The Kashmir Conflict
By SIR FRANCIS LOW*
MORE than three years have elapsed since Kashmir, beloved of the Moghul emperors and in more recent times the " happy valley " of holidaymakers, flared into prominente as the scene of a bitter struggle between the new Dominions of India and Pakistan. It has for three years poisoned, and is today con- tinuing to poison, the relations between India and Pakistan in a way that constitutes a danger not only to the two States themselves but to the survival of democracy in Asia. The trouble has completely baffled the remedial efforts of a United Nations Commission and of., two successive U.N. mediators of outstanding merit.
In one of his lighter moments—which often concealed shrewd political wisdom—His Highness the Aga Khan said the problem of Kashmir and Hyderabad in the days of British rule could be solved by the Maharaja of Kashmir and the Nizam of Hyderabad exchanging gadis. Both dynasties ruled over an alien population, the vast majority of the Nizam's subjects being Hindus and the big preponderance of the Dogra Maharaja of Kashmir's subjects being Muslims. It was inevitable that the two. States should be involved in dispute when the British left and the Indian States' rulers were given the right to decide their own and their subjects' future. Both India and Pakistan looked fixedly at the State of Kashmir and Jammu, which has frontiers with both countries. The Maharaja's Government was in no hurry to make up its mind and might have continued in that condition nad it not suddenly faced a serious crisis. In October 1947—this fact is not in dispute—bands of tribesmen from the tribal areas of Pakistan swarmed into Kashmir by way of the Jhelum valley.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nebru's friendship with Shaikh Abdullah and the State Congress was no new thing. In the days when Pandit Nehru was fighting for self-government for India, the Indian r National Congress sympathised with and encouraged similar move- i ments in the Indian States, irrespective of whether the State subjects 0 were Hindus or Muslims. Indeed, on see ,occasion the Pandit, t Various reasons are given for the irruption. One theory is that the tribesmen were merely indulging in their traditional pastime of raiding and looting, while another credited them with the desire to relieve their co-religionists from the oppressive regime of a non- Muslim dynasty. (There are some grounds for the latter belief in the fact that the Maharaja's Government had dealt severely with a revolt of Muslim peasants in Poonch, in the south-west corner of the State.) But, whatever the reason, the effect on the Kashmir Government was electrical ; the Maharaja acceded by cable to the Indian Union and asked for military help to repel the raiders. The Indian Government's reply was equally prompt. Troops of the Indian Army, flown to Srinagar, were just in time to save the capital, and in the flat terrain of the Vale of Kashmir they had little difficulty in driving back the unorganised tribesmen. It was only when the raiders reached the hilly tracts on both sides of the Jhelum valley, and were joined by dissident Kashmiris, that the battle-front became stabilised in winter conditions which made movement difficult. Meanwhile, the Indian Prime Minister, himself the scion of a Kashmiri family, compelled the Maharaja to release Shaikh Abdullah, the Muslim leader of the Kashmir State Congress—who was languishing in jail for his political activities—and eventually to make him head of a popular government.
*Formerly Editor of The Times of India. in a characteristic fit of impetuosity, was restrained from entering Kashmir to address the State Congress only by the bayonets of the State troops. India's position .vis-d-vis Kashmir was thus extremely strong ; the Maharaja turned to Delhi for protection from Muslim raiders, and the Congress Party—mainly Muslims—regarded the Indian Congress leaders as their friends and supporters. Mr. Jinnah's Muslim League came late on the Kashmir scene, and although a pro-Pakistan party was organised it did not have the strength of the State Congress. That is why, strange though it may seem, the Government and the politically conscious people in Kashmir in 1947 looked more to India than to Pakistan. Which way the Muslim masses lean today is, of course, the major point in dispute.
