Srinagar: By parroting the Indian state’s narrative on the disputed territory, the rights organisation puts itself at odds with international law and misses the pattern of deliberate demographic change – or ethnic cleansing – against Kashmiri Muslims.
“We are moving towards a human rights apocalypse in Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir,” Mr. Masood Khan, President of Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, told me when we spoke twelve months ago about the Indian government’s move to introduce new domicile rules that allow Hindus from all over India to buy property and seek employment opportunities in the disputed territory.
“This is a move to disenfranchise and dispossess the people of Jammu and Kashmir and displace them, ultimately. India is moving at a breakneck speed and has fast-tracked the issuing of these domicile certificates to non-natives,” said Mr. Khan in June 2020.
It is now June 2021, and the Indian government has indeed moved at breakneck speed in its effort to change the demography in Kashmir, or what is by definition ethnic cleansing, and it’s catching the world’s leading human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch, off guard and totally unawares.
The undeniable reality is this: On August 5, 2019, the Indian Government unilaterally stripped Kashmir of its special or autonomous status, and then nine months later passed so-called Domicile Rules, which remove protections that had been put in place to protect the ethnic, linguistic and religious identities of the Kashmiri people. Web Desk
