the torturable class by mirza waheed - guernica _ a magazine of art

7/27/2019 The Torturable Class by Mirza Waheed - Guernica _ a Magazine of Art

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2/3/14 The Torturable Class by Mirza Waheed - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

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The Torturable ClassBy Mirza Waheed

February 3, 2014

When it comes to Kashmir, India acts as a police state, holding even speech hostage. Why this obsession with

narrative control?

Photo by Alexandre Marchand(http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexandremarchand/)

In the summer of 2012, I received a phone call from the Indian High Commission in London. It was odd.

I hadnt applied for a visa or any such thing. My wife and three-year-old son had, however, and had

been waiting nearly three months. We were scheduled to visit my home in Indian-occupied Kashmir for

my sisters wedding, which was drawing close. We had been anxious and had written to friends and

acquaintances to ask if they could help. We knew the drill, of course: for many cross-border couplesI

was born and raised in Kashmir, my wife in Karachithe trip home is an annual or biannual ritual ofhumiliation that must be borne if one is to see ones people.

I told the voice on the phone that my wife was awayat work at the BBC World Serviceand they
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could call her on her mobile phone. They did; a certain Mr. K told her theyd like to speak with her

about her visa application; could she and her husbandcome for a meeting? When she asked why she

needed her husband to come along even though he wasnt an applicant, they insisted it would be better

if he came too. I was still baffled, but we decided to go.

After some brief chitchat at the High Commission in central London, the officer who had asked for the

meeting said, You see, this Channel 4 film has ruined our happiness These journalists go, make films

under cover, and then Delhi calls us! At this my wife and I looked at each other, searching for the rightwords, any wordsdoes he think we work for the British broadcaster Channel 4? Do you? Do you?

He was referring to the documentary Kashmirs Torture Trail

(http://www.channel4.com/programmes/kashmirs-torture-trail/episode-guide) , made by BAFTA award-winning

British filmmaker Jezza Neumann, which had been broadcast a few days earlier. The film included

chilling evidence of widespread use of torture by the Indian Army and police in the disputed region of

Kashmir. A torture survivor showed the camera his mutilated legs and said in an interview that he was

forced to eat his own flesh by the Indian armed forces in 1991.

But what did my wife or I have to do with all that? Clearly, the film had created some problems in

Delhi, which had then been communicated to the Commission in London and which were now,

incredibly, throwing a spanner in the works for my wifes visa, though she is neither a documentary

filmmaker nor an investigative journalist and certainly doesnt work for Channel 4. And she had, at the

time of her application, given a written assurance, on BBC letterhead, that she would not do any

journalistic work while in Kashmir. As a professional journalist, she is always made to do this, but it had

never bothered her, as she only gets to go to Kashmir with me once in two years or so and only to

spend time with the family.

The conversation then tilted toward my careermy books, my writingwhen the officer quite suddenly

asked of me, with a twitch on the upper lip, the most unambiguously humiliating thing anyone ever has.

So how long will the mass graves sustain you?

A week or so earlier, Id written a short Op-Ed in the New York Timesabout the presence of unmarked

and mass graves in the mountains of Kashmir. To my mind, it was a simple, fact-based opinion piece

about one of the darkest aspects of what goes on in Kashmir: the discovery of horrific burial sites that

contained the remains of those killed by the Indian forces in their anti-insurgency operations in the

1990s. Rights groups had alleged and provided evidence(http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/09/29/kashmir_mass_graves) that some of those buried may have

been innocent civilians. Like many people, I had felt outraged by this new evidence and written about it.

How could any writer with a moral bone or two in his body, and aware of such heinous history in his

own home, remain silent?

I took a deep breath, weighed my words. Mr. X, this is what I do. I write, and I will keep writing, not

because I have to or because a certain theme is in season, but simply because I want to. And since you

mention the mass graves of Kashmir, perhaps your government might want to do something about

them.

The encounter was surreal, with shades of Stasi-speak in it, with the abhorrent display of bureaucratic

power, and if I didnt have to take my little boy to visit his grandmother and meet his Kashmere
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cousins, I might have left in a huff, perhaps even after hurling the documents with some flourish. But I

simply couldnt bear the thought of my mothers disappointed, sad face.

