The Human Rights Framing of the Freedom Movement in Indian Held Kashmir on Social Media

Abstract

The contemporary phase of the freedom movement in Indian Held Kashmir (IHK) is not confined to the armed rebellion by the Kashmiri youth, but is coupled with a non-violent approach using the social media against the atrocities and human rights violations such as systematic torture, rape, extrajudicial killing, and prisoner abuse, committed by the Indian Armed Forces. Victims‟ stories have been well-documented and „re-packaged‟ for the world community through social media. This paper applies social movement framing analysis to this contemporary freedom movement in IHK to better understand the ways in which it is being re-defined by activists through exposure and affiliation to other transnational protest movements and re-framed in a manner which stresses the universal applications of contemporary human rights mobilizations. This is done somewhat strategically and is in contrast to what Kashmir issue has previously been interpreted broadly as an ethnonationalist or religiously-motivated issue.