ISLAMABAD: Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan chief Sirajul Haq has warned the government against making any change in the constitutional status of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan, saying the steps could prove fatal for the freedom movement in Indian occupied Kashmir (IoK).

"Any move by Islamabad to change the status of AJK and GB through constitutional amendment will be tantamount to backstabbing Kashmiris and facilitating New Delhi's plan to change the demography of the held valley," he said, while addressing the oath taking ceremony of the JI AJK chapter emir, Dr Khalid Mahmood Khan, in Islamabad.

Sirajul Haq vowed that the people of Pakistan and the JI would never allow rulers to damage the Kashmir freedom movement at any cost. He said the people of Pakistan loved the armed forces because they saw the army as protector of both the country's boundaries and Kashmiris. He, however, regretted that no bold step was taken by the rulers so far to challenge the Indian designs for the region.

He said the BJP regime was bent upon turning the majority of Kashmiri Muslims into a minority in the valley. He said thousands of Kashmiri youth was sent to jails, countless were missing as worst crimes against humanity continued in the area after the abrogation of status of Kashmir by India.

The international community, he said, was silent, and Pakistani rulers had also done nothing for the jugular vein of the country following India's August 5 move. The people of the AJK and the IOK were looking towards Pakistan for help, he said, highlighting the need for devising a joint strategy for freedom of Kashmir freedom from Indian yoke.

JI leaders Abdur Rasheed Turabi, Ijaz Afzal, Raja Fazal, and others also spoke on the occasion and said that the people of Kashmir would continue their struggle against Indian occupation. They said they had firm belief that the sun of freedom would soon rise on Indian occupied Kashmir.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020