Kashmiri Pandits expose separatist propaganda - catch Aditya Raj Kaul and Radhika Koul on Face the Nation, CNN-IBN

Kashmiris protest against Separatists Propaganda in New Delhi

Under Separatists Threatning, Kashmiri Pandits forced to leave Kashmir valley

Media Frenzy

I have a question first up.Have more Kashmiris(Kashmiri Muslims-now the media uses Kashmiris for them so liberally that even people like are me are brainwashed into thinking that the only Kashmiris who exist are the Muslims,forgetting that I am not) been killed in the last one month or is it less than the average number of people killed in Kashmir.The separtists keep shouting that more than 1 lac(100000) people have lost their lives in Kashmir in the last 20 years.Now if I believe them as Barkhas and Sagarikas do then every year there are 5000 people killed in Kashmir which means approx 13 per day.Now since July11,the total number of people killed is only 50.Isnt it less than what the figure ordinarliy should be?Am I being a death monger or am I belittling the loss of human life?Quite on the contrary,I am only calling the separtist bluff and the media naivette or willfull suspension of dibelief whichever suits you better.

We are bombaried these days with columns in newspapers and TV programmes who lecture us on how the Indian State has failed in Kashmir.Well it has.And how should understand the anger of the stone pelters(read roiters).We are consistently told that these people need to be listened to and they be given emplyoment while the Islamic Don Syed Ali Shah says quite the contrary.He says we are not fighting for better civic facilities or jobs.He is unequivocal in saying that we want Independence and not good governance.Yet column after column,one programme after another makes this nation feel guilty of "genocide" of "innocent Kashmiris".Now can anyone please tell these self appointed moral guardians of our "collective conscience" to please listen to Geelani and hear the speeches of Hafiz Saeed that mosques in Kashmir are loudly playing these days.

Fathom this..a young man or a woman or even a kid who throws petrol bombs or stones,burns public property,tears the unfirom of a policeman or simply lynches him.Does it give any sane man but the sleeveless siren any idea of this "innocent victim".Yet for the Indian media(except for one odd man out) such a person symbolises the innocence and purity of thought (of the Islamic kind may I ask?).What is the state supposed to do with a person whose intenet is reflected in the way he appears on the street.Is it the time to hear his greviances-real,imagined or perceieved.What about the Policeman whose eye was taken out by such an innocent group of people?Doesnt he have a family or are his human rights less legitimate than those of the mobsters who are the Indian Media's idea of an "innocent Kashmiri".

True human life is pious and shouldnt be lost and we keep repeating here,that no cause is worth one human life but doesnt the onus lie on both sides.Isnt it for the parents of these "innoncent Kashmiris" to tell their young ones that there are other more civil modes of protest available than the Islamic mode of protest.What does the Indian Media want?Should the CRPF and the local Police Garland the people who hit them with an intention to lynch them,should they cook mincemeat for the "innocent Kashmiris" who attack them?

And now all this bullshit about the "children of conflict" which a senior journo keeps going back to.My daughter is 5 and goes to a local school in Delhi.A month back me and my wife were asked to come to the school to discuss about my child.I was taken aback by the teacher told me.She said, my daughter needs a psychatirst because she belives that her father's house was burnt and one day they will go back to some land which she hasnt even seen.The teacher told me that my daughter is imagining things and should be shown to a child psychologist.Is she a child of the conflict too or just because she is a Hindu none of it sticks to her or just because Barkha looks the other way.

13 July, 1931 in the pages of history...

Run a Google search for July 13, 1931 and Kashmir and you will be hard pressed to find one mention of Kashmiri Pandits.

Grand and nostalgic articles you will find – some call it ‘Martyrs Day’, some call it the ‘first day of the Freedom Struggle for Kashmir’…

21 Kashmiris (read Muslims whenever you read ‘Kashmiris’ in journalese) were ‘massacred’ by Dogra soldiers that day, not unlike the 15 Kashmiris killed by Indian security forces this past fortnight, due to their opening fire on demonstrators. This connection, of course, has ‘noted’ historians (whose only works of note according to Google have been predicting when Allah will bless Kashmir with azadi) waxing eloquent on how things have not changed – poor Kashmiris are still at the receiving end of the atrocities of Hindu/Indian governments.

