/REPEAT/POLITICS: India Eyes Freeze on Line of Control in Kashmir

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jan 20 2002 (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.