Pakistan raises Kashmir in UNSC, asks for review of 1948 resolution

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Pakistan has brought up the Kashmir issue in the Security Council, accusing it of "selective implementation" of its resolutions.

"Nothing undermines the credibility of the Council more than selective implementation of its resolutions," Pakistan's Permanent Representative Maleeha Lodhi said on Tuesday during a session on its working methods.

"The Council should therefore periodically review implementation of its resolutions, especially on longstanding issues like the Jammu and Kashmir dispute," she added. "Failure to enforce its own resolutions undercuts not just the Council's standing in the world, but the UN as well."

Her reference was to a 1948 Council resolution that called for a plebiscite to determine the future of Kashmir, while also demanding the withdrawal of Pakistani "tribesmen" who entered the state.

India has said that the "tribesmen" were Pakistani troops who tried to annex Kashmir.

Given Pakistan's refusal to withdraw its troops, India could not hold hold a plebiscite and New Delhi maintains that by participating in the elections in the state the Kashmiri people have exercised their democratic rights integrating with India.

Other Council resolutions relating to Kashmir were about a commission to oversee the plebiscite and, in 1957, on a UN representative mediating between the two neighbours.

India also maintains that under the 1972 Simla Agreement signed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was then the President of Pakistan, the two countries have agreed to sort out their disputes between themselves without the intervention of third parties.

In 2010, the Council removed Kashmir from its list of unresolved international disputes.

At the beginning of every year, Pakistan also asks the Council to keep alive the question of the Hyderabad's integration with India based on a telegram from Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan Siddiqi Asaf Jah VII asking it to keep India out of the princely state. The Nizam, however, withdrew the complaint after the princely state's integration into India.

Two other issues it attempts to revive in its annual ritual are resolutions relating to the 1965 India-Pakistan War and the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)

--IANS

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