Daily Times

Denouncing India for organizing celebration of its Republic Day in Jammu and Kashmir, Ghulam Nabi Fai, a prominent Kashmiri leader, said Friday that New Delhi has “no legal, moral or constitutional authority” to do so on a territory which is not its integral part.

In a statement issued here, he reminded India and the international community that the 1948 U.N. Security Council resolution called for creating conditions for a plebiscite so that the people of Jammu and Kashmir could decide for themselves whether they wished to be a part of India or join Pakistan.

Dr Fai, Secretary General of the World Kashmir Awareness Forum, an advocacy organization, also said that India’s false claim about Kashmir being its integral part was the prime cause of continued death, destruction, devastation, pain and suffering of the people of Kashmir.

“There are shocking human rights violations, including more than 100,000 killings in the last three decades alone, torture, rape, mutilations, arson, plunder, abductions, arbitrary detentions, and draconian punishment for the exercise of peaceful political dissent: and contempt for international law and binding self-determination resolutions of the United Nations Security Council,” he said.

“India’s war crimes in Kashmir are notorious: Soldiers kill civilians with impunity. Rape and torture are routinely practice but never punished. Indeed, Indian law grants virtual legal immunity to any type of war crime or crime against humanity perpetrated in Kashmir.”

“The only solution to the problem lies in allowing the people of Kashmir to exercise their unrestricted right to self-determination to decide their destiny – a pledge given to them by the world community some 77 years ago,” Fai said.

“If the Kashmir question were resolved, much of the hostility between India and Pakistan would dissolve and the region would not be living on the edge of a nuclear holocaust,” the Kashmiri leader said.’

“Trade between the two countries would flourish, jobs would be created”, he said, adding it would also release Pakistan from a crippling burden.

“Those 900,000 Indian military and paramilitary forces could go home and do something constructive instead of beating up on women and children,” Fai said.

“What intelligent person could not agree with that? The refusal of omission to take a well-considered initiative neither responds to a long-term peace strategy nor answers the demand of the human conscience.”