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• Date: Apr 28, 2011
If it is the Indian mainstream media which has been keeping you informed about Kashmir, trust me, you have been in the wrong hands. Lies are peddled by the government, and in turn faithfully disseminated by the Indian media. This is a brief attempt at dispelling those lies-turned-myths.
Kashmir is militant-infested
Who told you so? Watching too many Bollywood films, or what? If the official admission is anything to go by, there are not more than 500 militants operating today in Kashmir. And all entrenched too deep to foment any discord. There has been no militancy...
The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA, for short) is very much in the news. And so are a host of officers of the Armed Forces, both retired and serving, who have voiced their desire for the Act to continue. It needs to be seen why they are being strident about an Act that has been repeatedly called “draconian” by many who are knowledgeable about it. What also needs to be exposed are the deceptive arguments they have been dinning into our ears.
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• Date: Jul 28, 2010
When it comes to Kashmir, you need to reconcile yourself to a few facts. First, you know as little about the goings-on there as the Indian news media condescends to tell you. And second, you know as much about the happenings there as you delve through alternative sources for news. And a corollary to the first would be that you believe as much rubbish as media wants you to.
If you thought from the coverage both in the print and broadcast media that Kashmir was finally in the news, well, here’s some news for you – you fell to the corollary machination. For the last two years while...
• Date: Mar 6, 2010
It's the kind of news item that tends to get buried under others of heavier national importance; for it hardly has any news value that any journalist worth one's salt would ascribe to it. This particular news item one read was about 36 former militants being appointed on Saturday as constables in the Jammu and Kashmir police. No big deal, that. In any case, nothing new about such a measure either.
It is not the news item in itself that is a cause for worry – reading between its lines is, and also by going beyond the straightjacket, desultory headline.
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• Date: Aug 11, 2009
The history of the Northeast is the history of romantic insurgencies and pyrrhic wars, devastating blasts and brutal carnages, internecine squabbles and ethnic clashes, political chicanery and myopic governance, and what have you. It is also the history of atrocities. By the agents of the State.
When Naga women were raped on church pulpits by the sacrosanct Indian forces, it was something that never coalesced into the form of news. But these days some news do trickle out.
Like that of a gutsy girl in Haflong who took on a group of Army jawans, sometime in the last week of July.
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• Date: Aug 11, 2009
In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications.
The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the story has appeared, but not in an Indian publication. I happened to stumble across it...
