Kashmir: The Case for Freedom

Throughout South Asia, people live in fear of death squads, from the Rapid Action Battalion of Bangladesh to the “encounter specialists” of India, army units in Nepal, the Frontier Corps of Pakistan, and the “men in white vans” of Sri Lanka. Their tools are disappearance, torture, and summary execution, and their supporters, Tasneem Khalil shows in Jallad, are the governments of these nations—and their patrons, like the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Israel.

 

An unsparing indictment of an international system of terror that is fully countenanced by the West, Jallad presents close-up, detailed accounts of incidents of state terror and targeted violence throughout South Asia. Khalil, a reporter who himself endured torture at the hands of agents in Bangladesh, and whose remarkable story was featured in the New York Times, draws on countless hours of on-the-ground reporting and a broad network of activists and human rights advocates to build an undeniable portrait of the domination and repression that lies at the very core of statecraft in South Asia. Shielded by their protectors in the developed world, the perpetrators of these abuses deploy them strategically to silence dissent and crush opposition.

 

A brave, essential work of reporting and investigation, Jallad brings these horrific acts to prominence in order to make it impossible for Western governments to continue turning a blind eye to the human rights violations of their erstwhile allies.

Kashmir is one of the most protracted and bloody occupations in the world—and one of the most ignored. Under an Indian military rule that, at half a million strong, exceeds the total number of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, freedom of speech is non-existent, and human- rights abuses and atrocities are routinely visited on its Muslim-majority population. In the last two decades alone, over seventy thousand people have died. Ignored by its own corrupt politicians, abandoned by Pakistan and the West, which refuses to bring pressure to bear on its regional ally, India, the Kashmiri people’s ongoing quest for justice and self- determination continues to be brutally suppressed. Exploring the causes and consequences of the occupation, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom is a passionate call for the end of occupation, and for the right of self- determination for the Kashmiri people.

Leading international voices condemn the brutalities of the Kashmir occupation.

At home, the Kashmiri people's ongoing quest for justice and self-determination is as much ignored by their venal politicians as it is rejected by Pakistan. Internationally, their struggle is forgotten, as the West refuses to bring pressure to bear on its regional ally India. Kashmir: The Case for Freedom is an impassioned attempt to redress this imbalance and to fill the gap in our moral imagination. Covering Kashmir's past and present and the occupation's causes and consequences, the authors issue a clarion call for the withdrawal of Indian troops and for Kashmir's right to self-determination.

Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer and activist. She has written screenplays and a novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Since then she has produced several collections of essays on politics, including, most recently, Broken Promises.Pankaj Mishra is an Indian writer whose work focuses on literature and politics. He is the author of a novel, The Romantics, and several non-fiction books, including, most recently, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. His essays have appeared in many publications, and he is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Guardian.Hilal Bhatt was born in Srinigar and is a freelance Kashmiri journalist.Angana P. Chatterji is a Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at California Institute of Integral Studies. Her work focuses on South Asia. She is the co-convenor of the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir and the author of Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India's Present. She lives in California and in India, where she was born.Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics--including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome--as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.