By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Foreign Office said Monday that India’s assertions about the disputed Kashmir region carry no legal weight, the latest exchange in a decades-old standoff that found new life this week in an unlikely arena: a United Nations vote on how continents are drawn on a map.
The dispute traces back to Friday, when the UN General Assembly voted 164 to 1 to endorse a resolution encouraging member states to adopt the Equal Earth projection, a map that renders landmasses in their true proportions, in place of the Mercator projection that has dominated classrooms, atlases and navigation charts for more than four centuries. On the Mercator projection, Greenland and Africa appear to be about the same size, though on the Equal Earth projection, 14 Greenlands would fit inside the African continent.
The measure, championed by Togo and backed by the African Union, was intended to correct what supporters call a cartographic injustice that has diminished Africa’s visual scale in the public imagination for generations. The United States cast the lone vote against it, dismissing the effort as part of a “radical ideological project,” while six countries — Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine — abstained.
India was among the resolution’s 164 supporters. But two days later, its Ministry of External Affairs moved to draw a sharp distinction between backing a resolution about proportion and accepting any implication about where its borders lie. Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement Sunday that the resolution does not constitute an endorsement of any specific map, projection or depiction of national boundaries, and that New Delhi’s vote was tethered strictly to the principle of equal-area cartography, not to any position on contested territory. The resolution, Jaiswal said, “neither adopts nor authenticates any particular world map, nor does it address political cartography, including international boundaries, disputed territories or place names.”
That caveat came with a condition attached. New Delhi insisted that any future world map — UN-backed or otherwise — must depict the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh in accordance with India’s own official map, and warned that any deviation from that depiction would be unacceptable.
It was that condition that drew Pakistan’s rebuke.
In a statement issued Monday, Foreign Office spokesperson Ambassador Sajjad Haider Khan said Islamabad “categorically rejects India’s baseless assertions regarding the status of Jammu and Kashmir which are contrary to internationally recognised facts.” He went further, arguing that nothing India says or does on the ground changes the territory’s standing in the eyes of the international community. “India’s unilateral actions and continued illegal occupation cannot alter the internationally recognised disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir,” Khan said.
The Foreign Office’s position rests on a claim that predates the map controversy by decades: that the United Nations itself has never recognised Kashmir as settled territory, regardless of what either government’s domestic maps show. Khan said the dispute remains one of the oldest unresolved matters on the agenda of the UN Security Council, and that any final resolution must come through the mechanism the Security Council laid out generations ago — a plebiscite, conducted under UN supervision, that would let Kashmiris themselves decide the territory’s fate. He said the maps published by the United Nations, which continue to show Jammu and Kashmir as disputed rather than as settled Indian or Pakistani territory, remain the only cartographic depiction with legal standing. Whatever India’s own maps show, he said, carries no bearing on that status.
Khan closed his statement with a call for the international community to press India over conditions in the portion of Kashmir it administers, urging New Delhi to halt what Pakistan describes as human rights violations there and to move toward honoring the Kashmiri right to self-determination under the Security Council resolutions Islamabad has invoked for decades.
The exchange is, in substance, a rerun of arguments both governments have made for years, revived now by a UN vote that had nothing to do with South Asian geopolitics when it was drafted. Togo’s foreign minister, Robert Dussey, framed the resolution before Friday’s vote as a matter of representation and psychology rather than politics. “Maps shape our understanding of the world. They guide education, nourish the imagination, and influence collective perceptions,” he said, adding that the moment had come for African nations to correct what they could correct themselves. Nothing in the text or the debate that produced it addressed Kashmir, Jammu, Ladakh or any other contested border anywhere in the world — a fact India’s own government acknowledged in explaining its vote.
That has not stopped the resolution from becoming, within the span of four days, a proxy battlefield for one of the world’s longest-running territorial disputes.
Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since the two nations gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947, when the subcontinent’s partition left the former princely state’s status unresolved and its territory split along a line of control that neither government has ever formally accepted as a permanent border. Both countries claim the region in its entirety while governing only portions of it, and both have gone to war over it more than once in the decades since. The dispute has simmered, flared and receded many times over, but it has rarely found its way into a debate ostensibly about the relative size of Greenland.
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