UN urged to declare India’s policies in IIOJK as apartheid, like Israeli actions in West Bank
Srinagar: In Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, Hurriyat leaders have called upon the United Nations to apply the same legal yardstick to India’s actions in the occupied territory as used in the UN Human Rights Office’s latest report branding Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank as “apartheid”.
According to Kashmir Media Service, the Hurriyat leadership, reacting to the sweeping report issued by the UN human rights office (OHCHR), said that the UN’s findings on systematic discrimination, racial segregation, repression, arbitrary detentions and apartheid in the West Bank fully mirror India’s conduct in occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
The leaders said the UN report has rightly concluded that Israeli policies are designed to permanently subjugate Palestinians through separation, segregation and domination. They added that the same features—two parallel legal systems, denial of movement, land grabbing, settlement expansion, unlawful killings, arbitrary arrests, digital surveillance and militarisation—exist in IIOJK under India’s occupation.
They maintained that India has enforced a decades-long regime of apartheid-style control in Kashmir, especially since August 2019 when it illegally scrapped Article 370, seized land, redrew constituencies, accelerated demographic engineering and crushed civil liberties through military repression and draconian laws.
The Hurriyat leaders said that, in light of the UN report on Israeli apartheid, there is a moral and legal obligation upon the United Nations to pronounce a similar verdict on India’s actions in IIOJK, where Kashmiris face killings, enforced disappearances, torture, mass detentions, property seizures and denial of their UN-recognized right to self-determination.
They urged the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to extend the same scrutiny to India, investigate war crimes and apartheid policies in Kashmir, and hold New Delhi accountable under international law.
The Hurriyat leadership stressed that international silence has enabled India to persist with its repression and state terrorism in IIOJK, and demanded immediate global action to end military occupation and allow Kashmiris to exercise their inalienable right to decide their political future.
They reiterated that apartheid, whether in Palestine or Kashmir, cannot be justified or normalized, and that justice must be uniform and universal rather than selective.
