India follows Israeli model to turn Muslim majority in Kashmir into a minority: Speakers

GENEVA, Sep 29 (SABAH): Speakers at a seminar hosted by Community Human Rights and Advocacy Center have said that the India’s RSS influenced regime led by Modi was pursuing Israeli model of demographic engineering in Kashmir to turn Muslim majority into a minority.

The seminar titled “Demographic Engineering in Indian occupied Kashmir: Violation of International Law & UNSC Resolutions” was attended and addressed by the international law experts, rights activists and political activists hailing from different parts of the world including veteran human rights activist Mousie Wahabudin, Altaf Hussain Wani Chairman KIIR/permanent representative WMC, Kashmiri leader Advocate Parvaiz Shah, Muzamil Ayoub Thakur president Kashmir Freedom Movement and others.

Speakers said that the Indian government’s systematic campaign aimed at bringing material change in the held valley was in complete violation of the UN Security Council’s resolutions and the Geneva Convention. They said that ripping Kashmir of its special status by abolishing article 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution had changed the entire dynamics of the Kashmir dispute. The speakers said that since 5th August 2019 Modi regime enacted a regime of new law that provided an impetus to the BJP’s policies aimed at altering the demography of the disputed territory.

“Annulment of the article 35-A in particular paved a way for the BJP to implement its agenda in Kashmir as revocation of the article virtually opened floodgates for non-Kashmiris to get them settle in the region”, they said, adding that the repealing of article 370 and 35-A have been the right-wing Hindu supremacists’ dream project, which was ultimately executed and implemented by Modi-the front man of the RSS.

They said that these laws were specially modified to encourage Hindus to settle in the Occupied Kashmir on a permanent basis. They said that the policy was akin to Israel’s model of occupation of Palestine. They said that establishing separate housing colonies of Pandits, Sanik colonies in the Kashmir valley were part of the BJP’s settler colonialism policy. These policies, they said, not only ran counter to international law and other human rights treaties but these actions were also in violation of the UNSC resolutions that strongly prohibit an occupying state from taking any unilateral decision that might undermine the status of a disputed territory.

They said that changing the electoral map of the state and now granting voting rights to outsiders speaks volumes about the Indian government’s malicious intentions to undermine the indeginous population’s role in the political decision making process. The speakers said that on one hand Indian government has launched a massive multi-front political, cultural, religious onslaught on Kashmiris while on the other its forces have been involved in systematic genocide that has been going on unabated in Kashmir for the past several years.

Stressing the need for holding the Indian government accountable of the war crimes it has been committing against Kashmiris, the speakers argued that the slow-motion genocide and attempts to change the region’s demography by the Indian government constitute as war crimes.