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.
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