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The Indian government thought that by hanging Shaheed Maqbool Bhat, they had silenced a lone voice of freedom for Kashmir. If they only knew that at that moment when Shaheed Maqbool Bhat raised his head in honor and closed his eyes in satisfaction as the noose of the gallows of Tihar jail were tightened, his victorious spirit was soaring over the nation of Kashmir and spreading out from generation to generation.

The nobility of Maqbool was to brave the miseries of oppression rather than remaining dormant in silence. He preferred to die for liberty rather than living in cowardly submission. The mission that he embarked on is not complete as yet. Its logical end is freedom of Kashmir from occupation. We, the people of Kashmir, are still on the path that leads to the fulfillment of the dream which Shaheed Maqbool Bhat believed in.

We, as a proud nation, have come a long way on this path of struggle and we must complete this path, as failure is not an option with us. Let us fortify our pledge that we will pursue the path that leads to our ultimate goal of freedom for Kashmir. And let us resolve that we will not fail in our endeavor.

REMEMBERING with deep anguish that Martyr MAQBOOL BHAT (Pioneer of Independent Kashmir Movement) was hanged by the Government of India at the infamous Tihar Jail, New Delhi, India on 11th February 1984.

NOTING with deep grief that Martyr MAQBOOL BHAT’s dead body was not handed-over to his relatives but buried in the grounds of Tihar Jail.

CONDEMNING the inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment to which Martyr MAQBOOL BHAT’s dead body was subjected after his execution.

DEMANDING that the Government of India hand-over the remains of Martyr MAQBOOL BHAT so that he can be honourably buried at the Martyr’s Graveyard at Srinagar, Kashmir.

URGING all the governments, the Secretary General of the United Nations and the High Commissioner for Human Rights to impress upon the Government of India to accede to the “Peoples’ Demand” and return the body of Martyr Maqbool Bhat to the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front for befitting burial.

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Farooq papa said that Kashmir Diaspora all over the world will continue to raise its voice against the Human Right abuses and India’s continued occupation of Kashmir, unless and until it respects its commitment that it has obligated to the world body under various resolutions of United Nation.

Spokesman of WKDA Habib Yousafzai in a statement reiterated that Kashmir Diaspora is united in their efforts to highlight the Kashmir issue in every forum around the globe that values the liberty of human dignity.

The other seven  persons whose PSA was  quashed by the High Court Shakeel Ahmad Rather, , Khursheed A Lone, R/o Qazi Bagh, Islamabad, Mohammad Abbas Parray, R/o Bandipora, Sarfaraz Ahmad from Sopore, Mohammad Shafi Chopan from Pahalgam, Islamabad, Tariq Ahmad Lone R/o Bijbihara, Islamabad and Javed Ahmad Pathan R/o Islamabad. Among these seven persons, Javed Ahmad Rather was represented in the Court by Advocate M.Ashraf Wani, while as others were represented in the High Court by Advocate Mir Shafqat Hussain.

Giving further details, Advocate Mir Shafqat Hussain, who represented six persons in the court, said “Khursheed A Lone from Qazi Bagh was detained for the forth time under PSA, which has now been quashed by the HC.”
As per Advocate Shafqat “Another detainee Tariq Ahmad Lone from Bijbihara was first arrested on 19 June 2007 and a case was registered in PS Bijbihara under FIR No. 147/07 under  section 302, RPC 7/27. In addition he was also booked in FIR No. 173/07 us 307 and FIR 560/07 while still in custody.”

He added, “Later on, Tariq was booked under PSA on January 3, 2008, which was later on quashed by the HC on 5/8/2008. But still then he was not released from confinement in Srinagar Central Jail. In the meantime, Tariq was granted bail in all the cases registered in PS Bijbihara on February 18 and April 5, 2009.”

“Tariq was then again booked under PSA on 16/6/2009, which has now been quashed by the High Court.”

By Arundhati Roy

While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By “democracy” I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: “Afghanistan, Pakistan,

Saudi Arabia, Somalia … is that what you would prefer?”

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all “developing” societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy – too much representation, too little democracy – needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly – our nearsightedness?

Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.

A clerk of resistance

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right, somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.

Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, “apply-through-proper-channels” nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world’s favorite new superpower. Repression “through proper channels” sometimes engenders resistance “through proper channels.” As resistance goes this isn’t enough, I know. But for now, it’s all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.

Today, words like “progress” and “development” have become interchangeable with economic “reforms,” “deregulation,” and “privatization”. Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no longer means a place where you buy provisions. The “market” is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling “futures”. Justice has come to mean human rights (and of those, as they say, “a few will do”).

