Binoo Joshi
Pakistan has nowhere to go. The Article 370 was a temporary provision in the Indian constitution, and the Government of India has scrapped it after the resolution was passed by the Parliament with two-third majority. It was reflection of the democratic will of the people of the country. The dissent was negligible. In democracy, dissent needs to be respected. It is not necessary that it should be accepted.
“This is an internal matter,” India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations cleared the air after a closed door meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Friday. His articulation left no one in doubt that India was confident of things having gone overwhelmingly in its favour in the UNSC closed door meeting, and the biggest evidence of that emerged with no statement being issued at the end of the meet.
Pakistan had sought to involve China in pushing for the meeting. China could not have said “no” to Pakistan, after all it has its obligation to its all-weather friend that has gifted it a large chunk of the land of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1960s and later almost gifted the entire territory of Gilgit and Baltistan for China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. For all this, China could have done all this for Pakistan. That’s what it did, too.
The outcome was known even before the meeting started, and it was clear when it ended with not even a single member of the UNSC standing for, or saying, what Pakistan had hoped.
Though it is not clear that India had factored in the move of Pakistan in raising this issue at the UN and then in the UNSC and devised its response accordingly, but what is known that all the diplomatic moves of Pakistan have fallen flat. There are clearly two reasons: one, Pakistan’s case on raising the issue of the Article 370 having been done away with in a “unilateral manner”, was weak. It had never recognized any of the provisions of the Indian constitution “temporary” or otherwise to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It used to call them sham and meaningless, often its leaders were on record to have said that this is just a deception to “befool the world” to deflect the attention of the international community from the “Kashmir dispute.”
Second, the world as a whole knows that Pakistan is a failed state. Worse still, it is a state that exports terrorism to its neighbouring countries. India and Afghanistan are the prime targets of its terror factories that it is running on its soil. No one wants to be seen siding with a terrorist state, hence it should accept the reality as it has emerged.
It can do nothing, diplomatically, militarily and if it tends to intensify the activation of its strategic assets, the terror groups, it should rewind the times before and post 9/11. The world uses its strategic location but is shy of giving it any benefit of doubt on any count. Kashmir chapter is closed for Pakistan forever.
