Pak PMO cleared plan of stamps on Kashmir

NEW DELHI: After last year’s goof-up when its envoy to the UN exhibited the picture of a Palestinian girl as a Kashmiri victim of Indian pellet guns, Pakistan has done it again.In the recently issued 20,000 sheets of 20 propaganda postal stamps on “atrocities in Indian-occupied Kashmir”, the Imran Khan government, besides glorifying Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani, unwittingly showcased Kashmiri Pandit and Sikh victims of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism An organisation, Roots in Kashmir , wrote a letter to UN secretary general Antonio Guterres on Monday, complaining that one of the stamps was the picture of an RIK-organised protest of Pandits against their exodus forced by Pak-backed terror groups.The stamp is “a malicious attempt to raise the bogey of Kashmir” by “appropriating the exodus and exile of Pandits,” RIK said. The organisation said that the stamp was also “a spiteful attempt at not just deflecting blame but also to deny the victims of ethnic cleansing a right to protest by appropriating their symbols of protest”.An organisation, Roots in Kashmir, appealed to the United Nations “to not only intervene to safeguard their existence but also write formally to the government of Pakistan to withdraw the stamps and ask them to issue an apology to the entire Kashmiri Pandit community for the crimes against them and also for the false representation they have tried to make by using the protest picture of Roots in Kashmir”.Among the 20 stamps, which displayed scenes of alleged human rights abuses and Kashmiri protests, interestingly, there was one shown to be that of victims of alleged chemical weapons and another one of victims of “braid-chopping”.One of the stamps had a line in Urdu , which read: “Kashmir will become Pakistan”.As per Pakistani media, there was no information on whose idea the 20 propaganda stamps was but the proposal had been cleared by the communications ministry, the foreign ministry and the prime minister’s office.Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj , who was to meet her Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mehmood Qureshi , on the sidelines of the UNGA session in New York last week, had called off the meeting citing the issue of Pakistani propaganda stamps and the brutal killing of a BSF soldier and three Kashmiri policemen.