G20 Kashmir Meeting: Modi's PR Ploy Backfires!

[Riaz Haq]

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's campaign to show normalcy in the Indian occupied territory of Jammu and Kashmir has backfired.  Three member countries of the G20 boycotted the tourism event in Srinagar. The rest of them sent local embassy staff to attend. The event also drew negative worldwide media coverage of the brutality of India's "settler colonialism" in the disputed territory. It elicited strong condemnation from the United Nations. Prior to the event, India’s tourism secretary, Arvind Singh had promised that the meeting will not only “showcase (Kashmir’s) potential for tourism” but also “signal globally the restoration of stability and normalcy in the region.” The Modi government failed to achieve both of these objectives.

G20 Meeting in Indian Military Occupied Kashmir

Meeting Boycott:

China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey did not attend the G20 event in Srinagar. Rest of the G20 members sent diplomats posted in New Delhi to attend it.  It's not unusual for foreign diplomats to visit disputed territories such as Jammu and Kashmir. Last year, Donald Blome, US Ambassador to Pakistan, visited what he called "Azad Jammu and Kashmir".  The G20 Tourism Working Group meeting in Kashmir drew condemnation from China and the United Nations. 

“China firmly opposes holding any form of G20 meetings on disputed territory. We will not attend such meetings,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson  Wang Wenbin at a press briefing on May 19 in Beijing.  

Fernand de Varennes, U.N. special rapporteur on minority issues, criticized the meeting, saying that by hosting the session in Kashmir, “India is seeking to normalize what some have described as a military occupation by instrumentalizing a G20 meeting and portray an international 'seal of approval’.” 

The UN representative warned the G20 of “unwittingly providing a veneer of support to a facade of normalcy at a time when massive human rights violations, illegal and arbitrary arrests, political persecutions, restrictions and even suppression of free media and human rights defenders continue to escalate.”

Heavy Indian Security Presence at Dal Lake For G20 in Kashmir. Sour...

International Media Coverage:

The global media coverage of the G20 meeting in Kashmir has largely been negative. It has highlighted the brutal occupation of the region by the Indian military. 

A piece in The Conversation accused India of "using the G20 summit to further its settler-colonial ambitions in Kashmir".  It pointed out that the "route to Gulmarg (G20 event location)  is lined with barbed wire. Armed soldiers keep watch from fortified bunkers".   The Conversation piece offers the following advice to anyone visiting Indian Occupied Kashmir:

"Those visiting  (Indian Occupied) Kashmir must first learn about the decolonial history of the region, one that honors Kashmiri calls for self-determination and sovereignty. They must follow the principle of do no harm by not visiting tourist sites or using tour operators run by Indian authorities. They should support local Kashmiri-run businesses as much as possible. There is no simple resolution for tourism on occupied lands. Tourism amid settler-colonialism manifests in exploitation, dispossession, commodification and other injustices and inequities. The goal of ethical travel is not immediate perfection or self-exoneration. It is an invitation to think about our own actions and complicity". 

A story in "The Guardian" noted that the G20 Kashmir meeting "required a large show of security at Srinagar international airport". It added: "India’s presidency of the G20 group of leading nations has become mired in controversy after China and Saudi Arabia boycotted a meeting staged in Kashmir, the first such gathering since India unilaterally brought Kashmir under direct control in August 2019". 

Voice of America reported that the "security moved into the background to give a sense of normalcy amid reports of mass detentions" as the event drew closer. 

Modi's Blunders:

Prime Minister Modi's PR campaign has clearly backfired. His government's actions have failed to project any sense of normalcy in the disputed region. In fact, Mr. Modi's blunders have helped internationalize the issue of Kashmir on the world stage. They have drawn China further into the Kashmir dispute, particularly in the Ladakh region where the Chinese troops have taken large chunks of what India claims as its territory. 

In an Op Ed for the Deccan Herald, Indian Journalist Bharat Bhushan has accused Modi government of "overplaying its hand in organizing a G20 event in Srinagar". He has summed up the fallout from the G20 Kashmir Meeting failure as follows:

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s upcoming State visit to the United States makes this rebuff on J&K by the international community, especially significant. What might have been ignored by India and perhaps down-played, at least publicly by the US, in the build-up to the Modi-Biden summit, will now become an additional irritant in the bilateral relationship. Did the Modi government bait fate by overplaying its hand in organizing a G20 event in Srinagar?"

Here's India's JNU Professor speaking about illegal Indian occupation of Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland:

https://youtu.be/KWp1E8xrY5E

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KWp1E8xrY5E"; title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>" height="315" src="https://img1.blogblog.com/img/video_object.png" width="560" style="cursor: move; background-color: #b2b2b2;" /> 

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[Riaz Haq]

Exterminate All the Brutes - The Chris Hedges Report

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/exterminate-all-the-brutes

When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.

“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”

Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always

[Riaz Haq]

Indian commentator advocates for Israel-like genocidal solution in Kashmir - Muslim Mirror


https://muslimmirror.com/eng/indian-commentator-advocates-for-israe...

On Sunday Indian right-wing commentator Anand Ranganathan called for an Israel-like solution in Kashmir during The Samosa Caucus Podcast hosted by Smita Prakash. Other co-panelists included Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, Sushant, and Tahseen.

“You need an Israel-like solution to Kashmir. The fact that Israel has not been able to ‘solve it’ is not because Israel is not acting to solve it, or Israel is not doing things that should be done. If, for example, seven lakh (700,000) Israelis were driven out of their homes, and Israel had not acted, you would have said ‘Yes, they didn’t solve it,’” Ranganathan stated.



