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- Unravelling J&K
- Sandhya Jain
- New Delhi must end the doublespeak on Jammu & Kashmir and inform the Indian people if there is a covert understanding, under American aegis, to unravel the northern state bit by bit and surreptitiously cede it to Pakistan. A leading national daily on Saturday reported a ‘strong’ Indian reaction to Syed Mehdi Shah, newly elected ‘first chief minister’ of Gilgit-Baltistan, calling it the “fifth province” of Pakistan.
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Doubts about New Delhi’s true intentions, however, arise because of the persistent mishandling of the State’s integration with India. First, Jawaharlal Nehru was manipulated by Louis Mountbatten into taking the Pakistan invasion to the United Nations and preventing the Indian Army from recovering the captured territories. The UN called for plebiscite and then sent Sir Owen Dixon to ‘suggest’ de facto partition of the State, with India keeping Hindu areas of Jammu and Buddhist Ladakh, while Pakistan kept the captured Northern Areas and Occupied Kashmir, and further received Muslim-dominant Doda, Poonch and Rajouri districts of Jammu! The proposed plebiscite was confined to Kashmir Valley, and north of Chenab declared the ‘new’ international border. As there was no way that Nehru could sell this proposal to his own cabinet, it died a natural death.
Yet Nehru, like the Bourbons, forgot nothing and learnt nothing.
- Now, Mehdi Shah’s statement suggests that Islamabad is moving to formalize the status quo and turn Gilgit-Baltistan into a province of Pakistan. New Delhi must realize this means Islamabad will no longer support the fiction of ‘self-determination’ for the people of J&K; all ‘diplomacy’ will involve de facto or de jure surrender of Indian territory.
- It is pertinent that Indian intelligence and diplomatic sources would have known about the November elections in Gilgit-Baltistan, but Indian public opinion was kept carefully in the dark. Why, in six decades, has Indian intelligence failed to build ‘human resources’ in a region badly treated by Pakistan; to sponsor a party that could have come to power?
- The author is Editor, www.vijayvaani.com
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