Srinagar: Joint Resistance Leadership on Tuesday said that if present dispensation in New Delhi was not even ready for autonomy, how can it address or engage with the Kashmiri people’s political will and aspiration of self-determination.
The leadership comprising Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik met at the Geelani’s residence at Hyderpora and issued a joint statement.
“While in principle pro-freedom leadership has always advocated and supported sincere and productive dialogue as a means of conflict resolution over Jammu and Kashmir, what it inherently entails from all participants to dialogue is the basic acknowledgment that there is a dispute that has to be resolved. But Govt of India continuously refuses to accept this basic premise and the reality on the ground,” they said.
Referring to Indian Prime Minister Naredra Modi’s outright dismissal of former Home minister Chidambaram’s suggestion of restoration of autonomy for J&K, they said that if government of India even rejects the demand of its co-political party for restoration of autonomy guaranteed by its own constitution, calling it a betrayal with soldiers and hence unacceptable, “how will such a dispensation in New Delhi address or engage with the Kashmiri people’s political will and aspiration of self-determination for which people have been relentlessly struggling and sacrificing for the past 70 years.”
They said that this clearly indicates that the hyped upon appointment of former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma by GoI as its interlocutor for J&K was nothing more than a tactic to buy time adopted under international pressures and regional compulsions and “due to the abysmal failure of the state policy of military repression upon the people of Kashmir.”
They said Sharma’s recent comment that he will come to Kashmir to dissuade the youth from “Islam and pursuing their legitimate political aspirations so that Kashmir does not become Syria is misleading. To compare the internationally recognized 70-year-old political and humanitarian issue of Kashmir to that of the sectarian war and power struggle in Syria is deception and propaganda as there is no correlation between the two situations.”
They said that Sharmas assertion that he was coming to the Valley with the directive from Government of India to “restore peace” rather than addressing the dispute or its resolution in keeping with the overwhelming majority sentiment of people of J&K limits the scope of any engagement with him and makes it an exercise in futility.
They said that unless the Kashmir dispute was understood and addressed in its historical context and in the background of international commitments made over it, lasting peace can neither be achieved in J&K nor in the subcontinent.
“While the repressive state militaristic approach continues in dealing with Kashmir, to talk of peace and dialogue is also a ploy by the GoI to strike a hard bargain which people of Kashmir and leadership will never succumb to.”
The resistance camp observed that for any Kashmiri to be part of “this futile exercise will only undermine our internationally acknowledged legitimate and just struggle, nourished by the blood of our martyrs and great sacrifices and hardships rendered daily by the masses.”
They reiterated that use of unlimited force on common people—“killings, torture of youth imprisonment intimidation propaganda media trials harassment of women and all such inhuman measures will not deter people or leadership to give up pursuing their legitimate demand for resolution of Kashmir issue as per our will and aspirations.”
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