India in the dock

It is, indeed, high time for the international community to put sustained pressure on India for stopping human rights abuses in held Kashmir and resuming dialogue with Pakistan. Several countries, the United States, China and Iran among them, have already offered to mediate between Pakistan and India. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon too has offered his good offices for resolution of the conflict, but India has repeatedly spurned the offers. The UN Human Rights Commissioner has said twice it’s ready to send a fact-finding mission. Civil society members are carrying out activities to sensitise people and their respective governments on the blatant human rights violations in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IoK) by the Indian occupation forces. India, however, remains intransigent and refuses to hold genuine dialogue either with the indigenous leadership in the IoK or with Islamabad. On the other hand, Islamabad has always welcomed these offers from the international community. Pakistan is looking forward to the international community’s efforts towards pressuring India to stop bloodshed in IoK and engage in meaningful dialogue. And this dialogue process must lead to resolution of the Kashmir dispute in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions and wishes of the Kashmiri people. However, instead of de-escalating its state terrorism against the defenceless Kashmiris in response to international imploration India is trying desperately to divert the world attention from its atrocities against a people refusing to live under its yoke by using multilateral forums like the Heart of Asia conference for maligning Pakistan even at the cost of derailing their agenda. The negative atmosphere, which India created much before the conference, distracted people’s attention from the real purpose of the gathering. It did not serve the purpose behind the conference because India was obsessed and hell-bent on maligning Pakistan at every opportunity.

The current Intifada in the IoK has now turned into a strident cry for independence as New Delhi continued to punish the Muslim majority of the occupied state by depriving it economically, especially denying its youth gainful employment, for what Prime Minister Modi calls as its ‘intransigence’. The barefaced killing of the youthful freedom fighter Burhan Wani had only served as the last straw on the camel’s back. What is happening in the IoK today is a classic case of the failure of India’s so-called democracy. No true democracy would have failed to win over a handful of people seeking their fundamental right to self-determine their political, economic and social fate. Instead of letting the IoK people self-determine how they would like to live, New Delhi in fact has kept on depriving them by degrees the level of independence India’s Constitution had granted them under Article 370. Today the IoK is being treated by New Delhi as its colony forcibly occupied by armed- to- teeth Indian troops numbering perhaps nearly 700,000. And in his panic at the escalating freedom struggle in the IoK the Indian PM is now openly discussing his covert intentions to destroy Pakistan from inside. This is a clear sign that he is engaged in a losing battle in the IoK. He is terrified; otherwise he would not have used a multilateral event to vent his bilateral bile against Pakistan. But this outburst or for that matter his public pronouncements about what he intends to do to meet the challenge he is facing in IoK are not going to solve his problems. What had actually made our task seemingly not so successful in this regard was the seeming success of India in making it appear, for the time being, to the world that the ‘insurgency’ in IoK was not an indigenous movement but was being fomented by Pakistan. However, like in the past when finding no way out of the IoK jam the past governments in New Delhi were forced to come to Pakistan seeking dialogue Modi is also likely to do the same when he realises, sooner than later, that on his own he would not be able to stop the freedom movement in the IoK.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th, 2016.

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