This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
[Update: Thanks to Kumar for pointing out the errors I had made in the earlier version of this post. The corrected text is in italics.]
An organisation going by the name of the World Kashmir Freedom Movement convened a two-day conference in Birmingham, at the end of which the unelected representatives mainly from the Pakistani side refused to accept any conversion of the Line of Control in Kashmir into an international border. Any solution of the Kashmir issue must be according to the wishes of the Kashmiri people - so the cliche goes - but unless the self-appointed Kashmiri voices get more realistic, they risk being passed over.
Unsurprisingly the only reasonable view came from an elected member of India’s Jammu & Kashmir state legislature Mohammed Yusuf Tarigami, who attended another conference in the UK that called for “a soft but safe border/LoC between India and Pakistan to facilitate trade between the two sides and also to encourage exchange of cultural groups”.
Oh (tub-thumping) Lord !
Lord Nazir Ahmed, a Labour peer used the opportunity to hold forth on why India has no right to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council because of its refusal to honour a UN resolution calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir. Going by Lord Ahmed’s yardstick, Britain too will fail to qualify for a permanent seat on the Security Council, at least because of its failure to get UN authorisation before invading Iraq.
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