London: The Kashmir Centre London in its report on the occasion of the 9th August - International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, said that Kashmiri people are the indigenous inhabitants of their land. Their civilisation, language, faith and culture predate every empire that's ever claimed authority over them.
According to the report, since 2019, the Indian occupation has systematically dismantled every legal protection that defined Kashmiri indigeneity in law. On a day the world celebrates indigenous rights, Kashmir is living through the active destruction of them.
The Kashmiri people are not an alien people who arrived with Islam. They are a people who have always been there. Their civilisation, culture, language and faith predate every empire that has claimed them. The Kashmiri language has a modern literary tradition stretching back to at least the fourteenth century, carried by the mystic poets Lal Ded and Sheikh Noor-ud-Din Noorani, whose work is so woven into Kashmiri identity that it cannot be separated from it. This is not a political claim. It is a demographic and historical fact. And it is a fact the Indian occupation has spent decades attempting to render legally irrelevant.
Article 35A of the Indian constitution defined who could be considered a permanent resident of Jammu and Kashmir, reserving for those residents the exclusive right to own land, access government employment and claim state benefits. It was an imperfect protection, but it was a protection. It meant that the demographic character of Kashmir, its Muslim-majority, distinctly Kashmiri identity, was shielded from the mass settlement used elsewhere to dilute or destroy indigenous communities. On 5 August 2019, the Indian occupation revoked it overnight, without warning and without consulting a single Kashmiri.
The JandK Domicile Rules of 2020 redefined residency rights so broadly that tens of thousands of non-Kashmiris became eligible almost immediately. The e-application system was launched whilst Kashmiris remained cut off from the internet under the occupation's communications blackout. They could not monitor what was being done to their legal status in real time. Within 72 hours, 25,000 domicile certificates had been issued. Land laws were amended to allow non-residents to purchase property. Government jobs were opened to applicants from across India. The door to irreversible demographic change was pushed wide open.
The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, is explicit on each of the following points:
Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions.
Indigenous peoples have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation destruction of their culture. or
Indigenous peoples shall not be subjected to any action which aims to dispossess them of their lands, territories or resources.
Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories.
Every one of these is being violated in Kashmir. In real time. With full visibility.
Alongside the legal dismantling, the occupation has waged a cultural war against Kashmiri identity. Kashmiri and Urdu are being replaced by Hindi and Sanskrit in official and educational contexts. Children are being made to sing Hindu hymns in schools. Mosques have been closed under security pretexts. Madrasas have been shut. Religious organisations have been banned. The Shrine of Sheikh Noor-ud-Din Noorani at Charar-e-Sharief, one of Kashmir's most sacred sites, was burned in an Indian occupation military operation in 1995. The physical sites of Kashmiri spiritual memory are not incidental to the occupation's agenda. They are targets of it.
What the UN's indigenous rights framework recognises, and what the Indian occupation systematically denies, is that a people's connection to their land, language, faith and cultural memory is not separable from the people themselves. To dismantle those connections is to dismantle the people. The occupation does not require a massacre on any particular day. It accumulates across years and decades, each individual measure appearing administrative or procedural in isolation, but forming together a pattern that can only be called what it is: the deliberate erasure of an indigenous people.
The evidence has been compiled by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN Human Rights Council and Kashmiri civil society organisations operating under extreme pressure. The picture is not ambiguous. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has a mandate to investigate exactly this kind of situation. India has so far avoided meaningful scrutiny, partly through diplomatic cultivation and partly through the information blackout that has made sustained independent documentation in Kashmir extraordinarily difficult since 2019. The world issues declarations on indigenous rights. Kashmir asks what those declarations are worth when the occupation apparatus ignores them without consequence. Reports filed declarations issued nothing done.
"Indigenous Peoples" include us? On 9 August every year, the world marks a day for indigenous peoples. The Kashmiri people are an indigenous people whose land, language, legal status, cultural institutions and demographic future are all under coordinated and accelerating attack by an occupying power. Their question to the world on this day is not rhetorical. It deserves an answer. And then it deserves action. "On a day the world celebrates indigenous rights, Kashmir is living through the active destruction of them."