03051962 Text of the speech made by Mr. Krishna Menon (India) in the Security Council meeting No. 1009 held on 3 May 1962.

03051962 Text of the speech made by Mr. Krishna Menon (India) in the Security Council meeting No. 1009 held on 3 May 1962.

Yesterday afternoon [1008 th meeting], when Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan began his observations, he referred to the time table of these meetings. We have nothing in the way of complaint to make, but it is my duty-and a compelling one-to make the position of myself and of the Government of India clear in this matter.

We are met here at the request of the Government of Pakistan. We have taken no initiative in calling this meeting. The request was made sometime ago: a considerable amount of negotiation or exchange of opinions with various people took place, and ultimately this date was decided upon. I regret I was not here at the earlier meetings when Sir Muhammad spoke, and I convey to him that it was not by way of discourtesy, but because my commitments in my own country do not permit me to leave India for more than a few days. I am in the position that I have to return tomorrow evening. But so far as we are concerned, we shall try to make all our observations this afternoon in reply to Sir Muhammad's statement and also in regard to the newer facts which have not been adduced in his speech but which are taking place in India currently in connexion with this problem. We are prepared to sit into all hours of the night, if necessary, but so far as my delegation is concerned it will be impossible for us to participate in this debate after tomorrow. This is in no way a discourtesy to the Council, because the meeting was fixed for a particular day, and it is assumed that when Governments are represented from such distant places, those proceedings will be continuous, for none of us can forsake his duties at home in order to participate in proceedings over here. My Government is anxious to assist the Council, to assist itself and indeed the Government of Pakistan, to have a view of this problem as it is.

Now, having said this, I proceed to the subject-matter. We are met here as a result of a letter dated 11 January 1962 [S/5058], sent by the Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the President of the Security Council in which it is pointed out that the efforts for a "just and amicable settlement of the dispute, have failed to open a way towards such settlement". I suppose this means that the Pakistan Government has come to the conclusion that there was nothing to be gained by what they called "direct negotiations". If by negotiations you mean exchange of views, the Government of India is always open to this. But ever since 1949 we have said that there cannot be negotiations on the substance of sovereignty.

But their letter would indicate that the Pakistan Government had come to the conclusions that there was then, no use, taking any other step than coming to the Security Council once again, and this is reinforced by the fact that my Government, my Prime Minister, invited the President of Pakistan to come to Delhi. The Security Council meeting was asked for and precipitated while these exchanges were going on. Naturally my Prime Minister replied to say that we cannot have this argument in two places: either you talk to us or you talk to the Security Council. These passages here indicate to those people of good-will who are constantly talking to us outside about bilateral and trilateral negotiations and so on, that the Pakistan Government has in the initial stage ruled that out.

Then comes the second part of the letter which states: "Recent pronouncements by responsible personalities in India have emphasized that the situation is charged with the utmost gravity". If there is gravity in the situation, the charging has been done by the Government of Pakistan, not by us. The very fact that the Council was called and was still going on in this lackadaisical manner and that there had been no great urgency is an indication that there is no grave urgency or crisis in relation to this. We repeatedly informed this Council-and you, Mr. President, are familiar with this problem intimately that we will take no initiative in the way of the use of force or of altering the situation in such a way as to disturb the peace of our continent or of the world. The Government of India has always made the commitment that, however correct its position may be legally, morally, politically and Charter-wise, it is prepared to alter that, even in the interests of justice, by the use of force. That is still our position.

Then the letter goes on to say that the Defence Minister of India said," we have not abjured, violence in regard to any country who violates our interests". This is not a very correct quotation, but I do not want to quarrel with the words. This statement was made to the Fourth Committee of the General Assembly in connexion with our position on colonialism, that if any part of our country became a victim of aggression, then there was a general feeling here that the American newspapers call it the image of India" but we did not create that we would in no circumstances use force. This is not a sensible view to take because India has an army, an air force and a navy, maintained at considerable cost to the taxpayer and perhaps to a certain extent-but only to a limited extent through the retardation of our economic development. Therefore, as a State we are not a pacifist State. And if we spoke truthfully, that is no crime. When we said that we have not abjured the use of violence, that is because we have troubles on our frontiers. Pakistan itself knows that when it has probed our frontiers more than our patience would bear, we have tried to teach it salutary lessons now and then. But that is what the statement means.

The letter goes on to say that the statements made by us constitute "a grave threat to the maintenance of peace in that region". No country, either in the world or in our region, has contributed more to the lowering of tensions and the maintenance of peace in South-East Asia, and even those who are not politically in full agreement with us would be willing to admit it at least in private. The letter further states that the Pakistan Government "feels that the Security Council should be made cognizant of the situation at the earliest opportunity".

I have been at great pains, although I was not here on the first day, to read every line of what Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan said, and also to listen to the speech he made as far as it could be heard yesterday and read it over last night. I have not seen in these statements that anything new has been communicated to the Council or that any proposals for a speedy settlement of the dispute based on the principles of the Charter or in regard to the history of this matter have been put forward. It would be easy for me simply to have an index of the previous statements made before the Council in 1957 circulated this I have done informally-in order to place before the Council members the key to the text of the Security Council proceedings on the statements submitted by the Government of India because, having gone through several pages, I feel it would not be fair to expect that those who are not intimately connected with the problem will be very familiar with every aspect of it. While we have no desire to introduce this as a Security Council document, we should like it to be made available for the information of the Council so that it may enable me to abbreviate the statements I am making. It is not necessary to read all the quotations, all the statements, and one could skip over a certain number of things.

What has happened? One further fact; we meet, and I hope no one will discount this, and proposals are being made; we meet in the shadow of a threat made by the representative of Pakistan in this Council. Here is what he said:

"If the Security Council does not want the elements in the State who started the liberation battle to start it again, if the Security Council does not desire that the tribesmen should get out of hand and pour into Kashmir again, if the Security Council does not desire that the people of Pakistan should get out of hand and-if I may mix the metaphor-take the bit between their teeth and run away with the whole system of ordered government, and if the Security Council does not desire that powerful neighbouring States should plunge into the vortex" the vortex of war, I suppose he means-"when it starts again, the Security Council had better take note of the realities of the situation." [1007th meeting, para. 63.] It is not for me to comment on this statement in so far as it is addressed to us. My Prime Minister has replied yesterday by saying that this argument by threats is not going to have the slightest effect on any decisions we are going to take, and no one knows it better than the Government of Pakistan.

Then it has been said that we have made certain offers in regard to this. At various times we have suggested ways and means by which tensions could be lowered. We have at various times made suggestions on this problem, as it is called, although Kashmir is not a problem but an integral part of India, and you do not call your country "a problem"; and the other day the Prime Minister said that we could negotiate even without any previous changes being made beforehand, and that has been taken as though it were an offer of some kind. The Prime Minister said the other day that various suggestions had been made in the course of the previous few years about the solution of the problem, and among them was one that the basis of talks should be the existing position so as to hear some reality. about the talks. What Pakistan had been doing was something unrelated to the present position. He said that since the President of Pakistan had rejected that basis the question did not arise of using it again. Therefore, just because someone makes a reasonable proposition or suggests a way of meeting someone somewhere, which is rejected so that nothing happens, you do not start from there again. Otherwise it would not be possible to think aloud.

This really means that when we left the Security Council 1957 we left it in the position that what was to happen was that Pakistan must vacate its aggression. We have two aggressors in Jammu and Kashmir-Pakistan and China. Some of you may have different feelings about the two but as far as their position in Jammu and Kashmir is concerned, they are identical. And, as I shall show later on, they are not only identical but they seem sometimes to play with each other in order to embarrass us. Therefore, what we said in 1957 was that the aggression must be vacated. Aggression has been established by the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan; aggression is a fact which can be noticed any day; aggression is proved by the fact, again, that Pakistan has illegally annexed this territory under the terms of its Constitution; aggression is also established by the fact that there has been considerable augmentation of troops-without the knowledge of the Security Council in the first instance and afterwards, not with its connivance, but within the purview of its knowledge of what has been taking place in Pakistan. That is by way of introduction. Now I proceed to deal with this matter.

As I said a while ago, there is nothing new in these statements. They are reiterations of what we would call misstatements, or statements with paragraphs taken out of their contexts, and so on. Thus I think that you, Mr. President, as an old member of the Council, will perhaps turn round and say, "Then why waste time? Cannot we go on?" Unfortunately, it so happens that the Security Council has new members, and, what is more, you have permitted these statements to be made-or, rather, these statements have been made-and they have to be met in part. As I said just now, we shall try as far as possible to avoid repetition, especially because, in the course of Sir Muhammad's six hours of speaking, there was no proof of any threats. There was no proof of anything whatsoever except the threat made by the representative of Pakistan himself, and if there are any changes in the conditions that exist they will be the changes to which I shall draw attention in the latter part of my observations-changes which will be substantiated by the facts as they exist today.

In the course of the statement made by the representative of Pakistan very little, if any, reference was made to the proceedings before the Security Council since 1953 or thereabout; that is to say, the more recent proceedings were totally ignored. The Government of India has no right to expect that another country will either ignore or take cognizance of this, that or the other; but the fact does remain that in 1957, in the two long sittings which we had, the Government of India made its position clear, correcting large numbers of misstatements that had cropped up; and that when Mr. Gunnar Jarring came back from India and Pakistan, the main part of his report was concerned with drawing the attention of the Security Council to the fact that conditions had changed not only as regards India and Pakistan but as regards the political and power relations in South-East Asia itself. Therefore, whatever UNCIP might have said with regard to the implementation of the first part of the resolution of 13 August 1948 in the early half of 1949, those conditions had long ceased to exist, because that was written when the Security Council was not being taken into confidence by the Government of Pakistan in relation to aggression or to the participation of Pakistan armed forces or other matters which the Commission discovered afterwards.

