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| Dixon Plan: Moves appear afoot to divide Jammu on communal lines | | |
RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, June 16: The outcome of the March 1990 Colombo meeting between the Indian and Pakistani Foreign Ministers; the May 2, 2009 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s revelations regarding the agreement he had reached with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf; the statements made by Pervez Musharraf himself in 2007 and thereafter in this regard; the April 24, 2010 revelations made by former Pakistan Foreign Minister Kasuri; and what the Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and the well-known India-basher and the India-based spokesperson of Islamabad and Kashmiri separatists A. G. Noorani said umpteen times during the past more than two years clearly establish that those who mattered in India and Pakistan had considered, and continue to consider, the Dixon Plan as an ideal solution to the “Kashmir problem”.
Who was Sir Owen Dixon? Who authorized him to visit India and Pakistan to discuss ways and means with the concerned authorities in both India and Pakistan in order to resolve the “Kashmir issue”? What did Dixon suggest? What was the attitude of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to the Dixon Plan and what exactly the Dixon Plan meant? The answer to the last question first. He wanted – apart from several other anti-India steps – the division of Jammu province on purely communal lines in order to help (at the behest of the United States and other rabidly anti-India countries) Pakistan, the aggressor.
Owen Dixon was an Australian. He was a judge. The United Nations had appointed Dixon as its representative for India and Pakistan (UNRIP) after General A. G. L. McNaughton of Canada, who had been appointed as its representative for India and Pakistan on December 17, 1949, told the United Nations on February 3, 1950 that he had failed to resolve the conflict between India and Pakistan. Dixon was appointed UNRIP in March 1950. He reached the sub-continent on May 27, 1950. Immediately after his arrival, he talked to the concerned Indian and Pakistani officials, but separately. He also visited Jammu and Kashmir for an on-the-spot assessment of the situation. His basic objective was to find if plebiscite could be organized in the whole of the state in one go and if Jammu and Kashmir could be demilitarized.
Dixon took no time to realize that “the chances of a plebiscite for the whole state proving successful were much reduced by the failure of the parties over so long a period of time, notwithstanding the assistance of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP), to agree upon in practical measures in pursuance of that course for the solution of the problem…Only if and when I was satisfied that no such agreement could be brought about and that all real chance of it had ended, ought I to turn to some form of settlement other than a plebiscite of the whole state”.
Dixon was fully aware of the difficulties that beset the problem. The attitude of both India and Pakistan had hardened. Pakistan had been emboldened by the support it had received from the United States and a number of Western countries. It was not prepared to relinquish what it had already gained (Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan). On the contrary, New Delhi felt, and rightly, that the Security Council dominated by the Western countries had all through not only tried to overlook its legal, political and moral claims but willfully created situations to humiliate it and deprive it of what was its legitimate due. New Delhi, therefore, looked upon the efforts of the Security Council with misgivings and was not prepared to yield even the smallest ground.
It was under these circumstances that Dixon tried to bring about an atmosphere of cordiality between India and Pakistan. He arranged a meeting of the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan with himself, at New Delhi from July 20 to July 24. At this meeting, neither India nor Pakistan agreed for demilitarization of the state. The initiative in this direction was left solely with the UN representative. In his report to the Security Council Dixon without branding Pakistan as an aggressor acknowledged that Pakistan did violate the international law twice, first on October 20, 1947, when hostile forces had entered Kashmir and then in May 1948, when the regular Pakistani units had moved into the state.
Thereafter, he proposed that the “first step in demilitarization should consist of withdrawal of the Pakistani regular forces commencing on a named day…Then the other operations on each side of the cease-fire line should take place and as far as practicable, concurrently. Dixon also asked for the disarming and disbandment of the “Azad Kashmir” forces and the Northern Scouts. Pakistan differed from the Dixon’s basic approach, but expressed his willingness to accept the “sequence of demilitarization proposed by him.” (To be continued)
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