Author: Simurgh

On January 4, 2022, the Critical Gender Studies program at UCSD published a statement, on their studied decision to disaffiliate from an academic, Prof XXXXX XXXXX. They are not the only program, group, or department at the University of California at San Diego to do so. The statement, temporarily taken down on February 5, 2022, succinctly described what ethical research in the colonized space of Kashmir should not be based upon and should not look like, with reference to the particular academic’s work, given the vast differentials of caste, class, religion, nationality, coloniality, and institutional and familial situatedness. In doing so the statement ipso facto modeled critical and decolonial feminist theory and praxis – sadly, terms glibly thrown around without doing the deep homework entailed. Sharing this statement, as-of-now unstated, for the sake of posterity.

PRESS RELEASE from Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Indian Occupied Kashmir

Dated: 10th Dec, 2015

International Human Rights Day is observed around the globe today on December 10. On this occasion, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) pays tribute to thousands of the disappeared of Jammu and Kashmir. Around 8,000 to 10,000 cases of enforced disappearances have been reported in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989 when the freedom movement turned into an armed struggle against the Indian rule. This tribute is a reminder to the fact that we have to keep struggling until justice is delivered. In addition, while paying tribute, we reiterate that memory is out resistance and a weapon to fight against power.

Continue reading “International Human Rights Day Marked by Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Indian Occupied Kashmir”

By Partha Chatterjee

I wholly endorse Huma Dar’s critique of the Indian state’s relation to Kashmir, even though, not being Kashmiri myself, I cannot share the position from which she writes. My declared position on the Kashmir issue has always been at odds with Indian nationalist views, as indeed have my views on the hill states of north-eastern India. Politically, I have taken every opportunity open to me to condemn the operations of the Indian security apparatus in Kashmir and the north-east. I have always argued against turning the Kashmir question into an exclusive matter of bilateral negotiation between Pakistan and India and insisted on recognizing the right of the Kashmiri people to determine its own political future. My views on the north-eastern states too are shaped by similar considerations. Those who are familiar with my critique of the Indian nationalist ideology recognize my position. Needless to say, for the last three decades, I have been condemned by Indian nationalists of every hue, including sections of the Indian Left, for holding those views. I have also realized that regardless of one’s standing in the academy, the voices of people like us in India’s public domain are utterly marginal.

I felt it necessary to bring up the question of Kashmir and Tripura in connection with my statement on the boycott of Israeli institutions only to point out that I was not employing a different standard in judging colonialist claims within the territorial state of India. That statement was obviously not the place to elaborate on my critique of the Indian state ideology. I was merely explaining my way of negotiating, as a private individual, the terrain of national and colonial power relations in which one is necessarily implicated. I do not mean my refusal to visit Kashmir or Tripura to serve as a demonstrative act of resistance, nor indeed do I mean it to be exemplary in any way. It is merely a personal ethical choice that I have never before felt it necessary to talk about in public. I did not mention in my essay the north-eastern hill states not because I accept their relation to the Indian state as unproblematic but because I did once visit those states – in the early 1970s. That visit, and the experience of being an “Indian” in Indian-occupied territory, left a deep impression on me. Since then, I have never visited Kashmir, Tripura and other such places not because I wanted to avoid observing a colonial occupation at work but because I was sure I knew exactly what I would see and yet would remain powerless to do anything about. All I have managed to do in the last forty years, besides adding my feeble voice to feeble public statements, is apologize to my friends in those places for not being able to visit them.

I fervently hope that where my generation has signally failed, another generation of young Kashmiris like Huma will, with their intelligence and commitment, succeed in changing things in those unhappy regions of India.

Note: Received via email from Ayça Çubukçu, Thurs, Sep 10, 2015 at 11:57 PM GMT.

Dear Prof. Chatterjee,

I heartily applaud your decision to boycott the colonial & apartheid state of Israel. And I do this especially as a conscientious citizen of the world and as a Kashmiri born outside of Kashmir due to the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of 1947-8, engineered by the Brahminical (though not Brahmin) Dogra ruler of the erstwhile princely state and the newly “independent” Indian State, when up to 1.1 million Muslims were massacred and forcibly exiled out of Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir. That means about one third of the total Muslim population of the larger princely state of J&K was eliminated from the area that came to be under Indian Occupation, by state complicity. This figure is disproportionately high given that the total population of J&K was less than one percent of the population of British India and presents a contrast to most, though not all, accounts of Partition 1947 violence in Punjab and Bengal, which was largely construed as spontaneous or unplanned. Moreover, up to 25,000 Muslim women from J&K, mostly from Jammu, were abducted and raped as a part of this genocide — a distant aunt of mine amongst them, who bore three children to an abductor. (And these women, comprising almost a quarter of the total number of women abducted during that time, though coming from less than a single percent of the overall population, never became a part of the “subcontinental” feminist accounting of the Partition, as done by Urvashi Butalia.) I reveal this in part to explain why your statement of solidarity with our fellow Palestinians, struggling to dismantle a brutal Occupation, feels even more intimate to me.

Continue reading “Dear Prof. Chatterjee, When Will You Engage with the “Discomfort” of Indian Occupied Kashmir?”