BanglaBhoot
RETIRED TTA
- Joined
- Apr 8, 2007
- Messages
- 8,839
- Reaction score
- 5
- Country
- Location
Tensions heightened when fanatic Hindu mobs imposed an economic blockade on the Jammu- Srinagar National Highway with Kashmiri Muslim truck drivers targeted. Indian Punjab, tellingly, followed suit, according to a BBC report, to once again expose the great myth of Indian secularism. Be part of the great developments taking place in Indian-occupied Kashmir in August 2008. India showed its ugly face to the world this month, when Indian settlers and outsiders tried to impose an economic blockade on Srinagar. While we are busy in Pakistan in our political instability created by the ruling coalition, Kashmir is in the middle of change. This is the time for Pakistanis to pay attention and support the Kashmiris against Indian brutality. Read this simple and fascinating story of the coming change.
By Abbas Jafari
Friday, 15 August 2008.
Ahmed Quraishi-Pakistan/Middle East politics, Iraq war, lebanon war, India Pakistan relations
SRINAGAR, PakistanIt started end of May and has built steadily ever since: the resistance to the Indian occupation of Jammu & Kashmir.
The movement began when the state government agreed to grant 40 hectares of forest land to the Amarnath Cave Shrine Board as the rest and recuperation area for Hindu pilgrimage to the cave. What followed is a general strike and students' protests against the plan throughout the Muslim-majority state and persuaded the state government to take a stand, fearing this was another ploy by the Indian government to change the demography of the disputed state from Muslim to Hindu.
This prompted Hindu retribution and violent clashes were reported between Muslims, Hindus, police and the Hindu protestors in Jammu, with more troops having to be called in for a curfew to be imposed. Reports of assaults on Muslims poured in, along with Muslim homes being set ablaze.
Shutdowns followed across the entire Kashmir Valley called by a freedom leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, in an expression of solidarity with the Muslims in Jammu. Geelani noted that the administration had failed to protect the lives and properties of the Muslims in Jummu with Hindus on the rampage and matters began to spiral out of control.
Tensions heightened when fanatic Hindu mobs imposed an economic blockade on the Jummu- Srinagar National Highway with Kashmiri Muslim truck drivers targeted. Indian Punjab, tellingly, followed suit, according to a BBC report, to once again expose the great myth of Indian secularism.
Another BBC report from Srinagar had Muslim truck drivers refusing to travel on that road, fearful for their lives. The BBC Srinagar correspondent reported that fruit exports worth millions of dollars perished, as a consequence, with stocks of food grain, fuel and other needed supplies rapidly running out.
Just before retaliatory violence reached fever-pitch, a two-day International Kashmir Peace Conference in Washington (July 08) is reported to have called for "the establishment of an independent and credible
investigative commission to probe human rights abuses". This call was reinforced when Z.G. Muhammad, the acclaimed author of 'The Cindering Chinars' and 'Kashmir in War and Diplomacy, quoted the venerated Mr.
Yusuf Buch enunciating at the conference: "In Kashmir, campaigns of murderous cruelty have been sustained for decades; when the population gets tired of militant insurgency, the repression seems to subside but when an act of police or paramilitary savagery is protested, the orgy of murder and rape is re-enacted.
Clearly aware of this, India's prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, turned to Hindu nationalist leader of the opposition L.K. Advani and called for an all-party conference to resolve the issue. But the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) represented by Mr. Advani, was said to have been much more inclined towards guarding the interests of the
Amarnath Sangharsh Samati (***), the spear-head of the Jammu agitation. The *** reportedly was not prepared to accept anything short of the allocation of the 40 acres of land to the Amarnath Shrine Board which is based in New Delhi!
Subsequently, an 18-member cross-party parliamentary delegation was dispatched to Jammu and Srinagar for a solution to draw the major concession from some of the moderates in Kashmir's All Parties Huriayat Conference, of their having no objection to the Hindu demand for a separate state in contiguous areas where Hindus constituted the majority. These areas were identified as Jammu, Kathua, Samaba, Udhampur, and half of Resai, with the majority Muslim areas of Poonch, Rajouri, and Doda districts merged with the adjoining Muslim belt.
