Successive Indian governments have allowed Pakistan to define the Kashmir problem, politically and geographically, and set the agenda. Secular India with a Muslim population larger than Pakistan's has also allowed Islamabad to paint the dispute in religious colours. Indian rule over the Kashmir Valley - just 9 per cent of the original State of Jammu & Kashmir - has been turned into the issue at dispute, as if the sizable J&K territories occupied by Pakistan and China are beyond dispute. What should have been the bottom line in serious negotiations -the existing line of control becoming the international boundary - has been publicly advanced by New Delhi since Nehru days as the starting line, fostering Pakistani intransigence and depriving India of any diplomatic space. It is pointless for New Delhi to opposes the internationalisation of Kashmir when the problem has been under international spotlight for long and India itself has sought to draw global attention to transborder terrorism.

Regionally, Kashmir will remain at the root of India's problems with Pakistan and China. Pakistan, through sponsorship of terrorist violence and aggressive diplomacy, has successfully brought India under intensive pressure on Kashmir. In contrast, Indian diplomacy has allowed Pakistan's continued occupation of 35 per cent of Jammu and Kashmir and China's control over almost 20 per cent of J&K (the areas seized from India and the small part ceded by Pakistan in 1963) to escape international scrutiny. A region whose control is divided among three countries has been portrayed internationally as a bone of contention between two parties, India and Pakistan, with the real dispute defined as the Kashmir Valley.

It is high time India shed its defensive stance ... If Kashmir is the core issue for Pakistan, it is doubly so for India because it is the essence of its territorial disputes with Pakistan and China and the fountainhead of externally-sponsored terrorism. The Sino-Pakistani nexus ... is founded on Kashmir. There is no reason for India to fear the internationalisation of Kashmir, although New Delhi should never allow any external power to meddle in Kashmir affairs. Indian diplomacy should come out of its defensive mode by demanding the vacation of occupied J&K terrorists by Pakistan and China as a prerequisite to the creation of UN-mandated conditions in that region ... New Delhi should also exploit Pakistan's virtual annexation of ... the Northern Areas, and demand the annulment of its seizure and the bartering away of Shaksgam Valley to China.                                                                              (Source: The Pioneer, 29 July, 1998)