Britain's tragic decision that sealed Kashmir's fate

Telegraph

07-05-2025

On July 8 1947, a senior British barrister called Cyril Radcliffe arrived for the first time in India and was handed an impossible job.
The British were leaving the subcontinent, and the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League – the parties led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah respectively – had agreed to partition India to allow the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for the sub-continent's Muslims.
They could not agree on a border, and both they and Lord Mountbatten, the British viceroy, wanted one drawn by Independence, which was scheduled for August 15.
Radcliffe, whose ignorance of the country was seen as a guarantee of his impartiality, had just five weeks to decide the fate of millions of people.
In the West, Radcliffe drew a red line dividing Pakistan from India from the Arabian Sea to the top of Punjab. But when he reached the foothills of Kashmir and Jammu, he stopped. Technically, the highlands feeding the headwaters of the Indus river were in one of the princely states of British India.
The principality of Kashmir and Jammu was inhabited mostly by Muslims and had once been part of the Sikh empire. But since the first Anglo-Sikh war a century earlier, Kashmir had been ruled by the Dogra dynasty of Hindu Rajputs, under the suzerainty of Britain.
It was a strange arrangement with all kinds of odd contradictions. Hari Singh, the Maharajah in 1947, was still nominally sovereign ruler, but was British educated and often wore a British military uniform.
He had sent troops from his small army to fight for the British in the Second World War and sat on Churchill's war cabinet. His army and police were mostly Muslims, but his officers – until Independence – were British.
Singh was seen as a liberaliser. Before the war he set up the state's first legislature and adopted a constitution that outlawed child marriage, made primary education compulsory, and opened places of worship to the lower castes. But he was not exactly a democrat, with fewer than half of the seats in the new parliament elected.
Now he, and the rulers of more than 500 other princely states across the subcontinent, faced a crucial choice created by the reality of partition: join India or Pakistan.
For Singh, it was an impossible dilemma. Kashmir literally and figuratively straddled the fault-line of partition; more than three quarters of his subjects were Muslim and would never accept joining India. However, the significant Sikh and Hindu minorities would never feel secure in Pakistan, especially following the bloodletting across Punjab that took place throughout much of 1947.
Further complicating things was a split between two Muslim-led parties – one pro-India, one pro-Pakistan, and both anti-Maharajah.
Lord Mountbatten urged Singh to make up his mind quickly. But Singh and his prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak, played for time. By July 1947, the Maharajah had opted to stay independent from both India and Pakistan – for the time being at least.
Three days before formal Indian and Pakistani Independence on Aug 15, Singh's government telegraphed the governments of both new nations asking for a 'standstill' agreement to maintain the status quo. Pakistan replied in the affirmative; India asked for talks to draw up an agreement.
Amid the turmoil of partition, independence for Kashmir was never sustainable. Two days later, Radcliffe's partition line was published, and both new countries were submerged in bloodshed.
Perhaps one million people were killed and more than 15 million displaced as Muslims in India fled to Pakistan and Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan fled the other way.
Two months later, in October 1947, riots over taxation, unemployment for returning war veterans, and demands for accession to Pakistan broke out in Kashmir. There followed a brutal massacre of Muslims by Hindu militias. Shortly afterwards, Pakistan-backed tribal irregulars invaded the princely state.
Singh appealed to India for help. Nehru, himself of Kashmiri descent, replied that help would come with a price: sign away independence and join India.
On Oct 26, Singh signed the accession agreement and Indian troops began to land in Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital.
Ali Jinnah, meanwhile, now the first leader of Pakistan, furiously denounced the accession deal as 'fraudulent' and a breach of the 'standstill' agreement.
The first India-Pakistan war had begun. One year – and 27,000 casualties – later, it ended in stalemate with India in control of two-thirds of the province and Pakistan the remainder.
There have been three more official Indian-Pakistani wars since then. The current crisis, if it spills into full-scale war, would be the fifth.
If war is averted, it will merely become the latest entry in a much longer list of skirmishes, artillery duels and other lesser conflicts.Yet in all that time neither the shape of the territory, nor the basic grievances, have changed, and the line of control today still follows the same frontline where the fighting stopped in 1948.
India insists that Kashmir is legally Indian, and accuses Pakistan's powerful intelligence agencies of sponsoring terrorist atrocities, including last month's attack in Pahalgam which triggered the current fighting.
Pakistan claims the province was illegally signed over to India and that its Muslim majority have suffered repeated repression under Indian rule.
For both, the high ground of the Himalayan foothills is strategically vital.
Pakistan, which relies almost entirely on the waters of the Indus River, is loath to surrender the tributaries that pass through the mountains.
But above all, the war in Kashmir has taken on existential dimensions. For Pakistan and India, mutual antagonism has become almost a defining feature of post-independence identity, and the events of those months in 1947 remaining bitterly contested.
Pakistani commentators have long accused Mountbatten and Nehru of pressuring Singh to join India. One story holds that the Viceroy prevailed upon Radcliffe to change a section of the border to ensure that India, not Pakistan, controlled a crucial road into Kashmir.
Debate still rages about whether Singh himself was complicit in the massacres of rebels in the early days of the war, or whether the massacres themselves were exaggerated by Pakistani propaganda.
In Pakistan, perceived defeat in 1948 led, in 1951, to the first of many attempted military coups. In India, Nehru himself came under attack for appealing to the United Nations to adjudicate the peace in 1948. Narendra Modi, India's current prime minister, claimed in 2018 that 'all of Kashmir' would have been Indian if Nehru had not been prime minister at the time.
Hari Singh left Kashmir in 1949, and afterwards proclaimed his son and heir, Karan Singh, to act as Prince Regent – an effective abdication apparently forced by Nehru.
In 1952, Nehru's government abolished the Kashmiri monarchy altogether. And while Singh died in Mumbai in 1961, the conflict that he unwittingly helped initiate remains more explosive than ever.