J&K ‘bilateralism’

As Beijing continues to treat Indian citizens from the state of Jammu & Kashmir differently from the rest for consular purposes, Delhi must come to terms with the difficulty of sustaining the myth of “bilateralism” on J&K. Since signing the Simla Agreement with Pakistan in 1972, the proposition that J&K is a “bilateral” issue between India and Pakistan had become a mantra. That was never really true.

India’s boundary dispute with China covers many parts of the state of Jammu & Kashmir including the Aksai Chin plateau. Technically, then, one might want to say India has two sets of problems in J&K — one with Pakistan and another with China — and wants to deal with each one of them separately. Bilateralism, then was about India’s preferred process and not the substance of the issue. Even that statement gets muddied by the fact that India’s contested frontiers with Pakistan and China meet in J&K. When it came to exchanging maps showing the Indian and Chinese national perceptions — not a mutually agreed delineation — of the Line of Actual Control in the Western sector that covers J&K a few years ago, Beijing had backed off because it did not want to offend Islamabad. Meanwhile, India can’t forget that Pakistan had ceded parts of the state of J&K under its control to China in 1963. China itself had stated that the final disposition of its border with Pakistan is subject to the eventual settlement of the Indo-Pak dispute over Kashmir.

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