Solidarity with the occupied of Kashmir & Palestine

Kashmiri photojournalist, Showkat Nanda, took this photo of a small Kashmiri boy facing off with stones against an Indian army tank (2009). The boy had just seen another young boy die in his arms after being shot by the Indian army. Resistance was his response to murder & loss & occupation. When Nanda took this photo, he had in mind the iconic image of Faris Odeh, the Palestinian boy who defied an Israeli tank armed only with stones. Ten days after Odeh’s picture was taken, he was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in another stone throwing incident. It is probably small comfort to those who loved him that Odeh has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.

Stones & political solidarity are the only weapons of the dispossessed against tyranny & occupation. So this poem by Indian poet, Musab Iqbal, solidarizing & linking the struggles of the Kashmiri & Palestinian people is particularly powerful. It is an anthem & act of defiance against those tyrannies:

I found some crushed saffron near that body
Bath in red, married to an intimate bulletIn
In a mournful street of Hebron

And,

I found some black olives rolling down
From the sloppy street of Srinagar, breathing under
the curfewed democracy

They were delivered by the same courier, same
agency
Same spirit.
Which resist the obsession of the operation and oppression.

Dissimilarity of two abysses are marked by High
Mountain
And the sorrowful sea.

One bowing down to kiss, another oscillating to
embrace.

The two stem of same heaven ruined by tanks and
nets
Darwesh and Agha must be read together; As unfortunately the paradise has no post office

When the spring of blood kills the courier, gives birth
To a fresh one!

- 14th March 2013