Islamabad
Dr Syed Inayatullah Andrabi, a Kashmiri intellectual based in London, has said that National Conference top leader Farooq Abdullah’s retort to Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s recent statement regarding the ‘Gupkar Declaration’ is absolutely out of place and makes no sense at all.
Syed Inayatullah Andrabi, elucidating his point in his latest tweets, said Pakistan being a legitimate party to the Kashmir conflict has every right to intervene in the affairs of Kashmir the way Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi did.
Dr Andrabi pointed out that the NC leader’s reaction that they are not puppets is neither here nor there as the Pakistani foreign minister never said they are so, either explicitly or implicitly. However, he added that Farooq Abdullah and his associates need to walk the talk, and practically demonstrate that they are not India’s puppets.
He further said they [Farooq Abdullah and co.] have a right to claim, like everyone else, they are not puppets but men of honour and dignity with their own minds, but that is not what India regards them as.
He maintained that India, right from 1947, has treated the ruling elites in Kashmir not merely as puppets but suspect-puppets – puppets who are not to be trusted, and kept under constant watch.
He emphasized that nothing illustrates it better than what happened on 9th August 1953 when a sitting Prime Minster (referring to Sheikh Abdullah) was arrested by an ordinary police officer, and 66 years down the line on 5th August 2019 when an entire state [IIOJK] was broken to pieces, redesigned and reshaped into parts.
Referring to the India’s illegal action of August 05, Dr Inayatullah Andrabi said it was a great spectacle to see that India’s power elites celebrated the move in and outside the Parliament, whilst those who thought they were in-charge of the state by virtue of fighting elections and running the governments had absolutely no clue of what was happening and were silenced and incarcerated.—KMS
