The Shadow of Kashmir

One of the bitter disputes that came out of the violent partition of India and Pakistan was what to do about the Indus River basin, which sprawled across the borders with no regard to politics. The Indus, whose flow is twice that of the Nile, is Pakistan's lifeline; without it, all Western Pakistan would be a desert. Though only 8% of the basin's area stayed in India, it includes the headwaters of three of the six principal tributary streams. For one brief period in 1948, India, eager to divert the flow into her desert territories, cut off Pakistan's water. As the downstream areas turned parched and seared, excitable Pakistanis called for war, crying that a quick death was better than death by thirst and starvation. India agreed to turn the water back on, but the Indus remained a major source of the antagonism that has long divided the two nations.

Canal v. Desert. Last week Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru flew into Karachi on his first visit in seven years. The occasion: the signing of an Indo-Pakistani water treaty largely engineered by World Bank President Eugene Black. Under the treaty, India will receive the full flow of her three rivers. Pakistan will keep the three others. So that the Pakistani areas downstream of India's rivers will not turn arid, an Indus Basin Development Fund will construct a massive system of connecting canals, bringing water for the northern rivers to fill the empty southern river beds. Six foreign countries (the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and two newcomers to the foreign aid game--West Germany and New Zealand) will supply $640 million of the fund's eventual $1.07 billion cost. By opening 20 million acres to irrigation and providing a potential of 500,000 kw. of power, the Indus project (originally suggested by TVA's David Lilienthal) should raise the living standards of 40 million Pakistanis and ten million Indians who depend on the river system.

Stroll in the Garden. In Pakistan the Indus agreement and the presence of Nehru renewed hopes that progress might now be made on the bitterest dispute of all: Kashmir, where since 1949 Indian and Pakistan armies have faced each other across a U.N.-drawn crossfire line. The treaty signing over, Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan took his guest to the summer lodge at Murree, overlooking Rudyard Kipling's storied mountain city of Rawalpindi. For two days, as 70-year-old Nehru gradually perked up from the aftereffects of a recent cholera shot and a tooth extraction, the two British-educated leaders walked in the pine-fringed garden and delicately explored their differences. It was, said an aide, a "conversation by suggestion, by implication, by pregnant pause, by meaningful silence." Before each session. President Ayub presented his guest with a new rose or a sprig of garden phlox for his buttonhole.

On small points, progress was made. Both sides were agreeable to setting up staff conferences to consider such issues as settling counter-compensation claims for refugee property, apportioning the cost of pensions for employees of the old, undivided Government of India.

But each time Ayub edged around to Kashmir--where the Indian army holds the populous and lovely Vale of Kashmir and the Pakistanis cling precariously to the rocky mountain flanks--Nehru's hackles rose. To Ayub's suggestion that India by now ought not to be afraid to accept the U.N.'s recommendations for a plebiscite, Nehru replied that the plebiscite would only stir up ''communal feeling"--Nehruese for the probability that Kashmir's predominantly Moslem population, even after 13 years of living under Indian rule, would still vote to join their fellow Moslems in Pakistan.

In the end, his tooth no longer bothering him, Nehru flew off to New Delhi to pack for his trip to the U.N. General Assembly this week. Behind him he left a vapor trail of the oldtime Nehru rhetoric. To correspondents he stressed the great similarity in "texture" between the culture of northern India and West Pakistan, with an old Harrow boy's knowledge of English poets quoted Samuel Taylor Coleridge to explain the peculiar persistence of Indian-Pakistani bitterness: "To be wroth with one we love/Doth work like madness in the brain."

Watching him go, President Ayub confided to newsmen that at least he had got Nehru to admit that Kashmir was a "problem." instead of brushing off the Kashmiris' longing for union with Pakistan as a mere "historical memory." Warned Ayub: "All the things achieved in other fields will be nullified if the Kashmir dispute is not solved."

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