OIC Kashmir resolution is four decades too old
Multilateral forums have often been criticised for being talk shops that provide glamorous platforms for international posturing and little else. The Organisation of Islamic Countries and its moth-eaten stand on Kashmir shows exactly why. At the annual meeting of its Council of Foreign Ministers, in Kuwait on Thursday, the 56-nation grouping adopted, yet again, a biased and partisan resolution on Kashmir, which was promptly dismissed the next day by India's Ministry of External Affairs with “the contempt it deserves”. All of this has been on expected lines.
Every now and then, like a broken record, the OIC tries to stir the pot with a controversial comment or action, be it referring to an “India-occupied Kashmir” or appointing an envoy to the disputed region. In response, India merely regurgitates its decades-old response that the OIC has no business commenting on the issue while the rest of the world carries on without even batting an eyelid. Thursday's resolution should be viewed against this backdrop. It is not worth the paper that it's printed on and, in private, many of its signatories (which include leaders of Arab states that have good relations with India) will tell you so. The entire episode is a hackneyed routine, and one may rightly ask about why the OIC continues with this charade.
The answer is simple: To please Pakistan which commands an influential position within the OIC. Pakistan fancies the OIC as its bully pulpit and has sought to use the platform to internationalise the Kashmir dispute. But this strategy expired more than 40 years ago when Pakistan signed and ratified the Simla Agreement which made clear that the Kashmir dispute is a bilateral issue. Pakistan, however, doesn't seem to care. Apart from using the OIC to issue ridiculous resolutions, it continues to religiously lodge complaints with the defunct UN Kashmir mission about ceasefire violations by India — both actions have the same aim and both are equal failures.
As for the OIC, it has no interest in breaking its long history of pandering to Pakistani delusions and tantrums. This is a trend that goes back to the forum's inception. At the OIC's first conference in Moroccan town of Rabat in 1964, India, as a country that is home to one of the world's largest Muslim populations, had been invited to join as a founding member. But the ministerial delegation from New Delhi was literally turned away from the door, after Pakistan threw a fit.
What underscores the absurdity of the situation is that, at a time when the Muslim world is facing multiple crises on several fronts, from religious extremism to economic collapse, the OIC wants to be seen as worrying about a territorial dispute over which it has no control whatsoever. The OIC regrets “the Indian attempt to malign the legitimate Kashmiri freedom struggle by denigrating it as terrorism” but can offer no solutions to end the bloodshed in Syria and Iraq or mitigate the plight of persecuted Rohingya Muslims.