Simultaneously, the Conference endorsed the demand of the Kashmiri fruit farmers and traders to take their produce to across the Line of Control (LOC) to Muzzfarabad to draw in urgently needed supplies from across the border. On this India's electronic media asked India's home minister Shivraj Patil whether bifurcation or trifurcation (as Ladakh's Leh district is Bhuddist) of Kashmir could be a possible solution, to which question the home minister replied he was not competent to judge.
The upshot: an additional 10,000 troops deployed to disrupt the Muzaffarabad- bound march and more killings. With the government unable to stem the tide of unrest, the Huriyat Conference's Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Omer Farooq were quickly put under house arrest, while Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JFKL) leader, Mohammad Yasin Malik's fast-unto-death protest saw him hospitalized and in critical condition. If that was not enough, Indian security forces then shot dead an alleged resistance fighter along with two farmers and following that, an important Huryiat Conference leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz, together with an unspecified number of others, as a reported 100,000 protestors began their march to Muzaffarabad.
Despite a curfew being imposed in all 10 districts of Indian-occupied Kashmir close to 250,000 gathered for the funeral prayers of the slain leader and thousands are reported to have stormed Geelani's home to free him. Farooq too was released soon after and the two called for peace as communal killings ravaged the Valley. But are peace and
harmony possible in an area where the Muslim majority sees itself persecuted for its religious beliefs?
Zafar Choudhary, in his Countercurrent August 8 article 'Why is Jammu burning' underplays this. He writes, "What has shattered in the last 45 days is the myth that 'Jammu' and 'Kashmir' can behave like a common entity called 'Jammu and Kashmir' In the early days of agitation, the popular slogans heard in Jammu were "we want the land returned These slogans are no more audible. Now people are asking for an end to Kashmir's domination over Jammu. The problem is now no more between the government and the local people on a controversial decision. It
has been now projected as Jammu versus Kashmir When small spark has put the state on fire it has also demonstrated that efforts of dousing flames in one region may well prove as fuel in the other. It is high time that New Delhi's Kashmir policy is redrawn and sentiments beyond Kashmir are also taken care of."
That as it may, the sentiments evoked on the Jammu blockade have accentuated Muslim-Hindu differences in Kashmir and the front-page picture of the crowd gathered to pay homage to Sheikh Abdul Aziz published in Pakistan's Daily Times on Wednesday August 13, is indeed worth a thousand words.
© 2007-2008. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium
without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
By Abbas Jafari
Friday, 15 August 2008.
Ahmed Quraishi-Pakistan/Middle East politics, Iraq war, lebanon war, India Pakistan relations
SRINAGAR, PakistanIt started end of May and has built steadily ever since: the resistance to the Indian occupation of Jammu & Kashmir.
The movement began when the state government agreed to grant 40 hectares of forest land to the Amarnath Cave Shrine Board as the rest and recuperation area for Hindu pilgrimage to the cave. What followed is a general strike and students' protests against the plan throughout the Muslim-majority state and persuaded the state government to take a stand, fearing this was another ploy by the Indian government to change the demography of the disputed state from Muslim to Hindu.
This prompted Hindu retribution and violent clashes were reported between Muslims, Hindus, police and the Hindu protestors in Jammu, with more troops having to be called in for a curfew to be imposed. Reports of assaults on Muslims poured in, along with Muslim homes being set ablaze.
Shutdowns followed across the entire Kashmir Valley called by a freedom leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, in an expression of solidarity with the Muslims in Jammu. Geelani noted that the administration had failed to protect the lives and properties of the Muslims in Jummu with Hindus on the rampage and matters began to spiral out of control.
Tensions heightened when fanatic Hindu mobs imposed an economic blockade on the Jummu- Srinagar National Highway with Kashmiri Muslim truck drivers targeted. Indian Punjab, tellingly, followed suit, according to a BBC report, to once again expose the great myth of Indian secularism.
Another BBC report from Srinagar had Muslim truck drivers refusing to travel on that road, fearful for their lives. The BBC Srinagar correspondent reported that fruit exports worth millions of dollars perished, as a consequence, with stocks of food grain, fuel and other needed supplies rapidly running out.
