The newly revived United News of India may well have put Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee in a bit of a spot. By publishing what it believes is the “secret agreement” between Mrs. Gandhi and Mr. Bhutto which the Minister for External Affairs has been talking about, it has in a sense put him under an obligation to say whether or not this is what he has in view. He has evaded the issue in Parliament but at some cost to his own credibility which, whether he realizes it or not, has already been adversely affected. The UNI report is specific and cannot simply be ignored. And it will not be easy to contradict it. Broadly, the report makes two points. The government has in its possession a record of the discussion that took place between Mrs. Gandhi and Mr. Bhutto at Simla and that record shows that the two leaders agreed that the only possible solution to the Kashmir problem would be to freeze the ceasefire line with some minor adjustments. While the first point can be taken to be accurate because it is only natural that Mrs. Gandhi should have recorded the discussion with Mr. Bhutto, the second is clearly correct for the good and simple reason that the Simla agreement in its entirety is designed to freeze the ceasefire line resulting from the 1971 war.
If this line of reasoning is incontrovertible as it apparently is, it follows that there was no secret agreement. For the private “understanding”, if any, was formalized in the Simla agreement. Moreover, it cannot be said that Mrs. Gandhi either deviated from the offer Mr. Nehru had made in the fifties or concluded a deal which was against the national interest. There is, however, another possibility which is that an understanding more favourable to India was reached with Mr. Bhutto whereby he was to incorporate the so-called Azad Kashmir into Pakistan and thus end the myth of its being an independent entity and with it the Kashmir problem. There is enough circumstantial evidence that the former Pakistan prime minister tried to do so and he is on record as having told Indian journalists that they should understand his difficulties instead of accusing him of going back on his word. Nothing in Pakistan’s domestic situation could explain either his actions in respect of occupied Kashmir and his above statements. Only an understanding with Mrs. Gandhi could.
It is in poor taste to raise these issues at present when Mr. Bhutto is under sentence of death and his detractors find no stick bad enough to beat him with. It would perhaps be too much to expect them to appreciate that he had acted in his country’s best interest. But the fact remains that the dispute with India over Kashmir had been the undoing of Pakistan and not to speak of the immediate problems of persuading India to vacate 5,000 square miles of territory under its occupation and release almost 90,000 Pakistani soldiers and civilians in its custody, it was necessary to end the long-standing quarrel with India if Pakistan was to be able to attend to urgent social and economic problems and stabilize its policy.