LoC as the border

By Pran Chopra

ON MAY 10 this year, the BJP declared itself firmly opposed to any partition of Jammu and Kashmir as the price of some resolution of the `Kashmir question', whether within Kashmir by way of some compromise with the Hurriyat or externally, by a compromise with Pakistan. Both kinds of resolution are so remote that speculation about them might seem premature if not unnecessary. But the BJP's position contrasts significantly with two developments which have given the Line of Control a status which it had lacked before the Kargil war.

The first development is the emphatic advice by many countries to both India and Pakistan to respect the Line or not to commit any transgressions across it. The second is changes in opinion within the State, most notably reflected in a recent statement by the Chief Minister, Dr. Farooq Abdullah, that India and Pakistan should accept the LoC as an international border. Neither development by itself is any reason why the BJP should not take the position it has, and many people within the State and in the rest of India would agree with it. But both developments have added more weight to the pedigree of the Line, which goes back to the very early days of the conflict over Kashmir between India and Pakistan, and back to the origins of one of the many controversies which surround the `question'.

For example, over the sub-question why did India take the matter to the United Nations in the first place? To that a further twist has been added by the former Foreign Secretary, Mr. T. N. Kaul. In his recently- published book, `A Diplomat's Diary', he narrates that when he was India's acting High Commissioner in London, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, asked him that, and he replied ``we did it under your representative's (Lord Mountbatten's) advice.'' The answer belittles both the question ad Nehru. As Mr. Kaul must have known, Nehru was under no obligation to accept that advice, and his reasons for taking that step, whether good or bad, were his own, complex and characteristic of his mixture of idealism and impatience with detail. But that is a different story and belongs to history.

More relevant today is the sub-question why did India accept the ceasefire line when it was well poised militarily to push much further to the west and could have bought the time for doing so through the usual argumentation and bargaining which goes with such matters? After all, through the same methods Pakistan stalled the plebiscite proposed by the U.N. for over five years until it found the situation in the region made favourable for it by the cold war and in the State by India's mishandling of relations with Sheikh Abdullah. This sub-question has never received an answer which could be called both authoritative and credible. But a theory which still holds the field and is more relevant to the present circumstances is that once the Kashmiri part of Kashmir had been cleared of Pakistani forces, Sheikh Abdullah lost interest in seeing India's frontier in the State being pushed further to the west, and given Nehru's dislike of warfare in any case and his respect for Abdullah's views in matters relating to Kashmir, the military's preference for a more strategic ceasefire line lost ground.

Against this background it is possible though not provable that Nehru was not entirely averse to the idea of converting a adjusted ceasefire line into the international frontier in the State. A view in favour of this possibility was expressed in 1994 by the former U.S. Ambassador, Mr. Dennis Kux, in his book, ``Estranged Democracies''. On the basis of U.S. documents and papers, he reports that Nehru said to Dulles that he ``envisaged a Kashmir settlement on the basis of the ceasefire line established in 1949 with some minor adjustments - a posture he would support to his death in 1964.''

A further link in the lineage of the Line and the possibility of its conversion into a border has been traced, both in Pakistan and India, to 1971 by Mr. P. N. Dhar in his just-published book, ``Indira Gandhi, the Emergency and Indian Democracy'', which is full of new facts and fascinating interpretations and insights, gleaned during the years when he was (a very special) Secretary to the Prime Minister and one of her ``closest advisers through the 1970s'' as the blurb describes him. He quotes Pakistan's former President, General Ayub Khan, as saying that India could not afford to go from one ceasefire line to another, and then adding, in print, in Dawn newspaper, ``We should therefore extricate ourselves from the shackles of the past and seek a solution by fresh, bold and imaginative thinking.'' More substantial however are Mr. Dhar's own observations about the Shimla Conference at which, after he had succeeded P. N. Haksar, he was indeed the closest adviser to the Prime Minister. Describing India's strategy at the conference he says ``The transformation of the ceasefire line into the line of control was the core of the Indian solution to the Kashmir problem. The de facto line of control was meant to be graduated to the level of a de jure border.''

Then follows an excellent insight into (a summary of?) Indira Gandhi's mind on this matter, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's constructive but alas infructuous response. It is worth quoting at some length as a companion piece to what Sheikh Abdullah was to say a few years later, which comes even closer to the present day controversies.

``Mrs. Gandhi elaborated the merits of the Indian proposal in the following terms: It was the only feasible solution. An important feature of the proposal was that neither country was gaining or losing territory on account of war. It did not involve transfers of population from one side to the other. Kashmiris as an ethnic community were left undivided on the Indian side. The line of control was therefore largely an ethnic and linguistic frontier. In fact, in 1947, at the time of partition, it was also an ideological frontier, being the limit of the political influence of Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah and his National Conference party. True, there were some anomalies in this otherwise neatly etched picture, but these, Mrs. Gandhi pointed out, could be removed by mutual consent.

``Mr. Bhutto, responded with feeling and apparent sincerity. After long reflection he had come to the conclusion that the Indian proposal was the only feasible one.'' What happened in fact is part of the unfortunate history of the State and the subcontinent. But that too is a different story, the present one being concerned only with the evolution of the idea, on the Indian side, of the LoC becoming the border.

The next link turned out to be even more remarkable (though also more tragic, for reasons which will follow later.) For this too the reader owes thanks to Mr. Dhar, for he has published, in greater detail than anyone else I know of, a letter to Indira Gandhi dated May 24, 1976, in which the Sheikh expressed himself with greater care and clarity than I had seen him do at any time during the forty years or so that I knew him, from the early 1940s. Writing about the Line of Control, he said ``... we have to take into account the hard fact that perhaps a realistic settlement with Pakistan in regard to the future of Jammu and Kashmir will ultimately have to be found on the basis of a permanent border running roughly along the present Line of Actual Control.'' He went on to add ``Presumably there is some degree of mental and other preparation in Pakistan to accept a solution along these lines.'' But in that he turned out to be wrong. Even as recently as 1972 Pakistan had turned down the idea of changing the name of the ceasefire line to Line of Actual Control because it would mean a change in its status.

Sheikh Abdullah's presumption was totally belied by what Pakistan was to say and do after 1976. But the reason why his letter turned out to be tragic was not that Pakistan belied his hopes but that New Delhi did. He wrote eloquently and convincingly about the value (indeed very great) of the Accord he had signed a few months earlier with Indira Gandhi, in which he fully affirmed his faith in the State's accession to India but was also promised greater autonomy for the State. He also claimed, and again very rightly, that the people of the State had overwhelmingly supported both aspects of the accord. A quarter century later we are still crying over the tatters to which the Accord was reduced, at a time when the Sheikh had much declined in health and efficacy, by the men positioned into his Cabinet, by the men, too clever by half and unscrupulous to the hilt, who had come to surround Indira Gandhi during the later years of the Emergency. Can tears revive it?

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