Asia Times: PART 1: A question of nationhood


	January 24, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

KASHMIR IN FOCUS
PART 1: A question of nationhood
By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE - The recent escalation of tension between India and Pakistan has brought the Kashmir issue fully back under the spotlight. The international community has often treated the long-standing conflict over Kashmir as though it is a squabble between the subcontinent's two siblings over real estate.

True, India and Pakistan are fighting for control over territory. But if the Kashmir problem were merely a territorial dispute between the countries, it might have been easier to resolve. It is not.

From its genesis in 1947, Kashmir has been inextricably knotted up with the national ideologies of India and Pakistan, "secular nationalism" in the case of India, "Muslim nationalism" in the case of Pakistan.

Pakistan was born in August 1947 out of an argument made by its founding father Mohammed Ali Jinnah that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations. The two-nation theory was rejected by India, but the partition of British India into India and Pakistan was carried out, nevertheless.

Kashmir, a Muslim majority princely state ruled by a Hindu Maharaja, refused to join either Pakistan or India. In October 1947, Pashtun tribals from Pakistan led unofficially by Pakistani army officers invaded Kashmir and rapidly pushed towards Srinagar, its capital. Facing military defeat and seeking the help of the Indian army to save his embattled state, the Maharaja signed a treaty of accession with India.

Indian troops were then flown in and the invaders were pushed back, but not out of all of Kashmir. The ceasefire line of 1949 left India in control of two-thirds of the state, Pakistan in control of a third. This is the position to date.

The accession of Kashmir to India was a huge blow to Pakistan, as a Muslim majority state had opted to join India. The National Conference, Kashmir's most popular political party, supported the Maharaja's decision to accede to India. For India, Kashmir's accession was a vindication of its position that Muslims and Hindus could co-exist peacefully in a secular democratic set up.

For both countries, Kashmir constitutes the core of their nationhood. The stakes in the conflict over Kashmir are therefore extremely high. Kashmir cannot be calculated in mere terms of territorial gains and losses.

The Indian and Pakistani positions today on the Kashmir issue have their roots in developments of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Pakistan questions the legality of Kashmir's accession to India. The Maharaja, it says, was no longer the effective ruler and had no moral or constitutional authority to sign the accession. In Pakistan's view, Kashmir is disputed. It calls for resolution of the "Kashmir dispute" according to United Nations resolutions and insists that a plebiscite be held to determine the wishes of the Kashmiri people.

India maintains that the accession of Kashmir to India is final and non-negotiable. At the time of Kashmir's accession to India, then Indian premier Jawaharlal Nehru declared that the accession was provisional and that it would be submitted to a popular referendum. However, subsequent developments pushed India to reconsider. One was the clearly partisan role of the United States and Britain that was reflected in the UN's position.

Nehru acted in good faith when, on the advice of Lord Mountbatten, he referred the Kashmir problem to the UN Security Council on December 31, 1947, asking for vacation of aggression by Pakistan. But instead of taking note of the aggression, the council declared Kashmir a disputed territory, thereby supporting the Pakistani position. It left the future of Kashmir to be determined by a plebiscite to be held later under UN auspices.

While the principle of a plebiscite was not a contradiction of India's official position, the UN's reason for it went against India. According to India, Pakistan's only locus standi in Kashmir was that of an aggressor. The UN made it an equal party to the "dispute".

While India is often accused of refusing to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir in accordance with UN resolutions, a not so well known fact is that the conditions for holding the plebiscite that the UN prescribed were never met. The UN Commission on India and Pakistan (UNCIP) declared in August 1948 that before a plebiscite could be conducted, a two-part action was necessary. In the first part, Pakistan should withdraw its forces from the disputed territory, and "secure the withdrawal from the state of Jammu and Kashmir of tribesmen and Pakistani nationals not normally resident therein who have entered the state solely of the purpose of fighting".

In the second part, "when the commission shall have notified the Government of India that the tribesmen and Pakistani nationals ... have withdrawn, the Government of India [will] begin to withdraw the bulk of its forces from that state in stages ..." Once both withdrawals were completed, a plebiscite would be held.

To date, Pakistan has not vacated the territory it occupied in 1947. With that condition not met, the subsequent step - Indian pullout - was never taken. Consequently, argues India, the question of holding of a plebiscite does not arise.

Besides, with the subcontinent being drawn into the Cold War, the settling of the Kashmir issue underwent a dramatic change. With Pakistan joining the Western military alliance in 1954, Pakistan was under no pressure to pull out its troops. The Soviets, who had hitherto abstained on UN resolutions, started to use their veto in India's favor.

In 1972, the two countries signed the Simla Agreement under which they agreed to respect the Line of Control (Loc) resulting from the ceasefire of December 17, 1971 "without prejudice to the recognized position of either side". They pledged "not to alter it unilaterally, irrespective of mutual differences and legal interpretations". They also undertook to "refrain from the threat or the use of force in violation of this line".

In the late 1980s, Pakistan once again took up the Kashmir cause, this time in an aggressive way. Young men from Indian-administered Kashmir were provided arms and training in Pakistan from around 1986-87. The popular disaffection in Kashmir against Indian rule provided Pakistan with an ideal opportunity to avenge its break-up and humiliating defeat at the hands of India in the 1971 war.

It may be recalled that when erstwhile East Pakistan split from West Pakistan to become Bangladesh in 1971, Pakistan's two-nation theory suffered a grievous blow. The East Pakistanis, despite being Muslim, had broken away from Pakistan. And India played surgeon in that process.

In Kashmir, Pakistan found an opportunity to show that Muslims were not willing to stay with India. By arming the militants, Pakistan waged a proxy war in Kashmir - a "low-cost option" to bleed India white. As Pakistan sent in more guns and more fighters, India sent more troops into Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have fought three full-blown wars - two of them over Kashmir - and one near-war following a Pakistani military incursion at Kargil in 1999. Relations between India and Pakistan have been tense through much of the last 54 years.

Pakistan maintains that it is the dispute over Kashmir that is the cause of the troubled India-Pakistan relations. Therefore, the Kashmir dispute must be tackled before other measures towards normalization can be put in place. The "core issue" must be addressed first.

India believes that Kashmir is not the cause of the conflict but the consequence. It is one among the many issues that bedevil India-Pakistan relations, that if confidence-building measures are put in place first, the Kashmir problem will be easier to tackle and even lose relevance as an issue perhaps.

India has long refused to negotiate the Kashmir issue with Pakistan. It holds that Kashmir is an internal matter and that if discussion has to take place with Pakistan it will be about Islamabad's role as a sponsor of cross-border terrorism. Pakistan projects its role in the Valley as "support to the Kashmiris' fight for freedom from Indian oppression".

And so, the Kashmir problem has been bogged down in semantics (issue or dispute, core issue or an issue, terrorists or freedom fighters, Jammu and Kashmir or Indian Occupied Kashmir, Azad Kashmir or Pakistan Occupied Kashmiri), entangled in a proxy war and the likely theater in a future all-out war. While India and Pakistan cling to Kashmir to prove their theories of nationhood, Kashmiri lives are being lost.

PART 2: How India lost hearts and minds

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