Muslims need to choose their battles

From Vishwaroopam to Kashmir rock band, India’s Muslims are forever battling shadows

Sometime back in these columns I had argued that if Islam were to sue for libel, many of its followers would find themselves in the dock. No faith has suffered as much as it has at the hands of its own overzealous followers. Bernard Shaw got it about right when he suggested that Islam is the best religion and Muslims are the worst followers. No day passes without the fervent faithful putting the religion in unforgiving global glare with their actions.

If it is not some crackpot blowing himself up with fellow believers right when they are in the presence of their God, it’s some self-anointed defender of the faith declaring who in his expert opinion has stepped beyond the pale of Islam. Without troubling the Ultimate Judge, they even decide right here and right now who gets to go to hell.

Indeed, if it were up to them, they would dispatch everyone right away to damnation. All this of course is done with complete sincerity and conviction believing in the justness of their cause. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

Lucknow Muslims against Vishwaroopam movie.

From the wild heart of Asia to the unpredictable Middle East to the edge of untamed Africa, this willful distortion and misrepresentation of Islam and its teachings and spirit has not only lost its shock value for everyone, including the faithful, it’s acquiring increasingly absurd and frightening proportions.

And this is in no way inferior or less dangerous than the kind of Western wars and ideological crusade against Islam that we have lately seen, especially over the past decade or so. In fact, they appear to be aiding and abetting and providing the fig leaf of an excuse to each other.

So if Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam unabashedly apes Hollywood and taps into the First world narrative of Islamophobia, painting all Muslims as crazed followers of Al-Qaeda and a threat to the world peace and civilized world, those threatening him with dire consequences for the movie wittingly or unwittingly end up justifying his message.

It must be said though that all protests against the movie in Tamil Nadu were totally peaceful. That didn’t however prevent the increasingly shrill Indian media from once again launching into a diatribe, screaming about a grave threat to free speech and the nation’s great democratic traditions. Excuse me but do not the same democratic traditions and the freedom of speech, include the right to protest peacefully and register one’s disagreement?

And it’s not Muslim groups but the TN government that prevented the film’s screening because of Chief Minister Jayalalitha’s own issues with Haasan. The movie has been running in the rest of India, including in several neighboring states without any incident. But those who have watched the film suggest that the outrage over the movie is justified. It’s an endless and predictable harangue against Islam and a paean to Uncle Sam’s global war.

I don’t believe Haasan is communal. One of the finest actors India has produced, the star is widely regarded for his sensitive portrayals in films that have enriched Indian cinema.

However, as Feroze Mithiborwala says in his brilliant Tehelka piece, the actor is being far from honest when he claims Vishwaroopam is his “tribute to Muslims” and that it would make them proud. The film actually reinforces communal stereotypes and justifies the empire and its hegemonic wars and occupation “in ways that even Hollywood would have felt ashamed of portraying.”

The message propagated all through, in Feroze’s words, is basically this: “One Good Muslim, All the Rest Bad Muslims.” The hero, a closet Muslim and a RAW agent, is a noble exception who saves the world while the rest of the Muslims are all committed to destruction and mayhem driven by their faith. Muslims are furiously praying while bombs go off all around them. The Quranic verses are recited in the background while machine guns are turned on defenseless women and children by the followers of a menacing, one-eyed Mullah Omar-type lunatic. There’s no mention whatsoever of what the Afghans have been through at the hands of their Western liberators.

That said though demanding a ban on such movies and books is no solution. It’s counterproductive and ends up earning them greater attention and hype as has been the case with numerous Hollywood and Bollywood flicks, Danish cartoons and Rushdie’s infamous book. And taking to the streets over every slight and slur–real or imagined–actually plays into the hands of the ever voracious, insensitive media and forces that can hardly be described as our friends or sympathizers.

In the past few weeks or so, not a single day has gone without the television pundits furiously debating about some Muslim issue or the other. If it’s not about the largely isolated demonstration against Vishwaroopam, it’s about some little-known outfit protesting against Rushdie’s visit to Calcutta. And then there was this absurd row over an all-girl rock band from Kashmir in the news with a fatwa promptly declaring it ‘un-Islamic.’