So we regret that no notice has been taken of those matters because perhaps, if it had been taken, Sir Muhammad with his very considerable experience of the judiciary in India and afterwards of political affairs, and more recently of the highest judicial tribunal in the world, the International Court of Justice would have been more objective. As I have said, no threats of this kind have been proved.

In this statement there is a reference to a liberation movement which will start all over again, and that liberation movement comes into play in the remainder of the speech also. My plan, in submitting my observations, is to deal with any new points-if I can find any-in this statement, and give the Council as brief answers as possible to the repetition of the allegations and arguments of previous times, to give cross references to the more elaborate statement made in 1957, which forms part of the proceedings of the Council, and refer to what we call the changed conditions and the concepts that obtain in the continent, the new perspective that exists today on the roof of India in the Himalayan region with the intrusion of China into our territory, and also to deal with the findings on behalf of the Security Council itself in the Jarring report. Coming to the text of his statement, if one may so call it, the thesis seems to be that there was a liberation movement in Kashmir. That liberation movement was sought to be suppressed by the Maharajah, and those who went in afterwards in the form of raiders, and ultimately the Pakistan Army, were those who were supporting the liberation movement. Particularly with the large number of States here who have either achieved their liberty through liberation processes or who are interested-as we are all interested as Members of the United Nations-in national this is word with which much play can be made. It is quite true that there was a liberation movement in Kashmir. Neither Pakistan nor its predecessor, the Moslem League in India, had had anything to do with it. What is more, they have been opposed to it. And I shall quote from Mr. Jinnah to show that he was opposed to it at the time. This liberation movement, this nationalist movement, really started as a Moslem movement: afterwards it became a nationalist movement. That nationalist movement tried to bring an end to the feudal regime inside Kashmir before Indian independence. It sought no assistance from the tribesmen or from Pakistan, or even from the rest of India, except in the way of general political affiliations.

Therefore, when we speak about the liberation movement in Kashmir, to us it means one thing. I do not know what it means to Sir Muhammad, but from the way it is presented it apparently must mean something else. The liberation movement in Kashmir was the "Quit Kashmir'' movement and was parallel to the "Quit India" movement in the rest of India itself. When Gandhi started the "Quit India '' movement on 8 August 1940 that was notice to the Empire to go-that is to say, direct action against all the works of the Empire, as such, and large scale resistance. A parallel movement grew up in Kashmir called the "Quit Kashmir '' movement, meaning thereby the removal of the Empire from Kashmir. It was not particularly aimed at the institutional monarch or princedom but was part of a national liberation in India. This was opposed by the Moslem League, which was the precursor of Pakistan. It is difficult for some of you gentlemen, without a background and knowledge of Indian development, to understand this.

Then, the next argument is that this liberation movement was sought to be suppressed by the Maharajah who, according to The Times of London, which is always very accurate in counting people, has somehow assessed that 237,000 people not 236,000 but 237,000 people were killed in Kashmir. That is neither historical nor factual. In the Second World War only 400,000 were killed. But this fantastic report was put out. There was no such mass killing or anything of that character. It is quite true that the Maharajah was not in favour of the national movement; which Maharajah is? The British Maharajah was not in favour of the national movement. So the British Maharajah put all our people in prison. But the British have a habit-my friend, Mr. Boland, who is opposite here can confirm this-to consider the prisoners of today the friends of tomorrow. They negotiate with them and what is more, even when they are in prison, it is conveniently arranged for them to get together for consultations and things of that kind. All Maharajahs put people in prison in that way. And this "Quit Kashmir" movement, which was a real nationalist movement and had nothing to do with Pakistan or tribal holdings in the country, was put down.

Having said that, I would like to draw the attention of the Council to a very small account of the history of Kashmir. When I say "history", nobody needs to be alarmed. I am not going to bring out books. But all these things are part of the background. This is not a case of a no-man's-land somewhere, some country which one of these great Powers found somewhere and where a flag was put up or something of that kind: it is not a case of a no-man's-land being snatched by two people. That is not the position. Kashmir had always been a part of India, whether under what in Europe would be called prehistoric days or later on. Kashmir has a long history since the foundation of its capital, Srinagar, Srinagar was founded by Emperor Asoka in the third century B.C., that is to say, it was part of the Buddhist hegemony at that time. There were many Kings - Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, Sikhs and Afghans-but it was always a part of the mainland of India. After Asoka's empire dwindled away-the valley of Srinagar, was part of the Kushan Empire of the first century B.C.-a Buddhist council was held in Srinagar. King Harsha, in the years 1089 to 1101, had a lord of the gate appointed to look after Kashmir. That was a sort of viceroy. Kashmir was one of the provinces of the Empire of the Great Moguls afterwards.

During the decline of the Mogul Empire, Kashmir and Gilgit which was part of the Maharajah's suzerainty and which has now been absorbed by Pakistan illegally, came under the rule of the Sikh ruler Rajit Singh, who was then fighting the Moslems, while Jammu and Ladakh and Baltistan were ruled by Gulab Singh, whose name you have heard and whom Sir Muhammad conveniently interchanged with Sir Hari Singh on many occasions.

In 1846, as a result of the Anglo-Sikh War, Kashmir and Gilgit were ceded to the British, who, in turn, granted it to Gulab Singh for consideration. That is where modern Kashmir begins. By the Treaty of Lahore these places went to the British; the British transferred them to Gulab Singh and the hegemony of Kashmir and all those territories under the suzerainty of the Maharajah began from that time. Gulab Singh entered into a treaty with the British, acknowledging the supremacy of the British Government and thus subjecting his sovereignty to the suzerainty or paramountcy of the Crown.

The authority of the paramount power of the States extended inter alia to a field of defence in external affairs and, in certain aspects, in internal affairs; that is to say, none of these princely States were independent in the international sense. There were a few territories under the British Crown which exercised this authority, not by the power of the United Kingdom or by the power of Britain, but by the fact that Britain was the ruling authority in what was then called British India. However, the rights and obligations of the paramount power were not created or sustained by treaties alone. They existed independently of such treaties, overriding them to a great extent, I want to make this point because the matter has been raised time and again that when the British went away, they said, "Our obligations to the princes are over." They could not do anything else because they could not carry out those obligations. This was so because while those obligations rested in the British Crown, the strength for carrying out those obligations came by the fact of the Government of India.

In other words, paramountcy has two aspects. Paramount has a kind of notional aspect in the same way as the leadership of a State rests in the Crown. I do not know whether Sir Patrick Dean will agree with this or not, but the British Crown today is a many-headed one. The crown of South Africa is not the same as the crown of Australia; we have no crown at the moment so we will not go into that. But the British Crown is not a monolithic crown. In the Kingdom of Canada or shall I say the Queendom of Canada, they are all different heads of independent States. The British Crown, it is quite true, in the person of the monarch, entered into friendly treaties with the princes of the time. That is what they were called. But actually they were either conquered or whatever it may have been-I will not analyse it. But the British Crown could not. function in relation to a prince in India except by means of the revenues or the armies of the administration of India, functioning through the Political Department.

And so, what happened? When the British left, the Crown remained for one more year. India being a Dominion, its King was the King of India but the Crown decided, under advice into the history of which we will not go, to tell the princes, "We cannot protect you anymore. You cannot exercise any rights." This is very important. Because the reference is only to rights. What the Crown said at that time was that the States could not exercise any more rights against the British Crown. Nothing was said about the obligations of the States. They could not exercise any rights against the British Crown because the British The Crown was in a difficult position because if, after the British left, one of these States had got into a conflict either in Pakistan or India, they would have been involved. For that reason, they kept out.

Under the terms of the Government of India Act 1935, to which India and Pakistan are equal partners, the India of today is a succession State of Britain. Pakistan is not. It is a State carved out of parts of India that did not want to remain with the rest, by agreement. It is a new State, admitted to the United Nations as a new member. We were not admitted as a new State; we were here. We have taken on all the obligations, the assets and the liabilities of the British Government. We have a succession State, whether it be as a result of the Japanese Treaty or anything else. We were a succession State and, as such, inherited the functions of paramountcy. This is to say, irrespective of the absence of the Crown, those things that were done by British India at that time had to be done by others as well. But the Treaty certainly was between the prince and the Crown.

The British Government succeeded to the utmost. power over India, which was possessed de jure and de factto by the Mogul Emperor and acquired de facto by the East India Company and finally assumed by the East India Company de jure by the disappearance of the Emperor. The Crown was now in India what the Emperor had been, a completely sovereign power, predominant over all others and claiming allegiance.

The tone adopted by Canning is explicable only if one understands that the Crown had succeeded to the whole authority of the Empire in so far as it chose to exert it, and the Crown, unlike the Emperor, had means fully adequate to make. active use of its powers. The Crown at that time had means fully adequate, but it lost British India, that is, once it ceased to be a Government of India-the same person was Governor General and Viceroy; once he was merely the Governor General, not the Viceroy-the Viceroy had no longer any implementary powers.

