AJK President declares time ripe for transition from statements to actions on Kashmir

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MIRPUR [AJK]: Dec 05 (APP): Azad Jammu and Kashmir President Sardar Masood Khan has declared that as the international community has become familiar with the story of Jammu and Kashmir, it is high time for transition from supportive statements to actions to decisions.

“We will have to take our destiny in our own hands and decide our political future according to our free will,” he unequivocally stated.

He was interacting with a huge gathering of students at Queen Mary University (QMU) at an event organized by the Pakistan Society QMU in London on Thursday, says an official statement released to media Thursday evening.

While inviting attention toward grave human rights situation in Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, the AJK president said that the egregious human rights violations in the held territory need to be halted.

“The unresolved Kashmir issue has put the peace and security of South Asia at stake,” he said and argued that the resolution of the Kashmir dispute is the responsibility of the entire global community.

He said that Indian actions on August 5 and October 31 were all illegal and unlawful. India, he said, once again invaded Jammu and Kashmir, reoccupied it, and had annexed it, and now it has bifurcated the territory in a unilateral move.

The entire population is being asphyxiated and brutalized, and the Kashmiri people have been besieged and made prisoners in their own homes. Particularly, the women are objectified, he added.

Sardar Masood Khan asserted that the Kashmiri people have been denied their basic and inalienable right to self-determination.

He said that special rights of the Kashmiri people to employment, education and possession of property have now been usurped and they have been told that their land now belongs to the occupiers and the ground has been to settle non-Kashmiri Hindus from all over India to settle in IOJK.

The AJK President said that in order to divert attention from these illegal actions, India was beating war drums further claiming to attack Azad Kashmir and erase Pakistan from the face of the earth with the use of nuclear weapons.

This is not all; he said adding that India has disenfranchised the Muslim population in India. This radical Hindutva policy of alienation and deprivation is fuelled by hatred, xenophobia and extremist Hindu religious supremacy.

He said that despite the population imprisoned, the economy destroyed and thousands of innocent Kashmiris incarcerated; India continues to project an image of normalcy.

As India continues to pursue its scorched earth policy, India naively claims that these steps were taken to usher in a new era of development and to fight the terrorism existing in IOJK, all the while playing the victim card.

India, he said, thinks that it can get away with this kind of carnage because of its strategic and economic linkages with major world powers.

This is nothing short of exceptionalism.

Authorities condemned for foiling peace march in Jammu

President Masood Khan said that India was attempting to recast the story of Jammu and Kashmir but thankfully this false narrative of theirs has been rejected by the international media and world parliaments – British Parliament, French Parliament, European Parliament and the US Congress – who have held hearings and testimonies issued reports on the factual position of Kashmir. “The taboo of not speaking against India has been broken and all these testimonies and hearings have given a damning verdict that India is guilty,” he maintained.

He appealed to his audience to actively step up to the plate and save the people of Jammu and Kashmir and not sit idly by as this carnage destroys not only the people of IOJK but the whole world. “We the people of Kashmir and Pakistan want a peaceful and progressive South Asia and we must have inclusive dialogues on Kashmir and in this academic environment conduct simulation exercises in this regard,” he said, and advised the students to invest in political processes and avert the impeding war being imposed by India.

The state president said that India continues to stoke the flames of war and there is no denying that this would in turn engulf India itself.

He said that we must stop this drift towards war and find recourse through peaceful and diplomatic means.

The global political leadership and opinion leaders must come forward to save the people of Jammu and Kashmir from genocide.

Other speakers at the event including Dr. Asma Shakir Khawaja and Ms. Shaista Safi spoke extensively on the grave human rights situation IOJK and how the lives of families have been traumatized due to the Indian occupation.

They said that innocent Kashmiris are under surveillance and are constantly subjected to torture.

Despite all this, he went on to say that the brave people of Kashmir are still struggling and will continue to fight the repression imposed on them. They stressed upon developing a strong narrative on Kashmir.

Students of Pakistan Society of QMU presented touching poetry during the event in which they depicted the situation in Jammu and Kashmir and the atrocities taking place there.

 

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