7. Editorial Note
The dispute between India and Pakistan over the disposition of the State of Jammu and Kashmir (commonly called Kashmir) began almost immediately after the partition of the subcontinent in August 1947. India first brought the conflict before the United Nations Security Council in January 1948. Security Council resolutions of January 20, 1948 (U.N. doc. S/654), and January 5, 1949 (U.N. doc. S/726), subsequently established the U.N. Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP), of which the United States was a member. In an effort to resolve the Kashmir dispute, the UNCIP then passed resolutions on August 13, 1948 (U.N. doc. S/995), and again on January 5, 1949 (U.N. doc. S/1196), which were quickly adopted by the Council. The former resolution provided for a cease-fire, a truce agreement, and a free plebiscite, while the latter resolution set down the conditions and basic principles of the proposed plebiscite.
Subsequent attempts to implement these principles by the U.N. Representatives for India and Pakistan, first Sir Owen Dixon of Australia and then Frank P. Graham of the United States, met with little success. On December 3, 1957, the Security Council adopted a new resolution on Kashmir (U.N. doc. S/3922), which called on Graham to make any recommendations to India and Pakistan that he considered desirable for implementing the UNCIP resolutions of August 13, 1948, and January 5, 1949. Graham left the United States on January 9, 1958, on a factfinding mission, first to India and then to Pakistan, in order to fulfill the terms of the latest Security Council directive.