It is thus an established fact that the British Crown itself did not acquire paramountcy rights this is the point I want to make-by an express grant, cession or transfer. In this context a declaration issued by the Crown terminating its relationship with the States could determine only the Crown's own future relationship with the States. It could not have the effect of divesting the succession Government of its status vis-a-vis the States and its rights and obligations in relation to them inheriting the supreme power in India.

I say all this not in order to raise a legal problem. But, judging by the way things are spoken about, as I said, it would look as though this is some island in some unknown sea and that we are both quarrelling about it. We are dealing with an integral part of India, historically-not only in ancient times but in the continuance of the transfer of power-this is one of those things which it is very difficult for those who have not been acquainted with the British system of government to appreciate and understand.

With the coming into force of the Indian Independence Act on 15 August 1947, the suzerainty of His Majesty over the Indian States lapsed. We admit that Suzerainty is nothing unless it is exercised - but the fundamentals on which it rested remain ed. The essential difference in the security requirements of the country and the compulsions of geography did not cease to be operative with the end of British rule in India. If anything, in the context of world events, they have become more imperative The Central Government of India, which succeeded the British, was unquestionably the paramount power in India. And here, if I may interpolate, if we abdicated or resigned from this position, both we and Britain would be in a difficult way, because we took over a considerable amount of liabilities in the same way as we took over the assets. Unquestionably the paramount power of India, both de facto and de jure, the Government alone was the only competent independent sovereign in India, that is, the de jure sovereign Government in British India.

There was a special responsibility on the part of this Government to protect all the territories in India from external aggression. The withdrawal of the Crown makes no difference. That is why the Maharajah of Kashmir appealed to the Viceroy, to the Governor-General, because it is the duty of the British Government to go to their protection from external aggression. It was not the Viceroy's business to go there to protect his subjects against a feudal ruler. And that was why there was no interference in British India in regard to the "Quit Kashmir" movement. But when foreign invaders came in, and when information was received by the Maharajah in that way, on the one hand he protested to Pakistan, and on the other hand he appealed to the Prime Minister of Britain, and it was the duty of the Government of India therefore to protect all territories in India from external aggression and preserve peace and good order throughout the country. I will not elaborate on this matter. There it is.

That is the background of this question. I think it was the representative of Pakistan himself who referred yesterday to the fact that India is always insisting that the positions of Pakistan and India are not the same in relation to Kashmir. That is true in more than one respect. It is true in the respect that Pakistan has no locus standi there. And it is true in another respect: the armies of the Union of India are in Kashmir because Kashmir is part of the Union. The armies of Pakistan are in India because they are an aggressor army. And therefore our position is that we will not be treated like two peas. in a pod in this matter. And there can be no question of any intervention, any good offices or anything. And I say this with all the responsibility that rests on me as a member of the Government of India. We will never consider this question on the basis of equality between Pakistan and India-a fact which has been recognized by the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan times without number. Even with regard to the still-born plebiscite administrator ship, there was no question of Pakistan having anything to do with this matter.

Then, the next lot of things that have been dealt with is the question of accession. The President is aware-for he was at that meeting-that I dealt with this matter at great length on the last occasion, and in the proceedings of the Security Council there are references to the law and the facts in relation to it.

Accession of Indian States to India is not anything like that. even started with independence. It was provided for by the British Parliament as early as 1935, when the dawn of independence became known to the practical British people and they did not want to leave India with a congeries of States warring one against another, whatever their differences with us might have been. The wiser among the statesmen in England, and Parliament as a whole, recognized that the unity of India was necessary both for the Indian people and for the world. And therefore, as early as 1935, twelve years before our independence, the British Parliament provided in the 1935 Act for these States to come into some sort of union. And so the idea of accession and the whole machinery, the whole mechanism, the architecture of accession, was provided in the 1935 Act. And that remained unchanged. It is not as though for the purposes of Kashmir, or because the British were going away, or because paramountcy lapsed, a new machinery was provided. That accession machinery is provided for in the Act of Parliament.

Afterward, when the British left India, what was the position in regard to what were then called the Indian States, all 561 of them, not one or two but 561? They were all "sovereign and independent" but none with either an international status or a capacity to defend themselves or a capacity to maintain their communications, or anything of that kind, no sovereignty in function or in practice, but sovereignty in the sense that there was a prince, there were guns fired when he went out, all that sort of thing. So the accession question, on the one hand, is an old question. It assumed a new complexion when the British withdrew from India, from undivided India-and, in the course of 1946, 1947 and 1948, many changes took place. Before dependence was actually established, for some time our Constituent Assembly, our constitutional discussions, were on the basis of a confederation in which the present territory known as Pakistan would also have been part of India. I refer to this because there are moving and dynamic factors in the matter.

Accession is provided for by law, What is required is that the acceding State have a particular form in which to make an application for accession, and when that application is made that application is made, that application is accepted, on behalf of the Government of India in the beginning, but later on behalf of the Dominion to which accession is asked for by the Head of that State. If you take an analogy in municipal law, there must be an offer and an acceptance; that makes a contract. That is, the acceding State makes an application, and it is also laid down-and particularly for those who have a republican tradition it is necessary to say this-under the law that application has to be made by the Head of the State. Whether the Head of the Maharajah, whether he is the feudatory or whatever, makes no difference. He was Head of the State; no other accession would be legal. That is provided for in the Act itself that the application for accession has to be made by the Head of the State. Therefore, in the case of these 561 States not only Kashmir - the applications for accession were made by the princes, chieftains, feudatories-whatever they were; and they were accepted, so far the States that acceded to us were concerned and the vast majority of them did-by the Government of India in the person of the Governor-General, who was the Head of the State on this side.

That takes us to the question of this particular accession. I will not at this moment go into the back-ground of the few days prior to the accession. I will not avoid it; I will come back to it. But let us get rid of this particular factor. The Maharajah sent a letter to the Governor-General that his State desired to accede to India he made this choice, for whatever reasons-and Lord Mountbatten, the Governor-General, wrote at the bottom "We accept the accession", or whatever the words were, I forget just what they were, but they were the prescribed words. Therefore, taking the analogy of municipal law, the offer by the State and the acceptance by the other side made a completed contract, and it is not possible, any more than with a civil contract, to alter it by any other instrument. There is no provision whatsoever-and the representative of the United Kingdom and his advisers will be familiar with this in the enactments of Parliament for "de accession" or conditional accessions or provisional accessions. An accession, once made, is complete.

Therefore, the accession of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, on 27 October 1947, was a full and final accession. The only way that any change could take place in this is by consent. It is laid down in the Act of Parliament- and in order to save the Council's time I will not read it out that any changes, any modifications, in the terms of accession must be asked for by the acceding party and agreed to by the Dominion concerned. In other words, they could not change it by themselves. Once in, you cannot get out.

Now while the Soviet spokesman may not agree with us he may even feel that we are rather backward, or that we are rather forward, or whatever it is all the others around here, and more particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, would have to agree, with all the emphasis possible, that there cannot be any question of any part of a federal State breaking away at will. The United States waged the most sanitary of all wars in human history where more people died than in the First World War, in order to maintain the right of the Union. In the case of the United Kingdom the questions did not arise in that way. But I believe there was an attempt made by one of the states of Australia, Western Australia is a federation; it is called a Commonwealth to secede. Their Constitution provides for a system of referendum they do not call it a plebiscite-on certain parts of legislation. They held a referendum. In that referendum, Western Australia, speaking in rough figures, by some 136,000 to 76,000, voted in favour of withdrawing from the Commonwealth. This matter was immediately referred by the dissenting party to the supreme tribunal in the British Commonwealth. It was before the Statute of Westminster and therefore it was not possible for any Dominion to have any legislation of this kind introduced, except in the British Parliament. It went to the House of Lords and the House of Lord shield that it was not possible, that it was not permissible, that it was ultra vires for anyone to secede. There is no way in our system of government for people to get out like that. What is more, if there is to be a reference to the people, it cannot be a reference to a particular part. It must be a reference to all of the Union. It is conceivable that if the whole of Australia-not Western Australia alone but the whole of Australia-had said by majority vote, "Let Western Australia get out", even though the legal position might be the same, the moral and political position might have been different.

So when people speak about plebiscites, about reference to public opinion, it is not as though you take any particular area and say: What about it? In this case no State would be able to remain entirely. I had not intended to develop this argument stage, but since it has begun I had better finish it so that I do not take any more time than necessary. I want the Council to understand that India today is a federation of about fourteen States and various units made up of a large number of elements, former provinces of British India and 561 States. India lives in the conditions of a troubled world. It lives in conditions of its own diversity: it is an old country but a new nation. If it were to be established and I would like the major Powers here to realize it-that any part of the country can secede, by either external intervention or propaganda or by some other means, or for some temporary disaffection of some kind, then we would put the whole of the Union in the melting pot and India would become not a congeries of States,
but a warring group of stateless entities, and this is not a situation we are prepared to face. It was never contemplated in the Act. It is not common sense and it will never be tolerated by our people, and let there be no mistake about it.

Therefore, when people speak about conditional accession, they may be speaking loose language, but there is no such thing as conditional accession. Once an accession is accepted, it is complete. Now the argument in favour of this has been that Lord Mountbatten-and it must be presumed that as a constitutional Governor-General he was acting with the consent of his advisers, his ministers or members of his council at that time; I do not know who they were, but let us assume that wrote a letter in which it was said that there would be consultation as regards the wishes of the people, or whatever it was.

