Sardar Masood terms Kashmir missing limb of Pakistan, its body politic

MUZAFFARABAD, August 9: The AJK President, Sardar Masood Khan, while terming Kashmir as the missing limb of Pakistan, said the state would have joined Pakistan but Indian leaders’ conspiracies and violation of the principles of partition based on the two-nation theory deprived the Kashmiris of their freedom and fundamental rights.

“Kashmir is the missing limb of Pakistan, its body politic. The State of Jammu and Kashmir would have joined Pakistan in accordance with the principles laid down in the 1947 Indian Independence Act, the aspirations of the majority of the Kashmiri people, and the contiguity of its geographical territory with Pakistan”, he said in an article published by national periodical.

He stated that by occupying part of the state on October 27, 1947, India wronged the people of Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan robbing them of their fundamental rights. That’s why Kashmir does not go away, and it will not go away until its destiny is determined by its people through democratic means.

The AJK President maintained that in 1947, the people of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, through a heroic war of independence, liberated a part of Jammu and Kashmir. The rest of the territory was occupied by India using military power, conspiracy, and legal manipulation.

“The people of Jammu and Kashmir believe that in 1947 a right had accrued to them under international law and the British colonial formula of uti possidetis juris to get twin freedoms from the tyrannical and the autocratic rule of the Dogra dynasty and the possible hovering menace of the Indian rule”, Khan asserted.

He said those two rights were crushed by India, and the wounds have continued to fester. India and Pakistan had come into being because of the two-nation theory. Murderous communal riots broke out, killing millions.

In the case of Jammu and Kashmir, the so-called secular Congress leaders, Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, the Indian National Army (INA), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and Maharajah’s Dogra army viciously usurped Kashmir with violent and organized communalism.

Recalling that more than 237,000 Muslims were killed by these genocidaires to purge the Jammu region of Kashmir of the Muslim majority, the President wrote that half a million Muslims were deported to Pakistan and Azad Kashmir.

“Holocaust and pogrom in one go and within a month. Since then, Indian occupation forces have conducted scores of organized massacres targeting Muslims. Now, these massacres have become part of the Kashmiris’ collective unconscious, a term used by psychologist Carl Jung to describe the life and death experiences of individuals and nations. That is why Kashmir has become part of Pakistan’s “objective psyche,” he said.

Highlighting the importance of the two-nation theory, President Masood wrote that after the failure of the war of independence in 1857, Muslims began to believe that they had to fight the two evils in the form of British colonial rule and slavery to the Hindu majority. And over time, this ideology became popular among Muslims in South Asia.

“The two-nation theory, which was no accident rather it was a doctrine that evolved and was driven by popular ethos since 1857 to fight two evils: British colonialism and Hindu majoritarianism. Take out Kashmir, and a part of the two-nation theory collapses,” he said.