The Gupkar Declarations and Pakistan

I am surprised, nay, disappointed and shocked. There was simply no justification for Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi to commend Gupkar Declaration 2 that was jointly issued by six parties in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) on August 22. Gupkar Declaration 1 was adopted on August 4, 2019, only a day before the Modi government illegally and unconstitutionally stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special status by revoking Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution.

The Gupkar Declarations—named after the Gupkar Road in Srinagar where the residence of Dr. Farooq Abdullah, President of the National Conference, is located—seeks to restore the special status of Jammu and Kashmir as it existed on August 4 last year and as per the constitutions of both India and Jammu and Kashmir. Besides the National Conference, the People’s Democratic Party, the People’s Conference, the Indian National Congress, the Communist Party of India (M), and the Awami National Conference are signatories to the declaration. All these parties are committed to the Indian constitution and consider Jammu and Kashmir as an integral part of India.

Pakistan recognizes only the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) as the true representative of the political aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir and, as recently as August 14, conferred on Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the veteran Hurriyat leader, its highest civil award, Nishan-e-Pakistan. Islamabad rightly never recognized the elections held in IOK as credible and always maintained that governments in Srinagar, headed by the National Conference or the People’s Democratic Party, were New Delhi’s puppet administrations. Nor did it ever accept that these sham elections were a substitute to a plebiscite as was committed to Kashmiris under several UN resolutions.

Addressing a press conference in Islamabad on August 24, Qureshi, while referring to the Gupkar Declaration as a very significant and unprecedented development, went as far as to claim that the demands of the Kashmiri nationalist parties were the same as Pakistan’s. In one fell swoop, the foreign minister delegitimized Pakistan’s 73-year-old principled position on Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan never recognized the legitimacy of the Instrument of Accession signed under duress by Maharaja Hari Singh on October 27 (not October 26, as claimed by India) 1947. After the APHC was established in 1993, Pakistan almost stopped engaging with the so-called mainstream IOK parties, though Omar Abdullah, son of Farooq Abdullah, did visit Pakistan in March 2006 as President of the National Conference. That was the time when President Pervez Musharraf had presented his misfired four-point formula toward resolving the Jammu and Kashmir dispute based on giving autonomy to Kashmir and turning the Line of Control into a soft border. However, the Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008, upended the talks on Kashmir and the backchannel diplomacy could not be continued long thereafter.

Speaking purely from the legal and constitutional points of view, since Pakistan never accepted the legitimacy of Kashmir’s accession to India, the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A should not have been a big issue for Pakistan. Kashmir’s special status, in any case, was a bogey since Article 370, during the last seven decades, had already lost its relevance through umpteen presidential ordinances. However, the state subject law of 1927 was still in force as provided for under Article 35A of the Indian constitution. This was significant to prevent the sui generis demographic mosaic of Jammu and Kashmir.

While it is necessary that India restores the status quo ante as it existed on August 5, 2019, this, as far as Pakistan and Kashmiris are concerned, would not settle the lingering Jammu and Kashmir dispute, which has its roots in India’s illegal occupation of Jammu and Kashmir that started in 1947. The dispute is about India’s refusal to implement the relevant UNSC resolutions and hold a referendum as India had itself committed both to Kashmiris and the international community.

By praising the Gupkar Declaration, Qureshi has unnecessarily created apprehensions as to what the Imran Khan government is trying to achieve. Having failed to build any meaningful international pressure on India after August 5, 2019, its foreign minister has reached a stage where he is seeking to justify Pakistan’s principled stance by appreciating the position adopted by the pro-India Kashmiri parties, which are not seeking the right to self-determination but the restoration of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir as an integral part of India. Does Pakistan now hold the view that these pro-India parties represent the political aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir and that the Hurriyat has been rendered irrelevant in the prevailing circumstances? Or, is Islamabad trying to resuscitate Musharraf’s four-point formula?

Even if the latter is the case, Qureshi’s remarks were gratuitous and premature, to say the least. Kashmir is not any other political issue to be dealt with in a slapdash manner. It was not appropriate for the foreign minister to comment on the Gupkar Declaration the way he did. There was simply no good reason for Pakistan to even take notice of the declaration, much less promote it as a manifestation of convergence of views between Islamabad and pro-India Kashmiri political parties.

During my stint in New Delhi as Pakistan’s high commissioner from 2014 to 2017, many pro-India Kashmiri leaders would try to reach out to me, but I was cautious since I did not want anyone to misconstrue my interaction with them. The people of Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir stand together. No government in Islamabad has the right to dent the national consensus on Kashmir. An unequivocal clarification by the government is now in order.

- Abdul Basit is the president of Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies. He was previously Pakistan's ambassador to Germany and Pakistan's High Commissioner to India.

Twitter: @abasitpak1