Kazim AlamA US-brokered ceasefire on May 10 pulled India and Pakistan back from the brink of an all-out war after four days of incessant missile and drone warfare that killed scores of people on each side of the border.
While Pakistan has warmly welcomed the US role in brokering the ceasefire, India’s response has been rather muted.
What angered the Indians was a highly unusual public offer by President Trump to mediate between the two archrivals on the Kashmir issue, the disputed Himalayan region that both countries claim in full but administer in part.
India has consistently opposed third-party intervention on the Kashmir issue, emphasising that it should be resolved bilaterally with Pakistan. The two countries have fought three major wars over Kashmir.
“I will work with (India and Pakistan) both to see if…a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir,” Trump wrote in a social media post.
The government of India chose not to formally acknowledge Trump’s mediation offer.
But Indian politicians and analysts castigated the US president for ‘internationalising’ what New Delhi considers an internal issue requiring no third-party involvement.
“Pakistan has, by design… managed to internationalise the question of Jammu and Kashmir,” said India-administered Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who is part of a political alliance opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP party.
Analysts say the one-off social media post by President Trump has set back years of diplomatic efforts by India to classify Kashmir as an integral part of the Indian union.
“It is a setback for India. For decades, India has been hostile to the idea of third-party intervention. That being said, even when (India) was a far weaker country, it fended off third-party intervention,” Sumit Ganguly, director of the Programme on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, tells TRT World.
India’s move to suspend the decades-old treaty after a deadly attack on Kashmir raises fears of escalating tensions with Pakistan, but can New Delhi really turn off the taps?
Decades of failed mediation attempts
Ejaz Haider, a prominent security and foreign policy analyst from Pakistan, tells TRT World that Trump’s statement on Kashmir as part of the ceasefire announcement was “certainly a setback for India”.
“India has, for years, expended much diplomatic capital to ensure that Kashmir remains off the international agenda. The current right-wing (Indian) government has even taken it off any bilateral discussions,” he adds.
The Kashmir dispute, festering since the independence of both India and Pakistan from British rule in 1947, has seen many third-party interventions and mediation attempts.
It was India that referred the matter to the United Nations in 1948, soon after the first India-Pakistan war on the Kashmir issue. The UN Security Council passed resolutions that called for, among other things, a plebiscite to determine the region's future. India did not hold the referendum, apparently wary of an adverse mandate by the Muslim-majority region.
The UN also set up a commission for India and Pakistan for mediation over Kashmir – a development that led to the establishment of the Line of Control (LoC), a 700-km-long de facto border separating India and Pakistan-administered parts of Kashmir.
The UN continued its push for a diplomatic end to the Kashmir issue over the subsequent decades but to no avail.
Following the 1971 war, India and Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement, in which both countries agreed to settle their differences “through bilateral negotiations”.
This was a major shift from international mediation, as India preferred direct talks to avoid external pressure. The Simla Agreement became a cornerstone of India’s Kashmir policy, which rests on the dispute being bilateral and necessitating no third-party intervention.
Pakistan shelved the Simla Agreement in April, barely days after New Delhi unilaterally suspended the Indus Waters Treaty – a 1960 river-sharing agreement brokered by the World Bank – after blaming Islamabad for the killing of 26 tourists in the mountain town of Pahalgam in India-administered Kashmir.
India says Pakistan has been sending ‘terrorists’ across the Line of Control since 1989, a watershed year for the region when a separatist movement gathered pace in India-administered Kashmir.
Pakistan denies that it materially backs the Kashmiri rebels, while acknowledging its moral support for the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination.
New Delhi’s stance hardened in 2019 when it made a constitutional amendment that stripped India-administered Kashmir of its political autonomy.
The move made India-administered Kashmir a formal part of the country’s union territory, further reducing any possibility of third-party mediation.
Haider says the May 7 attack backfired for India because it brought the Kashmir issue back into global headlines.
“India wanted to establish deterrence against Pakistan. That failed. It wanted international support against Pakistan. That failed, too. And, at least in the short term, Kashmir is back on the international radar,” he says.
Ejaz says Pakistan has “always wanted international mediation” on the Kashmir issue.
“How much can be built on that remains to be seen because that also depends on whether the US has the bandwidth to move from crisis stabilisation to dealing with what causes the crises,” he adds.
Ganguly of Stanford University says Trump has a “habit of making off-the-cuff remarks”, given his “unfounded belief” that he is a “great dealmaker” capable of solving every global problem.
“Consequently, I would not attach great significance to his remark unless, of course, there is some meaningful follow-up on the part of (US Secretary of State) Marco Rubio.”
