At Long Last, a Solution to the Kashmir Problem Seems Possible
By M.P. Prabhakaran
There is hope, at long last, that a resolution of the Kashmir dispute can be negotiated. Indeed, a negotiated settlement of the dispute is possible, if all parties to it – India, Pakistan and Kashmiris – are realistic in their approach and prepared to seize the momentum the issue has lately gained.
The momentum received another impetus on December 18, 2003. In an interview with the Reuters news agency on that day, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that his country was prepared to give up its long-standing position on Kashmir. Pakistan had always insisted that a plebiscite among Kashmiris, to decide whether to join India or Pakistan, was the only way of solving the problem. It was that position, it may be added, that blocked all these years even a dialogue between India and Pakistan on the issue. “If we want to resolve this issue,” Gen. Musharraf said in the interview, “both sides need to talk to each other with flexibility, coming beyond stated positions, meeting half way somewhere. We are prepared to rise to the occasion; India has to be flexible also.” It is now incumbent upon India to grab the opportunity and take the Pakistani President up on his word. The world is watching.
This is not the time India should be dwelling on the general’s past unreliability. It should appreciate the fact that he changed his country’s stance on Kashmir at considerable risk to his person and position. Already there have been two assassination attempts on him. They occurred within a span of 11 days, in December, the second one only a week after he offered the olive branch to India. One of the two suicide bombers involved in it has been identified as Muhammad Jamil, a 23-year-old Kashmiri militant who was also a member of the outlawed terrorist group, Jaish-e-Muhammad. The group has close ties to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and Afghanistan’s Taliban movement. It has also been reported that Jamil had fought in Afghanistan, alongside the Taliban, against America. In the eyes of al Qaeda and the Taliban, and of terrorists fighting to free Kashmir from Indian ‘infidels,’ Musharraf is a traitor. They are out to destroy him.
True, he came to power through a military coup. And he has made many more mistakes since: He either approved or looked the other way when the Taliban, propped up by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of his military, wreaked havoc in Afghanistan; he did nothing when terrorists, trained and equipped by his military, steadily crossed over to the Indian side of Kashmir and caused deaths and destruction there. But, it should be said in fairness, the rise of Islamic militancy per se cannot be blamed on him. The U.S. had a hand in it. In the 1980’s, the U.S. used Islamic fundamentalists, including terrorists who masqueraded as mujahideen, in its fight to free Afghanistan from Soviet occupation. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Most of those terrorists are now allies of al Qaeda, whose declared goal is destruction of America and its interests around the world.
Musharraf’s induction into civilized society and his distancing himself from terrorists took place after 9/11. It took a good deal of dangling of carrots and wielding of sticks by the U.S. for that to happen. The important thing is it happened and for that he deserves praise. Since then, he has been an indispensable ally of America in its war against terrorism. The invaluable help he has been rendering in that war has earned him some respect and legitimacy around the world. In the process, he has become the bete noire of al Qaeda and many other terrorist organizations. He has also earned the wrath of many in the upper echelon of his military, with whose encouragement and support terrorism flourished in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The rugged terrain that straddles the two countries is now the nerve center of al Qaeda.
Washington is well aware that a war over Kashmir between India and Pakistan, two nuclear neighbors, at this critical juncture will be a big setback to its war on terrorism. That’s why it has been working hard from behind the scenes to bring them to a negotiating table to thrash out a solution.
As far as the question of plebiscite on Kashmir is concerned, Washington had withdrawn its support for it long ago. It has been supporting India’s position that all bilateral issues between India and Pakistan are to be resolved in terms of the 1971 Simla Accord, signed by them at the conclusion of the Bangladesh war. As for India, the plebiscite has been a dead issue for nearly half a century.
Plebiscite on Kashmir has always been mentioned as U.N.-sponsored. Few people
know that the offer to conduct it was originally made by India. And still fewer
know that it was at India’s instance that the U.N. Security Council made that
offer part of its resolution which ended the first India-Pakistan war over
Kashmir. However, circumstances beyond India’s control forced it to withdraw the
offer later. It needs emphasizing that such withdrawals are valid under the
rebus sic stantibus (circumstances remaining substantially the same)
doctrine of international law.
In a speech before the Indian Parliament on March 29, 1956,
Jawaharlal Nehru, then Prime Minister of India, gave three reasons for India’s
decision to withdraw the plebiscite offer. The first was the failure on the part
of Pakistan to fulfill what was stipulated in the Security Council resolution as
a prerequisite for the conduct of the plebiscite: that Pakistan pull out its
troops from the area of Kashmir it illegally occupied. (How it came to occupy
part of Kashmir illegally is discussed below.) The second reason was that
Kashmir’s Constituent Assembly had approved the state’s merger with India and
accepted India’s constitution.
