Questions on Indian human rights record in IHK
Writing in the State-owned Daily News, columnist Lucien Rajakarunanayake pointed out that the British media, which had gone ballistic on alleged human rights violations in Sri Lanka, was silent on the “huge” human rights violations that India was committing in Kashmir, the latest being the hanging of Afzal Guru, described by the Indian media itself, as an “Execution Most Foul”.
Rajakarunanayake attributed the stony silence of the British media to Britain’s need to sell its products to India.
With the Indian government signaling to be with Tamil Nadu MPs to vote for the US-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka in the March session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Sri Lankan commentators have brought up India’s questionable human rights record in Kashmir.
Channel 4’s video documentary titled ‘Kashmir’s Torture Trail ‘showed how hundreds of thousands” of stone-throwing teenagers took aim at heavily armed Indian security forces, who returned live fire, killing 118 demonstrators, many of them children.
This was followed by a lock-down in which no one could get in or out of the State. It was a powerful and shocking film uncovering a State-sanctioned torture practices that had set India on a collision course with the international community.
Speaking to The Island Daily, Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa reminded India that UK’s Channel 4 TV had shown a video in July last year on Indian atrocities in Kashmir.
A section of UK’s influential print media had backed the Channel 4 documentary on Kashmir.