LAHORE: Speakers at a conference on the Kashmir issue said on Wednesday the BJP government was implementing the philosophy of extremist Hindu organisation RSS as it violated the UN resolution by scrapping the special status of the occupied territory.

The one-day conference on ‘Kashmir Dispute: Role of International Community’ was organised by the Punjab University’s Pakistan Study Centre in collaboration with the Centre for South Asian Studies here.

PU Pro-Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Saleem Mazhar said Modi was following Hindutva philosophy and it had also exposed the real face of India which claims to be a secular state. He said Pakistan was countering India successfully at the international forums and it needed to be reinforced with political and economic stability at home.

He said Modi’s misadventure would pave the way for the ultimate solution to the Kashmir dispute.

Senior journalist Mujeebur Rehman Shami said India had failed to achieve its desired goal of annexing the Kashmir region. He said India thought that with the passage of time, the struggle of the Kashmiris would die down and Kashmir would become an integral part of India but that did not happen.

The recent developments had worsened the situation for India, he said. The Indian government, Mr Shami said, had also violated its own constitution while abrogating Articles 370 and 35-A. At an international level, China’s support for Pakistan was very vital and after the annexation of Laddakh region, the dynamics of the Kashmir dispute had fundamentally been altered by involving another stakeholder in Kashmir.

He said the Indian government wanted to suppress the Kashmiris to stop another separatist movement going on in India.

Dean Faculty of Arts and Humanities Prof Dr Iqbal Chawla said the present crisis in the occupied Kashmir had vindicated the two-nation theory that the demand for the separate homeland by the Muslims was justified. He said the atrocities being committed in the occupied Kashmir had also disfigured India’s face of secularism. The UN had failed to resolve the dispute, he said.

Prof Dr Adnan Sarwar Khan discussed Simla Accord, the Lahore Declaration and the famous Musharraf formula. He said the people of Kashmir were the main party of the dispute and it could not be resolved without taking them on board. He said Pakistan must be cautious as India would not accept mediation offer of President Trump.

He hoped that the Indian Supreme Court would declare revocation of the Articles 370 and 35-A null and void. He said Modi had planned to use abrogation as bargaining chip for negotiations with Pakistan leaving aside the issue of Kashmir. He said the Chinese role in the dispute was very significant and now the dispute was going to become trilateral.

Dr Sajid Mahmood Awan said Kashmir was the unfinished agenda of the Partition. He said there were four states whose issues were taken to the UN but Pakistan did not follow the other three which gave breathing space to India and it successfully took control of Hyderabad, Junagarh and Manadar.

He said Pakistan must focus on building public opinion at the world level. He said India was not going to hold plebiscite in the occupied Kashmir because it knew of the outcome.

University of Sindh’s Pakistan Study Centre Director Prof Dr Shuja Ahmed Mahesar wondered at the inability of the UN to solve the Kashmir dispute while East Timor was resolved in a very brief span. He said Kashmir was not an internal problem of India.

He criticised the partition plan as unjust and unfair which sowed the seeds for the permanent disturbance in the region.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2019