On 16 August 2024, India’s Election Commission announced the dates for Assembly polls in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). The three-phase election will begin on 18 September 2024 with the counting of votes on 4 October 2024, along with those of Haryana, which will vote on 1 October 2024. What came as a surprise though was that the dates for Maharashtra, […]

Narendra Modi’s grand plan to tame the restive province masks the barren indifference, injustice and violence of the Indian state toward citizens it has long considered alien. In early March, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi flew to the airport here in the capital of the Himalayan state of Kashmir and made his way by convoy to a 30,000-seat stadium close […]

The violent uprising in Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK), euphemistically called “Azad Jammu and Kashmir” by Pakistanis, has left Pakistan in shock and awe. The scale, spread, and ferocity of the insurrection took the Pakistani authorities by complete surprise. Efforts were made by Islamabad to impose an information blackout on PoJK—the internet was suspended, mainstream electronic mediacovered the widespread […]

Al-Badr is an Islamic militant group operating in the Jammu Kashmir region. The group was allegedly formed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in June 1998. It is believed the group was encouraged by the ISI to operate independently from their previous umbrella group, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM). Prior to the group’s separation from HM, they participated in the fighting in Afghanistan […]

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Monday launched a widespread operation and raided at least nine locations across Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir as part of dismantling terror conspiracy hatched by Pakistan-backed terror outfits, including Laskhar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), Al-Badr, Al-Qaeda within the country. Newly formed organisations, including The Resistance Front (TRF), United Liberation Front Jammu & Kashmir […]

On 5 August 2019, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah announced to the parliament that the President had signed a decree abrogating Article 370 of the Constitution, which had given the people of Indian-occupied Kashmir substantial autonomy. Shah, a close aide of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and one of the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), argued that Article 370 […]

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s choice of where to cast his vote said everything about why the country held an early presidential election Wednesday. Shortly after the polls opened on February 7, Aliyev’s press service released video of the president, along with his wife and children, casting their ballots in a grand, high-ceilinged hall in Xankendi, known as Stepanakert in Armenian, […]

In a new book, historian Hafsa Kanjwal charts India’s decades-long consolidation of power in the occupied region. In July 2019, short months after India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi began a second term in office, 10,000 Indian soldiers arrived in Kashmir—the Muslim-majority region that India has occupied since 1947. The deployment of additional troops was accompanied by the suspension […]

Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, political parties and religious organizations have been organizing anti-Israel conferences and rallies in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Azad Jammu & Kashmir at which speakers stress that the issues of Kashmir and Palestine resemble one another, and Kashmiris should learn from the October 7 attack. “The One-Point Agenda Of Kashmiris Is The Liberation […]

Official claims about the security situation in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), especially since the August 2019 decision to abrogate Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, portray a vastly improved scenario. The Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai has said that terrorist incidents have significantly reduced owing to the government’s “well-coordinated and multi-pronged strategy.” The infiltration of terrorists from […]