Daily Times

Since August 5, the Muslim-dominated Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is in heavy lockdown. Schools and offices are closed. Businesses are shut down. Communication is cut off. A strict curfew is imposed, causing people to starve. Children and adults are confined at homes; medicines are scarce and people from across the sections of the society, including students, academics, activists, lawyers, businessmen, political leaders, and elected representatives, have been detained.

If the oppressed people come out in search of food and drugs to survive; milk to feed their infants and demand their globally-mandated human rights, they are shot with pellets in the eyes and across their bodies. They are greeted with sheer humiliation and an intense military clampdown to orientate them with an Indian tutorial of curbing “terrorism.”

These horrid facts have been reported by independent international media journalists, media organisations and humans rights activists from Kashmir after the ruling BJP Indian administration starkly violated 1972’s Shimla Agreement with Pakistan. It unilaterally stripped the valley’s autonomy by degrading and splitting the disputed region into two union territories: J&K and Ladakh.

The Indian ministry of external affairs has a different take on the boiling conditions in its controlled part of Kashmir. It said the local government was maintaining law and order with maturity while reports of a shortage of life-saving drugs in hospitals were false. Not a single life had been lost nor a single bullet had been fired, it maintained.

AFSPA and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) have led to destitution, infringement of human rights, medical lethargy and misrepresentation of the facts in the region

The worsening ground conditions in the “heavens on the earth” outrightly defy the whacky Indian claims while the existence of more than 700,000 military troops in J&K and the deployment of additional tens of thousands paramilitary forces additionally refute the recent assertions.

For decades, New Delhi has been asserting that Kashmir is an integral part of India. The ongoing austere actions and the massive military deployment clearly tell that it would “annexe” Kashmir into the Republic of India by overriding all international humanitarian laws.

In a bid to discredit and demean the local population, the central government of India had enacted the Public Safety Act (PSA) in J&K, under which more than 2,000 people have been arrested since August 5. The controversial legal provision empowers the local administration to book any person without charge and trial for up to two years.

Authorities previously denied an exact number of detainees. They later confirmed that there were only a “few preventive detentions” of over 100 people, including politicians, activists, and academics, immediately after the abrogation of Article 370.

But the figures provided by a local magistrate were shocking. On the condition of anonymity, he told AFP that as many 4,000 people had been arrested. “Most of them were flown out of Kashmir because prisons here have run out of capacity.” A police officer described the numbers as high as 6,000 and ratified the fact that the people taken in custody were “flown out of here in military aircraft.”

As the whereabouts of thousands of Kashmiris detainees are unknown, the allegations of enforced disappearances proliferate and are tantamount to the excessive use of force in Kashmir at a time when the world marked the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on August 30.

PSA and enforces disappearances are supported by vile impunity legislation, Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). This provides Indian soldiers with the tools to forcefully control vast swathes of Kashmir. The draconian law, alongside the National Register of Citizens (NRC), has led to destitution, infringement of human rights, medical lethargy, and misrepresentation of the facts in the region.

AFSPA grants enormous powers to Indian armed forces, such as shoot to kill, arrest anybody without a warrant, and detain local people without any specific time threshold. As the monstrous law forbids the prosecution of soldiers without formal approval from central government – which is rarely granted – Indian army routinely tortures and maltreats Kashmiris during interrogation in the army barracks.

Admitting the atrocious nature of the AFSPA, Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh had vowed to the international community to repeal the Act in 2004. Disbanding of the statute has become one of the major demands of the Kashmiris and the leading opposition parties in India but the Indian army and the ruling BJP party have scrubbed all democratic efforts to rescind the law.

While Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights presses to respect the right of freedom of opinion without interference, the authoritarian Indian regime continues to protect contentious PSA, enforced disappearances, and AFSPA. It allows its military to freely sustain an inhumane crackdown on freedom of expression; inflict restrictions on access to information and deny the right of peaceful protests to Kashmiri people.

The writer is a Pakistan-based commentator and opinion contributor. He writes on geopolitical issues and regional conflicts