In Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference leaders have urged the people of the occupied territory to observe India’s Independence Day on Monday (15 August) as a Black Day to send a strong message to India that they reject its illegal occupation of their motherland.
Illegally detained APHC Vice Chairman, Shabbir Ahmad Shah, in a message sent from New Delhi’s infamous Tihar Jail and released in Srinagar said India is an oppressor that has deprived millions of Kashmiris of their fundamental rights and snatched away all their freedoms by illegally occupying their homeland.
Shabbir Shah said, “India has no legal or moral right to celebrate its Independence Day as it has forcibly occupied our land.” He maintained that India’s illegal occupation of Jammu and Kashmir was a brazen violation of the international law and the UN resolutions. India, which claims to be a democratic country, has been remorselessly treating the Kashmiris as slaves, he said, adding that Kashmir has been turned into an open-air prison where Kashmiris live without rights. The APHC Vice Chairman reiterated the Kashmiris’ resolve to take the ongoing freedom movement to its logical. He said that the day was not far when Kashmiris would achieve their cherished goal of freedom.
Incarcerated senior APHC leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, in a statement issued in Srinagar asked the people of IIOJK to register their strong protest by observing the 15th August as a Black Day against Indian government’s policy of not resolving the Kashmir dispute and the subsequent severe repression unleashed on them.
He said for the past 75 years the Kashmiri people are demanding the right to self-determination that Indian leadership promised to them not only in the United Nations or the Indian Parliament, but reiterated at Lal Chowk in Srinagar by none other than the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. However, till this day not only has that commitment remains unfulfilled but those that remind them of it are rewarded with arrests and incarceration, he said.
The Mirwaiz said that a country that presents itself as a representative democracy chosen by the free will of its people, a republic, is executing tyranny and suppression to forcibly exert its will over the people of Kashmir. “Lakhs of Indian forces’ personnel are deployed to suppress the aspirations of people and draconian laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and Public Safety Act (PSA) are invoked to ensure people’s sentiments do not get out of hand. The entire leadership as well as thousands of people are languishing in jails in IIOJK and outside whose only crime is their demand for restoration of basic human and political rights the fundamental right to decide their destiny. Every voice raised for it is muzzled through Indian military might. All means of protest are barred and curbed” he deplored.
APHC leaders including Chaudhry Shaheen Iqbal, Hakeem Abdul Rasheed, Ghulam Nabi War, Advocate Shafiq-ur-Rehman, advocate Asra and Aqib Wani in a joint statement said India is a fascist state that has no moral right to celebrate its independence day until it allows the Kashmiris to exercise their right to self-determination. They took strong exception to the Indian government’s Har Ghar Tiranga (hoist Indian flag at every home) campaign and said India is a morally bankrupt nation that feels no shame in forcing people to unfurl its flag and sing its national anthem. Kashmiris, they said, have neither accepted Indian occupation nor have they ever willingly unfurled the Indian flag on their soil. On the contrary, they said, the Kashmiris have been proudly raising and displaying the Pakistani flags on every important occasion.
APHC leader, Syed Bashir Andrabi, said India has no right to celebrate its Independence Day in Jammu and Kashmir because it is a tyrant. He said that’s why Kashmiri people have been observing India’s Independence Day as a Black Day for the last over seven decades and this time also will do the same on August 15. He said that India had promised before the world to give the Kashmiris their right to self-determination but later backed away from its commitments. He said India’s intransigence was the main hurdle in te resolution of the Kashmir dispute.
Jammu-based APHC leader, Advocate Divender Singh Behl, in a statement said India which projects itself as world’s so-called largest democracy has no moral standing to celebrate its Independence Day while denying the independence of those whose right to self-determination has been recognized by United Nations and agreed by India decades back.—KMS
