The best option for making Kashmir a land of peace and prosperity is simply to give the people of Kashmir an opportunity to decide their own destiny.
by Ali Sukhanver in Islamabad
According to the India Today, the total population of the Kashmir valley is somewhere around 7 million with 97 per cent Muslim majority. Official figures say that in the last three decades about 50,000 Muslims have been killed in the conflict between the security forces and the civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of Indian troops and armed police have been deployed to quell an uprising against New Delhi’s rule. In such a horrible situation, the BJP government is planning to change the demography of the Kashmir valley. Senior BJP leader Ram Madhav said in a recent statement that his Party is committed to helping bring back some of the estimated 200,000-300,000 Hindus to the Kashmir valley. He further said that his Party is seriously working on a plan to build secured camps to resettle scores of Hindus in the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley. Reports say that in the aftermath of an armed revolt that began in 1989, more than three million Hindus had allegedly fled the Kashmir Valley. The Modi government is planning to bring them back.
In short instead of providing ease and comfort and confidence to the people of Kashmir, the Modi government is trying to win the situation by changing the demography of the region. The BJP government is misguided by the notion that by increasing the number of Hindu population in the valley, it would succeed in changing the Muslim majority into minority. But the fact of the matter is altogether different. Any effort of changing the demography of the Kashmir valley would do nothing but invite more blood-shed and more unrest in the region. The result of this futile result could never be positively fruitful. It would simply heighten tension in the already troubled Kashmir region.
The best option for making Kashmir a land of peace and prosperity is simply to give the people of Kashmir an opportunity to decide their own destiny. For the last many decades, the Hindus and the Muslims are living peacefully in the region; the warlike situation there is not between the Hindus and the Muslims, it is between the Indian security forces and the people of Kashmir. Pushing the region into a new religious divide would simply intensify the already blazing fire and increase the social distances among the different communities living there. This attempt would also be counted as another type of atrocity against the people of Kashmir.
It is a fact, though not accepted, but known to everyone that life is no doubt a pathetic story of pains and miseries for the unfortunate people living in the Indian Illegally Occupied valley of Kashmir. The most pathetic fact with reference to this reality is that the Indian security forces are using rape as a tool and a weapon against the innocent people. Last year in September, the Aljazeera published a detailed report on the atrocities done by the Indian troops in the Indian Occupied Kashmir. The report included statements of different ‘rape-affected’ families. Sixty years old Abdul Ghani Dar’s statement was also a part of that report. He is a resident of village Marhang. He said the security personnel raided his house for seven times and luckily all those times he was alerted by the local people about expected raid of the security personnel and fortunately he succeeded in sending her daughter to another location before their arrival. “They say they’ve come to check on my son”, Dar said with tears in his eyes, “I know they come looking for my daughter.”
It is the most common complaint of most of the people in the Indian Occupied Kashmir that the Indian soldiers so many times threaten them that they would take away their girls forcibly and ‘marry’ them. A rise in this cruel approach of the Indian security personnel is being noticed particularly after the 5th August 2019 when Modi government revoked Articles 370 and 35-A. Nazir Ahmed Bhat, a resident of the village Arihal said talking to the media, “They (the security forces) are marauding our homes and hearths like a victorious army. They are now behaving as if they have a right over our lives, property and honour.” Certainly the credit of making things so horrible goes only and only to the BJP government.
According to the recent details exposed by the media, the Indian security forces have introduced a new and novel technique of frightening the people of the valley. Whenever the Indian soldiers riding a military jeep find a motor-biker moving alone along some road, they hit him hard from behind and pose as it was done accidentally. Usually in such incidents the riders get serious injuries and have to bear the loss of their motor-bikes too. Avoiding confrontation with the security personnel, people don’t report such incidents to the police. The number of such incidents is increasing rapidly. The only motive behind this cowardly action is nothing but to generate fear and fright among the people of the Kashmir valley. It is a sheer misconception of the Indian security forces that by adding more fear to the lives of the Kashmiri people, they could stop the Kashmiris from raising their voices against Indian atrocities in the valley. Such actions are not adding fear; they are simply generating more hatred and more disgust in the hearts of the Kashmiri people against the Indian security forces.
Situation in the Indian Occupied Kashmir is getting worse and worse with every new day. Media reports say that thousands of Kashmiri people are in the illegal custody of the Indian security forces. Most are being held without charges under what is called preventive detention. The prison are over-filled with prominent businessmen, intellectuals, teachers, students and democratically elected representatives. What would be the end of this game of cruelty played in the name of security and when would the innocent people behind the bars be released; no one has any answer to these questions. World’s brutal indifference to the cruelties faced by the people of Kashmir is nothing but a slap on the face of humanity.
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