Did Pahalgam Attack Have A UN Angle?

Pakistan was waiting for an opportunity to bring the Jammu and Kashmir issue to the global agenda and resorted to the terrorism route to provoke India, observes Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.

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The latest consultation on the India Pakistan Question at the UN Security Council at Pakistan's request as a non-permanent member was as much a demonstration of the increasing irrelevance of the agenda item as the collapse of the UN Charter system for keeping international peace and security.

India has been of the view that the agenda item on Jammu and Kashmir was no more relevant after the changes in the state, but Pakistan preferred to keep it alive to internationalise the issue at an opportune moment.

Even after the Ceasefire Line became the Line of Control, a UN Peacekeeping Operation, UNMOGIP, is still deployed in the region.

Pakistan has realised that the internationalisation route to wrest control of Jammu and Kashmir from India is not available anymore because of the new power structure, which has changed from time to time after the UN Security Council Resolution, asking for a plebiscite under specific conditions.

But whenever there were signs of changes in the world order, Pakistan made efforts to agitate the issue at the Security Council.

One such occasion was at the end of the Cold War, when they expected that the Soviet veto would not be available for India.

They brought up the Jammu and Kashmir issue at every imaginable UN forum, but Indian diplomatic effort around the world defeated the Pakistani designs and the status quo continued.

Pakistan, in the meantime, became a failed State, the army regained control and the economic situation became grave.