMADRI. For a introduction to this series, see here.
Continue reading Report #1: Attack and killing on Pattan hospital premises
This post introduces a fact finding team’s work on the recent violence in Kashmir. The contents of the report are being posted as separate posts and will be linked below as and when they’re posted.
Since June this year, the Kashmir valley has been torn by mass protests which have been met with overwhelming force by Indian security forces. Curfews and closures have been frequent, often shading into each other. No less than 111 deaths have been registered, of which a large number have been of students and youth in the age group of 8 to 25 years. There have besides, been hundreds of cases of injuries, of both protesters and those who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. An independent fact-finding team went to the Kashmir valley at the end of October to go into the totality of the situation, principally to inquire into the causes for the unconscionably large number of deaths that have occurred in the current phase of mass agitation. The team comprised of academic BELA BHATIA, advocate VRINDA GROVER, journalist SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN and activist RAVI HEMADRI of The Other Media, a Delhi based campaign and advocacy organisation, at whose initiative the effort was organised. Each member of the team spent varying lengths of time in the valley, but in total, roughly about twenty-five person days were put in the fact-finding exercise. In groups or individually, the team met the families of almost 40 persons who had been killed since the beginning of the civil unrest. Several individuals who had suffered serious injuries were also met. The team worked out of the state capital of Srinagar, and visited villages and towns in five of the Kashmir valley’s ten districts: Baramulla in the north (Sopore and Baramulla tehsils); Anantnag (Bijbehara and Anantnag tehsils) and Pulwama (Pulwama tehsil) in the south; Badgam in the west (Chadura and Badgam tehsils) and Srinagar itself. Separate sessions were held with journalists and media practitioners, university teachers and students, doctors, lawyers and activists besides officials in the police headquarters and the civil administration. The findings of the team are being released in a series of short reports beginning with following two sections. Forthcoming reports will deal with various facets of the situation that civilians in the Kashmir valley face in a season of unabated turmoil.
Next in this series
Report #1: Attack and Killing on Pattan Hospital Premises
Report #2: Palhallan Under Siege
Report #3: Shooting the Messenger in Kashmir
I.
Anyone ever heard about Sudhakar Rao Maratha alias Sudhakar Rao Prabhune ? A hardcore rightwing criminal who was nabbed by the M.P. police few months back in Jhansi which seized a car, a revolver and five cartridges from him. In fact one of Sudhakar’s colleague Shivam Dhakad was already under the custody of Ujjain police when Sudhakar was apprehended. According to the senior police officers Sudhakar Rao was in touch with RSS Pracharak -Terrorist Sunil Joshi, who was shot dead in Dewas in 2007 under mysterious circumstances.
Hardcore right-wing criminal Sudhakar Prabhune alias Sudhakar Rao Maratha, who could throw light on the mysterious murder of RSS pracharak Sunil Joshi, has been arrested in Madhya Pradesh. The 26-year-old was wanted in connection with a string of murders of Muslims in Ratlam and Mandsaur. The state police claimed he was arrested on Tuesday from Bilkhiria when he was on way to Bhopal from Sagar. …
Rao took to crime when he was 19. His name cropped in the murder of Jafar Khan, who was shot dead in Chittorgarh. ’ (Right-wing criminal’ held, to be questioned in Joshi murder case, Indian Express, Posted: Thu Sep 30 2010, 02:50 hrs Bhopal)
Guest post by ARVIND NARRAIN, based on a talk given at the Kannada book release of Inner Voice of Another India: The Writings of Balagopal, at National College Basavangudi, Bangalore, 30 October, 2010
Remembering Balagopal: Thought, Action and the Moral Imagination of Human Rights [i]
Introduction
One year after Balagopal’s death, what remains with us are memories of the number of times he spoke with such eloquence on human rights issues on his numerous visits to Bangalore. We also go back to his writings in the EPW which show the clarity of his thought. Be it his speeches or his writings , it was clear that for Balagopal words were tools he used to express thought. Language for him was not something which served to obfsucate meaning and muddy concepts, but rather a tool which had to be used to clarify difficult ideas and cut through conceptual confusions. In George Orwell’s striking phrase, both his writing and his speeches had the clarity of a windowpane. Continue reading Remembering Balagopal – Thought, Action and the Moral Imagination of Human Rights: Arvind Narrain
Guest post by WARISHA FARASAT
I was a child when the Babri Masjid was desecrated. After the news of the demolition spread across Uttar Pradesh, we were huddled in buses and packed off home from our boarding school. We were happy that the school had announced the winter break earlier than usual. That apart, we didn’t think much of the episode. In fact, I think that we were oblivious, almost entirely, to the gravity of the incident.
