Location
The State of
Jammu and Kashmir is bordered in north by China, east by
autonomous region of Tibet, south by Indian states of Himachal
Pradesh and Punjab, and west by Pakistan. 63 per cent of the
territory is under Indian occupation; while the rest, 37 per
cent, is with Pakistan, called Azad (independent) Jammu and
Kashmir (AJK).
Area
151,360
square kilometers
Indian-occupied Kashmir: 95,356 sq.kms
Azad Jammu and
Kashmir : 56,003 sq.kms
Population
13 million
(approximate)
Indian-occupied
Kashmir: 7.7 million (projected figures, as census has not been
held since 1991) Azad Jammu Kashmir: 2.58 million (1990 figure)
Refugees in Pakistan: 1.5 million Expatriates: 1.5 million
The World's oldest dispute
The Kashmir dispute is the oldest
unresolved international conflict in the world today. Pakistan
considers Kashmir as its core political dispute with India. So
does the international community, except India. While Indian
security forces are practicing an unprecedented reign of terror
in Occupied Kashmir being widely reported world-wide; the Indian
government, currently led by Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party, is neither willing to negotiate the issue
multilaterally—through international mediation—nor is it ready
to sort it out with Pakistan through bilateral negotiations.
India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over Kashmir.
The exchange of fire between their forces across the Line of
Control, which separates Azad Kashmir from Occupied Kashmir, is
a routine affair. Now that both India and Pakistan have acquired
nuclear weapons potential, the possibility of a third war
between them over Kashmir, which may involve the use of nuclear
weapons, cannot be ruled out. The likely nuclear disaster in
South Asia, whose cause may be Kashmir, can be averted with an
intervention by the international community. Such an
intervention is urgently required to put an end to Indian
atrocities in Occupied Kashmir and prepare the ground for the
implementation of UN resolutions, which call for the holding of
a plebiscite to determine the wishes of the Kashmiri people.
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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.
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History of the dispute
The State of
Jammu and Kashmir has historically remained independent, except
in the anarchical conditions of the late 18th and
first half of the 19th century, or when incorporated
in the vast empires set up by the Mauryas (3rd
century BC), the Mughals (16th to 18th
century) and the British (mid-19th to mid-20th
century). All these empires included not only present-day India
and Pakistan but some other countries of the region as well.
Until 1846, Kashmir was part of the Sikh empire. In that year,
the British defeated the Sikhs and sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh
of Jammu for Rs. 7.5 million under the Treaty of Amritsar.
Gulab Singh, the Mahraja, signed a separate treaty with the
British which gave him the status of an independent princely
ruler of Kashmir. Gulab Singh died in 1857 and was replaced by
Rambir Singh (1857-1885). Two other Marajas, Partab Singh
(1885-1925) and Hari Singh (1925-1949) ruled in succession.
Gulab Singh
and his successors ruled Kashmir in a tyrannical and repressive
way. The people of Kashmir, nearly 80 per cent of whom were
Muslims, rose against Maharaja Hari Singh’s rule. He ruthlessly
crushed a mass uprising in 1931. In 1932, Sheikh Abdullah formed
Kashmir’s first political party—the All Jammu & Kashmir Muslim
Conference (renamed as National Conference in 1939). In 1934,
the Maharaja gave way and allowed limited democracy in the form
of a Legislative Assembly. However, unease with the Maharaja’s
rule continued. According to the instruments of partition of
India, the rulers of princely states were given the choice to
freely accede to either India or Pakistan, or to remain
independent. They were, however, advised to accede to the
contiguous dominion, taking into consideration the geographical
and ethnic issues.
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.
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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.
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Popular uprising since 1989
Since 1989,
the situation in Occupied Kashmir has undergone a qualitative
change. In that year, disappointed by decades-old indifference
of the world community towards their just cause and threatened
by growing Indian state suppression, the Kashmiri Muslim people
rose in revolt against India. A popular uprising that has gained
momentum with every passing day—unlike the previous two popular
uprisings by Kashmiris (1947-48, first against Dogra rule and
then against Indian occupation; and 1963, against Indian rule,
triggered by the disappearance of Holy relic), which were of a
limited scale.
