Staff Reporter
Islamabad
Sardar Masood Khan, President Azad Jammu and Kashmir, has said that historically the people of Jammu and Kashmir had decided to join Pakistan well before the Independence of Pakistan. This decision, he said was unanimously made during the meeting of the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference held on 19 July 1947.
The President shared these remarks while speaking to the concluding session of the Summer School 2020 Kashmir Boot Camp organised by the Centre for Security, Strategy and Policy Research (CSSPR) on the topic ‘Kashmir: Conflict, Crisis and Dialogue’. The web-conference was moderated by Dr Rabia Akhtar, Director CSSPR, and was attended by over 40 students.
‘It was the collective aspiration of the Kashmiris to accede to Pakistan. This will of the Kashmiris was trampled because of the connivance of the Maharaja, the Indian government and the British colonisers who forcefully tried to annex Kashmir to India’, he said. The President said that after the independence of India and Pakistan, the people of AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan fought a war against the Maharaja and liberated these areas. He added that had the Indian government not deployed their forces at Srinagar the whole State of Jammu and Kashmir would have been liberated. ‘The area we know as AJK and GB have now become a defensive rampart for Pakistan’, he said. President Masood Khan said that the people of Kashmir had suffered tremendously over the past 73 years.
