India fears return of economic stability in Pakistan: AJK president

ISLAMABAD: Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) President Sardar Masood Khan has said that India’s objection to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) passing through a disputed area is unfounded. He said that international conventions do not prohibit economic development or foreign investment in disputed areas.

He made these remarks during a meeting with Laura Schuurman, a researcher and writer, who called on him here on Monday.

The president said that CPEC was an integral part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which was a mega-project aimed at improving economic interconnectivity among regional countries.

Speaking about India’s objection on the CPEC project, he said that India hardly objected to the Karakoram Highway passing through Gilgit-Baltistan, but was doing so now because it was feeling threatened by China’s growing economic and political influence in the region. He added that India also feared that Pakistan would reap the benefits of this mega-project and achieve economic stability and prosperity.

President Masood Khan also said that CPEC would revolutionise the system of economic activity in this region by not only connecting Pakistan to China but also establishing access routes to Central Asia, thus making Pakistan a trade conduit and an economic destination. He said that in AJK, four major projects under CPEC, including two hydropower projects (Kohala and Karot), a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) at Mirpur and an Expressway connecting the SEZ to the central CPEC route, have been approved and were in different stages of planning and implementation.

While discussing the situation in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK), he said that 700,000 Indian armed forces personnel have been deployed in IOK, making it the highest military concentration by any country in a conflict zone.

These forces, he said, were terrorising the unarmed Kashmiris by openly murdering innocent protestors, maiming the youth, harassing the Hurriyat leadership and illegally incarcerating the people whose only demand was to exercise their right to self-determination.

He further added that India was using sexual violence as an instrument of war by brazenly dishonouring, molesting and raping Kashmiri women. “The human rights situation in IOK is dismal,” he said.

Even though in its constitution, Kashmir is shown to be an integral part of India, yet after 70 years of coercive tactics, political machinations and economic curfews, the oppressive Indian state had failed to win the hearts of Kashmiris as shown by its failure to quell the Kashmir freedom movement in IOK.

Masood further said that Kashmir was an unfinished agenda of the United Nations (UN), and it was its obligation to resolve the conflict in an amicable, democratic and diplomatic manner per the UN Security Council resolutions.