The only way to convince India is to convince the world

thanks chinaar

I was wondering we could draft a letter here that would include all facts about Kashmir concisely in a few paragraphs. Kashmiris living overseas can copy/paste that letter and email it to their local community newspapers. This will counter the Indian misleading propaganda that because Kashmiris participated in assembly elections, that proves Kashmiris are happy with the Indian occupation.

The letter will also highlight the recent murders by Indian forces and emphasize that no one has been convicted or punished for the murders and these inquiries are a mere show for the media.

Kashmir Dispute Will Make Ground Zero Seem Like a Bonfire

By Rafiq Kathwari

When I was a teenager about 35 years ago and in my final year in college in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, the movie "Battle for Algiers" was a big hit. It captured my imagination as well as that of my classmates, one of whom approached me a few days later and asked if I would commit myself to the liberation of Kashmir. Yes, of course, I said, reading a typed sheet my friend took out from his coat pocket. "Bear Arms against a Sea of Troubles," I remember the title said.

"This is our manifesto," my friend said as I read the aims and objectives, which included blowing up bridges and the local radio and telephone buildings, ambushing army convoys and killing soldiers. The text said nothing about where we would get arms and ammunition, the number of members in the group, how we would organize, who our leader was or when we would execute our plan.

However, I remember the manifesto was long on the why, with each point emphasized in the present tense: Our cause is freedom. India promised us a referendum on our future, but fails to keep its promise. Prime Minster Nehru, the last Englishman to rule India, has kept our popular leader Sheikh Abdullah in jail for over 15 years. To the extent that India denies us our fundamental rights and subverts its own constitution, to that extent, India is not a democracy.

It was great stuff for my impressionable mind. My friend had energized me. If the Algerians could do it, so could Kashmiris. I read the typed manifesto again before signing it with a flourish.

A few weeks later that teenage flirtation landed me for 11 months in Srinagar's Central Jail, where I met 12 of my classmates who had also signed the manifesto. (The college Principal had been somehow alerted to the plan and called the police.) Subsequently, India announced that it had cracked a dangerous gang of terrorists trained in Pakistan. There was no trial. We were just locked up and forgotten, until one beneficent pro-India sycophant in Kashmir was replaced by another, who ordered an amnesty. Soon after, I fled to the future of other continents.

The passage of 35 years hasn't dimmed my memory. My passion for Kashmir's freedom is undiminished, despite the horror of the last ten years during which anywhere from 35,000 to 80,000 mostly civilians have been killed. Maddened by merciless Hinduization of Kashmir's Muslim culture, the lack of career opportunities and India's repeated betrayals during the past 50 years, a rag tag army of young Kashmiri men took on the third largest army in the world.

To obtains arms, those young men crossed the Line of Control that divides Indian from Pakistani- administered Kashmir, rode in buses to Kabul, where armaments supplied by the CIA to the Mujahideen were readily available after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. India calls those Kashmiri youth "cross border terrorists" and blames Pakistan for supporting them. Pakistan, which has competing claims on Kashmir, calls them freedom fighters. Many Kashmiris I know simply say, a plague on all your houses, which, of course, includes my adopted home-I know it's politically incorrect to say it- the United States.

Many young native Kashmiri men who took up arms against a sea of troubles are dead or languishing in India's jails. The fighting now is being mostly done by foreign mercenaries, recruited by the elusive Mr. bin Laden, whose so-called martyrs have changed the tenor of Kashmir's legitimate struggle to that of an Islamic Jihad against Hindu India.

"See, we told you so," India is screaming, "Kashmiris are terrorists." India has fueled Western fears of resurgent Islam, propagandizing the militancy as fundamentalist, which in turn enables India to flout all international codes of conduct in Kashmir. If all Kashmiris are terrorists and must be smoked out of the Himalayas by 500,000 Indian troops stationed there, then let us at the very least agree on a working definition of terrorism which must include both the unofficial and official variety.