Not surprisingly, it’s not just the insufferable Arnab Goswami who had a field day; everyone else joined the fun, gravely speechifying about “our growing intolerance” and the creeping Taliban rule in Kashmir under Indian constitution. There was more bedlam when the nervous band of teenagers that calls itself, Pragaash (From Darkness to Light), clearly drawing on the Islamic imagery, decided to call it quits.

Frankly, I fail to see what the fuss is all about, especially when the young girls, in their early teens, observe hijab and have done nothing that violates Islamic traditions. Not only does Kashmir boast a hoary tradition of music and singing, especially by women, men and women sing and dance across the Arab and Muslim world on festive occasions and even otherwise. Women sang to encourage their men at the time of wars, including in those that were led by the Prophet, peace be upon him. He would make Hassan bin Sabit, the legendary poet, recite poetry right in Masjide Nabavi, the Prophet’s mosque.

So why are we constantly chasing chimeras and tilting at the windmills? Why do we for goodness sake see a threat to Islam everywhere? Is our faith so fragile and feeble that it cannot withstand a minor idle pursuit here or criticism there? Don’t we know how much abuse the Prophet himself silently suffered at the hands of his legion of enemies?

Islam is far more robust and tenacious than our insecurities. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be the fastest spreading religion today despite our own conduct and efforts and all the conspiracies and canard against it. More important, why are we battling shadows, ignoring our real issues and concerns? As a people, we have developed a rare talent for obsessing over the irrelevant and inconsequential.

As Amartya Sen so rightly put it commenting on the protests over Vishwaroopam and Rushdie, India’s Muslims have far larger problems facing them–from poverty, health and sanitation to food and education. And this is not a state of affairs that is limited to India. Indeed, elsewhere the community confronts fiercer demons.

Isn’t it about time we got our priorities and focus right? We cannot forever remain locked in a perpetual state of war, bleeding ourselves to death. We have to choose our battles. Every time we get bogged down in such minor irritations and irrelevancies, we let our adversaries win.

Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Gulf based writer. Email him at aijaz.syed@hotmail.com

A Collaborator in Kashmir

“A Collaborator in Kashmir” appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

After flights from Delhi to Jammu and then on to Srinagar, I rode north in a taxi to Sopore, closer to the Pakistan border. I’d come to Kashmir to meet Tabassum Guru, whose husband is on death row in Delhi. But when I stood before her, Tabassum waved me away. She had no desire to meet with journalists.

For his role in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, Mohammad Afzal Guru was sentenced to death by hanging. Another defendant was condemned to ten years in prison; two others were acquitted. Afzal Guru’s hanging, scheduled for October 20, 2006, was stayed after a mercy petition was filed with the President. In its judgment on his appeal, the Supreme Court had recognized that the evidence against Afzal was circumstantial and that the police had not followed legal procedures. Nevertheless, the judgment stated, the attack on the Indian Parliament had “shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”

In response, a group of Kashmiri leaders passed a resolution that read, in part, “We the people of Kashmir ask why the collective conscience of the Indians is not shaken by the fact that a Kashmiri has been sentenced to death without a fair trial, without a chance to represent himself?”

Afzal’s family could not afford a lawyer, and the court-appointed lawyer never appeared. A second lawyer was appointed, but she wouldn’t take instructions from her client and agreed to the admission of documents without proof. Afzal then gave the court four names of senior advocates, but they refused to represent him. The court chose another lawyer; this one said he did not want to appear for Afzal, and Afzal expressed a lack of confidence in him. But the court insisted—which is why the Kashmiri leaders asked whether it was Afzal’s fault that Indian lawyers thought it “more patriotic” to allow a Kashmiri to die than to ensure that he received a fair trial.

