Some Eid in Kashmir.

Byline: Abbas Nasir

THE few images, photos and videos, that trickle out of India-held Kashmir (IHK) chronicling the travails of the Kashmiris are heart-rending and a couple of days ahead of Eid it was not difficult to imagine that the valley would be seeing next to nothing in terms of a celebration.

Since August last year, when New Delhi revoked Article 370, which gave IHK special status, and annexed the disputed territory, a lockdown has been in place. That unilateral annexation was followed by unprecedented oppression even by the appalling standards seen there over the years.

Many of these images, shot by Associated Press photographers Dar Yasin and Mukhtar Khan in Srinagar and Channi Anand in Jammu, enabled the world to see the Indian's state brutality and the defiant resistance being put up by the Kashmiris, and won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in the process.

The Pulitzer Prize brought some cheer to the beleaguered Kashmiri journalists who have mostly worked without internet and mobile data services for some eight and a half months in a hostile, oppressive environment.

Prize-winning images tell the story of human tragedy unleashed by the Indian state.

These prize-winning images tell the story of human tragedy unleashed by the state which does not even spare little, unarmed children, injuring, blinding or even killing them with shotguns fired directly at them; they have captured the pain, the tears and the helpless loss on the faces of mothers of martyrs.

The cameras captured distraught, poor people standing on the rubble or the gutted remains of their homes destroyed by the security forces to teach them a lesson: that their defiance comes at a high price. But the Kashmiri spirit remains unbroken.

This unbroken spirit is manifested each time young men, who have taken up arms against the occupation forces, lay down their lives. Their funerals are marked by hundreds of people, defying the authorities, and congregating to pay their tributes.

Such funerals are marked by the grief of the affected families, whose wailing and lamentation rend the air. Equally poignant is how the fallen fighters are remembered by the rest. In contemptuous disregard of the heavy security presence around them, they raise vociferous 'azadi' slogans.

Apart from 1948 when Pakistan was able to wrest a part of Kashmiri territory from India, history has showed that militarily operations whenever initiated have not yielded the desired results. This has happened more than...