Barry’s Westminster Hall Debate speech on Kashmir

On Wednesday 10th of December, Barry spoke in the Westminster Hall Debate about Kashmir self-determination. His speech was truncated due to strict time limits imposed by the chair.

The full version of Barry’s speech can be found below this video.

Barry’s speech in full:

Let me start by saying that I would not expect any Indian politician to interfere with the constitutional arrangements and status of Scotland or Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom and so I do not think that it is for UK politicians to interfere over the status of Jammu and Kashmir in India. I do not wish to see the politics of the Indian Sub-continent played out in our domestic UK politics and I deprecate those politicians who seek to use political disputes on the sub-continent as a way of dividing communities here in Britain.

The troubled political history of Kashmir is complex and dates back to the time of partition under the Indian Independence Act of 1947. The rulers of each of the Princely States had the responsibility to choose between the two emergent nations and Kashmir’s ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, had to decide whether to accede to India or Pakistan. As he was doing so Pakistan troops invaded that part of Kashmir now known as Azad Kashmir, and he then signed the legal Instrument of Accession to the Dominion of India. That clarified the position of Kashmir in international law. Kashmir became a part of India. It is also clear that Pakistan was the primary aggressor in the dispute.

On the 1st of January 1948 India referred the situation to the UN Security Council and after much deliberation The United Nations passed Resolution 47. This set three steps to resolving the crisis:

First, that Pakistan should secure the withdrawal of all its tribesmen and Pakistani nationals from Kashmir and put an end to the fighting in the state. This was the precondition for the following stages.

Second, India was asked to progressively, reduce its forces to the minimum level required to keep law and order and that the administration should as far as possible use local personnel.

Third, that all major parties should be invited to participate in the state government and India should then appoint a Plebiscite administrator to determine the state’s future.

The resolution also called for the return of refugees and the return of prisoners.

The resolution was passed under Chapter VI of the UN Charter which means that it has the status of a recommendation, not of a demand which the UN is prepared to enforce.

Sadly, the withdrawal by Pakistan never took place and there followed constant fighting in two wars and aggression by militant insurgents from Azad Kashmir across what eventually became known as the Line of Control. At the Simla Agreement however, both India and Pakistan agreed that the final settlement of Kashmir was an exclusively bi-lateral matter and that in the meantime, both sides would respect the Line of Control. 

Since the Simla Agreement the UK has always adopted the position that the resolution of the issue of Kashmir is a matter for the two countries and should not be subject to external interference. It is certainly not a matter in which UK politicians should be making unwelcome proposals.

The subject of this debate is the issue of self-determination and so I propose to examine the total lack of self determination that the Kashmiri people actually have in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir.

As a constitutional entity, the so-called Azad Kashmir, which is better known to the world as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, is not just strange but unique. It has been given the trappings of a country, with a President, Prime Minister and even a legislative assembly, but it is neither a country with its own sovereignty nor a province with its own clearly defined devolved authority from the national Government. Under section 56 of the AJK interim constitution of 1974, the Pakistan Government can dismiss any elected Government in AJK, irrespective of the support it might have in the legislative assembly. No respect there then for self determination.

Strangely enough for an entity that purports to be a country, the constitution bars anyone from public office and prohibits them from participating in politics unless they publicly support the principle of Jammu and Kashmir acceding to Pakistan. Imagine that: a country all of whose politicians can be politicians only if they say they do not want to be a country. It will therefore come as little surprise to colleagues when I say that all the major civil and police administrative positions in AJK are held by Pakistani civil and military officers.

It may also come as no surprise to them to find that that putative country has no representation in the Parliament of Pakistan. The territory’s local representatives are excluded not just from the Pakistan Parliament but from even those Pakistani bodies that negotiate inter-provincial resource allocation and federal taxes. So much for “No taxation without representation”. It is not a country. It is not a province. It is not a state. It is a satrapy. Were I not a British MP, conscious of the fact that much of this mess is a legacy of our colonial past in the region, I might almost describe it as a prize of war; but then, of course, that is precisely what Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is. A territory taken by force, not permitted even the freedoms of other Pakistani citizens and then used by the ISI and the Pakistan military as a base for fundamentalist insurgency.

