Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was on a four day visit to the United States last week. He did what Pakistan is known historically for doing, crying ‘security concerns to protect nuclear facilities’ in the White House in exchange for an excess of two billion dollars in military aid. Apart from Sharif, who is under tremendous pressure from the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency,) the Pakistani military raised Kashmir in his visit.
“Currently, there are no bilateral talks (between India and Pakistan) on resolving the Kashmir issue. In that scenario there should be a third party meditation on this. If India does not accept a third party role, if there is no bilateral talks then there is a stalemate, U.S. is best suited to solve the Kashmir problem” Sharif said.
Like I have said before, the U.S. has no business in Kashmir and the Obama administration has made it clear time and again that this is a bilateral issue to be resolved between the two nations, India and Pakistan. We could be within our limits to say the Pakistan Prime Minister was snubbed at the United Nations and the White House after he raked up Kashmir.
Let’s dive into the details of why Kashmir has been an issue. The British loved partitions like India, Pakistan, Ireland and British mandate for Palestine. Hence, before leaving India in the summer of 1947, the British created Muslim Pakistan and secular India. Soon after Independence, Pakistan attacked India in 1947-48 upon orders given by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the first Governor-General of Pakistan. Pakistan’s attack was without any provocation by the latter to seize Kashmir under the pretext of Jinnah’s two nation theory, which partitioned the Indian subcontinent along religious lines. The Pakistani tactic was to infiltrate tribal militants from its Northwestern frontier province to Kashmir and seize control of the state by force.
Upon the UN’s intervention, both India and Pakistan agreed to a cease-fire along what is known as the Line of Control (LOC). However, in the process Pakistan ended up illegally occupying legitimate Indian Territory.
The Instrument of Accession, which enabled the princely states, including Kashmir, to accede to the Union of India was final, binding and non-negotiable. Once the ruler of a princely state signed the Instrument of Accession, his kingdom became a part of the new dominion of India. The same instrument of accession was used when other princely states acceded to Pakistan, and in both cases the accessions of the princely states to either dominion via the Instrument of Accession fell under the ambit of the Indian Independence Act, 1947. Maharaja Hari Singh, the last ruler of Kashmir, signed the Instrument to accede to India in the event of the Pakistani attack in 1947. Therefore, Pakistan’s false claims on Kashmir as its own and its attempt to wrest control of the province by violence calls the entire legal framework of the Indian Independence Act into question, which also gave birth to Pakistan itself.
After hearing both the Indian and Pakistani sides on April 21, 1948 the UN Security Council resolution 47 came to a conclusion that a plebiscite must be undertaken after Pakistan withdraws its troops from the region and “pulls out Pakistani nationals from Kashmir who are not normally resident therein and entered only for the purpose of fighting.”
Pakistan completely ignored the UN’s orders and did not withdraw its troops from the region, therefore holding on to the territory they claim as Azad Kashmir. The very first precondition to have a plebiscite of any kind in Kashmir is that Pakistan must first withdraw its troops.
In India, the Article 370 was inserted into the constitution to ensure that the demographic profile of Kashmir remained intact. However, Pakistan-sponsored terrorism drove away 500,00 Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in the 1990s, thereby severely altering the demographic profile of the Indian side of Kashmir. On the Pakistani side, settlers from all across Pakistan- Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, KPK arrived in Kashmir and changed a lot of the region’s demographics. Therefore, with such a skewed demographic profile as compared to what is necessary for an unbiased plebiscite, the very idea of a plebiscite seems criminal.
According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, over 43,000 people have been killed due to Pakistan backed terrorism in the region since 1988. After such horrendous acts Pakistan has lost all moral claims that it could lay on Kashmir. All four Indo-Pak wars were initiated by Pakistan and ended by India. India’s overwhelmingly superior military prowess forced Pakistan to change its tactics by resorting to terrorism and nuclear brinkmanship. Today, Pakistan’s continued support to terrorist organizations while sheltering them under its nuclear umbrella proves the fact that its regular military can never take on the might of the Indian Armed Forces.
Kashmir is a done deal, India has a democratically elected Chief Minister running a government for the state.
In conclusion, India is not part of the nuclear proliferation treaty but has agreed to ‘no first use of nuclear weapons.’ India isn’t Israel either that would look for help from the international community to strike a deal with its enemy, there is something called the counter-offensive in military terms that India successfully used against Pakistan in 1999. In 1998, it did not give two hoots to U.S. sanctions when it tested its nuclear weapons in Pokharan. Let me be clear, one more 26/11 like attack on India and an all-out war with Pakistan will be a political and military compulsion.
