In May this year representatives from some of the world’s wealthiest nations gathered for two days in Srinagar, the capital city of Jammu and Kashmir – a disputed territory currently claimed as a state by India – to talk about tourism.
The meeting of the third G20 Tourism Working Group took place amid a brutal media crackdown and a surge in raids and arrests as the Indian government ramped up security measures in the region. Fernand de Varennes, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on minority issues denounced it as ‘providing a veneer of support to a facade of normalcy at a time when massive human rights violations, illegal and arbitrary arrests, political persecutions, restrictions and even suppression of free media and human rights defenders continue to escalate’.1
