Well done Imran Khan!

 

Shamshad Ahmad

In his address to the UN General Assembly on September 27, Prime Minister Imran Khan articulated Pakistan’s principled position on the Kashmir dispute while also raising three other issues of global importance, Environment, Corruption and Islamophobia. Earlier in his 14 August address to Azad Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, Prime Minister Imran Khan had promised the Kashmiris that “from now onwards,” he will be their “ambassador at every global forum”. Imran Khan has indeed fulfilled his mission with courage and with conviction.

Imran Khan’s sole purpose at the UN was to wake up the world and sensitize it of the ongoing brutality being perpetrated by Indian occupation forces in Kashmir. On the sidelines of the General Assembly, Imran Khan had bilateral meetings with his counterparts from various countries drawing their attention to India’s atrocities in the occupied territory where the Kashmiris were suffering the worst hardship and human rights abuses. The Valley today is the scene of the biggest, bloodiest and also the most obscure military occupation in the world.

Immediately after his illegal abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, Modi had rushed thousands of additional civil-armed troops including uniformed RSS militants as part of a cold-blooded military crackdown in the occupied state where more than 8 million Kashmiris are facing untold sufferings and hardship. The Valley is a virtual prison today. Kashmiri youth are dying on the streets, not asking for a better future. They are holding the Pakistan flag. It is a clear verdict they are giving to the world from the streets of the occupied territory.

Overall, the centrality of the Kashmir dispute was the focus of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s myriad engagements in New York. Drawing parallels between Hitler’s Nazi regime and India’s RSS, of which Modi is a lifelong member, Imran Khan had been urging the world to stop the Indian brutality in the occupied Kashmir. Irrespective of Narendra Modi’s self-serving assertions, Pakistan did manage to place Kashmir high on the global radar screen as an outstanding issue and a nuclear flashpoint warranting world community’s attention for its solution sooner rather than later.

Apart from these engagements, the Prime Minister also interacted with cross-section of international media outlets including meetings with editorial boards to apprise them of the gravity of the situation in Indian-held Kashmir. The heads of Amnesty International, ICRC and International Crisis Group also called on Imran Khan to discuss the Kashmir situation. Several other similar meetings were also held by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi as part of the Kashmir Mission. Indeed, Pakistan has placed Kashmir on the world’s center-stage.

What should also be clear to India’s Narendra Modi is that by putting up an arrogant face you cannot change realities. In response to Modi’s brinkmanship, Imran Khan made it clear that Pakistan will give a befitting response to any Indian belligerence. His message to Narendra Modi was loud and clear: “We will teach you a lesson this time that you will never forget. Let there be no misunderstanding that Pakistan’s armed forces are ready to foil any Indian aggression.”  At the same time, Imran Khan assured the Kashmiris that Pakistan will always stand by them.

We will never abandon the Kashmiris and will continue to support their legitimate freedom struggle. Their cause is our cause. The Kashmiris consider Indian troops as an occupation force. India is forcibly hanging on to Kashmir when the Kashmiris don’t want to have anything to do with India. They want nothing but freedom from Indian occupation. For Pakistan, Kashmir represents the unfinished agenda of the June 1947 Partition Plan. Time will soon come when this historic atrocity is reversed. Popular movements can never be suppressed.

The world must also know that the impending threat of an apocalyptical India-Pakistan conflict is fraught with disaster of an unimaginable magnitude and must be averted at all cost. All said and done, one reality cannot be ignored. There will be no result or decision from the UN General Assembly session itself. It is a global debating forum where statements by UN member states are made as their policy framework to the world. They are merely heard, not listened to except for exceptional speakers which in our case was Imran Khan at the current session.

The world did listen to him as it has been to all his predecessors in Pakistan. The only difference this year was the eloquent, convincing extempore presentation of Pakistan’s Kashmir stand by Imran Khan. He highlighted the humanitarian crisis in the Indian occupied Kashmir and also gave a graphic illustration of the impending threat to world peace. All the points made by Imran Khan in his speech will inevitably find reflection in the UN General Assembly’s annual resolutions to be adopted in the relevant main committees of the General Assembly.

It will now be for the Pakistan Mission to ensure that Kashmiris’ human rights violations are fully covered in the relevant Committees and their resolutions. Beyond this ritualistic exercise, nothing should be expected from the General Assembly which is notorious for producing voluminous and repetitive resolutions without any follow-up action or consequence. The UN system is not only the world’s largest consumer of paper but is also the largest producer of waste paper. No wonder it is dubbed as the ‘dustbin of history’.

Today, UN is no longer the sole meaningful arbiter on issues of global relevance and importance. It has resolved no major disputes; nor has it prevented any conflicts. Washington, not New York, is the focus of world attention for actual decision-making on these issues. Ironically, UN Security Council, responsible under the Charter for maintenance of international peace and security, is also left with no role in preventing conflicts or resolving disputes. Its deliberations are conducted in stage-managed debates and choreographed scenarios.

In this scenario, there is no room for over-optimism on the final settlement of the Kashmir dispute. Imran Khan has no doubt generated enough global awareness of Indian atrocities in Kashmir. Besides drawing world’s attention to untold Kashmiri sufferings, we must strengthen the legitimacy of Kashmiri cause. We should now focus more on action rather than clichés and anodyne hue and cry. To quote Shakespeare, action is eloquence. For now, at least, the world knows the illegality of India’s military occupation of Kashmir.

The Security Council and the UN secretary general have reaffirmed UN resolutions requiring a plebiscite in Kashmir. India is in violation of these resolutions. Looking ahead, the challenge for us is to sustain the momentum and to keep the world engaged on Kashmiris’ human rights abuses. This requires a calibrated diplomatic offensive through our serving and retired diplomats in world’s major capitals and relevant global forums. Kashmiris are waging a valiant freedom struggle. This time, the Kashmiris have discovered the power of resilience.

Their youth have gone through a generational change. We must strengthen their resolve. The only way we can do this is to strengthen their freedom movement through determined political, economic, moral and diplomatic support. The Kashmiri diaspora and other oppressed Indian minorities will obviously be the pivotal factor in this campaign. The world now understands Modi’s fascist plan to impose a ‘final solution’ by changing Kashmir’s demographic composition. This is bound to provoke a fierce reaction from the Kashmiri people.

The prospect of an impending genocide in occupied Kashmir is a clarion call to the world community to act now before it is too late. Major powers and the UN must intervene to prevent mass murder and genocide in Kashmir. They must not ignore Imran Khan’s warnings that this time an India-Pakistan conflict could erupt into a nuclear apocalypse that must be averted at all costs.