Bhutto 'saw a border in the Line of Control'

Former prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir Sardar Qayyum Khan, in an interesting revelation, said that late Pakistan prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was 'very sincere' about converting the Line of Control into an international border on returning from New Delhi after signing the Shimla Agreement with former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1971.

He ran into a roadblock at home with Sardar Qayyum Khan foremost amongst those to strongly oppose the verbal assurance given by Bhutto to Indira.

Sardar Qayyum Khan said that he had a 'five-hour' meeting with Bhutto at the time and made it very clear to him that if the LoC was turned into an international border the Indians would first demand that a straight line be drawn between the two countries, and would then take Azad Jammu and Kashmir as their own.

"But I believe that he actually wanted to go ahead with this, and even took the steps of closing a Free Kashmir office in the United States and also toppled my government as the first steps towards this goal," he said. Bhutto had also created a party, he added, to help sell the idea of the international border to the people of Pakistan.

Sardar Qayyum Khan said that he had sought to convince the then Pakistan leader that the move would be totally unacceptable, "but he actually believed that it could work, and that people would accept it. He possibly did not comprehend the full implications."

Pointing out that a five -hour meeting with Bhutto then was like a five-year meeting with another leader, he said that his arguments were validated a few days later when Indira Gandhi, at a meeting in India, spoke of the need to straighten the LoC before converting it into an international border.

Faced with strong opposition from within, Bhutto was not able to honour his verbal agreement with India.

The Azad Jammu and Kashmir leader insisted that the Shimla agreements did not clear the air of suspicions but actually created 'more mistrust' within Pakistan of India's intent.

- The Asian Age