Towards the Tashkent Declaration

In the aftermath of September 1965 Indo – Pakistan the tragic happenings in the Indian occupied Kashmir were having repercussions on the Pakistan side of the Kashmir border. A news report was published in Dawn, quoting a radio programme Sada-i-Kashmir that the Indian Government was thinking of dividing the valley of Jammu and Kashmir into three parts on linguistic basis. In addition to this, the police had started taking punitive action against the students who refused to sign a prescribed form conforming their loyalty to India with the promise to take active part in Congress activities. To show solidarity to the Kashmiri brethren, Mr. Bhutto called a press conference in Rawalpindi on 11 November 1965 and criticized the Security Council for its slow progress in solving the Kashmir issue. An analysis of Pakistan’s domestic atmosphere in the post-war period reveals that people felt betrayed psychologically and emotionally by the United States and were disillusioned with Pakistan’s adherence to the Western sponsored pacts. In the meanwhile the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin invited President Ayub and Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to meet each other on Soviet territory to reach an agreement on the restoration of peace between India and Pakistan. The Sino – Pakistan axis was the underlying cause, which compelled the USSR to play the role of a peace-maker and Shastri immediately accepted the offer. The central argument of this study is that the US and the Soviet policies towards the regional arrangements in South Asia broadly coincided and resulted in Tashkent Declaration. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the then foreign minister in Ayub’s Cabinet differed with the contents of the declaration and sought to include a commitment to finalize a solution of the Kashmir problem. But it was clear that Bhutto’s role and effective- ness was limited. Setting aside his exchanges with Swaran Singh, his talks with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko were also far from friendly. Ironically Ayub had to seek the help of the Soviet premier to overcome the obstacles to agreement imposed by his own Foreign Minister.