MIRPUR (AJK) - AJK President Masood Khan Wednesday said that despite India’s unbridled coercion during the last 70 years of subjugation, the people of Jammu & Kashmiri have defeated the writ of the Indian government as they want freedom.

He was speaking at an event organised by the Consulate General of Manchester in the historic building of the British Heritage Centre on Wednesday, says a message released to the media here late Wednesday.

He said that India sent the occupation forces to Kashmir against the backdrop of massacres and exodus of Muslims of Jammu. India, he said, was changing demographic balance in Jammu and the Valley of Kashmir by giving permanent residence permits to non-Kashmiris and non-Muslims, leasing land to Indian industrialists, and constructing illegal settlements for Pandits and ex-army personnel.

President Masood said, “October 27, 1947 indeed was a black day in the history of Kashmir. This is the day when India landed its occupation forces in Srinagar and since then they have been brutalising the people of the occupied part of Kashmir.”

He said in those acts of genocide, the Indian National Army, the Dogra Army, the terrorists of Rashtria Swayam Sevak (RSS), the Maharajah of Kashmir, and the Jammu and Kashmir prime minister at that time, Mahar Chand Mahajan, were directly involved. “They were war criminals by any definition,” he said.

In fact, the governments in New Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir masterminded and executed the genocide in which more than 237,000 Muslims were killed; some 27, 000 women were captured and subjected  to predatory and sexual slavery; and half a million were forced to flee to Pakistan and Azad Kashmir.

“This was Muslims’ holocaust, shortly after the holocaust during World War II. This was their ethnic cleansing much before the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s. The crimes of the Hindu extremists are being brushed under the carpet by a systematic conspiracy of silence,” he said.

The president said that since 1947, India’s killing spree in Kashmir has continued unabated. The International inaction, he said, provided the cover to India to commit crimes against humanity in IOK.

Since 1989, they have killed more than 100,000 Kashmiris, used rape as an instrument of war, and employed incarceration, forced disappearances, torture, encounter killings, and custodial killings  to bludgeon Kashmiris to submission and enslavement. By the use of pellet guns, they have completely blinded more than a hundred, mostly youth, put 1,000 at the risk of blinding, and injured more than 20,000 others.

However, the president said, despite India’s unbridled coercion, Kashmiris, after 70 years of bondage, they still say no to Indian writ and rule. They only want freedom from the Indian subjugation.

The most lethal weapon India against Kashmiris was traditional and public diplomacy by which it was systematically distorting facts and a false picture of the situation in Kashmir, he said. “They project the unarmed and innocent Kashmiri civilians as terrorists, whereas the fact is that Indian state terrorists are killing Kashmiris. The Kashmiris have no means to defend themselves against Indian state terrorism,” he said.

He urged the Diaspora to raise the issue of Kashmir with their members of parliament, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the British prime minister. The issue be raised and discussed at the floor of the House of Commons, he said. The people of Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir, as well as the diaspora community, will demonstrate unity to internationalise the Kashmir issue because the bilateral track had proved to be ineffective.