Much later, when I read the Sri Krishna Committee Report on the Bombay riots of 1992-93, and about thousands who had lost their life in the aftermath of the demolition, memories of 1992 returned. I remembered whispers. I remembered the fear in the eyes of our teachers accompanying us home. I remembered the instructions to the bus driver not to stop the bus if we were mobbed. I remembered leaving school at three in the morning. And, I remembered being asked not to tell my real name if we were stopped. Continue reading Ayodhya Verdict: Does it provide closure?
The panchayat elections in Kerala are over and the dust has settled in the battle-field. In the past weeks, I have been repeatedly asked, why aren’t you writing something on the elections? Well, I told them, I have many failings but I do not suffer from Schadenfreude.
Guest post by MOHAMAD JUNAID
Dear fellow Kashmiris,
I’m writing this letter from New York, a place far away, yet so close to everything. This city can make you forget, by filching reality away from you. But it also reminds you perpetually, by bringing you close to a different reality, through the pain and suffering of others. There are exiled specimens from all over the world here (yes, mostly those permitted to come to the US). There are Irish and Greeks, escapees from famines and wars. There are Jews from Germany and Germans from Russia, ones who survived persecution. There are Latinos from El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, and Bolivia, who fled Western-backed dictatorial regimes in their countries in the 1970s and 80s. There are Africans who narrowly missed genocide in Southern Sudan. There are Kurds from Turkey, and Berber from North Africa, driven out of their lands by years of conflict. And, then there are African Americans, who were forcibly brought hundreds of years before to slave for their White masters, and who, despite recent claims of dawning of an age of “post-racial America,” are still groveling at the bottom of the socio-economic heap. Their stories tell a similar conclusion: The world is shrinking for small nationalities and powerless minorities. Continue reading From New York, a letter to fellow Kashmiris
A note from JAMMU KASHMIR COALITION OF CIVIL SOCIETY
November 2, 2010
On November 1, 2010, shortly after 5.10 am, Professor Richard Shapiro was denied entry by the Immigration Authorities in New Delhi. Richard Shapiro is the Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. He is also the life partner/husband of Angana Chatterji, who is the Co-convener of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir (IPTK) and also Professor of Anthropology at CIIS. Continue reading India Bans US Professor from Kashmir, threatens Indian writer with sedition charges: JKCCS
… and you just might hit the wedding party. A fascinating intellectual property rights dispute offers up a possible reason for the number of civilians killed by American drone strikes.
To quote from the article from The Register:
The dispute surrounds a location analysis software package – “Geospatial” – developed by a small company called Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), which like Netezza is based in Massachusetts. IISi alleges that Netezza misled the CIA by saying that it could deliver the software on its new hardware, to a tight deadline. Continue reading Aim for the Insurgent…
(Shuddhabrata Sengupta has written eloquently his account of the day-long seminar, ‘Azadi: The Only Way’. The seminar was organised by the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners. Given below are CRPP’s minutes of the seminar. You can also see, on YouTube, two short videos showing the ruckus that some Kashmiri Pandits created before Syed Ali Shah Geelani was to speak (1, 2). Also on YouTube, in two parts (1, 2), is Arundhati Roy’s speech, for which some want her booked for sedition. Those on Facebook can also see most of SAS Geelani’s speech (1, 2, 3). A small part of Geelani’s speech is on Youtube, here. Those hurling abuses at Roy and Geelani would do well to read this text, see these videos, and engage with these ideas intellectually, instead of asking for individuals to be jailed and persecuted.)
