Qaisar Mansoor
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has presented a 131-page dossier detailing a series of atrocities committed by the Indian government in Indian-controlled Kashmir during a joint press conference in along with the Federal Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari and National Security Adviser to the Prime Minister of Pakistan Moeed Yusuf.
The dossier contains incriminating audio, video and documentary evidence on growing human rights violations, war crimes, genocide, and torture against the innocent Kashmiris by Indian forces in Kashmir.
The dossier’s three chapters include one on war crimes by the Indian army, a second on the local resistance movement, and a third on demographic change.
The majority of the references in the dossier were from international and Indian media outlets as well as international human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The document features lists of violations including rape, enforced disappearances and torture, from the nineties to recent years. It also names 1,128 perpetrators allegedly involved in war crimes.
Now it is up to India to proceed against the perpetrators who have been highlighted in this dossier.
India should “put an end to demographic change”, lift a “military and digital siege” as well as release all political prisoners. United Nations and other international organisations and observers including journalists should be granted unhindered access.
“The Indian state would have all the figures, they know who has disappeared, so countries and human rights organisations need to target the Indian government to get the data from them,” said Shireen Mazari, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Human Rights.
Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan and has been claimed by both since they won independence from the British empire and began fighting over their rival claims.
Since 1989, an armed rebellion has raged in Indian-controlled Kashmir seeking a united Kashmir – either under Pakistani rule or independent of both countries.
In August 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi split Jammu and Kashmir – then the country’s only Muslim majority state – into two federally-administered territories. The region is one of the most heavily militarised in the world. Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict. At the time of writing, India had not responded to the publication of the dossier.
