NEW DELHI: The US has Jaunched a secret initiative to bring, India and Pakistan to the negotiating table.

The objective of this new initiative is to persuade Islamabad and New Delhi to seriously discuss the future of Kashmir. Several ideas have been tossed around between India and the US on the one hand and between Pakistan and the US ‘on the other through diplomatic channels in recent weeks.

Of these, a proposal that appears to have aroused interest within the governments of both India and Pakistan is one which is known in the history of the Indo Pakistan dispute as the “Dixon Plan.”

Named after its author, Sir Owen Dixon, who was UN representative for India and Pakistan in 1950, it envisages a division of Kashmir ‘between India and Pakistan, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had favored the Dixon plan, but it was an on starter, when the prime minister of Pakistan, rejected the proposal.

According to information pieced together from various highly placed sources, the Dixon plan, proposed 44 years ago, has been revived by the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Ms. Robin Raphel.

The Indian government’s decision last week to allow two Hurriyat leaders from Kashmir to attend the summit meeting of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) in Casablanca is said to be a sequel to the new US initiative on Kashmir.

Addressing the Foreign Correspondents’ Club here last week, the US ambassador to India, Frank Wisner, stopped short of saying that he had played a role in enabling the Hurriyat leaders attend the OIC summit. Wisner revealed that Kashmiri leaders had met him and the issue of their participation in the Casablanca summit was discussed) at their meeting.

The Dixon plan had proposed two ways for implementing a situation to the dispute which was before the UN, soon after India and Pakistan became Independent.

The first option envisaged several plebiscites, area by area in the whole of the disputed territory Kashmir; each designated area would be allotted to India or Pakistan.

An alternative was to allocate pans of Kashmir with known preferences toward India or Pakistan to the respective countries without holding a plebiscite, referendum would be limited only to the parts of Kashmir where both India and Pakistan claimed support in their favor.

Article extracted from this publication >>  December 23, 1994