Human Rights on the Indian Subcontinent

Debate between Fiona Mactaggart and Jason McCartney

Thursday 15th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

I start by paying tribute to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker), a fellow former Royal Air Force officer. I joined him and many other Members from both sides of the House in helping to secure the debate from the Backbench Business Committee, to which we are very grateful.

I shall focus on Kashmir. I have spoken in Westminster Hall debates on Kashmir and at meetings of the all-party group for Kashmir, but this is the first time I have had the opportunity to speak on human rights in Kashmir in this Chamber, and I am very grateful for it. My constituency in west Yorkshire has thousands of Kashmiris living in Thornton Lodge, Crosland Moor and Lockwood. They raise the situation in their homeland with me weekly, so I am proud to be speaking on their behalf.

I fully understand that international issues are never straightforward, so to try to understand the dynamic of the region I undertook a private visit to Azad Jammu and Kashmir last November. I flew into Islamabad in Pakistan, and after delivering blankets, clothing and tents donated by the good folk of Huddersfield and Colne Valley to some of the flood-hit villages in the area of Nowshera in Pakistan, we crossed the border into AJK. I was based in the vibrant city of Mirpur—a fantastic place, as the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) rightly said—on the beautiful Mangla Dam lake. I was honoured to be invited for tea at the homes of families with loved ones who live in my constituency, but their love of tea is not the only close cultural link that the Kashmiris have with the UK. When I was invited to meet the Prime Minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Sardar Attique Khan, in Dadyal, I was welcomed by their military band, complete with bagpipes and kilts.

I saw a beautiful and peaceful Pakistan-administered region of Kashmir, but time and again I have been told of human rights abuses in Indian-controlled Kashmir, some of which we have heard about in this Chamber in the past hour, so I fully appreciate that this is a region where terrorism and security concerns are rife. Of course our own previous Government have been accused of being implicated in activities such as rendition in the wider region. The position is not always black and white.

An hour ago in Central Lobby, I bumped into a Kashmir-based journalist I met over there. As a former journalist, while I was in Kashmir I addressed a group of 50 Kashmiri journalists at the Press Club in Mirpur, and I stressed to them the importance of factual reporting. Wild accusations and the emotionally charged inflating of casualty figures do not help the cause of those campaigning for peace in the region. For example, yesterday I received an e-mail telling me of hundreds of unidentified graves, with the accusation that they contain the bodies of victims of unlawful killings and torture. I have no idea whether that is true; we must be wary of propaganda and deal in facts.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that many Kashmiri journalists simply cannot report facts, because they cannot get press accreditation that will enable them to go into areas where the police are in control?