EDITORIAL: As India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ordered his army chief Gen Sir Roy Bucher to “go ahead”, the latter asked Defence Minister Sardar Baldev Singh “to go ahead with what?” “Go ahead with the ceasefire”, replied the minister. That ceasefire led to peace in occupied Jammu and Kashmir which was on the verge of falling into Pakistan’s hands in the wake of an armed revolt against the Maharaja Hari Singh’s rule.
India had learnt the hard way that its so-called accession excuse was no more tenable. It moved out of the battlefield and went for diplomacy. Prime Minister Nehru met his Pakistani counterpart Liaquat Ali Khan in Karachi in August 1953 and “it was their firm opinion that this [Kashmir issue] should be settled in accordance with the wishes of the people of the State”. And they agreed that the “most feasible method of ascertaining the wishes of the people was by fair and impartial plebiscite”.
This led to the grant of special status to Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian constitution, which was revoked by India’s incumbent government in 2019. That Gen Bucher is authentic in his narration about Nehru wanting a ceasefire followed by a plebiscite the Indian leadership then and now don’t want the world to know is a grim reality.
So, the Bucher Papers, which tell the whole truth about the Kashmir question, have been classified as state secret by the Indian government. Since the classification as “sensitive” material enforced by India did not go beyond 25 years there are calls for declassification of the Bucher Papers. But that’s not acceptable to the Indian government. India doesn’t want the world to know that not the so-called accession but the Kashmiris freedom fight had actually led to the ceasefire and New Delhi’s agreement to concede autonomy to Kashmiris under Article 370.
The Bucher Papers have been kept at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) as part of ‘India’s cultural history’, but these are inaccessible for glance by the public. Many have tried to read these papers, but that didn’t happen. An Indian activist, Venkatesh Nayak, filed multiple appeals to seek the documents from the NMML under the transparency law. The library advised Nayak to approach the foreign ministry and have its permission to declassify the Bucher Papers for academic research.
“Our view is that the papers need not remain ‘classified’ beyond the reach of academicians,” the NMML told him. When another activist approached the NMML he was informed that the foreign ministry was requested to declassify the Bucher Papers. But the ministry has rejected the request, because the papers contain “military operational matters in Kashmir and correspondences amongst senior government leaders on sensitive political matters on Kashmir”. This kind of approach to the Bucher Papers very much fits into the psyche of Modi’s mind who snatched whatever little autonomy was available to the Kashmiris under the revoked Article 370.
The said article was the byproduct of India’s defeat on the battlefront in Kashmir in 1948, and its revocation is denial of the truth Gen Sir Roy Bucher tells in his Bucher Papers. It is important to note that India’s Central Information Commission has observed in its order that the disclosure of files provided Gen Sir Roy Bucher to NMML, which may throw light on ‘accession’, is in ‘national interest’. Unfortunately, however, the commission has stopped short of ordering disclosure of these documents related to the period of 1947-49.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023