Manufacturing Terrorism: Kashmiri Encounters with Media and the Law

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This book is a rare combination of biography, scholarship and political commitment. It tells together the stories of Kashmiris living in Delhi trying to pursue their studies, business or professions but inevitably getting caught in the frames of distorted images constructed by the media and the law. It exposes the complicity of these pillars of democracy in lowering human rights standards in the name of war against terror.

The author weaves his own story about how overnight he lost all his other identities and became the brother of a terrorist when his older brother, SAR Geelani, was picked up by Delhi police's Special Cell and framed in the Parliament attack case and sentenced to death. Despite the fact that both the Delhi High Court and Supreme Court acquitted Geelani of the charges, he remained imprisoned by the image of the Kashmiri as terrorist.

This book will be useful to anyone interested in media studies or criminal jurisprudence and to those who have concern for the future of Indian democracy and secularism.

Syed Bismillah Geelani is a writer and columnist whose stories, essays and features have been published in Urdu and English both in Srinagar and Delhi. More recently, his column in a widely circulated Malayalam weekly, Free Press, was hailed as an authentic voice from Kashmir Bismillah has done his post-graduation in Arabic from Delhi University. He is a Founder Trustee of 'Poles Apart'.

We are proud to publish Manufacturing Terrorism: Kashmiri Encounters with Media and the Law by Syed Bismillah Geelani because we believe that this small but insightful study touches upon the most sensitive political questions facing Indian democracy today. The study combines the highest standards of scholarship with autobiography, biography, history, political science and media studies (without academic pretensions), and implicitly raises crucial questions about the legitimacy of the methodology used to study conflict under the guise of peace studies. For us this study is important for several reasons and that is why we persuaded Bismillah to publish his work now, even though he wanted to expand his work substantially before publication.

It is true that this is a monograph on state violence against Kashmiris living and working in Delhi, whereas Bismillah's overall study covers the much wider subject of Kashmiriyat. But we felt it was important to publish it as it is because it is so rich in empirical detail and the personal accounts have a poignancy which may get lost in a more theoretical work. However, it is not our intention that the emotional appeal undermine the political point being made.

Poles Apart is not publishing this study as a victim's account of state violence. This is despite the fact that Bismillah has himself several times been a target of political violence and has been through the nightmare of having his older brother framed in a case and sentenced to death.