By Majid Maqbool I can see my own breath on a particularly chilly winter morning. A thick, blinding fog is covering the street. The trees are withered, desolate, robbed of late autumn leaves that lie trampled on ground. I walk towards the road to board a bus. Inside the bus, … Read more →
Parveena Ahangar rejects CNN-IBN’s nomination for ‘Indian of the Year 2011’
While rejecting the CNN-IBN award Parveena Ahangar, founder chairperson of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) released the following statement: Srinagar, December 10, 2011: On this ‘International Human Rights Day’, December 10, 2011, the APDP (Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons), Srinagar, wishes to state that there is something … Read more →
Guru: A Mere Pawn in a Sinister Game?
By S Zafar Mehdi Safvi To hang or not to hang! The debate over barbarous capital punishment still lingers on. Many civil rights activists, lawyers, and liberal intellectuals have been arguing against it on humanitarian grounds for a while now. A potent argument against capital punishment is that it has … Read more →
I: The Stars of My Sky
By Feroz Rather Along that solitary graveled path into a crimson evening, My eyes chase you and chase you until you ask them: ‘Where do these boys go after they kill them?’ ‘What happens to their hearts, the love-lakes, now mad with the tempests of freedom?’ In Kashmir, in my … Read more →
His Favorite Song
By Irtif Lone And we decided to meet again. In the orchards of almonds blooming flowers, shimmering sun the temping smell of garden I waited for long. I looked at Zabarvan, the calmness of Dal, the rowing noise. What on earth could stop him from coming? He never broke his … Read more →
Locks in the Mirror
By Dr. Shahid Iqbal If you are a pregnant door that holds all answers to my questions, I will unlock your billowing shapes and unzip your lips. But, a voice in my head warns, ‘You are the mirror image of what you see in others.’ So tell me, what doors … Read more →
For Milad
By Dr. Shahid Iqbal Mother Kangaroo Teach us the art of Pouch. For we live in the Land of Snakes. Snakes, that swallow, alive, our children. Children, born out Of eyes, not wombs. Holy Tear Drops Trickle down Mom’s Cheeks And pierce Pa’s Heart. Foretellers on seeing our Foreheads, beat … Read more →
Red
By Dr. Shahid Iqbal In the city of red on a red evening with Head on a red pillow in a red sleep I had a red dream. Far at the horizon is the red sky Where on a red planet dwells a red maid Who distributes red roses. From … Read more →
I Was Seventeen When You Were Writing of Kashmir Burning
By Meenakshi Watts (In memory of Agha Shahid) It still burns. This must be a seed planted in Raj Bagh, under the ‘One Inch Himalayas’ On a summer afternoon in your father’s house. Our parents stood around with old times laughing and lost in shared memories and sons that came … Read more →
Jale-ae Watan (Banished to Exile)
Reviewer: Mushtaq Ul Haq Sikander Book: Jale-ae Watan (Banished to Exile) Author: Khaliq Parvez Publisher: Mir Son Publications, Baramulla Kashmir. Year of Publication: Not Mentioned Pages: 356, Price: 350 Indian Rupees The Politics in Kashmir was shaped by the events in the wake of partition of the subcontinent; hence partition … Read more →
A Conversation with Gautam Navlakha
Published on: Feb 1, 2011 @ 18:04 Gautam Navlakha is an Indian human rights defender and a peace activist. An Editorial Consultant with Economic and Political Weekly, Gautam is also the co-convener International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir. Here he shares his views on Kashmiri … Read more →
Remembering Mogal Maas, Human Rights Activist
By Ather Zia I am their Mother, who shall bar me from them?[1] Mogal Maas breathed her last in the fall of 2009, just some hours short of the 27th of October, a momentous date in Kashmir’s history. In her last days, she was bedridden but not defeated in the … Read more →
Humor in Mayhem
BY Hakeem Irfan The razor wires, barbed wire mentality, troops, dogs, garbage, bullets, tear smoke canisters, rubber bullets, pallet guns, murders, injuries, hospital, ambulance, protests, identity card, dialogue, peace, treason, apathy, promise break, impotent curfew pass and of course the CURFEW itself. The vocabulary has reduced to these words in … Read more →
Long Drive to Freedom
Long Drive to Freedom By Sajid Iqbal ‘We shall meet again in Srinagar, by the gates of the Villa of Peace, our hands blossoming into fists till the soldiers return the keys and disappear. Again we’ll enter our last world, the first that vanished in our absence from the broken … Read more →
Kathe Koar Woathe Zamane (A Tale of Times)
By Sohail Iqbal The legend has it that each locality in my homeland owned one pyjama only. Inhabitants of that locality would take turns to wear the solitary pyjama whenever they undertook a visit to another locality. Those times might have preceded me but the earlier period of the last … Read more →
Hindutva, Nationalism, and Fascism
By Nyla Ali Khan In the wake of Modi’s reprehensible attempt to stoke the flames of communal hatred and sectarianism in Gujarat and the judgment of the Lucknow branch of the Allahabad high court regarding the Ram Janmabhoomi site, our memories of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation of 1989 are refreshed. … Read more →
Social Diversity, Political Divergence and Challenges for Conflict Resolution in J&K
By Rekha Chowdhary Social Diversity Jammu and Kashmir is a highly diverse society going through conflict in an intensified manner. Diversities are so placed in this state that a complex social and political environment is generated. Firstly, there is no clear-cut context of ‘majority’ and ‘minority. Majority in one context … Read more →
“The View From Afar”: Nation-Building and Its Consequences in the North-East and Kashmir
By Shubh Mathur I recently came across a picturesque and devastatingly accurate metaphor for nation-building, that of a ‘‘handsome neoclassical building in which political prisoners scream in the basement’ [i]. Despite the truth we that we almost instinctively recognize in this image, the authoritarianism and violence ‘“symbolic and physical – … Read more →
Kashmir: Militarization, Protest, and Gender
Ather Zia Towards the end of June grim reports from Indian administered Kashmir (hereafter called Kashmir) about increasing mass agitation, demonstrations and protests which resulted in civilian casualties began pouring in. Although tension in Kashmir is nothing new given the conflict, these particular incidents involved civilian casualties on a daily … Read more →
Kashmir’s Stone Pelter
Ather Zia [circa 2010] You ask about his birth? No, no he was not born today. No not at the time you see him, frozen in the frames of countless magazines and screens, aggressive and intent on throwing the stone at the well armed and armored Indian trooper whose finger … Read more →