Thursday, April 27, 2017

Is India losing Kashmir?

(...)

Ajaz, a 19-year-old student in Budgam, told me that hope had evaporated for his generation "in face of Indian oppression" and he and his friends did not "fear death". When I took him aside after a while to ask about his ambitions in life, he said he wanted to become a bureaucrat and serve Kashmir.

"It is wrong to say that the Kashmiri youth has become fearless. He just feels alienated, sidelined and humiliated. When he feels like that, fear takes a backseat, and he becomes reckless. This is irrational behaviour," National Conference leader Junaid Azim Mattoo told me.

Secondly, the new younger militants are educated and come from relatively well-off families.

Wani, the militant who was killed last July, headed a prominent rebel group and came from a highly-educated upper-class Kashmiri family: his father is a government school teacher. Wani's younger brother, Khalid, who was killed by security forces in 2013, was a student of political science. The new commander of the rebel group, Zakir Rashid Bhat, studied engineering in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. The election where no-one came to vote...
  2. Dearest Modiji: This is the truth about Kashmir...
  3. Victims of clashes overwhelm hospital in held Kashmir...
  4. Firing at stone-throwers in Indian-administered Kashmir...
  5. Politics of rape in Kashmir...
  6. Kashmir: A familiar, bloody script...
  7. Kashmiris decry world's silence over killings...

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