
President asks international community to take notice of HR abuses in IIOJ&K
In a message on the occasion of Kashmir Martyrs' Day observed on July 13, he said, 'I pay tribute to the 22 great Kashmiri martyrs who sacrificed their lives against oppression and barbarism and for the right to freedom, outside Srinagar Jail on July 13, 1931.'
'The great struggle that the Kashmiri people are carrying forward today is a continuation of the sacrifices of these 22 martyrs. The candle of freedom that their sacrifice lit in the hearts of the Kashmiri nation is still burning brightly today,' he added.
President, PM reaffirm Pakistan's support for Kashmiri people
He said, 'Pakistan pays tribute to the bravery, determination and sacrifices of the Kashmiri people, who have stood firm against Indian rule for decades and continue to struggle for their freedom.'
'India's illegal occupation of Occupied Jammu and Kashmir has turned it into a military prison where extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, political imprisonment, attempts to change the population ratio and systematic conspiracies to erase the identity of Muslims are ongoing,' he added. He said, 'Today, we salute these martyrs and all other Kashmiris who sacrificed their lives for freedom.'
'Pakistan will continue to provide political, moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri brothers until they achieve their right to self-determination in accordance with the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council,' he concluded.
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Express Tribune
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Pakistan — a bit of history to understand the present
Listen to article Around the middle of the eighteenth century, traders from the islands of Britain were attracted to the land they were to call "India", named after the Indus River. The river originated in Tibet and then flowed through Kashmir into Pakistan. In a vast delta south of Karachi, now Pakistan's largest city and once its capital, the river emptied itself into the sea. The British did not come to India to conquer but to trade. They came to India to buy handicrafts from the skilled workers who produced delicate fabrics from the locally grown cotton. As they established their businesses, the areas' weak rulers offered some resistance which the British traders were able to overcome, sometimes with the help of local chiefs. Over time the British merchants were able to establish themselves as the rulers, laying the foundation of the British imperial raj. Their dominion over the vast land lasted for a couple of centuries. It was finally challenged by local politicians who took advantage of the way Britain had been weakened by its participation in the two world wars, the first fought from 1914 to 1919 and the second from 1939 to1945. The Indian independence movement was led by Mohandas Gandhi, a London-trained lawyer who launched a non-violent campaign against British rule after having tried the approach in South Africa. Gandhi's life as an ascetic and his pursuit of nonviolence as a weapon against the British colonisation of the country to which he originally belonged, became the model that other activists like Martin Luther King were to follow. In the early 1940s, the government in London headed by the Labor Pary leader Clement Attlee decided to leave India and transfer power to the leaderships of the Hindu dominated Congress Party and the Muslim dominated All-India Muslim League. This transfer took place after Attlee had agreed to divide the Indian colony into two states, India and Pakistan. India was to be a predominantly Hindu country while Pakistan was to have a Muslim population. The partition of the British colony led to what was to be later called "ethnic cleansing". As I estimated in my first book on Pakistan, fourteen million people moved from one country to the other. Eight million Muslims who were left on the Indian side of the border gave up their homes and headed towards Pakistan, while six million Hindus and Sikhs went in the other direction. They traveled mostly on foot and there were attacks on them by the members of the other communities. About a million people died in this mass transfer, some because of exhaustion and some because of communal killing. Khushwant Singh, a popular writer who wrote in English, published a widely read book on these moves. He called it The Train to Pakistan. More than half of the Muslim migrants headed to Karachi, which was chosen to be the new country's capital. The new arrivals spoke mostly Urdu while those who went to the Pakistani part of the province of Punjab were mostly Punjabi speaking. Punjabi was the language of the area they came from and settled on the lands the Sikh farmers had tilled before they pulled out their roots and headed to India. The majority of British India's Muslim population was concentrated in two areas: one in the northwest and the other in the northeast. The two together had a total of 65 million people, equally divided between the two regions. For a quarter century, these two areas were parts of the new state of Pakistan, mostly called the "wings" of the two countries. The wings were separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. The remaining 35 million Muslims stayed in India, scattered in several areas in the vast domain. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the founder of the Pakistani state. He belonged to the Khoja community, which was concentrated in the city of Karachi. 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However, there are 200 million Muslims who still live in India, the country the Hindu nationalists now like to call Bharat. To dominate this segment of the Indian population is seen as an unfinished business. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has abandoned its effort to be an inclusive place, tolerant of diversity. Its preference is to identify itself as primarily a Hindu state and changing the country's name from India to Bharat.


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Dalai Lama succession a ‘thorn' in China-India ties, says Chinese embassy
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Business Recorder
8 hours ago
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