Speak Out For Kashmir: The Muzzling of Kashmiri Voices
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Pieter Friedrich
Published on Aug 30, 2019
When I was a child, I used to watch these films. Films about an evil force that rose to power and swept across Europe. Films about wicked and powerful men who believed that they were better than everyone else. Films about armies invading and occupying.
Films about soldiers patrolling the streets and demanding: “Ihre Papiere, Bitte” — Your Papers, Please. Films about people who lived in terror, afraid to even whisper about what they really thought.
  Films about ruthless men who abducted people from their homes and shipped them away to far-off prison camps to die. As I grew up, I learned the history behind these films.
  In 1938, Adolf Hitler marched Nazi troops into Austria. Almost the whole world remained silent while Hitler annexed Austria. A few months later, the Nazis annexed the Sudetenland — with the agreement and approval of the world! Then came Kristallnacht — the night of broken glass — the first Nazi pogrom against the Jews.
   Today, we stand witness while the ideological children of Nazi Germany stage an annexation of their own.    
   In India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — a fascist paramilitary inspired by the Nazis — has risen to power. The RSS has already conducted its pogroms while the world stood silent.
   In 2008, they massacred Christians. In 2002, they slaughtered Muslims. Under the watch of Narendra Modi, thousands of Muslims in Gujarat were brutalized, gang-raped, beaten to death, hacked to pieces, and burned alive by the RSS.
   The blood of these innocent victims continues to cry out from the ground for justice.
  Yet how was Modi punished for overseeing that pogrom?
  Instead of punishment, Modi was rewarded with the office of Prime Minister of India.
   Now the RSS rules the roost. The RSS — these people who believe that they are better than everyone else — has swept across India. Journalists have been assassinated. Minorities have been lynched in the streets in broad daylight.
  Those who raise voices of dissent have been seized and thrown behind bars. Under Modi’s regime, writes Indian professor Anand Teltumbde, the RSS has “unleashed the Hindutva gangs to carry out its writ reminiscent of the Black-shirts of Mussolini and Brown-shirts of Hitler.” Three weeks ago, the world watched as the RSS implemented one of the top items on its agenda with the most grotesque and shameless tyranny imaginable.
    As Modi trashed the Indian Constitution and tore up the contract between India and Kashmir, he marched tens of thousands of troops into that small northern region — a region approximately the same size as Austria. Eighty-one years after Hitler’s Anschluss, Modi annexed Kashmir. Now, Kashmir bleeds as it suffers oppression like never before.