At some point in this bizarre encounter, the bureaucrat pointed to a bunch of papers in front of us and

said, Look, Id approved your case, last week, but then this documentary was broadcast. It ruined our

happiness, he repeated, as though my wife and I had sinned because a leading British TV channel had

chosen to make a film on a place we were desperate to go, simply because it was home. So it will have

to go to Delhi for approval I looked at the file on the desk, trying to decipher the handwriting forsome reason.

* * *

The next week, I received another call. The pretense was off. They wanted to talk only to me. Mr.

Mirza, would you be able to meet Minister Sahib for ten minutes? the voice from the embassy asked.

Just ten minutes.

But we just met your officer. We met all his new requirements, I replied. These had included an

additional email from a senior BBC editor vouching that my wife wasnt going to do any journalism in

Kashmir. So whats the new meeting for? And whos Minister Sahib?

The voice was that of the junior official who had arranged the first meeting with the mid-level diplomat

at the Commission. He seemed kind and was disarmingly soft-spoken, which occasionally made me

suspect he was a spook, or perhaps the poor man was simply following orders, and he essentially told

me that it would be to my benefit if I said yes. I had been preoccupied with the onerous and ultimately

futile task of remotely overseeing arrangements for a large Kashmiri wedding, so I didnt have it in me

to investigate and argue further. And therefore I went again, to meet the Minister Sahib, who, as itturned out, was a highranking official.

I now live in a place where, in the immortal words of

Graham Greenes Captain Segura, as he explains his

torture manual to Wormold, I dont belong to the

torturable class. Or perhaps I do. But back home,

everyone does.

I sat in his large, leather-heavy office and waited for another homily. He more or less repeated the

things Id heard in the earlier meeting: no one writes about what goes on on the other side, about

Pakistan, and so on. Again, I wondered how writing about Pakistan was my responsibility or myproblem. (Also, did he not glance at the days newspapers, which were full of bad news from Pakistan, if

thats what he longed to read?) Eventually, he got to the point, leaned forward a bit, and, in that

conspiratorial whisper reminiscent of odiously patriarchal Bollywood uncles, said, Actually, Mr. Mirza,


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you see, in our part of the world it is the husbands word that matters, you see, thats why we have

called you here. You know how it is.

I simply couldnt believe a senior member of the Indian Foreign Service, which prides itself on the good

behavior and impeccable manners of its technocratic staff, who are supposed to be apolitical in their

dealings with the public, could utter those words. I did not reply, as my mind tried to ward off visions

of my wife giving this man a mind-altering cold stare or at least a rudimentary tutorial in how to talk

about women. Yes, I know exactly how it is, sir.

I gave him my word that my wifewasnt going to Kashmir for work; by now she had handed in at least

three written statements that she wasnt. Then I noticed some important-looking, pin-striped guests

arrive and wait on the sofa, and so I launched into a speech on Kashmir. I invited the Minister Sahib to

read my novel, and then he gently nodded at the spook who had been standing all this while. That

was that. I went outside for a much-needed smoke and returned to collect my childs and wifes duly

stamped passports.

* * *

While my brief, often discomfiting and sometimes humiliating encounters with the bureaucracy of

empire may belong to the theater of the absurd, they remind me of the larger, starker perspective, of

people who actually suffer physically for the things they write or say or think. I am thinking of the boys

who were tortured for using social media to lodge dissent. I am thinking of minors detained against

international law for protesting on the streets of Srinagar. I am thinking of teenagers killed and then

blamed for their deaths in much of the mainstream media in India. Here are some of the odious phrases

used to describe over a hundred protestors killed by the Indian forces in the bloody summer of 2010 in

Kashmir: agitational terrorists, miscreants, and that perennial favorite of a hawkish state and itserrand boys in the media, misguided youth. Some of these misguided youth were killed while on

their way to school or tuitions. Some for simply being out on the road.

I now live in a place where, in the immortal words of Graham Greenes Captain Segura, as he explains

his torture manual to Wormold, I dont belong to the torturable class. Or perhaps I do. But back

home, everyone does.

What purpose, then, did these encounters, designed to intimidate, to suggest harm, in fact serve,

besides filling me with rage and frustration at the insidious ways of the state when it comes to dealingwith dissent of any kind? It put a grain of doubt, and possibly fear, in my mind, not in relation to what

I might write in the futurea writer cannot but writebut in relation to what physical obstacles may lie

ahead. I was to travel with my son by myself for the first timeowing to work commitments my wife

was to join us laterand I have to admit I was a bit ponderous. As I approached the immigration desk

at the airport in Delhi a week or so later, I made sure my phone had successfully switched to roaming, I

checked numbers for friends in Delhi who might help in case I was stopped, or even deported, but

thankfully none of that happened. (A couple of years earlier, they had actually deported the venerable

American broadcaster David Barsamian from the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi.

