Kashmiri protests over Iran and Palestine are also protests over Kashmir
When news broke that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had been killed in a US-Israeli airstrike on 28 February, thousands of Kashmiris poured into Lal Chowk in the heart of Srinagar, scaling its iconic clock tower to drape it with his portrait and Palestinian flags.
The authorities responded with criminal cases, sweeping detentions, and the shutting of Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid for Friday and Eid prayers. Kashmiri women offered their gold, and young children happily sacrificed their piggy banks to send relief for victims in Iran.
In the last six years, such spontaneous eruptions of outrage and grief are not just a rarity in India-administered Kashmir, they are almost unheard of.
Yet in June 2025, too, during Muharram – which marks the start of the Islamic lunar calendar, and, for Shia Muslims, the commemoration of the Battle of Karbala – Kashmir hummed with defiant energy. The flags of Iran and Palestine, and also of the Iran-backed Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, emerged during protests. Police summoned Shia elders and asked them to keep their community from waving Palestine flags or raising slogans against Israel, and an order prohibited acts that disturbed “communal, ethnic or religious harmony”. Muharram processions were held under tight security, with several protesters detained for defying the order.
The outrage over the US-Israeli attack on Iran and the killing of Khamenei dissolved Indian authorities’ manufactured narrative of “normalcy” and “progress”, in Kashmir. The protests were born of genuine solidarity with Palestine in the face of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, mirroring similar feelings across the Islamic world, and Khamenei, while he was an iconic Shia leader, was for many also a wider symbol of resistance against imperial powers. For Kashimiri Shias especially, what is happening in Palestine – children being ruthlessly killed and maimed, blockades cutting off water and food, an innocent population massacred by the powerful – finds parallels with the battlefield of Karbala. Yet Kashmiris’ outrage is not a reaction to the events in Palestine and Iran alone; it is also an expression of pent-up anger at the situation in Kashmir itself following years of repression by the Indian government, including lockdowns, mass detentions and a clampdown against local media and civil society. While the risks of direct opposition to India’s policies in Kashmir remain dire, the protesters seized upon the Gaza and Iran crises, especially in a context where the Indian government under Narendra Modi has broadly aligned with the United States and Israel, as an outlet for expressing defiance of the Indian state.