A knowledge of this chequered background is essential to an understanding of today's Kashmir deadlock. It explains why India insists on certain conditions which are unacceptable to Pakistan and seem unreasonable to outsiders. When in May, 1948, Pakistan troops entered Kashmir territory—professedly to protect the Dominion's frontiers—the two countries were in a state of undeclared war. An appeal to the United Nations led to a cease-fire which took effect on January 1, 1949, and in accordance with the U.N. decision—accepted
by the parties—proposals for a plebiscite to decide- whether the people of Kashmir wished to accede to India or to Pakistan were announced. By this time there were two Governments in Kashmir —one presided over by Shaikh Abdullah with the support of the Indian army, and the other, the " Azad " Kashmir Government, in occupied parts of the State with the backing of the Pakistan army. Negotiations between the U.N. Commission and the two Govern- ments failed because of Delhi's insistence that the disbandment of the " Azad " Kashmir forces was not a matter for arbitration but for immediate decision. General McNaughton of Canada, then President of the Security Council, was asked to conduct informal talks. His plan for the demilitarisation of Kashmir preparatory to a plebiscite included the simultaneous withdrawal of all troops, but India rejected this scheme on the grounds that it was substantially the same as the Commission's plan, and insisted that the defence of the northern area-after the withdrawal of the Pakistan forces should be vested in the Government of India.
The Security Council's next step was to ask Sir Owen Dixon, a judge of the Australian High Court, to act as mediator (with the consent of the disputants) in place of the Commission. After long and exhaustive negotiations in India, Pakistan and Kashmir, Sir Owen Dixon had, in September, -to confess his failure to secure agreement on how a plebiscite should be conducted. He tried two courses. When his plan for a plebiscite over the whole State did not fructify, he proposed, the division of the State on a well-defined population basis—this, for example, would give Jammu, which is mainly Hindu. to India, and the northern areas, which are mainly Muslim, to Pakistan—with a limited plebiscite under U.N. officers in the important and thickly populated Vale of Kashmir. " It appeared to me," Sir Owen Dixon wrote, " that the danger to the freedom and fairness of the plebiscite could not be removed unless in the administrative hierarchy-of the State so far as it controlled the plebiscite area United Nations officers were interposed temporarily." But Pandit Nehru would have none of this. He reiterated his position once more : Pakistan was an aggressor whose aggression must be recognised ; sovereignty should remain with the present Government of Kashmir during the plebiscite ; any other policy would amount to " appeasement of the aggressors.", In the view of many people this strictly legalistic attitude con- trasts sharply with India's own actions in Junagadh and Hyderabad.
What next ? Sir Owen Dixon thinks that the initiative should now pass back to the parties in the dispute. He himself has put up a convincing case for partition and for a plebiscite in the Kashmir valley under U.N. supeivision. As he points out, the State is not eally a unit geographically, demographically or economically ; " it s an agglomeration of territories brought under the political power f one Maharaja." And, as he argues with cogency, its wholesale ransfer to either India or Pakistan as the result of an over-all lebiscite would end in another refugee problem. since " no one
doubts the sentiments of the. great majority of the inhabitants " of certain areas adjacent to India and Pakistan.
The Security Council, owing to its other preoccupations, has not yet had time to consider Sir Owen Dixon's report. Pakistan is getting restive at the delay and the continued failure of the United Nations to solve the problem. But of far greater consequence is the grave damage which the dispute is doing to the cause of democracy in the East. Both countries are wasting their resources, hamstringing their defence arrangements and injuring one another economically and politically at a time when world peace is threatened. Pakistan is believed to be contemplating raising the Kashmir issue at the Commonwealth Prime Minister's Conference which is to take place in London at the beginning of January. Hitherto the rest of the Commonwealth has kept aloof ; in Britain's case, for example, her motives would be suspect by whichever party was displeased by her attitude. But there seems a strong case for the Commonwealth as a whole treating the matter as a family -quarrel and trying, possibly unofficially, to help both sides towards a conference table at which would be considered not merely Kashmir but the other Indo-Pakistan disputes such as the exchange, canal waters and the refugee problem.
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