Barsamians views on Kashmir, it turned out, may not have been welcome in India

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/30/david-barsamian-founder-o_n_988781.html) .) I made sure my wife,

too, had the numbers for my Indian friends, in case, as a British Pakistani, she was turned back from the

airport. (In 2010, another American, Professor Shapiro, the partner of Indian academic Dr. Angana

Chatterji (http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/us-professor-deported-for-political-activis/706855/) , who has
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done extensive work on Kashmir, was also deported from the airport in Delhi.) Quite fittingly perhaps,

my son, suffering some kind of jet lag-induced mirthor subject to the Kashmiri gene that says run

when you see a uniformdecided to run through the security gates at the domestic airport in Delhi on

our way to Kashmir. It was mildly comic as I saw a member of the Central Industrial Security Force,

deployed at airports in India, run after and bring him back to me.

On television, nearly everything smacks of a regressive

neocolonial habit. Do not trust the natives to tell their

story.

This creeping sense, however remote, that your travel home may be made difficult, thwarted even, at

the very least adds another layer of anxiety to your mind and a bad taste to your mouth. Self-censorship

is, of course, out of the question. In fact, if anything, one is further emboldened to challenge and

question the repressive regimes that seek to control thought or, at the very least, build real and

intangible walls of control and surveillance around your existence.

And India does build both discrete and concrete walls of surveillance and repression and downright

illegitimate structures as a matter of routine in Kashmir. As I have tried to say before, for all practical

purposes, India behaves and acts as a police state in Kashmir, in the manner of a junta that seeks, and

often achieves, complete control over what goes on. In 2010, when more than 120 people, many of themteenagers, were killed on the streets and, mostly unknown to the world, Kashmiris lived under a curfew

lasting nearly seventy days in total, newspapers were physically stopped from going to press, Internet

was blocked often (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9074770.stm) , and

local TV channels were barred from news broadcasts, all in the name of maintaining law and order. In a

few instances, accredited journalists were simply thrashed by the armed forces for trying to do their job.

The inescapable irony amid all this was that the local chief minister used the Internet to communicate

to the public decisions of the state, while severe curbs were placed on the local media and on the use of

electronic messaging by the common people. Sending text messages via prepaid phones in Kashmir

continues to be banned. On January 26, Indias Republic Day, Internet access and mobile phones wereblocked in all of Kashmir, as they are every year on all such days. This is only a minor illustration of

how the worlds largest democracy exercises its rule in the disputed region.

More recently, and in yet another Kafkaesque turn, Ocean of Tears (http://www.thehindu.com/todays-

paper/tp-features/tp-fridayreview/a-conspiracy-of-silence/article5452791.ece) , a documentary film produced with

the help of semi-official institutions and which depicted violence against women in Kashmir, was not

allowed to be screened at the local state-run University of Kashmir

(http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=9339) . The same university is, however, dressed up if a

politician from Delhi wants to visit for scenic political photo ops. The Kashmir University Students

Union remains banned to this day for the simple reason that its members dont follow official dictates

on what constitutes democratic political activism. It is even more shameful, and speaks of a deeply

insecure state, when you consider that students unions from India are actively encouraged, incentivized,

to recruit members on campus (http://www.deccanchronicle.com/140112/commentary-dc-
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/140112/commentary-dc-comment/commentary/rights-campushttp://www.deccanchronicle.com/140112/commentary-dc-comment/commentary/rights-campushttp://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=9339http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-fridayreview/a-conspiracy-of-silence/article5452791.ecehttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9074770.stmhttp://www.deccanchronicle.com/140112/commentary-dc-comment/commentary/rights-campus


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comment/commentary/rights-campus) in Kashmir. Kashmiri cable TV news channels remain banned, too,

while mainstream broadcasters favored by the durbar in Delhi are always welcome. Nearly everything

smacks of a regressive neocolonial habit. Do not trust the natives to tell their story. Only primetime

stars with massive ratings in India can narrate Kashmiror, for that matter, other areas of discontent,

dissent, or rebellionfor audiences in India. And it is to achieve this media-management goal that the

Indian state and its representatives in Kashmir routinely incentivize local media organizations with

sustained ad revenues and cut-rate loans, or punish those who may call a spade a spade by withdrawing

state patronage. These small and big media houses then choose to survive, rather than perish, so theycan at least report the news.

