Celebrating Indian and Pakistani independence days: Political prisoners remind us that the fight for freedom is not over
On the anniversaries of the independence of India and Pakistan, Sanaa Alimia and Maryam Kanwer reflect on the detention of Kashmiri journalist Fahad Shah and the continued practice of enforced disappearances to argue that freedom remains incomplete in the region.
Kashmiris have long faced repression in their fight for freedom, write Sanaa Alimia and Maryam Kanwer. (GETTY)
Since February 2022, Kashmiri journalist Fahad Shah has been imprisoned in Kot Bhalwal Jail in Jammu. He was detained by the Jammu and Kashmir police on charges of sedition and “incitement to terrorism and unlawful activities.” He is accused of publishing an article in the magazine he founded, Cashmere eleven years earlier, in 2011, which was deemed to incite “terrorism” and “illegal violence”. He faces between five years and life in prison or the death penalty.
Suppression of the liberation of Kashmir
Kashmiris have long faced repression in their fight for freedom. Before the 1947 independence and the partition of British India into India and Pakistan, the Hindu ruler of the then princely state used a Iron fist to silence the dissent of the majority Muslim population. After 1947, the two new states fought over Kashmir, although India controlled most of the territories under “special status.”
Throughout, Kashmiri’s demands for freedom have been silenced by India and misused by Pakistan. Popular uprisings against the Indian military occupation have been ever-present, especially since the late 1980s and 1990s, only to be frightfully crushed. Death, detention, torture, rape, curfew, blinding, all the routine tactics.
Today, India’s crackdown on Kashmir intensifies. As the era of the “War on Terror” began, successive Indian governments labeled Kashmiri calls for “azadi(freedom) as “Islamic terrorism”, mirror tactics used by Israeli governments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Today the relationship between Israel and India is getting stronger.
In 2019, the right-wing government led by Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) abrogated the special status of Kashmir. As Shah and others, from journalists to human rights activists, are detained, the message from Delhi is clear: Anyone trying to create spaces for Kashmiri self-expression, let alone self-determination, will be silenced.
For many of us who know Fahad Shah, his detention haunts our conscience. Moments of deep happiness to the mundane everyday moments of freedom are marked by thoughts about him.
Political prisoners are painfully evocative of our consciousness. Of Palestinian women in Israeli jailsto steve biko to Bacha Kan to bobby sands to khader adnan, to others lesser known, all lead by example in speaking truth to power. But despite all their courage and resolve, it is still their bodies that must suffer bodily and mentally in the face of an oppressive state.
In the Indian subcontinent, the giant of Urdu and Punjabi poetry, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who was also a political prisoner, reminds us that witnessing the suffering of others, loved ones, children and strangers is terrifying. As the says in intesab, “The name of a lonely man.”/ “on behalf of bereaved mothers”. It is to the thoughts of Fahad’s mother and family that we turn.
Bobby Sands, the iconic Irish anti-colonialist, who went on hunger strike, wrote in prison that he also knew the collective suffering his imprisonment caused, including his mother, saying: “(m)my heart is very sore because I know I have broken my poor mother’s heart, and my home is struck with unbearable anxiety.”
It is a painful irony that Shah also made the film. bring him back (2015) about one of Kashmiri’s most famous sons, Maqbool Bhat, and his mother Shamali Begum’s fight for justice as she fought to get her son’s remains from the Indian authorities. Bhat, who founded the National Liberation Front, the forerunner of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), was executed in Delhi in 1984 by hanging.
In every Kashmiri generation, mothers, fathers and families suffer as India sets the example. Today, Fahad Shah joins other imprisoned Kashmiri “examples”, past and present: Pervez Khurram, irfan meraj, hundreds of ghoul, sultan asif. The list goes on.
A region of torture
In neighboring Pakistan, Kashmir is abused and romanticized to forge and justify Pakistani identity and existence. In the 1990s, the national government, headed by Nawaz Sharif, introduced a new national holiday on February 5, known as “Kashmir Day.”
In fact, from right-wing, state-backed Islamists using Kashmir to recruit “the faithful” to defend Kashmiris through armed insurgency, to middle-class lounge circles, to state actors, You will find various statuses and… social support in Kashmir. In the meantime, however, there is no mention of the status own repression and material abandonment of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
There is also radio silence for the tens of thousands dead of the War on Terror years, which included terrible military operations in mainly Pashtun regions and peoples.
Meanwhile in Balochistanwhich is a situation comparable to Kashmir in Pakistan, thousands of Pakistani citizens have been “disappeared”, taken in front of their children, parents, relatives and friends or killed For the state. Yeah The Kashmiris powerfully tell us that theirs is a fight against the continuous settler colonialismwith media blackouts, dispossession of land, surveillanceand the tyranny, we hear the sameof the Baloch in Balochistan.
Zarjan Baloch was pregnant when her husband Zahid Baloch was forcibly kidnapped in Quetta, Balochistan in 2014. He is still missing. The term “half-widow”, frequently used in Kashmir, has migrated to Balochistan. On this, Sajid Hussain himself mysteriously found dead in exile in Sweden, said: “The dead do not haunt me as much as the disappeared.” Zarjan still doesn’t know where her husband is.
If the colonialists had a penchant for violence, imprisonment, and torture of anti-colonial dissidents (narratives we are often reminded of in school textbooks, public discourse, and political speeches), today, the new states and their elites that formed and reformed after he left-India, Pakistanand bangladeshi— have carried on this tradition in their own grim way.
It is because of these dark and terrible similarities in the region, and beyond, along with our friendship with Fahad Shah, that we write today. As he joins a frighteningly long list of people imprisoned, or worse, murdered, simply for speaking truth to power, his story is a reminder that our journey for freedom is far from over.
In intesab, Faiz dedicates his words to “
Maryam Kanwer is an exiled human rights researcher and activist in London.
Sanaa Alimia is an academic at the Aga Khan University.
Follow them on Twitter: @.nooremaryamk @SanaaAlimia
Do you have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board, or its staff.