Former British national security adviser Mark Lyall Grant said the time has come for a serious effort to resolve the half-forgotten Kashmir crisis. The international community, led by the US and UK, needs to play a role in this effort.
Writing in the Forbes, Lyall Grant claimed the main victims of this latest Kashmir crisis were of course the Kashmiri people themselves, who had seen their freedoms and human rights once again trampled on. But Pakistan has suffered too from the long running crisis – its economic development since independence has been distorted by bloated military spending and its democracy compromised by the army exploiting the perceived threat from India and the division of Kashmir, he said. “Nor is it cost-free for India – it finds itself once again in the dock of international opinion, criticised by international human rights organisations, its reputation as the world’s largest democracy tarnished and its global ambitions dented.”
Grant, who served in Pakistan as a British high commissioner (2003-2006) wrote that due to the Kashmir issue the wider international community was also affected. “India’s latest action is bound to increase the levels of disaffection and extremism in the majority of Muslim population of Kashmir. That in turn risks increased radicalisation of Kashmiri populations in the West.”
Grant also wrote that in the UK, around 60% of the 1.5 million British nationals of Pakistani origin come from the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir, and so they were deeply affected by what happens in Occupied Kashmir. There could be national security implications for the UK, he said.
One of the top British diplomat for the last 30 years also said that there were potentially financial costs too. After the military stand-off in 2001/02, he said the British government estimated that a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan could cost the UK up to £20 billion as a result of the threat to British nationals in the region, increased migration pressures, lost business opportunities and humanitarian and reconstruction costs. More widely, Grant commented that the Kashmir crisis was a threat to the authority of the UN and the rules-based international system, “at a time when that system is already threatened by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and China’s militarisation of the South China Sea”. Multiple UN Security Council resolutions dating back to the 1940s and 1950s calling for a plebiscite to give Kashmiris a say in their future have been ignored by India, he said.
