Right Of Self Determination For the People Of Kashmir

NPR’s Julie McCarthy was in Kashmir earlier in September and reported on how different the unrest seems now compared to previous years. “First of all, there’s this unprecedented kind of force being used. There’s these high-velocity pellet shotguns for crowd control. And it’s left thousands of people riddled with pellet injuries. And a lot of them have damaged eyesight. And some demonstrators have thrown stones, attacked police stations and government buildings. And, unusually, this started in rural areas. And it has spread throughout the Kashmir Valley. And it’s lasted over 60 days. That’s also unusual.”

Perhaps it’s not enough to point out that the champion of this latest uprising, a person who was slain in a fashion frequently called “extrajudicial” by others in the press, and whose killing was the primary provocation for the current uprising, was a self-declared militant who had used social media to resist the Indian occupation. He was someone who had become a symbol of the true spirit of resistance in the hearts of all Kashmiris.

This flood was the first in history, in the living memory of Kashmir.  More than 450 people are dead, and more than $1bn in destruction has been estimated.  The actual magnitude of the total destruction, the number of dead and the people who are missing may not be known for some time. Kashmir Valley was cut off from the rest of the world for days.  Thousands of villages have been submerged, including the capitol city of Srinagar. Hundreds of thousands of people particularly in the rural areas still remain trapped without any outside help or rescue and relief. There has been a total breakdown in communication with no telephone contact of the people with their loved ones  Boats were not available.  People had to stand on their rooftops waiting for someone to rescue them.

Washington, D.C. July 13, 2014. The Kashmiri Americans join the worldwide Kashmiri community to observe “Martyr’s Day”, in memory of 22 Kashmiris killed by Dogra troops on this day in 1931. The ‘Martyrs Day’ memorializes all those innocent victims, nearly 100,000, “who have been forcibly silenced by the occupation forces that erupted two and half decades ago,” said Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Secretary General of the World Kashmir Awareness.

Fai expressed concern over the on going tragic situation in Kashmir because all available evidence testifies that human rights violations are systematic, deliberate, and officially sanctioned. India has given its forces powers to shoot to kill and the license to abuse the people in whatever ways they like in order to suppress the popular movement for basic human rights and self-determination.

He emphasized, ‘India trembles at any attempt to resolve the Kashmir crisis because she is frightened by its outcome.’ When a former Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, was questioned as to why India would never hold a free self-determination election in Kashmir, he confessed that all of India’s political leaders knew it would lose. And would 700,000 soldiers be needed in Kashmir if the main opponents to India’s occupation were but a handful of outside “extremists”? The question answers itself.

Dr. Muhammad Ayyub Thakur, the first of four children, was born in 1948 in Pudsoo village near Shopian, in the Pulwama district of Kashmir. It was 1973 when I first heard that Dr….