Author: Ashis Ray
Publication: The Times of India
Date: April 2, 2011
URL: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-04-02/europe/29374265_1_pok-muammar-gaddafi-kashmiris
Introduction: But Results Boomeranged As People
On Both Sides of LoC Preferred India
Embattled Libyan dictator colonel Muammar
Gaddafi's controversial second son, Saif Al Islam Gaddafi, attempted to contrive
a pro-Pakistan opinion poll in Kashmir, but it boomeranged on him. The result
published last summer by Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known
as Chatham House) and Kings College, London, was contrary to Saif's expectation.
This little known fact, that Saif met Robert
Bradnock of Kings College who masterminded the survey to contrive the poll,
emerged at a seminar in UK's Houses of Parliament on Thursday evening. Saif
was then fresh from a visit to Pakistan occupied Kashmir (POK), where he was
fed usual propaganda of mock refugee camps and the plight of Kashmiris in
India compared to "paradise they experienced in Pakistan'' .
Not that Saif needed persuasion. His father
colonel Gaddafi had bankrolled Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme in the
1970s and 80s to the tune of half a billion dollars in response to Zulfiqar
Ali Bhutto's quest for an "Islamic bomb''.
Bradnock says that Saif returned from POK
with grandiose ideas of forcing a plebiscite in Kashmir as desired by Pakistan.
He then asked the academic to conduct a survey, which he would underwrite.
He funded it to the extent of $200,000 but any designs he might have had of
doctoring the outcome were demolished when Bradnock insisted that he would
do this only if the exercise was completely independent and had the institutional
involvement of Chatham House and Kings College.
Saif agreed. Brainwashed in Pakistan, he perhaps
could not believe the findings would be anything other than in Islamabad's
favour. He was in for a rather rude shock. The plebiscite, as agreed at the
UN in 1948, which Pakistan still demands, gave Kashmiris only two choices:
either to remain with India or join Pakistan. In the event, Bradnock's poll,
the first ever to be held on both sides of LoC, unearthed that 98% of people
in India-controlled J&K did not wish to be a part of Pakistan; and 50%
in POK did not wish to remain with Pakistan, either.
