India faced defeat after local body polls’ boycott in Kashmir: JKLF’s chairman

ISLAMABAD: Chairman of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), Muhammad Yasin Malik has said that India faced ultimate defeat after people of Kashmir boycotted en masse the recently-concluded urban local body elections in Indian occupied Kashmir.

According to Kashmir Media Service, Muhammad Yasin Malik addressing a Seerat Conference at Hyderpora in Srinagar said New Delhi also got exposed at the international level where it would sell people’s participation in polls as referendum in its favour.

He said people in cantonment areas people can’t even breath or drink water without army’s permission. He said, “In these areas, people’s every affair is managed by the army”. “But we must note that people in Ganderbal and Khonmoh areas stayed away on November 17,” he added.

Lashing out at pro-India political parties for hiring educated turncoats to run a sustained campaign against the Kashmir struggle on social media, Yasin Malik said: “Now an impression is being created that National Conference is better than PDP and BJP is the alternative to PDP. There is an all-out campaign on the social media by people hired by these parties who, in a bid to damage the Kashmir struggle, try to create an atmosphere for next assembly elections,” Malik said.

He said same was done in 2014 assembly polls when then PDP leaders told people in rallies that they should vote against RSS and BJP. “This party or that party, it hardly matters for us. Aren’t all these parties responsible for the oppression being unleashed by forces across Kashmir?” he asked.

He said Kashmiri people have understood the “sole motive of all pro-India parties” and “will no more come under their deception and fraud.” “People of Kashmir are well aware of how the previous elections in Kashmir were sold before the international community. People clearly remember how a former Prime Minister of India (late AtalBihari Vajpayee) claimed that by holding successful elections in Kashmir in 2002, he had won a democratic war,” Malik said.

The JKLF chief expressed anguish over shifting of 23 Kashmir prisoners from Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu to Haryana jails on November 17. All of them have been slapped with draconian Public Safety Act, he deplored.

He said there is no change in New Delhi’s Kashmir policy as it continues to follow military might. He said almost entire resistance leadership is in prisons including the women resistance leader, Aasiya Andrabi and her two aides. “Fake charges were framed against these leaders to prolong their confinement,” he said.

Yasin Malik said New Delhi’s policy is clear and its best example can be seen in southern Kashmir, where, under the garb of cordon and search operations, youth are killed on a daily basis. He said people of all ages are thrashed, maimed and arrested while properties are vandalised.