The Indian government has refused to revoke the Armed Forces Special Power Act that gives power to the army to detain indefinitely anyone they think is “reasonably” suspicious. The law further gives the permission to the armed forces to shoot anybody who is “acting against the law.”
Interestingly, this time around, apart from the general public, it is the puppet state government that has called for the law to be taken back by New Delhi. These vibes by the puppet regime are meant to win some favour with Kashmiris but at the end of the day help New Delhi take them away from the path. The people know that both the governments are complicit in keeping them under shackles. As things stand, nearly 100,000 people have keen killed so far, corpses of many thousands of them found in the recently discovered mass graves in the north of the Valley. A report in this paper reveals that the ongoing year seems to be the bloodiest in recent history of the struggle; the state army has been killing, torturing, destroying people’s homes and property on a routine basis.
Censure is coming from a section of India and intellectuals, the prominent example being Arundhati Roy, who has remarked that ‘India needs freedom from Kashmir as much as Kashmir needs freedom from India’. The sooner the arbitrary rule comes to an end, the better it is for Kashmiris, India itself and South Asia’s peace.