By Dr. Sheikh Waleed Rasool
Systematic, consecutive, and linear, step-by-step approach of India in IIoJK to dehumanize Kashmiris and cap education as a basic right is alarming.
Indian inhuman act at the macro-level, to discard the professional qualifications obtained in Medical and Engineering colleges of Pakistan, To target Kashmiri students in India at the micro-level to ban the Falah- e- Aam trust in Srinagar is all by design to squeeze even a little breathing space and keep the pot boiling. Targeting the right to education is a new low for India in illegally occupied Kashmir. Targeting the fundamental right of Kashmiris consecutively and now snatching the right to education carries the highest degree of lethality when the Kashmiris are already facing the wrath of occupation. The lips of leadership are already stitched while being kept hundreds of miles away without trial from their homeland in the frying temperate jails of India, including Tihar-Delhi.
The young generation is the main target whose number is declining because 93% of youth fell the bullets of the Indian occupation since 1990. Caping and controlling the education of the future generation of IIoJK is a gross human rights violation and serious concern. It is dialectical; on one side, it pushes the young age of the IIoJK towards walls where they are more susceptible to fell prey to the Indian propaganda, and on another side, the uneducated youth can be a burden on the society where the economic opportunities are already squeezed since decades.
The downtrodden Kashmir cannot afford to enroll their children in elite schools. The right to education is a fundamental right, not the derivative one. Therefore, it demands immediate attention. Indian double game is overt and covert because, on one side; they blame the youth, are engaged in anti-India activities, and demand freedom; it is why they are targeted every day by the Indian war machine; on the same breath, they are keeping the youth deprived of basic education. The right to education has significance and utility in odd hours of the turmoil when powerful tags everything with terrorism and carry the state terrorism to kill the young in cold blood. The remote, Lukewarm and ineffective response of the legal party, UN, the international community, and allied institutions post 5th August 2019 has given teeth to India to move at rampage multi-dimensionally.
India is taking advantage of the criminal silence of the global community. She is busy without any obstacle in changing the political, legal, demographic, ideological, geographical, and educational posture of the Kashmir dispute and trying to bring Kashmiris on toes who dare to demand the right to self-determination. Ninety thousand students are enrolled in the schools and colleges of the FAT, with 13000 teachers who have been providing education to the trouble-torn state of Indian-occupied Kashmir since 1972. when Jamaat-e-Islam founded FAT, however, later, they remained aloof from the politics, and FAT was registered as a separate entity.
Currently, there are 332 schools. 80,000 students are enrolled, while 10,000 academic and non-teaching staff are employed in FAT. This trust has a remarkable contribution and reputation in educating the Kashmiris when the Governments institutions were busy making the hay while the sun shininess due to the conflict.
FAT bridged this gap while providing almost free education during the conflict when entire cities and towns used to be under the curfew and the crackdown by occupational troops to hunt the freedom fighters. FAT is an educational non-profit and apolitical non-government organization with no affiliation with any political entity, and the same plea was taken in 1994 in IIoJK High court. The court allowed FAT to continue the noble cause.
The administrator of the Trust, Mr. Showket, made it clear that the trust has no affiliation with any political party, nor trust is profit earning entity. We are adopting the same curriculum as other Government institutions are following. The Government had given no reason why to ban these schools. However, it is being propagated that these schools provide room for agitation against the Indian role in Kashmir, which is baseless and fabricated. The trust was banned a couple of times in 1977 by Sheikh Mohmmad Abdullah and also in 1990, but nothing adverse was proved. Still, FAT was keenly kept under the radar of the Government supervision; therefore, any and everything, including finance, curriculum, and administration, was scrutinized by the Government. India is following the NCERT system.
Thus, FAT was also following the same central curriculum system; hence there is no reason to ban the FAT because it proved its efficiency in providing education to oppressed people of the Kashmir who could not be offered to pay huge fees when the state was in turmoil and the Government school system was a flop. It is the right time that thousands of the letters shall be addressed to Antony Gantries. A resolution needs to be moved by the UNHRCP by the NOGO s of education background. Global platforms of the right to education for all needed to be sensitized. It is the right time to bust the Indian lethal propaganda because denying the right to education is a tactical step to accelerate demographic terrorism as IIoJK is on the brink of extinction.
Sheikh W. Rasool Ph.D. (IR, Director, Institute of Multi-Track, Dialogue, Development & Diplomatic Studies and can be reached waleed.rasool@gmail.com, Wts Up +92-300-9508736
