‘Bilateral talks will never resolve Kashmir dispute’

WASHINGTON: Bilateral talks between India and Pakistan in the last 60 years have been fruitless and unless the Kashmiri people are associated by the two countries as equal partners, the situation will remain unchanged, Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai said at a panel discussion on Kashmir on Wednesday afternoon.Fai is the executive director of the Washington-based Kashmiri American Council. He said the Kashmiri leadership was not against bilateral talks between India and Pakistan, but it wanted them to be purposeful. Any attempt to strike a deal between any two parties without the association of the third party involved, would only fail to produce a credible settlement, he said.“India and Pakistan tried this at Tashkent in 1966, at Simla in 1972, at Lahore 1998 and at Agra in 2001. These agreements failed because they sought to bypass the primary party, the people of Kashmir. Similarly, the agreement between Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952, the pact between Abdullah and Indira Gandhi in 1975, and the agreement between Farooq Abdullah and Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s sought to bypass Pakistan, which was why the basic issue remained unsettled,” he added. Fai said the time had come for the talks to be tripartite, because the dispute primarily involved three parties: India, Pakistan, and the people of Kashmir, while the people being the primary and principal party.US influence: Fai said Kosovo had become a reality through the support, understanding and engagement of the United States. “The emergence of Kosovo as the world’s 193rd independent country has knocked out the misperception that in a post-9/11 world, the international community does not support freedom struggles.” He said there were two principles involved in the Kashmir dispute. “First, it is the inherent right of the people of the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir to decide their future according to their will. Two, it is impossible to ascertain their will, except through a vote under impartial supervision in conditions that are free from compulsion, intimidation and external coercion.” He urged the United States to assume the same role in the settlement of the Kashmir dispute that it chose for itself in the late 1940s and 1950s at the United Nations and elsewhere. He noted that on February 22, 2006, President Bush had declared that the United States supported a solution to Kashmir issue acceptable not only to India and Pakistan, but also to the people of Kashmir. khalid hasan