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| J&K symbol of secular India and, hence, on-negotiable | | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, May 31: Many of our so-called secular and liberal intellectuals and "legal" luminaries urge New Delhi to come forward and break the 63-year-old impasse over Jammu and Kashmir in order to avert the impending "dangerous confrontation" between the nuclear India and Pakistan. A few of them even equate this part of Jammu and Kashmir with the Aaland Islands (transferred to Finland by Sweden in 1922) and South Tyrol (transferred to Italy by Austria in 1919) and suggest that India should follow the path of Sweden and Austria and surrender her sovereign rights over this part of Jammu and Kashmir to Pakistan. The crux of their whole formulation is that such an approach would go a long way in preserving peace in South Asia and enabling India and Pakistan to achieve "prosperity for their citizens". The Valley-based and predominantly Sunni Kul-Jamait Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and similar other outfits also consistently advocate such theory.
Can we place Jammu and Kashmir at par with the Aaland Islands in the Baltic Sea and South Tyrol? Can we, like the American administration and London and Pakistanis of all shades of opinion, take the whole of Jammu and Kashmir as a "disputed territory"? Surely not. Jammu and Kashmir became an integral part of India on October 26. 1947, when its ruler, Hari Singh, who alone had the authority in terms of constitutional law on the subject, to determine the political future of his state, stopped "dithering" and took a decision to that effect. The two most striking aspects of the whole situation were the unqualified support of an overwhelming majority of the people of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh in favour of the Hari Singh's decision, and commendable and inspiring contribution the Kashmiris enthusiastically made to the defence of the state against what may be termed as a regular war by the Pakistani "irregulars" waged on August 22, 1947, in order to annex Jammu and Kashmir. (The Pakistani force, which entered Kashmir on October 22, consisted of "regular troops in disguise", Afridis from North West Frontier Province, Mahsuds and others and was led by army officers. Pakistan admitted it a little later. Despite this, the fact is generally ignored in endeavours by our "intellectuals" masquerading as trouble-shooters to find what went wrong in Kashmir.)
The attitude of the people of the state, barring a few in Kashmir, has not undergone any change. This is not the assumption of this writer. This is the conclusion of Beersmans Paul, president of the Belgian Association for Solidarity with Jammu and Kashmir, who has been visiting the state at regular intervals and interviewing people of all the three regions of the state - Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh - since 1994.
The truth, in short, is that the people from all parts of the state, including the troubled Kashmir Valley, regard the accession to the secular and liberal India as final, irrevocable and sacrosanct and most contemptuously dismiss Pakistan as an "aggressor" and wish to rejoin their brothers and sisters in the so-called Azad Kashmir and Northern Areas, who have been suffering from the depredations of the fundamentally feudalistic and theocratic Islamabad ever since 1947. Besides, an overwhelming majority of the people of the state considers Jammu and Kashmir a symbol of the Indian civilization. "Jammu and Kashmir is symbol of secular India and, hence, non-negotiable", they say. They also say that "to question to the merger of Jammu and Kashmir with India would be to question the very formation of Pakistan."
As for the handing over of the Aaland Islands to Finland and South Tyrol to Italy, the students of history of the First World War and its consequences know that the occupation of the Aaland Islands and South Tyrol by Sweden and Austria, respectively, unlike the constitutional merger of Jammu and Kashmir with India, was not lawful, and that both Finland and Italy were the rightful claimants to the transferred areas. (To be continued)
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