FLUSHING MEADOW: Pakistan today [Dec 6] charged before the United Nations that India was seeking to annex Kashmir without giving the inhabitants an opportunity to voice their wishes by any plebiscite. Mr Ziauddin, of Pakistan, made this charge during a General Assembly debate on the report of the International Law Commission. The Pakistani delegate alleged that the “richly gifted and much oppressed people of … Kashmir have already once been sold as chattels to the tyrannical rule of a petty feudal chieftain who was later installed as the Maharajah of Kashmir by the then British Government in India… .

“Are they again to be transferred to another sovereignty without being given an opportunity to voice their political wishes in a plebiscite?” he asked.

[Meanwhile,] Mr George McGhee, United States Assistant Secretary of State for Middle East and African Affairs, on his arrival in Ka­­rachi last evening [Dec 7] said that the USA would extend to Pakistan whatever help and assistance it could. … [He] said … he would discuss with the Pakistan authorities “subjects of mutual interest” including President Truman’s Point Four programme of aid to underdeveloped areas.

Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2024