But, wait. Let's be honest. Prior to the militancy, India portrayed Kashmir as the model for secularism in India, as the warp of her pluralist democracy. What has propelled Kashmiri society seemingly overnight from a model of secularism to deranged fanaticism?

Under the present ultra right wing regime, Indian society is becoming increasingly intolerant and absolutist. There is a profound disturbance within Mother India. Many Indians I know think of India as a super power next only to the United States. I will believe that when Kashmir, the source of five great rivers, gets a basic sanitation system and an unrestricted flow of electricity the Kashmir valley itself generates.

Kashmiris have been enslaved for generations. The West is finally taking note of the fact that regional conflicts have a global reach. Nothing is remote anymore. It never was. Now we must do whatever is necessary to win the hearts and minds of alienated peoples such as the Kashmiris. Restore their dignity. Fulfill longstanding promises, and watch how swiftly Kashmiris sign a manifesto to honor democracy in a world that has changed literally overnight after nine eleven zero one. Indifference will make Ground Zero seem like a Boy Scout's bonfire gone awry.

@kathwari
Welcome to the forum Kathwari sahib.
It is an honour reading your thoughts here.

Keep Working brothers cause the world is taking notice of our legitimate struggle. Just don't loose heart n don't loose hope.

Following is the excerpt from the resolutions of the very strong lobbying group in the USA called United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA).

Quote :

Kashmir
____________________________________________________________________________________
The National Convention of the United Nations Association of the United States of America,
Noting with appreciation that the United States was the co-sponsor of United Nations Security Council Resolution 91 adopted on April 21, 1948 that gave the right of self-determination to the people of Kashmir;
Recalling that the Governments of India and Pakistan were parties to the resolutions of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIO) that were adopted in 1948 and 1949 which recognized the Kashmiri people's right to self determination;
Recognizing that, freedom and self-determination are basic principals of both the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
Observing that two wars have been fought between India and Pakistan over the issue of Kashmir with no resolution;
Expressing concern that these two powers now have deployable nuclear weapons; Remembering that every United States President from Harry Truman to Barrack Obama have restated
the need for this stalemate to be resolved as essential for peace in the South Asian subcontinent and the world; and Applauding these Presidents and other world leaders who have stated that the resolution of the Kashmir dispute must take into account the wishes and aspirations of the people of Kashmir;
Therefore, Resolves to encourage the U.S. Government to call upon India and Pakistan to engage in negotiations with the Kashmiri people on the peaceful future of Kashmir;
Calls upon the parties to utilize all United Nations mechanisms available to them for the peaceful resolution of this conflict; and Hopes the conflict in Kashmir will end soon with the peaceful self-determination of Kashmiri peoples.

Regards

Kathwari

Quote :

Will Kashmir Be an Obama Foreign Policy Focus?




Indian officials may be celebrating what they believe to be their thwarting of Richard Holbrooke, the new U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they may want to hold off on the champagne. Despite the fact that India's behind-the-scenes lobbying may have helped ensure that the country was left out of Holbrooke's official mandate, the Obama Administration is unlikely to ease up efforts to pressure India to come to terms with Pakistan over their long, bitter dispute over Kashmir.


New Delhi views its success in avoiding becoming part of Holbrooke's diplomatic portfolio as proof of India's growing clout in Washington. Appearing on Al Jazeera, India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, evaded questions about the lobbying effort, saying only that relations between New Delhi and Washington had "increased substantially." But an official in his ministry told TIME that New Delhi is "feeling vindicated, because finally the U.S. has given us the respect we deserve."

The official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the campaign to keep Holbrooke out was "not personal...we just objected to being lumped into a category with two of the world's most dangerous countries." Besides, he added, "there was no way we were going to allow Holbrooke, or anybody else, become a broker on Kashmir."

