Kashmiris, Sikhs to protest during Singh's US visit

WASHINGTON - As India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meets with President Barak Obama in the White House on Tuesday, the Sikh- and Kashmiri- American communities will protest the repressive Indian regime and ask the US leader to raise the issue of New Delhi’s genocidial policies in Punjab and Kashmir.
“The unresolved Kashmir dispute is a rebuke to the international community for its inaction,” said Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fair, head of the Kashmiri-American Council in a statement issued Sunday. “The United States paved the way for freedom around the world and the United States can help the people of Kashmir achieve peace, freedom and self-determination,” he said.
On his part, Dr Amarjit Singh of the Khalistan Affairs Centre, said the Sikhs have protested the Indian genocidal policies against them during every Indian prime minister’s visit to Washington over the past 25 years. “Twenty five years ago, on June 3, 1984, during the reign of the 2nd Prime Minister of India’s Nehru Dynasty, Ms Indira Gandhi, a savage Indian army attack was ordered on Sikhism’s holiest site (its sanctum sanctorum), the Akal Takht Sahib, located in the Darbar Sahib complex in Amritsar, which action was synchronized with assaults on thirty seven other holy Gurdawaras located in the Sikh homeland. For us Sikhs, the memory of those attacks is a ‘diary’ that we carry about with us.” “How is it that the world’s so called largest democracy can also be the world’s most oppressive regime? This nation has denied minorities the freedoms which every person is entitled to on their birth in this world. The first is the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of every person to worship God in his own, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. These freedoms must be returned to Sikhs,” Dr Amarjit Singh added.
“The only way this is possible is through the establishment of an independent sovereign nation, Khalistan, which will also act as a buffer state between arch rival nuclear nations India and Pakistan. “We urge President Barack Obama to bring up the issue of the genocidal policies of India against the Sikhs when he meets the visiting Prime Minister,” he said in the statement released to the media.