* * *

Deeply entrenched and therefore what may appear, to the uncurious, as a normative structure of control,

state functionaries unambiguous entitlement to dictate what isand more vitally what is notwritten

and said about in repressed realms seems to sometimes gain a tacit acceptance among the receiving

subjects. People try to carry on with their lives as bread and butter takes precedence, but some do rise

up and scream if pushed to the wall.

Let me turn to another aspect, which may be described as culture and media management. In September

2013, world-renowned conductor Zubin Mehta performed Beethoven, Haydn, and Tchaikovsky in the

famous Shalimar Gardens by the shores of Dal Lake in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir.

On the face of it, this was an innocuous celebration of music, the fulfillment of a gentleman maestros

lifelong desire. On closer inspection, though, it turned out to be farcical, bordering on the most hideous

comedy. It had all the trappings of a Mughal-era musical soire meant for the courts grandees. Imagine

a bunch of Army officers in civvies, babus, self-important politiciansmany of whom cant tell Westernclassical music from Iggy Popfawning journalists drenched in self-congratulation on being invited to a

barricaded, closed-to-the-commoners concert in a walled Mughal garden. People wrote about the

concert, those who attended it and those who didnt, most pieces either nave paeans to the importance

of music in healing people (who had been expressly barred from listening to it) or cautions against

politicizing such an altruistic exercise in high art.

The concert was nothing but political, or at the very least manipulated into aiding a certain kind of

politics, one that is used to shore up the obfuscatory narrative of normalcy in Kashmir. Sadly, by the

end of the spectacle, it felt like an orchestra in the service of statecraft, straight out of some bad ThirdReich novel. Orchestral music can be uplifting, rapture-inducing, cathartic, and many other things. But in

the service of the state, it can also be used to hide the creak of the busy machinery of repression and

the howls of its victims.

To organize a concert with military precision amid a brutalized, besieged, and disenfranchised

population smacks of imperial hubris, particularly so if the natives for whom the concert was supposed

to bring harmonyas the German ambassador to India who helped organize the concert put itare

not even invited. In a newspaper report (http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Aug/31/shalimar-bagh-

vandalized-for-zubin-mehta-concert--25.asp) on the refurbishment of the majestic Mughal garden in

preparation for the concert, there was mention of workers whitewashing some old papier-mch art to

make it all spick and span. One couldnt help exclaim that a new empire was inadvertently whitewashing

the symbols of an old one. There is another layer of irony to this. Musical efforts to add some glamor

quotient to what is essentially a military occupation in the lead-up to the states 2014 elections can also
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throw into relief such a small detail as this: over half a million soldiers are stationed in Kashmir to

enforce Indian rule, making it the largest militarized region in the world. Some of these soldiers and

paramilitaries may be involved in massacres, torture, extra-judicial murders, or fake encounters (Indias

term for extra-judicial executions) and rapes. Some may have also been deployed to provide armed

escort to the esteemed conductor and the very important persons invited to the concert. Some of them

were certainly responsible for the killing of at least four civilians in South Kashmir

(http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Sep/9/-our-sons-were-innocent-killed-in-cold-blood--59.asp) on the

day, as the red carpet was being rolled out at the concert in the garden.

* * *

But why this obsession with narrative control?

Is there at work here a tradition of protecting some mythical idea of India, as though it were a

genetically unvarying, homogenous mass of people who must speak in one voice when it comes to

sensitive matters such as Kashmir? Perhaps. In the new India, a potent partnership necessitated by the

demands of corporatized media came into being in the 1990s, which, while paving the way for a

powerful and sometimes free press, has over the last two decades somehow morphed into a scarily

powerful entity. The business-media-business partnership seems to have in the process helped eschew

that good old rudimentary principle of journalismscrutiny of the things that the state wants to

suppress. Every time Ive heard that all-encompassing phrase National Interest on TV or some parts of

print media in India, I have wondered, But you have the armed forces or other institutions of the state

to protect national interestwhen did it become the nine oclock anchors job?

I refuse to believe a mighty modern state would try to

send an explicit message to a sometimes angry writer, but

it was the manner of it, the idea of it, which appeared

dangerous and indicative of a structure that would do

anything to ensure compliance.

