Kashmiri youth want self-determination

An intellectual discussion with Kashmiris helps one update one’s knowledge about Jammu and Kashmir, half of which continues to be occupied forcibly by India. Amazingly, children too have a yearning for their rights.

Conversation with Kashmiri college boys and schoolchildren in Azad Kashmir, Rawalpindi and Islamabad reveals they’re gifted with a spirit to seek knowledge even if they have to go up to People’s Republic of China. They have the will to fight for their rights even if they are armless, foodless and waterless.

The young boys say their cause is nothing but self-determination, peaceful and prosperous life with dignity and honour. No slavery, no exploitation, in any way.

Jawad of Mirpur, whose father Chaudhry Riaz Hussain died of a kidney disease while in service of a bank, argues that Kashmiris have great respect for the Quaid-i-Azan Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who fought not only for establishing a welfare state but also for freedom of Jammu and Kashmir.

Khawja Karamat surprises elders by telling them about the enthusiastic welcome to the Quaid on his visit to Srinagar in May 1944. The Kashmiri youth, on a visit from the UK to see his mother in AJK and cousins in Sialkot and Rawalpindi-Islamabad, is perfectly right when he talks about the struggle of the founder of Pakistan and his sister Fatimah Jinnah for freedom of Jammu and Kashmir occupied by India at gunpoint.  Young Kashmiri students, like their surviving grandfathers, keep fresh in their mind that hundreds of beautifully erected gates and arches decorated with the Quaid’s photographs and those of Allama Iqbal with flower garlands in a score of colours hanging around them had so effortlessly sprung
up that one wondered about the magic of the name that
Jinnah was.

Bare-footed and tattered clothed, the great majority of the welcoming ‘Hatos’ had trekked on foot many a hill and dale in order to catch a glimpse of the name, and to say with pride: “I saw him.”  College teacher Tahira says proudly her father Chaudhry Hashmat Ali witnessed thousands of the Kashmiri women come out of their villages for the first time and line up on both sides of the long road and sing welcome song: “My leader, thou rule my heart; pray, come to my humble dwelling; I shall lodge thee in a freshly white-washed room.” (It is a Kashmiri simile implying the tender devotion). The late Hashmat, along with elders, migrated from occupied Jammu Kashmir to Pakistan.

Young Fawad says: “We Kashmiris only want of the Pakistani brethren to support the people of occupied Kashmir in their present struggle for right to self-determination; it’s your duty to back us politically on humanitarian, diplomatic and moral grounds.”  How righteously dedicated the young Kashmiris are to their cause!

zasarwar@hotmail.com