Unwavering Resilience: An Unnamed Kashmiri Comments on Solidarity
“Israel” serves as a constant source of inspiration for the Indian occupation of Kashmir, including for India’s intense repression of Kashmiri speech, protest, and life. Occupation makes a struggle out of daily life and attempts to impose a totalizing silence on Kashmiris who speak about this struggle. But like Palestine — in the face of violence, criminalization, and erasure — Kashmir still speaks. SALAM interviewed a member of Kashmiri civil society on the parallels between Palestine and Kashmir, the solidarity between the two, and the current sociopolitical moment. Citing safety concerns, they have chosen to remain anonymous.
On Kashmiri solidarity through history:
Facing their own brutal occupation, Kashmiris are painfully familiar with the loss, dispossession, and suffering of Palestinians. The Jammu massacre, the RSS-planned ethnic cleansing of over 500,000 Muslims in Kashmir, happened only a year before the Palestinian Nakba. Kashmiris have not shied away from using terms more closely associated with the Palestinian struggle to describe their own movements. Intifada and Nakba are just two such examples. While Intifada was first used as a descriptive of the Kashmiri resistance in early 90s, it has been more powerfully deployed since the 2008 and 2010 mass uprisings of 2008 and 2010 in Kashmir. Pictures from these uprisings of young men facing armored vehicles with nothing but stones bear a striking resemblance to street protests in Palestine.
On Kashmiri students and the Indian ban on public solidarity:
The only student organizations permitted in Kashmir are those backed by the state; those that support Palestinian liberation, like the Islami Jamiat-eTalaba (the oldest and largest student organization in Kashmir), are banned. In an attempt to silence an entire people, all expressions of resistance — no matter how small — are repressed in Kashmir. At this year’s historic Muharram procession in the capital city of Srinagar, which took place for the first time in a decade, participants raised the Palestinian flag. In turn, the state booked these participants under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). The point I am making is that, despite this immense suppression and a high cost of speaking, Kashmiris continue to express solidarity with Palestine.
On oppression before, during, and after October 7th:
For Kashmiris, what stands out is both the unwavering resilience of Palestinians in Gaza in the face of a genocide and that their faith in God is the source of this resilience. October 7th has shown that liberation comes at a cost and through massive sacrifice. It has lifted the masks off (if any were still on) the faces of the ‘liberal’ world, exposing the inadequacy of international law when the occupier is backed by the Empire. The overarching vocabulary to describe the Kashmiri condition that the Kashmiris themselves use is one of zulm — a Kashmiri/Urdu/Persian/ Arabic word that roughly translates to “oppression.” I think it is important to focus on the vocabulary used on the ground. Words that are understood across borders as if they were part of the vernacular, in my opinion, show us the true nature of these resistance movements and their interconnectedness. A seventy-year-old from Gaza and a seventy-year-old from Kashmir may or may not know the English word “genocide,” but both will immediately recognize “zulm” as a part of their common vocabulary.