Speakers at a seminar while voicing their serious concern over India’s settler colonialism have said that intensifying settler colonialism posed a grave threat to Kashmiris’ existence.
The seminar was hosted by the Community Human Rights Advocacy Center on the 54th session of UNHCR and was attended and addressed by international law experts, academicians, rights activists, and parliamentarians hailing from different parts of the world including Senator Naela Chohan, Dr Imtiyaz Khan, Robert Fantina, Prof. Dr Syed Manwar Hussain, Dr Waleed Rasool, Syed Muhammad Ali, Advocate Parvez Ahmed Shah and others.
The event was moderated by KIIR chairman Altaf Hussain Wani. Discussing the trajectory of the occupation, Annexation, and Settler Colonialism of Kashmir, the speakers said that the Indian policies of assimilation and annihilation had a linear relationship in pattern with those of the colonizing states, received a press release from Geneva.
They said that the territory of Jammu and Kashmir was occupied by India illegally in 1947 and then annexed on August 5, 2019, in clear contravention of the UNSC resolutions and other international covenants.
They said that after the annexation and dissolution of the disputed territory, the phenomenon of settler colonialism was in full play in the region. The speakers pointed out that the Indian government’s goal of settler-colonization was the removal and erasure of Indigenous people’s identity and dislodging them of their resources, land, and other resources.
They said that following the annexation of the state under the controversial ‘Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act’, New Delhi took a series of steps that included balkanization, revoking special status, and abolishing Article 35-A.
They said that Article 35-A, which protected the state-subject rights and privileges of the people of the Kashmiris, was struck down by the Indian parliament with malicious intent to bring structured changes to establish Kashmir as a settler colony of India.
The speakers said that changes in the state’s nomenclature and extensive modifications in the state’s age-old laws have led to further dis-empowerment, disenfranchisement, and systematic marginalization of the indigenous population besides creating a sense of fear and insecurity.
They said that New Delhi’s settler-colonialism project in Kashmir coupled with policies of degradation, dehumanization, and demographic shifts, severely threaten peace and security in the region.
They said that the aggression and expansionist designs of the Indian government not only pose a threat to the Kashmiris’ existence but also to the sovereignty of small nations bordering India. Referring to the UN charter, ICCPR, and ICESR, They said that the Indian policies were in violation of the UN charter.
They said that the UN Charter of 1947 not only established the rights of Indigenous people but also their fundamental right, the right to self-determination. They regrettably noted that India was emerging as a brute colonizer in the region. “The country that sought freedom from British colonialism is now following the footprints of the colonizers to deprive Kashmiris of their basic rights”, they said. “The colonial mindset was reviving in India in the same pattern but more lethal than the British as a colonizer,” they added.
