Posted on 3-2-2002

 India Eyes Freeze On Kashmir
By Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jan 20 (IPS) - As international pressure mounts on India to
resume dialogue with Pakistan over Kashmir, New Delhi is likely to push for
a conversion of the Line of Control (LoC), which now divides the disputed
territory, into an international border.

Pakistan's present leaders do not accept the LoC. Both Pakistan President
Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar have said publicly
that the LoC is the problem and not the solution to the 55-year-old
dispute. India and Pakistan have uncompromisingly seen the merger of
undivided Kashmir into their own countries as the only acceptable solution.
In this context, the current military standoff on their common border is
but the latest episode in a saga of uncompromising hostility and suspicion.

In 1994, India's Parliament passed a resolution reiterating that ''all of
Kashmir, including the region beyond the LoC, now occupied by Pakistan, is
an integral part of India''. Musharraf has publicly declared Kashmir to be
the unfinished business of the partition. Despite such uncompromising
attitudes, each of the several wars that the South Asian neighbours have
fought over the territory, since partition and independence from British
India in 1947, have only served to lend ever greater legitimacy to the LoC.
The LoC first took shape as the ceasefire line (CFL) drawn up after the
armies of the two countries fought each other to a standstill in January
1949, in what was the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Although India's
army was vastly superior, it deliberately stopped its advance along what
became the CFL because it represented a natural divide between
Kashmir-speaking people and Mirpuris, who belong ethnically and
linguistically to Punjabi stock.

According to journalist and historian Ajit Bhattacharya, India's first
prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a Kashmiri himself, was keenly aware of
the ethnic divide which manifested itself politically in popular support
for the secular National Conference party in the Srinagar valley, in
contrast to the dominance of the Muslim Conference on the Pakistan side of
the CFL. Nehru's military plan had the tacit support of Sheikh Abdullah,
founder of the National Conference and father of the present chief
minister, Farooq Abdullah.

By November 1949, supervised by United Nations observers, the army
commanders of the two countries had demarcated the CFL on the ground
pending a plebiscite. The demarcation left little room for dispute except
on the high Siachen glacier. After the 1971 war, which resulted in the
creation of Bangladesh, the CFR was converted, with minor changes, into the
LoC under the Shimla Agreement, signed between the two countries in July
1972. The signatories to the Shimla Agreement, prime minister Indira Gandhi
and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, were said to have a secret understanding to have
the LoC gradually converted into an international border -- and Gandhi's
advisor and distinguished civil servant, P N Dhar, mentions this in his
published memoirs.

Dhar writes that Bhutto asked for time and then reneged on the deal. But it
took another 27 years before the validity of the LoC was challenged when
armed intruders, heavily backed by the Pakistan army, crossed it into the
Kargil sector of Kashmir, sparking off a bloody but undeclared war in the
summer of 1999. Alarmed at the prospect of a full-scale war between the two
neighbours, which declared themselves nuclear-armed just a year before in
May 1998, the United States intervened and prevailed on Pakistan to
withdraw the infiltrators without pre-conditions. Significantly, a joint
statement issued by then U.S. President Bill Clinton and prime minister
Nawaz Sharif, that brought the Kargil war to an end, expressed respect for
the LoC in accordance with the Shimla Agreement and pledged a bilateral
framework for future negotiations on the issue. By carefully avoiding any
violation of the LoC, and scrupulously sticking to its declared agenda of
vacating the intrusion, India earned international approbation for itself
while Pakistan was labelled the aggressor.

According to Prof. Amitabh Mattoo, who teaches international relations at
the Jawhaharlal Nehru University (JNU), converting the LoC into the
international border is the most practical solution to the Kashmir issue
because it is now impossible to reunify what once constituted the original
princely state. Mattoo points out that the two regions have now lived as
part of India and Pakistan for more than half-a-century and although they
have grievances against their respective leaderships, there has been a
''cumulative process of integration that will be extremely difficult to
reverse''. ''It is difficult to imagine how the existing political,
economic and communication links can be done away with without causing a
tremendous upheaval,'' Mattoo says.

Standing in the way of any reunification is the fact that Islamabad has
ceded a large part of the old Kashmir to China and virtually converted the
Northern Areas consisting of Gilgit, Hunza and Baltistan, into its fifth
province. On the Indian side, there is the question of Buddhist-dominated
Ladakh and Hindu-dominated Jammu regions, whose people are unlikely to join
Pakistan in any plebiscite.

Speaking at a television talk show last week, Chief Minister Abdullah said
any attempt to alter the present boundaries of Kashmir could result in the
displacement of vast numbers of people and a bloodbath such as the one that
accompanied the partition that created Pakistan in 1947. ''The solution
lies in the conversion of the LoC into an international border, ease of
movement across it and greater autonomy for both regions,'' Abdullah said.