I do not want to labour the point about ``simple futurity" or make a determination about "shall '' and "will" and "wish" or "desire" or anything of that kind. I maintain, and I maintained in 1957, that the act of accession is complete. And this letter stands separately and its only meaning at that lime was that India, having evolved out of a strong nationalist revolution, peaceful as it was, and what is more, unlike its neighbors, having adopted democratic traditions and democratic institutions, was anxious that this accession should not be merely rubber stamped by the Maharajah, who was not popular, but should also have the moral consent of the people. That is all it meant. It required a further moral reinforcement on the part of the people; and a moral reinforcement was sought not only in regard to Kashmir but in regard to a number of other States. There were States, small or large in the then undivided India, the then free independent India, which were perhaps unable to compare evils-but which were perhaps far more autocratically governed than, shall we say, Kashmir itself. In each case we made every attempt we could to obtain an assessment of opinion, and the only way to do it-and here we have good precedent was to do it the way the British did it. The British did not convene a constituent assembly. They did not ask for a plebiscite. They did not ask for circulation of the Independence Act in order to elicit public opinion. They negotiated with the main political party, as a great national movement, and the entire settlement of India was not on the basis of what we are accustomed to hear in these halls, of self-determination, in the abstract; but by an assessment of the people's will. The British abdicated in terms of friendship and transferred power by negotiation to the national movement. We have followed the same example.

As a national movement we were parallel to the National Conference in Kashmir, which had begun as a communal movement; in fact in India the earlier national movement was not necessarily as broad as it was later on. We consulted them, we consulted not just one individual, for it is always wrong to put up individuals and say that their opinions have changed. The whole of the nationalist movement was consulted, so we did not find ourselves in the position where we became the allies to the Maharajah against the popular movement. And that was the purpose of this phrase.

Then large numbers of statements have been made about what Mr. Gopalaswami Ayyanger stated, about whas the Prime Minister said, about what Sir B. N. Rau said and so on, and I hope Sir Muhammad will do us the honour, if I may say so, to accept the fact that not one statement is as good as another. Mr. Gopalaswami Ayyangar can be quoted in support of provisional accession, as it was called, or conditional accession Let me quote what Mr. Ayyanger said in some other statement. Mr. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, who preceded me here, and who was the Minister of State at that time, has been quoted times without number, and it is possible to do that because no member of the Security Council, with all the troubles they have in their own countries and in other countries, can be expected to read all this. He was quoted yesterday as having said that the accession was provisional. But at the 242nd meeting of the Security Council-not on Kashmir; on Kashmir we have not held 200 meetings as yet; we have passed the hundredth meet although Mr. Gopalaswami Ayyangar said the following: The instrument of accession is a document complete in itself. To the best of my memory, the instrument, in the case of Kashmir, does not contain any condition"-and you can examine the instrument; it is one application and then at the bottom of it we find the name "Mountbatten'' written "It does not state that the accession is provisional. The commitment which the Government of India made for themselves on the question of ascertaining the wishes of the people was contained in a letter accompanying the accepted instrument of accession. The Government of India is certainly bound by its commitment, but it is wrong to call the accession itself a provisional access. would sion.``

I shall deal later with the question of what is binding and what is a commitment, but I want to establish here and now. that the one person from our side who has been quoted against us. Mr. Ayyangar, has made it very clear at various times what took place. At the 285th meeting of the Security Council of 19 April 1948, Mr. Ayyangar stated:

"The accession which took place on 26 October 1947 was both legal and lawful."

In fact it could have been made in no other way. The Act of Parliament by which we were governed at that time as a British Dominion made no provision for any provisional or conditional instrument of accession. It made no such provision at all. Mr. Ayyangar continued:

"It has been followed up by India in the discharge of all the obligations that her acceptance of the accession has imposed upon her. She has saved the Jammu and Kashmir State from disintegration."

That is another point altogether. That is to say, it is not as if there was a contract written on paper, signed, sealed and delivered; by performance we have acted as a party to the accession. From the date of receipt of accession, we have been responsible and we have spent a lot of treasure in doing this for protecting Kashmir from external aggression and we have discharged the obligation of a sovereign Power. It is not as if there was merely an offer of acceptance to no purpose; this contract has been performed to the full although it is wrong to speak about contracts both in regard to marriages and in regard to these relations, because status has been acquired, the status of Jammu and Kashmir in the Union of India in that it is one of the many States in India, as integral a part of India as any of the other States or any part of India; it is as integral a part of the Union as anything else and the Union will resist any attempt at disintegration. It will do this for its own sake and also in the interests of all the States of Asia and the world; we will not countenance the disintegration of our country.

India, therefore, defends Jammu and Kashmir's status of integration. Who went there when she was attacked by the tribesmen, in the name of religion, those of the same religion were attacked and killed, as we shall show later, when the territory was being made the victim of rape, arson, loot and murder? It was the Indian Army, 'the Indian people and the Kashmir people who joined in repelling the attack. India is now resisting those who are attacking her integrity today. Mr. Ayyangar added :

"She is protecting the State's large population from the unfriendly attention of raiders from outside. The accession therefore subsists today and will subsist even after the fighting ceases and peace and order have been restored."

It has been said that once the raiders go, then we will do something. It did not mean once the raiders go; in fact the raiders have not gone, they are still there. The fact that they are called the army of a country which ought to be our friend does not stop them being raiders; they are raiders into our country and they still remain there. It could not said of them, as was said of the British Empire, that they came in a fit of absent-mindedness and stayed, they came here deliberately and that is that.

On the question of accession, therefore, the accession is full, it is complete, it is final. There is no law in our system, and there is no power except the power of "force majeure", of external force, that can dismember India; in fact, for the information of this Council, the Indian Parliament is not competent to divest itself of territory nor to meet our neighbours in some way. Without looking into the logic of it, we tried to transfer certain territories in the east of India to them, but the Parliament of India has no right to divest itself of territory. It would need an amendment of the Constitution and it would require a two-thirds majority of the two Houses, which you would never obtain because we do not have a ruling party with a two-thirds majority. If we had, it might be all right, but we have not. So much for accession.

Then we come to what is called the question of sovereignty. I myself would not like this word sovereignty to be bandied about very much because it is undefinable. It varies within the context of things, but broadly speaking, in the context of the United Nations, I will give you some idea of what it is. So far as the sovereignty of Jummu and Kashmir is concerned, it has become the sovereignty of the Indian Union by the act of accession, by the treaty of the Maharajah with the British Crown. Both by the functional aspects of paramountcy and by the fact of accession, sovereignty resided in the Union of India, and so when we speak of the sovereignty of the State of Jammu and Kashmir and the sovereignty of the Union, they are interchangeable terms. The exercise of sovereignty in certain spheres would be within the State according to our Constitution, and this sovereignty has never been questioned by the United Nations. On the contrary, it has been admitted in many places, as I shall point out. It has been admitted in the assurances given by the Commission [UNCIP] to the Prime Minister and the Government of India, and two things at least make it clearer. One is the responsibility for the security of the State. Responsibility for the security of the State rests with India, and I would like to ask the Council how, under international law or in the practice of civilized nations a country can take upon itself the responsibility for security and defence unless she is sovereign over the territory or, in the case of a Trust Territory or something like that, the responsibility has been placed upon it by international authority.

Responsibility for the security of the State vests in India, the Commission told us, according to the resolution of 13 August 1948. The Commission further stated that the sovereignty of the Jammu and Kashmir Government over the entire territory of the State shall not be brought into question. This was when the question of the evacuation of Pakistan troops and local authorities and so on was being discussed. Assurances were given on behalf of the Commission that the sovereignty would not be brought into question. It was also stated that there should be no recognition of the so-called "Azad" Government, which is spoken of here as if it were another Government. It is part of the decision of the Security Council that there shall be no recognition of the so-called "Azad" Government. In fact, at that time the "Azad" Government was merely the local authorities and in the course of the squabble it acquired some kind of a status. In the arrangements made by the Commission, it was for the Government of India- not for the Government of Pakistan-to give assistance if assistance was required for the maintenance of law and order; that was in the exercise of our sovereignty. It has been definitely said that under the existing cease-fire lines -at the time of the cease-fire mention was made of various places where there were all these pockets-it was for the paramount authority, the Government of India, to give them assistance. There was no other sovereign in the entire territory. The de facto authority may in varying degrees be said to be exercised by the Government of Pakistan on the one hand and the Government of China on the other.

Thus the Government of India maintained garrisons to prevent the incursion of the tribesmen and to guard the main trade routes. This relates to the territory now occupied by Pakistan, over which the Commission said on numerous occasions Pakistan had no authority, and in which the Government of India was to maintain garrisons to prevent the incursions of tribesmen-because Pakistan is not the only country with which we have a frontier; we have other international frontiers and therefore it was our responsibility to maintain the outer perimeter of India. The outer perimeter of India is our responsibility and all that lies behind that perimeter becomes our territory.

The last of these assurances for the exclusion of Pakistan from all the affairs of Jammu and Kashmir is that in fact if a plebiscite at that time had been possible, if the thing had not been prevaricate in that way, things would have changed. If a plebiscite had been held, the Plebiscite Administrator would have had to function through the State of Jammu and Kashmir and not through Pakistan. Pakistan might go there as an amicus curiae or to offer good offices, but had no position in the matter at all. The Government of India was responsible to the United Nations and you can read the whole of these documents and see that in each case when the Prime Minister asked the Commission "Is this the case ?", the Commission replied: This is the case, your interpretation is correct." These therefore are the assurances; they have been distributed as United Nations documents and are available to you. I shall not quote the numbers, but they are in the Official Records of the Security Council. They are here for you to look at. Therefore, sovereignty has not been questioned by the United Nations. It flows from function, it also flows from the fact that the Union of India is one and entire, and its sovereignty springs from the Act of the Constituent Assembly as implemented over all India.

