AJK president urges Kashmiri youth living abroad to take the lead

Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) President Sardar Masood Khan has urged Kashmiri youth residing in different parts of the world to create a critical mass to turn Kashmir movement into an international campaign so that India is forced to stop its repression in Occupied Kashmir and the United Nations Security Council is compelled to hold India accountable for its crimes against humanity.

“Talk to your peers from across the political and educational spectrum, across the racial and ethnic spectrum so people would respond to what you say and they would be able to make their contribution towards the realisation of the right to self-determination of the people of Jammu and Kashmir,” he said while addressing the International Kashmir Youth Convention through a video link.

Organised by Tehreek-e-Kashmir UK and chaired by its president, Faheem Kiani, the convention was addressed and participated by Kashmiri youth from UK, Denmark, Scotland, Norway, Italy, Spain and other European and Scandinavian countries.

The AJK president at the outset of the event expressed his profound gratitude to Faheem Kiani, President Tehreek Kashmir UK, for organising the convention and also thanked participants for assembling to raise their voice for the oppressed people of Jammu and Kashmir.

Referring to the latest events in Indian Occupied Kashmir, the President said that the situation in the occupied territory is dire and it is deteriorating with every passing day. "Kashmiris have shed their blood for over seven decades and half a million people have been killed in the occupied territory of Jammu and Kashmir," he added.

“For the past 72 years, India has been brutalising the people of Jammu and Kashmir and it has used economic blandishment, dehumanisation of Kashmiris as terrorists and enlisting the support of pro-India political entities and leaders; but nothing had worked.”

He said that valleys and mountains of the Indian occupied territory were still resonating with the slogan of ‘Azadi’ (freedom) with the same spirit and commitment as the people in the streets of Kashmir were chanting the slogan of Azadi in 1947.

India, Masood Khan said, despite its oppression could not crush the urge for freedom and liberty from the hearts of the people and therefore they now have come up with the novel idea of settler colonialism by bringing Hindus from all over India to Kashmir to change the population so that they transform Muslims into a minority and do not have to try to win the hearts and minds of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

Comparing new domicile laws introduced by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in IIOJK to Nuremberg Race Laws of Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1935, AJK president said India’s BJP-RSS fascist regime wants to replicate the same model in Occupied Kashmir.

“The BJP-RSS combine is replicating in IIOJK what the Balfour Declaration did to the Palestinians last century between 1918 and 1948. It facilitated land grab and creation of a homeland for Jews. What the declaration did in three decades, India wants to do it in two years.

He said that in the past three months, 1.8 million Hindus from India have been settled in the occupied Jammu and Kashmir and granted domiciles. The Indian imperialists, he maintained have introduced a policy, on the same pattern introduced in 1935 by the Nazi party where Jews were disenfranchised, dispossessed, pushed into concentration camps and ultimately killed or forced to migrate.

The same sequence of events is developing in Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, where killing spree is going on, genocide and ethnic cleansing is taking place and concentration camps are in place to incarcerate and torture the young Kashmiris.

Describing the doctrine of Hindutva more lethal and toxic than fascism seen in the last century, Masood Khan said this doctrine is based on religious superiority and the thinking that the only ‘pure’ religion in the Indian subcontinent is Hinduism; and Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and other minorities have made the land impure and therefore it has to be cleansed by killing, persecuting or expelling non-Hindus from India.

Urging the people of Pakistani and Kashmiri origin to contribute in a practical manner by turning the Kashmir resistance movement into a global campaign to end the Indian occupation of Jammu and Kashmir, the president encouraged the younger generation of diaspora community to take up leadership roles on Kashmir and help make this movement more dynamic and vibrant.