Matrix Report
The new map on Kashmir that Pakistan launched early this week has drawn mixed responses.
While a number of Kashmiris welcomed it as an expression of solidarity, others call it a “disproportionate response “ to the India’s “illegal annexation of the valley” in total disregard to the UN resolutions.
The new political map of Pakistan shows Kashmir ( the territory under Indian occupation) as a disputed territory. The part under Pakistan’s administration is called Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK i.e. Azad Jammu and Kashmir).
Foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, in a nationally televised ceremony said that “[Through the map] we are challenging their (India’s ) illegal occupation and claiming our right to the area.”
The launch of the political map of Pakistan coincided with August 5, the day when India sent in tens of thousands of additional troops to lockdown the already besieged Srinagar valley after revoking its special status for formal inclusion in its union territory.
Dr.Syed Nazir Gilani, president of the London-based Jammu Kashmir Council on Human Rights (JKCHR), is not bemused with the Pakistani moves. In a series of four tweets, Gilani said:
# Mr. Prime Minister we appreciate your efforts on Kashmir. Modi Government has aggressed against the people of Kashmir, has re-occupied them, and imprisoned them.
# We have also depicted the aspirations of the Kashmiri people & our commitment to UNSC resolutions in the political map of Pakistan released yesterday.
# US has stated, that UN SC had a ‘positive duty’ and “unless the parties are able to agree upon some other solution, the solution which was recommended by the Security Council should prevail.”
# Political Map is not the ‘proportionate’ and ‘pointed’ response. The anecdotes are prescribed by France at 539th meeting, Netherlands at the 566th, China at the 765th, Canada at the 235th meeting, Argentina at the 240th and USA at the 768th meeting of UN Security Council.
Gilani, separately in an article, who boasts encyclopaedic knowledge on the history of Kashmir’s jurisprudence, reminds people at large of the commitments on Kashmir various nations made at the UN nearly seven decades ago.
At the 539th meeting of Security Council held on 30 March 1951.France had stated:
“Resolutions of 13 August 1948 and 5 January 1949, to which we must always return because they won the express agreement of both India and Pakistan. If the parties are unable to reach agreement on the plan submitted to them, provision is made for arbitration, and, to make assurance doubly sure, arbitration is to be carried out by an arbitrator or panel of arbitrators appointed not by a political body but by the President of International Court of Justice”.
The representative of Netherlands had argued at the 566th meeting of the Security Council held on 10 November 1951
“The lack of agreement therefore, does not concern this right of self-determination. It concerns the ways and means and procedures to establish the conditions for a fair expression of the will of the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir who want to make their choice free from any kind of intimidation”.
The United Kingdom had proposed that the Plebiscite should be held by October 1948.
And , to top it all, the UN Plebiscite Administrator Admiral Nimitz, had planned to hold a Plebiscite in Kashmir by 1st November 1950, recalls Gilani.
Nimitz had been allotted a temporary office in the State Department and had the assistance of the South Asian Division Staff. Pakistani and Indian diplomats had paid him courtesy visits in turns.
To corroborate the above, Gilani draws on a secret telegram Number 267 sent by Sen from the Indian embassy in Washington to Bajpai in Delhi in March 1950.
But geo-politics eventually overtook the global commitment of a plebiscite in Kashmir, and prompted India to snub the UN resolutions and declare Kashmir its territory on5 August 2019.
“This is an Albatross’s curse round its neck. India has a war at hand till a last Kashmiri is alive in Jammu and Kashmir, Azad Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan, in India, in Pakistan and living as a Diaspora,” concludes Dr.Gilani, saying India has grossly violated the pledges it had made to the people of Kashmir, to Britain and to Pakistan in October 1947 and to the United Nations Security Council in January 1948.
