Kashmir Awareness Forum calls for press freedom 

The World Kashmir Awareness Forum has reiterated the demand for the international community’s due role in ensuring press freedom so that human rights violations could be stemmed.

The forum issued a statement in recognition of World Press Freedom Day on May 3. There is no press freedom for Kashmir, the forum stated, adding that the Indian government uses internet blackouts, police raids, and intimidating tactics so that activists and journalists could not expose its brutalities in Kashmir.

It said the regime’s followers go for online harassment to silence those who speak out, study, and report on Kashmir from abroad. The statement continues: “What Indian authorities and their loyalists are attempting to silence is nothing short of a human rights disaster. The extrajudicial killings, torture, disappearances, displacement, and sexual violence that Kashmiris endure must be brought to light and accounted for. 

“Access to widespread, reliable information is a matter of life or death for more than 13 million Kashmiris and is essential in the struggle for a just solution.  The UN established World Press Freedom Day in 1991 but 30 it is unconscionable for India to declare itself the world’s largest democracy when it aggressively censors and retaliates against reporting on Kashmir.”