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Kashmir History in English 1
The Kashmir dispute is
the oldest unresolved international dispute in the world today. Pakistan
considers Kashmir as its core political dispute with India. So does the
international community, except India. The exchange of fire between
their forces across the Line of Control, which separates Azad Kashmir
from Occupied Kashmir, is a routine affair. Now that both India and
Pakistan have acquired nuclear weapons potential, the possibility of a
third war between them over Kashmir, which may involve the use of
nuclear weapons, cannot be ruled out.
Kashmir may be a cause to a likely nuclear disaster
in South Asia, which should be averted with an intervention by the
international community. Such an intervention is urgently required to
put an end to Indian atrocities in Occupied Kashmir and prepare the
ground for the implementation of UN resolutions, which call for the
holding of a plebiscite to determine the wishes of the Kashmiri people.
Cause of the Kashmir Dispute
India’s
forcible occupation of the State of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 is the
main cause of the dispute. India claims to have ‘signed’ a controversial
document, the Instrument of Accession, on 26 October 1947 with the
Maharaja of Kashmir, in which the Maharaja obtained India’s military
help against popular insurgency. The people of Kashmir and Pakistan do
not accept the Indian claim. There are doubts about the very existence
of the Instrument of Accession. The United Nations also does not
consider Indian claim as legally valid: it recognizes Kashmir as a
disputed territory. Except India, the entire world community recognizes
Kashmir as a disputed territory. The fact is that all the principles on
the basis of which the Indian subcontinent was partitioned by the
British in 1947 justify Kashmir becoming a part of Pakistan: the State
had majority Muslim population, and it not only enjoyed geographical
proximity with Pakistan but also had essential economic linkages with
the territories constituting Pakistan.
History of the Dispute
The
State of Jammu and Kashmir has historically remained independent,except
in the anarchical conditions of the late 18th and first half of the
19th century, or when incorporated in the vast empires set up by the
Mauryas (3rd century BC), the Mughals (16th to 18th century) and the
British (mid-19th to mid-20th century). All these empires included not
only present-day India and Pakistan but some other countries of the
region as well. Until 1846, Kashmir was part of the Sikh empire. In that
year, the British defeated the Sikhs and sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh of
Jammu for Rs. 7.5 million under the Treaty of Amritsar.
Gulab
Singh, the Maharaja, signed a separate treaty with the British, which
gave him the status of an independent princely ruler of Kashmir. Gulab
Singh died in 1857 and was replaced by Rambir Singh (1857-1885). Two
other Maharajas, Partab Singh (1885-1925) and Hari Singh (1925-1949)
ruled in succession. Gulab Singh and his successors ruled Kashmir in a
tyrannical and repressive way. The people of Kashmir, nearly 80 per cent
of who were Muslims, rose against Maharaja Hari Singh’s rule. He
ruthlessly crushed a mass uprising in 1931. In 1932, Sheikh Abdullah
formed Kashmir’s first political party the All Jammu & Kashmir
Muslim Conference (renamed as National Conference in 1939). In 1934, the
Maharaja gave way and allowed limited democracy in the form of a
Legislative Assembly. However, unease with the Maharaja’s rule
continued. According to the instruments of partition of India, the
rulers of princely states were given the choice to freely accede to
either India or Pakistan, or to remain independent. They were, however,
advised to accede to the contiguous dominion, taking into consideration
the geographical and ethnic issues.
In Kashmir, however, the
Maharaja hesitated. The principally Muslim population, having seen the
early and covert arrival of Indian troops, rebelled and things got out
of the Maharaja’s hands. The people of Kashmir were demanding to join
Pakistan. The Maharaja, fearing tribal warfare, eventually gave way to
the Indian pressure and agreed to join India by, as India claims,
‘signing’ the controversial Instrument of Accession on 26 October 1947.
Kashmir was provisionally accepted into the Indian Union pending a free
and impartial plebiscite. This was spelled out in a letter from the
Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten, to the Maharaja on 27
October 1947. In the letter, accepting the accession, Mountbatten made
it clear that the State would only be incorporated into the Indian Union
after a reference had been made to the people of Kashmir. Having
accepted the principle of a plebiscite, India has since obstructed all
attempts at holding a plebiscite.
In 1947, India and Pakistan
went to war over Kashmir. During the war, it was India, which first took
the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations on 1 January 1948 The
following year, on 1 January 1949, the UN helped enforce ceasefire
between the two countries. The ceasefire line is called the Line of
Control. It was an outcome of a mutual consent by India and Pakistan
that the UN Security Council (UNSC) and UN Commission for India and
Pakistan (UNCIP) passed several resolutions in years following the
1947-48 war. The UNSC Resolution of 21 April 1948 one of the principal
UN resolutions on Kashmir stated that “both India and Pakistan desire
that the question of the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India or
Pakistan should be decided through the democratic method of a free and
impartial plebiscite”. Subsequent UNSC Resolutions reiterated the same
stand. UNCIP Resolutions of 3 August 1948 and 5 January 1949 reinforced
UNSC resolutions.
