In My View

Northern tears for Northern Areas

Pakistan’s ambassador at Brussels, Mr M Saeed Khalid, has ended his country’s decades of “calculated ambiguity” on the status of what is called Northern Areas of Gilgit, Skardu, Diamir, Ghizer, Ghanche and Astore. This is an area of 1.5 million people comprising normally vast, remote and mountainous terrain of 72, 495 kilometres. Ambassador Khalid’s first contention, made in his recent letter to the European Union’s Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne, consists of essentially two points:

(1) The Treaties of Lahore and Amritsar of 1846 that constitute as the main documents for establishment of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, do not recognise the area west of the river Indus. Thus the whole of Northern Areas were not a part of J&K on August, 1947.

(2) The United Nations resolutions are also relative to the state of J&K and do not apply to any part of the Northern Areas, “which were not a part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir before 1947. For this perspective, integration of the Northern Areas with Pakistan is also not prohibited.”

Baroness Nicholson, the Member of European Parliament who has drafted a recent report, “Kashmir, Present Situation and Future Prospects” has responded to the letter of Ambassador Khalid by stating that her careful perusal of the maps and historical documents has given her the belief that, “…Gilgit and Baltistan regions were constituent parts of Jammu and Kashmir by 1877, under the sovereignty of Maharaja (Ranbir) Singh and remained under the domain of the independent princely state up to and including the formation of India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947 and the accession of the State of Jammu and Kashmir in its entirety to the new dominion of India on 26 October 1947.”

Now, this unequivocal assertion by a member of the European Parliament should actually gladden any patriotic Indian as a sure sign of international recognition to its claim to the whole of the acceded territory of J&K, including the six districts of Gilgit and others. But unfortunately this heartwarming development should not in any way lead India to strut on the global stage as the true of inheritor of a controversial legacy.

Because the latest ‘Great Game’ in town – if the world can be considered a small town – is the global “War on Terror” (WOT) in which the West has marked as the contending enemy, sizable sections of the community of Muslims. India’s 150-200 million Muslims belong to this global religious community and contribute to its civilisational ethos.

But from the perspective of the WOT, the Western or the developed North’s, multipronged strategy seems to be to sow sectarian divisions amongst the Muslims so that they do not subscribe to the concept of the quasi-religious ummah (brotherhood), without addressing the ideological predilections of Muslim anger; attack Islam culturally as an insular monolithic without dealing separately with the self-aggrandising former Islamic allies (like Osama Bin laden) of West who now have turned against them; and contain the Muslims politically so that they do not taste success in their quest for ‘real’ freedom, without addressing the imperialist root of the Western domination that they are challenging.

The latest European angst over the conditions of Northern Areas needs to be viewed in this light. As a precursor to the European Parliament draft report, the Brussels headquatered International Crisis Group, published a paper Discord In Pakistan’s Northern Areas.

The paper details how sectarian discord was systematically sown in the area by the late Gen Zia ul-Haq, an ally of the West in the frontiers of the Cold War in Afghanistan in 1988. It talks of how the predominant Shi’i population of the Area was butchered by the Sunnis of the neighbouring North West Frontier Province of Pakistan as the security forces of the country stood aside, quietly. This, the paper avers, was a part of Gen Zia’s plan to Islamise the nation under the leadership of the Sunnis.

Not surprisingly, a Pakistan-based columnist Mr M Ismail Khan wrote with great derision in The News, “Strangely, it took the EU or any of its member country, for that matter, a good 60 years to figure out that the Northern Areas have been wronged.” And indeed the European Parliament’s current draft report is designed to sow as much confusion as possible when both India and Pakistan are inching towards a solution to the Kashmir tangle.

Indian policymakers would do well to focus on the fact that largest amount of space – 11 points in all – in the letter by Ambassador Khalid was spent on buttressing not the political status of the Northern Areas, but on India’s domination of Siachen. He insists that India had accepted Siachen’s status as a part of the Pakistan controlled Northern Areas when the former acknowledged the 1963 border agreement of Pakistan’s with China, by which Pakistan ceded some of the territory of Northern Areas so that China could build the Karakoram Highway.

He has sought to establish that India did not challenge the contention of the political control either in 1947, 1965 or in 1971, the occasions of three wars the two countries fought. In April, 1984, all that changed when India put its armed forces atop the glacier.

In other words, the letter seems more as a step towards establishing negotiating positions than any attempt at renewing calls to hunker down and protect the homeland at any cost. An Indian war of words on the issue, would only heighten tensions in the sub continent, thus bringing the WOT to its doorsteps. Matured diplomacy is about establishing one’s own rights through concrete evidence in dialogues away from the glare of publicity, without grinding the face of the other side in dirt.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in.