May 8 2025: The Kashmir Crisis
(Screenshot of a May 7th, 2025 article by Pakistani-British intellectual Tariq Ali on India, Pakistan, and Kashmir.)
A: How have you been, B? I called the circle because I felt a crisis in the afternoon. I’ve calmed down but I still check the news every 30 seconds.
B: I’m fine, but I felt shock in the beginning. On the first day, 30 towns were hit. I didn’t realize what was happening until I heard about my relatives. In Kashmir, we’re in the mountains and we were much more prepared. I felt more sad about people in the mainland who were caught in it. We have bunkers and basements in Kashmir because we’ve experienced things like this before. It’s a different experience, for sure.
A: I think leading up to this, I was in denial that anything was going to happen. A lot of things were said, there was the news that the Indus Water River Treaty was suspended. Even though that was stated, I’d read that India doesn’t have the infrastructure to divert the water so it might’ve been an empty threat. But I’ve also seen articles saying differently. There was a bit of a frenzy where families of the victims said that they wanted retaliation. I thought it wasn’t going to go beyond those statements.
B: There was an attack on tourists. There hasn’t been an official investigation. Pakistan did officially ask evidence from India about Pakistan’s involvement. There are local groups that might do something similar but they also asked for proof. So far, no one has claimed responsibility. Things like this aren’t a surprise, but this one was. The resistance in Kahsmir has said that they’ve been shifting towards more pacifist ways. They have no history of targeting civilians and they haven’t targeted military personnel in a while. There are some false-flag operations that India has done. A lot of the homes of the people in the resistance get razed and some of them become homeless. There’s a lot of dialogue going on there and somehow, it extended towards Pakistan. We expected a crackdown at most, because 3,000 people were detained across Kashmir. We just thought it would be like 2019 because things like this have happened before, even with religious bias. I feel like none of us would expect an attack on Pakistani soil.
A: A lot of my family has memories and trauma from the previous wars between Pakistan and India. I think that the media is contributing to the idea that it would become a fully fledged war. They’re inciting it. Al Jazeera is releasing articles about whether India or Pakistan has more nuclear weapons.
C: It’s so tasteless because they did that for Ukraine and Russia. Like, what is the point?
B: There are reposts about this on Instagram. The problem is that it simplifies it so much. I take offense on behalf of Indians as well. It erases Kashmir out of the situation and it used by the diaspora to preach a false sense of peace. When it comes down to my identity as a Kashmiri, we are essentially defenseless. The Kashmiris believe in the Pakistani military to help us, but when Pakistani missiles fall on the other side of the border, the consequences will fall on Kashmir. Especially when warheads are discussed, it becomes so colonial to be talking about warheads in that manner.
A: My mom has said that the bombs are no longer just dropping near the Line of Control but also cities that are far deeper into Pakistan. This goes to the roots of any war - that if one country attacks the other and the other retaliates, as it would, at the end of the day, the civilians are the ones who suffer. The bulk of the people who pay the consequences are the ones who did not cause it, always. So what is ever achieved?
D: Things like this often makes us think about the rationality response behind pain. I think about my dog and how he bit my sister’s ear. My dog was really mad about biting her ear, but when he did it, my sister was messing with him before. I told her to stop but she kept bothering him. But when he did bite her, he ran behind the couch and cowered. This happened when I was 12 or 13. I saw that my dog did something bad and he knew it too. It was so interesting. I think about that often when I think of the news and people who retaliate in resistance groups or oppressive groups. There is a rationale in retaliating in a way that feels almost right. It almost makes it feel more digestible to take in the information. I think about what my dog did - it was wrong but he was provoked. It’s hard to imagine people as dogs but you can imagine how to react to pain. But is it justified? Is it out of anger, or is it vindicated or justified? People say dogs can’t have remorse, but I felt it.
A: There’s also that difference between… the dog was being literally poked and provoked, but people have gone through similar feelings and responses in a metaphorical sense. They feel provoked by ideologies and threats.
