Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir – The arrest and imprisonment of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in a corruption case has angered many in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Ghulam Mohammad, 70, told Al Jazeera he was in disbelief at seeing the turn of events in a country that claims Kashmir in its entirety and has been supporting a struggle for self-determination on the Indian side.
A resident of Srinagar’s Habba Kadal area, Mohammad said it was the second time in the past year he felt anguished after seeing his favoured leader being “ill-treated” which he believed “Khan doesn’t deserve”.
“I am at a loss for words. I don’t know what to say any more,” he said, sitting in his small room on the second floor of his house and watching the updates from Pakistan on his mobile phone.
This time though, Mohammad was mentally ready to see the action against Khan without endangering his health. It wasn’t the case last year.
On the evening of April 10, 2022, soon after Khan was removed as prime minister after he lost a no-confidence vote in parliament, Mohammad complained of chest pain and was rushed to a hospital where the doctors said he had suffered a “mild heart attack” due to stress.
“I got very upset when I heard that Khan had been removed from office,” Mohammad told Al Jazeera.
Anger over Khan crackdown
Khan, who served as prime minister between 2018 and 2022, was charged in nearly 150 cases after his removal, including corruption and “terrorism”. The charges came after he blamed the country’s powerful “establishment” – a euphemism for the powerful military which also dabbles in politics – for his removal.
Finally, after a series of court appearances and a brief arrest in May, a court in capital Islamabad on Saturday sentenced the cricketing legend-turned-politician to three years in prison in a case related to the non-declaration of gifts he received from foreign leaders and governments when he was the premier.
On Tuesday, Pakistan’s election commission barred him from politics for five years due to his conviction. Khan has denied all the charges.
Khan’s Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party says nearly 10,000 of its leaders and supporters have also been arrested in the government crackdown since May, while dozens of top PTI leaders have quit the party, reportedly under pressure from the military.
Mohammad, who says he is an avid political observer, told Al Jazeera that Khan’s approach towards India on the Kashmir issue was the most striking thing about him.
“I believe if Khan would have continued as a prime minister and Modi [India’s prime minister] would have shown some flexibility, the resolution of the Kashmir issue could have been possible,” he said.
Mohammad is not alone in thinking along these lines in Indian-administered Kashmir, where pro-Pakistan sentiment is rampant. A decades-old rebellion against New Delhi there seeks to either merge with Muslim-majority Pakistan or form an independent state.
Many Kashmiris remember Khan’s first address as prime minister in 2018 when he urged India to “take one step forward, we [Pakistan] will take two” in resolving the dispute.
The call was well received in Indian-administered Kashmir and many residents saw a rare glimpse of hope.
Months later, a new and unprecedented misfortune struck the region. On August 5, 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government unilaterally abrogated the region’s special status guaranteed by the Indian constitution and brought the country’s only Muslim-majority region under direct federal control.
Meanwhile, a series of laws and policies imposed by New Delhi to further tighten its grip over Indian-administered Kashmir have worsened the already tense relations between the two South Asian nuclear powers.
But many in the region still believe Khan was their best bet in negotiating with India to find a solution to the Kashmir crisis.
In an interview in June this year with the Atlantic Council, a prominent United States-based think tank, Khan said despite India’s 2019 move, the then-Pakistan government headed by him was working on a “peace proposal with India” that would have seen New Delhi announce “some sort of road map” for the Kashmir issue and could have also led to a visit by Modi to Pakistan.
“[There] was supposed to be a quid pro quo. India was supposed to give some concessions, give some sort of a road map to Kashmir, and I was going to host Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi in Pakistan. But it never materialised. So, it never went further than that. That’s how it was,” Khan had said.
‘My thoughts towards Pakistan have changed’
The Himalayan territory of Kashmir has been the subject of a bitter dispute between Hindu-majority India and mainly Muslim Pakistan since 1947, when the borders of the two countries were drawn along religious lines by the departing British colonial rulers.
Since then, the two countries have fought two of their full-scale wars over Kashmir. Tens of thousands of people have been killed since an armed rebellion against Indian rule began in 1989.
New Delhi accuses Islamabad of backing the rebels with weapons, money and training. Islamabad denies the charges, saying it only provides diplomatic support to the rebel movement.
But the crackdown against Khan and his party has angered many Kashmiris.
“I am stunned to see this face of Pakistan. I never expected that its army could be so brutal against its own people. My thoughts towards Pakistan have completely changed after seeing what has happened with Imran Khan and his party,” said Irfan, a 27-year-old shopkeeper from the Rajbagh area of Srinagar.
Pakistan’s military has organised several coups and directly ruled over the country for more than three decades. Many observers call it the most powerful institution in Pakistan, which had even backed Khan during his rise to power.
