Syeda Mamoona Rubab: Seven decades ago, India`s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had pledged to the world that the future of the state of Jammu &Kashmir would be decided by the people of Jammu and Kashmir. This pledge was made right after illegal accession of the state by India that, among other issues, produced a protracted dispute with neighbouring Pakistan and turned the state to a flashpoint for future conflicts.

Subsequently, India avoided implementing its commitment to Pakistan, to the Kashmiri people and the international community by organizing fraudulent elections in the state as well as seeking to ensure its integration with the Indian Union through various constitutional guarantees. On 5 August 2019, even the charade of these constitutional guarantees was done away with. The state was arbitrarily divided and declared as a Union Territory in the presence of 900,000menacing Indian troops, ready to decimate Kashmiri opposition with genocidal hatred.
Since its forcible occupation, the Kashmiri people have opposed the way the occupying power - India - has treated them. In 1989, the occupation forces fired upon a peaceful protest against fraudulent state elections killing 100 protestors. This triggered a freedom movement against a brutal occupation in which, thus far, around 100,000 Kashmiris have been martyred, more than 22,000 women widowed and 108,000 children orphaned. Over 12,000 Kashmiri women have been raped by India forces as an instrument of occupation policy. In the first half of this year, 229 killings took place in the occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
Jammu Kashmir was a princely state under the British rule. It was forcibly annexed by India violating the principle that governed India`s partition in 1947. This led to a conflict between Pakistan and India. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) intervened in the matter at India`s request. In its several resolutions, the Council affirmed that Jammu & Kashmir is a disputed territory between Pakistan and India, that this dispute will be settled by a free and fair plebiscite and that no other mechanism created by the occupying power including elections or constitutional guarantees could substitute plebiscite. Later, under one pretext or the other, India avoided withdrawal from the state stalling thereby all necessary attempts to create conditions for fair plebiscite.

Since 5 August 2019, the scale of India`s draconian measures has increased manifold, resulting in denial of all fundamental freedoms in the state, large scale use of pellet guns, arbitrary detentions, torture and rape. The situation has, inter alia, engendered an intense food and medical crisis causing deaths of beleaguered Kashmiris either from hunger or non-availability of life saving drugs. Meanwhile, the state remains under an iron curtain due to an enforced information blackout. In April this year, the Indian Government passed Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Order 2020 aimed at illegally altering the demographic structure of the occupied territories. This is comparable to the policy of foreign settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Since August 2019, the United Nations Security Council has held consultations reaffirming the "disputed" nature of Jammu and Kashmir and the Council`s role in the dispute. The convening of these Consultations directly repudiated the Indian position that their actions were an "internal affair". They also rejected unequivocally the unilateral Indian attempt to sidestep Council resolutions. Earlier, the UN Secretary General in his statement of 8 August 2019 had clearly stated that the UN`s position on this region (IOJ&K) was governed by the UN Charter and the relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
Jammu Kashmir is not merely a dispute between two countries. It, in fact, is a test case for all freedom loving and law-abiding nations as well as people of goodwill worldwide to judge their commitment to the cause of sustainable and equitable peace and security - both at regional and international levels.
We all need to align our objectives and means to achieve the fundamental objectives of the UN Charter for South Asia. We cannot afford to let peace fail in the region that is home to the 1/4rth of humanity.

The writer is with the Islamabad Policy Institute (IPI) and writes from Pakistan.