Documentary Synopsis:

Shahmli Begum, 85, mother of Maqbool Bhat (Che of Kashmir) has been campaigning to get her son's mortal remains back to Kashmir for last 31 years. Bhat was a prominent leader of Kashmir's resistance movement, demanding independence from India and Pakistan. After imprisoning him, the Indian government hanged him on 11 February 1984 in the Tihar Jail of New Delhi in India. Without informing his family anything about him, his body was buried in the jail compound. 

In this film, his mother is followed while she talks about his childhood, struggle and the hardships during his political career. She goes from pillar to post to seek support in her campaign and also writes a letter to the President of India. She travels to different holy Sufi shrines to pray for her campaign to bring back her sons mortal remains back to Kashmir before she dies.

More info: www.bringhimback.info     www.rafilm.se

Kashmir Conflict Background:

Kashmir is the commonly used political description for the former princely state of ‘Jammu and Kashmir and Tiber Ha Aqsai Chun’. The other commonly used name is Jammu Kashmir State. The state is a home to the full South Asian religious, geographical and cultural diversity with having all the major religions and languages.

Most of the regions of the state were varyingly independent or mutually allied and at times contesting forces before the Mughals conquest in 1586.

In 1846 British handed over the Kashmir Valley and adjacent areas in the independent possession of Gulab Singh, the ruler of Jammu and his male body heirs for the sum of 7.5 million rupees, half of the war indemnity amount that the defeated Punjabi Sikh rulers who owned these areas could not pay. 

Thus was formed the modern state of Jammu Kashmir on16 th March 1946 when a treaty was signed between the representatives of British East India

Company and Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu.

During the on century and one year long Maharaja Rule, the state was significantly consolidated on the pattern of modern nation state but the monarchic rule was defeated by the popular politics by 1947. However, at this point the popular leadership of the state failed to defend the democratic struggle and the state fell victim to the neo-colonial politics of the newly created states of Pakistan and India. The first victim of the Indian and Pakistani invasion was the democratic struggle for a multiparty secular democratic State. 

UN brokered ceasefire divided Kashmir under the control of India and Pakistan who barred pro-independent politics across the division line and started a multi-layered process of Indianisation and Pakistanisation in their respective regions.

Resistance emerged on both of these processes in various forms and shapes leading to several wars and internal rebellions. The response to the voices against occupation on both sides have been brutal with different degrees of brutality though depending on the nature of resistance. 

Right now the Valley of Kashmir remains the victim of constant and most 

brutal violations of human rights by the Indian forces since 1990s when the local youth of the Valley took gun from Pakistan to fight against the Indian forces following the heavy rigging in the 1987 elections in the Indian held Kashmir to keep the Muslim United Front out of the local assembly. 

Nearly 70,000 mainly civilian Kashmiris have been reported killed and many times more injured and displaced and 10,000 are forced disappeared. 

Today although pro independent Kashmir politics, media and literature is banned by both India and Pakistan, the voices for independent Kashmir are the fastest growing voices across the division line along with the demands for the recognition of regional, religious and cultural diversity in the state.

While India and Pakistan continue spending big chunks of their budgets on building weapons of mass destruction to feed the world war industry, the people of the divided state of Kashmir in Ladakh, Jammu, Valley of Kashmir, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan want demilitarisation, freedom of all political prisoners, demolition of ‘illegal laws’ and ‘unconstitutional constitutions’ to let citizens of the state defined in the 1927 legislation of

the State Subject to decide their fate through a fair, free, democratic and inclusive mechanism.