MUZAFFARABAD: Kashmiri activists would hold an anti-India demonstration in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) capital to register their protest against the scheduled visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to occupied Jammu amid tight security cover.

“Since India’s savage machinery has been brazenly stifling all voices of dissent through the worst ever coercive measures, we, who breathe in free air on this side of the divide, will represent the sentiments of the entire Kashmiri nation by condemning the visit of killer Modi at a demonstration in Muzaffarabad,” said Uzair Ahmed Ghazali, chief of Pasban-e-Hurriyat Jammu and Kashmir (PHJK) in a conversation with a group of mediapersons on Monday.

Mr Ghazali said Mr Modi’s second visit to the occupied Jammu after scrapping the special status of the internationally acknowledged disputed region in August 2019 was not meant for development of the occupied state as claimed by him, but a portent of another spell of deaths and destruction.

“The so-called development in occupied Jammu and Kashmir is nothing but a farce to hoodwink the international community and can never win over the Kashmiris who have been constantly witnessing their loved ones killed, injured, arrested, harassed and humiliated at the hands of India’s occupational machinery,” he said.

He said since 2015 the fascist BJP regime under Mr Modi had arrested as many as 43,000 innocent Kashmiris to crush the revolutionary anti-India movement in occupied Jammu and Kashmir, apart from martyring more than 2,500 and maiming and injuring over 30,000 Kashmiris.

The most painful of all crimes against the Kashmiris were attacks on their women which they used as weapons of war despite condemnations from different parts of the world, he said.

“In fact, Mr Modi is the biggest terrorist on this globe like that of his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, because his hands are stained with the blood of Indian Muslims as well as the Kashmiris since long and the visit of such a person to the occupied territory is bound to be greeted with hatred by the subjugated Kashmiris,” Mr Ghazali said.

He pointed out that while there was no let-up in machinations to bring about demographic changes in occupied Jammu and Kashmir through issuance of illegal domicile certificates to Indian citizens, notorious Indian agencies like NIA and SIA were encroaching on state and private lands and properties of bona-fide state subjects were also being demolished or seized to subdue the Kashmiris and render them a minority in their own land.

Ironically, the Indian judiciary had also been aiding and abetting the war crimes perpetrated by the Indian government and its institutionsin occupied Jammu and Kashmirwith impunity, he added.

Mr Ghazali warned India to keep in mind that Kashmiri people would not give up their heroic movement against its unlawful military occupation of their motherland.

Published in Dawn, February 20th, 2024