G20 members’ willingness to Srinagar meeting lending legitimacy to India’s brutal actions in Kashmir

Homo sapiens have surely come a long way from primitive stages of life to organised tribal communities to modern civilizations and all this was possible due to ever growing knowledge and consciousness. Although, human history is replete with innumerable conflicts, hostilities, wars and bloodshed, however, this species denied to be gobbled up and managed to live on and blossom into a stunning civilisational miracle of today, the United Nations which marks the pinnacle and greatest milestone of this millennia long tortuous odyssey.

Today we have these many civilizations and nations living side by side in an environment of peace and harmony, and together endeavouring relentlessly to nullify every threat to their existence and to climb the ladder of mutual welfare and prosperity. However, when civilisational spirit and consciousness has reached an apogee, some twisted and rabidly evil minds, unfortunately, keep tearing it up as is the case with Modi’s communal Indian regime that driven by perverse Hindutva ideology has been engaged in genocide of enslaved Kashmiri Muslims and lynching every dissenter across the length and breadth of the land.

It is so baffling to note that this communal regime that feeds and thrives internally on bloodshed and massacres of Kashmiri and Indian Muslims is shamelessly and with such convenience projecting its “Shining India” to the civilised world with latter readily lapping it all without demur! Pertinent to note that India herself had been a victim of worst colonisation and had to pay a colossal price in blood and honour to win its freedom. And what could be more ironic than the fact that it was India that championed peoples’ freedom and Independence and lead the NAM, but in utter disregard and violation of the UNSC resolutions on the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir continued to perpetuate its illegal hold and occupation of the state and kept its fettered inhabitants deprived of their birth right, the right to self-determination as enshrined in those resolutions. More shameful is the fact that it was India herself that had taken this issue to the United Nations and proposed in writing that plebiscite in Kashmir should determine its future status and must be the basis of its final settlement and yet, when the UNSC accepted the proposal and incorporated it in its resolutions of 1948 and 49 with India one among the signatories to these, it did everything conceivable to undermine and stall their implementation. And what world was to witness afterwards was a relentless persecution, systematic genocide and suppression of the freedom loving Kashmiris and consolidation of its illegitimate hold of the territory through a nonstop series of colonial legislations and draconian laws.

During these seven and a half decades occupation, several hundred thousand Kashmiri Muslims have been murdered, many more tortured and incarcerated and trillions of worth properties destroyed and all this tyranny perpetrated to force the populace into perennial submission to its rule. Mass murders, extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, mass arrests, collective punishments, humiliation, torture, loot, arson and most repellent of all the molestation of Kashmiri women have remained the rule of the day. Can anyone contest this harsh truth that India turned the ‘paradise on earth’ into a virtual hell for its poor natives? Kashmir today is the most heavily militarised zone with almost a million brute trigger happy military personnel unleashing terror on the enslaved population 24/7. What phenomenon had all through these decades been most humiliating and painful was the unyielding indifference and apathy of the free world and the UN as it stood a silent spectator to this gory spectacle of state repression and terrorism.

With the advent of the “Butcher of Gujrat”, things took turn for the worst and the world witnessed the modern era’s worst communal and expansionist regime unleashing tyranny and worst form of state terrorism nonstop, and emboldened by the silence and apathy of the democratic world this wicked expansionist urge ultimately, culminated on August 5, 2019, in the colonization of Kashmir through colonial legislations that stripped the occupied state of its individual historical identity and bifurcated it into two territories to be directly ruled by Delhi as union territories.

And yet the UN and the free civilised world remained tight-lipped and unconcerned which was tantamount to sanctioning this illegitimate Indian annexation and merger of the disputed state with the universally established and recognised principles of equality and justice, and the lofty ideals of freedom, liberty and human rights the casualty.

How hideous and unfair it is that all human values that the civilised world boasted of upholding and championing were sacrificed at the altar of material desires and pursuits. India now is contemptuously smiling at our helplessness as it is gearing to host the upcoming G20 summit this year. And what else one could infer from the reported willingness and consent of the G20 member states to participate in a summit meeting proposed to be held on the soil of the occupied territory of Kashmir other than their complicity in the occupation, oppression and colonization of Kashmir? Were these states, one may ask, ready to condone the mass massacres, carnages, egregious human rights excesses and the unremitting persecution of the poor Kashmiris and lend legitimacy to the August 5 unilateral Indian measures of colonising the territory and its inhabitants?

We make a passionate appeal to the G20 member states not to grant such evil Indian wish, committing treachery against the defenceless subjugated people of the state and your own sublime human values and ideals you claim to uphold and stand for.

And as it was not enough, the conduct of the United Nations, the G20 countries are part of, which unfailingly prides itself in upholding and proclaiming the principle of “equality and self-determination of people’s” as the basis of international peace and its very raison d’etre (Art. 1(2) of its Charter) was to add more pain and agony to our oppressed lives. Let we Kashmiris be very candid and straight forward with this August Institution and the world fraternity and make it plain and clear in unambiguous terms that we won’t ever abandon our legitimate and noble resistance against this colonial occupation and rule of our motherland and warn the world that its criminal silence was a precursor of the worst nightmare for the region and the world at large as Kashmir was a powderkeg and a nuclear flashpoint and if left unaddressed could anytime explode into a cataclysmic conflagration reducing to ashes all fabric of regional and global peace security and trigger a human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

Therefore, we appeal to the UN and the democratic and civilised world to shun their apathy and intervene to resolve this longest unresolved item of the UN agenda to defeat and deny colonial mindsets of tearing the world peace and humanity through any expeditions or invasions upon the universally accepted norms of democracy, self- determination, freedom, liberty, equality and justice that characterize the most celebrated global document , the UN Charter. Kashmir seeks world attention!

Shaikh Yaqoob is senior leader of APHC and  can be reached at : Abufaiq2012@gmail.com