Arthur Moore must have known agony in his unmarked pauper's grave outside London as India and Pakistan traded insults and threats after innocent blood again stained the Valley of Kashmir. Moore "was totally opposed to the break-up of India" in the words of his biographer, Keith Haines; he was also the "onlie begetter" of the abortive federal plan associated with Jawaharlal Nehru that might still save South Asia from further conflict. Kashmir, for him, was "the great test for Nehru's statesmanship". As he warned, "Pakistan canal disputes, boundary disputes, displaced persons disputes - all these may be solved; trade between the two countries may be developed; but there will never be satisfactory relations between India and Pakistan till the Kashmir issue is amicably settled."

That was in Rafiq Zakaria's edited A Study of Nehru published in 1960. It's even more relevant now with mounting Indian demands for punitive action and not so muted Pakistani threats of nuclear reprisal. Haines's unpublished biography of Moore tells us that his subject fell under the spell of federalism more than 20 years before Zakaria's anthology. The biography's title is also eerily apposite. Haines called it The Looted Paradise, quoting the Persian poet, Sohrab, with whom Moore became friends when he was tramping the war-ravaged Balkans and West Asia on various official and semi-official assignments. Moore was "the first west European to penetrate central Albania" in 1908, and "led the final sortie at the siege of Tabriz" in Iran the following year. Sohrab reflected in March 1912 that they had once dwelt on the glories the future would unfold, expecting an era of freedom, peace and prosperity. "But we have been like the thieves who found themselves in heaven," he commented sadly. "We have looted Paradise instead of living in it." West Asia wasn't the only looted paradise.

Moore was still alive and occasionally writing for The Statesman when I joined it in London in 1960. A few days later an Englishwoman told me at a press function that she had seen him "making a meal of the small eats" at a cocktail party. James Cowley, who ran the paper's London office before me, chuckled when I repeated the comment. It wasn't unusual to dine off cocktail snacks but, yes, Moore had lost a lot of money in Thought, the magazine he launched in Delhi. I was excited to learn of the connection. Seeking openings in India while still living in England, I had found Thought listed in a journalists' directory and dashed off several articles. The magazine published everything, warmly inviting me to write more, but didn't pay a penny. Some years later when I met Nirad C. Chaudhuri for the first time, his wife reminded me I had reviewed A Passage to England in Thought. It can't have been a bad review; otherwise, Chaudhuri would have slammed the door in my face.

Moore came to India in 1922 to report for the Times, London. He joined The Statesman as an assistant editor in 1924, and represented the Bengal European constituency in the Indian Legislative Assembly from 1927 to 1933. That's when he became a friend and admirer of Motilal Nehru, also a legislator, so that he called his essay on Jawaharlal in Zakaria's anthology "My Friend's Son". The two attempts on Sir Alfred Watson's life in 1932 made Moore editor, a position he retained until he was sacked in 1942. "If he was a little trenchant, or even radical, in his views that was," says his biographer, "par for the course with editors of The Statesman." His eccentricity, too, again according to Haines, "was a quality which some regarded as both an advantage and an obligation to India".

There was no Kashmir problem then to challenge his imagination. That erupted later. But the principle of uniting peoples and countries already appealed to Moore. He was much taken with the ideas of an American called Clarence Streit who left his job on The New York Times and published Union Now, a book calling for an international federation of democracies in which the sovereignty and jurisdiction of national states might decline, but the individual's status would improve. Applying that idealistic notion to the British empire, Moore published an article, "A Federal British Commonwealth", in the Manchester Guardian in October 1938. Already alarmed, the India Office can't have been pleased to find this thinly-veiled plea for dominion status for India reproduced in The Statesman. Urging the federation of transport and communications under a single command, he warned "we must federate or perish".

India was to blaze a global trail. "We are a large part of the world and can contribute much to a world order if we can produce a united India," declared his first editorial in 1939. "If 1939 makes India one great political federation then, whatever happens elsewhere, a great step forward to an ultimate world order will have been taken." He returned to the attack at the Indian Institute of International Affairs in New Delhi which he addressed on the "The Necessity for a British League of Nations". Underlying it was the hope that if war broke out, a united front by India in support of Britain might persuade London to concede reforms. The proposed "war agreement" with Britain would include direct elections to a federal legislature, the new federal government assuming responsibility for external affairs, with the proviso that the viceroy would be his own foreign minister while hostilities lasted. The federal cabinet would be responsible for defence, subject to participation on the same basis as other self-governing dominions. Moore put these proposals to a startled Subhas Chandra Bose who feared the British government wouldn't play along (an understatement, according to Haines) but nevertheless promised to discuss them with Gandhi and Nehru. If they agreed, Jinnah and then the British could be approached.

Haines tells us the All India Congress Committee's demand for "a world federation of free nations" for "the future peace, security and ordered progress of the world" and to prevent aggression and exploitation so closely mirrored the political and economic federalism Moore propagated in his This Our War series of articles that people suspected him of links with the party. A world federation would also make disarmament practicable. From the general to the particular, Moore saw a subcontinental federation as the only way of containing the Kashmir problem. In 1948 he spoke to Gandhi about his plan for Kashmir to "be treated as an equal third party" in "a federated commonwealth state, with common foreign affairs, common defence, and such finance as concerned these subjects, but all three to be separate self-governing States". Gandhi who "was much interested" asked him to get Nehru's opinion. Moore was about to do so when Gandhi was killed. When he could discuss it with Nehru, the answer was not "No" but that "the time is not yet". Later, Nehru confided in Selig Harrison of the Washington Post "Confederation remains our ultimate goal". It would negate the two-nation theory and - from Pakistan's point of view - answer East Bengal's growing irredentist feelings.

Nehru's reply sent Moore to his unknown grave fortified with the hope "that at last there could be real peace between India and Pakistan and that the worst evils of partition would be forever wiped out", including religious quarrels. That still remains a flicker of faith sparkling on the distant horizon for those who understand that come what may, India and Pakistan must live together. The immediate task is to protect people, installations and institutions from attack. But once passions have subsided, the essential challenge is the running sore of Jammu and Kashmir without which there could have been no terrorist incursions. Looted paradises can't be unlooted. But an updated version of the Moore-Nehru formula might yet ensure some reprieve from further looting.