India's claim to Kashmir is 'technically strong': CIA

India's claim to Jammu and Kashmir is "technically strong" but given the chance the Kashmiri population will want to break free of Indian control, says a new book quoting a declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) document.

An "intelligence memorandum" prepared by the CIA on "The Kashmir Dispute" on Sep 20, 1965, dwelt at length on the main row plaguing India-Pakistan relations in the wake of their war that year.

Explaining how Jammu and Kashmir merged with India following a tribal invasion backed by Pakistan, the eight-page "secret" document says: "India's claim to the state has a technically strong legal foundation in the maharaja's act of accession.

"The Pakistani advocates point out, however, that the basic concept of partition was that Pakistan was to comprise the contiguous Muslim majority areas of British India. They insist that Kashmir is such an area," the CIA document added.

Over the years, the CIA said, New Delhi had gradually integrated Kashmir more fully into the Indian union, with a lot of financial backing, and "by now all significant constitutional distinctions (between India and Kashmir) have been swept away.

"This support may have reduced Kashmiri resentment in some measure, but there is little question that the Kashmiri population would vote to break away from India if offered the choice," it added.

The CIA assessment is part of many declassified US government documents in journalist Kalyani Shankar's book, "India and the US: Politics of the Sixties" (Macmillan).

Although India claims ownership over the whole of Jammu and Kashmir, it would be happy, according to the CIA, with just the portion of the Himalyan state it has held since the region got split up between Islamabad and New Delhi in 1947-48.

"The Indians would have no fundamental objections to a permanent division of the state more or less along the ceasefire line... Any proposal threatening India's complete control of the Vale (Kashmir Valley), however, would meet with hostility in New Delhi."

The CIA also pointed out that while Kashmir was "only one of India's foreign policy problems, it often seems to come close to being the very raison d'etre for Pakistan's foreign policy... To the Pakistani, Kashmir is a blight on Pakistan's national honour and a perpetual reminder that the Pakistani Muslim, whose heritage includes the glory of the Moghul Empire, is now a citizen of a country that is weaker, poorer, less skilled, and generally inferior to its 'Hindu' counterpart."

The CIA analysis also said that the death in 1964 of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, "closed out any real hope of a Kashmir solution. He was the only Indian who wielded sufficient political power to sell any significant concessions to India's Hindu majority".

It added that intermittent attempts since 1947 to reach a settlement over Kashmir or even to put Pakistani and Indian leaders on the road towards one had proved consistently futile.

"Third country and UN efforts to settle the long festering problem are likely to founder on Indian stubbornness unless major politico-economic sanctions are applied..."

Written a quarter century before Pakistan extended support to an armed separatist campaign in Jammu and Kashmir, the CIA said: "If both sides fall into a frenzy of mutually destructive violence, it is conceivable that the whole political structure of the subcontinent will undergo radical changes. In such an event, the destiny of Kashmir defies prediction."

(IANS)

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