fascist Modi twists the screws even more tightly on Kashmiris

Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 12:31pm

This is some of the backstory; I’d high-jacked one of my own recent threads when I’d seen this evil news on Twitter by Sameera Khan, as I must have written a dozen diaries on Kashhmir and the genocidaire Modi’s failure to hold a self-determination plebiscite over the past several years, among his many other dark deeds perpetrated on his own citizens.

‘India to build Israeli style “settlements” in Kashmir’, Ayesha Alam, crescent international  (a few bits):

“The people of Kashmir have suffered decades of Indian military occupation and aggression including rape, torture and mass killings. Now the Hindu fascist Bharatiya Janata Party plans to build Israeli-style settlements for Hindus in Kashmir.

Since 1947, the pristine, mountainous region of Kashmir has been the site of internecine and state violence, the natural beauty a reproach to the bloodletting, incarceration and rapes inflicted on its long suffering population. Kashmir is the site of nationalism gone amok, with both the Indian and Pakistani militaries fighting along the tenuous Line of Control or strategic hot points such as the Siachen glacier in order to maintain control. Numerous activists, including Indian writer Arundhati Roy, have sought to bring to light the atrocities suffered by the Muslim majority population at the hands of Indian military and other security personnel. Now the stakes have become higher.

Kashmir’s resistance movement has often taken inspiration from Palestine, modeling itself after the Palestinian intifadah. It is no surprise that India, a loyal ally of the US-Israeli nexus, should leaf through the Israeli occupation’s playbook. In recent years, India has been importing advanced cutting edge weaponry from the United States and Israel in order to bring the Kashmiri resistance movement under control.” [snip]

“Now Narendra Modi’s government is planning to build Israeli-style “settlements” (actually, colonies) to relocate Hindu Pandits who it argues had to leave the region in the 1990s after the emergence of the Kashmiri resistance movement against Indian military occupation. On April 9, Modi’s ultra-conservative, fascist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) declared that Kashmiri pandits should be returned to the high-conflict region, and demanded a “secure zone for those want to return to their homeland.”

“We are very much clear and we want the return and resettlement of the Kashmiri Pandit community in the Kashmir valley in a dignified manner,” said Ravinder Raina, the BJP member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA). “They must be given secure environment. They should not go and live in scattered places in their villages, they need proper security zones for their survival.” In other words, this is a road map for expanding draconian surveillance networks and Israeli-style checkpoints throughout the Kashmir region to ensure the “security” of the Hindu pandits at the expense of the Muslim residents struggling for their mere breath.” [long snip]

“Kashmir’s tragedy is akin to the tragedy of the Palestinians, looking for a way to realize their rights and freedoms being crushed by hyper militarized states. The Hindu Nazis have found their soulmates in the Zionist aggressors and land grabbers. There will be no criticism in the corporate owned Western media of the Hindu Nazis because India is viewed as a lucrative market for doing business with. True, there are potentially 300 million consumers in India with surplus cash for western luxury goods but there are also more than 400 million Indians living in absolute poverty. Many of them sleep on sidewalks or in shantytowns. Their plight is of little concern to the western do-gooders.”

I’d added more on the BJP executive coup revoking article 370 in kashmir and jammu:

‘India’s Hindu supremacist government abrogates Kashmir’s autonomy’, Keith Jones, 6 August 2019, wsws.org. (i’m not altogether sure he isn’t too critical of imran khan’s part, but that may be my bias speaking.) briefly:

“India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government illegally stripped Jammu and Kashmir, the country’s only Muslim-majority state, of its special constitutional status Monday, and split it into two Union Territories. One is comprised of the Jammu and Kashmir divisions of the now abolished state, and the other of the sparsely populated, but geostrategically significant, Ladakh region.

