In Kashmir, YouTube generation defines new struggle – by Izhar Wani
A labourer in a deserted market in Srinagar. Curfew was on Wednesday clamped in Baramulla town of North Kashmir. File Photo: AP
Editor’s Note: While pseudo-liberal media and bloggers in Pakistan and elsewhere consistently ignore Kashmir people’s suffering at the hands of occupying army and police of India, and while Islamofacists are busy in slaughtering Christians, Ahmadis, Shias and Barelvis in Pakistan, the LUBP will keep on supporting the rights of the oppressed and the disempowered notwithstanding who they are and where they belong. Some of the previous articles that we posted on this topic include:
Why is Pakistani media ignoring the situation in the Indian Occupied Kashmir?
State sponsored terrorism in Indian Occupied Kashmir – by Abdul Nishapuri
Here is an AFP report on Kashmiris’ struggle for freedom and the role of social media in that struggle. (SK).
SRINAGAR (21 July 2010) — For six weeks, in scenes reminiscent of Palestinian intifadas, hundreds of young Kashmiris like 17-year-old Amjad Khan have taken to the streets to pelt stones at Indian security forces.
Government forces have struggled to contain the outpouring of anger triggered by the killing of a schoolboy by police in early June. Protests began in the main city Srinagar and have spread widely.
The unrest marks a new phase in resistance to Indian rule in the disputed territory, some observers believe, revealing the deep frustration of the new generation in the 12-million-strong mostly Muslim local population.
In the violence, in which security forces are accused of killing 17 young locals, others see a danger of radicalisation in a region that was beginning to emerge from an insurgency that has claimed an estimated 47,000 lives.
“I have taken to stone-throwing to show my anger, my hatred at the present state of affairs,” says the softly spoken Khan (name changed), as he stands in one of Srinagar’s narrow back streets.
The son of a government employee father, who disapproves of his behaviour, Khan is dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt and has his hair gelled in a style familiar from Indian Bollywood films.
He says he is not a particularly devout Muslim and attends Friday prayers only to be able to join the regular protests that take place afterwards, denouncing Indian rule in the territory.
Born during the insurgency like most of the under-20 protestors — tech-savvy Internet users who are harnessing Facebook and YouTube to highlight their struggle — he has known nothing but violence and turmoil in Kashmir.
“Why should this problem linger on if so many other problems have been resolved?” he asks.
When the subcontinent was divided in 1947, Kashmir’s Hindu leader opted to take his mainly Muslim subjects into Hindu-majority India rather than Pakistan and the two nuclear-armed neighbours have since fought two wars over the territory.
Kashmir is divided into Indian and Pakistani-controlled regions, with both countries claiming the territory in full.
For two decades from 1989, a violent anti-India insurgency raged in the Indian part, making it one of the most dangerous places on the planet in the mid-1990s.
But the intensity of the attacks has waned significantly in recent years, widely attributed to the start of peace talks between India and Pakistan in 2004.
Before the latest wave of unrest, there was talk of major troop withdrawals and revival of the region’s main economic activity, tourism.
— Delhi gropes for a response —
The government in New Delhi has tried to paint the protests as the work of shadowy Pakistani extremists, but many local leaders believe the underlying reason is despair among the young generation about their prospects.
There are over 400,000 unemployed young people across the state and decades of on-off political dialogue about the status of the disputed territory have yielded few rewards and no end to the deadlock.
Some pro-India parties call for autonomy for the region, moderate separatists seek independence and hardliners continue to campaign for a merger with Pakistan.
“The single largest factor today is that people don’t see the light at the end of the dark tunnel they were hoping to see,” the state’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah, admitted on Indian news channel NDTV earlier this month.
“Until we resolve it politically we will always have problems.”
A wave of street protests, which observers date back to mid-2008 when the state government attempted to transfer a piece of land to a revered Hindu shrine, reveal this frustration.
Indian army chief General V.K. Singh said last month that the battle against anti-India insurgents had been more or less won, but people needed to feel that progress was being made to improve their lives.
