A Jamia Millia Islamia scholar Basharat Ali recently flaunted on Facebook about an article he wrote on the death of terrorist Burhan Wani, and which got published in a Pakistan-based newspaper, Dawn.
The article, which was initially published in the Indian newspaper, Kashmir Reader, is an anti-India article written about the day Ali learned about Wani’s death and days that followed.
” Burhan gove shaheed (Burhan has been martyred), I told them. They (his family) looked back at me in shock. My aunt began to wail. Ye kusu tawan cxunuth khudayoo (what tragedy did you send upon us, oh God), she lamented.”
Ali, who a research scholar at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia, posted his Dawn article on Facebook on October 29, flaunting about the fact and using it to attack many “Indian Kashmir experts”.
In a note posted along with the article, he said…
“An edited and abridged version of my piece, earlier published in Kashmir Reader under the headline The Crumbling Statist Narrative, is published in Dawn.
One of the Indian Kashmir experts, Aarti Tickoo Singh, had then threatened to sue Kashmir Reader for calling her a Right Wing writer. In Dawn, the praise has been carried forward. Now, let’s see if she can get Dawn banned.”
The Dawn article was published under the headline “I’ll never forget the day Burhan Wani was killed” and narrates Ali’s recollection of the days that followed Wani’s death and how they were “incensed with songs of freedom.”
The protests were a sign of the Indian state losing all ground. The divisions that they had constructed…to obfuscate the truth went up in smoke as the air was now incensed with songs of freedom. But in the newsrooms in India, it was the perennial threat..Pakistan, they said, was responsible for causing unrest in Kashmir.”
The narrative further said that the Indian state’s oppression is as routinised in “war-time as it is in peace-time” and added that there was no Pakistan-hand in the unrest in the Valley.
He even called the Indian media “jingoistic” and asked, “Who will they (media) blame for their own failure and guilt?”
Ali spoke about Kashmiri youths whom he claims were “tortured” inside the Army camp and how they were still determined to protest when they came back.
“Inside the camp, they were tortured. One of the boys later told me about how they were made to stand naked, abused, spat on, and beaten with guns, sticks and belts till their bodies bled. They were given death threats and some were even made to jump naked in the river. Yet, after he came out of the prison, he was determined to protest again.”
He then went on to take on “Kashmir Experts” and accused them of filing ‘contradictory’ versions of the actual incidents so as to ‘construct a narrative which helped the government’.
“For them (experts), the responsibility of Kashmiris getting killed by an Indian soldier is on the Kashmiris and not on the Indian state…However, their ideological manipulations have been of little consequence to the people of Kashmir…(who) will keep coming out on the streets to demand for their rights”
Soon after he shared the post, his views were severely criticized by many on Facebook, with some even expressing anger…
Source: http://topyaps.com/
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