Sir Muhammad goes on to deal with aggression, and much to my surprise he says it is an academic question. I do not know whether he had in mind the debate that goes on year after year in the Sixth Committee trying to define aggression. It may be that some people may regard that as academic. But so far as we are concerned, the aggression in Kashmir, either by Pakistan or by China, is not academic; it is something that cats into our vitals, it is something that affects our national integrity, to put it milely; it is something that sits on our economic development; it is something that contributes to the unsettlement of our continent. Therefore, aggression is not academic to us.

This is what Sir Muhammud said:

"My second line of argument will be that, whatever may be the merit of that part of the controversy-on one side the claim; on the other side, the denial of it-it was after the so-called aggression..." [1008th meeting, para. 21].

But with thousands of miles of territory occupied with, according to some people, forty battalions, according to others, twenty-two battalions-they need thousands and thousands of Pakistan troops; they are part of the regular army of Pakistan, today modernized, thanks to their military allies-with all this, you cannot call it academic. It is almost like saying, when two people are having a fight and one man has his hand gripping the other man's throat, "Why are you worried about this? We are together".

I continue to quote:

It was after the so-called aggression, whether it be related to the situation created by the incursion of the tribesmen in October 1947, whether it was the entry of the regular forces of Pakistan into 'Azad Kashmir. Whatever may be the situation with regard to that, it was long after these two dates that the Commission's resolutions of 13 August 1948 and 5 January 1949 were accepted by the two Governments," [Ibid].

I am prepared to agree with this. But if that were so, then why does Sir Muhammad raise the question of accession ? -because accession is admitted in the resolutions, sovereignty is admitted in the resolutions he cannot have both ways. Let us take it from the resolution of 13 August 1948. Whether the provisions of this resolution are capable of implementation we shall see later. But if the resolution of 13 August 1948 is the beginning, then we are to examine what the position is in relation to that resolution On 13 August the Pakistan Government did not inform the Security Council-and I do not want to use strong language - but withheld from it the information in regard to their own military position in the area Pakistan is now occupying. At the time of the 13 August resolution the Commission told us that the Pakistan Government had no authority, that their troops were not functioning, that they were not in functional, de facto possession of the northern areas. On 13 August Pakistan had not illegally annexed, under the terms of its own Constitution, any part of the Union of India, and therefore, since 13 August and 5 January-the two resolutions must be taken together-if that is the position, certain other things have taken place. Therefore, if for a moment they dismiss the idea - let us not quarrel about the tribesmen, and this, that, and the other what has happened? After all, there are only three resolutions that the Government of India has accepted: the resolutions of 17 January 1948, 15 August 1948 and 5 January 1949. The Security Council has since passed many resolutions; we have not accepted any one of them. But because of the traditional hospitality exercised in our country, when people came to us we received them and talked to them. So the issue is that these resolutions created no situation.

I would submit that since the resolution of 13 August 1948 also, aggression has taken place and aggression is continuing today-I shall deal with that in a later part of my observations. That is my main purpose in participating. There has been the occupation of the northern areas; there has been the receiving of the so-called accession from the rulers of Hunza and Nagar; there has been the occupation of Gilgit; there has been the annexation of Baltistan; there has been the taking-in of various territories even apart from the continual infringement, or attempt at infringement, of our borders, to which I shall a moment. aggression. Therefore the aggression is a continuing

So Pakistan, in this case, begins to look almost like a colonial Power of the nineteenth century seeking an expanding frontier and, in order to protect one frontier, it seeks a frontier beyond that, and then to protect that frontier, it seeks a frontier further on. We had a Viceroy in India called Lord Curzon, who enunciated this policy of the expanding frontier until he found himself in Afghanistan, much to the discomfiture of our friends of the present time. Therefore aggression to us is not academic.

I shall have to deal with this question of aggression again, because when I come to make our submission to the Security Council we shall not merely turn to Pakistan, because we do not regard ourselves as on the same plane, or the same level, with it in this matter. We shall have to ask the Security Council where it stands in this matter. The Security Council has given certain assurances. The Security Council has not repudiated the Commission, It is no concern of ours whether the Commission sent a copy of the letter to the other side or not, to Pakistan or not; that is a matter between the Commission and the Security Council. When that Commission-a commission appointed by the Security Council so composed that there was one nominee of the Pakistan Government, the former Government of Argentina with which at that time they had intimate connexion, and two others not nominated by either of us when that Commission gives us an assurance, that assurance is given on behalf of the Security Council, otherwise these men have no position, no locus standı, and there is no need for them to come to India or to do anything of that character.

Now therefore, the question of aggression as it exists today is not academic, It is real. But perhaps this may be an occasion to dismiss the whole question of aggression at this time. The Council will remember what I said a while ago about the question of the liberation movement in North Burma. What actually happened in Kashmir was that when the British withdrew from India, the Maharajah in his wisdom, or lack of it, was probably trying to play both sides against the middle or not make up his mind-you know, Maharajah's minds are often made up for them by other people-but however that may be, then the accession had not taken place. And I speak to you with all seriousness on behalf of the Government of India; until that accession took place the Government of India made no attempt, by political persuasion, by pressures of any kind or by the sending of armies or anything of that character, to get any State, let alone Kashmir, into India. But what does Pakistan do? I would like at this point to refrain, because too many extraneous issues have been brought in already; Sir Muhammad referred to them. But in the case of various other territories which were contiguous to Pakistan, approaches were made to us, but we did not encourage them. The ruler of a certain part of Balochistan wanted to seek accession to India. We did not encourage him. But on the other hand, Mr. Jinah tried to play with the Maharajah of Jodhpur on the territorial frontier or the Nawab of somewhere else, far away from Pakistan but on the territorial frontiers. We did not put any pressure on the Ruler of Bahawalpur, whose State was contiguous to India.

There again, let me dispose of this issue. It has been said here that there is some theory somewhere that because the population of Kashmir is, in the majority, Muslim in its religion, therefore they should accede, by some written or unwritten right, to Pakistan. We do not accept this. We are not a theocratic State; we are a secular State. In our country, in our Union and under the law of civilized nations it is not religion that qualifies people for citizenship. Now, it may be said that is what we agreed to. We never agreed to anything of this kind, and if anyone quotes British statesmen or parliamentary enactments, I would like the Council to look at the entire text of what is being quoted. The parliamentary enactment in relation to the transfer of power in India, as the representative of the United Kingdom will, if necessary, inform you later, did not concern itself with the Indian States at all. In fact, it definitely stated that the Act had no relation whatsoever to Indian States; it concerned only British India. Lord Mount batten has been quoted as having told the princes somewhere, "Although you may accede to any body you choose, you must take into account geographical considerations and communal representations."

I want to say to you with the fact of authority behind me that he made no such statement. What has been quoted is what somebody said Lord Mountbatten had said. The text of his speech is in the archives of India. What he said was, that while it is true that each of you is entitled to accede to one or the other Dominion, the question of your sovereign independence, that is impractical, or your acceding to any body you like does not arise, because you have to take into account geographical contiguity. Not a word was said about communal composition in the address to the Chamber of Princes or to anyone else: not a word was said about the ruler being a Muslim who would accede in this way, or the subjects being Hindus who should accede in that way.

We are a secular State. Religion is not a qualification or a disqualification in our country, and we stand by this as fast as we can. In fact, Kashmir is one of the acid tests of this. The introduction of this argument is so facile and people who do not know the in's and out's of this thing are at least delighted to accept it. There has been no statement on behalf of the Government of India, either by my Prime Minister or any. member of the Government or by the Governor-General who was then the Head of the State, to any authority saying that communal composition was one-that is, the religious composition of the factors in accession. What was said was "geographical compulsion".

So far as Kashmir is concerned, the State of Jammu and Kashmir we must not forget that it is not Kashmir but Jammu and Kashmir, it is one-is contiguous to the Union of India, is has a frontier with Pakistan, it has a frontier with Afghanistan and a frontier with China. I have not heard any arguments in this Council-there may be elsewhere-that parts of Kashmir should accede either to Afghanistan or to China. But as far as Pakistan and we ourselves are concerned, they are nearer to us than to them. It is the factor of geographical contiguity that is really relevant because the accession has taken place. Jammu is practically part of the extension of the mainland of India, and all the communications and things of that character are taken from India. So even in regard to geographical contiguity, if you want to be very liberal on the other side, you might at least say that they are equal. But they are not.

In fact, it is not merely mileage that covers it, it is the whole set-up of things. So the argument that three-fourths of the population of Kashmir are Moslems and that therefore they should accede to Pakistan-is groundless for then what would happen to the 60 million Muslims inside the Union? India today is the third largest Muslim populated State in the world. Only Indonesia and Pakistan have more than we have. There are 60 million Muslims living in our country who are content with a secular State, who are accustomed to the habits of democracy, who are as loyally affiliated and patriotic as a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, on Animist or anyone else in our country. How can we betray the faith that is vested in the country by our compatriots who are of another religion than the Mohammedan religion? Religion plays no part in the adherence of our people to our State. Therefore, I speak with some feeling on this because this is one of those things that has been put over, surprisingly enough, among Western communities which ought to be turning their faces against them. This seems to make some kind of appeal because there has been, in international connexions, talk of the Islamic belt and the Islamic brotherhood and this and the other. This sort of thing has happened in the world so many times. Today nationalism and membership of the Union are what characterizes the citizens of our country.

