The Kashmiri separatists have threatened an agitation across the Valley after Eid if the government does not come clean on the proposed separate townships for Kashmiri Pandits, Sainik Colony and the industrial policy.
Reading out a resolution from the pulpit of the grand mosque in the downtown to thousands of people, which has been agreed upon jointly by the hardline Hurriyat faction, headed by Syed Ali Geelani, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chairman Yasin Malik and his faction of Hurriyat, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said people didn’t trust the government over its past explanation on these controversial issues.
Addressing a mammoth gathering during the Juma-tul-Vida prayers, as the day is also being observed as Youm-e-Quds to show solidarity with Palestine, Mirwaiz said Jammu and Kashmir was a Muslim majority region and the people of the state would not allow that its Muslim majority character be altered at any cost.
Mirwaiz decries the BJP’s warmongering and said Pakistan was also nuclear armed.
“Day by day, the situation in Kashmir is deteriorating. It is unfortunate that the people in power here are calling for bombing and waging a war against Pakistan. They want to destroy and destabilise whole of the subcontinent,” Mirwaiz said in his address, with people responding by calls of “shame, shame”.
“It is not 1967 or 71. Today is 2016 and both the countries are nuclear armed and fully laced with lethal weapons. Only an idiot can think of a war in this scenario,” Mirwaiz said, with an obvious reference to recent demand by the BJP in the J&K Assembly, which is the ally of ruling PDP, that Pakistan should be bombed.
He said they (PDP-BJP) called themselves people’s representatives, but talked of waging war, whereas the All Parties Hurriyat Conference had always called for “peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute.”
“But , still they call us terrorists, fundamentalists,” he said. The Hurriyat leader said because of the suppressive policies of the government, the educated youth of the Kashmir were being forced to take up guns in their hand as the political, economic and religious rights of the people here were being usurped by the government.
Without naming the PDP and its leaders, Mirwaiz said these people used to talk about Kashmir resolution when they were out of power, but it had now been proved that they were after power and wanted to grab the chair.
Mirwaiz said the government could not suppress the people’s urge for self-determination by using force.
At the end of his speech, while reading a joint declaration, which was read to people in other parts of Kashmir today as well by the separatists, Mirwaiz said people would fight tooth and nail any proposal to set up separate townships for migrant Kashmiri Pandits, Sainik Colony or the new industrial policy allowing non-state subjects to set up factories in J&K.
Separatists asks govt to come clean on Pandit townships