Religious minorities in Pakistan have been systematically marginalised. Pakistan, while calling itself an Islamic republic, actually had a secular constitution in 1956. It was only after the ethnic civil war in 1971, which saw the division of the country and the secession of East Pakistan to form Bangladesh, that Pakistan adopted Islam as its state religion under a new, less democratic—and much less secular—constitution. Stringent blasphemy laws mean that many religious groups face the death penalty if they are even accused of denigrating the Prophet, peace be upon him.

Earlier this year Human Rights Watch (HRW) assessed Pakistan as having a shrinking space for dissent, widespread crackdowns on free expression, ongoing violence against minorities under blasphemy laws, and systemic failures in protecting women and addressing economic/climate crises. Pakistani authorities frequently use draconian laws to intimidate critics, target journalists, and repress political opposition

Perhaps most disturbing of all they stated that the authorities continued to use enforced disappearances as a means of intimidation and exercising control, with hundreds of cases reported annually.

According to the world press freedom index, prepared by Reporters Without Borders, Pakistan ranks 158th out of 180 countries – 16 places further down the list than 5 years ago when it was 142nd

The rights of women are of course governed by the Offence of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance 1979 penal provisions, which prevent women from exercising their marriage choices. Self determination then is a concept which many women and religious minorities feel is essentially foreign to their experience in AJK and Pakistan as a whole.

Five years ago The South Asia Terrorism Portal recorded that, of the 42 identified terrorist training camps located in Pakistan, 21 were located in Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.

In September of this year The Portal reported that militant groups, particularly Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), continue efforts to establish new camps near the Afghan border following Pakistani military operations, suggesting an ongoing cycle of dismantling and rebuilding.

Those camps belong to three main terrorist groups: 

Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Hizbul Mujahideen. One of the key areas around which the camps are located is Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The Simla agreement was signed in 1972, when both countries committed to resolving all differences bilaterally and peacefully. That is what they should do, and it is what UK policy is and should be: to let them resolve their differences without political interference from either side.

I deplore the way in which some have always tried to import the conflicts of the subcontinent into our domestic politics. In my borough of Brent, our council leader is a fine and devout Muslim whose family is from Pakistan; our chief whip is a wonderfully authoritative Bangladeshi woman; and our Greater London Authority representative is an enormously respected Hindu

But of course the proposers of this debate did not intend to talk about these human rights. They intended to use it to attack India

The revocation of article 370 of the Indian Constitution has brought to an end the limited autonomy that previously had been granted as “Temporary provisions with respect to the State of Jammu & Kashmir” back in 1950. That historic autonomy saw the passing of state legislation that denied civil rights to women and to gay and lesbian people. It debarred Indian Citizens from outside J&K from property ownership and thereby stifled inward investment into the region. By Revoking Article 370 the Indian government equalised the rights of citizens across India regardless of sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation. It has done away with the Muslim practice of "triple talaq" which allowed a husband to instantly divorce his wife by saying "talaq" (divorce) three times –  a practice that was already banned and criminalized in the rest of India. Perhaps most significant of all, the change in constitutional status has enabled financial investment to flow into Kashmir and to create a GDP which is now recorded at ₹2.88 lakh crore (US$34 billion) in 2025–26. By contrast the latest GDP figures for Azad Kashmir are stated as $6.6billion.

In this context, I am also aware of the serious violation of human rights in Kashmir that has gone unchallenged by the international community for far too long; indeed I have visited the refugee camps around Jammu and spoken with the Kashmiri Pandits who were forcibly evicted from the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s as a result of the declarations issued by community leaders at that time, which proclaimed that Kashmiri Pandits were Kafirs who must either convert to Islam, leave the Kashmir Valley or be killed. 

This ethnic cleansing resulted in at least 100,000 Kashmiri Pandits being deprived of their homes and many of them continue to live in appalling conditions in refugee camps without proper facilities. In 2010 the Government of Jammu & Kashmir estimated that less than 3,500 Pandits were still living in the Valley and that, of those who remained, 219 had been murdered in militant sectarian violence.

It is natural for communities in the UK with family connections in the region to express their views on either side of the India/Pakistan dispute. And the freedom to protest is one of the great rights that we enjoy in the United Kingdom. But that right must be exercised responsibly.

My plea is that when honourable members do so in this House they do so on the basis of facts – all the facts. And that they should respect the fundamental understanding that the parties to this conflict set out in the SIMLA Agreement. To resolve their defferences bilaterally and not by the intervention of any other government.

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