Kashmir Life
A just cause
After landing in London for higher studies Khursheed Drabu began his career as a lawyer and activist challenging discriminatory measures towards immigrants. He retired...
Denial of rights
Freedom of speech and expression may be a constitutional guarantee, but JK government deals protesters with an iron fist, rendering the guarantee
Cities within Srinagar City
Gull M Wani
Srinagar is the city I have known all through my life. I first came to see it as a small boy with my father and later to join the NCC camp as a student of middle school Panzath Qazigund. It was really fascinating then to come to Srinagar from a really rural setting and be a participant in certain socio-religious activities. As I joined Degree college Anantnag I used to come to Kashmir University to take part in inter-college volley ball tournaments. Interestingly the physical college was located at Naseem Bagh campus where after some time I had to join the department of political Science as a postgraduate student. Today I live in Kashmir University campus as a professor in the same department and as a family man. Srinagar has now so to say become my second home. I do make frequent trips to Qazigund –my ancestral home and it continues to be my political laboratory to understand politics in substantive terms.
A Crisis of Our Own Making
by Arshad Malik
I doubt whether there would be much left in the coming years to protect and fight for. Kashmir as a landlocked territory...
Murder most foul
JK Government’s one-man inquiry commission to probe the alleged rape and murder of a women and a teenage girl in Shopian, has its task...
You are right, Mr CM
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah admitted this week that institutions of state meant to protect and serve people have lost credibility in Kashmir.
Reviving Kashmiri Language
by Abid Ahmad
Recently Kashmir observed the death anniversary of Akhtar Mohiuddin, the legendary writer of Kashmiri language and literature, who elevated Kashmiri to a...
Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din: Courage till last
by Majid Maqbool
In a seminal essay written as early as 1950, Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din urged writers to side with majority of people, not power, if...
Sex Slavery
Abducted, she spent more than a year as a sex slave entertaining drug addicts, paedophiles and other criminals who brutalized her childhood. She was...
Much Ado About Nothing
by Arshad Malik
Yesterday evening, I went shopping only to find myself burdened with the goods I had purchased as the shopkeepers would not give...
Shadow of 90s: Torture 09
The infamous torture centre of 90s Papa 2 and Hariniwas may have been converted into palatial mansions,
A biscuit for health
As entrepreneurship in Kashmir takes roots, a businessmen is in the process of manufacturing biscuits from water chestnuts. Haroon Mirani reports.
A Srinagar based company...
Remembering Shahid
Amitav Ghosh referred to Agha Shahid Ali as the ‘closest that Kashmir had to a national poet’. Recently America’s prestigious and largest publishing house,...
Leelakaran dumped
While election results in Kashmir were surprising, Jammu parliamentary constituency shocked one and all. But the underlying reasons are not hard to find. Majid Maqbool reports.
As Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) entered poll fray in 2008 assembly elections, the Amarnath land controversy had polarized voters in Jammu. The Hindutva card was the best this right wing party could have played. BJP played the card and grabbed 11 seats in J&K’s legislative assembly.
Leelekaran Sharma, who led the Amarnath Sanghrash Samiti during protests in Jammu, Kathua and Samba districts of the state, entered Parliament election fray on a BJP ticket hoping to cash on the polarization once again. But the land controversy had already boiled down and Sharma was shooting his foot by joining politics.
Before the elections, Leelakaran had publicly announced that his mission was completely apolitical. By jumping into elections, he was actually making his intensions of a career in politics clear. This annoyed many voters who had earlier seen a selfless leader in Sharma.
In vortex of crime
From a society which believed that skies turn red when a murder is committed, Kashmir was made
