SRINAGAR: Scores of
people were injured once again by government forces in Kashmir on the
35th day of the anti-India uprising on Friday. SMHS and SKIMS, the two
main hospital of the valley, received 52 injured, mostly hit by pellets.
At SMHS, 19 of the 38 admitted have received eye injuries while at
SKIMS, among the 14 admitted was a person hit in the head. Scores of
other injured were treated at their district, sub-district hospitals.
The joint pro-freedom leadership as part of its programme ‘to end Indian
occupation’ had called for protests after Friday prayers. Syed Ali
Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq were kept under house arrest while JKLF
chairman Muhammad Yasin Malik continues to languish in Central Jail
Srinagar.
In the 35 days of curfew and restrictions in Kashmir, 58 people
including two cops have been killed and over 5,500 civilians injured,
more than 500 with pellet injuries in their eyes.
The government had imposed strict curfew across the valley, snapped all
private mobile phone services, and blocked all entry and exit points of
districts by barricades and razor wires.
Police on Thursday had appealed to people to stop their children from
taking part in ‘stone pelting’, besides asking clerics to not deliver
provocative speeches.
Following not the appeal of the police but the directions of the
pro-freedom leadership, people took out anti-India protest
demonstrations and were attacked with pellets, teargas shells, pepper
gas and aerial firing. At many places the protests morphed into pitched
stone fighting, including in parts of the old Srinagar city soon after
curfew was lifted in the evening.
Scores of peaceful protests were taken out from Rainawari, Chota bazaar,
Kani Kadal, Sarai Bala, Chattabal, Mala Bagh, Bagh-e-Mehtab areas that
were dispersed by forces using teargas shells, pellets and aerial
firing. Friday prayers at the historic Jamia Masjid were disallowed for
the fifth consecutive Friday.
According to locals, forces didn’t allow
them to venture out of their homes.
Massive stone fighting erupted at Khag, Beerwah and Ompora areas of
central Kashmir’s Budgam district after Friday prayers during which
police used teargas and stun grenades to disperse the protesters. At
least 40 protesters were reported to be injured in the clashes but all
are said to be stable. Clashes also erupted at Kojer area of Ganderbal
district after Friday prayers.
In north Kashmir, people jointly offered Friday prayers at Eidgah Qadem
and Rangwar ground in Baramulla. Forces blocked the town’s four bridges
-- Cement Kadal, Azad Gunj, Khanpura and Sheikh-u-Alam -- by razor
wires.
The Sheikh-ul-Alam bridge was blocked by iron rods. These bridges
connect old town Baramulla with Civil Lines.
The forces paid scant respect to the curfew pass issued by the district
magistrate. Kashmir Reader Baramalla correspondent Mushtaq Ahmad was
told by army personnel that “only passes issued by them will be
allowed.”
A journalist, Irshad Ahmad, working with an Indian national news channel was also beaten by forces in Baramulla.
In Bandipora, peaceful protests at many places turned violent when
forces waylaid them.
A protest taken out from new Jamia Masjid was
joined by other protesters, including women, at the district’s square.
A large procession on way to Kupwara Town from Muqam-e-Shah Wali was
intercepted by police at Bohama and in the ensuing shelling, more than
six persons sustained injuries.
Peaceful protests were also held at
Kandi, Brambi and Arampora villages of Kupwara.
Stone fighting occurred at Kralgund, Tikkipora and other areas of Lolab.
Protesters at Tikkipora smashed the vehicle of a PDP sarpanch from
Dewar, Manzoor Ahmad. He escaped unhurt.
In Shopian, at least 8 people sustained injuries following clashes
between government forces and local youths at main town Shopian, Ziyarat
Sharief, Reshipora, Qoimoh, Bugam, Khudwani and Mohanpora areas.
Incidents of stone-fighting also took place at Choudhary Gund near DC
office in Shopian where youths hurled rocks at the troops.
In Damhal Hanjipora four persons received injuries after forces attacked
a protest demonstration. The forces fired several rounds of teargas and
pellets to disperse the protesters.
Massive demonstrations were held in Bijbehara, Aariwan, Goriwan and
Srigufwara areas of south Kashmir’s Anantnag district. The protesters
made heavy sloganeering in favour of freedom and against India.
A huge pro-freedom rally, witnesses said, was taken out in Dialgam after
thousands of people offered Friday congregational prayers. The
procession dispersed peacefully later.