Only the naïve assume that the conflict in Kashmir is between fanatical militants and valiant soldiers. The real picture is darker and more complicated. In a system where the conventional economic nodes no longer function, and all resource lines intersect at some level with the security-state, there is a sense of enormous, often inescapable, dependency on those who are clearly seen as oppressors. This has bred complex schizophrenia. The writer Arundhati Roy has written, “Kashmir is a valley awash with militants, renegades, security forces, double-crossers, informers, spooks, blackmailers, blackmailees, extortionists, spies, both Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies, human rights activists, NGOs, and unimaginable amounts of unaccounted-for money and weapons….It’s not easy to tell who is working for whom.”

Tabassum Guru illuminated this murky landscape in the night-flare of a statement she wrote for The Kashmir Times in 1994. “A Wife’s Appeal for Justice” is anguished and unafraid. It tells the story of how the police and the armed forces have turned Kashmiris into collaborators; although the statement is no more than fifteen hundred words long, it starkly demonstrates the costs of military occupation. She begins with her husband’s story.

In 1990, like thousands of other Kashmiri youths, Afzal Guru joined the movement for liberation. He had been studying to be a doctor, but instead went to Pakistan for training. He returned three months later, disillusioned. The Border Security Force gave him a certificate stating that he was a surrendered militant. His dream of becoming a doctor was now lost; instead, he started a small business dealing in medical supplies and surgical instruments. The following year, in 1997, he got married. Afzal was twenty-eight, and Tabassum eighteen.

After his surrender, Afzal was often harassed and asked to spy on other Kashmiris suspected of being militants. (Sartre, writing more than fifty years ago: “The purpose of torture is not only to make a person talk, but to make him betray others. The victim must turn himself by his screams and by his submission into a lower animal, in the eyes of all and in his own eyes.”) One night, members of a counterinsurgency unit, the Special Task Force, took Afzal away. He was tortured at an STF camp.

Dravinder Singh, one of the officers mentioned in Tabassum’s appeal, has been frank about the necessity of torture in his line of work. He has stated that torture is the only deterrent to terrorism. Singh spoke to a journalist about Afzal Guru in a recorded interview: “I did interrogate and torture him at my camp. And we never recorded his arrest in the books anywhere. His description of torture at my camp is true. That was the procedure those days and we did pour petrol in his arse and gave him electric shocks. But I could not break him. He did not reveal anything to me despite our hardest possible interrogation.” Azfal’s torturers demanded that he pay one lakh rupees, and Tabassum sold everything she had, including the little gold she had received when she married.

In the statement she wrote in 2004, Tabassum Guru sees her suffering in the light of what other Kashmiris have experienced: “You will think that Afzal must be involved in some militant activities that is why the security forces were torturing him to extract information. But you must understand the situation in Kashmir, every man, woman and child has some information on the movement even if they are not involved. By making people into informers they turn brother against brother, wife against husband and children against parents.”

After his release from the camp, where his interrogators had attached electrodes to his penis, Afzal needed medical treatment. Six months later, he moved to Delhi. He had decided that he would soon bring Tabassum and their little son, Ghalib, to a place he had rented. But while in Delhi, Afzal received a call from STF’s Dravinder Singh, his former torturer. Singh said that he needed Afzal to do a small job for him. He was to take a man named Mohammad from Kashmir to Delhi, which he did, and he also accompanied the same Mohammad to a shop where he bought a car. The car was used in the attack on the Parliament, and Mohammad was identified as one of the attackers.

As Afzal waited in Srinagar for a bus to Sopore, he was arrested and brought to the STF headquarters and then to Delhi. There he identified the slain terrorist Mohammad as someone whom he knew. This part of his statement was accepted by the court, but not the part where he said he was acting under the direction of the STF. Tabassum wrote, “In the High Court one human rights lawyer offered to represent Afzal and my husband accepted. But instead of defending Afzal the lawyer began by asking the court not to hang Afzal but to kill him by a lethal injection. My husband never expressed any desire to die. He has maintained that he has been entrapped by the STF.”

