Daily Times

In an apparent crackdown against ‘militancy’, India’s National Investigation Agency recently seized two properties owned by separatist leader Ayaz Akbar who has been in jail since 2019 over allegations of promoting terrorist and secessionist activities in Kashmir. Indeed, Akbar is merely one of many people accused of spreading ‘false narratives’ about India’s rule in its only Muslim-majority region-thousands of journalists, activists and local leaders have been similarly accused and jailed under the Public Safety Act. Earlier this year, Khurram Pervez, already detained since 2021, was arrested in a second case after two days of interrogation by the NIA for financing terrorism under the even more sinister Unlawful Activities Act, all because he dared to work with the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, which has been instrumental to monitoring human rights in the region.

Indian authorities appear to be intensifying the long-standing repression of Kashmiri civil society-the Unlawful Activities Act, though, might be the most dangerous of India’s laws, allowing the designation of any individual as a ‘terrorist’ and completely bypassing the need to establish membership or association with banned groups. Time and time again, the Indian government has been called upon to address the fundamental issues with the country’s anti-terrorism framework and its misuse to smear and stifle human rights defenders but to no avail. Indeed, the Indian state, aided by a near-militaristic TV news media, has done everything in its capacity to cover up its gross record of human rights abuses in one of the longest-running conflicts in the world.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan continue to harp on their territorialist positions, neither one fully concerned with the suffering of the Kashmiri people. Very little has changed in the Indian state’s response to the demand for self-determination from the people of Kashmir but after the area lost its last vestiges of freedom after the revocation of its semi-autonomous status, it is apparent that self-determination simply isn’t an option anymore. Because Kashmiris have become accustomed to the violence inflicted on them – as they are to the indifference of the world; with new annexationist settlements popping up everywhere in Srinagar, it is clear that we have failed Kashmir. *