Now Indian T-shirts belittle Kashmiris

ISLAMABAD: Not content with the relentless persecution of Kashmiris, the Indian security forces in Held Kashmir have now resorted to humiliating Kashmiris by introducing T-shirts depicting an innocent youngster, Farooq Dar, who was tied to the front bumper of a jeep by an Indian Army major as a human shield in April 2017.

The military officer, Major Nitin Gogoi, was later awarded by the Modi government. This inhuman act was designed to terrorise the Kashmiri youth seeking their right to self-determination. It was an image befitting the Hitler era.

While photographs of these T-shirts mocking and belittling an innocent young man have gone viral on the social media, two can play (at) the game. If the local cottage industries have emerged in the IHK which manufacture the Pakistan crescent and star, it will not be long before these very Kashmiris come up with their own brand of T-shirts.

If there are changing trends in the manner that every generation of Kashmiri fights the daily battle, so is the change seen in the Indian security forces which denies them their freedom. Meanwhile, conflicting reports still circulate in the occupied valley of the presence of Daesh raising their black flags in south Kashmir.

Years back, even before the murder of Burhan Wani, a young Kashmiri freedom fighter, eminent jurist AG Noorani had pointed to the possible emergence of Daesh in the area. This week Outlook magazine dwelt upon the issue writing, “Following a claim by Daesh (ISIS) that it had carried out an attack on Indian police in Jammu and Kashmir, the state’s top cop has confirmed that the forces are currently verifying the presence of Daesh militants and they are well-prepared to take on the challenge if necessary”.

Hurriyat leaders The News spoke to in the past had denied presence of Daesh in the IHK saying New Delhi wanted to give a bad name to the continuing resistance movement by labeling it acts of ‘Islamic terrorism”.

While New Delhi, officially, has never ruled out the presence of Daesh in India, A’maq, the publicity wing of Daesh, had claimed that some of its operatives were present in the valley. In 2016, claims Outlook, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had arrested some youths from Kerala, Mumbai and Hyderabad, as they were allegedly associated with Jund-al-Khilafah, which is responsible for sending recruits from India for Syria.

With the ISIS retreating from Mosul and other former strongholds, and allegedly turning its gaze to ‘Khorasan’ (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh), many in the intelligence agencies believe that some recruits from the southern states have been asked to go to the ISIS’s new battlefields.

The report says earlier this month when three militants were killed during a cordon-and-search operation in a hamlet on the outskirts of south Kashmir’s Anantnag town, senior police claimed that one of them was radicalized into the Daesh ideology through the social media.

Notes Outlook, “Jaish has pumped up its activities in the past two years, and on February 10, it carried out an attack on the Sunjuwan army base in Jammu, killing six personnel and wounding 11. Earlier, on January 1, Fardeen Khanday, a 16-year-old local, attacked the Lethpora paramilitary camp, killing five personnel before getting killed along with another militant.

In a video, Fardeen had urged Kashmiri youth and Muslims across India to join the “fight against India”. He claimed that militancy was not the result of unemployment, but “a reply to Kashmir’s illegal control by India” and then hailed Masood Azhar and Afzal Guru.

“We believe Jaish will have a larger and more active role now. And that is a challenge,” says an official.” Meanwhile, Amira Jadoon, an assistant professor at the Combating Terrorism Center and the Department of Social Sciences at the US Military Academy at West Point, has written extensively on the subject.

She argues in “An Idea or a Threat? Islamic State Jammu & Kashmir”, that, “In early February 2016, the Islamic State announced its intention to expand into Kashmir as part of its broader Khorasan branch. One of the causes of concern associated with the spread of the Islamic State affiliate in Jammu and Kashmir (ISJK) is the existing instability within the region due to the controversial Line of Control (LoC) that divides the region into Indian and Pakistani controlled areas”.

So what happens if for the sake of argument the black flags emerge in an environment which is already volatile, and what could be the consequences for Pakistan?

“If successful, an Islamic State-inspired movement may have severe negative consequences in the already volatile environment of Jammu and Kashmir, such as increased rivalry amongst militant groups and sectarian violence. This would not only exacerbate Pakistan’s current instability, but also antagonize relations between the two nuclear-armed countries”, is how Jadoon sees the situation.