Through actions that are tantamount to a constitutional coup, the Indian state has not just abrogated the broad autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) enjoyed—at least on paper—under articles 370 and 35 (A) of the Indian constitution. The new governments of the bifurcated state have been given a status inferior to that of the Indian Union’s remaining 28 states, enabling New Delhi to exercise wide powers over the territories’ affairs in perpetuity.” [snip]

“Fearing mass popular opposition to its actions, the BJP government has poured tens of thousands of additional troops into Jammu and Kashmir, cut off internet, cell phone and landline access across much of the region, including in Srinagar, J&K’s summer capital, and arrested prominent opposition politicians. As of midnight yesterday, several districts, including Srinagar and Jammu, have been placed under Section 144 of the Criminal Code, meaning all gatherings of more than four people are prohibited.” [snip]
“Pakistan, for its part, has sought to manipulate the mass alienation from New Delhi among the Muslims of the Kashmir Valley to further its own reactionary agenda. This has included sidelining secular Kashmiri nationalists, while providing arms and other logistical support to Islamist anti-Indian Kashmiri insurgents.”

[Imran Khan denies harboring the above, but it was one of the reasons John Bolton had given when he’d green-lighted India to bomb Pakistan six months ago or so.]

“In 2016, two years after Narendra Modi and his BJP came to power in New Delhi, a new wave of mass protests erupted in J&K. The BJP government’s response was twofold: to order a vicious crackdown, which left over a hundred dead and thousands of protesters, the overwhelming majority of them young people, blinded; and to ratchet up tensions with Pakistan. First in September 2016 and again this February, the Modi government ordered military strikes inside Pakistan in what it claimed was retaliation for Pakistan-supported terrorist attacks. The latter “surgical strike” resulted in a Pakistani counterattack and a dogfight over disputed Kashmir that brought South Asia’s nuclear-armed rivals the closest they have been to all-out war since 1971.”

But the bottom line for ‘the west’?

“The Modi government, however, calculates that its provocative steps in Kashmir and incitement of communal reaction will occasion no more than handwringing from the Western powers—and above all US imperialism—which are assiduously promoting India as a military-strategic counterweight to China. According to news reports, New Delhi is on the verge of signing the third and final of three “foundational” documents with Washington providing the framework for joint Indo-US military operations. India has already agreed to open its military bases for use by US warplanes and battleships.”

I’d been wracking my brain for the name of this odious and evil law, and here it is in: ‘Report details Indian security forces use of torture against Kashmiri people’, Wasantha Rupasinghe, 23 July 2019

“Titled Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir, the report is, in its own words, “the first ever comprehensive report on the phenomenon of torture in Jammu and Kashmir perpetrated by the Indian State from 1990 onwards.”

The 550-page document was published by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS). It gives a detailed account of cruelties practiced by Indian security forces in J&K, through an examination of 432 individuals who were subjected to various types of torture, including water-boarding, beatings with iron rods and leather belts, and electric shocks to the genitals.”

“For the past three decades, J&K has been under de facto military rule, with over half a million Indian Army troops and other security forces deployed in a state with a population of just 13 million people.

In 1990, the Indian armed forces were given sweeping powers to arrest civilians, and even use lethal force against “unlawful assembles,” under “The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Ordinance” and then, with parliament’s blessing, “The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 (AFSPA).”

“Tens of thousands of people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the Kashmir conflict. According to estimates, “more than 8,000 people have been subjected to enforced or involuntary disappearances since 1990,” notes the Torture report.”

b at Moon of alabama had the cursed news up as well.

For further exploration at Kashmir Awareness:

‘The world cannot remain silent as India attempts to devour occupied Kashmir and crush its people’, August 8, 2019
And 28 pages of articles speaking to the long-ago promised ‘Self-determination plebiscite for Kashmir’.

And this report yesterday:

 ‘To enforce Monday’s constitutional coup India dramatically intensifies repression in Kashmir’, Keith Jones, 8 August 2019, wsws.org

“India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is mounting an unprecedented military-security crackdown in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region to quell popular opposition to the patently illegal changes that it has made to the region’s government and relations with the central government.

Underscoring the BJP government’s reactionary antidemocratic aims, these changes were conceived in secret and implemented by stealth, in a conspiracy orchestrated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his henchman, Home Secretary Amit Shah, and the country’s president, Ram Nath Kovind, himself a long-time cadre of the far-right Hindu chauvinist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), together with the most senior members of the state bureaucracy and the army and intelligence agencies.

Not only were the people of Jammu and Kashmir not forewarned and their elected representatives not consulted about the impending changes. India’s so-called supreme law was modified behind the backs of the entire population, including the most senior leaders of the opposition and the BJP’s own allies in the governing National Democratic Alliance. To provide a pseudo-democratic cover for this conspiracy, the BJP subsequently had parliament pass two motions endorsing the changes to J&K’s constitutional status, borders and government, but even then debate was limited to just a few hours.