“Militarily, we have brought the overall internal security situation in Jammu and Kashmir under control. Now, the need is to handle things politically,” he told the Times of India in an interview.
He added that he felt “a great requirement for political initiatives that take all people together.”
In New Delhi, Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram has pushed the notion that the protests are being orchestrated by militant groups and Pakistan.
He has sanctioned a crackdown, with the army out on the streets, text messages banned to disrupt communication between protestors and strict curfews in place across most of the region.
He has also pointed the finger at the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba militant group, which India blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that left 166 people dead.
Others have suggested the protestors are being paid by hardline separatists — a theory that has been widely challenged, even among pro-India politicians in Kashmir.
“Linking the genuine anger and anguish among people with terrorism is nothing short of an assault on their self respect and dignity,” said former chief minister Mufti Sayeed of the pro-India People’s Democratic Party.
Mehboob Beigh, who is close to chief minister Abdullah and advocates autonomy in the region, agrees.
Political alienation of Kashmiris is the larger issue,” he said. “Our youth want to be heard. New Delhi should listen to them with compassion and sincerity or we may soon see another cycle of violence.”
So far, the young men on the streets are gunless rebels. Their weapons of choice are stones and the Internet, with social networking site Facebook and video-sharing platform YouTube key parts of their struggle.
“Facebook and YouTube have provided us a platform to convey our aspirations and frustrations to the world,” says Showket Ahmed, 24, who captures events on his mobile phone camera and later uploads them on Facebook.
But former militant commander Javed Mir warns that New Delhi’s hardline response could turn today’s frustrated stone-throwers into new recruits for the severely weakened insurgency.
“Before the launch of the insurgency, I and my friends used to indulge in stone-pelting with the aim of highlighting the Kashmir issue, but we failed,” said Mir, now a separatist campaigner.
“Finally we took to guns and succeeded in bringing Kashmir out of the cold storage. If present protests are ignored, these young men may be forced to follow our path.”
Source: AFP
A counter view:
The ugly world of Kashmir’s online rebels
Praveen Swami
Social networking sites backing street clashes overflow with communal invective and calls to violence
There is no evidence that social networks are used to organise or fund protests
Little infrastructure to enforce Facebook’s terms of use that prohibit abuse
NEW DELHI/SRINAGAR: “I know I’m sexy,” Srinagar resident Junaid Rafiqi proclaims on his Facebook page, below a professionally lit photograph that, among other things, shows off his possession of an expensive pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses.
He goes on with an enthusiasm unfettered by punctuation, spelling and grammar: “I got the looks that drives the girls wild I got the moves that really move them. I send chills up and down their spines” [sic., throughout and below].
Facebook users like Rafiqi have been sending chills down the spines of the police in Jammu and Kashmir for much of this summer. Much to the dismay of the authorities, social networks backing the cause of the Islamist-led protesters have proliferated on the Internet.
There is no evidence that social networks have been used to organise or fund the protests — but their content underlines concerns at the growing influence the religious right-wing has over the educated young people in Kashmir.
“We Hate Omar Abdullah,” a network Mr. Rafiqi often participates in, gives some insight into the world of Kashmir’s Facebook rebels. The network hosts a collection of political satire. There is, for example, a digitally-manipulated image of Paul, the celebrity octopus, picking a dead donkey over the Chief Minister in response to a question who has “more guts.”
But much of the satire is venomously communal. Mr. Abdullah is repeatedly referred to as “Omar Singh” — a derisory reference derived, evidently, from the rumour that his wife is Sikh. The former Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, is shown offering respects at a Hindu temple, while another image caricatures the Chief Minister and his wife as pilgrims to the Amarnath shrine. The administrators of the “We Hate Omar Abdullah,” quite clearly see politicians’ efforts to reach out to multiple religious communities as a betrayal.
“The Dalla [broker] family,” the Ray-Ban wearing Rafiqi asserts in one post on the Facebook page, “should be hanged publicly.” Elsewhere, he refers to Mr. Abdullah as a kafir, or unbeliever. In another post on the page, a member asserts that Mr. Abdullah has been denied permission for pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia because of his marriage — a canard circulated by Islamists soon after he took power.
