Kashmir Update

US Assistant Secretary of State Alice G. Wells informed a Congressional panel on Tuesday that India’s annexation of the occupied lands has not changed America’s position on held Kashmir, as it continues to consider it a disputed territory.

Despite escalating tensions between Malaysia and India, a defiant Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (pic) has stuck to his guns over his recent remarks on the Kashmir conflict made at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

In a move that openly violates the constitutional protection of free speech in India, political detainees in Kashmir, including top leaders, are being forced to sign a bond that will bar them from speaking or commenting on the “recent events” in the state as a condition of their release.

Do the learned judges of the Supreme Court – who will soon begin to hear the petitions against the way in which the Narendra Modi government hollowed out Article 370 of the constitution and dissolved a state – fully appreciate the gravity of the responsibility that a desperate civil society has placed on their shoulders?

Whatever now happens in Kashmir or is happening right now, it is officially normal. Who sets the standards of ‘normal’ and ‘normality’? The dictionary defines normalcy as the condition of being normal; the state of being usual, typical, or expected. By definition, normalcy is messy and inconsistent. The thumb rule for ‘usual’ and ‘expected’ is never the same for any two places or persons. But is there even a thumb rule to measure normalcy in Kashmir? It is a word given and it means what the rulers intend it to mean. Everything else is reality.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cancelled a two-day official visit to Turkey after Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) last month in which he criticised the Centre’s decision to abrogate Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir.

With state under a communications blackout, the J&K FAC has worked with stealth, issuing record forest clearances

The visit by Pakistan PM Imran Khan to Beijing on October 8-9 has been a runaway success from Islamabad’s perspective. It revved up the dynamics of the China-Pakistan Economic Cooperation projects, will most certainly intensify China-Pakistan defence cooperation and, importantly, reaffirmed the whole-hearted Chinese support on Kashmir at the highest level of leadership in Beijing.

When our sisters and brothers in Kashmir are going to recall these dark months 20, maybe 30 years from now, there will no doubt be so many wounds which would not have healed.

The law forbids any arrest of a juvenile under the preventive detention provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code. Yet the police has listed dozens of such arrests in its report to the Supreme Court.