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The Blood of Kashmir, Part Five: Shotguns at the Mosque

Friday prayers began at half-past twelve. There had already been a minor altercation. As I arrived at Nowhatta Chowk, a square on the Srinagar-Leh Highway where a fountain tinkled prettily, Indian security forces were attempting to prevent a group of

The Blood of Kashmir, Part Four: The Rugby Girls and the Restless Resistance

With my stay in Kashmir now approaching its end, I wandered down to the town’s rugby pitch to see one of the beginners girls’ squads at practice. As Waheed Para had promised, it was a great story: a ray of

The Blood of Kashmir, Part Three: Rape Threats and Roadside Bombs

The worst thing I ever did on Twitter was follow Shehla Rashid. From the moment I did so—or at least from the moment she first retweeted me—I have had a front-row seat at the shitshow that is Hindutva, or Hindu

The Blood of Kashmir, Part Two: Families of the Jihad Martyrs

The day after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Srinagar, the city remained in a state of suspended animation. It was the anniversary of Molvi Farooq’s assassination, the one-time Mirwaiz of Kashmir and separatist leader having been murdered 18

The Blood of Kashmir, Part One: A Ramadan Ceasefire

In the end, I was probably lucky that the dog bite was the worst thing that happened to me. Not that I felt very lucky at the time. What I felt at the time was a pain in my leg.

The magnificently messy ‘House of Cards’

There is a spectre hanging over the sixth and final season of House of Cards: the spectre of Frank Underwood. Or is it the spectre of Kevin Spacey? In October last year, Spacey became one of the first high-profile targets

Poppies for the forgotten: Armistice Day, imperialism, and the war that never ended

Well, that went quickly, didn’t it? Today, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day and all that, we marked a hundred years since the guns fell silent on the battlefields of WWI. This year, for obvious reasons, the commemorations

What Australia can learn from Cape Town’s countdown to Day Zero

Julia Snaddon was already several months pregnant when Cape Town announced that “Day Zero” was imminent. This was the day the city would be forced to turn off the taps: Cape Town was dry, tempers were frayed, and Mrs Snaddon