Indian Authorities Target Human Rights Advocates, Journalists, and Academics
By Tariq Ahmed
Sep/Oct 2024
Just about everyone who has not cloaked his/her head in the proverbial sand acknowledges that Kashmir’s political history is a litany of betrayal, manipulation, massive state-sponsored structural and militaristic crimes, as well as human rights violations. All this has been enacted by the rulers, politicians, political and military establishments and India’s nationalist media warriors against a hapless people demanding an end to the settler-colonial occupation of their land.
Repression, erasure, disempowerment, invisibilization, a devious combination of assimilationist and eliminationist strategies, along with dehumanization of the subaltern Kashmiri and appropriation of Kashmir’s history, have been foundational to and constitutive of India’s settler colonization project.
These violations, described by international legal luminaries as “crimes against humanity,” have surpassed the threshold of crimes under international law. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has observed, “Impunity for human rights violations and lack of access to justice are key human rights challenges in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.”
Nonetheless, the international community has largely watched in silence, much as they have done in the case of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In unwitting ways, these amount to sanctioning India’s occupation of Kashmir and the genocide in Gaza.
Kashmir’s landscape simmers with unease and indignant resignation. Military bunkers, concertina wires, unmarked mass graves, a panopticon of digital surveillance and militarized medical spaces and schools dot the landscape. The people’s memory is soaked with the countless rapes, killings, blinding, murders, tortures, disappearances and imprisonments.
Fear permeates every corner of people’s lives. Indian authorities have targeted human rights advocates, journalists, academics and civil society members in the occupied colony.
Its obsession with entrenching the occupation means that India shows no interest in a form of transitional justice that addresses the root causes of the long-standing discontent and ends egregious human rights violations and impunity for killing, maiming and silencing dissenters. A settlement-colonization enterprise cannot afford such concessions.
Several journalists — some of whom have won Pulitzer awards — have been detained, tortured or denied their right to travel abroad by confiscating and canceling their passports, as detailed in a recent report by the Kashmir Law and Justice project titled “They Should Be Beaten and Skinned Alive: The Final Phase of India’s War on Kashmir Civil Society” (March 21, 2024, https://www.kljp.org/).
The family of prominent human rights advocate Khurram Parvez has endured harassment and incessant house raids during his incarceration in India’s high-security prison. Listed among Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2022, Parvez has been described as the “modern-day David” who has been “silenced, for his voice resounded around the globe for his fierce fight against human rights violations and injustices in the Kashmir region” (Rana Ayyub
May 23, 2022, https://time.com).
Several academics have been expelled from their university positions and incarcerated. Measures against academics and scholars include close surveillance, intimidation and harassment. For raising Kashmir at a conference 14 years ago, Dr. Sheikh Showkat (principal, Kashmir College of Law) was charged with sedition.
Public Safety Act
In what Haley Duschinski and Sankar Gosh have described as “occupational constitutionalism,” the ruling Hindu nationalist party of Prime Minister Modi has unashamedly politicized the law and legalized repression in Kashmir. The colonizing authorities have used several laws to suppress Kashmiris and justify repression, including the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978 (PSA) and the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 (AFSPA).
PSA is the primary tool used against dissenting voices to justify capricious and prolonged incarceration. Amnesty International describes it as “lawless law.” Military administrations use the AFSPA, the other equally brutal tool, as a sword and a shield to suppress dissent while shielding themselves from accountability. The law provides them with the cover of impunity.
In contravention of international humanitarian and human rights laws, the state privileges AFSPA and PSA over India’s Protection of Human Rights Act (1993) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Detention without trial for two years under the PSA violates fundamental principles of justice such as equality before the law, formal charge sheets, due process and access to counsel. Those police and military personnel who misuse this instrument of suppression to win medals for killing dissidents are never held accountable.
Athar, 16, along with two other civilians, was killed in a staged police encounter in December 2020. A counter-terrorism charge was filed against his parents and other family members when they demanded the deceased’s corpse.
The military authorities are utilizing technology-assisted surveillance and predictive tools against Kashmiris as a means of force-multiplying their physical repression. They require that in businesses CCTV systems must be installed, filmed daily and submitted to authorities.
With this unmistakable digital panopticon, the Kashmiris will be surveilled for alleged anti-Indian activities in public spaces and any mass mobilization attempts by people already besieged at gunpoint.
Amnesty International’s (AI) India office has been blatantly targeted by New Delhi for highlighting the human rights situation in India generally and Kashmir specifically. As a result of police intimidation and legal harassment, the UN Special Rapporteur asked India, among other things, to provide proof of allegations against AI, the legal basis for government action and demonstrate that the government will ensure human rights activists, including lawyers, operate in a conducive environment without fear of threats or acts of intimidation and harassment of any kind.
Indian authorities have intimidated, harassed and detained Kashmiri poets and musicians. Despite being hunted by the government forces, these activists have chosen to go underground to continue making protest music.
As India’s lawyer community shuns Kashmiri students across India, vigilante groups and law enforcement abuse, harass, intimidate and kill them equally brutally. Among the flimsiest charges against the students are their alleged or actual celebrations of Pakistan’s T20 World Cup victory over India.
Weaponized Media
Weaponized media is the most incredible soft repression tool. The nationalist press reframes resistance as anti-national. Rather than deliver the facts as they are, allowing for a more neutral and in-depth analysis, the media manufactures the consent of unsuspecting Indians for military violence against Kashmiris by invoking terrorism and generating anti-Kashmiri and anti-Pakistan sentiment.
Settler-colonial authorities have designated and then banned several resistance groups as unlawful associations. Labeling them as such is meant to stigmatize, discredit and delegitimize them, thereby undermining their recruitment and any attempts at mass mobilization.
As a result of this preemptive repression, paramilitary personnel defile, harass, watch, prohibit, detain, torture and kill members of such organizations to increase the costs of supporting resistance to Indian rule.
In denial, the colonizing power uses police and army spokesmen as objective purveyors of the reality on the ground, minimizes Kashmiri political resistance and justifies dubiously legalistic and excessively militaristic retaliation as a legal response to the assumed “threatening law-and-order situation.” In Kashmir, any challenge to Indian hegemony is hideously portrayed as a threat to India’s national security and territorial integrity.
Despite what India would have the world believe, the petitioning of national security and preventive incarceration laws against Kashmiri dissenters is not an exceptional and extraordinary or extra-constitutional measure. These cherished cutting-edge tools with which they chisel the settler-colonial Hindu state are constitutive of and integral to their Brahminical colonial-settler enterprise.
Through its deceitful political maneuverings and brutal militaristic doctrine, the Kashmiri political-military establishment has elevated Kashmiris’ resentment to a point beyond repair. Court-sanctioned repression, glamorized by its cabal of anti-Kashmir and anti-Pakistan rhetoric in the media, has stifled all voices of colonized territories.
As Kashmiris are portrayed as pro-Pakistan (and therefore anti-Indian) agents, state-sponsored violence is justified. With its ever-evolving repressive regime, the state has lost its claimed moral authority to rule Kashmiri hearts and minds.
India’s goal is to hold Kashmir forever, even if that means keeping it at gunpoint. The asymmetrical power relations in Kashmir make Kashmiris vulnerable to colonizers on all three levels: materially, mentally and physically. For them, a long haul is ahead. They are digging their heels in for now.
Tariq Ahmed is a freelance writer.
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