ALI SUKHANVER

More than 50 people had been killed and more than 250 seriously injured by the Hindu extremist groups in the last four years; says a recent report of the Human Rights Watch, most of the attacks on religious minorities in the Indian Occupied Kashmir are led by BJP supporters. Pathetically the only allegation against all the targeted ones had been the same; they all were blamed of trading or slaughtering the cows. The Human Rights Watch says that before killing the alleged ones, the BJP extremists force them to chant Hindu slogans. The role of the local police has always been very condemnable because it always fails in doing proper investigation. There have been complaints that criminal cases are filed against witnesses to harass and threaten them. Maltreatment with the minorities is a heinous act of human rights violation and there could be no more serious and frightening example of human rights violation than maltreatment with the minorities.

Human Rights Watch is a US-based human rights international non-governmental organization with its headquarter in New York City. The basic function of this organization is to conduct research and advocacy on human rights. In mid-January 2020, this group published a report on the worst situation of the human rights violations in Indian Occupied Kashmir. The report mainly focused on the situation after Modi government’s revocation of articles 370 and 35-A which deprived Indian Occupied Kashmir of its autonomy and its people of their basic human rights. The report said, The Indian government’s unilateral actions in Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019 caused enormous suffering and rights violations of the Kashmiri population. The Bharatiya Janata Party led government revoked the province’s special constitutional status and split it into two separate federally governed territories. Indian authorities also failed to protect religious minorities, used draconian sedition and counterterrorism laws to silence peaceful dissent, and invoked foreign funding regulations and other laws to discredit and muzzle nongovernmental organizations critical of government actions or policies.” Another report on the same subject says that the Modi government has failed in enforcement of Supreme Court’s directives to prevent and investigate mob attacks on religious minorities and other vulnerable communities in the Indian Occupied Kashmir.

Some prominent members of the Conservative Party had a meeting with the First Secretary of State Dominic Raab a few weeks back and insisted on including the names of officials from China and Hong Kong in the list of those found involved in human rights violations. In response to the demand of necessary action against officials from China and Hong Kong, Dominic Raab said, Whilst having targeted sanctions, the visa bans and the asset freezes on the individuals who may be responsible where the evidence shows that is the case, we got the mechanism to deliver it. We will of course look very carefully at any further proposals.” This said list was prepared by different investigation agencies of the UK and presented for approval in the UK Parliament. This all move is in fact the outcome of the Magnitsky legislation which has been designed to fix those foreign individuals who have been involved in significant corruption or who have committed human rights abuses. It is something very positive that this is for the first time that UK, a prominent and dominant western country, has issued a list of the human rights abusers and did not fix and frame only the Muslims. Prior to this list, it has ever been a tradition to include only the Muslims in such lists.

It was the US which passed the first Magnitsky legislation in 2012 after the brutal ‘murder’ of a Russian auditor Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. Later on some other countries also followed the US steps against human rights abusers; UK is also among those human rights caring countries. Certainly the credit goes to the US for setting such an epoch making tradition of taking to task the abusers of human rights and surely the UK also deserves appreciation for the bold steps in this context but one thing must be kept in mind that personal liking or disliking must not hinder the way of  the Magnitsky legislation. A prejudiced rather a narrow-minded approach towards the names of abusers of human rights would simply promote nothing but mar the credibility of this very sublime process. No list of human rights violators could be authentic without mentioning the brutalities of the Indian Army in the Indian Occupied Kashmir. Recently on 17^th July, 2020, the Indian troops martyred three Kashmiri youths in Nagnad Chimmer area of the Kulgram district of the Indian Occupied Kashmir on. These three innocent ones were targeted during a cordon and search operation. Experts say that this fresh act of state terrorism would give birth to a new wave of agitation in the valley. In the name of cordon and search operations, such brutal activities of the Indian forces are simply a routine matter. Let us see, how the UK Parliamentarians react to this cruelty and injustice.