Daily Times

Denouncing India’s stage-managed visit of a group of New Delhi-based envoys to Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), AJK President Sardar Masood Khan said that Kashmir is burning and India has vainly tried to project an image of normalcy in the territory.

“The visit is a farce because the envoys know the bitter truth about the occupied valley. They went there out of sheer courtesy. Their presence in selected and ‘sanitised locations’ of Srinagar will not underwrite the occupation authority’s crime against humanity being committed with impunity in the territory,” said Masood Khan in a statement issued on Thursday.

The president said that in the past such disingenuous public relations exercises have failed to gain currency for India’s false narrative on Kashmir. This visit too is a flop”, he said and added that no access was given to common Kashmiris to meet the visiting envoys.

“It was totally stage-managed event. Sufferers barricaded and silenced. Envoys are not stupid; they knew what was being hidden under a thick pall of tyranny,” he said.

“Empty streets, shuttered shops, boarded up wounds of a captive people, a territory under siege, parents waiting for their sons’ dead bodies- that’s all the “normalcy” the occupation authorities showed to the envoys. They witnessed silence of lurking death,” Khan said.

If India is so confident, the AJK President said, why it doesn’t receive a delegation of the Human Rights Council as recommended by the High Commissioner of the UN Human Rights Council in its reports of 2018 and 2019.

Earlier in an interview to a national English periodical, the AJK president highlighted the enormity of the crisis in Kashmir and said that some 14 million people of Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir have been totally disenfranchised and they are at the mercy of their captors.

The occupiers’ hope that the hostage population would at least develop Stockholm Syndrome is not materializing to their utter frustration. Hence, their recipe is more brutal oppression.

Equating the current Indian rulers with the rulers of Nazi Germany, President Masood said that in the last century, Adolf Hitler thought that he was above the law. He introduced Nuremberg Laws to target, persecute, expel and kill Jews, Poles and Romanis. He (Hitler) set up concentration camps to eliminate them.

The BJP-RSS regime in India is replicating that vicious model in IIOJ&K and India itself, and threatens to export it to its neighbourhood to establish Hindu supremacy in South Asia and beyond, he said and maintained that the world is busy appeasing India.

He said some powers are underwriting India’s crimes by not calling out the regime or by empowering India by making it their preferred destination for investments and trade.

But unfortunately, the authors and custodians of the world, order have started either backtracking from their commitments to protect human rights or soft-pedalling them because of political expediency leading to glaring double standards, President Masood regretted.