Kashmir conflict

[48] According to scholars, Indian forces have committed many human rights abuses and acts of terror against the Kashmiri civilian population, including extrajudicial killing, rape, torture, and enforced disappearances.

Later in September, Muslim League officials in the Northwest Frontier Province, including the Chief Minister Abdul Qayyum Khan, assisted and possibly organized a large-scale invasion of Kashmir by Pathan tribesmen.

In May 1948, the Pakistani army officially entered the conflict, in theory to defend the Pakistan borders, but it made plans to push towards Jammu and cut the lines of communications of the Indian forces in the Mendhar valley.

[90] On 1 November 1947, Mountbatten flew to Lahore for a conference with Jinnah, proposing that, in all the princely States where the ruler did not accede to a Dominion corresponding to the majority population (which would have included Junagadh, Hyderabad as well as Kashmir), the accession should be decided by an "impartial reference to the will of the people".

[note 10] Cold War historian Robert J. McMahon states that American officials increasingly blamed India for rejecting various UNCIP truce proposals under various dubious legal technicalities just to avoid a plebiscite.

[note 12] The UNCIP appointed its successor, Sir Owen Dixon, to implement demilitarisation prior to a statewide plebiscite on the basis of General McNaughton's scheme, and to recommend solutions to the two governments.

[118][119] Dixon's failure also compounded American ambassador Loy Henderson's misgivings about Indian sincerity and he advised the US to maintain a distance from the Kashmir dispute, which the US subsequently did, and leave the matter for Commonwealth nations to intervene in.

The main objection from the Pakistani leaders was to Nehru's demand for replacing the plebiscite administrator (Admiral Nimitz, appointed by the UN Security Council) with somebody from a smaller neutral power that had no strategic interests in the region.

[161] However, he requested that the formal declaration of the Agreement should not include a final settlement of the Kashmir dispute as it would endanger his fledgling civilian government and bring in military and other hardline elements into power in Pakistan.

In a broadcast on 2 November 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announced that the fate of Kashmir would ultimately be decided by the people, once law and order was established, through a referendum "held under international auspices like the United Nations.

[213] After the mass unrest due to missing of holy relic from the Hazratbal Shrine on 27 December 1963, the State Government dropped all charges in the Kashmir Conspiracy Case as a diplomatic decision, on 8 April 1964.

It is said that, Sheikh Abdullah, watching the alarming turn of events in the subcontinent, realized that for the survival of the region, there was an urgent need to stop pursuing confrontational politics and promoting solution of issues by a process of reconciliation and dialogue.

[229] Shah's administration, which did not have the people's mandate, turned to Islamists and opponents of India, notably the Molvi Iftikhar Hussain Ansari, Mohammad Shafi Qureshi and Mohinuddin Salati, to gain some legitimacy through religious sentiments.

[278] As a Human Rights Watch stated in a report from May 1991, "In the weeks that followed [the Gawakadal massacre] as security forces fired on crowds of marchers and as militants intensified their attacks against the police and those suspected of aiding them, Kashmir's civil war began in earnest.

[289][290] An investigation by a Christian Science Monitor reporter in 2002 claimed to have unearthed evidence that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates were prospering in Pakistani-administered Kashmir with tacit approval of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

[291] In 2002, a team comprising Special Air Service and Delta Force personnel was sent into Indian-administered Kashmir to hunt for Osama bin Laden after reports that he was being sheltered by the Kashmiri militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.

[395] Michigan State University scholar Baljit Singh, interviewing Indian foreign policy experts in 1965, found that 77 percent of them favoured discussions with Pakistan on all outstanding problems including the Kashmir dispute.

Borrowing a term used by Owen Dixon, Musharraf's Chenab Formula assigns Ladakh to India, Gilgit-Baltistan (G-B) to Pakistan, proposes a plebiscite in the Kashmir Valley and splits Jammu into two-halves.

[457] A 2002 Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) survey, on the basis of 850 interviews, found that within Indian-administered Kashmir, 61% of respondents said they felt they would be better off as Indian citizens, with 33% saying that they did not know, and the remaining 6% favouring Pakistani citizenship.

[458] [neutrality is disputed] According to a 2007 poll conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi involving around 400 people, 87% of respondents in the Kashmir Valley prefer independence over union with India or Pakistan.

[462] [463] In 2011, the FBI revealed that Pakistan's spy agency ISI paid millions of dollars into a United States–based non-governmental organisation to influence politicians and opinion-makers on the Kashmir issue and arrested Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai.

[466] The British Government have formally accepted that there is a clear connection between Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and three major militant outfits operating in Jammu and Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Tayiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.

[472] According to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, both former members of the National Security Council, the ISI acted as a "kind of terrorist conveyor belt" radicalising young men in the Madrassas of Pakistan and delivering them to training camps affiliated with or run by Al-Qaeda and from there moving them into Jammu and Kashmir to launch attacks.

[501] According to cables leaked by the WikiLeaks website, US diplomats in 2005 were informed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) about the use of torture and sexual humiliation against hundreds of Kashmiri detainees by the security forces.

[488] State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) has found 2,730 bodies buried into unmarked graves, scattered in three districts — Bandipora, Baramulla, and Kupwara — of North Kashmir, believed to contain the remains of victims of unlawful killings and enforced disappearances by Indian security forces.

Amnesty International criticized the Indian Military regarding an incident on 22 April 1996, when several armed forces personnel forcibly entered the house of a 32-year-old woman in the village of Wawoosa in the Rangreth district of Jammu and Kashmir.

[498] According to an op-ed published in a BBC journal, the emphasis of the movement after 1989, ″soon shifted from nationalism to Islam.″ It also claimed that the minority community of Kashmiri Pandits, who have lived in Kashmir for centuries, were forced to leave their homeland.

Reportedly, organisations trained and armed by the ISI continued this ethnic cleansing until practically all the Kashmiri Pandits were driven out after having been subjected to numerous indignities and brutalities such as rape, torture, forcible seizure of property etc.

[549][548] UNHCR reported that a number of Islamist militant groups, including al-Qaeda, operate from bases in Pakistani-administered Kashmir with the tacit permission of ISI[547][548] There have also been several allegations of human rights abuse.

[551] A report titled "Kashmir: Present Situation and Future Prospects", submitted to the European Parliament by Emma Nicholson, was critical of the lack of human rights, justice, democracy, and Kashmiri representation in the Pakistan National Assembly.