For the better part of two days last week. India's gaunt, silver-maned V. K. Krishna Menon waved his arms, flashed his eyes and showered the U.N. Security Council with words. When the torrent finally petered out, the exhausted Menon held the alltime U.N. record for a single speech—7 hours 48 minutes. It was a performance worthy of a Southern Senator, and had a purpose familiar to any Southern filibusterer hoping to frustrate the majority will. Menon was out to stall Security Council proceedings while India's moralizing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru completed India's illegal annexation of most of the strategic state of Kashmir.
Kashmir, a mountainous never-never land that lies jammed in between China, Tibet and Afghanistan, was a prize which both India and Pakistan had been eying greedily ever since the British left India. As a princely state, it was entitled to choose which new nation it would join. Kashmir's Hindu maharaja, panicked by an invasion of tough Pathan Moslem tribesmen from northwest Pakistan, chose India—despite the fact that 77% of his subjects were Moslems.* There followed a 14-month war in which the Indian army badly mauled both the Pathans and the Pakistani regulars who had come in to give the tribesmen a hand. By the time the U.N. succeeded in arranging a cease-fire in January 1949, India held two-thirds of Kashmir.
Four times the U.N. Security Council, by overwhelming vote, demanded a plebiscite in Kashmir. Nehru (whose family originated in the beautiful Vale of Kashmir) was well aware that in a free election the Kashmiris would almost certainly vote for Pakistan.
Nehru paid lip service to the principle of self-determination, but, in fact, steadily tightened India's hold on Kashmir. At first India ruled the state through 6-ft. 4-in. Sheik Mohammed Abdullah, a Kash miri Moslem who had long been a friend of Nehru's. But in 1953. when Abdullah showed signs of objecting to Indian domination, he was thrown into jail, and remains there now without trial. So-called "peace brigades" of Indians rigidly suppressed advocates of Kashmiri independence or union with Pakistan. At Indian behest, a hand-picked Kashmiri Constituent Assembly began to draw up a state constitution whose third article read: "Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India."
Two weeks ago, as the target date for adoption of the "Kashmir Constitution" rapidly approached, Pakistani Foreign Minister Malik Firoz Khan Noon appealed to the U.N. to head off Indian annexation of Kashmir. Pakistan, Noon declared, was anxious to see a U.N.-organized plebiscite policed by U.N. troops, but India had repeatedly blocked plebiscite proposals "by insisting on some new condition or raising irrelevant issues." Since 1949, noted Noon, "eleven proposals for settling the differences [have been] put forward. Pakistan accepted each; India rejected every one."