When I arrived in Sopore in my hired car, I noticed soldiers on the streets and on rooftops. There had been soldiers in Srinagar, too, but it was different here. We had left behind the painted roadside signs put up by the army and paramilitary units with messages like “Kashmir to Kanyakumari India is One.” In this town, there were only small, often half-finished houses and grimy stores. I got out of the car to ask about the hospital where Tabassum Guru worked.

She was at the cashier’s desk in the Inpatient Block, a tall woman in green shalwar-kameez, her head covered with a dupatta. She said she didn’t want to talk to me. I went outside to call friends in Srinagar, and learned that a week or two earlier two journalists from Delhi had done a sting. Afzal’s brothers had been collecting money for his defense but using the cash to buy property instead. The journalists had brought a spy camera and asked Tabassum if she felt that she had been betrayed by the Kashmiri leadership.

I decided to wait. I had come too far. Patients kept walking up to the entrance of the hospital, and a pony cart dropped off a sick woman. My driver, Shafi, having learned that I was visiting from New York, wanted to know where in America were the World Wrestling Federation’s matches held. We talked for a while, and then went inside the hospital again. A large crowd waited in the area marked Outpatient Block. Most people stood in the corridor, jostling against each other with a feverish energy that required good health. The few chairs were occupied and those who were sitting had adopted postures that suggested they’d been waiting for days. A sign on the wall said: UTILIZE YOUR WAITING TIME EFFECTIVELY—PLAN THINGS TO DO—MEDITATE—DO BREATHING EXERCISES—CHANT A HOLY NAME—READ BOOKS. I studied that sign for a while but felt agitated and decided to tell Tabassum that I was leaving. She nodded and half-smiled, then said goodbye.

From the road outside the hospital, lined with walnut and willow trees, I could see the snow-covered mountains. Shafi was full of ideas about how I might have persuaded Tabassum to talk to me. He said I should have told her that what I wrote would help her husband. But I had seen pictures of mobs in Delhi and elsewhere burning effigies of Mohammad Afzal; activists for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party had exploded firecrackers on the streets outside the courthouse when he was first condemned to death; the print and television media had repeatedly described him as a terrorist mastermind. How could I have assured Tabassum that what I wrote would help?

When the journalists had interviewed her about Afzal’s brothers, Tabassum had said that she had never asked anyone for money to help in her husband’s legal case. She had said, “Mera zamir nahin kehta” (“My conscience doesn’t allow it”). I thought of that statement again when, in Delhi a week later, I watched Sanjay Kak’s film Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate Freedom), which documents the cost of violence in Kashmir. An indigent woman in a hamlet is asked whether she has received the promised financial compensation from the armed forces for the wrongful death in her family. The woman, her hands beating her breast, replies, “They have snatched my child from my bosom. I’ll eat pig’s meat but not accept compensation from the army.”

Soon after my return from Kashmir to upstate New York, where I work, I read Orhan Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul. In his youth, Pamuk wanted to be a painter, and he still saw his city with the eyes of an artist. “To see the city in black and white,” Pamuk writes, “to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if it’s winter, every man on the Galata bridge will be wearing the same pale, drab, shadowy clothes.”

Reading those words, I thought again of Srinagar. I had flown in from “a rich Western city,” and everything there looked drab to me, draped in a dirty military green. Every house that was new looked gaudy and vulgar or curiously incomplete. Many structures were shuttered, or burnt black, or simply falling down due to disrepair. Pamuk writes that those who live in Istanbul shun color because they are grieving for a city whose past aura has been tarnished by more than a hundred and fifty years of decline. I believe Pamuk was also describing plain poverty.

Jashn-e-Azadi had shown me another Srinagar. The film’s richness lay in the space it created, in the viewer’s mind, despite the violence, for thought and for color. The filmmaker had discovered again and again in the drabness of the melancholy the gleam of memory: the memory of blood on the ground, of the beauty of the hills and red poppies, of the keening voices of mothers and painted faces of village performers. Also the memory of the dead, of falling snow, of new graves everywhere, and the shining faces crying for freedom.

