Srinagar, 13 Oct 2023: A serious allegation has been made against India’s BJP government and its regime in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), accusing them of systematically enabling settler colonialism in the territory through the implementation of new laws, following the unilateral abrogation of the region’s special status on 5 August 2019. The information has been disseminated via a report from Kashmir Media Service (KMS), indicating that the Indian administration has been progressively treating Jammu and Kashmir as a colony since 27 October 1947, when Indian troops allegedly landed in Srinagar and occupied the territory against the will of the Kashmiri people.
Colonization of the IIOJK is pointed out to have been a long-standing aspiration of the RSS and BJP. KMS reports that the inclusion of non-Kashmiri Hindus in the voter list is an additional move aimed to advance the Hindutva government’s expansive plans in the occupied territory. KMS referenced a report titled “Colonial Diary – A Repository of Settler Colonial Diktats in IIOJK,” released last year by the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC-AJK) chapter and Legal Forum for Kashmir (LFK) in Islamabad, to validate its points.
The aforementioned report enumerates around 220 legislations, administrative changes, orders, notifications, and press releases by India from August 2019 to August 2022, subsequent to the revocation of Article 370 and 35 A. Post-5 August 2019, the Indian government introduced several new laws and amended others to facilitate the issuance of domicile and land-owning rights to non-Kashmiris, primarily Hindus. By June 2022, four million such certificates were reportedly issued, highlighting India’s intentional demographic alteration of Kashmir. New laws also reportedly permit the government-acquired lands for industrial or commercial purposes to be sold or disposed of to any Indian and authorize the Indian occupying forces to declare any area as “strategic” for operational and training purposes, indicating a form of land-grabbing, with the Indian occupying forces already securing thousands of hectares of land in IIOJK.
The government led by Narendra Modi has been accused of initiating another phase of attempts to depict a favourable image of the situation in the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, seeking to convince the global community that the territory is experiencing normalcy. However, according to KMS, the Modi regime, along with its armed Indian army and police establishment, has been consistently trying to mislead the international community about the serious situation prevailing in the IIOJK since the revocation of the territory’s special status on August 05, 2019.
Despite the Modi regime’s intense efforts, the international community is reportedly not aligning with its narrative of normalcy in the IIOJK, with reports from human rights organizations periodically debunking the Indian government’s assertion that “all is well” in IIOJK.
KMS asserted that the RSS-supported Hindutva regime’s colonial actions in IIOJK are stark violations of United Nations resolutions and appealed to the global community to recognize and respond to the Indian settler-colonial project in the occupied territory.