ISLAMABAD – In a private event on Saturday in New York City, SandeepChakravorty, India’s consul-general to the city, told Kashmiri Hindus andIndian nationals that India will build settlements modelled after Israelfor the return of the Hindu population to Kashmir.

Speaking to Kashmiri Hindus, known as Pandits, and Indian nationals at theevent, organised to discuss Indian filmmaker Vivek Agnihorti’s forthcomingproject on the forced displacement of Kashmiri Hindus in the early 1990s,Chakravorty askedlink thosepresent to give the government some time to implement its plans in thevalley.

“I believe the security situation will improve, it will allow the refugeesto go back, and in your lifetime, you will be able to go back … and youwill be able to find security, because we already have a model in theworld.

It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we canalso do it

*- Sandeep Chakravorty, Indian consul-general*

“I don’t know why we don’t follow it. It has happened in the Middle East.If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it,” Chakravorty said.

The event held in New York is one of a number of events held at the behestof India’s right-wing government in its attempt to wrestle back contol ofthe narrative in the face of the immense grassroots mobilisation againstits actions in Kashmir.

It is also the latest incarnation of the Indian government’s goals of asettler-colonial policy for the valley, which Kashmiri academics andscholarslinklong warned is the ultimate ambitions of the Indian state.

“I think the return of Kashmiri Pandits is being instrumentalized tojustify a settler-colonial project in Kashmir,” Mona Bhan, an associateprofessor of South Asian Studies at Syracuse University in New York, said.