In a travelogue written more than four decades ago, V.S. Naipaul described how out of the “cramped yards, glimpsed through filth-runnelled alleyways, came bright colors in glorious patterns on rugs and carpets and soft shawls, patterns and colors derived from Persia, in Kashmir grown automatic, even in all their rightness and variety…” In Kak’s film, riotous color is glimpsed only when we see tourists donning traditional Kashmiri costumes for photographs, holding pots filled with plastic flowers.

When I think of the melancholy of Afzal and Tabassum Guru, it isn’t color that I seek, but a narrative to give sustenance to their lives. That is what was powerful about the story that Tabassum told: She gave coherence to what had been their experience and the ways it resonated with the experiences of other young Kashmiri couples.

As with Pamuk’s Istanbul, I found traces of Srinagar in a film about another distant place. Paradise Now, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, tells the story of two friends on the West Bank, Said and Khaled, who are recruited to carry out a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. The two young men are disguised as settlers going to a wedding. The would-be bombers get separated at the border, and the plan is called off, instigating some reflection and doubt on Khaled’s part. But Said is determined. We learn about his motivation when, in the company of Suha, a young woman who has just returned to Palestine, he goes into a watch shop, and Suha notices that videos are also available at the shop. These videos show the execution of collaborators, and Suha is shocked. She asks, “Do you think it’s normal that those videos are for sale?” Said replies, “What is normal around here?” Then he tells Suha, quietly, that his father was a collaborator. He was executed.

In Nablus, cars keep breaking down. Nothing works. The houses look either bombed or unfinished. In all of this, Nablus resembles Srinagar. Nablus is also like Srinagar in the ways in which its children are scarred by violence. I’m thinking of Ghalib, Afzal and Tabassum’s son, as well as thousands of other Kashmiris. It is horrifying but not difficult to imagine that many of them will find words to offer as testimony which are similar to those Said, sitting in an empty room, speaks to the camera just before he leaves on his suicide mission:

The crimes of occupation are endless. The worst crime of all is to exploit the people’s weaknesses and turn them into collaborators. By doing that, they not only kill the resistance, they also ruin their families, ruin their dignity and ruin an entire people. When my father was executed, I was ten years old. He was a good person. But he grew weak. For that, I hold the occupation responsible. They must understand that if they recruit collaborators they must pay the price for it. A life without dignity is worthless. Especially when it reminds you day after day of humiliation and weakness. And the world watches, cowardly and indifferent.

By: Amitava Kumar

Related articles

• Parliament 2001 Attacker Afzal Guru hanged in Delhi’s Tihar jail (indiavision.com)
• Afzal Guru hanged, protests in Kashmir Valley (ibnlive.in.com)

Kashmir: the demons of war return

After the holiday season standstill relations between India and Pakistan have sharply deteriorated. The mysterious cruel killing of the two Indian military men in the state of Jammu and Kashmir reminded the world of the “oldest conflict on the UN agenda”. While Delhi and Islamabad are blaming each other for violating the truce, the conflict escalation threatens to upset the fragile status quo along the ‘Control line”, which is one of the most explosive borderlines in the world.

The disfigured bodies of the two Indian military who guarded the post at the border with Pakistan in the Mendhar sector and died on Tuesday under unclear circumstances, became a grim reminder of the fact that the demons of war sometimes return in the relations between India and Pakistan. Mysterious and unstoppable they come back to claim new victims. Each side has its own truth, its own view of the conflict, compiles its own list of victims, the true number of which nobody really knows at this point. Besides the official wars, there is an undeclared war in progress. And each side sticks to its own myths in this war.

The standoff between India and Pakistan, which has the dispute over Kashmir at its basis, with all the rejection of compromise and violence today appears irrational if not meaningless and leads to a dead end. And all this is not simply due to the fact that there can be no winners and defeated in this standoff – everybody would lose. And the fact that both sides have nuclear weapons forces the world to freeze in tension again and again when the word “Kashmir” comes up, which points at one of the most beautiful and at the same time hardest to access places on Earth.

