A State in Denial
Author: BG Verghese
Publisher: Rupa, Rs500
The recent avalanche at the Siachen Glacier is not a new crisis. Siachen has for long been a pressing concern for both India and Pakistan. BG Verghese discusses the issue at length. Excerpt:
The origins, course, consequences and lines of resolution of the Siachen imbroglio have been misunderstood, confused and even mismanaged by Indian policy-makers over the years. There was a flurry of interest after Pakistan’s all-powerful army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, reversing gear, suddenly declared in April 2012 that India and Pakistan must live in peaceful coexistence as defence without development was neither viable nor acceptable.
Pakistan has long sought India’s withdrawal from the glacier, a mutual pull back and demilitarisation. India however insists on the authentication and demarcation of the actual ground position line (AGPl) that we hold before redeployment to mutually defined positions, to prevent the vacated area being otherwise stealthily seized. Nevertheless, the Kayani initiative was worth pursuing so that no opportunity for peace was lost.
Both Siachen ‘solutions’, however, beg the question: There was no AGPl prior to 1984. Where, then, did the northern extremity of the CFl or loC lieIJ
The critical date is therefore not 1984, when India took control of Siachen, but July 29, 1949, when the ceasefire agreement was signed in Karachi by ranking military representatives of India and Pakistan and the UN Military Observer Group in pursuance of Part I of the key UN resolution of August 8, 1948. This was to be followed by a truce under Part II and, after full compliance, by a plebiscite under Part III.
The Karachi Agreement delineated the entire CFl, demarcating over 740 km on the ground. With the ceasefire increasingly running through high mountains and glaciated areas as it traversed north, it often followed a directional path in the absence of clear landmarks — thus, ‘Chalunka (on the Shyok River), Khor, thence north to the glaciers’, passing through grid reference NJ 9842. The segment beyond NJ 9842 was, by mutual agreement, not demarcated on the ground, being a highly elevated, glaciated, unexplored and unpopulated region that had not witnessed any fighting. A plebiscite was soon to follow and the matter, it was assumed, would be settled.
Clearly, the delineation of the northernmost segment of the CFl was unambiguous: NJ 9842, ‘thence north to the glaciers’. The very next section crucially directed: The cease-fire line described above shall be drawn on a one inch map (where available) and then be verified mutually on the ground by local commanders on each side with the assistance of the United Nations Military Observers, so as to eliminate any no-man’s land.
So, the line, whether delineated or demarcated, could in no way be left hanging in the air.
The CFl was ratified by both sides and deposited with the UNCIP. It was revalidated as the loC under the Suchetgarh Agreement of December 1972, in accordance with the clear intent of the Shimla Conference earlier that year to move from military confrontation to a political resolution in J&K. The loC now incorporated the military gains made by either side in J&K in the 1971 war. Thus in the Kargil-Siachen sector, all territorial gains went entirely to India, which acquired the 254-square-mile Turtok salient comprising five villages just south and west of NJ 9842. This military acquisition provided India an additional territorial bulwark against hostile claims on Siachen.
Earlier, in 1957-58, during the UN-designated International Geophysical Year, an Indian scientific expedition led by the Geological Survey explored the upper Nubra and Shyok valleys, mapped and measured Siachen and other glaciers, and publicly recorded its findings. No Pakistani protest followed the prolonged, internationally known and publicised presence and activity of the Indian scientists. It is simple to see why. locate NJ 9842 on a detailed physical map of northern J&K and draw a line ‘thence north’ and much or most of Siachen will be found to lie on the Indian side of the CFl. Pakistani military maps, depicting Pakistan’s military positions during the Kargil operations, situate the entire Siachen Glacier on the Indian side of NJ 9842 ‘thence north to the glaciers’.
At Shimla, as we know, Mrs Gandhi demanded acceptance of the CFl/loC as the permanent political boundary, but accepted Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s honeyed assurances that he would take steps to promote the evolution of the loC into a permanent boundary. But no sooner were his prisoners of war back home and his lost territories in the west restored, than he raged and reneged.
Pakistan, the UN and global atlases depicted the CFl neutrally or correctly till around 1964-72. By the mid-1950s, China had commenced its cartographic aggression in ladakh. In 1963, it signed a boundary agreement whereby Pakistan unilaterally ceded ‘2,700 sq km of Shaksgam Valley in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to China’. Thereafter, Pakistan kept extending its lines of communication eastwards and even began licensing western mountaineering expeditions to venture east of K2. It was emboldened to extend this ‘eastward creep’ when, between 1964 and 1972, the US Defense Mapping Agency (now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), an international reference point for cartography, began depicting the CFl as extending from NJ 9842 to a point just west of the Karakoram Pass.
Pakistan gladly accepted this fraudulent international endorsement and thereafter initiated moves to occupy Siachen. Reconnaissance teams were sent to the Saltoro Ridge, Siachen’s western wall, in 1983. Getting wind of this stratagem, India pre-emptively occupied the glacier in March 1984.
At a US Institute for Peace conference on J&K in Washington in 1991 that I attended, delegates were delivered a map at their hotel rooms without the mandatory credit line regarding its origins. It was headed ‘The Kashmir Region: Depicting the CFl/lOC, Siachen and Shaksgam’. This showed a hatched triangle NJ 9842-Karakoram Pass-K2, and Shaksgam in the north, with a legend reading, ‘Indian occupied since 1983’. The conference organisers disowned what they surmised could be a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) map and suggested it be treated as ‘withdrawn’! Even so, the map not only confirmed Pakistan’s claims but labelled India an aggressor. Years later, when Robert Blackwill was the US ambassador in Delhi, certain statements appeared suggesting that the US Defense Mapping Agency had got its lines wrong and that the impugned maps would be amended. Nothing ensued, and this piece of cartographic aggression remains.
Excerpted from A State of Denial by BG Verghese, Rupa Publications