Nehru’s Betrayal
India’s
first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made a pledge to resolve the
Kashmir dispute in accordance with these resolutions. The sole criteria
to settle the issue, he said, would be the “wishes of the Kashmir
people”. A pledge that Prime Minister Nehru started violating soon after
the UN resolutions was passed. The Article 370, which gave ‘special
status’ to ‘Jammu and Kashmir’, was inserted in the Indian constitution.
The ‘Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly’ was created on 5 November
1951. Prime Minister Nehru also signed the Delhi Agreement with the then
‘ruler’ of the disputed State, Sheikh Abdullah, which incorporated
Article 370. In 1957, the disputed State was incorporated into the
Indian Union under a new Constitution. This was done in direct
contravention of resolutions of the UNSC and UNCIP and the conditions of
the controversial Instrument of Accession. The puppet ‘State’
government of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed rushed through the constitutional
provision and the people of Kashmir were not consulted.
In 1965,
In 1965, India and Pakistan once again went to war over Kashmir. A
cease-fire was established in September 1965. Indian Prime Minister Lal
Bhadur Shastri and Pakistani President Ayub Khan signed the Tashkent
Declaration on 1 January 1966. They resolved to try to end the dispute
by peaceful means. Although Kashmir was not the cause of 1971 war
between the two countries, a limited war did occur on the Kashmir front
in December 1971. The 1971 war was followed by the signing of the Simla
Accord, under which India and Pakistan are obliged to resolve the
dispute through bilateral talks. Until the early 1997, India never
bothered to discuss Kashmir with Pakistan even bilaterally. The direct
foreign-secretaries-level talks between the two countries did resume in
the start of the 1990s; but, in 1994, they collapsed. This happened
because India was not ready even to accept Kashmir a dispute as such,
contrary to what the Tashkent Declaration and the Simla Accord had
recommended and what the UNSC and UNCIP in their resolutions had stated.
The
government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, after coming to power in
February 1997, took the initiative of resuming the foreign
secretaries-level talks with India. The process resumed in March 1997 in
New Delhi. At the second round of these talks in June 1997 in
Islamabad, India and Pakistan agreed to constitute a Joint Working Group
on Kashmir.But soon after the talks, India backtracked from the
agreement, the same way as Prime Minister Nehru had done back in the
1950s by violating his own pledge regarding the implementation of UN
resolutions seeking Kashmir settlement according to, as Mr. Nehru
himself described, “the wishes of the Kashmiri people.”
The third
round of India-Pakistan foreign secretaries-level talks was held in New
Delhi in September 1997, but no progress was achieved as India
continued dithering on the question of forming a Joint Working Group on
Kashmir. The Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Atal Behari
Vajpaee is neither ready to accept any international mediation on
Kashmir, nor is it prepared to seriously negotiate the issue bilaterally
with Pakistan. Popular uprising since 1989, the situation in Occupied
Kashmir has undergone a qualitative change. In that year, disappointed
by decades-old indifference of the world community towards their just
cause and threatened by growing Indian state suppression, the Kashmiri
Muslim people rose in revolt against India. A popular uprising that has
gained momentum with every passing day unlike the previous two popular
uprisings by Kashmiris (1947-48, first against Dogra rule and then
against Indian occupation; and 1963, against Indian rule, triggered by
the disappearance of Holy relic), which were of a limited scale.
The
initial Indian response to the 1989 Kashmiri uprising was the
imposition of Governor’s Rule in the disputed State in 1990, which was
done after dissolving the government of Farooq Abdullah, the son of
Sheikh Abdullah. From July 1990 to October 1996, the occupied State
remained under direct Indian presidential rule. In September 1996, India
stage-managed ‘State Assembly’ elections in Occupied Kashmir, and
Farooq Abdullah assumed power in October 1996. Since then, the situation
in the occupied territories has further deteriorated. Not only has the
Indian military presence in the disputed land increased fundamentally,
the reported incidents of killing, rape, loot and plunder of its people
by Indian security forces have also quadrupled.
To crush the
Kashmiri freedom movement, India has employed various means of state
terrorism, including a number of draconian laws, massive
counter-insurgency operations, and other oppressive measures. The
draconian laws, besides several others, include the Armed Forces (Jammu
and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990; Terrorist and Disruptive
Activities Act (TADA), 1990; the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act,
1978 (amended in 1990); and the Jammu & Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act,
1990.