In Mattan township of Anantnag district, thousands of people offered
Friday prayers at Hanifa Eidgah. Later, hundreds of people raising
pro-freedom, pro-Burhan and anti-India slogans marched along the
Khanabal-Pahalgam road. The rally culminated near Pran Bhawan
peacefully. Pro-freedom processions were also taken out in Arwani, and
several areas of Dooru, Kokernag and Bijbehara.
In Anchidora locality of Anantnag, hundreds of people took out a protest
rally after offering Friday prayers. Raising pro-Azadi slogans the
protesters marched towards the main town. On reaching Laizbal they were
prevented by government forces from marching ahead. Clashes followed.
In Kachdoora area of Shopian, witnesses said that the army resorted to
aerial firing to disperse a procession that was marching towards the
army camp. In Arhama village of the district, people after Friday
prayers took out a rally towards main town Shopian. On reaching near the
mini-secretariat, forces stopped them from moving ahead by lobbing a
few teargas shells at the procession.
A harsh curfew was enforced in all the four district headquarters of the
region and other major townships. Huge contingents of forces wearing
riot gear were deployed in the streets of all towns to curtail the
movement of people. Forces also blocked main entry points of all the
district headquarters. In Anantnag, army men were seen enforcing
restrictions near Mominabad. A photojournalist working for a local daily
said that army men checked their mobile phones when they were returning
after covering a rally at Dialgam.
A peaceful protest march was carried out in Pampore town after Friday
prayers offered jointly at Khanqah-e-Molla. The march, attended by
thousands, moved through several areas and raised pro-freedom and
anti-India slogans. The march ended peacefully.
Reports said that more than a dozen persons sustained injuries in
Burhan’s hometown Tral where heavy clashes erupted between youths and
government forces. An official source at Tral sub-district hospital told
Kashmir Reader that five persons injured during the clashes have been
admitted to the hospital.
A youth sustained injuries during clashes in Kakapora area of Pulwama
district where youths hurled stones at the forces while the forces
resorted to heavy teargas and pellet gun firing.
Protest rallies were also reported from Ruhmoo and Gusoo areas where people carried flags and posts with them.
Clashes also erupted in Newa, Trisoo and Tahab areas of Pulwama areas after congregational prayers.
In Nagbal area of Shopian district, thousands of people jointly offered
Friday prayers and held protest demonstrations in the village.
At least 47 persons sustained injuries in Doda district of Jammu
division in Friday clashes that erupted in protests against the civilian
killings. Locals said that police resorted to heavy ammunition firing
to scatter the protesters who pelted forces with stones and raised
pro-freedom slogans. A local Station House Officer (SHO) is reported to
have sustained injuries.
Reports said that soon after the prayers, a group of youths engaged
police in pitched battles at Ajar and Nowpora areas. Police lobbed tear
smoke canisters to quell the protests.
Protesters from Poshkar, Khag, Sitharan, Habar who led a peaceful
protest to Khag had to face pellets from the government forces with
several youth receiving pellet injuries. The injured were later referred
to SMHS for treatment.
Police version:
More than three dozen incidents of stone pelting were reported from
different districts of the Valley including Anantnag, Pulwama, Kulgam,
Shopian, Baramulla, Sopore, Kupwara and Bandipora. Curfew was imposed in
Srinagar and in the towns of Ganderbal, Budgam, Anantnag, Shopian,
Baramulla and Sopore.
After Friday prayers ‘miscreants’ assembled at various places and tried
to disrupt the vehicular movement. At most of the places the
‘miscreants’ started pelting stones on moving vehicles, police and
security force deployments.
The deployments exercised utmost restraint despite severe provocations
at a number of places. Many police/security force men have been reported
injured during these clashes.
At Arhama Ganderbal miscreants assembled on road and pelted stones on
security forces. While tackling the situation six persons were injured.
At Dooru Tangmarg about 300-400 miscreants assembled on road and pelted
stones on police and security forces. Two persons were injured, one of
whom was shifted to Srinagar.
At Uttrsoo Anantnag miscreants pelted stones on police and security
forces. While dispersing the mob, four persons suffered minor injuries
who were discharged after first aid from the hospital.
Arrests:
A number of pro-freedom leaders were taken into police custody including
Muslim League (ML) General Secretary Muhammad Rafiq Ganie, and shifted
them to Srinagar’s central jail. Reportedly, police in the intervening
night of Thursday-Friday raided the houses of several leaders including
ML’s Rafiq Ganie, other ML leaders and activists, TeH’s Umar Adil and
leaders and activists of other amalgams.
