Thread by @dharmadispatch

At the height of Kashmir tension after Article 370, the New Yorker did a hit job against Narendra Modi. Entirely expected. But guess who fed the US journo? Rana Ayyub who actually managed to travel to Kashmir and "report" from there.
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Totally sinister.
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

Here are some excerpts from that piece.
1. On the phone, she invited me to meet her in Mumbai and try to get into Kashmir.
2. When I arrived, she handed me a pair of scarves & told me to buy a kurta “I am ninety-nine per cent sure you will be caught, but you should come anyway."

3. Ayyub and I landed at the Srinagar airport two weeks after Modi’s decree. In the terminal was a desk labelled “Registration for Foreigners,” which she hustled me past. "Hustled me past." How? What is her source of network that enables something so brazen?

4. Indian intelligence agents are widely understood to monitor the rosters of local hotels, so Ayyub and I, along with an Indian photographer named Avani Rai, had arranged to stay with a friend.

5. A smartly dressed man with a close-cropped beard stepped into our path and placed his hand on Ayyub’s shoulder. “What are you doing here?” he said. Rai looked at me and quietly said, “Run.”

The next morning, we drove to the village of Parigam, near the site of the suicide attack that prompted Modi’s air strikes against Pakistan. The insurgency has broad support in the villages outside the capital.

It was impossible to verify the brothers’ tale, but, as with many accounts that Ayyub and I heard in the valley, the anguish was persuasive. “I am a slightly more civilized version of these people,” Ayyub told me.

As Ayyub and I drove around Kashmir, it seemed unclear how the Indian government intended to proceed. “Modi is doing what he did in Gujarat twenty years ago, when he ran a tractor over the Muslims there.”

Fehmeeda had begun stoically, but gradually she lost her composure. Ayyub gripped her hands and said, “Your son will return to you. God is very big.”

We were both gripped by a sense of foreboding, that we were witnessing the start of something that would last many years. “I feel this as a Muslim,” Ayyub said. “It’s happening everywhere in India.”

I suggested that maybe it was time for her to leave India—that Muslims didn’t have a future there. But Ayyub was going through a notebook. “I’m not leaving,” she said. “I have to stay. I’m going to write all this down and tell everyone what happened.”

This dear friends is Rana's brand of "journalism." And she calls herself a victim. Which journalist has this kind of access to travel around Kashmir especially at that time? With a foreign journalist. What does THAT tell you?