Covid-19 pandemic: India exploited virus to change IIOJ&K’s demography: Mazari

Islamabad: Federal Minister for Human Rights, Dr Shireen Mazari on Wednesday said that India has exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate the pace of its colonization project in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IIOJK).

“India consolidated its illegal and unilateral actions of 5th August 2019 before the world,” she said. The minister said that global human rights landscape presents a bleak picture of so-called Indian secular state where the abuses and impunity are writ large especially in occupied territories.

“Some of the leading Human Rights advocates continue to prioritize political, strategic and commercial interests over human rights values and principles,” she said. Addressing virtually the 46th session of UN Human Rights Council, she said last year, she had presented before this House about the plea and the petition of the Kashmiri people where India is deploying unprecedented demographic engineering, in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention, to convert the Muslim majority into a minority in the occupied region.

Highlighting the ongoing Indian atrocities in Kashmir, she said that over 3 million non-Kashmiris have been illegally granted Kashmiri citizenship; allowed permanent settlement; purchase of properties and lands and apply for local jobs in the occupied territory. "India is usurping Kashmiri people’s inalienable right to self-determination in wilful breach of the UN Charter, UN Security Council resolutions, and international law.

This Final Solution , as the fascist BJP-RSS regime calls it, can be a major precursor to the genocide of Kashmiri people," she said. The Genocide Watch has already sounded the alarm bells. Eight million Kashmiris are caged up in one of the world’s largest concentration camps. Using draconian laws, she said that Indian forces have intensified systematic use of summary executions, torture, and rape as a weapon.

She said that hundreds of Kashmiri leaders, such as Asiya Andrabi, Shabbir Ahmed Shah, Yasin Malik, Masarat Alam Bhat and journalists like Asif Sultan, remain illegally imprisoned without any due process.

Shamelessly, Dr Shireen Mazari said that the occupation forces are using live ammunition, including pellet gunshots, against peaceful protestors and even religious gatherings, as exemplified by pellet firing on a Muharram procession in Srinagar in August 2020. During staged encounters, houses and entire neighborhoods are being demolished to inflict collective punishment, even as affected families are left hapless at the mercy of the deadly COVID virus.

She said that a pliant Indian judiciary is acting as a veritable arm of occupation as hundreds of habeas corpus petitions remain unheard before the courts. Indian troops are gagging local media, harassing journalists and carrying out reprisal attacks against human rights defenders. Even amidst the global health emergency, she said that arbitrary restrictions have not been eased out, infringing upon Kashmiri people’s fundamental rights to life, livelihoods.