Kashmir under a state of siege

At least a hundred prominent political leaders, including the foremost spokesmen of the traditional pro-Indian section of J&K’s Muslim elite, have been arrested. These include two former J&K chief ministers—People’s Democratic Party leader Mehbooba Mufti and J&K National Conference head Omar Abdullah—and the chairman of the J&K People’s Conference, Sajjad Gani Lone.”

By today?  It looks even worse today according to the Twittersphere.

Please take your fake Namasté rubbish on a one-way ticket to the nearest asteroid; if you had a divine soul, you’d share it, you bastard.

There are just too many more soul-crushing Tweets on that hashtag to bring. But I will bring this brief Jimmy Dore video that Sameera Khan had retweeted:

...as well as this dilly by Fascist Modi (not what he'd told RT.com, but never mind:

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

Tags: 
#FreeKashmir
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Submitted by Fishtroller 02 on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 1:14pm

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 2:04pm
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@Fishtroller 02

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz8RjPAD2Jk]

but well..er...um, yes, and unless pressed to, i won't elucidate further, but it's sure one of my major chiches w/ her. ; )

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Submitted by wendy davis on Sat, 08/10/2019 - 8:54am
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@Fishtroller 02

tulsi's hubbie might not appreciate that designation, but yes, they are well-acquainted. ; )

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Submitted by gjohnsit on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 4:00pm

ignorant dipshit

When U.S. President Donald Trump offered to mediate the decades-old Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan late last month, he wasn’t attempting anything all that new for modern American presidents. U.S. leaders have sought to play arbitrator-in-chief in global affairs going back to Teddy Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

The difference was that Trump botched the effort in the most ham-handed way—and ended up seriously exacerbating tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations when, a week later, an incensed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made clear that not only would there not be any talks, he was formally annexing Kashmir.

It’s not only that Trump flagrantly misrepresented Modi’s position and humiliated the Indian leader by saying—to the cameras and to the delighted surprise of visiting Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan—that Modi had asked him to mediate. (No Indian prime minister, especially a nationalist like Modi, has ever consented to international mediation over Kashmir, which India regards as its own province.) What was most obvious to observers is that Trump’s blundering, casual comments about one of the most complex issues in South Asia were directed toward a single end—inducing Pakistan to help the United States withdraw from neighboring Afghanistan—and that he likely knows little about Kashmir except that people occasionally wear it. “I honestly don’t think Trump has the slightest idea of what he’s talking about,” tweeted Shashi Tharoor, a former senior United Nations official and now a legislator from the Indian National Congress Party.

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Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 4:40pm
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@gjohnsit

and while hirsch certainly sees causality in those first two paragraphs, i guess i just don't, as this has been coming for quite some time.

but i'd vaguely remembered reading about that kerfuffle at RT.com, i just looked, and the version there is somewhat different (on a quick read):

"Indeed, Trump has recently offered to mediate between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. This was welcomed by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, but India's leadership made it clear they don't want anyone to interfere in what they see as a strictly bilateral matter. Chitra Subramaniam, an Indian journalist and author, said she has serious doubt whether Trump could do much in this regard anyway.

"I don't think Mr. Trump even knows where Kashmir is. He probably thinks it's a sweater," she said, adding that the president may be more interested in fostering the image of peacemaker and collecting a Nobel Peace Prize than in resolving a conflict.

.......................
but RT has this today, which makes more sense as far as mediation/diplomacy, although it's long, but it opens:

‘China ‘can’t just stay out’ of Kashmir dispute, will play peacemaker’, RT.com

"China shares a border with India, and lays claim to a “Switzerland-sized” chunk of Kashmir, making it “not an outsider but a party to the Kashmir dispute,” geostrategist Brahma Chellaney told RT. However, it is in China’s interests to bring about a peaceful resolution to the current crisis, Leung continued. “Any conflict… between Pakistan and India – both are nuclear powers – is going to be very unsettling and unstabilizing for China.”