The leaders were arrested during the night and were lodged in police
station Kothi Bagh and in the wee hours of Friday were shifted to
Srinagar’s central jail.
Whenever there's "talks" there's always an assumption of equity. Over here, Jeremy Corbyn has been vilified for openly meeting with Sinn Fein representatives at precisely the same moment when Thatcher's government was deep in private meetings.
ReplyDeleteWhat worries me about Kashmir is that nobody is paying attention, nobody's talking. Even the sullied, thoughtless peace of the 9 counties wouldn't do.
Thank you for your posts , Tom. The worst enemy is this work of forgetting.
Thank you, Duncan.
ReplyDeleteI did see yestereve in The Independent T. May is now the... can't remember if it was most popular person in Britain, or merely most popular politician.
Meanwhile we're to be Hillaried into... continuing to neither know nor remember...
The sole person with whom I have yet spoken, here in Murica, who knew what or where Kashmir is or was, was (is) a former Indian Security Forces intelligence officer, who served in the J&K border regions.
At least the Palestinians have their aura and their international support.
Pathein
Tom,
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit of the internationalism yr posts and photos continue to inspire, sharing a bit from Pothik Ghosh (a dear comrade)'s piece, originally posted here:
" There is something Indian mainlanders outraged by the unspeakable brutalities inflicted on Kashmir by the Indian occupation need to realise. Kashmir’s national liberation struggle needs neither the charity of their teary-eyed pity for the plight of Kashmiris; nor the slightly more honourable philanthropy of directing their self-flagellating anger and outrage, abstractly and impotently, at the Indian state and its brutal occupation. What such mainlanders need to actually give is the non-exchangeable gift of solidarity to the Kashmiri movement. And that is precisely what they have failed to offer. That such solidarity is fundamentally distinct from — nay radically opposed to — patronising sympathy for the suffering victims of Kashmir is something one can hardly overstate. Unfortunately, almost all mainlanders who claim to be in solidarity with the Kashmiri struggle against Indian occupation have the two badly mixed up. (As for the politically correct Indian liberal, who is enraged only and mainly by the human-rights abuses carried out in the Valley, the less said the better.)
Sympathy and charity are constitutive of an economy, at once symbolic and political, of exchange and power. And that does not change even if one chooses to construe them, unwittingly or otherwise, as solidarity. If anything, such conflation of solidarity with sympathy and philanthropy amounts to articulating the existing hierarchised socio-political relation between Indian mainland and the IoK (Indian occupied Kashmir) in yet another register. That serves to legitimise and reinforce — admittedly by other, apparently more consensual means — both that relation and the military occupation constitutive of it. It’s time one clearly understood the difference, and learned to disentangle one from the other. Solidarity is not a sentiment to be abstractly expressed and extended. It is a politics that has to be produced as a concrete strategy and materiality. Frantz Fanon, while criticising the ‘solidarity’ extended by “French intellectuals and democrats” to the Algerian struggle against French occupation, underscored precisely that. In an article, ‘French Intellectuals and Democrats and the Algerian Revolution’, he writes:
“…French intellectuals and democrats have periodically addressed themselves to the FLN. Most of the time they have proffered either political advice or criticisms concerning this or that aspect of the war of liberation. This attitude of the French intelligentsia must not be interpreted as the consequence of an inner solidarity with the Algerian people. This advice and these criticisms are to be explained by the ill-repressed desire to guide, to direct the very liberation movement of the oppressed.
“Thus can be understood the constant oscillation of the French democrats between a manifest or latent hostility and the wholly unreal aspiration to militate ‘actively to the end.’ Such a confusion indicates a lack of preparation for the facing of concrete problems and a failure on the part of French democrats to immerse themselves in the political life of their own country.”
The question that has been driving many mainland Indians in their self-proclaimed solidarity with the Kashmiri national liberation struggle, is the following: what can and should they do for Kashmir and its struggle against occupation? However, in order to produce solidarity as a strategy and materiality of politics they would do well to reverse the question: what is the Kashmiri movement against Indian occupation doing – or can potentially do – for the everyday struggles of the masses in the Indian mainland? The answer to that is something they need to build on.
Aditya,
ReplyDeleteHow sweet to be hearing from you again, my brother...
