When you go through many aid agency websites, you see words like impartiality, equality, unbiased and many more such terms that gives a sense of transparency and accountability about their works. However, the role played by most of international humanitarian agencies in Kashmir during the continuing siege of over two months, which has resulted into a humanitarian crisis, was more or less that of mute spectators.

It is sheer idiocy on anyone’s part to think that Kashmir is a contiguous part of Pakistan. Kashmir was a princely state, preferring to remain independent. It was only treachery and deceit from both India and Pakistan (and of course Kashmiri leadership), which have pushed us to the trouble we are in. Plus it is of no logic going from one sort of ‘Ghulaami’ to another.

Ask any youngsters who are fighting on the streets, what they want and you will get the answer. It’s true that Kashmiris out of emotions were wishing to accede to Pakistan, but times have changed and so has the generation. UN Resolutions have no meaning, Indian promise of plebiscite dumped deep under, Pakistan occupying 1/3rd of Kashmir, and so on.

Times have changed and so has the thinking. Kashmiris neither want to become a part of a nation which is Islamic for only namesake nor of that nation which in the name of secularism in the most communal in practice. Kashmiris are fighting for their own identity, which they never had the opportunity to possess

MUHAMMAD JUNAID COMMENTS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN KASHMIR AND NEW DELHI IN A POLITICO-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

On 26 January 1992, Murli Manohar Joshi, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, after traveling by road all the way from the southern tip of India, was airlifted from Jammu to the heart of Srinagar where he half-raised the Indian flag near historic Lal Chowk. All of Kashmir was put under severe curfew, and the army was given shoot-at-sight orders.

Throughout the day soldiers shot dead more than a dozen Kashmiris in the streets of Srinagar. Over the previous two years, the Indian government had unleashed a reign of terror on the people, with massacre upon massacre of unarmed protestors dotting Kashmir’s timeline. Joshi’s Ekta Yatra (Unity March), protected and provided full support by the Indian government, was an important reminder of the nature of the India and the relationship it sought with the people of Kashmir. The event was designed to put on display the majoritarian character of Indian nationhood, and line up power of the state behind it to send barely coded messages to audiences in India and in Kashmir.