ISLAMABAD: The chairman of parliament’s special committee on Kashmir, Shehryar Khan Afridi, has urged the world to act against India’s medieval plans to artificially bring a demographic change in occupied Kashmir.

Reacting to grant of domicile certificates of the disputed territory to non-Kashmiri Indian citizens, Mr Afridi condemned the racist Hindutva supremacist Modi government’s continuing attempts to illegally alter the demography of the occupied valley in violation of all international laws and treaties, as well as the 4th Geneva Convention.

He said in a statement on Sunday that India’s move to grant domiciles to non-Kashmiris “is meant to change the demographic status of the occupied territory as non-Kashmiris will flood into the region to diminish the Muslim majority”, adding that since the matter was already in the UN Security Council for a plebiscite, no demographic change could be brought on the barrel of gun in held Kashmir.

He said that the fascist Indian regime was exploiting the international focus on the Covid-19 pandemic to push forward the Hindutva supremacist agenda.

Mushaal calls for immediate release of ailing Yasin Malik

Mr Afridi said that all Indian narratives on Kashmir have proven false. “It’s now proved that India was never a democracy. It is a fascist coloniser using notion of democracy. This isn’t only now killing and imprisoning Kashmiri Muslims in their own homes and land, but to wipe out, in a genocide carried out via laws and economic and population measures. An entire population is being decimated, and being replaced by bringing in outsiders from thousands of miles away to call them legal locals is a part of it.”

He said that the Indian state could not be looked at as a normal or merely dysfunctional state anymore. It is a rank fascist evil which must be exterminated from Kashmir. “There can be no going back to any pre or earlier era, no solution is now possible without the total elimination of Indian forces from Kashmir. And it is an ethical and moral duty of every human being to support the just cause of freedom from Indian occupation,” he said.

Mr Afridi urged the United Nations and the world leaders to pressurise India that it must agree to UN mandate of self-determination in held Kashmir as per the UN resolutions as India itself had taken the Kashmir issue to the UN and promised a plebiscite to decide the dispute.

Meanwhile, Mushaal Hussein Mullick, wife of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik, asked the international community to speak up against Indian atrocities in occupied Kashmir.

She said in a statement issued here on Sunday that the world should raise its voice for the release of Yasin Malik who is a political prisoner and a face of the Kashmiri freedom struggle.

Ms Mullick said the fascist Indian government, contrary to the world’s norms, had refused to release thousands of Kashmiri detainees, including Yasin Malik despite his critical health condition.

She said that Mr Malik was taken into custody in February last year under the draconian Public Safety Law. Later, Mr Malik was shifted to the notorious Tihar jail where he was deprived of all basic facilities.

Ms Mullick, who is also chairperson of the Peace and Culture Organisation, said that her husband currently was suffering from several ailments, including heart disease, kidney stones and a backache, but the administration not only deprived him of his legal rights but also of medical and health rights.

She said: “I have raised voice repeatedly and informed the world of my husband’s health condition that he needs immediate and urgent medical aid, but unfortunately the international community and human right organisations observed criminal silence over the serious issue of human rights. I demand that his passport should be returned to him so that he could go abroad for the best medical treatment.”

Ms Mullick lauded Democratic presidential nominee and former US vice president Joe Biden for his unequivocal and unambiguous stance on the unabated brutalities and continued human right violations in occupied Kashmir.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2020