“The will of Kashmiris is the supreme law in Kashmir,” said Mahatma Gandhi.
“We are committed to abide by the decision of the people of Kashmir, whatever it might be. We are committed secondly to a plebicite (promised and agreed in UNSC resolution). If the people of Kashmir decide to remove or do away with their old ruler, we must accept that decision in view of our repeated assurances to the effect. If they want to leave India, that also we have to accept because of our assurance. We could of course want this done in the proper way and having due regard to the constitutional proprieties,” – Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India in a letter to Indian President Dr. Rajinder Prasad.
“From their arrival on October 27, 1947 to the present day, Indian troops continue to occupy a large proportion (60%) of the State of Jammu and Kashmir despite the increasing manifest opposition of the majority (80% Muslims) to their presence,” wrote British historian Alastair.
October 27 marked the 62nd anniversary of the Indian occupation of the Muslim-majority British Raj’s Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir. Historically, it were the Muslim rulers who united the over 5000 Hindu princely states in the Indian subcontinent, some as tiny as a ‘city state’, into Hindustan, later known as ‘Bharat’ and finally Christianized by the British colonialists into “India”. First Muslim rule was established in 712 CE by an young Muslim Arab General, Muhammad Bin Qassam, aged 17 – in the present-day Pakistan’s Sindh province.
Like occpied Palestine, the for State of Jammu and Kashmir (J & K) is also occupied by the anti-Islam extremists. Muslim genocide in both Palestine (by the European Jews) and J & K (by Hindus from neighboring India) began in 1948. However, the plight of Kashmiri Muslims is long fallen from the Western screen for several reasons. One of the major one being that J & K doesn’t have oil reserves and there had never been a “Hindu Problem” in the past in Europe. However, when it comes to distorting the glorious Muslim history in those regions and their personal cunningness – Both Jew and Hindu extremists are birds of the same feathers.
Like Israeli Jews – the Hindu fascist too took the J & K issue to the United Nations – to buy time for their eventual annexation of the major part of the State into the Mother India against the wishes of state’s majority.
Mushtaq A. Jeelani, executive director of Toronto-based ‘Kashmiri-Canadian Council’ wrote under the title Black Day Anniversary for the Kashmiris.
Those who have followed developments in Kashmir know that the ongoing struggle for freedom began in 1931 when people came out in open revolt against then autocratic and tyrannical regime; they had nearly succeeded in over-throwing the regime when India stepped in 1947 to take over the tyrant disposed regime, faced with stiff resistance from the locals against its invasion – India transformed Kashmir into a purely military camp, killing hundreds of civilians.
The first war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir broke out in 1947. In 1948 India took the Kashmir issue to the United Nations Security Council, which constituted a special commission – the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan – with the mandate to independently investigate the matter and help the contending parties reach a negotiated settlement. The most important outcome of the deliberations of the commission were two resolutions passed by the Security Council on August 13th, 1948 and January 15th, 1949 respectively, calling upon the governments of India and Pakistan to hold a free, fair and impartial plebiscite under UN auspices in order to enable the people of Kashmir to decide whether they wanted to join India or Pakistan.
Since October 1989, the 700,000 strong Indian forces have killed more than 100,000 Kashmiris to silence the people’s demand for freedom, justice, and respect for human rights. They continue to carry out arbitrary detention, summary executions, custodial killings, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, rape, sexual exploitation, torture and fake encounters. Generations of Kashmiris have grown up under the shadow of the gun; not a single family is unaffected; property worth hundreds of millions of dollars has been destroyed and the suffering and devastation continues unabated, sadly drawing no significant attention from the international community.
This year the occupying Indian troops kidnapped and killed 17-year-old Aasiya Jan and her sister-in-law, Nilofar Shakeel, 22; their corpses were found floating in a shallow stream on May 30th, 2009 after disappearing from their family’s apple orchards in the city of Shopian in Indian-administered Kashmir. Subsequently, the occupation forces’ attempt to cover it up set off months of massive demonstrations, several protesters were killed and hundreds injured in pitched street battles between anti-India demonstrators chanting: “we want freedom,” and the Indian occupation troops using brute force to get the situation under control.
Last two years have seen spontaneous, massive and non-violent protests where virtually everyone young and old, men and women, boys and girls are out on the streets protesting against India’s continued occupation. Such – on and off – protests have totally re-energized the Kashmiri freedom struggle into a classic people’s movement, which has stunned the Indian government.
The right to self-determination is the cornerstone of the United Nations system that underpins the contemporary international order. Its unquestioned acceptance has been established by core international instruments including the Charter of the United Nations, the two Covenants on Civil and Political and Economic, Social and Cultural rights and the declaration adopted by General Assembly resolution 1514.
For New Delhi to help resolve the Kashmir issue through peaceful negotiations, following actions are necessary and urgent:
- India must cease all military and paramilitary actions against civilians in Kashmir.
- India must end torture, custodial killings and extra-judicial executions of prisoners immediately.
- India must withdraw its military and paramilitary forces from all the urban areas immediately.
- India must release all the prisoners immediately arrested or captured in connection with the resistance movement and false cases instituted against them under the so-called emergency laws must be withdrawn.
- India must annul the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, the National Security Act and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, with respect to Kashmir, immediately.
- India must bring to justice all those killers and murderers who have committed horrendous crimes against innocents in Kashmir during the past 20 years. Or transfer all such cases to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for impartial justice.
- India must continue to help the displaced Kashmiri Hindu families to resettle in their homes in Kashmir and provide them all necessary assistance.
- India must allow International human rights monitors and the world media to visit Kashmir for their investigative work.
- Last but not least, India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir together with help from the international community can resolve the Kashmir issue peacefully; it may be time that India return to the negotiating table to resolve the 62-year-old Kashmir issue; this is essential for regional peace and security.”
The Father of Pakistani nation, Quaid-e-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, called the Valley of Kashmir as “Jaguar Vein” – and that’s the strategic importance of J & Kashmir is for Hindu India. By controlling the three major rivers (Ravi, Chenab and Sutlej) out of four – have their source in the Valley. By diverting the water, India has chocked Pakistan’s agriculture and power-generating sector. The power supply situation, since USrael installed their puppet Asif Zardari as the ‘king maker’, has crippled the industrial and human life of the great majority of Pakistanis. Some ares experience load-shedding for upto 12 hours per day. Pakistan’s major source of electric power is the hydro-electric generating plants, but they cannot run at their full capacity when India divert the water sully to those dams.
The Mumbai-based Indian think tank, ‘International Center for Peace Initiatives’, admitted in its 2005 report: “Pakistan’s per capita water availability has declined from 5,600 cubic metres at the time of its independence in 1947 to 1,200 cubic metres in 2005. This is expected to reach the ‘threshold level’ of 1,000 cubic metres before 2010”.
Rehmat's World 