Kashmiriat under assault

Three years ago, on 5^th August 2019, the people of Indian occupied Kashmir witnessed yet another brutality afflicted on them. Under assault this time was not just their life and honour, but also their very identity, the Kashmiriat. In one stroke, the Modi government decided to abrogate the special status given to the occupied Kashmir under the Indian constitution. After abolishing the statehood, the Indian government went for demographic engineering by granting to non-Kashmiris, especially Hindus, access to Kashmiri domicile. The objective was to change the Muslim majority status of the state to Muslim minority status. Alongside that, electoral engineering, through a delimitation exercise was commenced to demarcate the constituencies in such a manner that Hindu vote in the state assembly would exceed or at least equal the Muslim vote. For instance, Jammu has 44 per cent population but it is being given 48 per cent of seats while the Valley with 56 per cent of population will have only 52 per cent of the seats.

The assault on the Kashmiri identity is accompanied by a 36-month long military siege of the Kashmir Valley with every conceivable curb on their fundamental human rights. From arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings to cordon-and-search and fake operations, every Kashmiri household has been violated. The goal seems to be to break the will of the Kashmiris so that they don’t demand their right to self-determination. Since 5 August 2022, 640 Kashmiris have been martyred, 119 of them this year alone. Kashmiri leadership has been jailed under trumped-up charges. The continued arrest and illegal detention of Hurriyat leader Mr. Yasin Malik on self-contrived and fabricated charges is a case in point.

For decades, the Kashmiris have struggled for their right to self-determination. The international community had granted the Kashmiris this right seven decades ago. Indian leaders like Pundit Nehru had accepted that the fate of Kashmir will be decided by a plebiscite administered under the UN aegis. Alas, as the time showed, all those commitments remained hollow.

Here, one must commend the valiant and resilient Kashmiri nation. They have consistently refused to live under Indian rule. One is surprised that despite 75 years of Kashmiri resistance to Indian rule, the Indian leadership has not realised that the Kashmiris simply did not wish to live within India or accept the Indian identity. They do not feel any belongingness to India. Historically too, Jammu and Kashmir was always linked politically, culturally, and economically to Pakistani territories, especially northern Punjab, and not India.

What should the Kashmiris do now? Their first target is to salvage their identity. Expectedly, Kashmiris of every political hue have opposed the Indian move to abrogate Article 370 and make Jammu and Kashmir a union territory. In June 2021, the Modi government met a select group of pro-India Kashmiri leaders, called Gupkar alliance, only to hear that they all unanimously wanted their statehood to be reverted immediately.

Kashmiris are understandably disappointed that the international community did not choose to condemn India for refusing to implement the UN Security Council resolutions and pursuing a racist agenda of creating a Hindu state by making life difficult for Muslims and other minorities of India.

In Pakistan too, there is deep anguish on what is happening to the Kashmiri Muslims. The people of Pakistan and Kashmiris have remained connected for centuries through bonds of faith, culture and geography. Pakistanis have raised their voice at every level, at every forum, to remind the international community that Indian actions of unilaterally altering the status of the disputed territory of Kashmir was a violation of international law, particularly UN Security Council resolutions and Fourth Geneva Convention. Pakistan has also voiced our concern at the gross human rights violations of the Kashmiris by Indian security forces. No government in Pakistan would do anything less. There is a consensus in Pakistan that it must continue to extend its full support to Kashmiris’ right to self-determination and their resistance to the Indian rule. On the 5^th of August this year, Pakistanis will stand with their Kashmiri brethren to mark the yom e istehsal (the day of exploitation).

What has aggravated the situation is the evolving geopolitics, which has brought India closer to the US in the latter’s competition with China. So, the US and other countries which have economic and commercial links to India, have looked the other way while Indian government is creating a Hindu rashtra internally and entertaining hegemonic designs externally in South Asia. But Indian leadership must not forget. No matter what they do, the resolve of the Kashmiri nation will never be broken. It would be in India’s own interest to reverse all illegal measures taken on 5^th August 2019, and let Kashmiris determine their own political destiny in accordance with the longstanding resolutions of the UN Security Council.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 5^th, 2022.

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