On 17 December 2003, the President of Pakistan, General Pervaiz Musharraf, made an unexpected pronouncement. He told a journalist that Pakistan had 'left aside' the United Nations Security Council resolutions that deal with his nation's dispute with India over Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). At first glance, General Musharraf's conciliatory gesture appeared to mark an important shift: he was renouncing Pakistan's long-held policy that a UN-supervised plebiscite for the people of J&K should be used to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Further inspection, however, shows that the Pakistani president was forgoing little of substance; rather, he was confirming the reality that a plebiscite in J&K had not been an option since at least the 1972 Simla Accord signed by Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, which stated that all India-Pakistan differences would be resolved bilaterally. Given the various plusses that the plebiscite offered for the three parties immediately involved in the Kashmir dispute - India, Pakistan and the people of J&K - why was this poll never held? Furthermore, had a plebiscite been held, would it have solved anything? This article addresses these two questions. It examines how the proposal for a plebiscite to resolve the issue of J&K's disputed international status came about in 1947; discusses why the poll was never held and why it was off the India-Pakistan agenda by the early 1970s; and seeks to determine who might have 'won' had a vote occurred. The article concludes that - even had a plebiscite been conducted - it would probably not have resolved the dispute over whether J&K should be part of India or Pakistan. © 2005 South Asian Studies Assciation of Australia.
