ISLAMABAD: While condemning the Modi government’s belligerent policy towards Kashmir, Senior leader All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), Nayeem Ahmed Khan has urged the influential world governments to take effective cognizance of the fast deteriorating political and human rights situation in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir. In his message from Tihar jail, the APHC leader who has been languishing in the notorious prison for the past four years said that India’s racist regime whose hands were soaked with the blood of innocent Kashmiris was hell-bent on killing every voice of dissent in the region. The ruthless suppression of dissent, killing spree of innocent civilians, and a witch-hunt against civil society, rights activists, and journalists speak volumes about the apartheid regime’s repression, brutality, and barbarism in Kashmir. Khan lamented that extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances, harassment and humiliation of common masses, arbitrary arrests, and attacks on rights defenders by the Indian occupation forces have become a new norm in the valley. India, he said, has been using these colonial-era tactics to suppress Kashmiris’ legitimate struggle for the right to self-determination. He, however, maintained that the policy of oppression and suppression could not deter Kashmiri masses from pursuing their legitimate struggle for which they have rendered matchless sacrifices. Lauding Kashmiri youth for their resilience, he said, the youth of Kashmir who has taken up the mantle of freedom movement have been scripting a new history of resistance against India’s illegal occupation by laying down their precious lives. Urging New Delhi to shun its policy of intransigence, he said, Indian leadership must bear in mind the fact that genuine freedom movements cannot be suppressed by the dint of force. Referring to the Indian government’s nefarious designs to change the status of the occupied Kashmir through political and administrative machinations, the APHC leader said, “Stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and unlawful attempts to alter the region’s demography and changing the electoral map has been a dream project of the RSS influenced regime”. Terming these attempts as an atrocious assault on Kashmiris’ political and cultural identity, he said, these policies aimed at marginalizing the majority community and reducing them to minority were in violation of international law and the UNSC resolutions that strictly prohibit the occupying state from changing status of a disputed region. About the plight of Kashmiri prisoners, Khan said, “Caging Kashmiri political leaders on flimsy grounds and holding them in preventive custody and denying them the right to a fair trial and subjecting them to inhuman treatment in prisons and terrorizing their families is yet another dark aspect of Indian colonialism”.
