Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control and across the globe observe October 27 as Black Day and consider it as the blackest day in the history of Kashmir. This is the Day when India landed its army in Jammu and Kashmir, in total disregard to the Indian Independence Act and Partition Plan in 1947.
In order to change the demographic composition of the territory, Indian troops, the forces of Dogra Maharaja Hari Singh, and Hindu extremists massacred over three hundred thousand Kashmiri Muslims within a period of two months.
The Indian Independence Act and Partition Plan of 1947 had stated that the Indian British Colony would be divided into two sovereign states, India, with Hindu-majority areas, and Pakistan, with the Muslim-majority areas of Western provinces and east Bengal.
India by landing its Army in Jammu and Kashmir violated the guidelines set for deciding the future of Hyderabad, Junagarh and Kashmir, three of the independent Princely States at that time, which were given the choice to either accede to Pakistan or India, considering the geographical situation and communal demography. It forcibly occupied the Hyderabad and Junagarh, which had Hindus in majority but their rulers were Muslims. Kashmir was a Muslim-majority state and had a natural tendency to accede to Pakistan, but its Hindu ruler destroyed the future of Kashmiri people by announcing its accession to India under a controversial accession document (Instrument of Accession). Many neutral observers deny the existence of such document with the argument that had it been there Indian government had made it public either officially or at any international forum.
It is a historical fact that if the partition was done on the principles of Justice then India had no land route to enter into Jammu and Kashmir but the so-called Boundary Commission, headed by British Barrister, Cyril Radcliff, that demarcated partition line, under a conspiracy split Gurdaspur, a Muslim majority area, and handed it over to India, providing it terrestrial access to the territory.
Right from the day one, the people of Kashmir did not accept India's illegal occupation and started an armed struggle with the total support of public in 1948, which forced India to approach the UN Security Council to seek help of the World Body to settle the dispute. The UN Security Council through its successive resolutions nullified Indian invasion and occupation of Kashmir. It also approved a ceasefire, demarcation of the ceasefire line, demilitarization of the state and a free and impartial plebiscite to be conducted under the supervision of the World Body. Although the ceasefire and demarcation of the ceasefire line was implemented while demilitarization of the occupied territory and a free and impartial plebiscite under UN supervision remain unimplemented till date. As a result of the demarcation, about 139,000 square kilometers area of Jammu and Kashmir remained with India while 83,807 square kilometers constituted the territory of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
Indian rulers promised before the UN to resolve the dispute and provide the people of Kashmir with their basic right of self-determination, but later backed away from their commitments. India has been putting peace, security and stability of the entire South Asia at stake by demonstrating continued rigidity and stubbornness and not responding positively to the efforts made by the international community to settle the Kashmir dispute during the last more than six decades.
Disappointed at the failure of all the efforts aimed at resolving the Kashmir dispute through peaceful means, the people of occupied Kashmir launched a massive uprising in 1989 to secure their right to self-determination. This movement gathered momentum with the passage of time and pushed the Indian authorities to wall, forcing them to sit around the negotiation table with Pakistan in January 2004. The talks process continued till it was hampered after Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008, when India without any substantive evidence laid the responsibility of these attacks on Pakistan and its intelligence agencies. However, Prime Ministers of the two countries, Yousuf Raza Gilani and Manmohan Singh after a meeting at Sharm El-Sheikh, on July 16, 2009, in a joint statement declared to resume the composite dialogue process to resolve all outstanding issues.
It is worth mentioning that Pakistan demonstrated considerable flexibility in the dialogue process by floating various proposals including demilitarization, self-governance and joint-management to settle the conflict over Kashmir, but India's intransigent approach continued to remain the biggest hurdle in making successful any effort made in this regard. The ground situation in the occupied territory remains unchanged, as the confidence building measures and the dialogue process could not provide Kashmiri people respite from the Indian state terrorism.
India has exhausted all its resources and means but has not been able to deter Kashmiris from continuing their liberation struggle. It has given a free hand to its troops and police to subject peaceful protesters to brute force. Over 70 people were killed only within a period of two months in 2008 when Indian police personnel resorted to indiscriminate firing to break up demonstrators in Kashmir. The Chairman of All Parties Hurriyet Conference, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq was placed under house arrest for two months to prevent him from addressing public gatherings. Liberation leaders including Syed Ali Gilani, Shabbir Ahmed Shah, Aasiya Andrabi, Nayeem Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai, Masarat Alam Butt and Muhammad Saleem Nunnaji have been booked under the infamous draconian law, Public Safety Act to keep them away from the people. The troops have been setting new records of human rights violations by killing innocent people, arresting youth, disgracing and harassing women and setting residential houses afire with impunity.