For Beijing, the status quo, in which India and Pakistan focus their defensive energies on each other, is ideal. China has fought a series of border conflicts with India since the 1960s, and “will be in a tight spot if Pakistan escalates conflict,” Sreeram Chaulia, professor of international affairs at Jindal Global University told RT.

“India is a much bigger economy and military than Pakistan,” he explained. “And China will face an adverse balance of power if Pakistan loses another war with India. So, China will quietly advise Pakistan to tone down the rhetoric over Kashmir.” What China will not do, public policy expert Iftikhar Lodhi of Nazarbayev University told RT, is “actively get involved in putting a resolution to the UN,” a move that Pakistan may consider next.

Pakistan has responded to India’s Kashmir clampdown by downgrading diplomatic relations with New Delhi, expelling an envoy, and cutting bilateral trade and cross-border transport links. While these steps are diplomatic weapons and a long way off the military conflict China fears, the government in Beijing also has economic reasons to simmer down tensions in the region.

there are six more paragraphs on trade and other alliances that would be threatened if the situation...heats up.

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Submitted by boriscleto on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 4:59pm
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@wendy davis Why are the fighting over a sweater?

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

Submitted by wendy davis on Sat, 08/10/2019 - 8:58am
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@boriscleto

think trump could negotiate between those two nuclear powers is a total maroon (h/t bugs bunny), especially as india is key to the US pivot to china already, ports, airfields, US weapons to purchase...crap, wasn't sec def Raytheon esper there just recently?

on edit: it'd be like asking bibi to negotiate.

but india's already being touted as having created its own new Space Command, although macron's is far more advanced.

but yeah. the kashmir/cashmere word play is pretty funny, whether he said it or not.

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Submitted by Big Al on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 4:04pm
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tweet. One of the comments said he later admitted he was wrong about his statement on India, evidently quickly getting wind of the pushback to his idiotic partisan garbage. Definitely showed his true colors though. I'm sure if Gabbard was a good friend of Netanyahoo he wouldn't sing the same tune. Wonder if he'll give it more introspection.
Thanks for the report wd, still digesting it.

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Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 4:47pm
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@Big Al

i'll admit i was appalled at his cavalierly blind "Why should i care? what's it got to do with ME?" rhetoric. i've never cared for him, but that just sealed the deal and tied it up with a gordian knot.

lightbulb: you reckon that his response was just sorta in defense of tulsi gabbard, then? if so, i'm even more slow-witted than i'd thunk these days, ay yi, yi.

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Submitted by Big Al on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 4:55pm
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@wendy davis that I reckon what you said I reckon. Smile That was it plain and clear to me.

I just clicked on the "54 people are talking about this" thing and presto, I was in the twittersphere.

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Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 5:21pm
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@Big Al

figured that out! thanks, lol. too many to read for now, but i'm glad his diatribe was denounced by most of them. guess that was his way of being an anti-interventionist?

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Submitted by Battle of Blair... on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 4:47pm

Her link to Modi. Her signing on to reproach the boycott. Signing onto an AIPAC bill. She's the Hindu arm of the US-Israel-India alliance. Seems there's a lot of divided thought on Israel's proxy war with Syria inside Israel. Netenyahu has taken a lot of heat and his power has been challenged. A lot of military strategists are seeing that the U.S. is being dragged down trying to secure the Levant for Israel and take out Iran. They see that China and Russia have gained at our expense. They see this PNAC escapade as reckless. There is a strong push by the MIC to say China is our biggest threat. The new USSR.

Things we know: Israeli is fascist. That won't change. India is fascist, that might change. Tulsi, a military woman, is aligned with both.

Does she really want peace or just less reckless use of the military?

Would she get us out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria - tossing the PNAC into the bins of history - just to divert our forces to Pakistan and China?

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Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 5:08pm
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@Battle of Blair Mountain

analysis. i hadn't known that netanyahoo's been taking heat internally for syria, but yes, military analysts must see that policy has created alliances that challenge Imperial power, not that they need be 'enemies', but have sure become so as a default position, tragically.

myself, i see no hope that india won't remain fascist, as even the oppo party in india is cheering on this coup over kashmir. i guess the only thing he'd objected to that modi 'might have done it all more slowly' but as i remember it, not even 'more transparently'.

as to your over-riding Q as to what she might do if elected, i have no idea. but i have often wondered allowed that if she has any sway over modi, why she wouldn't at the very least advise him to hold the self-determination plebiscite, and rescind the terrifyingly fascist Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act.

i've featured stories earlier of how many kashmiris would be attacked, beaten, and disappeared that few would even venture outside unless it was impossible not to. i can't even think of a proper analogy, save perhaps south africa back in the day.

