New Delhi, (Samajweekly) In the run up to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) session, the Indian listening posts have picked up chatters that the ISI and the Pakistan Foreign Office are asking their station chiefs and diplomatic missions to drum up negative media coverage on Kashmir after the recent initiatives taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The 76th session of the UNGA will open on September 14 and continue till September 30. In the run up to the UNGA, Indian listening posts have come across messaging to ensure negative publicity about Kashmir and also proliferate it in the international media.
Pakistan seems to be uneasy about the progress made in the fields of education, health and the other developmental initiatives take by the Modi government, along with the impending restoration of statehood for Jammu and Kashmir for which an all-party meeting was convened recently in New Delhi.
A process is already on to ramp up negative sentiments by Pakistan as #KashmirRejectsModiAPC is trending on Twitter.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has described Narendra Modi’s all-party meeting with top political leaders from Jammu and Kashmir as a “drama” and a “PR exercise”.
“In my view, it was a drama. Why was it a drama? Because at best it could be called a public relations exercise, but nothing was achieved,” Qureshi said a day after the high-level meeting on Jammu and Kashmir in New Delhi on June 24.
Qureshi said the Kashmiri leaders at the meeting “unanimously demanded full-fledged restoration of statehood”.
But the fact is that the Government of India is already contemplating such a move at the earliest. In fact, the delimitation exercise has already been jumpstarted.
Under Westphalian sovereignty laws, India is clear as daylight that Jammu and Kashmir is legally, ethically and constitutionally a part of India and no external interference will be brooked. However, Pakistan continues to daydream that it can get this to change diplomatically, militarily and by launching a 30-year long proxy war.
It has failed on all counts and yet it hankers for Kashmir as the unfinished business of Partition and as a reprisal for the brutal defeat in the 1971 war when it was vivisected, and a new nation called Bangladesh was born.
Pakistan daily ‘Dawn’ said in an editorial that Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has also said that Pakistan is ready for talks with India should the latter provide a roadmap for restoration of Kashmir’s special status.
“Therefore, India must take solid steps to not only address Kashmiris’ concerns, but also to push the peace process with Pakistan forward. Moreover, India needs to halt its efforts to change Kashmir’s demographics by settling outsiders in the region. India must show that it respects the wishes of the people of Kashmir, or else such meetings will be little more than a political pantomime,” Dawn said.
In recent days, there is a bump up in terrorist activity to break Jammu and Kashmir’s peace with encounters almost every other day. The drone attacks in Jammu are also seen as attempts to scuttle the prevailing peace.
