The Kashmir....!

Kashmir was a Muslim majority princely state under the British Raj. In its 1947 partition plan granting independence to Pakistan and India, Britain's paramountcy over Kashmir and other princely states lapsed on August 15 of that year, and its people were then entitled to choose between accessions to either power. Problems arose in three states where the Maharaja's creed differed from that of the popular majority. In Junagarh and Hyderabad state (Sultanate Asifia) where the ruler was a Muslim and the subjects predominantly Hindu, India uncoiled it’s military to insure that popular sentiments favoring accession to the new Hindu nation prevailed. Kashmir presented the converse situation: a Hindu Maharaja presiding over an 80 percent Muslim population.

According to India's own theory of international law and sovereignty of princely states, Kashmir's accession to either of its neighbors should have been decided by a plebiscite or equivalent exercise of self-determinat

ion. Indeed, India's icon and then Prime Minister Pandit Nehru repeatedly affirmed the same to the United Nations and to the world. Kashmir's Hindu Maharaja, however, chose defiance. His repression had sparked a popular revolt months prior to the lapse of British paramountcy, and his regime stood at the abyss when he pleaded for Indian military intervention on October 27, 1947. The plea was a legal nullity since Kashmir's sovereignty had already devolved on its people, but India responded nonetheless and rescued the Maharaja from oblivion. Since then the tale is both sad and dismaying.

India raced to the United Nations Security Council seeking a resolution to halt the Kashmiri conflict and to conduct a self-determination plebiscite under United Nations auspices. The Security Council embraced the Indian plan in a pair of resolutions adopted on August 13, 1948, and January 5, 1949 that were expressly agreed to by both Pakistan and India.

A cease-fire in Kashmir was implemented along a line of control that de facto divided it into Azad Kashmir (operating under Pakistani suzerainty) and Indian occupied Kashmir (operating under Indian control). But India unilaterally renounced its legal obligation to permit an internationally administered plebiscite in Kashmir when it recognized that accession to India was a delusion.

Since the renunciation, the Kashmir stalemate has occasioned a 1965 war between India and Pakistan, and endless unfructifying bilateral negotiations between the two rivals. India intransigently insists that its illegally occupied portion of Kashmir is as much within its sovereign universe as Calcutta or Bombay, and that its sovereignty is non-negotiable.

Pakistan lacks the leverage to coax India into budging. More importantly, the self-determination right of the Kashmiri people is at stake, and that right cannot be the sport of any other nation.

The denial of self-determination in defiance of the United Nations Security Council now threatens to find expression in the mushroom cloud that India celebrates. Since 1989, more than 90,000 people have been killed in Indian Occupied Kashmir. Rape, torture, plunder, and the destruction of schools and hospitals are commonplaces.

At a cost of $4 million per day, more than 800,000 Indian soldiers are deployed there, the most militarized region on the planet….!