|  | 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 Accesion. The United Nations also does 
      not consider Indian claim as legally valid: it recognises Kashmir as a 
      disputed territory. Except India, the entire world community recognises 
      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. 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.  Prime Minister 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 were 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 Adbullah, 
      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 said 
      constitutional provision was rushed through by the then puppet ‘State’ 
      government of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed. The people of Kashmir were not 
      consulted.  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.  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, thousands of 
      innocent Kashmir people have been killed by the Indian occupation forces. 
      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’ 
      organisations—also cites the same number. Estimates of world news agencies 
      and international human rights organisations 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 
      organisations 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 |