Relevance of Simla Agreement

YET another anniversary has come. The Simla Agreement was signed by Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto 40 years ago on July 2, 1972. Here is, however, a minor quibble. It was actually signed after midnight; so, technically on July 3. Have its provisions been implemented? Short answer, ‘No’. Does it still have any relevance? Short answer, ‘Yes’. And that provides the reason for delving further into these questions.
The Simla Agreement was required from India’s perspective to establish durable peace and sanctify the principle of bilateralism with Pakistan after the India-Pakistan war of 1971. It ended in the east with the excision of East Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh. In the west, Pakistan gained some territory across the ‘ceasefire line’ beyond the Munnawar Tawi river in Chamb, and some ‘pimples’ of territory across the international border in India. A status quo ante situation was agreed upon under the Simla Agreement along the international border. Captured territories were exchanged. But the areas gained across the ‘ceasefire line’ in Jammu and Kashmir would be retained. India lost territory in Chamb, but acquired valuable strategic depth in the Kargil-Dras sector, which was the theatre of the Kargil conflict in 1999.
Incidentally, the ‘ceasefire line’ was deliberately re-designated as the ‘Line of Control’ in the Simla Agreement, a change in nomenclature that enabled India to end the tenure of the UNMOGIP (United Nations Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan). It was charged with maintaining peace along the ‘ceasefire line’ established by the Karachi Agreement (1949), but was found very irksome by New Delhi with its frequent calls for site inspections and constant nitpicking about border violations.
The two major decisions taken by New Delhi (read Indira Gandhi), and incorporated into the Simla Agreement that drew most flak were to return the territories captured by India across the international border and to return the 93,000 (mostly military but also civilian) prisoners of war (POWs) to Pakistan. The popular belief is that Indira Gandhi showed naïveté, and was deceived by the wily Bhutto’s nebulous promise during a one-on-one meeting that he would work towards converting the new ‘Line of Control’ in Jammu and Kashmir into an international border. Is this true? Three lines of argument are possible to question these popular myths.
First, it must be appreciated that Indira Gandhi had an inherited sense of history. She realised that imposing a victor’s peace on Pakistan would only ensure its enduring hostility in future. The humiliation of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles (1918) almost guaranteed the recrudescence of hostilities and World War II in 1939. It is another matter that the Pakistan Army, disgraced after 1971, quickly regained its primacy in Pakistan and is obsessed with the desire to avenge its humiliation. It did not allow India-Pakistan relations to normalise then. Or, ever after.
Second, the return of the captured territories and the POWs was equally informed by hard-headed calculations. New Delhi had consistently argued all through 1971 that its support to the Mukti Bahini and the insurrection in East Pakistan was an act of humanitarian intervention - indeed the literature recognises this humanitarian intervention by India to be a ‘just war’. It would have been disastrous for India to have held on to the captured territories thereafter for any base motive like bargaining for political advantage.
Third, the decision to return the POWs was equally pragmatic. For one, they were, in Bhutto’s memorable words, ‘a wasting asset’. The longer India kept them, at considerable expense, incidentally, to itself, the greater the opprobrium it was attracting, since many of the POWs were women and children. Besides, if India was to use these POWs as hostages it needed to remember that Pakistan was holding a large number of Bengali (Bangladeshi) military and civilian personnel as hostages to ensure the repatriation of its POWs by India. Furthermore, Bangladesh had incarcerated a huge lot of Bihari Muslims in camps around Dhaka, who needed to be transferred to Pakistan. Matters were further complicated by Sheikh Mujib’s strong desire to hold war crimes trials against senior Pakistani officials. It took much persuasion by New Delhi to talk him out of this insistence. Ultimately, a three-way repatriation of the POWs to Pakistan, Bengali (Bangladeshi) military and civilian personnel to Bangladesh, and Bihari Muslims to Pakistan was negotiated in 1974 to resolve these thorny issues.
Another controversial issue pertaining to the Simla Agreement is whether Bhutto had reached an understanding with Indira Gandhi to convert the ‘Line of Control’ into an international border, and that he reneged from this offer. Nothing, obviously, is inscribed in the Simla Agreement. New Delhi’s beliefs are largely based on P.N.Dhar’s account, written in 1995, about the one-on-one meeting between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in which he is believed to have made this offer. Dhar informs that Indira Gandhi told him about this promise immediately after the meeting. Abdul Sattar, who later became Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary and was also in Simla when the Agreement was finalised, has flatly denied that Bhutto made any such promise. When interviewed by me many years later, P.N.Haksar had an enigmatic answer regarding Dhar’s account: “Was he present in the meeting?” We shall never know what transpired in that one-on-one meeting. But, more disconcertingly, the Simla Agreement had also enjoined the Heads of State to meet again to reflect on all these issues, which was to be preceded by their representatives’ meeting earlier for this purpose. These meetings never took place.
Judging by subsequent actions, however, Bhutto did move some way towards converting the ‘Line of Control’ into an international border. The Northern Territories were incorporated into Pakistan, and ‘Azad Kashmir’ (Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir) was made a province of Pakistan in 1974. For its part, New Delhi installed Sheikh Abdullah in Srinagar and initiated some steps to draw Jammu and Kashmir more closely into the Indian political structure. These steps were probably designed to imbue the ‘Line of Control’ with the attributes of an international border. Then, why did this process stall, and not continue? The short answer is that both the main protagonists of the Simla Agreement became distracted and embroiled in internal affairs. A virulent drought situation, the railway strike, and JP’s Nav Nirman Movement claimed Indira Gandhi’s attention over 1973-74, later leading her to declare the internal Emergency in mid-1975. Bhutto was similarly required to deal with serious disturbances in Balochistan. The Pakistan Army had to be called out, which greatly assisted their rehabilitation, and return to their earlier position of centrality in the country’s polity. The quirk of circumstances, therefore, rather than any lack of will adversely affected this process.
What is left then of the Simla Agreement? Should it be consigned now to the dustbin of history?
This would be a hopeless overreaction. Article III, relating to the restoration of relations between India and Pakistan, lays out the full spectrum of normalisation measures that need being pursued. They include establishing greater communications through all available means, promoting travel facilities, resuming trade and economic cooperation, and exchanges in the fields of science and culture. Only the slightest reflection would reveal the distance that remains from realising these goals to even a minimal extent.