So there is no special claim in regard to Kashmir except that there could be only geographical contiguity or accession. If the Maharajah had acceded to Pakistan, we would have accepted it because we have a large enough country and we have large enough troubles of our own. That is why we said from the housetops in regard to another matter whatever our troubles are with Pakistan, whatever Pakistan's internal difficulties, whatever some foolish people may say, we have no desire, in spite of our past connexions, for any part of Pakistan to come into our country because we have troubles enough of our own, and, therefore, we leave it at that. So then we come to this question of accession. I dispose of it in this way.

What happened? Soon after the British left, the leaders. of the real liberation movement were imprisoned. I believe that at that time some of them were released. I don't quite know. One of the people whom the State authorities were seeking to arrest at that time was the present Prime Minister of Kashmir. He certainly was not a liberationist sent by Pakistan. One of the people imprisoned by the Maharajah for association with the liberation movement just before independence was Pandit Nehru, who is now the Prime Minister of India. So all these people are interested. At that time there came into Jammu and Kashmir, fishing in troubled waters, numbers of people who have been spoken of as raiders, whatever that means. We have no evidence to think that they came to steal a couple of cattle or go away, or something of that kind. They were people that we were told were tribes-men. I have not been able to find out what that means. If it is meant that they came from Trans-Pakistan, from the territory beyond the Durand Line, there is no evidence of it. But let us assume there is. If they came from beyond the Durand Line, what right has a civilized State, which was in existence either as a result of an agreement between its neighbour, the British Parliament and itself, to permit its territory, its fuel, its food, its communications to be used in order to permit aggression on a neighbouring State. That is not a practice of civilized nations. They have the right to give them sanctuary, if they want to, but they have no right to allow them to pass over their territory. At that time the then Prime Minister, who a few days before was still a citizen of India, said: "What can we do, they are our co-religionists ?", and this idea of religion was raised again. And so people came day after day.

I have no desire to repeat what I said before. If you refer to the proceedings, to the key which I have circulated, you will find entries in his diary of a Major-General Scott. He was and is, I believe, now a British national. He was a General seconded by the British Government to command the army of the Maharajah. He was the Commander-in-Chief of the Kashmir forces. Major-General Scott reported at various times to the Maharajah. He was the Chief of Staff of Jammu and Kashmir. He submitted his first report of border raids from Pakistan on 31 August 1947 long before the accession. Protests were made to Pakistan by the Maharajah, and they were. submitted by Major-General Scott.

The Kashmir Government protested by telegram to the West Punjab Government against armed Moslems from the Rawalpindi District infiltrating into the State. Protests were also made to the Deputy Commissioner. If you know the conditions that existed there you have got to think back fifteen years. We were the same country and a few people would come over this way by mistake or for the purpose of stealing cattle or for some other reason. This sort of thing happened. Anyway, protests were made.

Then on 6 September there was a marked increase in the activities of the Pakistan troops on the main road. A patrol visited Ali Beg twelve miles south of Bhimber. Major-General O. de T. Lovett, commanding the 7th Infantry Division, was informed. On 13 September 1947 a Pakistan Army patrol visited Ali Beg and Jatlai, fourteen miles south of Bhimber, both in the State territory.

I could read from Major-General Scott's diaries further entries showing how the rate of strength increased, and by About 18 September the railway service between Sialkot and Jammu-Sialkot is in Pakistan, Jammu is with us-was suspended by the Pakistan authorities. I will tell you why they should not have done it. It was suspended by the Pakistan authorities without any reason and in contravention of the stand-still agreement. Armed gangs entered these places, including Poonch, on the State border. On 28 September hundreds of armed men with service rifles, automatics and spears, attacked a State patrol near Chak Akka. Hundreds of armed Pathans entered State territory on 30 September. The Jammu and Kashmir Government protested on 3 October telegraphically to the Pakistan Government that hundreds of armed people from Murree hills in Pakistan were operating in Poonch; they were also protesting the lack of essential supplies, including petrol, rice, salt and cloth, which were being withheld.

"The fighting broke out with renewed activity by armed men in the Chirala area, near the Jhelum River. There was fighting between raiders and State forces."

State forces went into operation. Whatever may be the opinion of the Maharajah and his Government, he had the responsibility of protecting his State against raids from outside.

"If 10 October sections of the Pakistan Army, followed by an armed gang attacked Pansar Village in Jammu."

And this is the first time that we have evidence-although it may have happened before of elements of the Pakistan Army actually entering Jammu and Kashmir while Sir Muham mad and others were telling the Council that no Pakistan troops were in Kashmir, until afterwards they were found out:

"Pakistan has cut off from Kashmir her supplies of petrol, etc."

The economic boycott, again, is a violation of an agreement  The Maharajah, in his wisdom or lack of it, instead of acceding to one Dominion or the other-which would have been better for him, for better or worse-asked for what is called a stand-still agreement. Until he could make up his mind to accede to anybody, he wanted both India and Pakistan to maintain the normal amenities of life, such as, post office communications, and so on. Kashmir regards salt as a very essential requirement-salt, petrol and things of that kind; trade relations, post office communications, and all those things.

I notice that it is implied in Sir Muhammad's observations that this stand-still agreement constitutes some recognition of Pakistan's sovereignty or paramountcy, or something of that kind. The fact that the Jammu Government asked for a standstill agreement with regard to posts and telegraphs simply means that there was one postal and telegraph system for the whole Union before partition, for the whole of what is called the subcontinent. Some letters go this way, some go that way. They had the same arrangement with us. They asked India for a stand-still agreement. We said, "We are prepared to discuss any agreement with you. Come over and talk about it." But by the time they could come over and talk about it, the standstill agreement had been made with Pakistan, it had been violated, and an economic boycott was imposed by Pakistan. And an economic boycott in these essential commodities of life is very hard on a population such as that of Jammu and Kashmir.

So it was violated, and these raids had come through over hundreds of miles of Pakistan territory. They were well organized and well disciplined, and no one in the world who knows anything about these things could say that these were all raiders coming to lift cattle. They were led by Pakistan officers. It is quite true that there were some guerrillas among them, as Pakistan is discovering now, but they were properly led. They were offered by the Pakistan Army. There appeared on the scene a general called General Tarig. It sounds like a Phillips Oppenheim story, or something like that. General Tarig was none other than a commissioned general of the Pakistan Army who afterwards was dismissed-probably because he was too enthusiastic-but he is coming back through the rear door. Anyway, there was a General Akber Khan, who also was operating in the area. By that time these raiders had reached a very large number and had taken on the aspect of a large army.

We at that time appealed to Pakistan to deny its territory to these raiders and not to give them assistance, and the Prime Minister wrote to Mr. Liaquat Ali Khan, who was Prime Minister. The Governor-General of Pakistan, Mr. Jinnah, the founder of the State, who is highly revered in Pakistan and treated with a degree of affection in India, explained to the Governor-General of India on 1 November 1947- and this is on record that he had no control over the forces of the "Azad'' Kashmir Government or the independent tribesmen, engaged in the fighting. We shall show the Council pictorial records taken at that time of Mr. Jinnah held court with these very tribal chieftains in the territory of Kashmir-the people over whom he had no influence.

Then, later, Lord Mountbatten advised Mr. Jinnah of the strength of the Indian forces at Srinagar and of their likely build-up in the next few days. That is to say, the Indian Army, having entered and having pushed back the tide of invasion almost within a few hours of its approach to and possible sacking of Srinagar-they were turned back at the airfield Lord Mountbatten advised them of the large build-up. He told him that he considered the prospect of the tribesmen entering Srinagar in any force was now remote. This led Mr. Jinnah to make his first general proposal, which was that both sides he had placed himself on a plane of equality by then meaning Pakistan and ourselves, should withdraw at once and simultaneously. Then Lord Mountbatten asked him to explain how the tribesmen could be induced to remove themselves, he having told us before that he had no influence. His reply was, "If you do this, I will call the whole thing off." They were the people over whom he had no influence. We at least suggest that the public propaganda line that the invasion was wholly beyond Pakistan's control was not true.

On 22 December, protests having failed to bear fruit, the Government of India formally asked the Government of Pakistan to deny the raiders all access to the use of Pakistan territory in operations against Kashmir - "all military and other supplies, all other kinds of aid that might tend to prolong the present struggle". It was a normal request for a Government to make. Even today, if a United States airplane-or a United Kingdom airplane, for that matter-wants to fly over our territory, they ask our permission and we give it. They do not just walk through anywhere, so to speak. That is a normal custom And if the airplane is loaded with any goods of a military character and touches down and, if we so wish, we go and inspect it. The same applies to us. That is normal international practice. So we asked them to deny aid, and as the Prime Minister has said in one of the letters that was read the other day, it was easy for Pakistan to stop these troops because they had to come by bridges which could either have been very easily defended or obstructed, or could have been blown up. Therefore, there was no excuse whatsoever.

This was an undeclared war against our country, in regard to the facts of which this Council was deceived by the Pakistan Government and its representatives. On 30 December 1947 the Prime Minister of Pakistan said:

"As regards the charges of aid and assistance to the invaders by the Pakistan Government, we emphatically repudiate them. On the contrary the Pakistan Government has continued to do all in their power to discourage the tribal movements by all means short of war."