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Submitted by wendy davis on Sat, 08/10/2019 - 5:12pm
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@Battle of Blair Mountain

but this nagged at me: 'Does she really want peace or just less reckless use of the military?, and it finally reminded me that someone had put up a post about 'Pimplegate'. (oh, the horror!) but i did watch, and at least in the part that was covered, what she'd said about 'the war on iraq' (although there were at last two) was how many american lives and (close to) amerikan treasure were wasted.

no one commenting brought up how many iraqi lives were ended, how those wars actually created more conditions for further wars and insurrections by radical islamists, and so on.
occupy Our Holy Lands, install puppet governments, and sure we're gonna try to kill you.

but whole generations to come will be dying of all the depleted uranium the US used to 'turn the desert to glass'.

all of which is meant to convey: that's a seriously good question, battle of blair mountain.

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Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 5:27pm
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‘Modi hails Kashmir crackdown as ‘historic’ decision that helps combat terror and separatism’, 8 Aug, 2019, RT.com

“As a country and as a family we have taken a historic decision,” Modi said, adding that the former system in Kashmir had left many “bereft of various rights,” and has therefore been “done away with.” Kashmiris, Modi assured all, would still be able to “elect [their] representatives in a transparent way.”

Two articles of the Indian Constitution – 370 and 35A – had until now given the territories of Kashmir and Jammu a greater degree of control over their local affairs, but since last year they have been under de facto federal control. A bill to formally remove the special status passed the Indian parliament on Monday, and was later approved by Indian President Ram Nath Kovind.

Some 35,000 soldiers were deployed to the region in preparation for the unrest the decision might provoke, but there are, so far, no reports of major clashes with security forces.

In Thursday’s statement, the prime minister also assailed Islamabad for exploiting the region’s former autonomous status to support terror groups in the Kashmir Valley, a common refrain of many members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Pakistan, which also claims territorial rights to Kashmir, denies any support for terrorism."

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Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 6:33pm
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but here are a few bits from ‘Arundhati Roy on Reckless Modi & Kashmir’, april 20, 2019

the video (14 mins, and she looks so frail and so exhausted...)

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=8RH2nkn-fGg]

‘India’s BJP releases manifesto before elections, the BJP promises to scrap Article 35A, which prevents non-residents from buying property in Indian-administered Kashmir’, April 8, 2019, aljazeera.com

“Political leaders in Muslim-majority Kashmir, where India is fighting an armed rebellion against its rule, have warned that repealing the law would lead to widespread unrest.
Modi has made his strong stance on national security a key part of the BJP’s election campaign, following a recent flare-up in tensions with arch foe Pakistan, which also lays claims to Kashmir.”

and:

‘It is now Pakistan’s turn to weep’: Modi boasts about India’s ‘mother of nuclear bombs’ at rally’, RT.co,, April 18, 2019

“Amid rising tensions, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he has called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff by launching airstrikes while also claiming that New Delhi has the “mother of nuclear bombs.”

“Earlier, terrorists from Pakistan would come here and go back after conducting an attack. Pakistan would threaten us, saying it has the nuclear bomb and will press the button,” Prime Minister Modi said at a campaign rally at Surendranagar in Gujarat on Wednesday.”

and from the twittersphere:

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Submitted by wendy davis on Fri, 08/09/2019 - 9:49pm
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and rather than bring music, i'd like to feature this kashmiri resilience artwork a painting against disremberingby rollie mukherjee

it's so poignant that one can almost hear musical sounds emanating from it. good night, all, and may we all walk in beauty....