It appears that owning the mountainous Kashmir which is poor in natural resources and has a severe climate can give little benefit to India: its military and economic significance is not that great. In reality, the territory of Kashmir presents little value for Pakistan as well. But why then are both sides engaged in this tug-of-war game on the «Roof of the World» risking to fall into the abyss?

In reality the issue at stake is not only and not as much the territory as the state ideology of each country. It is the ideology that raises the stakes so high and prevents the sides from compromising their principles. In reality, it is the historic argument between the two concepts that lie in the basis of the two states that used to be one at some point in the past. The Pakistani concept of the «two nations» opposes the Indian concept of «one nation».

The founding fathers of modern India Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi were Hindu, but they wanted it to be so that in their country not only Hindus, which were the majority of the population, but also representatives of other ethnic groups, religions and cultures could have a worthy life. This principle lies at the core of the theory of «one nation» or «one happy family of nations», which according to the plan of Nerhu and Gandhi the Republic of India was to become.

In his turn, the founder of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah believed that there were differences between the Hindu and the Muslims, which prevented them from living together. Jinnah sincerely believed that only in their own Islamic state could the Indian Muslims receive equal rights and realize themselves fully. This is how the theory of the «two nations» was born – of the Hindu and the Muslims.

If today one can for a minute imagine that the separatists’ dream could come true and Kashmir would split from India that would bury the idea of the «united family» of nations, which is at the basis of the ideology of democratic secular India. If the events were to develop along that menacing scenario, the entire existence of the Indian federation would be under threat. Nobody would allow that.

And here a comparison to Russia is called for: if during the two Chechen wars that started after the collapse of the USSR the so-called advocates of «independent Ichkeria» realized their plan and created an independent state, it would have been a lethal strike at the Russian Federation.

It was no surprise that India from the very beginning supported the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya and never voiced any doubts about that. The situation Moscow found itself in from the very beginning appeared very familiar to the Indians – similar to that in Kashmir.

Kashmir found itself a hostage of the half a century long fight between the two state ideologies, the Indian and the Pakistani. And that remains the main cause for the demons of war to continue to torture that part of the world, the land and the mountains of which are soaked with blood. And the anticipated resetting of the relations between the two countries keeps giving way to the shootings and terrorist attacks, the war of symbols and gestures, as it happens today.

Ten Things You Should Never Do In India

 

India is a land of enormous internal diversity. On your journey from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, the cultures and things you encounter are lot more diverse and complicated than you think. There are many actions which seem to be normal to you but are extremely offensive in certain areas. Here we list ten things which is considered as offensive or bad throughout the country.

Religious discussions

You can freely discuss about anything in India, especially politics. Most people will have an opinion but they will not mind their opinion being contradicted. But be careful while including the religion into any of your discussions especially with the strangers since it is one of the sensitive areas in the minds of Indian people and they will feel offended for no reason!

Public display of affection

The beautiful backwater sceneries in Kerala and the story of Taj Mahal- the symbol of love may make you romantic. But think twice before performing any acts of love in public since the people around you in India is very conservative and doesn’t want to watch or do public displays of affection.

Left Hand Rule

You can give rest to your left hand while you are in India. Indian people never eat with their left hand or they won’t pass or receive anything with it. So remember – never give any gifts, money or anything with your left hand.

Feet Rule

According to Indian culture, the head is considered as the superior part of the body and feet, the inferior. So try not to touch anything important with your feet, especially books. Also never point your feet at someone and if you do, express your apologies immediately. However touching elder’s feet is considered as a sign of respect in India.

Clothing Rule

Majority of Indian people dress conservatively and it is advisable if you do the same, especially when you are in rural areas. It is better not to wear revealing or tight clothing especially when you visit places of religious significance.

Handshake rule

In India, it is generally not acceptable for men to shake hands with a woman until and unless she offers the same. If she extends her hand, you should reciprocate otherwise it is better to join your palms and wish her in Indian style.

