Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan deserves accolades for keeping his promise of forcefully presenting the Kashmir issue at the UN like never before. However, while his sincerity is on this issue remains beyond any doubts, but unlike his predecessor Nawaz Sharif, who did his best to impress upon the international community that what Kashmir was witnessing isn’t terrorism but a “freedom struggle,” Khan spoke disparagingly about the ongoing ‘armed struggle’.
Readers would recollect that in his 2016 UNGA address, Sharif had referred to Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) commander Burhan Wani who was killed in an encounter with security forces as a “young leader” andeven described him “as the symbol of the latest Kashmiri Intifada (uprising).” On the other hand, in his UNGA address, Khanreferred to Pulwama suicide car bomber Adil Ahmed Dar who attacked a CRPF convoy as a “radicalised” Kashmir boy.
Perhaps this is the first time that a Prime Minister of Pakistan has humiliated a Kashmiri ‘freedom fighter’ by terming his sacrifice as the work of a radicalised mind.Moreover, while Sharif talked of the Kashmir movement being an “indigenous uprising of the Kashmiris” and even issued a postal stamp honouring Burhan Wani as a “Freedom Icon,” Khan on the other hand busted the claim of the Kashmir struggle being indigenous in nature during his US visit when he admitted that “when you talk about militant groups, we still have about 30,000-40,000 armed people who have been trained and fought in some part of Afghanistan or Kashmir."
However, it would be unfair to say that Khan isn’t doing enough on Kashmir because while Sharif was busy playing to the gallery with his ill-considered comments on militancy in Kashmir, Khan is facing the heat for Pakistan’s continuing support to militant groups. Khan has rightly interpreted the signs of time of how those ‘freedom fighters’ whomthe world once hailed as “heroes” were looked down upon as “terrorists” by the international community after 9/11.
Reading through his UNGA address, one finds that after saying “Now I want to move on to talk about Kashmir,” heinstead went on to describe in detail as to how “Pakistan trained the then ‘Mujahedeen’ at the behest of the Americans” and the grave consequences when these “indoctrinated people” were told that what they were engaged in wasn’t a “freedom struggle” but “terrorism”! Could this just be a mere coincidence?Or was it the lurking worry in Khan’s mind regarding the futility of the ongoing ‘armed struggle’ in Kashmir and its negative fallout that madehim subconsciously relate it to bitter consequences for Pakistan as a result of ISI introducing ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan to help US fight the Soviets?
Things don’t seem to be going too well for the ‘armed struggle’. Facing possible ‘blacklisting’ by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Islamabad is distancing itself from ‘freedom fighters’ because it’s inability to take firm action against banned militant groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Jaish-e- Mohammad (JeM) has put it in a precarious situation on the terror front.
Even before going to UNGA, Khan had already warned his people not to go to India “to fight jihad” as it will hurt the cause of the Kashmiris and has said that this advice was because New Delhi is looking for "an excuse to launch crackdown on the besieged people of Kashmir."However, the real reason is obviously that Islamabad knows very well that with the FATF reviewing Pakistan’s performance on the anti-terror front in the second week of October, any militant attack with a Pakistani connection at this juncture would greatly harm Islamabad’s efforts to avoid blacklisting by FATF.
Just how desperate Islamabad is can be seen from the sudden arrest four top JuD/LeT leaders and the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) issuing a statement that "JuD/LeT chief Hafiz Saeed is already in prison facing trial for commission of offences of terrorism financing. Now the entire core leadership of the JuD/LeT will be on trial."
Those who are participating or supporting ‘armed struggle’ in Kashmir need to take a lesson from Pakistan’s failed experiment in ‘jihad’ because if the very country that says ‘armed struggle’ in Kashmir is not terrorism but a freedom struggle,ends up locking up those who are leading it, then the future of ‘jihad’ in Kashmir isn’t very bright. We must also take note of the fact that the phrase “peaceful settlement” is the common factor in every statement on resolving the Kashmir issue and the most paradoxical thing is that even though it defends the ‘armed struggle’, butwhenever it comes to commenting on settlement of the ‘K’ issue, Islamabad always makes it a point to emphasise onits peaceful resolution .
In three decades, ‘armed struggle’ in Kashmir hasn’t yielded any positive results and with the international community unanimously rejecting violence as a means to achieve an ideological or political objective, it’s time to sit back and introspect. The ‘armed struggle’ has hijacked the Kashmir issue and the ongoing violence by militant groups has resulted in loss of international support for the ‘K’ cause. So, with no nation or international body supporting ‘armed struggle’ in Kashmir, what’s the point of our youth picking up guns and dying in such large numbers when their sacrifices don’t even stir the international community’s conscience?