As Islamabad continues to protest the Indian Parliament’sdecision, by a two-thirds majority, to bifurcate Jammu & Kashmir into twoUnion Territories, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, and scrap Articles 370 and35A of the Constitution that give the state special status and its permanentresidents special priviliges, it emerges that the Pakistan Army publicy termedthe two articles as a “sham” which Rawalpindi never recognised.

According to an August 6 statement by the Inter ServicesPublic Relations (the media unit of the Pakistani armed forces), “Pakistannever recognised the sham Indian efforts to legalise its occupation of Jammu& Kashmir through Article 370 or Article 35A decades ago, efforts whichhave now been revoked by India itself.”

Copy of the statement, which was issued after a CorpsCommanders Conference at GHQ, Rawalpindi, presided over by General Qamar JavedBajwa, the chief of the country’s army staff, soon after India’s decisionsregarding Jammu & Kashmir. India’s diplomatic establishment is flummoxedover Pakistan’s unilateral action to suspend relations on various dimensionswith India, and talk of escalating the matter to the United Nations if, indeed,as the statement claims, 370 and 35A were never recognised by Islamabad. “If370 and 35A are sham according to Gen Bajwa, then what is this reaction allabout. We see the unilateral action by the Pakistan government as being used toaddress the domestic audience, which has been weaned on Kashmir myth fordecades,” said a senior Indian government official who asked not to be named. WhileIndian High Commissioner to Pakistan Ajay Bisaria will wait for Pakistan’sreconsideration of its action downgrading diplomatic ties before returning toIndia, Islamabad is making deliberate efforts to project that there is tensionalong the borders.

Interestingly, the Indian military has reported no forwarddeployment of troops or fighters by Islamabad on both the international borderand the Line of Control (LoC), according to government officials.