NEW DELHI: Pakistan’s skillful diplomacy recently, succeeded in putting India on the defensive on the Kashmir question. This appears to observers as the net outcome of the three-day meeting of foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan at the week-end.

Pak foreign secretary Shaharyar Khan turned the tables on India when he proposed that the two countries hold bilateral talks on Kashmir in terms of clause 6 of the Shimla agreement. India all these years had been insisting on the Kashmir talks with in the framework of the Shimla agreement but Pakistan had been pleading for enforcement of the U.N. resolution in favor of plebiscite in the valley to determine the views of the Kashmiris. Pakistan’s sudden turn around on the Shimla accord put the Indian side in an awkward position,

Early this year, Pakistan prime minister Nawas Sharif”s proposal to declare the sub-continent as a nuclear-free zone had projected Delhi as a bull in south-east Asia’s China shop. India had to do a lot of tight-rope walking and had to put in a considerable amount of effort tO case pressure on the nuclear issue, Rawalpindi’s new posture appears to have embarrassed India again.

The fact of the matter is that India does not want to discuss the future of Kashmir with Pakistan and Delhi’s immediate reaction to the Shahrayar proposal bore this out. Observers of the Indian scene point out that India’s minority government is in no position to discuss and resolve the Kashmir problem with Hindu fundamentalism on the rise. “Kashmir may perhaps have to be resolved by the tide of history” asserts an analyst.

Whatever India’s internal compulsions, Pakistan will further succeed in showing to the western countries, as it did in the case of the nuclear issue, that India is determined to keep Kashmir a colony and is not interested in a negotiated settlement.

India’s credibility on the Kashmir talks between the two foreign secretaries suffered in the eyes of the media because Indian authorities were far from forthcoming on what transpired between the officers. It was left to the Pak foreign secretary to set the record straight. He spent a few days in India to meet the media to put across that country’s viewpoint and to expose some of the hidden discussions. For instance, it was Shaharyar Khan who told the “Pioneer” that the {Wo Countries had agreed to pull back their armies from the Saich on glacier area, idea will be further at a meeting of defence secretaries of the two countries in | October and the details will be worked out in a day.”

Shahrayar Khan said the troops of the two countries would be pulled back to the 1972 Positions but India insisted it should be 1984 positions.

Meanwhile, B.J.P representing the hard-core Hindu fundamentalist opinion in the country raised a hue and cry at its Bhopal session recently, that the Indian government was planning to partition Kashmir. B.J.P chief Murli Manohar Joshi quoted a Camage Endowment for International Peace professor claiming that Indian officials appeared to him ready to accept the portion of Kashmir along the present line of actual control and code memory so that China and Pakistan could feel secure about the roads linking the two countries. The professor James Klal was also quoted by Joshi as claiming that India had allowed access to its nuclear and space facilities.

Article extracted from this publication >> September 4, 1992