For several years, I have been sending my writings to various portals that boast of free speech and encouraging dissent, but like bottled messages, they remain adrift in a vast, indifferent sea, with no one to publish them. These writings were not idle musings, but an articulation of a lifetime of witnessing histories buried beneath layers of propaganda, truths sharpened by pain and endurance, stories of a people who have suffered the unimaginable and yet continue to breathe, resist, and dream.
Every time that I wrote, I waited for some sign: a brief acknowledgment, a courteous line of acceptance, even a perfunctory rejection. But none came, only silence, stretching endlessly and engulfing me during the long wait. A silence far harsher than rejection. For rejection at least signifies, “We have seen you.” But silence whispers coldly, “You do not exist.”
Their silence remains sharp and unforgettable.
This silence is not simply personal. It reflects a deeper, systemic pattern.
These so-called liberal platforms may loudly criticize governments, question majoritarianism, and speak of democracy, socialism and secularism. They publish endless essays on free speech and dissent. Yet when it comes to Kashmir, there are lines they dare not cross, truths they dare not print.
When they do speak of Kashmir, it is usually through “safe” voices—drawing-room academics writing in sterile terms, with unfathomable sentences and vague meanings, often from Delhi, Mumbai, or London.
Reporters parachute into the Valley for a few days, gather selective quotes from their patrons, and then fly back to urban comfort. Even Kashmiri writers have learned to self-censor, carefully trimming Kashmir’s agony, grief, and anger so as not to unsettle the sensibilities of the liberal urban reader, or jeopardize their own paid engagements with these portals.
Stories of individual suffering are welcome, so long as they are stripped of their political roots and any reference to the state’s growing undemocratic temperament. A mother’s tears, a broken home, a lost childhood – narratives that invite pity, but not solidarity – may be published.
But a story that names the systemic injustice, that points to the structures of power, will be quietly set aside.
This is not journalism. This is curated dissent, carefully managed to soothe the conscience of readers without ever threatening the foundations of the status quo.
Managed Dissent: The Illusion of Inclusion
These portals depend on fragile networks of funding, advertising, and elite social approval. Their readership comes largely from India’s urban, upper-middle-class circles; the very spaces where discussing Kashmir honestly is taboo. Their silence thus appears deliberate and strategic, managing dissent where the core truth of Kashmir is never told. It’s too dangerous!
Silence becomes their shield, their escape route from both responsibility and accountability. And so, the erasure continues, not through loud censorship, but through the quiet, cold efficiency and indifference.
Selective Liberalism: The Double Standard
These portals present themselves as champions of diversity and pluralism, yet their liberalism is highly selective. They will fiercely defend the free speech of writers in Delhi or Bangalore, amplify Dalit and feminist voices, but when it comes to Kashmir, their liberalism stops at the border of nationalist consensus.
They will publish endless thought-pieces about democracy, but they will not touch the deepest contradictions of the post-colonial Indian state, its relationship with Kashmir, its treatment of Muslims, its militarization of an entire population.
By refusing to publish certain voices, they actively shape public discourse, deciding whose suffering is visible and whose is erased. The celebrated idea of “unity in diversity” becomes hollow when diversity is permitted only on terms acceptable to the majority.
A Kashmiri Muslim voice is never heard as an equal participant; it is treated as a risk to be managed, a problem to be contained. Through their pages, our stories do not travel beyond barbed wire and internet blackouts, carrying truth into spaces where it is most needed.
The Humiliation in the Mainland
Ashok Kumar Arora, a noted social media voice, who also teaches English in Punjab, recently described the everyday humiliation that a Kashmiri faces in mainland India. His words cut to the bone because they are not abstract; they are lived truth. Kashmiris, he wrote, are perpetually under suspicion. They are refused houses on rent.
They are asked to vacate premises during cricket matches, as if their mere presence signals disloyalty. In public spaces, they are stared at, mocked, sometimes attacked.
Even in places like Uttar Pradesh or Himachal Pradesh, where the tourist economy depends on Kashmiri traders and pherewals (shawl sellers), they are treated with open hostility, treated as the perpetual “other,” always suspect, never belonging.
And yet, these everyday humiliations rarely find space in the so-called liberal press. They speak of “grave diversions” in poetic language, but they refuse to name the deep-rooted chauvinism and structural discrimination that make these diversions possible.
Publishing Houses: Another Wall of Silence
This selective liberalism is not confined to digital media. It runs deep within the world of big publishing houses as well.
Major publishers eagerly publish fiction set in Kashmir: novels about star-crossed lovers amid snow, travelogues celebrating the Valley’s beauty, coffee-table books, like my Shawls and Shawlbafs of Kashmir: Legends of Unsung Heroes, filled with photographs of shawls and silks, saffron fields, houseboats etc.
These are safe stories, designed to sell without controversy. But when a Kashmiri author submits non-fiction that challenges the state narrative, the doors quietly close. Manuscripts, especially when they name the structures of violence and injustice, vanish into endless review cycles. There is simply no reply at all; a silence as telling as it is cruel.
This is not about quality or style. It is about control of narrative.
Thus, even in the world of books, Kashmiris are permitted to decorate the bookshelf, but not to write history and politics.
The Human Cost of Silence
For Kashmiris, this is not merely about unpublished articles or manuscripts.
It is another form of dispossession. Our land has been militarized. Our political rights stripped away. Our bodies surveilled, controlled, violated. And now, even our words are denied a home.
This silencing is a form of violence. It turns living people into objects of study. It steals the dignity of grief by refusing it a voice. It erases us, not only from headlines, but from memory itself.
In this systemic, brazen and deliberate, few rare portals and publications still shine a light on Kashmir (whose courage and commitment needs to be celebrated) but the majority liberal ones retreat into silence. This media silence is only the latest chapter in a long story.
After 1947, when promises were broken, our voices were again shut out.
Decade after decade, the truth of Kashmir rarely reached the outside world.
Others spoke about us, while we were denied the right to speak for ourselves.
Today, when liberal portals ignore our submissions, they are repeating the same colonial pattern of erasure – surveilling our speech, denying our political agency, erasing our narratives, and occupying our very language.
(Dr Abdul Ahad is an internationally acclaimed author and a household name in Kashmir. His works include Kashmir to Frankfurt, Kashmir Rediscovered, Kashmir: Triumphs and Tragedies, and the coffee table book Shawls and Shawlbafs of Kashmir: Legends of Unsung Heroes, which celebrate the region’s history, culture, and heritage.)
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