The initial
Indian response to the 1989 Kashmiri uprising was the imposition
of Governor’s Rule in the disputed State in 1990, which was done
after dissolving the government of Farooq Abdullah, the son of
Sheikh Abdullah. From July 1990 to October 1996, the occupied
State remained under direct Indian presidential rule. In
September 1996, India stage-managed ‘State Assembly’ elections
in Occupied Kashmir, and Farooq Abdullah assumed power in
October 1996. Since then, the situation in the occupied
territories has further deteriorated. Not only has the Indian
military presence in the disputed land increased fundamentally,
the reported incidents of killing, rape, loot and plunder of its
people by Indian security forces have also quadrupled.
To crush the
Kashmiri freedom movement, India has employed various means of
state terrorism, including a number of draconian laws, massive
counter-insurgency operations, and other oppressive measures.
The draconian laws, besides several others, include the Armed
Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990; Terrorist
and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA), 1990; the Jammu & Kashmir
Public Safety Act, 1978 (amended in 1990); and the Jammu &
Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act, 1990.
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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.
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Settling the Kashmir issue
For decades,
India has defied with impunity all the UN resolutions on
Kashmir, which call for the holding of a “free and fair”
plebiscite under UN supervision to determine the wishes of the
Kashmiri people. Not just this. A massive Indian military
campaign has been on, especially since the start of the popular
Kashmiri uprising in 1989, to usurp the basic rights of the
Kashmiri people. Killing, torture, rape and other inhuman
practices by nearly 600,000 Indian soldiers are a norm of the
day in Occupied Kashmir.
The Kashmir problem will be solved the moment international
community decides to intervene in the matter—to put an end to
Indian state terrorism in Occupied Kashmir and to implement UN
resolutions. These resolutions recommend demilitarization of
Kashmir (through withdrawal of all outside forces), followed
immediately by a plebiscite under UN supervision to determine
the future status of Kashmir. The intervention of the
international community is all the more necessary, given the
consistent Indian opposition to both bilateral and multilateral
options to settle the Kashmir issue. Such an intervention is
also urgently required to stop the ever-growing Indian
brutalities against the innocent Muslim people of Kashmir, who
have been long denied their just right to self-determination.
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Averting the nuclear disaster
If the world
community failed to realize the gravity of the Kashmir problem
now, there is every likelihood of Kashmir once again becoming
the cause of another war between India and Pakistan. And, since
both the countries have acquired overt nuclear weapons
potential, and since India led by Hindu nationalists has clearly
shown its aggressive intentions towards Kashmir after declaring
itself a nuclear state, a third India-Pakistan war over Kashmir
is a possibility, a war that may result in a South Asian
nuclear catastrophe. The world community, therefore, has all the
reasons for settling Kashmir, the core unresolved political
dispute between Islamabad and New Delhi.
Like many
other international disputes, the Kashmir issue remained a
victim of world power politics during the Cold War period. When
the dispute was first brought to the UN, the Security Council,
with a firm backing of the United Sates, stressed the settlement
of the issue through plebiscite. Initially, the Soviet Union did
not dissent from it. Later, however, because of its ideological
rivalry with the United States, it blocked every Resolution of
the UN Security Council calling for implementation of the
settlement plan.
In
the post-Cold War period—when cooperation not conflict is the
fast emerging norm of international politics, a factor which has
helped resolve some other regional disputes—the absence of any
credible international mediation on Kashmir contradicts the very
spirit of the times. An India-Pakistan nuclear war over Kashmir?
Or, settlement of the Kashmir issue, which may eventually pave
the way for setting up a credible global nuclear arms control
and non-proliferation regime? The choice is with the world
community, especially the principal players of the international
system.
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