Author: M.P. Bhandara, Rawalpindi
Publication: Dawn
Date: May 22, 2005
URL: http://www.dawn.com/2005/05/22/letted.htm#6
This refers to Mr Khalid Hasan's
letter (May 16) in reply to mine (May 10). The gravamen of Mr Hasan's charge
is that President Musharraf has conceded "on essentials to India on Kashmir
without receiving any reciprocating gesture". Let us first examine this
charge on legal merits.
UN resolutions are of two types.
Resolutions passed under Chapter 7 are mandatory involving sanctions and
those under Chapter 6 are not. Unfortunately, the UN resolutions on Kashmir
do not indicate under which chapter the resolutions were passed.
Pakistan has all along stressed
that the resolutions were passed under Chapter 7 because their substance
provides for a detailed implementing mechanism and thus by implication
has a binding character.
Unfortunately, this point of view
has never been supported by any of permanent members of the Security Council,
including China. Pakistan has not requested for a formal opinion from the
office of the UN secretary-general on this issue; perhaps there is wisdom
in not doing so.
Even assuming that the Kashmir resolutions
were passed under Chapter 7, SC resolution 1172 has changed the legal matrix
altogether. This 1998 resolution recommends that India and Pakistan should
address the issue of Kashmir bilaterally. This resolution in effect endorses
the mechanism provided by the Shimla Agreement followed by the Lahore and
Islamabad declarations. Thus the SC has in effect altogether changed the
character and remedies of the original resolutions.
The Pakistani public has been deliberately
fed on a diet of half truths by our governments as regards the status of
the UN resolutions. The original resolutions also called for the withdrawal
of our troops from Azad Kashmir before a plebiscite could be held. We agreed
to this condition but long after the horse had bolted from the stable.
Our undeclared policy since 1965
(Operation Gibraltar) up to Kargil was to front freedom-fighters. In the
1990s many of these fighters were loose guns. This misdirected, misconceived
jihad was read as state-sponsored terrorism by the world community. Pakistan's
jihadi option of the 1990s virtually destroyed our Kashmir case. Even the
veteran Sardar Qayyum, supreme head of the Muslim Conference, in a recent
interview declared: "Jihad has become a business. In fact, the worst damage
to the Kashmir cause has been caused by the Jihadis ... Jihad has no future."
I shall take Mr Hasan's word that
Mahatma Gandhi visited Srinagar on August 1, 1947 to advise the ruler to
remove his pro- independence prime minister. It is a measure of this great
man that in the last days of his life seeing the obtaining facts, he made
more than a dozen statements advocating a settlement in accordance with
the wishes of the people. It is for this reason he declared a few days
before his assassination: "I have been severely reprimanded for what I
said concerning Kashmir." His assassin Nathu Ram Godse, inter alia, cited
Gandhi's Kashmir statements in his non-defence in court.
Mr Hasan refers to my reflections
on a visit to Srinagar as a more or less a "rosy eyed account". Perhaps
he should read the article again. I have described Srinagar as city under
siege with "broken people" as inhabitants. Is it not a case of Mr hasan
seeing the Kashmir dispute through the rosy-coloured spectacles of yesterday's
jihad?
