SRINAGAR -AFP/UNS:A G20 tourism meeting began on Monday under tight security in occupied Kashmir as New Delhi seeks to project an image of normalcy in a region wracked for decades by violence.
Both China and Pakistan have condemned holding the event in the occupied valley.
India wants to show that what officials call “normalcy and peace” are returning to the region after New Dehli revoked its limited autonomy and took direct control in 2019, imposing an extended lockdown.
Since then, Kashmiri fighters have largely been crushed — although young men continue to take up arms — and the annual death toll, once in the thousands, has been on a downward trend, with 253 fatalities last year.
Now India is promoting tourism in the region, with its spectacular mountain scenery and signs at the airport declaring it “paradise on earth”. More than a million Indian citizens visited last year.
But dissent has been criminalised, media freedoms curbed and public protests limited, in what critics say is a drastic curtailment of civil liberties by New Delhi.
Police said last week that security had been beefed up “to avoid any chance of an attack during the G20” meeting, and on Monday soldiers and armoured vehicles were deployed at multiple locations in Srinagar.
But many checkpoints — wrapped in metal mesh and barbed wire — had been dismantled overnight, and some paramilitary police stood hidden behind G20 advertising panels in what appeared to be an effort to minimise the security forces’ visibility.
The People’s Anti-Fascist Front, a new rebel group that emerged in occupied Kashmir after 2019, issued a statement condemning the event and threatening to “deploy suicide bombers”.-AFP/UNS
“Today, tomorrow or day after. It will come,” it said.
Bilawal bashes India for ‘show of arrogance’
Meanwhile, in an address to the AJK Legislative Assembly today, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari bashed India for its “display of arrogance”.
“India’s continued denial of the rights of the Kashmiri people is a wrongful and illegal act,” he said, stressing that “no amount of diplomatic duplicity or Indian state-perpetrated terror can change this fact”.
