In late October 2020, India’s National Investigation Agency raided the homes and offices of internationally recognized human rights defenders in Indian-Administered Jammu and Kashmir (IAJK).  These raids are part of the Indian Government’s broader assault on truth, transparency, accountability and human rights in IAJK and in furtherance of its project of colonial domination.  India’s illegal occupation of, and violations in, IAJK are well-established.  India has not been held to account.

India has committed rampant violations in IAJK, including atrocity crimes effectively sanctioned through legalized impunity.  For decades, international accountability efforts have culminated in mere diplomatic appeals to a flagrant violator who consistently denies accountability and attacks accountability mechanisms.  In recent years, the Indian Government has increasingly used anti-terror and non-profit funding laws to silence dissent, violate rights and eviscerate accountability.  The recent forced closure of Amnesty International in India is a case in point. 

The international community has been deeply involved in IAJK since 1947, including through the UN’s Security Council and a dedicated peacekeeping mission.  UN experts and international human rights organizations have done extensive reporting of India’s violations in IAJK.  While Kashmiri human rights defenders risk their lives and face persecution to document violations in the world’s most intensive militarized occupation, the international community has done little to defend them.  India is now overtly fascist, yet the international community continues to aid, abet and arm India.  For Indian fascists, the destruction and disintegration of IAJK has long been a key goal, which they achieved in August 2019.  They are now implementing a long-planned settler-colonial program in IAJK.  The international community has long understood IAJK as ground zero for the next world war and a nuclear holocaust.   IAJK is now also ground zero for the global rise of “democratic” authoritarianism and fascism.  

Over the last seventeen months, the Indian Government has ended politics,  free expression and journalism in IAJK, stripped resources, accelerated an ongoing environmental catastrophe, strangulated the economy, assaulted the local culture, denied people access to communications, education and healthcare and engaged in a campaign of mass illegal imprisonment, torture and property destruction.  At the same time, Indian instrumentalities have enhanced their systematic surveillance, disinformation, organized lying and silencing and suppression of critics (locally and internationally, particularly targeting scholars, journalists and activists).  The recent raids on civil society activists and humanitarian organizations in IAJK, together with the intensification of land expropriation and dispossession of vulnerable communities, are dismantling what little remains to the indigenous peoples of IAJK: some knowledge of ongoing violations and the ability to maintain a subsistence level of existence in their homeland.  

A genocide alert for IAJK was issued over sixteen months ago.  The conditions in IAJK have deteriorated substantially since.  Gross violations continue on a daily basis and the international community continues to do little.  The international community’s failure in IAJK is old and egregious.  It can and must end now.

Select organization signatories:

• Adalah Justice Project
• Al-Haq, Law in the Service of Man - Palestine
• ALTSEAN-Burma
• American Muslims for Palestine
• California Scholars for Academic Freedom
• Canadian Rohingya Development Initiative
• Canadians Against Oppression and Persecution
• Canadians for Peace and Justice in Kashmir
• Canadians in Support of Refugees in Dire Need
• Critical Kashmir Studies
• Ensaaf
• Ethnic Studies Department University of California at San Diego
• Free Rohingya Coalition
• Genocide Watch
• Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War
• Hindus for Human Rights
• Housing and Land Rights Network - Habitat International Coalition (Geneva/Cairo)
• Indian American Muslim Council
• International Human Rights Program, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
• Islamophobia Studies Center
• Jewish Voices for Peace
• Just Peace Advocates
• Justice for All
• Kashmir Gulposh
• Kashmir Law & Justice Project
• Kashmir Reading Room
• Kashmir Scholars Consultative and Action Network
• Lausan Collective
• No Business With Genocide
• Oakville Palestinian Rights Association
• Palestinian Youth Movement
• Project South
• Rohingya Association of Canada
• Sikh Information Centre
• South Asia Solidarity Initiative
• South Asian Dalit Adivasi Network
• South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD)
• Stand With Kashmir
• SWANA Region Radio Collective 
• University Network for Human Rights
• World BEYOND War
• World Kashmir Awareness Forum

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Select individual signatories:

• Dr. Muhammad Idrees Ahmed, University of Stirling
• Susan M. Akram, Director, International Human Rights Clinic, Boston University School of Law
• Dr. Paola Bacchetta, Professor, Department of Gender and Women's Studies, University of California Berkeley
• Dr. Hatem Bazian, Executive Director, Islamophobia Studies Center
• Joel Beinin, Donald J McLachland Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University
• Babinder Singh Bhogal, Sardarni Kuljit Kaur Bindra Chair of Sikh Studies and Professor of Religion, Hofstra University
• Carole H. Browner, Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA
• Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
• Dia Da Costa, Professor, University of Alberta
• Claudio Fogu, Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Director of Italian Program, UC Santa Barbara
• Corrina Gould, Tribal Chair and Traditional Spokesperson, Confederated Villages of Lisjan
• Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of Literature, UC San Diego
• Richard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University
• Nancy Gallagher, Professor Emerita, UC Santa Barbara
• Ayesha Jalal, Mary Richardson Professor of History, Tufts University
• Ioannis Kalpouzos, Boston University School of Law
• Zayn Kassam, John Knox McLean Professor of Religious Studies, Pomona College
• Rupi Kaur, Poet + Author
• Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Dean's Professor of the Humanities, Syracuse University
• Jamal Nassar, Dean Emeritus, California State University San Bernardino
• David Palumbo-Liu, Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
• Daniel Rothenberg, Co-Director, Center of the Future of War, and Professor of Practice, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University
• David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English, UC Riverside
• Sherene H. Razack, Distinguished Professor and Penney Kanner Endowed Chair in Women's Studies, UCLA
• Lisa Rofel, Professor Emerita, UC Santa Cruz
• Yasmin Saikia, Hart-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies and Professor of History, Arizona State University
• Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law, UC Berkeley
• Mirza Waheed, Novelist
• Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics, University of San Francisco

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