On 19th January, the day when entire religious minority community of Kashmiri Pandits was extirpated from their homes in Kashmir in 1990, the community fraternity in Great Britain assembled at the British Parliament to commemorate the fateful day. On the same day, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Kashmir conducted by Common’s Backbench Business Committee took up for debate an application from Conservative Party MP David Nuttall along with MPs Nusrat Ghani, Robert Flello and Fiona Mactaggart.
The motion for the debate reads: “This House notes the escalation in violence and breaches of international human rights on the Indian side of the Line of Control in Kashmir; calls on the Government to raise the matter at the United Nations. And further calls on the Government to encourage Pakistan and India to commence peace negotiations to establish a long-term solution on the future governance of Kashmir based on the right of the Kashmiri people to determine their own future in accordance with the provisions of UN Security Council resolutions.”
It talks about violence. First, we can mark glaring contradiction in the statement. The motion wants the House to note “escalation in violence” but does not feel the need to be told who the originators of violence are? British Government is fully aware that Kashmir violence has its roots in London where an Indian diplomat in Birmingham, namely Ravindra Mhatre, was kidnapped by UK-based activists of Kashmir Liberation Army (KLA) floated by PoK emigrants to UK, and murdered in cold blood on February 3, 1984. Scotland Yard had deployed nearly 100 detectives to track the murderers, and, in the process, had rounded up nearly a score of these PoK emigrants in UK including Amanullah Khan and Hashim Qureshi. The Scotland Yard had also interrogated the night correspondent of Reuter who had received a message from KLA about the kidnapping and three conditions of releasing Mhatre.
Birmingham is one of the three main cities of UK where about 15,000 out of nearly 1 lakh emigrants from PoK, mostly from Mirpur and Muzaffarabad, are settled. On further investigation by Scotland Yard, it was found that the KLA was actually the marauding wing of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) formed and funded by ISI. The story of PoK emigrants in UK and ISI jointly forming the JKLF is vividly told by Hashim Qureshi in his work “Unveiling of the Truth”. We hope MP David Nuttall, who moved the motion in the British Parliament, will have read Hashim’s account. This is the same JKLF which, in consort with ISI, lured Kashmiri youth to terror training camps in PoK, brainwashed them, trained them and then provided them with arms to sneak across the LoC and began armed insurgency in Kashmir.
JKLF has its founding base in UK and the PoK emigrants in UK raised huge funds for supporting separatists in Kashmir. Most of these funds come to Kashmir separatists through clandestine conduits like hawala and fake bank transactions. We hope MP Nuttall will have read detailed reports about these clandestine transactions. He will do well to educate himself on how Pakistan has been overtly and covertly extending sponsorship and logistic support to JKLF. We know that one Daulatana, the Pakistani High Commissioner in London writing a letter to JKLF chief Amanullah Khan (now late) promising Pakistan’s full support to their armed action for ” freedom” (read annexation) of Kashmir.
When JKLF gained popularity with the Kashmir separatists and Pakistan sensed that their slogan of independent Kashmir was gaining ground, they maneuvered its split helping Yasin Malik to head the Kashmir chapter. Simultaneously, the ISI created parallel groups like Hizbul Mujahideen, and later on Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad etc, first to escalate terrorist agenda in Kashmir and secondly to sideline JKLF as ISI would not trust it any more. We know that some PoK and Pakistani émigrés to the UK, involved in politics and having been elected to the Parliament from their PoK dominated constituencies including some British MPs of those constituencies are lending full support to these promoters of violence in Kashmir.
In final analysis, we find that Prime Minister Modi has given the right message to the visiting group of eight British MPs to raise their voice against terrorism, extremism and radicalization and urged them to raise a collective voice against these problems. We hope MP Nuttell & Co will understand the importance of Modi’s message to the British Government.
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