Left to be tacitly understood is that these poor Kashmiri demonstrators of 1931, 1990, 2008 and 2010 - then as now, had and have all the right in the world to pelt stones at the security personnel, beat them and shoot them, not to mention riot, loot and kill people who just don’t feel like doing the same. How else can they express (and show to the world) the immeasurable frustration they feel? Listen to any of the Kashmiri separatists, representatives of the current Opposition in Kashmir (party doesn’t matter) or even any random stone-pelter talk and you will find yourself being asked to believe that even 5-6 year olds in Kashmir (who also pelt stones) have this frustration pounding in their veins. Never mind the phone tappings and video confessions of some of the same stone-pelters that explain, in nitty-gritty detail, just how these bloody protests come about.

So, coming back to July 13, 1931. The story has it that serendipitously, at a major Muslim political gathering of Kashmir on the preceding June 21^st, the ‘true problems, demands and aspirations’ of the Muslims of Kashmir got expression in the speech of a totally “unknown, robust Pathan” named Abdul Qadeer Khan. This one speech, like others in the subsequent politics of Kashmir, drove the normal peace-loving people of Kashmir to a frenzy, as it talked about how the holy Quran and the teachings of Islam had been violated by the Hindu rulers of Kashmir and asked the people to fight this autocratic force. So it was at the arrest of this one person on July 13 that Kashmiris felt necessary to protest outside the Srinagar Central Jail. A few ‘notable’ people have wondered aloud just what would have happened to the struggle for Kashmir independence had not that priceless man, Abdul Qadeer Khan arrived on stage that fated day – never mind the probable theory that this ‘accidental speech’ had been meticulously planned by the British to destabilize the reign of Maharaja Hari Singh as a little punishment for his patriotic demand for Independence of India from the British in the Round Table Conference.

It is also interesting how these people have tried to have it both ways - on the one hand they vociferously shouted out Allah-o-Akbar along with their demands of justice from the Maharaja and on the other they totally denied that the subsequent protests that took place in Srinagar, Vicharnag, Ananatnag and Shopian were in any way communal in colour. The Khatri traders of Maharajgunj were looted by crores; Hindu shops from Bohrikadal to Alikadal were raided and burnt, the Tribune reports Hindu boys returning from school being hurled into the river Jhelum, and there was general loot, murder and rape (yes murder and rape too) of the Kashmiri Pandits almost simultaneously in Srinagar and Vicharnag – but no, this was not communal. This was, as Yasin Malik will explain to you any day, a purely social problem caused solely by the economic disparity between the majority (poor illiterate Muslims) and the minority (rich educated Hindus). Kashmiris can just not be communal, get it? At any given time they are either secular or in one of the various colours of Kashmiriyat - which can come into the picture whenever you give food (and not attack) an Amarnath pilgrim or quote Lal Ded.

Hopefully now you understand why you don’t get Kashmiri Pandits when you search the web for Kashmir and July 13, 1931. 60 years hence you will probably find that January 19, 1990 was also just another day of turmoil in Kashmir – nothing too notable about it. Another day when Kashmiris found the oppression of just being in India too much to bear and hence resorted to release their pent up energies in whatever ways they could. Nothing else.

- Radhika Koul. The author is an undergraduate student of Yale University.

Hurriyat Lie Nailed - Confession of Mobster Shabir Ahmed Wani

THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT

My name is Shabir Ahmed Wani S/o Ali Aziz Wani r/o of Narbal. This Hurriyat takes out these processions through these small children and give them money which results in stone pelting. In this context I called Wasim Allahpuri on Wednesday whose actual names is Ghulam mohammed dar and is the district president of Tehrek-e-Hurriyat led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani. I told him that there is a procession going on here and where he was. He complimented me and said that in this at least 10 to 15 people should get martyred so that the pot (demonstration) keeps boiling..as in the disruptions continue. This is basically tehrek-e-Hurriyat which gives money and brainwash also some of the kids as they want that the situation should not improve at all in this place.

Who is this Ghulam Mohammed Dar?

He is the district president of Tehrek-e-Hurriyat and before this he was a militant of Hizbul Mujahideen and was known as Wasim Allahpuri.

Is he the man who incites mobs?

Yes he is the person who is responsible for taking out processions through small children which results in stone pelting and subsequent tears gas shelling from the other side resulting in killing of innocents.