Much of the intelligentsia ceded ground inch by inch until reaching a point where it seems perfectly

acceptable for the state to force-feed a protestor who has been on a hunger strike for thirteen years.

Were talking about a state apparatus that prefers to keep in detention and feed with a nose tube the

brave Manipuri hunger striker Irom Chanu Sharmila (http://www.guernicamag.com/features/mathur_12_1_11/)

rather than repeal what is by all accounts a draconian, authoritarian law, the Armed Forces Special

Powers Act, that has been in place in Manipur since 1958, and in Kashmir since 1990. The law, imposed

to protect the military from prosecution for any act committed in the line of duty, essentially providesimmunity to murderers, rapists, and torturers in the name of law and order.

A recent report by Praveen Donthi in the magazine The Caravan reveals how easily Indian security can
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/mathur_12_1_11/http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Sep/9/-our-sons-were-innocent-killed-in-cold-blood--59.asp


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find journalists who might report favorably on their legal and illegal activities. It turns out they dont

have to make too much of an effort, as some mainstream journalists are more than willing to toe the

official line, especially on terror investigations. As a former bureaucrat put it, We dont have to pay

anything. This is far more inimical to freedom of expression than outright repression. In the case of the

latter, there is at least a record of shame, a concrete reason to outrage and protest.

There may be an amateur explanation for this, or at least a quasi-explanation. Some star journalists and

TV anchors identify so closely with the idea of a powerful state and its interests that they need not beturned. Some of them candidly say that they cant do anything that might be seen as antithetical to

national interest. Indias media has been in some state of boom, and occasional bust, for more than a

decade, and its relationship with India Inc. and the state is increasingly one of give and take. But there

may be another historical reason for the acquiescence of some sections of the media: its mostly run by

a generation comprising the children of the middle or upper classes, essentially an urban elite whose

parents or grandparents were builders of modern India, many of whom worked directly for the state, its

steel-frame bureaucracy, the Nehruvian engine that kept a wildly diverse country together with railways

and other enterprises of state power. The identification with the state has been organic, with built-in

ideological accord, and the state has therefore seldom needed to suppress expression or crack down onwhat is written in the press or shown on TV. There simply hasnt been much radical scrutiny of the

state, at least on what are referred to as security issues, such as the separatist tendencies or freedom

struggles in Northeast India or Kashmir. So-called Northeast India (seven diverse states, each with a

specific problem with the Indian state), the Maoist insurgency in Indias heartland, the outright rebellion

in contemporary Kashmir, which has seen an independentist movement since the decolonization of

South Asia in 1947all remain no-scrutiny areas for much of the mainstream press in India, especially

some parts of the electronic variety, because the state wants it that way. The reflex of primetime seems

to be that the state is always right. And if at all the mainstream press delves into the darkness, we only

get sanitized versions of what the state does on the so-called margins.

Even some of the most liberal voices in the media suffer from a sudden and strange moral malfunction

when it comes to the war in Kashmir or the persecution of minorities within contemporary India. In

September 2013, thousands of Muslims were made homeless, nearly fifty killed, and at least twenty

women brutally raped (http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?288907) in Muzaffarnagar, in the northern

state of Uttar Pradesh, in what might pass in history as one of the most blatant and disgraceful acts of

persecution in the country. While some pundits and activists initially paid lip service or checked the

conscience box on Twitter, the local governmentincensed when a few media outlets dared to show the

images of destitute children living in paper shelters in the coldhad the camps evacuated toward the

end of 2013 instead of providing shelter suitable for human habitation. The conspiratorial silence, barringa few brave and chilling reports, almost all by women journalists

(http://www.livemint.com/Politics/9H1U38ylv86OVRID8g5L0H/Riot-victims-leave-Muzaffarnagar-camp-but-have-

nowhere-to-g.html) , over Muzaffarnagar speaks volumes about how a mega-state manages its speakers.

The absence of outrage among the Indian commentariat, some of whose members are often quick to

pounce on high-profile cases of rights abuses, points to the increasingly pro-establishment attitudes

among the middle classes.

