ISLAMABAD: Adviser to the Prime Minister on Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan Qamar Zaman Kaira on Wednesday said that all the political parties in the country were united on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir regardless of their political differences.
He was speaking at a news conference along with leaders of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), AJK chapter, and Legal Forum for Kashmir (LFK) after launch of a report — “Colonial Diary” – that highlights the grave situation in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) in the wake of Indian atrocities there.
Kaira reiterated Pakistan’s firm resolve of moral, political, and diplomatic support to the people of IIOJK in their just struggle for freedom.
He said the government had raised the Kashmir issue on every international forum and that was an issue on which all political parties had always been united regardless of their political differences.
On the occasion, “Colonial Diary”, a repository of settler colonial diktats in IIOJK was launched on Wednesday to appraise the international community about Indian machinations political, legal, and economic subjugation of Kashmiris which amounts to war crimes under international law.
The report has been compiled by the team of LFK which includes around 220 legislations, administrative changes, orders, notifications, and press releases by the Indian State in the last three years, from August 2019 to August 2022) after the abrogation of Article 370.
The report includes various laws, articles, and bills on different issues and with diverse themes including land acquirement for military purposes, the Roshini Act, Termination of government employees under 311 (2) (c), Waqf properties, Pandit Migration, Jammu Kashmir Reorganization Act (2019), Domicile Certificate, Delimitation Commission etc.
On August 05, 2019, it pointed out that the Indian Parliament passed the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 containing provisions to reconstitute the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories (UTs) called Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh, and became effective on 31 October 2019. The Reorganization Act consists of 103 clauses, extends 106 central laws to the UTs, repeals 153 state laws, and abolishes the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Council.
Kashmiri lawmakers believe that it is a pathway paved for replicating the Israeli model of occupation and colonisation of the West Bank in Kashmir towards dis-empowerment and dispossession of the locals, particularly Kashmiri Muslims, to exercise hegemonic control through new settlers.
It further stated that the Narendra Modi-led BJP government is adamant to engineer the demography of Kashmir Valley which has around 97 percent Muslim population. The long-term objectives include abolishing the Muslim identity of the state; manipulating the results of the plebiscite in favour of India. Short-term objectives include inflicting damages to the local economy; and to deprive the Kashmiris of all basic human rights and crush the indigenous voice for freedom from Indian occupation.
It added that the RSS-backed BJP government delimited the Legislative Assembly electoral constituencies on the basis of geography instead of the population in order to allocate more seats to Hindu-dominant areas of Jammu, further oppressing Kashmiri Muslims by minimizing their political representation.
Accordingly, 43 seats were reserved for Jammu and 47 for Kashmir, whereas, population-wise there should be 51 constituencies for Kashmir (6.8 million population) and 39 for Jammu (5.3 million population). This delimitation will pave the way for a Hindu CM in a Muslim-majority region.
Post-August 5, 2019, the Indian government introduced many new laws and amended several others to facilitate the issuance of domicile and land-owning rights to non-Kashmiris, mostly Hindus. Until June 2022, 4 million such certificates have been issued, making it very clear how India is wantonly altering the demography of Kashmir, it added.
It added that the new laws also allow the lands acquired by the government for industrial or commercial purposes to be disposed of or sold to any Indian. “These also authorise the Indian occupying forces to declare any area as “strategic” for operational and training purposes. This is a form of land-grabbing as the Indian occupying forces are already occupying thousands of hectares of land in the occupied region,” it added.
Those who were present on the occasion included Mehmood Ahmad Saghar, convener All Parties Hurriyat Conference, Sheikh Abdul Mateen, general secretary APHC and Advocate Nasir Qadri, executive director LFK, besides Qamar Zaman Kaira.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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