Kashmir dispute
DURING the conflict in Northern Ireland, there appeared to be no imaginable clue. The centuries-old quarrel between the Catholics and Protestants — those who wished to be part of Ireland and those who liked to stay with the UK — was just too deep.
But in 1998 Tony Blair did secure a tranquility deal and even though that unforgettable attainment is now endangered by Brexit, it nevertheless prompts the question: might a deal on another ostensibly irresolvable dispute — Kashmir.
Pakistan and India are neighbours and nuclear powers and have numerous unresolved controversies and problems topped by the lingering and burning Kashmir issue.
Pakistan enjoys cordial and friendly relations with all other countries of the region. It is pertinent to speak of here that India is not only illegally occupying the Jammu and Kashmir territory for more than seven decades, it is denying the Kashmiris their basic right of self-determination, and is persistently resorting to brutalities.
cities through its security forces on the residents who are living in the longest lockdown and curfew since 05 August 2019, and is committing gross human rights violations while the international community just sometimes condemns mournful incidents in the occupied territory and the UN Security Council is also helpless in forcing its own resolutions for a free and fair plebiscite to let the Kashmiris decide their future themselves.
India’s struggles to integrate Kashmir into the Indian Union were not achieved because the main Kashmiri leaders and parties opposed these endeavours.
The Kashmiris want that they should themselves decide about their political future, as committed to them by the UN Resolution of 1948-49.
Indian leadership contests this and uses force to crush this desire.This has resulted in an eternal dispute between the Indian authorities and the people of Kashmir.
India has been using the security establishment to govern Kashmir which frequently resulted in human rights violations in Kashmir.
Indian actions are driven by the consideration of keeping Kashmir under its influence irrespective of human rights or other costs.
The unnecessary design of security forces and state power by India has turned the Kashmir Valley into a “Human Tragedy”.
The Indian government uses security forces to suppress Kashmiris.The Kashmiri people want freedom from India and decide their political future on their own.This is not acceptable to India and it uses force to control Kashmiris.
International human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights have regularly reported human rights mayhem in occupied Kashmir.
Their reports can be divided into two periods.Those that were documented between 1990 and 2003, when militancy in Kashmir was severe and relations between the two countries were less than normal to pay the least.
And those that were filed after the militancy had considerably dwindled and a thaw in relations between the two countries had set in.
For the first period, the 1996 report of Human Rights Watch Asia and for the second period 2004 report of the European Parliament’s Committee of Foreign Affair are worth mentioning.
As to the Watch report, it holds the Indian government accountable for summary executions, torture, illegal detentions, disappearance, rape cases, and election-related intimation of voters.
It is estimated that the human rights situation began worsening from 1995 onward when the Indian government began systematically using “renegades”– described by the Watch as India’s secret, illegal army, for its own objective is observed that the Indian government did not make any public investigation into anyone of the documented cases of torture, nor has it ever announced that a number of the security forces was prosecuted or penalized for torture.
The political history of Kashmir since 1947 shows that the Kashmiris have resisted Indian actions to integrate Kashmir fully into the Indian federation.
The Kashmiris are constantly facing the wrath of Indian security forces but they did not change their mind about future of Kashmir.
This problem has negatively affected the relations between India and Pakistan.There is a necessity to pursue a tranquil political solution to the Kashmir dilemma.
For this purpose, Pakistan and India should hold a regular discussion for evolving methods to implement the UN resolutions on Kashmir.
Meanwhile, the Indian Government should adopt ways to control human rights mayhem by its security forces in the Indian administered Kashmir and build an environment for a solution to the Kashmir dilemma.
—The writer is contributing columnist, based in Kandhkot, Sindh.
