Kashmir Dispute

Introduction
1.The Indian princely states numbering 562 comprised roughly a third of India’s
territory and a quarter of population.

2.They were outside the administration set up of British India and were ruled by
Indian princes who had accepted the UK as paramount power.

3.Most of the states were small in area and territory but Hyderabad,Mysore and
Kashmir were as big in population and territory as the British Indian provinces.

4.The British government announced on 20th February 1947,that the British

paramountancy would not be transferred to any government of British India.

5.It declared that the British paramountancy over India and princely states
would come to an end in June 1948.

6.The government left it to the will of the states to decide whether they wanted
to remain independent or join any government after the partition.

7.By 15th of August 1947,all princely states except ,Junagarh,Hyderabad and

Kashmir had announced their occasion with either India or Pakistan.

8.These states were to full a victim to Indian aggression later on.

Historical Background
1.Kashmir or to give it its full name ,the state of Jammu and Kashmir is the
northern most part of the Indo-Pak Subcontinent.

2.It is land-locked between Himalayas,Karakoram and Hindukush.

3.Its area of 84471 square miles was the biggest of any state in India.

4.Its borders with Tibet,China,Afghanistan and Russia gave it a highly

importance.
5.The total population of the state according to the 1941 census was about
Forty lakh of whom 77 percent were Muslims.

6.The Muslims were in a majority in every province of the state,there were 93

percent Muslim population in the Kashmir Province,61 percent in Jammu and
almost 100 percent in the northern region of Gilgit.

7.The Kashmir tragedy began when under the Treaty of Amritsar in 1846,the
British sold the state of Jammu and Kashmir to Gulab Singh,a Hindu Dogra
Chieftain for the sumd of 7.5 million rupees.

8.Lord Lawrence who negotiated this treaty,termed this transaction an

iniquitous arrangement.

9.The sale of such a vast area with a predominantly Muslim majority was
identified by the Viceroy Lord Hardinge,in his correspondence with Queen
Victoria,to recover the losses in wars against the Sikhs.

10.The Maharajah and his kinsmen established and maintained a century of

despotic,reactionary and oppressive regime in the state.

11.The people were ruthlessly and heavily taxed and reduced to the condition
of abject powerty.

12.With the spread of modern education,a demand for basic political rights
began in the early 1930’s.

13.In 1931,the Kashmiri Muslims earnestly began protest movement.

14.The leaders of the movement were Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah and Chaudri
Ghulam Abbas.

15.In 1939 Sheikh Abdullah came under the spell of Ghandhi and Nehru.

16.The congress leaders assured him of their support in the struggle against the
maharajah if the Muslim Conference was converted into a communal
organization.
17.The movement soon turned into a wide scale agitation against the Dogra Raj.

18.There was a demand for an independent and sovereign Pakistan which

produced a new situation.

Kashmir Dispute Key Points

1.Legacy of the Partition of the Subcontinent in 1947

1.The sub-continent was partitioned on the agreed principle that contiguous
Muslim majority areas ,to form the two independent states of Pakistan and
India.

2.There about 562 Princely States,which existed under the overall

paramontancy of the British Crown.

3.The Cabinet Mission,in its statement of May 16,1946 clarified that

Paramountancy could neither be retained by the British Crown nor transferred
to the new Government.

4.Lagally the Princely states become independent.

5.The last British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten,during his address the Chamber of
Princes on July 25,1947 asserted that the rulers were technically at liberty to
link with either of the dominion (India or Pakistan).

2.Right of Self Detemination

1.The Kashmir Dispute as recorded in the UN documents,involves the principle
of the right of sel-determination,which was basic both to the principle of
partition and the Charter of the United Nations.

2.According to 1970 Declaration of the Un General Assembly,the term self

determination means the right of all people to freely determine their political
status.

3.The Kashmir Dispute basically involves three parties Pakistan and India as the
two main parties according to the UN resolutions.
4.The third are the Kashmiries whose right of self determination has been
recognized in the UN resolutions.

5.Pakistan and India on their own cannot decide the future of the Kashmiries.

3.An Internationally recognized Dispute

1.The Kashmir dispute though it appears to be predominantly a bilateral one
between Pakistan and India as it stressed by India directly involves the
international community.

2.India itself took the dispute to the UN Security Council in 1948,where it is still
registered as such and thus remains a pending agenda till it is resolved.

3.India presently takes the line that the signing of the Simla Agreement in
1972,between Pakistan and India has made the earlier UN Resolutions
redundant and that the issue has to be dealt with bilaterally.

4.The Indian argument that the Simla Agreement supports bilaterism is its
interpretation of Article (II) of the agreement which states: that the two
countries are resolved to settle differences by peaceful means mutually agreed
upon between them.

5.The factual position is that Pakistan has repeatedly stressed the need to begin
the process of talks under the UN resolutions.

4.An Indigenous Freedom Struggle

1.The Indian Government attempts to describe the mass Kashmiri Rsistence
movement in areas under its control as terrorist activity being waged by
infiltrations,is an attempt to nullify the indigenous nature of the freedom
struggle in jammu and Kashmir.

2.India blames Pakistan for fanning the movement.

3.The fact of the matter is that the struggle for the right of self determination in
the Indian held Kashmir has been going on since 1947.
4.Despite India ’s harsh and repressive measures,the movement could not be
suppressed.

5.It began as a political struggle,but faced with continuous set backs and the
Indian policy of backbiting on promises made,transformed the movement into
an armed struggle.

6.An Indian scholar Sumit Ganguly wrote after years of frustrated attempts at
meaningful political participation and in the absence of institutional means of
expressing dissent,the resort to more violent means become all but inevitable.

Proposed Options for the Resolution of the Kashmir Dispute

Over the past sixty years,besides the UN resolutions,observers and intellectuals
have proposed various other options for resolving the Kashmir dispute time and
again at the UN fora and at the bilateral India-Pakistan levels.

These proposals are examined below.

1.Un Resolutions:The Plebiscite Option

1.The UN Security Council resolutions of August 13,1948 and January
5,1949,proposed the plebiscite option for resolving the Kashmir dispute.

2.However,it is important to note that the Government of India itself accepted

plebiscite or referendum as right of the Kashmiri people,when it filed the initial
complaint against Pakistan before the united Nations on January 1,1948.

2.The UN Trusteeship option

1.Generally, this option proposes that Kashmir should be placed under UN
Trusteeship and then plebiscite may be held for the final resolution of the
dispute.

2.It is argued that this will provide a face-saving for India,and will also give
Kashmiris,on both sides of the Line of Control,enough time to come up with a
joint option.