B: If you see the context of Kashmir before the attack, Indians gave out about 80,000 domiciles. This means an Indian basically becomes a Kashmiri resident and have the right to buy and sell land. There is no more protection because they stripped our autonomous status. It’ll change everything because the Indian government is trying to erase our culture and now change the demographics of the area from being a Muslim-majority area to a Hindu-majority area. It might be a false flag operation, but it definitely will damage the area.
E: The problem is that it’s not as clear as with Israel and Palestine.
B: I’ve been to Pakistan a few times and see what they feel about Kashmir. Geographically, Pakistan is the closest Muslim majority to us so we feel connected to them. To be fair, we find a lot of people in the Valley who claim to be Kashmiri and they’re not. If you ask a Kashmiri, they will never say they want to join India. It’ll be either to join Pakistan or remain independent. The Palestinians want a free Palestinian state. The Kashmiris have been politically active for the past 76 years. We’ve had pro-Pakistan and anti-Pakistan sentiment over time. The Kashmiris are practicing Muslims so they feel connected to Pakistan. Raising the Pakistani flag in Kashmir means we are supporting Muslim representation, similar to how the Palestinian flag represents global solidarity. The newer generation is much more self-reliant and they can see a lot of these issues.
E: I don’t know if you’ve all heard of Tariq Ali. He’s one of the most famous Pakistani-British intellectual economists and socialists. He wrote a new piece about India and Pakistan. He has this great discussion about going through the history and how there was supposed to be a referendum in Kashmir and how they should join Pakistan or remain independent. The Maharaja was threatened by the loss of political power and asked the Indian government to intervene.
B: The Maharaja was so desperate to remain in power that he called on the Indian military to help and started a massacre in 1947. That’s why there’s a lot more Kashmiris in Pakistan than there are in Kashmir. I have so many friends who are ethnically Kashmiri but can’t speak the language because their ancestors got kicked out of the land.
C: Even Gandhi was an asshole over this. The things about this guy is crazy.
F: Gandhi was a racist, pedophile, and a rapist.
B: There’s a lot of Hindutva going on. Modi is ramping it up and the problem is that people don’t realize it. Indian Muslims will say to free Palestine but also call Kashmir an integral part of India. They don’t realize that Kashmir is a colonial entity. Even Osmanistan / Hyderabad. Kashmir is a border area. Hindus and Indians are brainwashed to not know about their own history to protect the idea of the Indian state. The education system in India is also terrible. Their education system is just Indian propaganda.
E: A lot of the leftist Indian friends I know have been imprisoned or beaten up by Hindu right-wing nationalists.
C: The consequences of speaking the truth and being Muslim in India is death, torture, and prison.
B: Tihar jail is known for hosting a lot of political prisoners from Kashmir. A lot of people think that Kashmir will roll over but we’ve also been fighting back. We’ve had massive funeral processions for people who have been killed by the Indian-occupying force. They’ve done mass rapes in towns. We had this one incident in the 90s and the men were tied up and basically all Kashmiri women were raped. This is what happens with an occupying force. There was this group that is basically Kashmiri Hamas and this one young man [Nasir Shafi] became like their leader. The Indian occupational force killed him and jailed so many others.
D: Thank you so much for sharing all of this. For someone who got their international degree in the US, I once asked about Kashmir and India to understand it more. Every time I wanted to learn about the situation and questioned it, no one said anything. There were five countries I was never allowed to ask about: Taiwan, Tibet, Kashmir, South Sudan and Palestine. But my teachers let us recognize South Sudan even before they became independent. The only time I’ve ever known about it was because of my weird privileged bubble. Kashmir was the place where you get the cool sweaters. All I understood was the market value of the material. Then I asked questions like “is it a country,” “why does it have conflict?” Then I read one news article about a conflict. I brought it to class and it got immediately shut down. That’s why I got frustrated and stopped learning about it. I felt like I couldn’t trust anything I learned about it, like how it would rightfully belong to India and not become independent.
B: Our diaspora is so small. We only have about 14 million. Other than the fact that there are Kashmiris in Pakistan who don’t know they’re Kashmiri, it’s the opposite of the Palestinian diaspora. The big problem is that there is no one from Kashmir to speak out in the West. I’m from Windsor and know only one other Kashmiri, who’d be my brother. We have a Kashmiri gala in Chicago and we go because there’s literally no one else here. That’s why I always encourage my friends who I went to school with to talk about Kashmir. Even if we say some misinformation, we bring the name to the forefront.
