WRITE-UPS

Qazi Shibli The father of slain Athar Mushtaq who was killed in the Srinagar Encounter on December 31 has been booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Mehbooba Mufti, the former Chief Minister of Jammu Kashmir tweeted,  "After losing his son in an alleged fake encounter, Athar Mushtaq’s father has been slapped with an FIR for demanding his dead body. His crime was to stage a peaceful protest. The inhabitants of Naya Kashmir can’t even question a callous admin & have been reduced to living corpses." ALSO READ: ‘Ours was in Srinagar to Deposit Fees, Our Son Went to Repair his Bike’- Families Plead the Innocence of Sons Killed in Srinagar Encounter She tweeted that Mushtaq Ahmed had been slapped with an FIR, after which The Kashmiriyat got in touch with the family who...

Shahid Ayoub After struggling for more than a decade, tribal communities in Jammu Kashmir felt hopeful that they will not be evicted from their homes in the coming years with the implementation of the Forest Rights Act 2006. Even after the abrogation of article 370, when almost all central laws are applicable here, Forest Rights Act was an exception. With the continuous struggle of activists, support from media, academicians and rights groups, finally in 2021 this law is going to be implemented in Jammu Kashmir and the process for its implementation has already been started with the Constitution of Forest Right Committee in each Panchayat. Students demanding implementation of Forest Right Act : These committees have an important role to play in helping tribal communities and ot...

Fizala Khan Memories about personal identity are fragmentary for our sense of who we are. It is often awful when we lose them. The common grounds that knit our roots to our existence are the folktales and folklore that we once harked in our childhood. My grandmother (Yay’euo) would often talk to me about how my grandfather (Abbaji) survived an encounter with a Rantas. She asserted that it was due to Abbaji’s charming personality, which also happens to be the reason why Yay’euo fell in love with him, that the very smitten Rantas followed him home and tried to take him away. All she remembered after Abbaji walked in from the creaking wooden door, that had holes and a hatch made of thin stick, that fell of a walnut tree, was a feminine voice that rang through her ears and she fell uncon...

Qazi Shibli/ Meer Irfan In the Winter of 2018, as Kashmir was going through an endless cycle of violence, the phone of one Ghulam Nabi Khan rang in the Handoora area of Tral in Kashmir almost 60 Kilometers away from Srinagar, It was a call from the police asking him to take the body of his militant son back home for his last rites. Khan though, upon reaching the police station, was devastated to see the corpse that was 'charred beyond recognition.' The sight haunts Khan every day even after two years have passed. “I was asked to identify my son from the pieces of charred bodies lying on the floor of the police station,” Khan said. In a span of Six Months in 2018, Khan lost two sons to an unending cycle of violence in the Kashmir valley. In April 2018, Ishfaq Ahmad Kha...

Irshad Hussain Four days after the Border Security Forces personnel killed 52 persons in the Gawkadal area of Srinagar on January 21, 1990, the word of this first massacre spread into the nooks and corners of the Kashmir valley. A word of mouth spread that Jagmohan, the Governer had licensed people to kill at will, As the word reached Handwara, people gathered on bakery shops as the trooper movement heightened in the North Kashmir area. ALSO READ: The Red Bridge On a Thursday morning, Ghulam Mohammed Khan, remembers, anguished over the Gaw Kadal massacre people gathered shouting slogans against the BSF men who were deployed in large numbers in the area. Soon the crowd changed into a procession which started marching ahead shouting pro Freedom slogans. Marching through lanes and street...

Danish Zahoor In the year 1869, Leo Tolstoy published War and Peace which was to become one of the most celebrated works of world literature. It was a colossal work of over a thousand pages, part history and part fiction. Featuring more than 500 characters around its plot of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1805, it masterfully brought the Battle of Borodino to life. Tolstoy hesitated to call it a ‘novel’ and argued that it was a work that could not be categorized under the rubric of the western literary thought. Very typically Russian, it was in fact a literary category in itself. War and Peace would become not just an epitome of literary genius but also the beacon light of a distinguished school of historical thought, one that sought to understand history through an enormous number...

Qazi Shibli Who are we, if no one sees us? If we disappear, do our dreams vanish as well? Or, do they remain, in the space where we had them, in the air we once breathed and in the hearts of those we touched? And if they do not disappear, then how do the imaginings of those who were forcibly disappeared persist to haunt the living? It is those haunting voices that Brazilian author Machado de Assis, in the unforgettable novella "The Mirror" captures to narrate an enthralling tale of interconnectivity. Brazilian author Machado de Assis, in the novel-The Mirror. When one loses a loved one to death even if brutal and untimely the promise of closure is hopeful. But when one is ripped away from everything and everyone it derives its belonging from, the ones left behind live in perpetual...

Irshad Hussain Last gunfight of the year 2020, which broke out on 30th December 2020, at Lawaypora in the outskirts of Srinagar city in which the Security forces claimed to have killed three militants, who were later identified by their families as civilians. Wani, an 11th standard student from Bellow, Aijaz Ganaie, a graduate student from Putrigam, both in Pulwama district and Zubair Lone, a carpenter by profession from Turkwangam from Shopian. ALSO READ: ‘Video Could be Dubbed, May be Nobody was Inside the House’- Not the First Claim of ‘Fake Encounter’ in Hokarsar Srinagar As the encounter concluded, the images of the trio killed surfaced on social media. The homes of all the three boys were flooded by people that sent shockwaves to the South Kashmir residencies, hundreds poured...

Fizala Khan Senior People's Democratic Party (PDP) leader and former Minister of Jammu Kashmir government, Syed Naeem Akhtar Andrabi, was the third politician who was detained on the 21st of December, just a day ahead of counting votes for District Development Council (DDC) Elections and lodged in a government building declared as a sub-jail, by Jammu Kashmir Police. However, the family members of Akhtar mentioned that his arrest was unwarranted and unascertained to any legal documents. Akhtar was admitted to Khyber hospital on Thursday morning after he fell unconscious in sub-jail. The news came after Naeem Akhter's daughter, Shehryar Khanum took to her Twitter and wrote that her father was found unconscious and the family was not informed by any official. It was a senior police off...