Washington, November 01 (KMS): Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum (WKAF) has condemned the Indian government’s continued brutal repression in occupied Kashmir and refusal to reverse its August 5, 2019 decision of unilaterally abrogating special status of the territory.
Te WKAF in a statement issued in Washington rejected the capricious and undemocratic decision of the Indian government to divide occupied Kashmir into two union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh and rule them by bureaucratic fiat from New Delhi. It is the flagrant violation of India’s obligations of the international law, it added.
The WKAF stands with the people of occupied Kashmir facing the inhumane conditions created by the Indian administration’s lockdown, communications blackout, mass arrests, torture of detainees, restriction of freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, the statement said. It said, the world is horrified to watch almost a million Indian military and paramilitary personnel deployed in the territory, especially in densely populated urban and rural areas, using live ammunition, pellet guns, torture and other forms of state-sanctioned violence against men, women and children living in occupied Kashmir.
The WKAF said that the Indian government must immediately restore Kashmir’s special status, restore political and administrative unity of the three regions of the territory and end all draconian laws under which civil liberties have been abolished and create a conducive atmosphere to enable the Kashmiri people to exercise their internationally-recognized right to self-determination.
It demanded immediate and complete restoration of all basic human rights, including freedom of movement, assembly and speech, and access to all forms of communications in occupied Kashmir. It also called for release of all political prisoners and bring back all the Kashmiri youth who have been arrested and lodged in prisons across India with little access to their families.
The WKAF said, despite claiming to be the largest democracy, India’s policy towards Kashmir has been uniformly colonial, brutal, deceitful and undemocratic. While India, initially, explicitly accepted the UN Security Council resolutions calling for a free and impartial plebiscite in Kashmir under the auspices of the United Nations, it soon reneged on its own obligation realizing that the people of Kashmir would vote against it in an unfettered plebiscite, it maintained.
The WKAF appealed to the international community to use its diplomatic, moral and economic leverage with India to fulfill its commitment of giving the right to self-determination to the people of Kashmir according to the United Nations resolutions. It said that a just and lasting settlement of the Kashmir dispute was possible only through talks participated by all the three stakeholders i.e. India, Pakistan and the genuine leadership of Jammu and Kashmir.