Most Densely Soldiered Territory
The
Indian troops-to-Kashmiri people ratio in the occupied Kashmir is the
largest ever soldiers-to-civilians ratio in the world. There are
approximately 600,000 Indian military forces including regular army,
para-military troops, border security force and police currently
deployed in the occupied Kashmir. This is in addition to thousands of
“counter-militants” the civilians hired by the Indian forces to crush
the uprising. Since the start of popular uprising, the Indian occupation
forces have killed thousands of innocent Kashmir people.
There
are various estimates of these killings. According to government of
India estimates, the number of persons killed in Occupied Kashmir
between 1989 and 1996 was 15,002. Other Indian leaders have stated a
much higher figure. For instance, former Home Minister Mohammad Maqbool
Dar said nearly 40,000 people were killed in the Valley “over the past
seven years.” Farooq Abdullah’s 1996 statement estimated 50,000 killings
“since the beginning of the uprising.” The All-Parties Hurriyat
Conference (APHC)-which is a representative body of over a dozen
Kashmiri freedom fighters’ organizations also cites the same number.
Estimates of world news agencies and international human rights
organizations are over 20,000 killed.
Indian human rights
violations in Occupied Kashmir include indiscriminate killings and mass
murders, torturing and extra judicial executions, and destruction of
business and residential properties, molesting and raping women. These
have been extensively documented by Amnesty International, US Human
Rights Watch Asia, and Physicians for Human Rights, International
Commission of Jurists (Geneva), Contact Group on Kashmir of the
Organization of Islamic Countries and, in India, by Peoples Union for
Civil Liberties, the Coordination Committee on Kashmir, and the Jammu
and Kashmir Peoples’ Basic Rights Protection Committee. Despite repeated
requests over the years by world human rights organizations such as the
Amnesty International, the Indian government has not permitted them any
access to occupied territories. In 1997, it even refused the United
Nations representatives permission to visit there.
Settling the Kashmir Issue
For
decades, India has defied with impunity all the UN resolutions on
Kashmir, which call for the holding of a “free and fair” plebiscite
under UN supervision to determine the wishes of the Kashmiri people. Not
just this. A massive Indian military campaign has been on, especially
since the start of the popular Kashmiri uprising in 1989, to usurp the
basic rights of the Kashmiri people. Killing, torture, rape and other
inhuman practices by nearly 600,000 Indian soldiers are a norm of the
day in Occupied Kashmir.
The Kashmir problem will be solved the
moment international community decides to intervene in the matter to put
an end to Indian state terrorism in Occupied Kashmir and to implement
UN resolutions. These resolutions recommend demilitarization of Kashmir
(through withdrawal of all outside forces), followed immediately by a
plebiscite under UN supervision to determine the future status of
Kashmir. The intervention of the international community is all the more
necessary, given the consistent Indian opposition to both bilateral and
multilateral options to settle the Kashmir issue. Such an intervention
is also urgently required to stop the ever-growing Indian brutalities
against the innocent Muslim people of Kashmir, who have been long denied
their just right to self-determination.
Averting a Nuclear Disaster
If
the world community failed to realize the gravity of the Kashmir
problem now, there is the very likelihood of Kashmir once again becoming
the cause of another war between India and Pakistan. And, since both
the countries have acquired overt nuclear weapons potential, and since
India led by Hindu nationalists has clearly shown its aggressive
intentions towards Kashmir after declaring itself a nuclear state, a
third India-Pakistan war over Kashmir is a possibility, a war that may
result in a South Asian nuclear catastrophe. The world community,
therefore, has all the reasons for settling Kashmir, the core unresolved
political dispute between Islamabad and New Delhi.
Like many
other international disputes, the Kashmir issue remained a victim of
world power politics during the Cold War period. When the dispute was
first brought to the UN, the Security Council, with a firm backing of
the United Sates, stressed the settlement of the issue through
plebiscite. Initially, the Soviet Union did not dissent from it. Later,
however, because of its ideological rivalry with the United States, it
blocked every Resolution of the UN Security Council calling for
implementation of the settlement plan. In the post-Cold War period when
cooperation not dispute is the fast emerging norm of international
politics, a factor that has helped resolve some other regional disputes
the absence of any credible international mediation on Kashmir
contradicts the very spirit of the times.An India-Pakistan nuclear war
over Kashmir? Or a settlement of the Kashmir issue, which may eventually
pave the way for setting up a credible global nuclear arms control and
non-proliferation regimes? The choice is with the world community,
especially the principal players of the international system.
