Kashmir: A battle that has been laid off for far too long

By Amjad Ayub Mirza On October 22, 1947 Pakistan attacked the State of Jammu and Kashmir. It was the beginning of a conflict that would leave thousands dead and maimed and scar the lives of millions. It was also the start of a feud between India and Pakistan that continues to this day.
Attempts, thenceforth, made by India to try to resolve the issue of Kashmir peacefully through the corridors of international diplomacy have each time ended in a stalemate at the floor of the United Nations forcing India to start attempts to seek a resolution, all over again.
Meanwhile, religious terrorist outfits, working in unison with Pakistani military establishment and its spy agency the ISI, have kept the riot alive, which Pakistan presents to the world community as evidence of an ongoing imaginary mass separatist movement in Kashmir.
Today, as battle hardened LeT and other jihadi terrorists returning from Afghanistan have once again managed to infiltrate our territory and an all-out Indian military operation in Poonch is under way, which, by the way, has already cost the lives of 10 of our jawans and 15 infiltrators, the occasion begs to seek a new approach towards solving the seventy odd year old conflict that seems to be going round in circles.
At the time of Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 guidelines for the future of the 560 plus Princely States were stated in the 1935 Government of India Act according to which, The Indian (princely) state’s…accession to a Federation (Pakistan or India) … cannot take place otherwise than by the voluntary act of the Ruler of each State.