I WRITE about the gastranomic requirements of the High Commissioner of Pakistan.

Last Wednesday was Kashmir Solidarity Day. During the evening, I went to a dinner which aimed to publicise the Kashmiri cause. It was attended by both Labour and Conservative MPs. It was addressed by Abdul Kader Jaffer, the Pakistani High Commissioner.

He is an imposing figure with a magnificient head, whose profile is like an eagle's. As he rose to speak, the camera lights went on. Crews from Pakistani television stations were there to record his words.

He made an emotional speech about the sufferings of the Kashmiri people. He said that the plight of Kashmir is largely Britain's fault, and that he felt too upset to eat. When the High Commissioner had finished his speech, the camera lights went off. He then ate.

Yes, I suspect that when the High Commissioner said that he was too upset to eat, he was using a figure of speech to make a political point.

Television audiences in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir will have seen President Musharraf's man in London laying into British MPs about Kashmir, and I expect that they will have liked it. As a practising politician myself, I know a clever operation when I see it, and I admired the High Commissioner's manoevre. Furthermore, there was no hypocrisy in it.

A line from an old verse comes to my mind: "The truest poetry is the most feigning".

The High Commissioner may have been performing for the cameras, but he was expressing his real emotions. Most important of all, he was right. I have just been re-reading Victoria Schofield's "Kashmir in the crossfire", a masterly summary of the causes of the present conflict. It is a complex story, but the main point is simple: The Kashmiri people have never been consulted about their future.

Mountbatten failed to do this in 1947, when Britain said farewell to Kashmir, and they have suffered ever since. There is much talk here about Pakistan-sponsored terror in Kashmir, but less about Indian-sponsored terror behind the line of control. Musharraf recognises a responsibility to confront terrorism; India, by contrast, refuses to let observers monitor what is happening behind its illegal line of control, because of its human rights abuses there.

My Kashmiri and Pakistani constituents tell me that while great efforts have been made to resolve conflicts in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and the Middle East, the west has failed to pay the same attention to Kashmir, which lies among two mutually hostile powers now armed with nuclear weapons.

It is in all our interests that this outstanding dispute, which has gone on for over 50 long years, receives the international attention which it deserves. No wonder the High Commissioner was so forceful.

Paul Goodman

MP for Wycombe

February 15, 2002 11:30