The Bloody Streets of Kashmir Have Spoken

Prakash Kona

Countercurrents,  October 4, 2010

Not their criminal politicians who’ve betrayed their people and the folks on the streets know that. The youth, the lower middle classes and the workers – they’ve got the idea right that the only way to fight is with your back against the wall – either you die fighting or you fight dying. The treacherous government of India has sponsored generations of local elites to do the dirty job of suppressing the people on the street.

Omar Abdullah, the Chief Minister of Kashmir and President of Jammu and Kashmir National Conference has a fine English accent albeit fake and sure knows how to make a speech prepared before one or two or many mirrors look extempore: “I don’t know why should I fear the nuclear deal. It is a deal between two countries which, I hope, will become two equals in the future” says Omar in 2008 while defending a fraud nuclear deal made by the Manmohan Singh government – in anticipation of being the head of a puppet government whose strings are pulled by a bunch of robbers in New Delhi – who themselves are puppets of a global mafia in Washington.

There are neither decent armies in the world nor decent policemen. Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal jacket” (1987) makes the point rather well: armies exist on this planet to kill – not to do social justice or any justice. To take a line from Che Guevara that I’m fond of quoting, the Indian army is a bunch of “wild bloodthirsty animals determined to slaughter, kill, murder and destroy the very last vestige of the revolutionary or the partisan in any regime that they crush under their boots because it fights for freedom.”

India’s Embedded Journalists

embedded journalism

Express Buzz, July 29, 2010

Is media a mouthpiece?

Seema Mustafa

The Americans coined a phrase during their invasion of Iraq: embedded journalism, which basically underlined the use and misuse of the media by governments. Journalists embedded in the US tanks that rolled into Iraq gave glowing accounts of the war, the massacre of innocent Iraqis, and the terrible adversity of violence.

Since then sections of the media around the world have struggled to keep up with the phrase, working around the clock to please governments and pass on disinformation as the truth. Unfortunately, the same holds true of the Indian media where reporters and publications and news channels have deserted the people, to work for and on behalf of governments. Those who follow the government line well in Delhi are rewarded with trips with the prime minister, with select briefings denied to others, with access to the corridors of power, with planted information, with awards and seats of power at some point in time.

All that they have to do in return is to kill their conscience, report the wrong for the right, ask only those questions that their ‘masters’ and ‘benefactors’ want them to, and make sure that the voice of the people never becomes the news.