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Cause of the Kashmir Dispute
India’s forcible occupation of the State of Jammu
and Kashmir in 1947 is the main cause of the dispute. India claims to have
‘signed’ a controversial document, the Instrument of Accession, on 26
October 1947 with the Maharaja of Kashmir, in which the Maharaja obtained
India’s military help against popular insurgency. The people of Kashmir
and Pakistan do not accept the Indian claim. There are doubts about the
very existence of the Instrument of Accesion. The United Nations also does
not consider Indian claim as legally valid: it recognises Kashmir as a
disputed territory. Except India, the entire world community recognises
Kashmir as a disputed territory. The fact is that all the principles on
the basis of which the Indian subcontinent was partitioned by the British
in 1947 justify Kashmir becoming a part of Pakistan: the State had
majority Muslim population, and it not only enjoyed geographical proximity
with Pakistan but also had essential economic linkages with the
territories constituting Pakistan.
In Kashmir, however, the Maharaja hesitated. The
principally Muslim population, having seen the early and covert arrival of
Indian troops, rebelled and things got out of the Maharaja’s hands. The
people of Kashmir were demanding to join Pakistan. The Maharaja, fearing
tribal warfare, eventually gave way to the Indian pressure and agreed to
join India by, as India claims, ‘signing’ the controversial Instrument of
Accession on 26 October 1947. Kashmir was provisionally accepted into the
Indian Union pending a free and impartial plebiscite. This was spelled out
in a letter from the Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten, to the
Maharaja on 27 October 1947. In the letter, accepting the accession,
Mountbatten made it clear that the State would only be incorporated into
the Indian Union after a reference had been made to the people of Kashmir.
Having accepted the principle of a plebiscite, India has since obstructed
all attempts at holding a plebiscite.
In 1947, India and Pakistan went to war over
Kashmir. During the war, it was India which first took the Kashmir dispute
to the United Nations on 1 January 1948 The following year, on 1 January
1949, the UN helped enforce ceasefire between the two countries. The
ceasefire line is called the Line of Control. It was an outcome of a
mutual consent by India and Pakistan that the UN Security Council (UNSC)
and UN Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) passed several
resolutions in years following the 1947-48 war. The UNSC Resolution of 21
April 1948--one of the principal UN resolutions on Kashmir—stated that
“both India and Pakistan desire that the question of the accession of
Jammu and Kashmir to India or Pakistan should be decided through the
democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite”. Subsequent UNSC
Resolutions reiterated the same stand. UNCIP Resolutions of 3 August 1948
and 5 January 1949 reinforced UNSC resolutions.
Prime Minister Nehru’s Betrayal
India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
made a pledge to resolve the Kashmir dispute in accordance with these
resolutions. The sole criteria to settle the issue, he said, would be the
“wishes of the Kashmir people”. A pledge that Prime Minister Nehru started
violating soon after the UN resolutions were passed. The Article 370,
which gave ‘special status’ to ‘Jammu and Kashmir’, was inserted in the
Indian constitution. The ‘Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly’ was
created on 5 November 1951. Prime minister Nehru also signed the Delhi
Agreement with the then ‘ruler’ of the disputed State, Sheikh Adbullah,
which incorporated Article 370. In 1957, the disputed State was
incorporated into the Indian Union under a new Constitution. This was done
in direct contravention of resolutions of the UNSC and UNCIP and the
conditions of the controversial Instrument of Accession. The said
constitutional provision was rushed through by the then puppet ‘State’
government of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed. The people of Kashmir were not
consulted.
In 1965, India and Pakistan once again went to
war over Kashmir. A cease-fire was established in September 1965. Indian
Prime Minister Lal Bhadur Shastri and Pakistani president Ayub Khan signed
the Tashkent Declaration on 1 January 1966. They resolved to try to end
the dispute by peaceful means. Although Kashmir was not the cause of 1971
war between the two countries, a limited war did occur on the Kashmir
front in December 1971. The 1971 war was followed by the signing of the
Simla Accord, under which India and Pakistan are obliged to resolve the
dispute through bilateral talks. Until the early 1997, India never
bothered to discuss Kashmir with Pakistan even bilaterally. The direct
foreign-secretaries-level talks between the two countries did resume in
the start of the 1990s; but, in 1994, they collapsed. This happened
because India was not ready even to accept Kashmir a dispute as such,
contrary to what the Tashkent Declaration and the Simla Accord had
recommended and what the UNSC and UNCIP in their resolutions had stated.
The government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif,
after coming to power in February 1997, took the initiative of resuming
the foreign secretaries-level talks with India. The process resumed in
March 1997 in New Delhi. At the second round of these talks in June 1997
in Islamabad, India and Pakistan agreed to constitute a Joint Working
Group on Kashmir. But soon after the talks, India backtracked from the
agreement, the same way as Prime Minister Nehru had done back in the 1950s
by violating his own pledge regarding the implementation of UN resolutions
seeking Kashmir settlement according to, as Mr Nehru himself described,
“the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” The third round of India-Pakistan
foreign secretaries-level talks was held in New Delhi in September 1997,
but no progress was achieved as India continued dithering on the question
of forming a Joint Working Group on Kashmir. The Hindu nationalist
government of prime minister Atal Behari Vajpaee is neither ready to
accept any international mediation on Kashmir, nor is it prepared to
seriously negotiate the issue bilaterally with Pakistan.
Most Densely-Soldiered Territory
The Indian troops-to-Kashmiri people ratio in the
occupied Kashmir is the largest ever soldiers-to-civilians ratio in the
world. There are approximately 600,000 Indian military forces—including
regular army, para-military troops, border security force and
police—currently deployed in the occupied Kashmir. This is in addition to
thousands of “counter-militants”—the civilians hired by the Indian forces
to crush the uprising.
Since the start of popular uprising, thousands of
innocent Kashmir people have been killed by the Indian occupation forces.
There are various estimates of these killings. According to government of
India estimates, the number of persons killed in Occupied Kashmir between
1989 and 1996 was 15,002. Other Indian leaders have stated a much higher
figure. For instance, former Home Minister Mohammad Maqbool Dar said
nearly 40,000 people were killed in the Valley “over the past seven
years.” Farooq Abdullah’s 1996 statement estimated 50,000 killings “since
the beginning of the uprising.” The All-Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC)--which
is a representative body of over a dozen Kashmiri freedom fighters’
organisations—also cites the same number. Estimates of world news agencies
and international human rights organisations are over 20,000 killed.
Indian human rights violations in Occupied
Kashmir include indiscriminate killings and mass murders, torturing and
extra-judicial executions, and destruction of business and residential
properties, molesting and raping women. These have been extensively
documented by Amnesty International, US Human Rights Watch-Asia, and
Physicians for Human Rights, International Commission of Jurists (Geneva),
Contact Group on Kashmir of the Organization of Islamic Countries—and, in
India, by Peoples Union for Civil Liberties, the Coordination Committee on
Kashmir, and the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples’ Basic Rights Protection
Committee. Despite repeated requests over the years by world human rights
organisations such as the Amnesty International, the Indian government has
not permitted them any access to occupied territories. In 1997, it even
refused the United Nations representatives permission to visit there |