Pakistan’s unflinching solidarity with Kashmir
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The Kashmir question represents the unfinished agenda of the partition of the South Asian sub-continent in 1947. The rulers of princely states were allowed by the British to take the decision of acceding to India or Pakistan, keeping in view the wishes of their citizens.
But Maharaja Hari Singh, the Sikh ruler of Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir state was obliged to join India in October 1947 as Indian armed forces had already entered his territory. The people of Kashmir rose in revolt against his unfair decision and a war ensued between India and Pakistan. India took the Kashmir case to the Security Council in December 1947 which prescribed a UN supervised plebiscite to know the wishes of the Kashmiris. Instead of holding that referendum, in August 2019, India abolished Kashmir’s constitutionally guaranteed autonomous status and merged it with the Indian Union.
The Kashmir issue is a poignant story of deceit and betrayal. It is a sad tale of repression and broken promises and Pakistan extends its full diplomatic and moral support to the Kashmir cause. In Pakistan, February 5th is celebrated as Kashmir Solidarity Day every year. On this day, Pakistan’s government and its people renew their resolve to fully support the right of self-determination for eight million Kashmiris. They reiterate their adherence to UN resolutions calling for a free and impartial plebiscite.
Kashmir is the oldest item on the UN’s agenda. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru, fully supported the UN resolutions on Kashmir to begin with. In 1949, he said that Kashmir was a world question and that he supported mediation. That same year, Shaikh Abdullah, the most popular leader of Indian-administered Kashmir held long negotiations with the Indian leadership to craft special autonomy clauses. Under the mutually agreed position, Kashmir could have its own constitution and the Indian authority was restricted to defence, foreign affairs and communications. An additional article was inserted in the Indian constitution which forbade outsiders to settle in Kashmir or buy property there.
But Premier Nehru, himself a Kashmiri, did not take long to ditch his international commitment to a UN supervised plebiscite. This signalled his parting of ways with Shaikh Abdullah, the first Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir who not only lost his job but was also put in jail in 1953, to remain there for eleven long years. However, Nehru was sanguine enough not to tinker with the autonomy clauses. After the 1971 war with Pakistan and subsequent Simla Accord, India claimed that Kashmir was a bilateral issue now, to be resolved by the two countries. India’s unilateral decision of last August has performed the last rites of the Simla Accord, which for all practical purposes is dead.
The Kashmir issue is a poignant story of deceit and betrayal. It is a sad tale of repression and broken promises and Pakistan extends its full diplomatic and moral support to the Kashmir cause.
Javed Hafeez
From Nehru’s multilateralism to Indira Gandhi’s bilateralism to Modi’s unilateralism, the tale of Kashmir is a painful one. It has taken a heavy toll on human lives in Indo-Pakistan wars and the indigenous risings of Kashmiris. With 800,000 Indian soldiers, Kashmir today is the most militarized region in the world and a nuclear flash point. Much to the displeasure of India, the issue has been internationalized. It has found its way to the UN, US congress and the European Union. China has started referring to the UN resolutions again as a solution to this protracted issue. Two special sessions of the Security Council were convened in recent months to discuss Kashmir. The world is no longer prepared to buy India’s narrative that this is their internal matter.
In the bloodshed, scores of Kashmiris have died and been blinded fully or partially due to the indiscriminate use of pellet guns by Indian forces- a documented fact.
The UN map of South Asia still declares emphatically: “The final status of Jammu and Kashmir has not been agreed upon by the parties.”
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, had described Kashmir as Pakistan’s jugular vein. Almost all Pakistani rivers flow into the country through Kashmir. In addition to the geographical contiguity, there are centuries’ old spiritual and cultural links that bind the two people together. A large number of Kashmiri diaspora now lives in Pakistan, as its citizens. Pakistan’s unflinching empathy for the Kashmir cause is, therefore, understandable.
Contrary to the Indian narrative, there are three parties to the Kashmir conflict and those are: India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir. The Kashmiri people have been denied their fundamental right to self- determination. Any attempt to change the demographic realities, as feared by Kashmiris, will further alienate them from India. It is about time the UN assumed an assertive role to resolve the oldest item on its agenda, in the interests of world peace.
– Javed Hafeez is a former Pakistani diplomat with much experience of the Middle East. He writes weekly columns in Pakistani and Gulf newspapers and appears regularly on satellite TV channels as a defense and political analyst.
Twitter: @hafiz_javed