He continued, “Israel has catered for its people who were hard done by, we haven’t! It’s as simple as that. Despite that, yes, there may never be a solution because of the ideology of the people who hate Israelis, and the ideology of the people who hate Hindus. That’s irrespective. What I’m saying is, have we taken the right decisions; we haven’t.”

This is not the first time right-wing Hindu nationalists have invoked the “Israeli-model” as the go-to solution for Indian-occupied Kashmir. In 2019, a former Indian envoy to New York City suggested at a private gathering that India should follow the Israeli settler model in Kashmir.

Anand Ranganathan, an Indian scientist and political commentator known for his crass Islamophobic remarks, is the Consulting Editor of the Hindu nationalist publication Swarajya. He has more than a million followers on X and is known for his vehemently anti-Muslim rhetoric. His remarks on the podcast followed dehumanizing commentary about Kashmir’s “fertility rates” by Abhijit Iyer-Mitra.

“The fertility rates [in Kashmir] cannot support an insurgency,” Iyer-Mitra said casually. The concern over “Muslim fertility” is a deeply ingrained Zionist and Hindu nationalist talking point. In their view, Muslims are not seen as human beings but as “terrorists” or “demographic threats.”

The discussion’s shift from “fertility” to the adoption of Israeli genocidal tactics in Kashmir highlights the troubling nature of such rhetoric. The invocation of Israel’s tactics, which have been widely criticized for their human rights violations, as a model for Kashmir underscores the dangerous and dehumanizing ideologies driving these conversations.

You can watch the entire discussion in full here:

https://youtu.be/gsndXogKXaI?si=80Zel4xbIXSA16yG

[Riaz Haq]

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


The Zionist idea of ‘transfer’ – the expulsion of the Arab population – is older than Israel itself. It was embraced both by Ben-Gurion and by his rival Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Revisionist Zionist who was a mentor to Netanyahu’s father, and it fed directly into the expulsions of the 1948 war. But until the 1980s, and the rise of the New Historians, Israel strenuously denied that it had committed ethnic cleansing, claiming that Palestinians had left or ‘fled’ because the invading Arab armies had encouraged them to do so; when the expulsion of the Palestinians and the destruction of their villages were evoked, as in S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh and A.B.Yehoshua’s 1963 story ‘Facing the Forests’, it was with anguish and guilt-laden rationalisation. But, as the French journalist Sylvain Cypel points out in The State of Israel v. the Jews, the ‘secret shame underlying the denial’ has evaporated. Today the catastrophe of 1948 is brazenly defended in Israel as a necessity – and viewed as an uncompleted, even heroic, project. Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, are both unabashed advocates of transfer. What we are witnessing in Gaza is something more than the most murderous chapter in the history of Israel-Palestine: it is the culmination of the 1948 Nakba and the transformation of Israel, a state that once provided a sanctuary for survivors of the death camps, into a nation guilty of genocide.

[Riaz Haq]

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1831300901828464911
Jonathan Cook
@Jonathan_K_Cook
Both Keir Starmer and Kamala Harris are faithful creatures of a permanent bureaucracy that was long ago captured by the West’s profit-hungry corporate war machine.

Its most favoured son is Israel, a highly militarised state – a colonial outgrowth of the West – implanted into an oil-rich Middle East like a bone stuck in the back of the throat. Israel is there to advance an openly belligerent Jewish supremacism, mirroring a western supremacism that nowadays prefers to veil its imperial ambitions.

From early on, Israel’s backers were given a perfect cover story for the crimes they sponsored against the native inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians – and one that could be adapted to justify Israel’s permanently warlike posture in the region.

In a self-serving narrative promoted by the West, the continuing threat of antisemitism required Jews to have their own militarised fortress state – a modern Pale of Settlement – as a bulwark against a future Holocaust.

Western capitals accepted one marker only of whether westerners were rehabilitated from their earlier Jew-hatred: they must agree to indulge Israel’s every military wish.

Those in the West who armed Israel and helped it expel the native Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, those who turned a blind eye as it built the region’s only nuclear arsenal, those who encouraged its wars against its neighbours, and those who lobbied for the undermining of international law in the pursuit of those wars, proved themselves to be free of the virus of Jew-hatred.

Those who opposed western imperialism and the excesses of its favourite Middle East client state, those who stood up for human rights and international law, could be dismissed and denounced as antisemites.

That well-worn formula, extraordinary as it seems, has persisted even as Israel has pursued Jewish supremacism to its logical end-point in Gaza: exterminating the population there.

Those in favour of arming a genocide are the good guys. Those opposed are the antisemites and supporters of terrorism.

Independent journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists are now being rounded up and intimidated under draconian anti-terrorism laws in Britain.

Social media platforms are limiting the reach of posts critical of Israel, herding opposition to the genocide into small online ghettoes.

Universities are starting to draft new rules to make being a Zionist – subscribing to Israel’s extremist political ideology – a protected characteristic, no different from being born Hispanic or Black.

The aim is to silence all Palestinian solidarity activism on campus as equivalent to racism, extinguishing any chance of a repetition of the large protests that swept US universities during the spring and summer.

This is an extract from my latest article You can’t arm a genocidal state into moderation. So why does the West keep trying? Read more here:

https://middleeasteye.net/big-story/west-israel-arm-genocidal-state...