The Pothik Ghosh piece, which indeed I've sought out and read in its entirety, and have been thinking about all day, is quite compelling certainly.
"For this reason, mainland Indians committed to forging an effective politics of solidarity with the Kashmiri national-liberation struggle must necessarily double up as militants of proletarian-revolutionary politics."
I value and appreciate every sensible word I can find on the subject of the Kashmiri freedom struggle, the resistance to Occupation there, which from far away can only appear a natural and inevitable if also necessarily painful development, part of a larger global struggle..
But -- correct me if I am wrong here -- there is concurrently the fear, as with all academic proposals, even the most enlightened ones -- that in the present techno-capitalist structure of things, the danger would be to think ahead of the realities.
Does not the present techno-economic "development" of India bring it ever more closely into the centre of world power? And would not that drift, or rush, toward centrality, of itself, make "doubl[ing] up as militants of proletarian-revolutionary politics" a sort of idealistic fantasy?
There is so much to be said and thought about, here. And so much to be suffered and endured, there.
Very grateful for any enlightenment.
Yes Tom you are, of course, spot on with your question.
ReplyDeleteThe contradiction between the global economic aspirations our ruling govt harbours and the Brahmanical Hindu nationalism it espouses at the same time, is, I believe, not an anomaly but a contradiction fundamental to the present techno-capitalist structure of things. There is an uncanny strangeness to the present neoliberal integration of the globe. For example, on the one hand, over the past fifty or so years, finance and techno-capitalism has been incessantly forcing the Third World to open its markets. But at the same time, never before had the unconscious, as it were, of this drive of imperial-globalisation emerged as forcefully and violently as the present refugee crisis in Europe. The failure to seize this contradiction, which is immanent to capital's continual self-surpassing, is what manifests as the present paranoia of Fascism, a paranoia from which, if one does not suffer and thereby bash-n-trash Modi, Sarkozy, Trump, and so on, then one is likely to be branded as a "fascist" stooge! Or, if you are in America, then one certainly runs the danger of being labelled a "fascist" patriarch who refuses to accept the fact that finally, with Hillary Clinton (that arch-imperialist of a patriarch!) woman-power is where it truly belongs. And where is that, if one may ask? In the un(wo)manned cockpits of those drones bombing our Palestinian and Syrian brothers? Or in the boardrooms of Wall Street gutting the rest of whatever welfare there still remains in circulation.
In our own country, this contradiction has manifested in various forms-- a gimmick promise of national self-sufficiency which is sustained by the programmed state-diktats of "Make in India" (which always remind me of the neon gloat-signs Subway has been flashing, for some time now, in our markets-- "we bake our own bread"-- as if they grew their own wheat, used their own seeds, and grew it on a planet which was all their own, and as if their we" was our "we" too, which is to say, following Marx, who is making the bread after all)
and secondly this contradiction has manifested in a brutal crackdown on the proletarian sections of our society--- industrial belts in the NCR region, several universities across India, Kashmiris, Dalits, and so on. . . Before the insurrection could emerge in the Indian Occupied Kashmir, at the turn of the year isolated protests emerged in JNU and other universities after sedition charges were slapped on student leaders for organising a meeting against the Indian Occupation of Kashmir. Later, the protest, instead of emerging as a determinate movement against the Indian occupation of India itself, co-opted the question of Dalit identity, subsumed the suicide of Dalit militant activist Rohit Vemula, effaced the very question of Kashmir's freedom, and sought out to consolidate a certain nationalist consciousness, the sole objective now being to save from the Right-wing populism a university which has always been a cesspool of reified Indian-Left politics breeding Brahmanical intellectual elites by the plenty.
Continued. . .
ReplyDeleteIn the light of the events I have only perfunctorily alluded to, Pothik's piece must be contextualized in the current state of Indian left-liberal politics which has failed to understand the present strife and regimentation as the effect of a contradiction fundamental to the techno-capital structure of our world. Say, what is the point of holding student-meetings supporting, in principle, the cause of Kashmir, or protesting against the changes in curriculum, or whatever, when, speaking concretely and particularly, you, let alone build a strategic militant solidarity with, do not even understand that the university of ideas (or rather, as you say, idealistic fantasies) sustains itself by oppressing, say, the sanitation workers, clerks, and a whole lot of other "manual" workers?
I am backchanneling a pamphlet we had written during the events of January-February which, one hopes, might try and clarify, if only a little, the situation at this end of the world.