Just before retaliatory violence reached fever-pitch, a two-day International Kashmir Peace Conference in Washington (July 08) is reported to have called for "the establishment of an independent and credible
investigative commission to probe human rights abuses". This call was reinforced when Z.G. Muhammad, the acclaimed author of 'The Cindering Chinars' and 'Kashmir in War and Diplomacy, quoted the venerated Mr.
Yusuf Buch enunciating at the conference: "In Kashmir, campaigns of murderous cruelty have been sustained for decades; when the population gets tired of militant insurgency, the repression seems to subside but when an act of police or paramilitary savagery is protested, the orgy of murder and rape is re-enacted.
Clearly aware of this, India's prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, turned to Hindu nationalist leader of the opposition L.K. Advani and called for an all-party conference to resolve the issue. But the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) represented by Mr. Advani, was said to have been much more inclined towards guarding the interests of the
Amarnath Sangharsh Samati (***), the spear-head of the Jammu agitation. The *** reportedly was not prepared to accept anything short of the allocation of the 40 acres of land to the Amarnath Shrine Board which is based in New Delhi!
Subsequently, an 18-member cross-party parliamentary delegation was dispatched to Jammu and Srinagar for a solution to draw the major concession from some of the moderates in Kashmir's All Parties Huriayat Conference, of their having no objection to the Hindu demand for a separate state in contiguous areas where Hindus constituted the majority. These areas were identified as Jammu, Kathua, Samaba, Udhampur, and half of Resai, with the majority Muslim areas of Poonch, Rajouri, and Doda districts merged with the adjoining Muslim belt.
Simultaneously, the Conference endorsed the demand of the Kashmiri fruit farmers and traders to take their produce to across the Line of Control (LOC) to Muzzfarabad to draw in urgently needed supplies from across the border. On this India's electronic media asked India's home minister Shivraj Patil whether bifurcation or trifurcation (as Ladakh's Leh district is Bhuddist) of Kashmir could be a possible solution, to which question the home minister replied he was not competent to judge.
The upshot: an additional 10,000 troops deployed to disrupt the Muzaffarabad- bound march and more killings. With the government unable to stem the tide of unrest, the Huriyat Conference's Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Omer Farooq were quickly put under house arrest, while Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JFKL) leader, Mohammad Yasin Malik's fast-unto-death protest saw him hospitalized and in critical condition. If that was not enough, Indian security forces then shot dead an alleged resistance fighter along with two farmers and following that, an important Huryiat Conference leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz, together with an unspecified number of others, as a reported 100,000 protestors began their march to Muzaffarabad.
Despite a curfew being imposed in all 10 districts of Indian-occupied Kashmir close to 250,000 gathered for the funeral prayers of the slain leader and thousands are reported to have stormed Geelani's home to free him. Farooq too was released soon after and the two called for peace as communal killings ravaged the Valley. But are peace and
harmony possible in an area where the Muslim majority sees itself persecuted for its religious beliefs?
Zafar Choudhary, in his Countercurrent August 8 article 'Why is Jammu burning' underplays this. He writes, "What has shattered in the last 45 days is the myth that 'Jammu' and 'Kashmir' can behave like a common entity called 'Jammu and Kashmir' In the early days of agitation, the popular slogans heard in Jammu were "we want the land returned These slogans are no more audible. Now people are asking for an end to Kashmir's domination over Jammu. The problem is now no more between the government and the local people on a controversial decision. It
has been now projected as Jammu versus Kashmir When small spark has put the state on fire it has also demonstrated that efforts of dousing flames in one region may well prove as fuel in the other. It is high time that New Delhi's Kashmir policy is redrawn and sentiments beyond Kashmir are also taken care of."
That as it may, the sentiments evoked on the Jammu blockade have accentuated Muslim-Hindu differences in Kashmir and the front-page picture of the crowd gathered to pay homage to Sheikh Abdul Aziz published in Pakistan's Daily Times on Wednesday August 13, is indeed worth a thousand words.
© 2007-2008. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium
without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