Continue reading Minutes of the seminar on ‘Azadi: The Only Way’
Guest post by HILAL MIR
There are various divisions of pain the different classes of people feel in Jammu and Kashmir. Like those bank credit cards which classify customers according to precious metals—Platinum, Gold, Silver—pain is a class thing. For example, when PDP veteran Muzaffar Hussain Baig, after making a long convoluted speech in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, said Omar Abdullah’s name figured in the list of the people who used their authority to sexually exploit girls, the junior Abdullah was transformed into a character from a Greek tragedy.
Guest post by ANGANA CHATTERJI
The 8-point Plan, New Delhi’s political initiative to address the crises in Kashmir, attests to the parallel and incommensurate realities of the sovereign and the subjugated, the Indian state and the Kashmiris.
The 8-point Plan renders obvious New Delhi’s limited comfort zone. The Plan is not an overture to healing the reality of suffering and outrage inside Kashmir. Rethinking militarization and military governance is not the priority. The ambition is to manage Kashmiris and to keep the disarray concealed from the international gaze.
New Delhi announced its 8-point Plan on September 25, 2010, following the visit to India-ruled Kashmir of a 39-member All Party Delegation from New Delhi led by Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, and parallel to the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York City. That Defence Minister Arackaparambil Kurian Antony did not accompany the All Party Delegation was indicative of New Delhi’s mood.
Over the last month, the levels of violence in Chattisgarh appear to have de-escalated to a degree. I say de-escalated rather than reduced because the violence is largely driven by raids and counter-raids between the Maoists and the security forces, which is very different from the chaotic and un-nerving violence described in the recently leaked Iraqi war-logs covered by the Guardian and the NYT.
Sources in the police and the Maoists agree that the reduction is largely due to this year’s torrential monsoons which submerged large parts of the interiors in Dantewada and Bijapur. In the monsoons, the jungle tracks used by both forces turn into fast moving streams, making it difficult to launch operations and confining the forces to their camps.
(This post is by SUBHASH GATADE. It was initially inadvertently posted under Aditya Nigam’s name. The error is deeply regretted.)
I. Conflating Hinduism and Hindutva
Mr Mohan Bhagwat, the ‘young’ Supremo of an eighty plus year old exclusively male cultural organisation called Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is in high spirits these days.
It is not very difficult to understand the glee on his face which has to do with the latest developments in the cause celebre of Sangh Parivar. One can even notice that every member of this different kind of ‘family’ also seem to be upbeat , whose representatives can be traced on neighbourhood playground in the morning doing drills, playing games or listening to ‘sermons’ of their seniors which they call Baudhik.
Guest post by HILAL MIR
During the convention, Azadi the only Way, at LTG auditorium on Thursday, a potbellied man was standing on the aisle, listening intently to the speech of professor of history at Jadavpur University Sugata Bhadra. The man, I reckon, might be easily burdening earth with nearly 130 kilograms of his fair, north Indian bulk. The professor was stripping the Indian state to its bare minimum and the audiences clapped. The man could stand it no more. I soon found out his voice was equally weighty, and gravelly—a cross between Shatrugan Sinha and Kulbushan Kharbanda. Quite audibly he said jis thali ma khatey hai usi main chaid kartey hain. In Bollywood films this saying condemning treachery is reserved for domestic helps who fall in love with the pretty daughters of their employers. Here, the context was different. A Maoist sympathizer was sharing the dais with a Kashmiri pro-freedom leader who was sharing the dais with a Sikh secessionist who was sharing the dais with a Naga human rights defender…A veritable thali of secessionism and dissent indeed. No wonder Arnab Goswami was hysterical. Continue reading Let Delhi have its thali
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 