Shoes rule

It is generally considered as good manners to remove shoes and sandals before you enter someone’s home. In some temples, people are not allowed to enter into holy areas with their shirts on.

Gift rules

The rules related to gifts vary in different parts of India. In some areas it is considered as an offence to gift white flowers since they are used in funerals. Gifting alcohol and animal-skin made products are considered as offensive in some other areas. Generally it is better to carry some sweets along with you when you are invited to someone’s home.

Smoking and drinking in Public

In India, it is offensive to consume alcohol or smoke in public. Even if you smoke, remember to ask the permission, otherwise it is considered rude. You are also not allowed to hunt or hurt animals, especially cow, which is considered as a holy animal in many areas.

Last but not the least, there are a lot of spiritually elevated people in each and every corner of India who offers magic remedies and spiritual salvation and there is no way you can distinguish the crooks. So as a traveler, it is advisable not to get into their traps and lose your money.

 

India will Fail in Kashmir as U.S. in Afghanistan: Imran Khan

It was a real show of power from the cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan who with his 100,000 flag-waving supporters rallying near the Minar-e-Pakistan monument, saw himself establishing as a real force in Pakistani politics.

Talking up the issue of the rights of Kashmiris at the heavily electrified political rally, he said the Indian Army will fail in Kashmir as the U.S. army did in Afghanistan. “Did the Americans succeed in Afghanistan? Is the Indian Army more powerful than the U.S. Army? When the Americans couldn’t succeed, how can you succeed with 700,000 troops that are involved in excesses?,” he asks as the crowd cheered.

“No army has been able to solve any country’s problems at any time,” he said demanding that the Indian troops should be withdrawn from Jammu and Kashmir. The chief of Tehreek-e-Insaf also asked Hindustan to give the people of Kashmir their right to self-determination. He said his party would “stand with the Kashmiri brothers and speak for their rights at all forums”.

Khan who founded his political party 15 years ago is trying hard to translate his fame into votes. Focusing on the core issues in the country such as corruption, lack of education, rising prices, inflation and unemployment, the cricketing legend is expanding his political base ahead of the 2013 general election. A poll conducted by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center back in June sees Khan as the most popular political figure in Pakistan.

Related articles

• I am a voter of Imran Khan, Are You ? (yasirimran.wordpress.com)
• Will popular Imran Khan be independent too? – Pakistan Daily Times (news.google.com)

Army Rollback: A Promise of Freedom from the Gunpoint

For Kashmiris, freedom is only in words and not in deeds. There is not even a semblance of freedom in the world’s most heavily militarized zone, where they are stopped any time for security checks and their homes are often raided.

As the debate over the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) gets heated, it’s that indomitable quest for freedom that shook the established political arrogance to rethink about a possible revocation of this draconian law. Under this rule, the troops can forgo warrants and use force. It even allows the army to shoot or arrest anyone on mere suspicion, a rule often criticized to be powering the army with complete impunity against human rights violation. The AFSPA was initially passed 1958 giving special powers to the army to be exercised in specially categorized “disturbed areas” in the North-Eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. The Special Powers Act was later extended to Jammu and Kashmir in 1990.

The act clearly says, “Fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person who is acting in contravention of any law” against “assembly of five or more persons” or possession of deadly weapons.” It also permits the forces to arrest without a warrant and with the use of “necessary” force anyone who has committed certain offenses or is suspected of having done so. The army also can enter and search any premise in order to make such arrests.

While the government figures tell us that insurgency and fatalities due to terrorist attacks are weakening, it’s startling to know that the soldiers-to-civilians ratio still remains to be very high that there is a soldier for every ten civilians in Kashmir.

However, the army has raised strong objections against the suggestions made by Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah for the withdrawal of the controversial special powers to the troops and it reportedly has the full backing from the defense ministry. The army would never agree on proposals on diluting the AFSPA until soldiers are assured of legal protection against being dragged to civilian courts.

