Kashmir Threat to International Peace And UN

The UN in the Dock

Z. G. Muhammad

Two years back the National Geographic identified world’s six “worrisome disputes”-   potentially dangerous to the global peace.  These included Crimea, the East China Sea, Jammu and Kashmir, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and West Bank, Western Sahara and Transdniestria.  The report recognized Jammu and Kashmir as disputed, ‘since the British relinquished control of the subcontinent in the 1940s.’ For the state being ‘highly militarized, and troops of two nuclear powers of South Asia pitted against each other along the 724-kilometre long Line of Control, the National Geographic looking at Jammu and Kashmir as most ‘simmering’ dispute had very candidly pointed out dangers inherent in the ‘lingering’ of this dispute.

Since the birth of the dispute thousands of people have fallen to the bullets and bombs.  At least,  there have been four major migrations of people in  1947, 1965, 1971 and 1990. And thousands of women for the enforced disappearance of their husbands have earned the painful title of ‘half-widows’. The agony and pain suffered by the people during past sixty-eight years are simply attributable to the non-resolution of the dispute.  The question that haunts the public, who is responsible for lingering of the Kashmir Dispute. Can the United Nations Security Council be squarely blamed for this?  Can the co-sponsors of the UN resolutions of 1948 and 1949 that is the United States blamed for its failure to see these implemented? And how is India’s policy of procrastination on Kashmir responsible for making Kashmir a nuclear flashpoint in South Asia? Is it Pakistan’s  pinning much hopes in the sterile dialogues between Islamabad and New Delhi- a diplomatic fiasco that has helped New Delhi in procrastinating the resolution of Kashmir. Or waywardness of Islamabad’s Kashmir policy that has contributed to the non-resolution of the Dispute so far?  These questions that bother public mind, in fact, need a detailed analyse for identifying the ways means that could help in taking people of the sub-continent in general and people of Jammu and Kashmir in particular out of the seven-decade-old predicament. And given to constraints of the space, I will try to look holistically at all these questions without going into the genesis of the dispute.

India after taking the ‘Kashmir question’ to the United Nations Security Council remained committed to the resolutions adopted by the organization for enabling the people of Jammu and Kashmir to exercise their right to self-determination through a plebiscite under its aegis. The resolutions passed in the United Nations after India and Pakistan agreed to abide by them ceased to be just the resolutions but graduated to the status of an international agreement between the two nations- thus a binding for the two nations. And any unilateral alteration of these  document would tantamount to the breach of the International agreement, which would call for the intervention by the UN Security Council. Even the United Nations Secretary General cannot arbitrarily fiddle with the sanctity of this agreement.

The debates in the Constituent Assembly, whether these were about the introduction of Article 370 for evolving a mechanism for governing Jammu and Kashmir till the final disposal of the State show India was committed to holding a plebiscite in the State. Prime Minister Nehru’s speeches in the Parliament, Nehru’s correspondence with Sheikh Abdullah and other International leaders and Indian envoy’s reassurances on the floor of UN are testimony that India stood by its commitment to holding a plebiscite in the state. In fact, India and Pakistan leaders met at the summits and secretary level more than once to work out details for holding a plebiscite. It was after the visit of    Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin Soviet leaders to Srinagar in 1955 that New Delhi is brazenly unmindful of the international community reneged promise of holding a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir.

New Delhi’s, reneging its commitment to the UN resolution brings us to another question. If there would have been no UN resolutions, does that mean that there would have been no Kashmir dispute and no demand for the right to self-determination? The fact remains that the proviso for holding a plebiscite in the state is inherent in the very grain of the “Instrument of Accession.” The proviso of holding plebiscite added by the first Governor-General of India to the basic “accession document” is sacrosanct in as much it was endorsed by the first Prime Minister of India in a radio broadcast on November 2, 1947, and the Parliament. In the meeting between the Governor Generals of India and Pakistan on November 1, 1947, granting the right to self-determination was basics premise on which the talks were held. The two governor-generals differed only on the nitty-gritty, Mountbatten wanted to hold a plebiscite under UN supervision and Jinnah for his apprehensions involving UN could procrastinate holding of referendum pleaded for holding it under the supervisions of two governor-generals. Till, India took Kashmir to UN, the two countries held meetings and exchanged telegrams about holding a referendum.

Whether one looks at the Kashmir from New Delhi’s preferred prism of the “Instrument of Accession’ or through the lens of the UN resolutions of 1948-1949, the accrued right to self-determination for the people as it stood on August 14, 1947, is inviolable. So the statements like one made by UN Peace Building Commission Chair, Macharia Kamau, who “wasn’t in any authoritative position to define the issue one way or another” asking for resolution of Kashmir as per political situation carries no weight.

Even if there would have been no UN resolution on Kashmir.  As identified by the National Geographic for it having  become a nuclear flashpoint with potential of flaring up qualifies for a “denovo cognizance” by UN Security Council, under Chapter 6 and 7 of the United Nations, under which it  had earlier taken cognizance that Kashmir can be a threat to regional and international peace and security. ‘It can even take ”denvo  cognizance” of the Kashmir issue in continuation of the previous resolutions.’

Published in Greater Kashmir On  2 May 2016