If that is the position, how does Pakistan claim a position in Kashmir, in this territory it has occupied, and then talk about the tribesmen and things of that character? On 1 January 1948 India came to the Security Council and requested it to call upon Pakistan to put an end immediately to the giving of such assistance that is to the raiders- "which is an act of aggression against India." Some doubt has been expressed-unfortunately by people who ought to know better -whether we have ever complained about aggression. It is quite true that we came here under Chapter VI of the Charter, and not under Chapter VII, largely because, as I have said, fifteen years ago we had been, only a few days before the complaint, members of the same nation and the same country. Conditions were different. But we said that it was aggression even then. It was an act of aggression against India. I am sorry to say that the gentleman who sits opposite me, on 15 January 1948, told this Council solemnly:

"..the Pakistan Government emphatically denies that they are giving aid and assistance to the so-called invaders or have committed any act of aggression against India. On the contrary, and solely with the object of maintaining friendly relations between the two Dominions, the Pakistan Government has continued to do all in their power to discourage the tribal movement by all means. short of war.

"The allegation made by the Indian Government that the Pakistan Government is affording aid and assistance to 'Azad' Kashmir forces, or that these forces have bases in Pakistan territory, or that these forces are being trained by Pakistan officers or are being supplied with arms or material by the unfounded." Pakistan Government is utterly

I submit that this is contrary to the fact What is more. It was either at that time or a little before or after, that the Governor-General of Pakistan gave orders to the Commander in-Chief of the Pakistan Army, General Gracey, an Englishman who was acting for the permanent general, to wage war against India. Happily for the good of the world, General Gracey disobeyed. That is to say, he consulted General Auchinleck who in fact had no authority in this matter and they decided not to wage war. But the permanent Commander-in-Chief we have evidence of this and we will show it to you if you want-inspected the troops, and egged them on to fight; but in any case here was the Governor-General giving orders to his Chief of Staff to wage war against India.

At the 229th meeting, held on 17 January 1948-which is an important date because at that time the Security Council passed a resolution which was one of the few resolutions they accepted-Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, then Pakistan's Foreign Minister, who, I therefore assume, spoke with authority and knowledge, solemnly stated in the Security Council:

"One matter to which attention is drawn in the Indian statement is that the tribesmen, when they captured Baramulla, committed certain atrocities, including atrocities against the inmates of the local convert there. I have no knowledge and my Government has no knowledge with regard to what has actually been happening inside the Kashmir State, except so far as reports have appeared or communications have been directly addressed to my Government."

And these are the raiders against whom armoured cars and all the panoply of force of the Indian Army-within the short time available to us after receiving all the applications for accession-had to be used, and it took us four months before the Indian Army rolled back the tide of invasion. It was no joke.

Sir Muhammad knew all about this because, according to Father Shanks, the Roman Catholic Father of St. Joseph's Convent, General Cunningham, who was the Governor of the North-West Province of Pakistan-unhappily no longer in existence, and not by a plebiscite-sent troops to Baramulla to rescue Father Shanks. In a statement made as late as June 1958, Father Shanks said: "At the end of Mass, there was a thunderous knock at the door of the ward, and we thought that the end had come. It happened to be our rescue convoy, sent by Sir George Cunningham, Governor of the north-western frontier province of West Pakistan. And the rest of that day was spent in getting our belongings together in preparation for the trek out of Kashmir under the protection of a Mahsud officer and some non-commissioned men belonging to the regular army."

I shall have something to say about these individuals later. Mr. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, who represented India at that time, also informed this Council on 19 April 1948, before Sir Muhammad made his admission in confidence to the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan at Karachi on 8 May that :

"A mountain battey of the Pakistan Government, in civilian dress, has been sent to the front. It consists of some 1,300 personnel, out of which about 600 have been sent to the Nowshera front via Bhimber and 700 to Poonch via Palandri."

We had been observing the action at one of these fronts. At a subsequent meeting of the Security Council, ending in the adoption of its resolution 21 April 1948, Sir Zafrulla Khan did not deny this.

There is other evidence. A gentleman called Lord Bird wood, who is very well known to the United Kingdom delegation, though he is no friend of ours as he does not approve of us very much, has written a book on Kashmir. He says:

"Once again I draw attention to the obscurity surrounding the first use of Pakistan regulars in the war."

General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, in so far as they are prepared to discuss the matter, assured us that no regular unit was moved before May. That is the date when Sir Zafrulla Khan admitted that armies had gone. A battery of mountain guns with infantry escort were in action in an unsuccessful attack on Poonch on 17 March. Again on 21 March, General Kalwant Singh of the Indian Army had to abandon an attempt to land on the Poonch airstrip, since it was under artillery fire. The tribesmen had no artillery. He was, however, able to arrange for the landing of 25-pounder guns of the Indian Army, which were effective in saving Poonch for the Indians. On the Indian side, General Russell believed that regular troops were involved. He accordingly asked to be relieved of his command. That is to say, it was one of the unwritten laws of the Government of India that they would not ask British personnel to engage in any combat where Pakistanis were involved. We did not want British officers to be involved in this trouble. General Russell had opted to serve India. He was in command and, under those conditions, he withdrew.

The Foreign Minister, Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, informed the members of the Commission-in confidence-that the Pakistan armies had at the time, on 8 May, three brigades of regular troops in Kashmir, that troops had been sent into the State during the first half of May. Sir Muhammad stated that these measures had been taken as a result of the spring offensive of the Indian Army.

The Indian Army had a right to be in Kashmir. It was sent there to protect that territory against invaders. And if any other army came to push them back, then from that point of time they became allies of the raiders. Sir Muhammad went on to say that the three main reasons-as is stated in the United Nations Commission's first report which had motivated the entry of Pakistan troops into Kashmir were the protection of the territory from possible aggression by Indian forces-Indian forces had at no time gone any where near Pakistan-; prevention of a fait accompli in Kashmir by the Government of India; and the prevention of the influx of refugees into Pakistan. None of these arguments are tenable. They cannot be advanced by a civilized country. The United Nations Commission in the same report states:

"The statement of the Foreign Minister of Pakistan to the effect that Pakistan troops had entered the territory of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, and later his reply to a Commission questionnaire that all forces fighting on the 'Azad' side were 'under the overall command and tactical direction of the Pakistan Army', confronted the Commission with an unforeseen and entirely new situation.

"According to the Security Council's resolution of 17 January, the Government of Pakistan was requested to inform the Security Council immediately of any material change in the situation. In a letter addressed to the Security Council, the Pakistan Government agreed to comply with this request. The Government of Pakistan had, however, not informed the Security Council about the presence of Pakistan troops in the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan explained that, since the Commission had been charged to deal with the problems related to the India-Pakistan question, his Government thought that the information should instead be given to it by the Commission" it was so confidential

- "but he had been unable to do this previously because. of the delay in its arrival on the sub-continent."

But he had not had any difficulty in communicating other matters to the Security Council and, although on the one hand they denied it, on the other hand they were bound by the Security Council resolution of 17 January 1948, and subsequently the then Foreign Minister of Pakistan himself admitted that the Azad forces were under the overall command of the Pakistan Army. They glibly told UNCIP that they had been there since 8 May because if they had not gone there, India would have gone there.

The view of the Commission on this matter is important. In paragraph 4 of the appendix to Annex 27 of the Commission's report they stated:

"The Security Council resolution of 21 April 1948, which sets forth the terms of reference of the Commission, was adopted with cognizance of the presence of Indian troops in the State of Jammu and Kashmir

In other words, the Security Council could not be expected to abet a crime. They passed this resolution and asked that nobody else come in, knowing that the Indian Army was there. There was no secret about it; it was exercising its right para mounted the protection of the State and so the Commission said that was done with the cognizance of the presence of Indian troops in the State of Jammu and Kashmir :

"The presence of Pakistan troops in Jammu and Kashmir, however, constitutes a material change in the situation. inasmuch as the Security Council did not contemplate the presence of such troops in that State, nor was it appraised thereof by the Government of Pakistan."

A member of the Commission, writing later, on 7 July -- Mr. Korbel, who, I must say in fairness, was our nominee on the Commission, but still he was a member of the Commission and did not always take the view that we did wrote as follows:

"Sir Zafrulla gave the Commission a three-hour discourse on his concept of the background of the Kashmir conflict." -rather a short one-"His tone was calm, his language precise, and, following the best traditions of his English schooling, his narration was broken by good stories. Then came the first bombshell. Sir Zafrulla Khan informed the Commission that three Pakistan brigades had been in Kashmir territory since May. He explained the measure as an act of self-defence...

"The Commission explained to the Pakistanis that the movement of these troops into foreign territory without the invitation of that territory's Government was a violation of international law."

I want you to ponder this. It is one of several statements that I am going to cite in which representatives of the Security Council have said, as they have done on repeated occasions, that international law has been violated by acts of aggression. That is the first one. Then later, in May of 1949, Sir Owen Dixon, a member of the Australian judiciary, who can by no means be regarded as a partisan of India-his country is a military ally of Pakistan-said:

"I was prepared to adopt the view that when the frontier of the State of Jammu and Kashmir was crossed, on I believe 20 October 1947,"- that is before the accession-"by hostile elements, it was contrary to international law, and that when, in May 1948, as I believe, units of the regular Pakistan forces moved into the territory of the State, that too was inconsistent with international law."

I am informed by my staff that the President would like to have a recess.