Kashmir History in English 2
Introduction
Jammu and
Kashmīr, territory in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Commonly
known as Kashmīr. Both India and Pakistan claim all of Kashmīr, but the territory has
been partitioned since 1947. India controls most of the region, which it has
organized as the state of Jammu and Kashmīr. The capital of the Indian
portion is Srīnagar. Pakistan administers the northwestern portion as
Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The administrative center of the Pakistani portion
is Muzaffarābād.
Kashmīr is
almost entirely mountainous, including the great mountains of the Karakorum
Range in the north. The Indus River flows through the region. Most of the
population is engaged in agriculture; the principal crops are rice, corn,
wheat, and oilseeds. Silk weaving and carpet weaving are major industries.
The majority of the population is Muslim, and there are Hindu, Sikh, and
Buddhist minorities.
History: Kashmīr was
originally a stronghold of Hinduism. Beginning in the mid-14th century AD,
Muslim sultans controlled the area for two centuries. Mughal emperor Akbar
conquered Kashmīr between 1586 and 1592 AD. It later was controlled by
Afghans, Sikhs, and the British. Following the 1947 partition of India into
Pakistan and the Republic of India, a small portion of the predominantly
Muslim population of Kashmīr demanded accession to Pakistan, a Muslim state.
Pakistan invaded the area, and India dispatched troops to Kashmīr. A
cease-fire agreement between the two nations was concluded in 1949. Fighting
broke out in 1965 and 1971.
Location: It is
situated in the heart of South-Central Asia and shares its borders with
Afghanistan, China, Hindustan and Pakistan. A small strip of Wakhan
seperates it from Tajikistan.
Area: The
territory covers an area of 222,236 sq km (85,805 sq mi). It is larger than 70 other independent countries in area.
Nearly two-third of its territory is under the occupation of
Hindustan.
Population: 13
million, including 1½ million refugees in Pakistan and ½ million living in
other parts of the world. It is thus bigger in size than 96 sovereign
countries of the world.
Political
Status: Jammu & Kashmir is a disputed territory within the meaning of
international law. While its future status was yet to be determined,
Hindustani forces invaded the territory on October 27, 1947 and obtained
temporary accesion of the state from its autocratic ruler while at the same
time promising the Kashmiri people as well as the United Nations that the
future status of the territory would be determined by its people. These
commitments incorporated subsequently into the United Nations resolutions of
August 13, 1948 and January 5, 1949 stipulate that the future status of the
state shall be decided through a free and fair plebiscite held under the
auspices of the U.N
Solution: The
international community in general and the U.N. in particular should use all
their moral, economic and diplomatic influence in order to:
-
Stop forthwith
the ongoing genocide of the innocent Kashmiri people.
-
Obtain a speedy
withdrawal of over 700.000 Hindustani occupation forces from
the territory.
-
Induct the
United Nations Plebiscite Administrator.
-
Secure the
earliest holding of the plebiscite within the terms of the U.N. resolutions.
Kashmir History in English 3
Kashmir is one of the most beautiful valleys of South Asia. But at the
same time, it is also one of the most disputed areas of world since a
very long time. Kashmir issue is between Pakistan and India since the
time when the separation of both countries was declared by British
government. In the south of subcontinent the beautiful valley of Kashmir
is located with the terrible and the most deadly beast in human form
being the most cruel on the peaceful humanity living over there. The
disputed and non-disputed area of Kashmir totals a huge sum of 39,102
square miles. This mass coverage by this beautiful valley and its
belonging areas is divided into two parts the independent Kashmir and
the disputed Kashmir. Disputed Kashmir comprises of 39102 square miles,
which is in under the hold of Indian government and their military
forces. The capital city of this disputed area is Siri Nagar. And the
remaining 25,000 miles are of independent Kashmir and the capital of
this area is Muzafar Abad, which is stabilized and operated under the
concentrated observations of Pakistani government. The total population
of Kashmir is one crore out of which 25 Lac Kashmiri people lives in
independent Kashmir and the remaining are strangled in Disputed Kashmir
and are fighting for their independence.
In 1846, British government sold the valley to a Dogra raja Ghulab Singh
for 75 Lac rupees. The 80 % population of Kashmir comprises of Muslims,
to rule over this hudge amount the raja used the extreme of his power.
At the time of separation, on 26 October 1947, the raja Hari Singh
announced the merger of Kashmir in India, which was against the will of
Muslims. The merger caused a war between the two neighbor countries.
Kashmir issue is one of the major reasons for the dispute between
Pakistan and India. to stop the war between Pakistan and India UNO had
to interfere in 1949. On the basis of resolutions passed between
Pakistan and India, UNO asked both countries to invade armies from
Kashmir and to do a fair poll. Primarily the Indian prime minister
agreed for poll but later on, he denied to do so. As a result of war
Pakistan was able to invade some area from India, where an independent
government was established. Still both countries are trying to resolve
the Kashmir issue in peaceful manner.