Washington, May 19, 2023 (PPI-OT): As India prepares to host a meeting of tourism officials from the G20 in the disputed territory of Kashmir, authorities have deployed elite commandos and stepped up security in the region’s largest city, reported New York-based Associated Press news agency. The AP report said the meeting will be the first significant international event in Kashmir since New Delhi stripped the Muslim-majority territory of semi-autonomy in 2019. Indian authorities are hoping the meeting will show that the controversial changes have brought “peace and prosperity” to the region, it added.
For the G20 meeting, the report said, the city has spruced up its commercial center and roads leading to the convention center on Dal Lake, while police have increased security even further, placing a massive security cordon around the site. On last Wednesday, gun-toting naval commandos in rubber boats were seen patrolling the waters in the famous Dal Lake. The report quoted Paul Staniland, a political scientist who studies South Asia at the University of Chicago, as having said the G20 meeting is “in line with Indian government policy to symbolically project normalcy and stability in Kashmir,” and is unlikely to herald a change in policy.
The report also referred to a UN human rights expert who on Monday said the meeting would support a “facade of normalcy” while “massive human rights violations” continue in the region. “The government of India is seeking to normalise what some have described as a military occupation by instrumental sing a G20 meeting and portray an international seal of approval,” the report quoted Fernand de Varennes, the special rapporteur on minority issues, as having said in a statement. The AP report further said that intrusive security measures have been a fact of life in occupied Kashmir since 1989, when an armed struggle erupted against Indian rule and Indian forces replied with a brutal crackdown. While the armed struggle was largely suppressed, the region remains one of the world’s most heavily militarized territory, with hundreds of thousands of Indian troops deployed, it maintained.
For decades, the report said, a typical Kashmiri’s day has included frisking and questioning by police and soldiers, house raids and random searches of cars, but after New Delhi revoked the special status of the region, authorities have seized scores of homes and arrested hundreds under stringent anti-terror laws. The report also quoted Mehbooba Mufti, the PDP president, as having said that police had detained hundreds of Kashmiris ahead of the meeting. In a party newsletter, she said that there has been an “unprecedented surge in arrests, raids, surveillance and persecution of our people” ahead of the event.
In the end, the report pointed out Kashmir has remained on edge since the 2019 changes, as authorities put in place new laws that critics and many Kashmiris fear could transform the region’s demographics. In New Delhi’s effort to shape what it calls “Naya Kashmir,” the territory’s people and its press have been largely silenced, the report concluded.
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