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 Azad Kashmir...

People everywhere want to learn something about their past. I did too. I was born in the UK. The first member of my direct family to come here was my maternal grandad. He was a veteran of the British Indian Army. Terms can be...

Muhammad Ali Murtaza, an innocent young man was brutally tortured to death by Pakistan's army without any explanation and worse, they tried to cover it up. Quotes of the Day "The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who...

Having been born and raised in the UK, whilst ascribed an ethnic minority status from birth, I discovered that identities are complicated things. Being ascribed a group identity is one thing, but not feeling part of it is another thing altogether. We can have...

Dear Pakistan Occupied Kashmiris I speak to you through this medium as a brother from Indian Occupied Kashmir. I speak to you for our shared homeland, history, and continuous struggle against oppression and aggression. We are the children of hills and mountains. We fought collectively...

The immediate thoughts which sprung to mind when faced with the word ‘history’ were recollections of sitting in a high school classroom making notes on British monarchs. However, it is only after following the dictation of the National Curriculum, I found myself with a...

EXCERPT from "The Evolution of AJK Public Agency" "Before arriving here, I can confidently assert that I was neither a patriot, nor a nationalist or even a democrat. I was a journalist working in various conflict hotspots around the globe (Iraq and Afghanistan), had regular...

Those who argue that Kashmir is the Valley of Kashmir and that Kashmiris are the ethnic Kashmiris of the Valley are engaged in deliberate disinformation. These sinister interests want you to think that they are making ethnolinguistic claims about the people we call Kashmiris, but...

It’s okay to maim my name for I am an inconsequential thing You can place me on the shelves of Primark and Aldi Mine is a ‘budget identity’, made on the cheap - no frills! But a long time ago, in the era of benign...

Don't trust everything you read online. You'll be duped into believing utter tosh. This holds true for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Had it not been for authoritarianism and control freaks, these spaces would have been wonderful places to learn...