D: I imagine it’s just so interesting to take it all in and feel everything. It’s so candid and I can get an honest perspective about something so dismissed. I have to say my department in Chinese studies, we had banned three topics: Taiwan, Tibet, and Singapore. This is kind of similar.
B: My family is a bunch of generational lawyers so I feel like all we think about is international law in occupation. There’s a lot of rap that goes on, like “when I look at the lake, I see the bodies that the Indian forces throw into” and “when I see the ground, I see where people are shot.” Even coming to Western University, the Hindu Council have posted stuff about the Kashmir attack. Everywhere I go, my identity is on full display. I have to try to release myself from the situation.
E: So we have the BJP party in India and Modi. They are very much comparable to the Likuds in Israel - ultra-nationalist and fascist. The BJP has also radically brainwashed India from being a secular, multicultural country to a Hindu country where 150 million Muslims are second-class citizens. There is a very rigorous tracking of Hindu women marrying Muslim men. What they have done towards Kashmiris is horrendous.
A: I was going to add the 80,000 domiciles is illegal - completely against international law. To quote Michael Lynk, the former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine: “It has been forbidden for 74 years under the 4th Geneva Convention for an occupying power to put any part of its civilian population into the occupied territory. And the reason for that is that putting your civilian population into the occupied territory is a prelude to making a claim of sovereignty over the occupied or conquered land.”
B: The biggest concern is that these people are gonna be on the front lines with us. We’ve had a large minority of different religions before this. The fact is that India used to be secular and we have two big questions. We can put away the question of Kashmir first. Now it’s about the Muslims in India. For the Indian Muslims, there is a lot of persecution that has started recently. Hindutva has never really been a problem because we’ve always been seen as outsiders so it hasn’t created an identity question. We’ve never seen ourselves as Indian. However, Indian Muslims have always been a fabric of Indian society and now that identity has been brought into question. Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat before and they have been horrible against Muslims. So many Gujaratis are Islamophobic and a lot of them would support the massacre of Muslims when Modi was in power. Same as in Uttar Pradesh. I think the whole world has seen the effects of Hindutva on India, especially how they treat women and Brahmin superiority over everyone else. Indian Muslims have bore the brunt of a lot of it. Their religion is their oppression while it’s just our identity. During Hindu celebrations, they have to put up Hindu decorations on their mosques. Kashmir has struggled in religion as well, especially when people try to separate the Kashmir issue from Islam. It becomes a very personal topic for us. During Ramadan, they shut down our biggest mosque. Islam is a political religion in terms of assembly and justice. India does not want anyone to assemble, especially if it’s a minority group. Our religious leaders are persecuted a lot as well. Our imam is always under house arrest. This is not just erasure of identity, but it’s also religious persecution. It has simply reached a new level.
E: There’s a modern Indian adaptation of Hamlet that was filmed in Kashmir. They really toned down the level of occupation. It’s not the case that you could expect that India could produce something like this in 2025.
B: As a Canadian citizen, I can speak freely against the Indian occupation. Others cannot and they can and will be disappeared. This is a fear that Kashmiri parents have instilled in their children. Our cousins and I cannot talk about this on the phone. Some Kashmiris are very brave and try to speak out. Otherwise, it’s silence. All we have to do is say one thing and say it to the wrong person and we can be disappeared.
E: Kurdish people have been through the same thing from the Iranian government. The Kurds have always advocated for democracy and freedom. When I grew up there, I was always told by my family there are things we cannot say. Even in school I learned that. The fear of persecution is real.
D: I wonder if that’s how people feel in American schools. I spoke out about a lot of things growing up and the retaliation was immense. I faced death threats and people threatened to set me on fire. My classmates bullied me when I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance especially when we were bombing countries in the Middle East. They would shove me and put my stuff in the trash. I was in classes where the ratio of Black to white kids was one to four. I was in the 12th grade when Trump first got elected. A lot of my peers were Trump supporters and had Confederate flags. There was a dummy lynched in the neighborhood near where I stayed. Now I think about statements like these and how people are unable to speak up and how even though I was deeply ridiculed and made to feel unsafe in so many ways - I think about moments like these and how it’s a massive privilege that the worst that has happened to me wasn’t major and that I still have my life. I wonder what happens at home, and if I was still at home, would I still do it? I’m sure I would. But I feel as though there’s this idea of ‘what gets sacrificed in the way of being empathetic and sympathetic for others outside of my own world’?
