Kashmir

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Ahmed for bringing this topic to your Lordships’ House. To the substantial question of what Her Majesty’s Government can do, I think that the answer is not much. As far as possible, Her Majesty’s Government should keep out of this. I remember what happened to my right honourable friend David Miliband when he went to Delhi and made a statement on Kashmir. I had to spend several evenings defending him and telling people, “No, he’s really a good man”.

This is a bilateral issue. Since the Simla Agreement of 1972, as several noble Lords have pointed out, the UN no longer has any locus standi in the matter. This was a mutual agreement between the two countries. Neither the UN military observers nor the UN Security Council as of now has any locus standi in the matter.

I was in Pakistan 15 years ago and spent a whole month in Islamabad. I was very struck that the second question I was asked in every social gathering—after how I was and so on—was, “Why do you not give up Kashmir?” My answer was that I had a British passport, so Kashmir was not mine to give up. They said, “Forget about that. You really have Kashmir and you ought to give it up”. I suddenly realised that India has Kashmir by virtue of the agreement with the old king, Maharaja Hari Singh. Pakistan’s sense of nationhood depends on having Kashmir as part of Pakistan. There is a great asymmetry in feeling about Kashmir in those two countries. India has the bulk of the valley of Kashmir and Pakistan has only a sliver and wants all of it. Flying on Pakistan International Airlines in those days, I saw a map of Pakistan that included all Kashmir in Pakistan.

I can see that there is a very strong feeling in Pakistan that, somehow, something happened and Kashmir should have come to it. The state of Jammu and Kashmir has three components: one is the valley of Kashmir, which is majority-Muslim; then there is the Jammu, which is predominantly Hindu: and then there is Ladakh, a huge area which is mainly Buddhist if anything. When we talk about Kashmir, it is one of the three components of Jammu and Kashmir that we mean. You could not really hold a plebiscite even if it was possible, except on the condition that the votes of the three regions were counted separately and you had different choices, because, ultimately, Pakistan cares only about the valley—which is the most beautiful part as well.

Forgetting about the plebiscite, what we have to do is to maintain the status quo. In both areas—I do not think that there is a paradise of human rights in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir or even in Pakistan itself—we have to have civil society people monitor violations of human rights, complain about them, point them out and try to make the Governments involved behave better. In that respect, civil society in the UK can perform a function, but that function cannot be performed by the Government, who would be well advised to stay out.

I have always championed, and written about, an independent Kashmir which would be like Switzerland with a condominium guaranteed by all the major powers plus India and Pakistan. When I put forward this idea in Pakistan, I was violently opposed by people saying, “No, an independent Kashmir will not do. Kashmir is part of Pakistan”. I think that in India also there is considerable opposition.

This is one of those endless disputes, like that between Israel and Palestine, which goes on and there is nothing much that the UN can do about it. We have to make sure that the people involved in that tragedy are assured as peaceful and lawful an existence as possible and hope that India, which is a kind of older brother in this dispute and already has a democratic structure in Jammu and Kashmir, will improve governance in Kashmir. It should try to make sure that violations of human rights which take place are addressed and that the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, about which there is a lot of debate in India—not only with respect to Jammu and Kashmir but also with respect to the north-east—is removed in its application from the area of Jammu and Kashmir.

Perhaps something like that can by urged by civil society groups in the UK, because it is already being urged by civil society groups in India. I do not say that that will happen, but we have to keep up the pressure. It is very important on humanitarian grounds that we keep up the pressure and try to improve as much as we can the lives of the people of Kashmir on both sides.