A brief history of Kashmir!

Recently read a few scholarly and a few “not so” scholarly articles on the Kashmir issue. In the “not so” scholarly articles and across the web there are several articles that contradict each other a lot. These prompted me to write this blog.

A clarity that has to be brought to this issue is that Kashmir was not part of India in 1947, as it was not part of British India. Maharaja Hari Singh, the then monarch of Kashmir, to escape the atrocities of Pathans requested India to interfere through a Letter to Lord Mountbatten, the Governor General of that time. You can find that letter here. When Mountbatten used that opportunity to demand the Maharaja to annex Kashmir to the Indian Union (letter here), the then Indian Prime Minister, left it to the people of Kashmir to decide (letter here) and till date they are undecided. You can find a lot of transcripts in this website and in this page.

After the war in 1947 that lasted for just 3 months, in which the Indian troops drove away the Pathans (supported by Pak army), India requested UN’s intervention and the world community to understand the ulterior motives of the then leaders of our neighborhood country and help to establish peace in Kashmir. This is re-iterated in this letter to the Security Council. So India never had an intention to bring Kashmir into Indian Union by force. The question that lingers in most of the Indian minds is resonated in this article in Quora.com - Why did India gave back POK (Pakistan occupied Kashmir) even after winning the war with Pakistan? You can read various perceptions in these answers, if you ignore some silly ones. In multiple wars that followed, we kept the promise of respecting peace in the valley and we do so even now, by conducting fair (?) elections. 

Unfortunately no other country in the world had really had any interest, neither in the peace of Kashmir valley nor in respecting the sovereignty of that princely state. Whether this first war in 1947 or the subsequent wars, we always respected the sovereignty of the Kashmir state and expected same from the international forces of that time and the UNO. However they did not think in the same way. Read this account of an American on the 1965 war and the comment by Roger at the bottom. An interesting read.

Personally, I really don’t bother whether Kashmir is in India or stays independent. It’s up to the people of Kashmir to decide and the world should respect that decision. It can be a Switzerland of Asia, if the neighborhood nations cooperate and the people of Kashmir have the ability and courage to decide.