* * *

It is an instructive tamasha when art, and artists, are marshaled, or manipulated, into the service of the

state and its projects. It goes against the very grain of artistic freedom and autonomy.
http://www.livemint.com/Politics/9H1U38ylv86OVRID8g5L0H/Riot-victims-leave-Muzaffarnagar-camp-but-have-nowhere-to-g.htmlhttp://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?288907


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What is at play is not the threat of harm or intimidation, as became gradually clear in my casethe file

didnt have to go to Delhi, it was always there, and for gods sake, what security clearance does a three-

year-old boy need? Its the suggestion of harm, the subtle menacing of state or empire as it expresses

itself: We know everything, and you know that; we can do anything, and you better know that. So perhaps

tone it down. I refuse to believe a mighty modern state would try to send an explicit message to a

sometimes angry writerand I still believe they dont really care in the endbut it was the manner of

it, the idea of it, which appeared dangerous and indicative of a structure that would do anything to

ensure compliance. It makes you sad and angry. Angry that someone is trying to play you.

States with neocolonial tendencies may not march on

sovereign nations to acquire exploitable territory, but they

can always cannibalize their own people or those living on

the margins, work sometimes aided by all-too-willingmedia entrepreneurs and celebrities.

Yet I have thought about what my personal brushes with state power, however absurd, however

arbitrary, but quite potent as vehicles of the empires intent vis--vis dissent or even mere difference,

signify. I suppose the stated and unstated purpose is to install a loose but overarching framework of

surveillance, of eyes watching you, both in the physical and, perhaps more significantly, the subliminalsense, where you begin to entertain and abhor an element of doubt, of fear, and to agonize about the

sacrosanct space enclosed on the written page. States with neocolonial tendencies may not march on

sovereign nations to acquire exploitable territory, but they can always cannibalize their own people or

those living on the margins, work sometimes aided by all-too-willing media entrepreneurs and

celebrities.

There comes a point for some, however, when the mind knows no fear, thinks nothing of the

consequences for the self. I witnessed a glimpse of it in the big diplomatic premises: if the cost of

speaking the truth, however small and immaterial to the indifferent edifices of the modern superstate, isto be prevented from seeing ones family, or being unable to travel, so be it. It made me angry that

someone was trying to play me.

Ironically, these small and large, direct and indirect, craven and brazen, attempts at curtailing thought

sometimes have the opposite effect. A writer tries to inhabit a moral world and, by confronting

impediments, is often emboldened to keep going. And it is in that attempt that the pen seeks to

challenge the might of the empire.

* * *

Let us turn to the beginning again.


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Toward the end of our first meeting with the visa bureaucrat, he told us an approval might happen soon

after Delhi approvesand we should check again in a week or so. He also mentioned, ever so

casually, that my wife should consider applying for a multiple-entry visa the next time. Both aghast and

amused, my wife softly said, Well, Mr. X, if a single-entry one isnt happening, why bother?

To which he said, It can happen. It happens sometimes. And looked at me.

Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Kashmir. His debut novel The Collaborator

(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670918954/ref=as_li_tf_tl?

ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0670918954&linkCode=as2&tag=gueamagofarta-20)was

shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat First Book Prize and longlisted for the

Desmond Elliott Prize. It was also book of the year for The Telegraph, The New Statesman, The FinancialTimes, Business Standard, and The Telegraph India, among others. Waheed has written for the BBC, The

Guardian, Granta, Guernica, Al Jazeera English, and the New York Times. He lives in London.

To contact Guernicaor Mirza Waheed, please write here (mailto:[email protected]) .

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waheed-an-elegy-sung-by-apparitions/)

Major Avtar Singh of the Indian

Armys counterinsurgency in Kashmir killed dozens. India refused to punish him. So did Canada and the

U.S., where he killed his family and committed suicide.

(http://www.guernicamag.com/features/impunity-in-india/)

Impunity in India

(http://www.guernicamag.com/features/impunity-in-india/)

In the disputed territory ofStone Wars(http://www.guernicamag.com/features/stone-wars/)

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11/11


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Kashmir, civilians wage a battle without

modern weapons against the idea of

domination.

(http://www.guernicamag.com/features/stone-wars/)

The few women in the Indian army are battling

not only against their countrys enemies but also against poverty, patriarchy, and loneliness.

(http://www.guernicamag.com/art/basu_2_15_11/)

To Conquer Her Land

(http://www.guernicamag.com/art/basu_2_15_11/)
http://www.guernicamag.com/art/basu_2_15_11/http://www.guernicamag.com/art/basu_2_15_11/http://www.guernicamag.com/features/stone-wars/http://www.zemanta.com/?wp-related-posts

the torturable class by mirza waheed - guernica _ a magazine of art

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