Some networks host express calls to violence. “Everybody,” exhorts the administrator of “Times Now is Anti-Kashmiri,” “[the] next time you see any Times Now correspondent pick up a stone and throw that on their face!.” Arnab Goswami, the channel’s editor-in-chief, one user asserts, “should be killed.” Ethnic-Kashmiri anchor Mahrukh Inayet comes in for unprintable abuse targeting her gender.
Barkha Dutt, arguably India’s best-known English-language television journalist, also draws flak. “We hate Barkha Dutt” contains claims that her reportage on the clashes lacked balance. Much of it, though, consists of personal invective — and threats. “Hell is meant for her,” writes network member Faizan Rashid, “but she should have some kinna punishment in this world as well…‘stoned to death’…wot say?”
Facebook’s terms of use prohibit content that is hateful, threatening or incites violence. Little infrastructure, though, seems to be in place to enforce those terms.
Not all protest-linked networks promote these kinds of invective. Barring the odd comment about “Indian dogs,” “I Protest Against the Atrocities on Kashmiris” has no abusive language. Most posts on this network address questions of media bias and political grievances, not individuals.
Even networks like this, though, are remarkable for the complete absence of the very kinds of serious commentary and debate they believe is wanting in India’s mainstream print and electronic media.
There is no way of telling just who the participants on these sites are: users contacted by The Hindu, including Mr. Rafiqi, did not respond to requests to be interviewed. For the most part, though, users seem to be English-speaking and Kashmiri. Judging by their clothing and cultural idiom, are middle-class. Despite the aggressive religious chauvinism evident on the site, there is nothing to suggest substantial numbers of users support established Islamist clerics.
The police say most young people held on the charge of throwing stones do not have a high-school education, and are either unemployed or semi-employed — a class quite distinct from that of the Facebook radical.
More likely than not, official concerns at these networks is exaggerated: their scale and reach is tiny. “I Protest Against the Atrocities on Kashmiris” has 810 members — small numbers compared, for example, with the Palestine solidarity page “Palestine Freedom,” which has 101,178. “We Hate Omar Abdullah” has 675 members and “Civil Disobedience 2010-Quit Kashmir Movement” 134. “Bloody Indian Media,” set up to protest the reportage of the street violence in Srinagar, has 58.
It is possible, though, that the ideas they propagate reflect new ideological trends among some sections of young people in Jammu and Kashmir — a prospect which, if true, holds out a real reason for concern.
The Hindu
Jul 24, 2010
http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/24/stories/2010072454691200.htm
Consider PPP’s own manifesto, which says:
The Pakistan Peoples Party supports the rights
of the Kashmiri people and will pursue the
composite dialogue process agenda that it
initiated with India including Kashmir and Indo-
Pak issues. It will not allow lack of progress on
one agenda to impede progress on the other.
Do you support PPP’s position on this issue? If so, what purpose do you see in creating further tension and division by exaggerating the Kashmir situation by comparing it to “Islamofacists are busy in slaughtering Christians, Ahmadis, Shias and Barelvis in Pakistan”? Do you see some sort of equivalence between the attacks on religious minorities in Pakistan and the suppression of massive violent riots in Kashmir? What was your intention behind leaving out more accurate comparisons like the suppression of the Baloch separatist movement? I mean, we all choose the words we use to express a message with some intention.
i am a citizen of india & a resident of kashmir,i love omar abdullah, his leadership,hls approach,his dedication.what he is doing in these circumstances is absolutely appreciable.he has the backing of whole country.only a handful of butchers out of 125 crores cant decide the fate of our chief minister.& yes KASHMIR KISI RAFIQI & TAUFIKI KAY BAAPKI NAHI HAI,KASHMIR WILL REMAIN WITH INDIA.
A great article is as much about writing flair as it is about technicalities, but you have it all. It takes a great writer to have flair and and skill.