Following the ceasefire of January 1, 1949, the military representatives of India and Pakistan met in Karachi between July 18 and 27, 1949, under the auspices of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan. An agreement was reached and the Line of Ceasefire (today’s LoC) was demarcated. The last point on the map was known as ‘NJ 9842′. Nobody thought of going further north at that time. The agreement of July 1949, mentioned therefore that the Line extended “thence north to the glaciers” without going into the details. The important point which is often forgotten now has been pointed out by General SK Sinha, the Governor of J&K, who participated in the Karachi negotiations as the ADC to General Shrinagesh, the head of the Indian delegation. Before leaving for Karachi, the delegates had a briefing from Nehru and the Secretary General of the MEA, Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, who explained the legal position in detail to the delegates. He told them that the resolution of August 1948 “had conceded the legality of Kashmir’s accession to India and as such no man’s land, if any, should be controlled by India during the period of ceasefire and truce.
This meant that the onus of proof to convince the commission of any factual position, on the date of ceasefire, in any disputed territory, rested with Pakistan. “In the absence of any such convincing proof, and even if India had no troops on the date of ceasefire in that area, the disputed territory should automatically come under Indian control. This convincing and legalistic argument proved a trump card in our hands at Karachi. Based on this, we obtained control of several hundred square miles of State territory where we were not in position on the date of the ceasefire.”
This position was then accepted by Pakistan and the UN. It remains valid today. Even if not demarcated, the glacier legally belongs to India. More, the area (including the Saltoro range) has been in the physical possession of the Indian troops since in 1984. In the early ’80s, Islamabad had tried to occupy the glacier under the cover of mountaineering expeditions, but the Indian Army intervened in time and took control.This was the beginning of the conflict. What disturbs me most is seeing the Indian press biting the Pakistani propaganda bait. Take, for example, a reputed national weekly which regularly publishes the map of Jammu & Kashmir with a different colour for the Siachen¬as if the glacier is were disputed. After the recent dialogue on Siachen between the defence secretaries of India and Pakistan which concluded without any agreement, many newspapers spoke of “failure of the talks”. Does it mean that a unilateral withdrawal from the glacier would have been a “success”? General Musharraf likes to quote the Fifth Round of talks in 1989: “Yes, indeed there was an agreement in 1989. And that Agreement was based on reallocation of the Siachen.” This is far from true. The negotiations saw a hardening of the position of the Pakistan military and, finally, the talks broke down.
