It’s not about warmongering. It’s about taking a principled stand. India has played its trump card. Now it’s our turn to spring a surprise and cut the ground from under India’s feet. As it is, our declared policy on India’s scrapping of Article 370 is to internationalise the issue to the best of our abilities and efforts and to defend our borders, that’s it. We are told that our hands are tied. We are told that we have too much on our plates to take care of. We are told that the world has largely thrown its weight behind India and we are all alone except for our all-weather friend China backing us, which has helped us knock on the doors of the UN Security Council to call its meeting on the Kashmir issue. The whole Kashmir has been turned into the biggest cage of the world with drones flying over the Kashmiri houses; carrying out 24/7 surveillance and troops on the ground conducting a crippling curfew. The latest article, “The Silence is the Loudest Sound,” in the New York Times by Arundhati Roy heaps opprobrium on India for oppressing Kashmiris and doing away with Articles 370 and 35-A. She has been writing articles defending Kashmiris’ rights and condemning India. Indeed, she is lion-hearted. India is containing a pressure cooker of pent-up Kashmiri aggression, which can explode any time soon into a conflagration so huge that it might take India with it. It is fanning the flames of liberation. Kashmiris are looking to us for help and we are attaching expectations to the international world, shutting our eyes to the crucial fact that the world, in the last 72 years, had not largely responded positively when it came to India’s oppression of Kashmiris and its illegal occupation of Kashmir. The world largely acts as a silent spectator. Lamentable as it is, it seems that we are paying lip service to our Kashmiri brothers, who have been cut off from the outside world and are without food, water and medicines for days at a stretch. They have been shot dead. They have been blinded and maimed by pellet guns. They spent their Eid locked in their homes, deprived of the joy, thereof. What is appreciable is that our prime minister did spend Pakistan’s Independence Day in Azad Kashmir. While addressing Azad Kashmir’s Assembly, he said that we will internationalise the issue and retaliate with a bigger force. While expressing these remarks, his body language was disappointing. He spoke these words casually. There was no preparation beforehand. He should have at least spoken like a statesman to drive his point home more forcefully. It would have been his finest hour, had he made himself mentally prepared to make a speech like Winston S. Churchill. One is reminded of a famous speech that Churchill made on June 4, 1940, to the House of Commons. An excerpt there from is worth quoting: “… we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…” When the energies of a prime minister are focused on throwing the political rivals behind the bars, how can one expect him to unite the nation? Needless to say, the United Kingdom was facing worst of circumstances at the time of the Second World War, as opposed to Pakistan right now. Its economy was in dire straits. Its cities were bombed out. However, when it comes to Imran Khan, he manifestly lacks the charisma, spine and moral fibre expected of a leader to live up to this kind of leadership challenge. Speeches by national leaders either boost up the courage of people of a country or demoralise them. They either inject despondency into a nation or inject confidence into it. We can’t leave Kashmiris in the lurch to let them fend for themselves. It is worth bearing in view that Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah ordered to send the troops into Jammu and Kashmir when Pakistani troops were not in a large number and when British Army Chief advised against it. Now that we have a battle-hardened gargantuan army with a nuclear bomb, can’t we even look the enemy in the eye and say aloud, “Enough is enough?” Wars are not fought with numbers. They are fought with conviction, bravery, courage and above all, with unity. When the energies of a prime minister are focused on throwing the political rivals behind the bars, how can one expect him to unite the nation? He should sink all the differences with his arch-foes, take them into confidence and take a principled stand against India over Kashmir’s intractable issue. Otherwise, he will be relegated to a mere footnote in history. We are facing a double-faced extremist butcher, Modi, who can go to any length to translate his dream of Hindutva and Akhund Bharat into reality. God forbid if he orders for a mass massacre of Kashmiris. If even then, we remain sitting on the fence, clamouring for international help, we would be condemned by history. The UN jumped into the fray and sprang into action when it came to liberating East Timor and South Sudan. The UN Security Council passed a resolution No 1996 on July 8, 2011, welcoming South Sudan’s independence from Sudan. Interestingly enough, all 15 countries voted for it and no one abstained or voted against the resolution. When it comes to East Timor, UN rallied to its side to help it accomplish independence from Indonesia. It organised the referendum in 1999. Curiously enough, it was Jamsheed Marker, the late Pakistani diplomat, who brought his diplomatic wizardry into play to help organise a referendum in East Timor, under the auspices of UN. Be that as it may, when it comes to the issues of Kashmir and Palestine, UN ducks and sidesteps them. They say, God Helps those, who help themselves. Is it not the high time, we stopped looking elsewhere for help? The world is callous, and it will remain so, given its long criminal silence about Palestine and Kashmir. We should wake up and smell the coffee. We should stop complaining and help ourselves. We should stop letting India make Kashmir another Palestine. The time to act is now. The writer is a practising lawyer and a columnist based in Lahore