Shinde Unsuited As Indian MoH If Clueless Of What We Want: Geelani

SRINAGAR (ONS)  – Terming the union home minister’s statement with regard to talks with separatists as an ill-suited joke and grandstanding, the chairman of the Hurriyat (G), Syed Ali Shah Geelani, on Wednesday said that Sushil Kumar Shinde had no moral right to hold such high office in India if he was still unaware of what Kashmiris wanted. 

“It is because of their wilful intractability that Indian rulers shut their eyes to eloquent reality and sing songs with neither rhyme nor reason,” Geelani said a day after Shinde told the media that he wanted to meet Kashmiri separatists to know what they wanted. 

“To construe shopping and eating ice cream in Lal Chowk as a change in the Kashmir situation is juvenile thinking on the part of Sushil Kumar Shinde which deceives no one but his own self,” he said. 

“Such feats can neither change the complexion of the Kashmir issue nor push the immense sacrifices of the Kashmiri people into the background,” he said. 

“Every child in India knows the struggle Kashmiris have been waging for the past sixty-five years which the international community and the UN have endorsed and legitimised,” he said. 

Asking the union home minister to study history, Geelani said that Jammu and Kashmir was an independent state until 1947, and in no way poised to join the Indian union under the principles on which the subcontinent was partitioned,” he said. 

“But India occupied the state illegally purely by military might, and since then, Kashmiris have been fighting against this forcible occupation,” he said. 

“The architects of the Indian nation have promised in international fora, not once but on scores of occasions, that Kashmiris would be given the opportunity to determine their own future, and would not be stopped if they did not want to live with India,” he said.

“Sushil  Kumar Shinde should either deny these facts of history, or own up that his statement about wanting to know what separatist wanted was irresponsible,” he said. 

“Indian rulers have memorised some stale platitudes about Kashmir, and make their position ridiculous by repeating them every now and then,” he said. 

“For the past 65 years, they have been treading the same beaten path and sticking to the same policy on Kashmir which has proved a failure on every count,” he said. 

Asking Shinde to adopt a realistic approach, Geelani said that this intractability had neither solved the Kashmir issue nor changed the thinking of the Kashmiri people. 

“The Kashmir issue is a living reality even in 2012, and India itself is beset with myriad problems because of its lingering on,” he said.

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