Qazi Mizan: India has authorized a police state reminiscent of the Gestapo in Kashmir. The Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, The Armed Forces Special Powers Act, The Disturbed Areas Act, The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act are illustrative. Generally speaking, these laws empower the Indian military and paramilitary forces in Kashmir to arrest, detain, torture, search, wiretap, tr, and punish without material restraints.”
Tens of thousands of Indian officials are guilty of war crimes in Kashmir. These crimes include willful killing, torture, rape, wanton destruction of civilian properties and maiming of innocent civilians. These brutalities are commonplace in Kashmir and have been verified by numerous impartial human rights NGOs.
Ms Arundhati Roy, an internationally acclaimed novelist of India wrote, “The documentation of instances of torture, disappearances, custodial deaths, rape and gang-rape (by security forces in Kashmir) is enough to make your blood run cold. The fact that despite all this India retains its reputation as a legitimate democracy in the international community and amongst its own middle class is a triumph.”
Aljazeera reported that “Human Rights bodies say India uses torture as ‘instrument of control’ to quash rebellion in Indian-administered Kashmir.”
Amnesty International reported, “The Indian government must take urgent steps for the protection of the people of Kashmir…Indian government’s historical failure to protect the people of Kashmir will keep feeding into this never-ending cycle of abuses and impunity.”
The United States, Department of States, 2022 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in India says, “According to human rights NGOs, police used torture, other mistreatment, and arbitrary detention to obtain forced or false confessions.”
Let me also tell you that even in today’s violent world, the behavior of the Indian occupation regime in Kashmir is singular in so far as it has enjoyed total impunity from restraint imposed through international action or persuasions. No word of disapproval, much less condemnation, has been uttered by the international community. There has not been a call on India to cease and desist from the murderous course it has chosen for itself in Kashmir. Such passivity, such unfeeling and indifference, let no one blame the Kashmiris for concluding, amounts to encouragement of tyranny.
Does anyone seriously believe that if the ICC statute were ratified by India, a single Indian soldier or civilian official would ever be prosecuted before the ICC? Of course, not. India has sneered at international law for decades, and the international community has yawned, whether the violations were in Kashmir or with minorities within India. Although not contrary to international law, India showed itself utterly contemptuous of international moral sentiments. It stands proudly outside the mainstream of international conventions.
And the Biden Administration would do nothing to call India to account. The United Nations Security Council has sat on its hands for over 76 years over Kashmir. President Biden stood mute when he met Prime Minister Modi at the White House on June 22, 2023, and then at the G20 meeting on September 9, 2023, in New Delhi, India. He never paid any attention to the warning of Dr. Gregory Stanton, Chairman, Genocide watch who said that Kashmir was at the brink of genocide and New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists that the news media in Kashmir was at the brink of extinction.
