The author, a Kashmiri journalist, contemplates how Kashmir is being publicly portrayed. Though atrocities like the Holocaust are quite rightly memorialised for their horror, the world ignores the Kashmir conflict despite its 80,000 dead, 6,000 mass and unmarked graves, and thousands of disappeared youth – post resistance of 1989. And while provocations like the execution of Mohammad Afzal Guru and other oppressive tactics by India are still radicalising new sections of Kashmiri youth, India publicly promotes the notion of a Kashmir at peace whilst never accepting its role in human rights abuses. Who, asks the author, will tell Kashmir’s story? Who will memorialise the atrocities it has suffered?
International People’s Tribunal on Human rights and Justice in Indian Administered Kashmir, Alleged Perpetrators: stories of impunity from Jammu and Kashmir (Srinagar, December2012), available at: www.Kashmirprocess.org/reports/alleged_Perpetrators.pdf.
2.
Examples of Kashmiri authors writing about resistance and their own realities include, among others, the novel by Nitasha Kaul (a Kashmiri Pandit based in London), Residue (Rupa and Co., 2014); a memoir, White Man in Dark by the Srinagar-based medical doctor, Rumana Makhdoomi (Partridge Publishing, 2013); in Urdu, Wadi-e-Khoonab (Valley soaked in blood) by Ess Peerzada. Published by the Kashmir Studies Foundation, it contains brief profiles and biographical details of the youth killed by police and paramilitary fire during the dominant wave of anti-Indian protest demonstrations in 2010. There are also the prison memoirs by journalist Iftikhar Gilani, My Days in Prison (Penguin India, 2005); political activist Anjum Zamruda Habib, Qaidi Number 100 (Prisoner number 100) (Habib Publications, 2009); Maqbool Sahil’s Urdu Shabistan-e-Wajood (The ordeal of a journalist) (Meezan Publications, 2009). Also, note Shahnaz Bashir’s forthcoming novel, The Half-Mother (Hachette, 2014); Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (HarperPress, 2011) and Mirza Waheed’s novel, The Collaborator (Penguin, 2011).
Statement made at the ninth Intra-Jammu Kashmir Dialogue, organised by the CDR, Delhi, 20–21December2010.
6.
Email correspondence with the author, in response to a structured questionnaire concerning voting dilemmas in J&K, issues of local governance, and Mattu’s reasons for joining a pro-India mainstream political party, the National Conference.
