Another perspective on the Kashmir Turmoil

Update (08-25-2008): Just read Arundhati Roy’s article in which she says that Kashmir needs azaadi from India. She’s quite a hateful (I mean, she hates) person as far as this country and Hinduism goes. She is full of spite and it drips through her every sentence. I’m not saying you cannot question the policies of the country you live in and cannot dislike a particular religion (many dislike Islam, and Christianity) and I’m not even saying that people like her should be persecuted, but you can see she doesn’t mean well for Muslims as well as Hindus. Incidentally, I found this text:

The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, amended in 2004-05, says, "Secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union includes the assertion of any claim to determine whether such part will remain a part of the territory of India." The offences listed under this law include any assertion or statement "which is intended, or supports any claim, to bring about, on any ground whatsoever, the cession of a part of the territory of India or the secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union, or which incites any individual or group of individuals to bring about such cession or secession".

A good thing about our country is that you can speak up your mind without scores of fanatics stalking you and vying to decapitate you, and people like Arundhati Roy know it well, and that is why – since they need targets to feel important and relevant – they chose soft targets. Everybody knows what a bloody history the Muslims have had and – I hate to talk like this but the fact smacks at your face with amplified clarity almost everyday – the expression Islam and peaceful co-existence is an oxymoron. Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen took up cudgels against Islam and you have seen what happened to them. Arundhati Roy, on the other hand, couldn’t even spend a single day in jail in order to take a stand. She knows pretty well that Hindu fanatics are not going to come after her throat, and she knows that there are many obfuscated and somnambulantly liberated people in the country, and abroad, who are going to support her views.

I’m not writing this to badmouth about a community – this is the last thing I want to do – but as a religion, you can only progress if you can indulge in self analysis and rectification, and this is anathema in Islam. And people who support Islam blindly and criticize other religions irrationally are in actuality doing it a great harm. In Sikhism there is this great saying (written, interestingly, by Bhagat Kabir Das):

Sura so pahchaniye jo lare deen ke he

The real warrior-champion is that who fights for the oppressed. These days it has become a fashion to side with Muslims and Christians – at least in India – even when they commit the worst human crimes; by dint of no possible logic they can be viewed as oppressed. It has become kind of a peer pressure. The majority has, all of a sudden, turned into the Gestapo and every minority is like the Jews in Germany; which is totally wrong. They are playing a dangerous game and every right-thinking person in the country should actively oppose such subversive activities.

The Indian state as usual is at its pusillanimous best. I’m wondering how dare a Pakistani flag be waved on the Indian territory. Such people should be immediately shot, and I’m not saying it in anger. You take your flag to another territory (disregard the Olympics and other international events) when you have taken over that territory. If they want to hoist Pakistani flags and want to chant slogans like Jeevey Jeevey Pakistan. Long live Pakistan, then they should be either put behind bars or packed off to Pakistan. They should be slapped and told: no Pakistani flag on the India-occupied territory. It sucks? Yes, it does; too bad.

The older post follows:

Reading this article in the New York Times, you’ll feel what a repressive regime the Indian government is, and how an average Kashmiri craves for azaadi, and is ready to die for it.

A few waved Pakistani flags. Some shouted praise for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the banned Pakistan-based militant organization that India blames for a series of terrorist attacks in recent years. “India, your death will come,” they chanted. “Lashkar will come. Lashkar will come.”

Another mass gathering, however, is planned for Friday at the martyrs’ cemetery, where two generations of those killed in the conflict are buried, with all the potential to become yet another flash point of conflict.

“Before the storm, there is always a calm,” a Kashmiri woman, Assabah Khan, 34, declared. “The uprising we see now is the latent anger against the Indian state that has erupted again.”

Mehmeet Syed, who only a few months ago could sing her heart out on stage with her five-piece rock band, remained caged in her home, as her city erupted in a series of fiery protests and strikes. On the road leading to the Syed family home, children guarded a homemade roadblock the other day, clutching stones.

On Monday, on the edges of an open field where tens of thousands had gathered to vent their anger at Indian rule, Abdul Gani Mir, 62, marveled at a young man who had scaled a chinar tree to plant a green Islamic flag.

Mr. Mir said being here filled him with hope. “We succumbed, but I don’t think this generation will,” he said, and then he chuckled. “I wish I were young.”

His niece was among 20 unarmed Kashmiri protesters killed by Indian security forces last week, as they set off on a march to Muzaffarabad, in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

Sheik Yasir Rouf, 27, said he had never before taken part in a demonstration so large, so intense. He was a child in the early 1990s, when the anti-Indian rebellion was at its peak. “This feeling was always there,” he said. “We are fighting for our one right to be free.”

A BBC article on the similar lines (OK, I know someone is going to say that both have been, surprise, surprise, written by Bengali writers).

The paralysed nature of the talks seemed bearable since the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir since 1990 ebbed during these years.

The valley’s population feels that their homeland is essentially occupied, and harbours a deep sense of oppression over several decades and generations by Indian governments.

This powerful sense of unmitigated grievance was triggered by yet another ‘slight’ – the decision to transfer land without any consultation with the valley’s people.

Although the second article is a bit unbiased. I was just wondering, in the international press, why don’t we find articles explaining the Indian side. I use the expression “explaining” because I see this propaganda going on unabated and it is not being cleverly countered.