Portmir Foundation

Competing ‘State Identities’ & Ethnic Ambiguities In the absence of a genuine Pakistani state or nation-state identity what are Azad Kashmiris? It is at this point that we enter the quagmire of the Kashmiri identity dialectic which in the UK some pro-independence actors from our region...

You must have heard the claim that modern-day 'Israel' is a country with another people's language and religion? If you haven't, you're probably living in some idyllic wilderness (that's a good thing), and you can skip this post. If you have, anti-semitic propaganda has become...

I can recall quite vividly my first foray into the world of “anti-Mirpuri” racist dribble-dribble that still goes on in the world of social media. It began like this... People everywhere want to learn something about their past. I did too. I was born in the UK. The...

Heather Streets, author of "Martial Races; the military, race and masculinity in British imperial culture, 1857 - 1914" said, "...the savage representations of masculinity that lay at the heart of martial race ideology* were a crucial imaginative site upon which Anglo-Indian military elites responded to,...

Understanding interminority racism Internalising the hatred of others, because you've become a designated group in someone's mind, is not proof that there’s something inherently wrong with you. "Mirpuris", for want of an adequate identity label, (I would prefer the term British-born Azad Kashmiris or British-Paharis)...

It’s ‘Azad’ - 'Free'. "Okay!?" "It's Azad!" "Free!" This is Pakistan’s official stance on 'Azad' Jammu & Kashmir. But, what is Azad Kashmir ‘free’ of? According to the Pakistani state-enforced narrative, Azad Kashmiris are free from Indian tyranny. Women aren’t being raped by Indian soldiers, and by ‘Indian’ they mean non-Muslim...

Anonymous Quote “They’re fighting over Kashmir! One way to win this fight is by splitting the people into different groups. When people are divided, or adopt identities of neighbouring people naively, the occupiers win. Indians and Pakistanis celebrate their own unity. But Jammu & Kashmir...

A lot of us confuse our 'countries', and the technical term for what I'm describing is 'nation states', with ideas of historical continuity. We tend to confuse our countries delineated by their map-depicted borders as being the product of a natural timeline that connects...

The needle has struck, the hour has come, and the open road unwinds. With a heavy heart, I place my soul’s keeping into nature’s lair for the journey unknown. Of human depredation, her foibles, her impatience, I know well her misspent youth. And so I pocket my worldly things and hit the road...

  We are not "inbreds"     We are not "illiterate"       We are not "uneducated"         We are not "uncultured"           We are not "backwards"             We are not "uncivilised"          ...