The Indians were alarmed when, during the Presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly said that ending Indo-Pakistani differences over Kashmir was one of the keys to calming tensions in South Asia and winning the war on terror. New Delhi views Kashmir as a bilateral issue, and has long resisted what it regards as third-party interference. In recent years, India has sought to isolate the Kashmir issue even further, by seeking to keep it out of other negotiations (over trade and travel, for instance) with Pakistan. "The Indians are allergic to any indication of outside mediation," says Bruce Riedel, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution who served as an Obama campaign foreign policy adviser.

Pakistan, on the other hand, is keen to get Holbrooke involved in the Kashmir dispute, which it has traditionally held is central to its differences with India . President Asif Zardari, in an Op-Ed for the Washington Post, wrote that he hoped the Special Envoy would "work with India and Pakistan...to bring a just and reasonable resolution to [the Kashmir issue]."

Islamabad has long argued that the disputed territory inflames Pakistani sentiment and feeds terrorist groups. More recently, Pakistan has played the terrorism card in other disputes with India. Zardari's Op-Ed noted that the two countries are currently arguing about water from rivers that flow through both countries; Pakistan says it is denied a rightful share of the water by Indian dams. Failure to resolve the water dispute, Zardari warned, "could fuel the fires of discontent that lead to extremism and terrorism." (See pictures of Pakistan's vulnerable northwest passage.)

For the moment, the Obama Administration is being careful to publicly distance the Special Envoy from the region's most intractable problem. State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters on Tuesday that "it's not in [Holbrooke's] mandate...to deal with the subject of Kashmir." And the White House has also been careful to deny that India's lobbying played any role in the formation of Holbrooke's diplomatic charge; not only has it insisted that it held no meetings with foreign governments or their representatives with respect to the assignment, but it has also claimed that Obama never actually intended the South-Asian portfolio to include India in the first place.

None of that is to say, however, that the Administration is going to buy India's line that the U.S. should butt out of Kashmir. The President himself plainly believes there's a role for the U.S. to play. In an interview with TIME's Joe Klein in October, Obama said that "working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve the Kashmir crisis in a serious way" would be a critical task. The key, he said, was to "make the argument to the Indians, 'You guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this?'" Obama added that he would have to "make the argument to the Pakistanis, 'Look at India and what they are doing, why do you want to keep on being bogged down with this, particularly at a time where the biggest threat now is coming from the Afghan border?'"

So it's probably safe to say that after the euphoria of their lobbying victory has died down, Indian officials will probably feel Holbrooke's breath on their neck. Some Indian analysts are already predicting this. C. Raja Mohan writes in the Indian Express that "reworking the India-Pakistan relationship will be an inevitable and important component" of Holbrooke's plans. "Whether India likes it or not, Washington will devote substantive diplomatic energies towards the subcontinent, and New Delhi will be drawn into this dynamic."

Keep working guys, the Indians over the last 60 years have never listened to us Kashmiris, its time to try and convince the world about what India is doing to us helpless Kashmiris.

Dudh Mangoge [admin: only English or Kashmiri allowed]

Please stop this neurotic ass Bharat from publishing such blasphemous and fanatic comments such as above.

@BHARAT
Kashmir is for Kashmiris, and we Kashmiris will fight you Indians till the last drop of blood is left in our veins. No country in the world whether Indians or Pakistanis have the right to occupy us against our wishes. YOU fanatic Indians can only be thrown out by CONVINCING THE WORLD ABOUT WHAT INHUMANE TERRIBLE ATROCITIES your nation is INFLICTING ON US HAPLESS KASHMIRIS......and you have the nerve to tell us that Cheer denge n stuff.....after you have killed more than a 120,000 of our brethren.

Na sambhloge Na samjhoge aey Hindustan walo, daastano main na rahegei daastan tunhaari.

KASHMIR ZINDABAD, Indian dogs go back, yeh Kashmir hamara hamara hai...hindustani kuttoo wapas jao.

Quote :

Kasher ********* karakh che chupha

"KASHMIR ZINDABAD, Indian dogs go back, yeh Kashmir hamara hamara hai...hindustani kuttoo wapas jao."

IS THIS ENGLISH OR KASHMIRI??