The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir led to the first major war between the two countries. The war ended inconclusively, with a tense cease-fire and Kashmir divided along the Line of Control between Indian and Pakistani occupying forces. The two nations would continue to skirmish and occasionally fight all-out wars over Kashmir for the rest of the century.
The clashes over Kashmir between India and Pakistan must be understood against the background of India’s struggle for independence from British rule, which lasted approximately two hundred years, and the eventual partition of India and creation of Pakistan at the time of independence
Indian Muslims felt a separate Muslim nation was necessary to protect their rights, but this insistence thwarted the hopes of leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, the father of independent India, who wanted the new nation to remain united. The British, who generally followed a divide-and-rule policy to manage their vast colonial empire, exploited the rift between the Indian National Congress
When the Indian National Congress refused to accept Jinnah’s proposal to divide India and create Pakistan, Jinnah threatened direct action and incited his followers to defy law and order, resulting in carnage and destruction in many Indian cities during the 1940’s. The violent uprisings were most devastating in Calcutta, in Bengal, and in Amritsar and Lahore in the Punjab. The “vivisection” of India, as Gandhi called it, came to seem inevitable, and violence and chaos remained unabated until, on June 3, 1947, Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India and its first governor-general, announced the British plan to partition India
Soon after that announcement, a boundary commission was appointed under Sir Cyril Radcliffe
There were, however, millions of Muslims scattered throughout India. Many chose to remain where they were. Many others, who wished to join the new Islamic nation, had to leave their homelands to reach it. Moreover, the lands that were to form Pakistan were home to a great many Hindus in addition to their Muslim population. Thus, an immediate consequence of the partition of India was the displacement of millions of people, which was hardly anticipated or planned. During the summer of 1947, an estimated seven million Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan, and about as many Hindus traveled from Pakistan to India, with very little planning and protection. This mass migration resulted in the deaths of more than one million people through violence and hardship.
Following the independence and partition of the two nations, states with Islamic majorities, except Kashmir, joined Pakistan, while the vast majority of the other princely states joined India voluntarily. The few resisting states located within India’s new borders—Hyderabad and Junagadh—were annexed by force.
Kashmir, the largest of all Indian princely states and one known for its natural beauty and its strategic value due to its location bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, and India, presented a special problem. Although its majority population was Muslim, Hari Singh, Kashmir’s ruler and a Dogra Rajput Hindu, hoped to maintain his realm as a separate kingdom. To that end, he refused to join either India or Pakistan and instead signed a “standstill” agreement with Pakistan. Kashmir was valuable to India not only for its strategic importance, its control of the headwaters of the Punjab rivers, and its fame as the Switzerland of Asia, but also for its status as the home of the Pandits, or the Kashmiri Brahmins, whose most famous son was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.
There were preexisting tensions between Hari Singh and his Islamic subjects, emblematized by Sheik Muhammad Abdullah
When the insurgents reached the outskirts of Srinagar, the state’s capital, Maharaja Hari Singh released Sheik Abdullah from jail and dispatched him to New Delhi to confer with his friend, Nehru: He appealed to India for military assistance. In response, India initially maintained that it would be illegal for it to intervene because of the agreement of nonintervention it had signed with Pakistan. When Hari Singh understood that the only legal basis for India to send its army into Kashmir would be for him to accede his kingdom to India, the maharaja and Lord Mountbatten signed the instrument of accession, legally making Kashmir a part of India.
Following Kashmir’s legal accession to India, on October 27, 1947, Indian armed forces entered Kashmir to suppress the insurgency. The Indian action eventually turned into a full-scale war between India and Pakistan in which India gained control of two-thirds of Kashmir. On January 1, 1948, at the urging of Lord Mountbatten, India’s Prime Minister Nehru agreed to involve the United Nations Security Council to resolve the dispute.
The Security Council called for an immediate cease-fire and an eventual plebiscite, which was to be conducted under the supervision of a special United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan
After the 1948 cease-fire agreement, the area under India’s control became known as the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and the area under Pakistani control was named Azad Kashmir, or Free Kashmir. Pakistan continued to maintain that Hari Singh’s cession of Kashmir to India was invalid, because it was signed under duress and it contradicted the previous agreement between India and Pakistan, which committed the two nations to maintaining the status quo. India argued that the nonintervention agreement prior to the war was null and void, because Pakistan instigated and supported the insurgency.
In 1954, Kashmir’s Constituent Assembly ratified the instrument of accession, officially making Jammu and Kashmir an Indian state, and India considered the matter finally settled without a plebiscite. Pakistan’s forces still did not withdraw, however. In 1962, China launched a surprise attack against India and occupied Ladakh, an area of Kashmir bordering China, resulting in the division of Kashmir into three parts, controlled by three nations. Ever since this Sino-Indian War
In September, 1965, Pakistan crossed the LOC in an attempt to invade Jammu and Kashmir, leading to a second full-scale war with India, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965
-
Blinkenberg, Lars. Asia: The History of Unresolved Conflicts. 2 vols. Rev. ed. Odensk, Denmark: Odense University Press of Southern Denmark, 1998. Provides the history of the conflict in great detail with an analysis of the relevant political issues. -
Bose, Sumatra. Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Outlines the problems that divide India and Pakistan with regard to Kashmir and makes policy recommendations that may lead to peace. -
Chofield, Victoria. Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan, and the Unending War. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Taking the reader through a history of Kashmir, this book outlines some of the basic issues that underlie the conflict, mainly from the Pakistani viewpoint. -
Coll, Steve. “The Stand-Off: How Jihadi Groups Helped Provoke the Twenty-First Century’s First Nuclear Crisis.” The New Yorker 82 (February 13, 2006): 126-139. Discusses the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001, and the diplomatic involvement of the United States to avert war. -
Paul, T. V., ed. The India-Pakistan Conflict: An Enduring Rivalry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Adopts the questionable enduring rivalry theory of war to shed some light on the roots of the conflict.
India Gains Independence from the United Kingdom
India Invades Hyderabad State
India-Pakistan Conflict Prompts U.N. Peacekeeping Response