Kashmiri Americans Observed July 13th As the Martyrs Day: Dr. Fai

Washington, D.C. June 29, 2012. “Any Kashmir solution that fails to command the consensus of the 17 million people of Jammu & Kashmir is doomed to shipwreck moments after launching. Indeed, any process that ignores the wishes of the people of Kashmir will not only prove to be an exercise in futility but can also cause incalculable human and political damage. Thus, it makes no sense to negotiate over their heads. The best that could result from these meaningless negotiations would be sound and fury signifying nothing, as at Tashkent, Simla, Lahore and elsewhere,” said Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai at a reception held in his honor in Darnestown, Maryland.

Dr. Fai thanked the members of the Kashmiri American community for becoming instrumental in highlighting the issue of Kashmir not only in Washington, D. C. but in New York City as well. He told his well-wishers that the people of the Indian Occupied Kashmir remain indebted to them for their relentless and consistent advocacy for the just cause of Kasshmir.

One of the darkest chapters of Indian judicial partiality was left hanging half closed and banging in the wind when Major Avtar Singh, the killer of internationally known human rights activist and Chairman of Kashmir Commission of Jurists, Advocate Jalil Andrabi, was found dead after he killed his wife and two children, and finally himself this past Saturday morning, June 9, 2012, in Selma, California. Avtar Singh, a fugitive from justice, who lived in the hot dry central California community, a suburb of Fresno, was clearly haunted by his past, a past that had seen the blood spilled of more than one man by his own hands. He had killed four others to hide the murder of Andrabi, and now he had killed his own family.  

In killing Jalil Andrabi, Avtar Singh certainly did not act on his own volition. He was only a major.   His act was no doubt a response to orders from above and occurred in a longstanding climate of impunity that the Indian army enjoys in Kashmir.   The Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives any Indian soldier the right in Kashmir to take a Kashmiri’s life under any circumstance, has enabled such a climate for decades.  And Jalil Andrabi had become a hated, despised man by the Army, a man dangerous to the status quo of continued murder and torture that had been taking place in Kashmir’s jails, interrogation centers and detention facilities for many years.  

When the Kashmir dispute erupted in 1947-1948, the world powers championed the stand that the future status of Kashmir must be ascertained in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the people of…

Be Back Soon

Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai

Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Saying goodbye is sometimes easy but sometimes a very difficult thing to do, particularly when I am saying goodbye, though temporarily, to freedom and to a mission that I have given my life to. But the real goodbye is not the words that I have formed in my head because there are none that express how I really feel. The goodbye is in a slowly swelling sense of absence of all the people and places and efforts I have put my heart into that has become like a flower near a pond that may dry up for lack of rain. Its sustenance is going away. The absence is the letting go of all the things that I embrace. How does one let go of love? How does one let go of one’s heart, one’s very life? A life is not merely held within one’s blood circulating in the body or in the breath that one takes. It is so much more in all the people that I have lived for and my beloved country of origin, Kashmir – the paradise on earth.

One thing is very clear. The statement issued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif representing some kind of agreement at the Russian city of Ufa on July 10, 2015 seems on its face to be conspicuously duplicitous. One wonders if Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had some subordinate prepare it, trusting him to convey the intent, but never actually read what was published before it was published.

Here’s the thing. There are two distinct parts to the Ufa agreement as it is explicitly written. First, It is prefaced with the general policy statement:

They agreed that India and Pakistan have a collective responsibility to ensure peace and promote development. To do so, they are prepared to discuss all outstanding issues.
Both leaders condemned terrorism in all its forms and agreed to cooperate with each other to eliminate this menace from South Asia.

“they are prepared to discuss all outstanding issues.”

The purpose of this paper is to provide you with a plan to mount an educational and  awareness campaign in support of self-determination in Jammu & Kashmir and to enlist the support of foreign embassies in your country, NGO’s (both international and national) and media (both international and national)  to persuade India and Pakistan to include Kashmiri leadership in any future dialogue that will lead to the settlement of the Kashmir dispute.