The five-day India-Pakistan summit ended in a grand climax with the signing of an agreement by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Shimla on the night of July 2, 1972.
The signing ceremony was held at 12.40am at the Durbar Hall of Himachal Bhavan.
The agreement came after hard bargaining by both sides and was held up for a lack of consensus on the formulation of the Kashmir question. A compromise eventually emerged after two rounds of talks Gandhi and Bhutto held earlier in the day. The final round followed a dinner hosted by the Pakistan President in honour of Prime Minister Gandhi.
The agreement, which sets out guidelines on durable peace and normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan, will be made public simultaneously in Shimla and Islamabad.
According to the agreement, India and Pakistan have agreed to settle all mutual problems bilaterally. Both countries have also agreed to abjure the use of force in settling the issues between them.
How the agreement was reached
After the special dinner, the two leaders held a 10-minutes long meeting separately.
The principal aides of both the sides were then called in. Thereafter, members of the political affairs committee of the Union Cabinet — finance minister YB Chavan, agriculture minister Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, defence minister Jagjivan Ram, external affairs minister Swaran Singh — who also attended the dinner, were consulted.
Rough weather
Gandhi then decided to finalise the agreement.
According to sources, India has agreed to withdraw troops from occupied territories on the western front, except from those in Jammu and Kashmir.
The signing ceremony was watched by members of the political affairs committee of the Union Cabinet.
A beaming Bhutto was cheered on by waiting reporters for the successful conclusion of the agreement.
Gandhi and Bhutto said the agreement would mark a “new beginning” in the relations between India and Pakistan, and both expressed satisfaction with the outcome.
Talks ran into rough weather
India made an effort to meet the Pakistani demands to “some extent” by revising the draft it presented earlier for consideration. The new draft was approved at a meeting of the political affairs committee of the Union Cabinet and was taken to Bhutto by PN Haksar, the principal secretary to the Prime Minister, and foreign secretary TN Kaul. It was further considered, but without any agreement, at a meeting of the principal aides of the Prime Minister and the Pakistan President.
At the end of the afternoon round of talks with the Prime Minister, Bhutto addressed a news conference where he appeared hopeful that an agreement would emerge from his final meeting with Gandhi. He admitted progress was held up for lack of agreement on the Kashmir question. “We are in a deadlock. but there is hope of limited success,” the Pakistan President said in reply to a question while declining to spell out further details.
Bhutto’s overall impression of the summit, till the time he came to address the news conference, was that “we have not succeeded; we have not failed”. But, he added, meaningfully, “the situation may change after our post dinner talks”.
He maintained that the dialogue itself was a big step towards normalisation of relations with India. There was a need to clear the subjective prejudices of the last 25 years before the two countries could deal effectively with objective elements. A beginning had been made and that itself was a gain, he argued.
“Both the countries suffered, Pakistan particularly, by shutting the door on each other. Pakistan at least was not going to shut the door,” he said. He also noted hopefully that PM Gandhi had spoken of “a series of summits” at her meeting with Pakistani newsmen earlier.
On Kashmir, he said, Pakistan stood by the self-determination principle while India had its own stand. He added significantly that the gap between the two viewpoints could be narrowed by talks. Pakistan was prepared to negotiate, he declared .
A historic accord
The dramatic eleventh hour understanding that Gandhi and Bhutto arrived at answered the prayers of millions of people in India and Pakistan who yearn for peace. The agreement suggests something in the nature of a breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations and reflects the statesmanship that both the President and the Prime Minister have shown in dealing with the immensely complex issues that have divided the two countries over the past 25 years.
The Simla accord represented a great victory for the 700 million people of this sub-continent, heralding a new hope.
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