11-05-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Why Kashmir must be Unified and Whole
A border is a line drawn by politics and held in place by rote. Few are as blood-soaked and brittle as the one that runs down the spine of Kashmir, cleaving a valley into two, and history into a wound. Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is not just territory. It is the unfinished sentence of 1947, the jagged consequence of deceit, delay, and the tragic timidity of post-colonial diplomacy.
Pakistan has no moral or historical claim to PoK. It is stolen land, seized in the fog of Partition through the deployment of tribal militias backed by Pakistan, in direct violation of the Instrument of Accession signed by Maharaja Hari Singh in October 1947: an instrument recognised by India, the British Crown, and even the United Nations. In that moment, Kashmir legally became a part of India. We must step into the past, into the chaotic cartography of Mountbatten's Radcliffe Line, which split not just the subcontinent but its conscience. The two-nation theory, the flawed seed from which the Partition bloomed, demanded division by religious majority. Kashmir was never just a demographic puzzle. It was, and remains, a civilisational keystone, historically connected more to the plains of Punjab and the bygone empires of Delhi than to the tribal badlands of Pakistan's northwest.