This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the czars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress,” “anti-development”, “anti-reform”, and of course “anti-national” – negativists of the worst sort.

Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, “Don’t you believe in progress?” To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs, and whose homes are being bulldozed, they say, “Do you have an alternative development model?” To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, health care, and social security, they say, “You’re against the market.” And who except a cretin could be against markets?

To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when free speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.

Two decades of “progress” in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it – and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines and special economic zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

The hoary institutions of Indian democracy – the judiciary, the police, the “free” press, and, of course, elections – far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of union and progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colorful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.

A new cold war in Kashmir

Speaking of consensus, there’s the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard core. It cuts across every section of the establishment – including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and even Bollywood.

The war in the Kashmir Valley is almost 20-years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have “disappeared”, women have been raped, tens of thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir Valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that’s true. But does military domination mean victory?

How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India’s deep state. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.

In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, non-violent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen – who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people – and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of “Azadi! Azadi!” (Freedom! Freedom!). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting “Azadi! Azadi!” Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers – everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted “Azadi! Azadi!” The protests went on for several days.
 
The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were non-violent. For the first time in decades, fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrests of hundreds of people.

Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary – it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were re-arrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)

Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir Valley.

None of India’s analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy – who practically live in television studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count – talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment (one armed soldier for every 20 civilians).

No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir Valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.

Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues – roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades – where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night – might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.

The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers’ view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. “Never trust a Kashmiri,” several Kashmiris said to me. “We’re fickle and unreliable.” Psychological warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades – its attempt to destroy people’s self-esteem – are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It’s enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.

The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies – Indian nationalism (corporate as well as “Hindu,” shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), US imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation).

Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new cold war (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India’s 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the “party line.”

Of course, we haven’t yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there’s a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, “demon-crazy” can’t fool all the people all the time. India’s temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.

Is democracy melting?

Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.

The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war – thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.

While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They’re good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the United Nations Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan … it’s a long list.)

The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We’ll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life – and the glaciers will melt even faster.

The DFP chairman was later shifted to central jail after a local court sent him to judicial custody for three days.  Before their house arrest the duo had served nine months in detention.
Confirming Shah’s re-arrest, his wife Dr Bilquis told Rising Kashmir that they bailed him out today, “But as he (Shah) stepped outside the Central Jail he was arrested again and taken back into the jail.”
“This is highhandedness of police and they are not allowing him (Shah) to live a peaceful life. Recently he was released after nine months and then kept under house arrest and then arrested and now re-arrested,” Dr Bilquis said.
Publicity secretary JKLF (R) Wajahat Qureshi also clarified Nanaji’s re-arrest. “Police re-arrested them (Shah and Nanaji) without citing any reason,” he said.  
Police accused them of being a threat for the maintainace of law and order in Kashmir.
Shah was recently released after serving a nine month jail term under Public Safety Act (PSA), for leading ‘Muzaffarabad Chalo’ march in August last year when supply of essentials was stopped at Jammu following Amarnath land agitation. Shah led the mass uprising of 2008 and the Muzaffarabad march on August 11 to protest the economic blockade imposed on Kashmir in the wake of the row over land allotment for the controversial Amarnath Shrine Board. He was arrested under the Public Safety Act.

Srinagar, May 24 GK News: The secretary general, of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (R), Muhammad Saleem Nanaji, was released on Sunday, after nine-month detention. He was arrested at Srinagar Airport on September 19, 2008 after he attended Iftar party at Pakistan Embassy in New Delhi. In a statement a JKLF(R) spokesman said that immediately after his release Nanaji went to Martyr’s graveyard at Eidgah here and offered Fateha Khawani. “I salute the Kashmiri nation for their valor and urge them to remain united to fight the oppression. By boycotting elections people have shown that it’s a futile exercise,” Nanaji said. 

He called upon the international community to accept the ground realities and ask India to settle the Kashmir issue once for all. “India can’t hold Kashmir by force for long.  We will continue to strive our cherished goal of freedom till we achieve it.  Arrests and killings won’t deter us,” he said.  

He asked the government to release Bitta Karate, Masrat Alam Bhat and other detainees without any delay.

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Fareed Zakaria on Kashmir

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Liam Dalrymple on the Kashmiri Voice:

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Dr. Deepak Chopra says Kashmiris should decide:

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Jeffrey Sachs discusses Kashmir:

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