The third reason that Nehru gave was that Pakistan’s membership in the U.S.-led (now moribund) military alliances – the South-East Asia Treaty Organization and the Central Treaty Organization – made India suspect that Pakistan intended to seek military solutions to the problems involving neighbors. Nehru was in a way saying that India’s decision was partly prompted by America’s meddling in that part of the world in pursuance of its Cold War policy.
If those were the reasons given by India for its withdrawal of the plebiscite offer then, many more can be added now. The most valid one is that the whole Kashmir issue has been hijacked by terrorists. To conduct a referendum in a place infested by terrorists is a laughable idea. Pakistan is slowly coming around to realizing what the U.S. and many other nations did long ago. It has been said that the impartial role the U.S. has lately been playing vis-à-vis the Kashmir dispute rights to some extent some of the wrongs it did to India during the Cold War.
The Origins of the Kashmir Dispute
Let us examine briefly how the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir arose in the first place. When Britain decided to grant India independence, it also decided to partition the country into a mostly-Hindu India and a predominantly-Muslim Pakistan. That decision, however, applied only to the territories it administered directly. The 565 princely states that lay scattered around the subcontinent, which were under British paramountcy but autonomous in all other respects, were given the option of joining either India or Pakistan. Their decision was to be governed by two criteria, though: the religious composition of the state’s population – whether Hindu-majority or Muslim-majority – and its geographical contiguity to the country it wanted to join.
By the second criterion, Kashmir, wedged between India and Pakistan that were going to be created, could join either. As a Muslim-majority state, however, its merger with Pakistan would have been accepted as more logical. Maharaja Harisingh, the Hindu ruler of the state, dithered. It was reported at the time that the dithering was also due to a dream he nurtured of declaring total independence for his kingdom, independence from both India and Pakistan.
While vacillating, he sought to enter into what were called standstill agreements with both India and Pakistan. Pakistan signed such an agreement while India refused to do so. Under the agreement, Pakistan was supposed to leave him alone while he made up his mind. This was the situation as of August 15, 1947, the day India became independent. Pakistan had declared its independence a day earlier.
The situation dramatically changed in a matter of two months when armed tribesmen from Pakistan, aided by its regular army, infiltrated Kashmir. Obviously, it was in clear violation of the standstill agreement. The ostensible purpose of the infiltration was to extend help to their Muslim brethren who had been revolting against their Hindu ruler. The actual purpose, however, was to help their new country end the stalemate over Kashmir and annex it by force.
The king of Kashmir panicked. He appealed to India for military help to drive the marauders out. It was at this crucial point that he decided to accede his kingdom to India. The accession treaty was signed on October 26, 1947. Jammu and Kashmir, as the state is officially called, thus became one of the states in the Indian federation.
India, recognizing the fact that the validity of the treaty would be challenged because of the pressure and peculiar circumstances under which it was signed, decided that “the question of [the] state’s accession should be settled by a reference to the [Kashmiri] people.” In that undertaking given by India lay the origin of the idea of a plebiscite on Kashmir.
Deriving authority from the newly-signed treaty, the Indian army went into Kashmir to expel the intruders. What followed was a war with Pakistan that dragged on for 14 months. Even as the war was going on, with India steadily winning, it brought the Kashmir issue, including the plebiscite offer, to the United Nations. India had driven out the invaders from two-thirds of Kashmir when the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution calling upon the two countries to stop the war.
Abiding by the resolution, which was passed on January 4, 1949, India and Pakistan signed a cease-fire agreement. A cease-fire line or, what those on the subcontinent prefer to call, a Line of Control, came into existence across Kashmir. The parts of Kashmir that were under the respective control of India and Pakistan on that day have remained so till today.
We already discussed why the promised plebiscite did not, and will not, take place. If India and Pakistan are keen on finding a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem, they have to look for other ways. But no solution will be a lasting one unless it reflects what has been a reality in Kashmir for over five decades now: that two-thirds of Kashmir has been functioning as an integral part of India and one-third as that of Pakistan. It is unrealistic to expect either country to let go in favor of the other what it has exercised sovereignty over all this time. Which means that converting the present Line of Control in Kashmir into a permanent international border between India and Pakistan is the only practicable and feasible solution to the Kashmir problem.
[Originally published on January 1, 2004. It has since been slightly edited.]
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Reader's Response
'Nice Tone'
I enjoyed reading the piece. You have a nice tone to your writing.
Kathryn Gleason, New York, New York, U.S.A.
February 1, 2004