Senior APHC leader Nayeem Ahmed Khan while taking strong exception to the Indian authorities’ recent move to dismiss five Kashmiri employees has said that the authoritarian move was part of India’s settler colonialism policy to strangulate Kashmiris economically and deprive them of their livelihoods. In a message issued from Tihar Jail on Saturday the incarcerated Hurriyat leader said, “Economic Strangulation of Kashmiris has since long been a part of India’s systematic settler colonialism campaign in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir that includes illegal confiscations, dispossession, forced evictions, demolition of the civilian properties and disempowering indigenous people, said a reliable source on Thursday. He said that this vicious campaign aimed at marginalizing the majority community in Kashmir has gained momentum since the Modi government abrogated article 370 and 35 A on 5th August 2019”. Since then, Khan said, dozens of Kashmiris have been dismissed from their jobs on trumped-up charges while on the other hand the apartheid regime has opened flood-gates of employment for non-state subjects. He said that deliberate attempt to suspend Kashmiri govt employees from their rightful jobs was a dangerous game plan to minimize the role of Kashmiris in the civil administration. Terming it as a deep-rooted conspiracy against indigenous population, he said, “Settler-colonialism drive has been initiated under the garb of the newly introduced domicile law to replace the indigenous population with a new society of settlers”. The redefinition of the law, he said, had formally paved a way for outsiders to get settled in the state permanently besides enabling them to be the claimants of the already existing jobs in Jammu & Kashmir, where unemployment rate is double than in any other Indian states. Urging world human rights organisations to take effective notice of the matter, Nayeem Khan said that the amendments made to the state’s domicile and other laws were meant to push forward and implement the right wing Hindu extremist parties’ agenda of effecting demographic change and disempowering the people of the occupied territory”.