Sheikh Abdullah acted as a ‘facilitator for India’: PaK president

Srinagar

Replying to a question during an event held at the Oxford Bookshop in Clifton, Pakistan, Pakistan Administered Kashmir President Sardar Masood Khan said that Sheikh Abdullah acted as a facilitator for India and if he hadn’t sided with India, so much bloodletting wouldn’t have happened. The phrase, atoot ang, that Jammu and Kashmir was inseparable from India was included in the Indian constitution because of Sheikh Abdullah, Pakistan media reported.

Khan during his address said that people of Pakistan believed that there was no military solution to the Kashmir issue and it could only be resolved through diplomacy and politics, Dawn reported

Khan said people needed to know that since 1947, government forces had killed 500,000 Kashmiris; and since last Friday alone they had taken 24 lives.

He said it was Pandit Nehru, Viceroy Mountbatten and Maharaja of Kashmir, together, who hatched a conspiracy against the people of Jammu and Kashmir, 85 per cent of whom were Muslims, and all of whom wanted to be with Pakistan. They had relatives in Pakistan, and people from there used to come to Pakistan. But all the three men conspired to cut that line [of relations] off, the effects of which we were facing even now, the report said.

Despite having 700,000 troops in Kashmir, India had not been able to control the region. India’s strategy to subdue Kashmiris had failed. “The hearts of Kashmiris beat [in harmony] with those of Pakistanis,” Dawn quoted Khan as saying.

Replying to another question, Khan said, in the 1990s, India committed “terrible atrocities” against Kashmiris because of which young Kashmiris came to Pakistan. They had vowed to take revenge. It was not a conventional war, it was an asymmetrical war.

Khan, according to the report, made it clear that Kashmiris and Pakistanis didn’t think that the Kashmir dispute could be resolved through military means. It could only be resolved through diplomatic and political means. Khan said after 9/11, many countries dubbed their enemies ‘terrorists’. India also used the same terrorist tag for Kashmiri “freedom fighters”.

During the event, Khan also paid tribute to Kashmiri leadership including Syed Ali Gilani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik for keeping the flag of the freedom struggle aloft in such difficult circumstances. And in order to dispel the notion of differences among them, a Joint Resistance Leadership had been formed in Kashmir, Dawn newspaper reported.