13 Kashmiris Murdered by Indian Forces

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 14, 2008 – Indian forces killed 13 Kashmiris during a protest Tuesday, according to the New York Sun. They were protesting a blanket curfew imposed on the state after several Kashmiris tried to march to the Line of Control, which divides Indian-occupied Kashmir from the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. This followed the Indian government closing the main road, blocking the export of apples, Kashmir’s main export. The road had been blockaded by militant Hindus who were demanding land for a Hindu temple.

Protestors took to the streets to protest the government’s killing of Sheikh Abdul Aziz, a leader of the Hurriyat Conference, a Kashmiri independence organization, and four other people, in a hail of bullets in Baramula. Sheikh Aziz died instantly, according to reports. Mirwaiz Omer Farooq, a Hurriyat leader, said that killing Sheikh Aziz would only make matters worse. “The people of Kashmir are not going to sit still at the death of a leader,” he said. Over 300,000 people attended Sheikh Aziz’s funeral, according to PTV News, monitored here in North America. At his funeral, Farooq said, "Our struggle for complete independence from India will continue. No power on earth can deter us from achieving this." Funeral attendee Rafiq Ahmed said, "It's a do or die for us. India can take as many lives of Kashmiris as it can, but it must leave." In 1948, India promised that it would hold a plebiscite on the status of Kashmir, but 60 years later, that plebiscite has never occurred. The Sikh Nation of Khalistan also demands its freedom from India, as do the people of predominantly Christian Nagaland and many others, and they are also being denied a free and fair vote by “the world’s largest democracy.”

India has a pattern of killing its own people. India has murdered over 250,000 Sikhs since 1984, according to figures compiled by the Punjab State Magistracy and human-rights groups and reported in the book The Politics of Genocide by Inderjeet Singh Jaijee. It has also killed over 90,000 Kashmiri Muslims since 1988, 2,000 to 5,000 Muslims in Gujarat, more than 300,000 Christians in Nagaland since 1947, and thousands of Christians and Muslims elsewhere in the country, as well as tens of thousands of Assamese, Bodos, Dalits (“Untouchables,” the dark-skinned aboriginal people of South Asia), Manipuris, Tamils, and other minorities. The Indian Supreme Court called the Indian government's murders of Sikhs "worse than a genocide."

Investigations by the Indian human Rights Organization, the Movement Against State Repression in conjunction with the Punjab Human Rights Organization, and New York Times reporter Barry Bearak all found that Indian forces carried out the murders of 35 Sikhs in the village of Chithisinghpora. In a village in Kashmir, Indian forces were caught red-handed trying to set fire to Sikh homes and the local Gurdwara to set Sikhs against Muslims. The Sikhs and Muslims in the village jointly prevented the Indian forces from carrying out their plan and seized their jeep. In Gujarat, the government pre-planned the massacre of Muslims, according to a police officer quoted in Indian newspapers. Police were ordered not to interfere, according to the officer, in an eerie parallel to the Delhi massacres of November 1984 in which over 20,000 Sikhs were murdered while Sikh policemen were locked in their barracks and the state-run TV and radio called for more Sikh blood.

The June 2008 issue of the International Journal of Sikh Affairs reprinted a section from Betrayal: The Spy Canada Abandoned by former Canadian Member of Parliament and Cabinet minister David Kilgour writes about a Canadian-Polish double agent named Ryszard Paszkowski (also known as Robert Fisher) who attended a meeting with “two Sikhs wearing traditional turbans, a pair who looked Italian, Paszkowski, and the [leader of the meeting who was ] German, in which the leader said, “The job at hand is, with the use of explosives, to blow up an Air India plane in Europe.” According to Kilgour, it seemed very clear to Paszkowski that the Indian government was involved in this action, just a year after the bombing of an Air India jet that killed 329 people.

This action, according to Kilgour, was necessitated in part because two Canadian journalists, Zuhair Kashmeri of the Toronto Globe and Mail and Brian McAndrew of the Toronto Star, had published a book, Soft Target: How the Indian Intelligence Service Penetrated Canada, exposing the Indian government’s culpability in the Air India bombing. Soft Target shows that Indian intelligence penetrated the Sikh community in Canada in order to discredit them world wide and halt the momentum of the demand of an independent Sikhs state. The book quotes an investigator from the Canadian Security Investigation Service as saying, “If you really want to clear the incidents quickly, take vans down to the Indian High Commission and the consulates in Toronto and Vancouver, load up everybody and take them down for questioning. We know it and they know it that they are involved.”

Among many other things, they note that the Indian Consul General in Toronto, Mr. Surinder Malik (no relation to Ripudaman Singh Malik), called in a detailed description of the disaster just hours later when it took the Canadian investigators weeks to find that information. He told them that they should check the passenger manifest for an "L. Singh" because he was responsible -- before there was any public knowledge of the bombing! Kashmeri and McAndrew write, “Curiously, [Consul General] Malik knew more details about the two blasts than did the police investigators….Malik said that while one of the suspects was booked to Japan, the other was booked to Toronto and onwards to Bombay. He also said that the two checked their bomb-laden bags but did not board the flight themselves. In sum, Malik had painted a scenario of the double sabotage operation that was a near perfect account of what the Mounties would take weeks to fathom.”

“The violence we have seen in recent days in Kashmir is typical of the Indian government’s shoot first, ask questions later policy,” said Dr. Aulakh. “Only when Kashmir is free will the repression of the Kashmiris stop. Similarly, only a sovereign, independent Khalistan will end the repression and lift the standard of living for the people of Punjab,” Dr. Aulakh said. “We must continue to press for our God-given birthright of freedom,” he said. “Without political power, religions cannot flourish and nations perish,” Dr. Aulakh said. “The time to free Khalistan is now.”

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This material is circulated by the Council of Khalistan, which is registered with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington, DC under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as an agent of the Council of Khalistan, Golden Temple, Amritsar, Punjab. The material is filed with the DOJ where the required registration is available for inspection. Registration does not indicate approval of the contents by the U.S. Government.