NEW YORK, : A prominent Kashmiri leader has decried India’s stepped up repressive measures targeting human rights activists and organizations as well as media offices in Jammu and Kashmir, and urged the international community to push New Delhi to settle the Kashmir dispute.
“We condemn the Indian government’s continued Hindutva fascist assault on the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir,” Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, secretary-general of the Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum, said in a statement issued here on Friday.
“The Modi government seems to be bent on suppressing the voices of Kashmiris and anyone else who raises a finger against its settler-colonial agenda and blatant human rights abuses in the region.”
Dr. Fai pointed out that India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) has, in recent days, carried out surprise raids in Jammu & Kashmir and across India, mainly on the Jammu & Kashmir Yateem Foundation, the Salvation Movement, Human Welfare Foundation, Jammu & Kashmir Voice of Victims, Falah-e-Aaam Trust, the humanitarian outfit Athroot, and Delhi-based Charity Alliance.
In addition, he said, the NIA has searched the offices of Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, and the Greater Kashmir Trust for what it called “incriminating documents.”
The agency also went after the most vocal civil society members and human rights activists and their associates, Dr. Fai said.
Among them: the famed rights defender Khurram Parvez, Co-coordinator of the Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society) and Parveena Ahanger , Chairwoman of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons,, and their associates in Jammu & Kashmir and across India — these two organizations at the forefront of extensive reporting on human rights abuses in
Kashmir, including indefinite incarceration, torture, extrajudicial killings of political opponents, and the extensive impunity enjoyed by Jammu & Kashmir’s armed forces.
Dr. Fai condemned those raids and urged men and women of conscience around the world, particularly international human rights advocacy groups and other NGOs, to redouble their efforts in highlighting the ongoing human rights abuses in the Indian occupied Kashmir, and to demand that the government in New Delhi work for a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute.
“The Indian state’s new repressive measures may bring temporary silence among Kashmir’s besieged population and their supporters, but it will never buy their allegiance to India,”Dr. Fai said.
“Prolonging the settlement of the Kashmir dispute will bring peace neither to India nor to South Asia, and will prolong the unnecessary suffering of thousands of innocent civilians.”
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