Kennedy to Trump: America's tightrope act on Kashmir, then and now

New Indian Express

17-05-2025

U.S. President Donald Trump's recent repeated reiteration of his offer to mediate between India and Pakistan has reignited a familiar and uncomfortable diplomatic discourse. His latest comments raise difficult questions about the international community's role in a conflict shaped by colonial legacies, nationalism, and decades of insurgency cum terrorism.
Going by President Trump's own mercurial reputation and in an effort to ring-fence the growing India–U.S. strategic partnership, the Indian establishment has generally refrained from directly challenging him. As expected, Trump's remarks were warmly received in Islamabad and curtly dismissed in New Delhi, each reaction shaped by entrenched strategic postures and historical interpretations.
India's response to Trump's offer was unequivocal. Reiterating its longstanding position, the Ministry of External Affairs stated that there was 'no scope for any third-party mediation.' New Delhi's traditional line remains that the Instrument of Accession signed by Maharaja Hari Singh in 1947 rendered Jammu and Kashmir an integral part of India. While India did approach the United Nations in 1948, it did so with the limited purpose of seeking Pakistan's military withdrawal from territories it had occupied; not to invite external mediation on Kashmir's sovereignty.
Indian skepticism of American involvement is rooted in historical experience. In the 1990s, comments by U.S. officials such as Robin Raphel, the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian affairs, caused significant unease in New Delhi, and it took time to repair trust. Historically, the United States began formulating an independent role on Jammu and Kashmir in the early 1950s, initially in deference to the United Kingdom. Together, the two nations co-sponsored several UN resolutions, but their strategic interests increasingly diverged over time.
During the Cold War, U.S. policy was shaped more by the need to contain communism than by any principled stance on Kashmir. A practical reading of the U.S. engagement, however, reveals a more nuanced reality. Despite its public posture of rejecting third-party involvement, India has, on occasion, quietly leveraged U.S. influence when it served its interests in managing relations with Pakistan. Post-9/11, the U.S. focus shifted toward transnational terrorism, particularly when it intersected with extremist groups based in Pakistan with links to Jammu and Kashmir.
The fact is that India has capitalized on direct or indirect U.S. involvement when it has aligned with its strategic interests in the context of India-Pakistan relations. Even during past peace overtures such as the backchannel talks in the early 2000s between Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and President Pervez Musharraf India ensured that the dialogue remained strictly bilateral, leaving no room for third-party intervention.
However, observers familiar with the trajectory of developments since the 1990s recognize that some of the ideas explored during these backchannel engagements, particularly during the Vajpayee-Musharraf and later Manmohan-Musharraf phases, drew inspiration from a broader international discourse on Kashmir. While official channels maintained a posture of strategic autonomy, certain proposals in circulation among U.S.-based policy circles and international think tanks did feed into the conceptual backdrop of bilateral diplomacy. Themes such as demilitarization, people-to-people contact, and cross-border trade though not adopted wholesale from any single external source found resonance in initiatives like the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service and the opening of cross-LoC trade. These reflected how Track II and unofficial exchanges subtly informed formal negotiations, even when governments publicly distanced themselves from external formulations.
President Trump's offer also fails to account for the deep historical currents that have shaped, constrained, and ultimately limited American involvement in Kashmir. In this regard, there is no better guide than the late American diplomat Howard B. Schaffer, whose book The Limits of Influence: America's Role in Kashmir provides a granular, sobering account of Washington's past efforts in the region.
According to Schaffer, the most proactive phase of American diplomacy on Kashmir unfolded during President John F. Kennedy's administration. Convinced that a stable South Asia was essential for building a Cold War coalition against communist expansion, the Kennedy White House launched an ambitious, though ultimately futile, effort to broker peace between India and Pakistan. Central to this initiative was the dispatch of W. Averell Harriman, a senior State Department official, to the subcontinent in the wake of the 1962 Sino-Indian war. India, having suffered a humiliating military defeat at China's hands, found itself at a moment of unusual diplomatic vulnerability. Harriman's mission, backed by personal letters from Kennedy to both Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani President Ayub Khan, sought to exploit this rare alignment to lay the groundwork for direct bilateral negotiations.