B: After October 7, you can feel a lot of sympathy because a lot of the people in my school were brown. I feel like it’s similar and how all the struggles are intertwined. Even then, how the internet was, it was immense that you can feel empathy towards people you couldn’t even communicate with.
D: I don’t talk about being Black in the US much. In the US, all I can think about as a Black person is things that have happened. North Carolina is a massive banking place and it sustained a lot of Black businesses. The US government has intentionally bombed and burned buildings and seized homes and businesses from Black people in North Carolina and moved it to a whiter area. Everything got moved to North Carolina after 9/11 and it sustained the Black economy. I think about how there are so many instances of carpet bombings in cities that never get talked about. They’re nothing but highways now and there’s a lot of destruction. People say African Americans do nothing and create nothing, but when they do create and flourish a little too much, it gets destroyed and taken away. People did not respect how I looked or what I did, everything I did, said, or anything was disrespected. The foods that I grew up eating that I never thought were weird and were my favorites that were reminiscent of slave culture … Even that idea of the land struggles in Puerto Rico and how it should be its own country and that those who do come here are mistreated… and whenever they complimented my beauty, they would try to isolate something that wasn’t related to my Blackness. Growing up, I know this idea where people around me would think of me as an American… If this is what they do to people who were forced to be here ancestrally and stay here, I cannot imagine the brutality towards those who weren’t. I can’t tell you how many times people post about dead bodies. About a dead Black person. Another dead Black person. Another dead Black person. They barely covered this, even in November and December, they burned down a historical Black college in Tennessee after Trump’s election and how there were celebratory gunshots and fireworks that my parents heard. I can’t imagine, if that’s how things are treated here with people like me who are “American,” what it’s like being brutalized in the name of peace and democracy. I’ll live here and I’ll call it home but I don’t like the idea of this place. But I cannot criticize it until I hear from someone else outside of my bubble. The jokes they make and what they do. Like a second cousin had a birthday party at a well known Klan meeting spot and we just had to laugh it off. The Klan lost it because they owned the land but had to loan it out due to asset debts. Black people go missing in unreported ways and the KKK still lynches people in North Carolina. The violence is ever-present but doesn’t get talked about. If it happens in this way, I can’t imagine what happens there. I don’t have to see the person to care or to know that being humanized is the least you deserve.
E: My impression is that since we talked about Palestine and Kashmir, we see a population under siege and under persecution. So a population is being colonized in different ways. Your experience in North Carolina, Black people and minorities, are living in similar ways.
D: I was literally told to go back to where I came from. I just told him that my mother’s vagina was relatively closed up. I just didn’t know what else to say. A lot of my peers had a lot of horrible stereotypical things to say about me, like being aggressive and rude. When I did defend myself, I was the only one who got in trouble. I had this one kid who called me Medusa and my braids look like snakes. The teacher was racist and hated me and always thought I was cheating. But the guy would always knock the books out of my hands. When I tried to get my books, his Black friend also knocked the books out of my hands again. I punched him in the stomach and kicked his friend but I was the one who got into detention. The teacher didn’t care and she was a godawful woman. A lot of my teachers were racist and really rude.
E: Would this be an intense experience in North America?
D: No.
E: I’ve seen interactions with Black people who were interviewed and said that they were not persecuted or have not experienced racism in the US.
D: I think they just got really lucky. I’m socio-economically privileged but people have refused to help me in stores. There’s no such thing as being a good minority because people will treat you based on how they believe you deserve to be treated. I learned really young that if I was isolated, if I could leave North Carolina, I wouldn’t want to take this hatred and resentment with me. I lived in Greensboro where a lot of civil rights movements have happened. North Carolina has the second highest number of Black institutions in the United States.
