Lal chowk Massacre completes 30 years of Violent Act today

1. In Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, the Srinagar’s Lal Chowk massacre of 1993 that completed 30 years, today, continues to be one of the grisliest incidents of brutality and gross human rights violations committed by Indian troops and paramilitary personnel in the territory.

2. On 10th April 1993, a large section of Lal Chowk housing markets, shrines and schools, was burnt to the ground by the Indian troops. More than 60 houses, five commercial buildings and 150 shops were completely burnt to ashes. Over 125 innocent civilians were killed, 47 of them burnt alive, by the Indian paramilitary Border Security Force. This massacre was consistent with the policy of repression and subjugation by India and its local collaborators to silence the people’s resistance against the illegal occupation. Hindutva-inspired judicial system has, so far, failed to provide justice to the victims and the criminals are moving freely in India.

3. Senior APHC leader Nayeem Ahmad Khan in a message from New Delhi’s Tihar jail condemned the massacre and said, the mayhem provides every reasonable basis for the International Criminal Court to prosecute India for war crimes. He asked what else criteria is if such killings, arson and destruction are not enough to initiate a criminal proceeding against New Delhi.

4. Meanwhile, Indian authorities have shifted over three dozen Kashmiri political detainees from IIOJK’s Kotbhalwal and Baramulla jails to different jails of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh in India.

5. The UK-based Amnesty International has said that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to hit international headlines for all the wrong reasons including his increasingly hard-line Hindutva policies that are particularly targeting people in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir. The Amnesty in one of its posts displayed on its website mentioned some key issues recently highlighted in the press. These include Modi’s bulldozer politics, extortion of Kashmir’s mineral resources and arrest of journalists. The Amnesty posted a photo, captioned “the houses and businesses of Kashmiris are being destroyed without warning or valid reason, using JCB excavator” and drew a parallel between Israel and India with reference to their respective actions in Palestine and Kashmir. The post was written by Cherry Bird who has been the human rights watchdog’s Country Coordinator for India since 2017.

6. On the other hand, tension prevailed after a Hindutva armed group vandalised a mosque and attacked Nimazis inside a mosque in BJP-ruled Indian state of Haryana. Restrictions were imposed after anti-Muslim violence erupted in another Indian state, Jharkhand.

Category: English

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