Chatham House & Kings College survey

Embattled Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s controversial second son, Saif Al Islam Gaddafi, attempted to engineer a pro-Pakistan opinion poll in Kashmir, but it boomeranged on him. However, the result published in 2010 by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as the Chatham House) and the Kings College, London, was contrary to Saif ’s expectation. This little known fact, that Saif had met Dr Robert Bradnock of Kings College, who masterminded the survey to contrive the poll, came out at a seminar in the UK’s Houses of Parliament on Thursday. Saif was then fresh from a visit to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK), where he was fed the usual propaganda of mock refugee camps and the plight of Kashmiris in India compared to “paradise they experienced in Pakistan”. Bradnock says Saif returned from PoK with grand ideas of forcing a plebiscite in Kashmir as desired by Pakistan. He then asked the academic to conduct a survey, which he would underwrite. He funded it to the extent of $200,000 but any designs he might have had of doctoring the outcome were demolished when Bradnock insisted he would do this only if the exercise was completely independent and had the institutional involvement of Chatham House and Kings College. Saif agreed. The plebiscite, as agreed at the United Nations in 1948, which Pakistan still demands, gave Kashmiris only two choices: either to remain with India or join Pakistan. In the event, Bradnock’s poll, the first ever to be held on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC), unearthed that 98% of people on the Indian side of the LoC did not wish to be a part of Pakistan and 50% in PoK did not wish to remain with Pakistan either.