The troops have killed over ninety-two thousand Kashmiris, widowed more than twenty five thousand women, orphaned more than one hundred thousand children and molested or gang-raped around ten thousand Kashmiri women during the past 20 years. The whereabouts of thousands of innocent Kashmiris, disappeared in the custody of troops, are yet to be made known while hundreds of unnamed graves have been discovered in the occupied territory, which are believed to be of disappeared Kashmiris. This whole mayhem is being carried out with the protection of draconian laws, by virtue of which any person can be killed or put behind the bars without any accountability.
The All Parties Hurriyet Conference sources made a shocking revelation recently that in line with a new scheme, Indian troops were killing innocent Kashmiri youth in fake encounters in the areas near the Line of Control after arresting them from different parts of the occupied territory. According to the APHC sources through these killings India wanted to mislead the international community by propagating that Kashmiri youth were trying to enter Indian occupied Kashmir after crossing over the Line of Control.
The Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Asia Watch and other international humanitarian organizations in their regular reports over the unabated rights abuses in the occupied territory have been raising their concern. Even the European Union Parliament during its session in Strasbourg on July 10, 2008 unanimously passed a resolution calling upon the Indian Government to urgently conduct an independent and impartial probe into the issue of discovery of mass graves in the territory. It also strongly condemned unlawful killings, enforced disappearances, torture, rape and other human rights abuses, which have been taking place at the hands of the occupation troops in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989.
It was yet another exposition of India's callousness that the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh on India's Independence Day, this year, tried to hoodwink the international community by stating that the elections in Kashmir had rendered the freedom element irrelevant. To protest this unrealistic statement Kashmiri people observed crippling strike on August 22. Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi while addressing a meeting of Kashmiri leaders on September 4, 2009 in Islamabad categorically emphasized that the elections in Indian occupied Kashmir could not be a substitute of Kashmiris' right to self-determination. He reaffirmed his country's moral, political and diplomatic support to Kashmir liberation movement. The mammoth anti-India protest demonstrations, participated by millions of people in Indian occupied Kashmir, last year, should be taken as Kashmiris' referendum against the Indian illegal occupation of their soil.
These are the reasons that why Kashmiris observe October 27 as Black Day. The observance is intended to send a loud and clear message to the international community to take cognizance of the miseries of Kashmiri people, help stop human rights violations in the occupied territory and play its role in bringing about a solution of the Kashmir dispute in accordance with Kashmiris' aspirations. It is also aimed at calling upon India to read writing on the wall, accept the ground realities and come forward with a realistic approach to settle the dispute for the larger interest of the people of the region.
(The writer is working as Senior Editor at Kashmir Media Service, Islamabad, and can be reached at razamalik849@yahoo.com)
It was yet another exposition of India's callousness that the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh on India's Independence Day, this year, tried to hoodwink the international community by stating that the elections in Kashmir had rendered the freedom element irrelevant. To protest this unrealistic statement Kashmiri people observed crippling strike on August 22. Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi while addressing a meeting of Kashmiri leaders on September 4, 2009 in Islamabad categorically emphasized that the elections in Indian occupied Kashmir could not be a substitute of Kashmiris' right to self-determination. He reaffirmed his country's moral, political and diplomatic support to Kashmir liberation movement. The mammoth anti-India protest demonstrations, participated by millions of people in Indian occupied Kashmir, last year, should be taken as Kashmiris' referendum against the Indian illegal occupation of their soil.
These are the reasons that why Kashmiris observe October 27 as Black Day. The observance is intended to send a loud and clear message to the international community to take cognizance of the miseries of Kashmiri people, help stop human rights violations in the occupied territory and play its role in bringing about a solution of the Kashmir dispute in accordance with Kashmiris' aspirations. It is also aimed at calling upon India to read writing on the wall, accept the ground realities and come forward with a realistic approach to settle the dispute for the larger interest of the people of the region.
(The writer is working as Senior Editor at Kashmir Media Service, Islamabad, and can be reached at razamalik849@yahoo.com)
