Ambassador Rao: India's Supreme Court verdict an unjust rubber-stamp on an inherently illegal act

In 1963, Martin Luther King said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”.

These words ring as true today as when they were first spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King. We recently witnessed the Indian Supreme Court’s verdict of 11 December 2023 upholding the Indian Government’s illegal annexation of Occupied Jammu & Kashmir of 05 August 2019.

Harkening back to that fateful day when the Indian Government abrogated Article 370, as well as 35(A), of its own Constitution in contravention of all international legal norms and precepts, the silence of the major powers of the world was a damning indictment that the rules-based order we wished to institute no longer exists, sadly.

Needless to say, Pakistan categorically rejects the judgment announced by the Supreme Court of India on the status of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK). It is a widely known fact and a well-established truth that Jammu and Kashmir is an internationally-recognized dispute, and remains on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council for over seven decades. Therefore, India retains no legal or moral right to make any unilateral decisions on the status of this disputed territory against the will of the Kashmiri people and Pakistan, who remain parties to the dispute.

As outlined in multiple United Nations Security Council Resolutions, the final disposition of Jammu and Kashmir was to be made in accordance with the provisions contained thereof as well as according to the aspirations of the Kashmiri people. India cannot abdicate its international obligations by hiding behind the thin veneer of self-serving domestic legislations and judicial verdicts. Its plans to annex IIOJK are, therefore, bound to fail.

The recent verdict of the Indian Supreme Court fails to recognize the internationally-recognized disputed nature of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. Further, it also fails to cater to the aspirations of the Kashmiri people who have already rejected India’s illegal and unilateral actions of 05 August 2019. It is for this very reason that occupied Jammu & Kashmir remains under a media blackout and the Kashmiri people continuously face extra-judicial arrests, torture, arbitrary detentions and killings in order to silence their voices. This recent judgment, therefore, is yet another manifestation of the pliant judiciary under India’s current ruling dispensation.

Such unilateral and illegal measures by India since 05 August 2019 are aimed at changing the demographic structure and political landscape of occupied Jammu & Kashmir, which is a flagrant violation of international law and United Nations Security Council Resolutions, especially Resolution 122 (1957). These actions remain a matter of grave concern as their ultimate goal is to convert the valiant Kashmiris into a disempowered community in their own land. These measures must be rescinded to create an environment for peace and dialogue by giving the Kashmiri voices their due.

While Pakistan will continue to extend its full political, diplomatic and moral support to the just struggle of the people of Occupied Jammu and Kashmir for the realization of their inalienable right to self-determination, I ask our brothers and sisters in Bosnia and Herzegovina to also raise their voices against this historic injustice perpetrated against the Kashmiri people by the Indian Government. Despite being a country whose wounds from the injustices and war crimes of over 30 years ago have still not fully healed, Bosnia and Herzegovina has consistently adopted principled positions in support of oppressed people all around the world, as we recently saw in the case of Palestine.

Echoing the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, injustice anywhere is, indeed, a threat to justice everywhere. This is a precept that Pakistan has always believed in the conduct of its foreign policy since its inception and we followed the same instincts when we supported the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the War in the 1990s.

I have no doubt that the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their Kashmiri brothers and sisters, in the same way Pakistan stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their Bosnian brothers and sisters in the past.

Whether it is Bosnia, Palestine or Kashmir, we believe it is our moral and intellectual responsibility to stand with oppressed people around the world. This, surely, is the right path and the only way to stand on the right side of history, concluded in his statement Akhtar Jamil Rao, Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

(FENA) S. R.

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