The President: I would merely like to ask whether the representative of India would prefer to have a little recess now or whether he would prefer...

Mr. Krishna Menon (India): If the Council wants to have a recess, I have no objection. It does not inconvenience me.

The meeting was suspended at 5.5 p.m, and resumed at 5.20 p.m.

Mr. Krishna MENON (India): I was dealing with the facts of aggression against the territory of the Union by a Power that should be a friend of ours and a neighbour. Until just a few days before the aggression, we were parts of one nation.
On either side were people who are of the same family, inheriting the same traditions, and it was our hope that, while the amputation of India was a painful business, that surgical operation would bring relief and harmony. But that is another matter.

There are large numbers of other factors in this connexion, a great many of which are set out in the Official Records of the Security Council. In accordance with what I said at the beginning. I do not propose to go into them in great detail, but again I draw the attention of the Council to the key of those proceedings that I have circulated, where the subject headings are given.

Now we come to this other matter. As I said, much has been made of the kinship in religion, which is the alleged basis of the "claims'' that Kashmir should be part of Pakistan-right or wrong. First of all, it was said that this is the liberation movement of the Kashmir people, mainly Moslems suppressed by a Hindu Maharajah. I gave all the facts in connexion with it, and our views and sentiments on the matter are well known.

But now let it also be stated here that a great many atrocities were committed, atrocities of which Sir Muhammad had no knowledge; it is a great pity that the Foreign Minister of a neighbouring country had no knowledge of the atrocities that went on, while fanciful atrocities are known. Therefore, I want to deal with the first phase of this invasion, not in order to purvey the so-called atrocities, being accustomed to cruelty in the world, but in order to refute the argument that much this was a Muslim rescue operation or Muslim and Hindu domination.

The people who died in Kashmir were, by a large majority, people of the Islamic faith-men, women and children. The people against whom the worst atrocities were practiced were not Hindus merely, but Christian missionaries. And the evidence on this does not come from the Government of India but from others, such as United States journalists, who have been by no means friendly to India in the discussion of this problem, and certainly not to me. Therefore, we can take that as more or less impartial evidence. There is photographic evidence taken by an Associated Press photographer at that time, presumably an American, who flew over a section of Kashmir and saw villages in flames. The villages, in an area of ten miles long by ten miles wide, had apparently been set on fire by the invaders, who were scouring the valley and moving in the direction of Srinagar.

So there was no question of frontier loot. It was a well planned attack on the capital city of Srinagar-because he who dominates Srinagar dominates the valley, and he who dominates the valley dominates Kashmir. Therefore, it was a well-conceived military operation which was stopped in time by the Indian Army which flew in small units, in transport Dakotas and put men brought in the airplanes in the lines of battle straight away. That is the evidence of the Associated Press photographer, copies of which we have.

Then, on 10 November, a few days after the entry of the Indian Army, there was a report by Robert Trumbull, The New York Times correspondent. And here I want to say that while I am obliged to quote a newspaper report, I will not quote their opinions. I am quoting only a description of facts. Now Trumbull has written a great deal against the Government of India, about our shortcomings and that short of ideas. He lived in India for five or six or seven years. I was in Japan at the time, I believe. He said the following, under the dateline of Baramulla is a town of some thirty miles from Srinagar, where most of the atrocities took place. Now he said:

"The city has been stripped of its wealth and young women before the tribesmen fled in terror at midnight Friday before the advancing Indian Army. Surviving residents estimate that 3,000 of their fellow townsmen, including four European nuns and a retired British Army officer known only as Colonel Dykes and his pregnant wife, were slain. When the raiders rushed into town on
26 October, witnesses said one party of Mahsud tribesmen immediately scaled the walls of Saint Joseph's Franciscan Convent compound and stormed the convent hospital and little church. Four nuns and Colonel Dykes and his wife were shot immediately. The raiders' greed sometimes triumphed over their blood lust. A former town official said the raiders forced 350 local Hindus into a house with the intention of burning it down. The group of 100 raiders is said to be holding another 500 as hostages on a high mountain barely visible from the town. Today, twenty four hours after the Indian Army entered Baramulla, only 1,000 were left out of a normal population of about 14,000."

I hope you will forgive me if I say that at Baramulla lies buried the flower of the Indian Army. Not one of the personnel who went out to combat these people returned alive to his home. Commanding them was a Muslim officer. All lie dead, buried in that soil and our country, if nothing else, owes a debt of gratitude to these people who defended our territory at that time.

Here is another account from Father Shanks, one of the Christian missionaries working in the area-not in the pay of the Government. It is a story that Father Shanks would never tell in the beginning. He describes the attack on the convent, without giving his own name, as follows:

"The tribesmen-great wild, black beasts came shooting their way down from the hills on both sides of the town. They climbed over the hospital walls from all sides. The first group burst into a ward, firing at the patients. A twenty-year-old Indian ward, Philomena, tried to protect a Muslim patient whose baby had just been born."-No coreligion here.-"She was shot dead first. The patient was next. Mother Superior Aldetrude rushed into the ward, knelt over Philomena, and was at once attacked and robbed."-Robbed is a euphemism-"The assistant Mother Teresalina saw a tribesman point a rifle at Mother Aldetrude and jumped in front of her. A bullet went through Teresalina's heart. At that moment Colonel Dykes, who had assured us we would not be attacked, raced from his room a few yards along the terrace to get the Mother Superior out of danger, shouting at the tribesmen as he ran, but the Mother Superior fell, shot, and Colonel Dykes collapsed besides her with a bullet in his stomach. Mrs. Dykes ran from her husband's room to help him. She, too, was shot dead. While this went on Mr. G. Boretto, an Anglo-Indian, was killed in the garden before a firing squad."

Here comes a story wherein, irrespective of other considerations, one liks to pay a tribute to the young man :

"As the tribesmen raised their rifles, a young Afridi officer, who once studied in a convent school at Peshawar, rushed in and stopped them."

At least there are living characters with human qualities in these incidents.

"He had been told his men were raiding a convent and had run all the way from town. That saved all our lives for a few seconds."

I should be wanting in decency if I did not express the appreciation of our people for the courageous conduct of this young man who, although he was on the other side-he was a Pakistan officer-did not fear the Afridi tribesmen.

"We did not find Mrs. Dykes until the following day. She had been thrown down a well."

Another report:

"A Pakistan Army convoy was sent to rescue us. On the away from Baramulla we stopped at the village of Boniyar to seek the staff of the World-Wide Evangelistic Crusade Mission. At Baramulla the towns-people told me of a young Muslim shop-keeper who had sacrificed his life rather than recant in his creed of religious tolerance. His martyrdom had taken place almost under the shadow of the convent walls, and in the memory of the devoted Kashmiris he was fast assuming the stature of a saint."

Here we have a report, again from a distinguished American photographic journalist, Margaret Bourke-White, and I will quote a little from her book Half-way to Freedom:

"He, Mir Maqbool Sherwani, must have been a sort of Robin Hood character from the stories of the townspeople. told me, championing peasants who could not pay their exorbitant taxes, pitching into the police when he found. them beating up some luckless victim, bolstering the resistance of the people against their many oppressions. When the tribesmen invaded Kashmir and terrorized the countryside, Sherwani, who knew every footpath in the valley, began working behind the lines, keeping up the morale of the besieged villagers, urging them to resist and to stick together regardless of whether they were Hindus, Sikhs, or Muslims, assuring them that help from the Indian Army and People's Militia was on the way. Three times, by skilfully planting rumours he decoyed bands of tribesmen and got them surrounded and captured by the Indian infantry. But the fourth time he was captured himself."

This is perhaps the occasion here to say, in reference to the Indian Army and to the pushing back at Baramulla and so on that, as a matter of historical fact, the first resistance to the tribesmen, to the raiders, to the Pakistanis who came in, did not come from the Indian Army. They were a longtime in coming because the accession had not taken place and when it did they had to be shipped over. But the unclad, half-starved men, women and children of Kashmir, with nothing to help them but bare arms and bamboo sticks they were the people who felt the call of their soil and rallied to the defence of their country and their fellow beings. They were the people who offered the first resistance, so that when people speak of liberation or co-religionism, or whatever it is, let us remember that they were the people who offered the first resistance to the ferocious invasion that came along. Soon afterwards came the Army of India, at a time when partition had divided practically every unit. There was not a single unbroken unit in the Army of India at that time, because the soldiers had been allowed to opt for one State or the other, Gandhi was alive at that time. I say this because it is now fashionable to speak about the image of India, and even if you beat us black and blue we shall take it. Gandhi was alive at that time, and the Prime Minister records that in the anguish of his heart at the fact that so soon after independence his country should be involved in war, he went to him for counsel. Gandhi, then whom no greater man of peace even lived, said: "Your duty is to repel the invasion"; and the Army went in. We are not relying on the authority of a great man who is no longer with us, but this should be known to the world.

I have no desire to recount atrocities in this way, but in the whole tale of the invasion of Kashmir, until it became more or less a regular war, it was the forces of India--not by superiority of numbers or even by superiority of equipment, because we had the same, what the British left us-which rolled back the invasion and after coming to the Security Council here, not under compulsion as some people think, but because of the desire of the Government and the people of India which stopped the bloodshed.

What about the cease-fire ? It was not an army in retreat, but an army belonging to a country and a Government that placed its reliance on the United Nations and which continues to do, an army which regards the sanctity of life even of its opponents who had invaded the territory, which repelled the army which invaded the territory and brought about a cessation of fighting.