PM Imran Khan to visit Azad Jammu and Kashmir today

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan will visit Muzaffarabad on Wednesday (today) where he will address Azad Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly to express solidarity with Kashmiris, ARY News reported.

The Prime Minister has undertaken the decision to celebrate the Independence day of Pakistan with the people of AJK in context to the illegal occupation of Kashmir by India which was escalated in the recent past after India revoked article 370 of it’s constitution.

Scrapping the article means that Occupied Jammu and Kashmir’s right to frame its own laws was being retracted along with allowance of non-residents to buy property in the disputed territory which had long been a flash point between two nuclear states, Pakistan and India.

In Occupied Kashmir, strict curfew and communication blackout continued since last Monday when India unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.

According to BBC, India had deployed thousands of troops at each locality of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir ahead of last week’s announcement that special status of the state was revoked.

Even People observed Eid al-Adha amid a communications blackout and tight security. People offered Eid prayers at local mosques as the main mosque in the capital, Srinagar, was closed.

People could not offer Eid prayers and slaughter sacrificial animals on Eid-ul-Azha due to continued curfew and communication blackout on the eighth straight day, on Monday (yesterday)

The entire occupied territory including Doda and Kishtwar areas of Jammu region is reeling under strict curfew and communication blackout since last Monday when India unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.

Eid prayers were allowed in only a few small mosques located in peripheral areas of the Kashmir valley.

As people came out of these mosques, they started shouting anti-India slogans, which prompted the authorities to immediately re-impose curfew.

The political leadership including Syed Ali Gilani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and former puppet ministers Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti are in house detention or in jails.

Meanwhile, the CPI-M General Secretary, Sitaram Yechury, has said that the people of Kashmir have been kept imprisoned in their own homes and warned the government that the impact of changing Jammu and Kashmir’s status would be felt in other states with the special status.

He said the impact of undemocratic and forced altering of Jammu and Kashmir’s status will be felt in other states with special status.

US Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi through a letter on social media has asked US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to make Kashmir a major focus of the Trump Administration.

He said the action by the Indian government risks provoking mass social uprising in the territory.

Meanwhile, students from occupied Kashmir enrolled at the Aligarh Muslim University boycotted a so-called feast organised by University Vice Chancellor on Eidul Azha as a mark of protest against the abrogation of special status of Jammu and Kashmir.

A group of Kashmiri Pandits, Dogras and Sikhs through a petition filed in Indian Supreme Court condemned the abrogation of Article 370, and asked India to immediately lift siege of the Valley.

The petition was signed by 64 civil society members, journalists and politicians.