G20: India’s fake attempt to eclipse Kashmir issue
INDIA ‘s projected drama is meeting its predictable failure in New Delhi as it faces absence of the G20 group counties by holding the G 20 meeting in Srinagar tried to throw dust in the eye of the international community that all is normal in Kashmir. Fernand de Varennes, the United Nations special rapporteur on minority issues, accused India of seeking to normalise the “brutal and repressive denial of democratic and other rights of Kashmiri Muslims and minorities” by holding a G20 meeting in the disputed region. In a dissipated attempt, India intends to hold Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, will host a meeting of the tourism working group for G20 members on May 22- 24. A massive security cordon was placed around the venue on the shores of Dal Lake with elite naval commandos patrolling in rubber boats in the water.
Vladimir Putin did not attend the G20 summit staged by Indonesia last year, but instead sent his veteran Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov. India divided the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 to create two federally administered territories – Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Ladakh is a disputed frontier region along the line of actual control between India and China and both countries claim parts of it. Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Monday said holding a meeting of the Tourism Working Group of G-20 countries in Srinagar was an utter violation of the United Nations resolutions on Kashmir.
Hundreds of people rallied in Pakistan-administered Kashmir on Monday to protest arch rival India’s decision to host a G20 tourism meeting in its part of the disputed Himalayan region. Arguably, India created as much hype as it has for the G-20. Even if the meeting in Kashmir goes smoothly, he argued it would have little practical significance, as it “doesn’t mean anything for the legal standing of Jammu and Kashmir [vis-a-vis] international law and instruments relating to it.” Said an official of the Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Whereas Indian media reported that numerous corporate leaders, expats, businessmen and diplomats, from Middle Eastern countries, have indeed toured Jammu & Kashmir in the past few months to investigate opportunities to invest in the so-called Union Territory. On the other hand, China Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Egypt “decided” to boycott the G20 summit in picturesque Srinagar of Occupied Valley, the first such gathering since India unilaterally brought Kashmir under direct control in August 2019.
India’s devious perception of new Kashmir: The policies that the Modi Government pushed through have been demonstrably unpopular; from the delimitation to the modifications in domicile rules as well as the new land laws. Small wonder that it takes a federally handpicked Lieutenant Governor to approve them as opposed to an elected government that would’ve found itself rather hard-pressed to take steps that are likely to antagonise the voters to whom it is accountable. Notably, Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs “cautioned” G-20 countries against accepting proposals from India to hold meetings in J&K, describing such moves as Delhi’s “attempt to legitimize its illegal control of the disputed region”.
UN disapproves G-20 meeting in Srinagar: Appointed special rapporteur in 2017, Varennes claimed that human rights violations have only risen since India revoked the constitutional special status of Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019. He also asserted that there were demographic changes being forced in Jammu and Kashmir by moving “significant numbers of Hindus from outside the region” in order to “overwhelm native Kashmiris in their own land”. Responsibility of international community, Bilawal said ironically, “today India deviously tries to convince the world that Jammu and Kashmir was an undisputed part of her territory. But history remembers that it was India that took the Jammu and Kashmir dispute to the Security Council as a dispute yet to be resolved’’.
Modi’s false narrative: Seeking an opportunity via G-20 forum is Modi’s false narrative. Given Modi’s Hindu-nationalist stance, it becomes glaringly clear as to why the abrogation of Article 370 was put into motion by the BJP in August, 2019. Nonetheless, it is important to understand the inevitable concomitant butt the precarious balance between India, Pakistan and Kashmir cannot be easily addressed without seeking a durable solution of the simmering dispute of Kashmir between the two nuclear armed states—India and Pakistan. Needless to say, the ongoing stalemate between the three entities—the Kashmiris, India and Pakistan has existed for an unlimited time. Practically speaking, Narendra Modi’s gambit of integrating vale into the Indian Union remains the most controversial notion of contemporary international relations as settling a disputed territory though the vestiges of domestic, albeit not via international law. Make no mistake, this fashion of making a unilateral annexation of an occupied territory cannot attain the approval of international law.
Thus, in violation of international law, India’s unilateral abrogation of Articles 370 and 35-A show that New Delhi is taking steps that are detrimental to regional peace and stability. Furthermore, India has made Kashmir one of the most militarized zones in the world, with a ratio of security personnel to the local population of 1:8. Due to the imminent threat of a conflict between nuclear-armed neighbours, the oppression and subjugation of the Kashmiris make regional stability and peace precarious. The obduracy of India’s successive governments over the years to resolve the dispute is causing concern for policy makers around the world. ‘’The issue should be resolved through pacific settlement of disputes as enunciated in Article 33 of the UN Charter’’. The International Religious Freedom Report has categorically stated that India’s use of intimidation tactics against its minorities is akin to state terrorism as recently the Biden Administration has shown its due concern regarding the declining status of religious minorities in India.
The September summit & lack of moral significance: The most pertinent question arising in the mind of human rights activists is that how the upcoming G-20 Summit in New Delhi to be held in September can hold its moral leverage given the fact that the United Nations and other G-20 member States do charter their strong reservations regarding the currently held G-20 tourism moot in Srinagar in the India-occupied Kashmir. While a G-20 Leaders’ Declaration will be adopted at the conclusion of the New Delhi Summit, it is obligatory that the global leadership must convey the Indian leadership a message of not a unilateral choice vis-à-vis the Kashmir resolution but a multilateral synergy.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-international law analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law. He deals with the strategic and nuclear issues.
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