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| J&K symbol of secular India and, hence, non-negotiable | | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, June 1: The so-called constitutional experts like AG Noorani regard India as the prime cause responsible for the "agonies of Kashmir and Kashmiris" and boldly ask New Delhi to rectify the past mistakes. While doing so, they completely overlook the STARK REALITY that the Indian Army joined the State Forces only on October 27, 1947, a day after Hari Singh executed the Instrument of Accession under the terms and conditions of Britain's transfer of power to India and Pakistan, to perform its legitimate duty to not only check the Pakistani advance towards Srinagar, but also to liberate the 83,294 square kilometer land area (and the Indian people it housed) the aggressor had illegally captured between August 22 and October 27 after pillage, rape and murder. (This area also includes the one - 5,180 square kilometers - which Islamabad later ceded to China for the strategic Sino-Pak Link Road of Karakoram Highway. China itself has annexed an area of 37,555 square kilometers in the Aksai Chin region of Jammu and Kashmir so as to link itself with Tibet).
In other words, the likes of Noorani ignore or underplay the hard reality that it was Pakistan that created the so-called Kashmir problem in 1947 by invading the princely state. The war Mohammad Ali Jinnah began in Kashmir in August 1947 to finish what Benazir Bhutto called on August 14, 1994 the "unfinished agenda of partition" still continues unabated although officially ended on November 1, 1949 under the United Nations-sponsored ceasefire. And, at a time when General K M Cariappa was about to implement his meticulously worked out plan to liberate Domel and Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir and some of the Northern Territories Pakistan had grabbed and when the Indian Army had the Pakistani invaders - regular and irregular - on the run.
Sixty three years' experience with Pakistan, including two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971, and the current over twenty-year-old low-cost, low-intensity proxy war on the Indian soil, which so far has claimed over 50,000 lives and rendered over three lakh Kashmiri Pandits homeless, should vanish any lingering expectation of an Indo-Pakistan friendship unless the authorities in the South Block are willing to withdraw from Jammu and Kashmir and allow the state's merger with Pakistan.
So far India has on its own shown several goodwill gestures to Pakistan, hoping that it would change and not do anything to generate a climate of violence in the Valley and elsewhere to destabilize the Indian polity and dismember India, but without evoking any favourable response. All the unilateral overtures have gone down the drain or have been construed by Pakistan as signs of New Delhi's weakness. Do not the circumstances demand a review of the widely published "Gujral Doctrine" or the "Vajpayee doctrine" (solution within the parameters of Insaniyat) or the policy of unilateral goodwill gestures, including the gestures shown by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh?
The Indian strategy seems to have proved counterproductive. What the Pakistani Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, did after the 1972 Shimla Agreement is too well-known. He secured from his Indian counterpart, Indira Gandhi, as many concessions as possible like the release of over 90,000 surrendered soldiers, including army generals, and held out, according to P N Dhar, a solemn pledge (not in writing) that in future Islamabad would desist from creating any trouble in Jammu and Kashmir and that the Actual Line of Control would be converted into international border. Bhutto, everyone knows, took no time to turn out to be a fair-weather cock and sabotaged the efforts towards normalization of relations between the two countries. Pakistan rulers before and after Bhutto too acted likewise.
That the Pakistani rulers have all along construed the Indian policy of goodwill gesture as a sign of weakness can also be seen from the fact that the friendly overtures by the Indian Prime Minister, Inder Kumr Gujral, were followed almost immediately (September 30, 1997) by heavy artillery shelling on the cent per cent Shia-dominated Kargil town and nearby villages in the frontier region of Ladakh from across the Line of Control by the Pakistani troops, which damaged a Shia mosque, a hospital, bus stand and hotel, killing in the process 20 innocent civilians and inflicting fatal injuries to more than 30 others. Not only this. The Pakistani Rangers opened unprovoked firing in the R S Pura sector in the Jammu region umpteen times obviously to teach the people of the border areas a lesson for their unflinching allegiance to India. (To be continued)
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