But the relations soured when Khan was in power, resulting in his eventual overthrow.
Irfan said for him, Pakistan is the most “corrupt country where the army holds the ultimate power”.
“These days you can’t hide things. With social media, you come to know about everything. The way police are arresting and humiliating women and the media is being muzzled, it feels like Kashmir,” he said.
Khan’s rise to fame in Kashmir is largely attributed to him portraying himself as an anti-corruption crusader.
“What have Nawaz Sharif or [Asif Ali] Zardari done for us all these years apart from filling their own coffers and living luxuriously in European countries? They are all a bunch of corrupt people who looted Pakistan all these years,” Imran Hussain, owner of a business in Kashmiri handicraft, told Al Jazeera.
Nawaz Sharif, thrice the prime minister of Pakistan, was convicted of corruption charges. He fled to London where he is currently in exile as his brother, the outgoing Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, tries to clear the legal and political hurdles for his return to the country ahead of national elections.
Zardari, the former president of Pakistan and head of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), had earned the moniker, Mr Ten Percent, following allegations of corruption when his wife, the late Benazir Bhutto, was the prime minister.
In 2017, Pakistan’s Supreme Court dismissed Nawaz Sharif from the prime minister’s office after the Panama Papers controversy. Similarly, in 2020, Zardari was indicted in a money laundering case, a year after he was briefly arrested in a separate laundering case.
Both Sharif and Zardari were in alliance in Shehbaz Sharif’s outgoing government, whose tenure will end on Wednesday after the National Assembly is dissolved.
“How come these families who were the most corrupt till yesterday were ruling over the country again?” asked Tariq Jeelani, a resident of Rainawari in Srinagar.
Jeelani, a student of political science, believes Khan had the potential to be a world leader.
“Look at his speech at the UN [United Nations] on Kashmir after Article 370 was removed. See the respect he was getting when visiting other countries,” he said.
But Khan is not the first Pakistani leader to gain widespread popularity in Kashmir.
In the 1960s, military leader Field Marshal Ayub Khan became popular in the region after he launched Operation Gibraltar, a covert Pakistani army operation in Indian-administered Kashmir to trigger a mass uprising against India.
Similarly, PPP founder and former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s speech of “waging 1,000 years war” with India in 1965 made him an instant hit in the disputed Himalayan region.
Military rulers General Muhammad Zia Ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf also gained popularity among the Kashmiris due to what residents considered their firm approach on the Kashmir issue.
However, no contemporary Pakistani politician matches Khan’s popularity in the region.
Khan’s Kashmir stand more complex: Experts
But experts insist on caution in celebrating Khan’s Kashmir stand.
Kashmiri political analyst and scholar Sheikh Showkat Hussain told Al Jazeera that though Kashmiris do feel negatively about Pakistan and its army after Khan’s imprisonment, it is Pakistan’s state policy on Kashmir that matters in the long run, not an individual’s approval or dislike.
“Political and economic stability of Pakistan has always been a factor in orienting Kashmir politics. But ultimately it is the Pakistan state’s narrative that prevails over here [Kashmir],” Hussain said.
Citing an example, Hussain said Indian-administered Kashmir witnessed widespread discontent after the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979, but within a decade, in 1988, Kashmiris also mourned the death of General Zia ul Haq – who had ordered Bhutto’s hanging – in an air crash.
“So Kashmiris might be feeling negatively about the ouster of Imran Khan, but eventually it depends as to how the new dispensation manages the country and recasts its Kashmir policy,” Hussain told Al Jazeera.
Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist, said if Khan is seen as the most popular leader in Kashmir, then he should explain why his government signed a ceasefire agreement with India after August 5, 2019.
“I think his silence was like a betrayal to Kashmiris. Many Pakistanis called him Kashmir ‘farosh [seller],” Mir told Al Jazeera, adding that many Pakistani leaders lost power and popularity in Pakistan when they tried to compromise with India on the Kashmir issue.
Ajay Bisaria, the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan from 2017 to 2020, said though he believes Khan is a “sincere politician”, he had an “immature team” to handle the Kashmir issue with India.
“He [Khan] did start off with wanting a better relationship with India but because of his inexperienced and immature team, a lot of things went wrong, particularly his strange, inflexible and undiplomatic position that there can’t be talks with India unless Article 370 is restored,” Bisaria told Al Jazeera.
Abdul Basit, a former Pakistani High Commissioner to India, said a dual policy adopted by Khan and the Pakistani army after August 5, 2019 “exposed Pakistan’s contradictory stand on Kashmir”.
“[They] say one thing and do another. And that is why Pakistan has not been able to garner any international support on Kashmir after India abrogated the special status of Kashmir,” he told Al Jazeera.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
