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#Duty and #Disgust: It's time India talked about PoK

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Kamlesh Singh
Kamlesh SinghMar 25, 2015 | 11:39

#Duty and #Disgust: It's time India talked about PoK

The Indian Army is known for valour, honour and the sense of duty above all. We do not associate these values with Indian politicians. So if General (retd) VK Singh has lost them, blame politics. If you do something with a sense of duty and follow up with expressing your disgust, then you disgrace that sense of duty you probably didn't have in the first place.

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The retired general wasn't sent to attend the Pakistani National Day celebrations at the Pakistani High Commission as a retired general but the minister of state for external affairs. It is a part of his job. #DUTY. He did it. The #DISGUST tweets that followed were a #DISGRACE and undid everything that he agreed to do as his duty.

The invitation was sent well in advance. There were ways to avoid this if he was unwilling. He did not. He took enough care to wear a green jacket to the dinner, laughed at the jokes like a true dinner diplomat in the 15 or less minutes he spent there. There was no need to expose the utter lack of diplomacy and leave a blot on his leadership and government.  

We all know the pain point. It can get unbearable for an Indian minister, definitely for one who has once been in uniform, to dine with the Hurriyat Conference separatists. The BJP and the government led by it have expressed their displeasure at the Hurriyat visits to the high commission. The Hurriyat Conference in Kashmir is but a proxy body that carries out Pakistan's agenda in the Indian side of Kashmir. Successive governments have swallowed the bitter pill of their parlays at the high commission, because technically they are Indian citizens and have a right to visit any embassy in the country.  

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Their love for Pakistan over India is not a secret and neither are their bloody hands. They all live comfortable lives while instigating the youth to fight the state. They claim to represent the Kashmiri sentiment but we have no measure for it because they do not fight elections. Their claim doesn't stand also because they never speak for the human rights of Kashmiris on the Pakistani side of the line of control. They cry hoarse about the Indian Army's shadow on the Valley but the Kashmiri brethren living under the boots of the Pakistani army evoke no tears in their eyes. That people in so-called Azad Kashmir do not have basic freedoms and even Pakistani media are censored and controlled for them.  

That the elections, if they take place, have been one circus act after the other. They do not get to voice their opinion as freely as this side of Kashmir, where even separatists hold rallies and appear on TV. The Hurriyat is a bunch of politicians who are their master's voice. The masters live in Isloo and Pindi. If they exercised the same freedom on the other side, they will be "disappeared".

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Pakistan Human Rights Watch regularly reports the lack of basic freedoms in the area and how the agencies (ISI) "disappear" people who refuse to become terrorists in their jihad against India.  That does read wrong because "disappear" is normally an intransitive verb. People disappear. Things disappear. In Pakistan, the verb takes the abnormal transitive form. It becomes an action verb. State, the subject, disappear, the verb, and people mere objects. The state disappears people.

In Balochistan, people disappear only to be found, if indeed they ever are, in ditches months or sometimes years later. The Baloch people have been fighting for independence for decades. The state's response has been to disappear every leader who emerges to be a faint Baloch voice.  

India and the rest of the world do not give the same moral support to the Baloch people that Pakistan gives to the Kashmiris in India. It's Pakistan's internal matter, they say. Kashmir, because Pakistan occupied parts of it, ceases to be India's internal matter. The irony is India recognises that as well and is ever on the defensive. Unwittingly justifying the invaders who came into Indian territory and seized part of it soon after Kashmir joined India in 1947. A part of that was gifted to China. The failure of the Indian government to ask from Pakistan what's rightfully India's has resulted in Pakistan staking a claim to the part that is in India.

Islamabad has fomented insurgency that bleeds India by a thousand cuts. India is so busy begging Pakistan to stop the offensive, it has forgotten the Pak-occupied Kashmir. Pakistani high commissioner in Delhi invites and meets Kashmiri separatist leaders regularly. The Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad doesn't get to meet Baloch leaders the same way, because Pakistan disappears them.

Forget that, the Indian high commissioner doesn't get to parlay with Kashmiris on the Pakistani side of the border, who are separated from their Indian brethren. Because Pakistan has built this narrative and India has failed to demolish it. It's time India began caring for Kashmir, which claims as its own on maps and international fora. Not just the part that is in India but the entire Kashmir, including the part that Pak occupies.

Last updated: March 25, 2015 | 11:39
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