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Submitted by wendy davis on Sat, 08/10/2019 - 8:51am
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israel has has the exact same policy for palestinians as india' policy for kashmiris 'armed forces special powers act'. this was written by a kashmiri/palestinian living on turtle island:

'Kashmir and Palestine share the struggle for self determination against colonial occupation', Zainab Ramahi, August 8, 2019, mondoweiss.net

“India’s neocolonial relationship with Kashmir is brilliantly illustrated by laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which grants special powers to Indian Armed Forces in so-called “disturbed areas,” a category of which Kashmir has been a part since 1990. AFSPA grants the Indian military sweeping powers to arrest without warrant, shoot-to-kill, and destroy property. Characterized by Human Rights Watch as a “tool of state abuse, oppression and discrimination,” AFSPA also handily provides immunity for military personnel who conduct extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, and mass disappearances.

Reviewing the literature on AFSPA and its origins, it is not hard to draw the connection to Israel’s justification of the use of torture and indefinite detention against the Palestinian population by declaring the areas in which it is applied to be in a state of emergency, remaining so for decades.

Hindutva, a form of Hindu nationalism, is the official ideology of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its followers claim that Muslims and secularists have undermined the strength of the Hindu nation. Hindutva nationalists and Zionists often try to reframe the conflicts not as ones over human and political rights, sovereignty, consent, and self-determination, but as being caused by irrational and implacable Muslims and Islamists who if not confronted and stopped will take over the world. In this context, all the repression and state violence to which millions of people are subjected is justified in the name of fighting terror and defending democracy and civilized values.”

“Suggesting that the two nations are not un-self aware of their close ideological ties, India and Israel have fostered political and military links in recent years, including arms sales, joint intelligence operations, trade agreements, and cultural exchanges. Since 2003, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon signed an agreement with the Indian government declaring that India and Israel were “strategic partners,” Israeli technology and tactics have been deployed regularly by Indian forces occupying Kashmir. The Shin Bet and other Israeli agencies responsible for human rights abuses and killings of Palestinians have provided training and advice to India on how to suppress the people of Kashmir. Today, India is the largest buyer of Israeli arms and Israel is training Indian military units in “counter-terrorist” attacks and urban warfare to be used against Kashmiris and resistance groups in northeast and central India.”

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Submitted by wendy davis on Sat, 08/10/2019 - 5:27pm
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but for posterity, i'll add this excellent piece laden with both history and a scathing analysis of modi's regime:

‘Indianising Kashmir, at Gunpoint’, Aijaz Zaka Syed — August 10, 2019, countercurrents.org

"But then this has been the signature style of this regime. It believes in delivering shock and awe from time to time, no matter what the long-term costs and consequences for the nation’s peace and wellbeing.

What really matters is the sense of faux euphoria and feel-good majoritarian machismo such actions generate in an increasingly chauvinistic polity. Of course, it helps if they can deflect the public attention from diversions such as the deepening economic woes, unprecedented unemployment and the acute crisis facing India’s desperate farmers.

From the disastrous demonetisation to the “surgical strikes” across the border, this is how this regime has operated. Dangerously reckless, politically shortsighted and totally oblivious to the consequences for the country’s future and stability.
..........................
"Under the BJP, the Indian state has reduced itself to a jackboot, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta puts it in Indian Express: “This is a state for whom the only currency that matters is raw power. This is a state that recognises no constraints of law, liberty and morality. This is a state whose psychological principle is fear. This is a state that will make ordinary citizens cannon fodder for its warped nationalist pretensions.”
...........................
"But if the BJP thinks it can get away with murder using its brute strength in Parliament and locking away the entire population of Kashmir, it had better think again.

If the history of the past 70 years is any guide, the Kashmiris would not take this humiliation and dispossession lying down. You cannot rub away the identity and existence of a people as proud and free-spirited as the Kashmiris. Kashmir is an idea. Kashmir is a state of mind. You cannot kill it using jackboots or wish it away no matter how much you detest it.

Right now, the Himalayan state is like a powder keg, waiting to blow up anytime. It has been simmering for decades in anger and frustration over the un-kept promises of Delhi and the overwhelming presence of overbearing security forces in the state for the past many decades. The long years of unrest and insurgency have claimed more than 100,000 lives. Thousands more remain unaccounted for."

and straight from the horse's ass mouth, his Namaste Modi:

@narendramodi Aug 8

Our priority is the socio-economic development of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. It is vital these beautiful regions become centres of growth and the skills of the local youngsters are utilised effectively. There are ample opportunities in sports, tourism and culture.

(aundhati roy said he's closed most of the universities by now.)

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