August 13, 2010 - By Robert Mackey

As my colleague Lydia Polgreen reports, in Kashmir, India faces “an intifada-like popular revolt against the Indian military presence,” in which images of stone-throwing youth are celebrated on Facebook pages and in YouTube videos.

As was the case in Iran, short video clips of protests by Kashmir’s mainly Muslim population and clashes with Indian security forces, often shot on cellphones and passed from device to device or posted on the Web, have been used by activists to document their own struggle and to inspire more resistance.

In a documentary for the BBC World Service last year on the role of new media in Kashmir’s revolt, Suvojit Bagchi explained that in 2008 Kashmiris were galvanized by video showing the final agony of a cellphone salesman named Shaheed Tanveer who was shot and killed during a protest that summer, a year before Neda Agha Soltan became an icon of Iran’s protests.

This graphic footage of Mr. Tanveer’s last moments — and the wounding of another man who survived — was shot by a 15-year-old boy on his phone and uploaded to YouTube:

In a harrowing part of his documentary for the BBC, Mr. Bagchi showed the video of Mr. Tanveer’s death to his mother, who was seeing it for the first time. Despite the shocking nature of the images of her son, she said after viewing them that she wanted them to remain online: “The video should stay on the Internet. Why should we erase it? The world should know about the atrocities in Kashmir.”

Mr. Bagchi also explained that all the Kashmir’s video bloggers he met, who were mainly English-speaking children of the province’s educated upper class, said that their movement began with an edit of images of the protests set to music — the song “Revolution” by the Irish singer Chris de Burgh — which was uploaded to YouTube early in 2008.

As Emily Wax reported from Kashmir for The Washington Post, one of the videos rallying protesters this summer was made by a young Kashmiri with a computer degree who “edited a powerful video to the lyrics of the Everlast song ‘ Stone in My Hand‘ and posted it on YouTube, prompting police to launch a manhunt for him.” Soon enough, Ms. Wax reported, “The lyrics — ‘I got no pistol, ain’t got no sword. I got no army, ain’t got no land. All I got is stones in my hand’ — became the anthem of Kashmiri youth and is hummed on the streets here.”

Ms. Polgreen points out in her report that Kashmir’s Web-savvy protesters do not seem to conform to the stereotype of uneducated youth described by Indian officials:

Indian officials have tried to portray Kashmir’s stone-throwing youths as illiterate pawns of jihadist forces across the Pakistan border and have suggested that economic development and jobs are the key to getting young people off the streets. But many of the stone throwers are hardly illiterate. They organize on Facebook, creating groups with names like “I’m a Kashmiri Stone Pelter.”

Ms. Wax reported similar findings in her article for the Post. One video editor, she explained, is a 21-year-old who “wears all black, chain-smokes and looks like a Kashmiri James Dean.” She noted, “He has a girlfriend and a $500 cellphone that is also a high-tech video camera and says he has been accepted for a master’s program in London. He, too, is being sought by police.”

Update: In response to a question from a reader who asks what is behind the intensity of these protests, consider a statistic cited by Pankaj Mishra in a review of Basharat Peer’s book, “Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland,” earlier this year: “out of a population of some 7.6 million people, more than 80,000 people have died since an insurgency supported by Pakistan began in 1989.”