Backed by the Home Ministry‘s suggestion that violence-free areas can be denotified as “disturbed areas,” the state government is all-set to revoke the Disturbed Ares Act from districts like Badgam, Samba, Srinagar, and Jammu.

The iron-lady of Manipur Irom Sharmila‘s fight seems to have gotten the attention of the nation as several hundreds are taking it to the streets to join ‘Save Sharmila Solidarity Campaign which calls for the revocation of the special armed force act. Her decade-long Gandhian way of protest has become a nucleus for collective protest against the draconian law.

The account of human rights violations under the shadow of this law is unimaginable as it can be better said to be “over 50 years of human rights violation” in Kashmir and in the North-Eastern states. While the army should be given its needed freedom and adequate protection in its fight against insurgency, the revocation of this draconian law would be the much-needed taste of freedom from the gunpoint.

Related articles

• End the culture of impunity, not just AFSPA: APDP (kafila.org)
• India campaign over ‘draconian’ anti-insurgent law (indianmilitarynews.wordpress.com)
• Lup flays attack on Sharmila supporters [The Sangai Express] (koksum.com)
• Army still opposed to withdrawal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act from J&K (indianmilitarynews.wordpress.com)

Pakistan to grant MFN status to India

Pakistan has, in principle, decided to grant Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to India, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said in the National Assembly.

Hina Rabbani Khar

حنا ربانی کھر

The minister said during question hour that the dialogue process with India had been initiated after a gap of two years, reported Associated Press of Pakistan.

Khar said: “The topmost priority of the country is to ensure uninterrupted dialogue with India so that the resolution of core Kashmir could be ensured.”

“There are a number of achievements regarding relations with India. We have achieved ground on trade with India. First time in history, the Indian foreign minister had attended the reception of Pakistan foreign minister in New York,” she was quoted as saying.

During the past three years, the Jammu and Kashmir dispute has been discussed during all bilateral interactions between the leadership of the two countries as well as at the foreign secretary levels.

“I raised the Jammu and Kashmir issue with my Indian counterpart at the ministerial meeting in New Delhi in July 2011. The joint statement of the ministerial meeting underscored the need for continued discussion of Jammu and Kashmir in a purposeful and forward-looking manner with a view to finding a peaceful solution by narrowing divergences and building convergences,” the minister said.

The MFN status could be a big step forward in strengthening trade ties between the two neighbours. Once MFN status is granted, Pakistan will have to treat India on par with its other favoured trading partners. India has already granted most favoured nation status to Pakistan and is treating it on par with other trading partners.

Pakistan Commerce Minister Makhdoom Amin Fahim had visited India for five days last month.

Currently, Pakistan’s exports to India stand at $300 million, while imports from India are at $1.5 billion.

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Indian Army Chief Says Chinese Troops Present in PoK

 Around 4,000 Chinese including the troops of the People’s Liberation Army of China are in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK), Army Chief Gen. V K Singh said today amid the unease in the Indian establishment over their presence there.

“There are certain construction working teams, a large number is available. Around 3,000 to 4,000 of these people are present including certain people for security purposes. There are certain engineers troops. Now (like) our own engineers are combat engineers. So, in some way they are part of the PLA,” he told reporters here.

The Army Chief was responding to a query on the presence of Chinese Army troops in the PoK on the sidelines of the 16th Field Marshal K M Cariappa memorial lecture delivered by national security adviser Shivshankar Menon.

The statement comes against the backdrop of concerns in India about the presence and engagement of Chinese troops in PoK, which India considers as its own land.

IAF Chief N A K Browne had made this clear when he said in an interview that increasing presence of China in PoK warrants India’s “attention”.

New Delhi has already conveyed its concerns to China over the presence of its troops in PoK and its activities in that region.

Last year, there were reports of presence of about 11,000 Chinese troops in Jammu and Kashmir‘s Gilgit-Baltistan region held by Pakistan but Beijing said there was no wrong-doing.

Recently, a senior Indian Army commander had said that Chinese are mainly engaged in construction activities of highways and dams in PoK as well as the northern areas which are very close to the LoC.

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