Why Drabu deserves a D- for his latest article on Kashmir

 

On May 16, Haseeb Drabu, former Finance Minister of the Jammu and Kashmir government during PDP-rule (read: Pro-India Client Regime), wrote an article in Kashmir Life magazine. Mr. Drabu has also been famous for cutting a deal with the far-right Hindutva organization RSS to form a joint PDP-BJP government in 2015 until it’s life was unceremoniously cut-short in 2018. Mr. Drabu is this piece was responding to pushback he received for writing an earlier piece on “Ramadhan” greetings.

 

Here, a “Professor” has taken on a cumbersome task: to grade the paper both for its structure and content. This is primarily for the benefit of students, and other interested readers, to impress upon them the need for careful reading, to tell them how not to quote thinkers out of context as well as the need to write with clarity. The exercise is important because such pedestrian writings by politically powerful people often camouflage as serious interventions. By pointing out the theoretical inconsistencies and muddled language in this piece, which is merely symptomatic of the larger malaise of political hypocrisy and intellectual mediocrity of pro-occupation circles, we intend to raise the level of public debate in and on Kashmir. Our readers in Kashmir deserve better! The pro-Indian client regimes and their lackeys continuously misrepresent the Kashmiri past and present to fit a particular master narrative, oftentimes replicating colonial, Islamophobic and xenophobic sentiments.