Kashmir, the paradise on the earth, ranked as the world’s second most beautiful destination. Unfortunately for more than 70 years, the Kashmir conflict has remained a bone of contention between two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. The tension between Indian authorities and pro-independence groups have increased since as armed uprising in 1989 against the Indian rule.
According to the human rights groups, some 100,000 people have been killed, 20,000+ orphans, 20,000 widows, 8000+ enforced disappearance, 200+ women raped. Kashmir is the world’s most militarized area where is 900,000+ military personnel deployed. 6000+ pellet gun injuries since 2016, 200+ blinded, 45% suffered from mental health since that uprising and a subsequent Indian military crackdown. In 2020 where the whole world had been in the situation of lockdown, all the powerful countries tried to overcome this pandemic. All the powerful countries did an immense struggle to get rid of of being locked up at home. But no one even bothered to notice the lockdown/shutdown situation in the Kashmir. India and Pakistan have fought four wars and have held several rounds of talks over Kashmir but without any tangible success.
The revocation of the Indian constitution’s Articles 370 and 35-A by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-majoritarian government is alarmingly geared towards changing IHK’s demographic profile and its political, economic, social, and cultural character.
Indian wants a colonial project in the disputed Kashmir region and calling for the building of a settlement in the valley that replicates the Israeli occupation of the west bank, What is colonization ? settler colonization is a specific kind of colonization that function through the replacement of indigenous populations with the intention of gaining control over local resources or natural resources. The naked colonization of Kashmir has taken place many decades before 2019 what happened on August 5 was an act of granting permission to what was already going on in Kashmir without and legal authority have grown manifold Muslim majority region. Critics say India’s right-wing Hindi Nationalist govt, the BJP has introduced the new laws to paved the way for a gradual takeover of political, administrative, and economic institutions of Jammu and Kashmir. The ordinary Kashmiri’s life has been upended over this past one year by the threat of an unending war that is being wrought upon Kashmiri’s to satisfy the pursuit of electoral interests in India. The people of Kashmir have been responding one crisis after the other as India feeds its population rhetoric of moral superiority that allows them to wage war on the aberrant Kashmiri as well as the putative directives of Islam. First people of Kashmir were not allowed to communicate with families for weeks, then they faced mass arrests, judiciary apathy, media ban, torture, and killing. The state engineered anxiety and shock to make wonder.
Pakistan is undertaking every effort feasible to highlight the situation and mount pressure on India to reverse the disastrous decision of revoking the special status of Kashmir. India must not be allowed to get away with this travesty. Pakistan’s early diplomatic response was standard: recall of ambassadors, termination of trade, and approaches to the UN and human rights organizations. The initiative to raise Kashmir in the UN Security Council was bold. China has declared its support for Pakistan’s position. Pakistan’s strategy will have to build on this critical support. Russia will walk a fine line between its traditional relationship with India and its new strategic partnership with China and, by extension, with Pakistan. The US will use India’s self-created vulnerability on Kashmir to keep it in line, as it flirts with Pakistan to get the Afghan deal done with the Taliban. (Trump’s mediation offer was a non-starter and should not divert Pakistan’s attention.) France is desperate to replace Russia as India’s main arms supplier and will continue to act as India’s surrogate in the UNSC. The UK may be sympathetic to human rights issues but, like many others, will take refuge in the impotent advocacy of ‘bilateral’ Pakistan-India talks on the Kashmir dispute. Pakistan will need to adopt a clear and politically defensible position on the Kashmiri freedom struggle. On the one hand, it must propagate the legitimacy of the struggle on the basis of international law and the numerous UN resolutions.
Ultimately, if India confronts a Kashmiri insurgency, a resilient Pakistan, international pressure, and an impaired economy, it may agree to negotiate a mutually acceptable settlement with Pakistan and the Kashmiris. But the Hindu fascists may choose not to compromise. Bleeding in occupied Kashmir, they are likely to provoke another war with Pakistan, bringing Armageddon to South Asia and much of the world.
The international community must thus act now to stop them.
