Latest news with #partition
Khaleej Times
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Khaleej Times
India-Pakistan tensions: A history of war, conflict between South Asian neighbours
Long-running tensions between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan soared Wednesday after New Delhi launched deadly strikes at Pakistani territory. The missiles killed at least eight people, according to Pakistan, which said it had begun retaliating in a major escalation between the South Asian neighbours. India accuses Pakistan of backing the deadliest attack in years on civilians in disputed Kashmir on April 22, in which 26 men were killed. Islamabad has rejected the charge. Both countries have since exchanged gunfire in Kashmir, expelled citizens and ordered the border shut. Since the April attack, soldiers on each side have fired across the Line of Control, the de facto border in contested Kashmir, a heavily fortified zone of Himalayan outposts. The two sides have fought multiple conflicts, ranging from skirmishes to all-out war, since their bloody partition in 1947. 1947: Partition Two centuries of British rule ends on August 15, 1947, with the sub-continent divided into India and Pakistan. The poorly prepared partition unleashed bloodshed that killed possibly more than a million people and displaced 15 million others. Kashmir's monarch dithered on whether to submit to Indian or Pakistani rule. After the suppression of an uprising against his rule, Pakistan-backed militants attack. He sought India's help, precipitating an all-out war between the countries. A UN-backed, 770-kilometre (480-mile) ceasefire line in January 1949 divided Kashmir. 1965: Kashmir Pakistan launched a second war in August 1965 when it invaded contested Kashmir. Thousands were killed before a September ceasefire brokered by the Soviet Union and the United States. 1971: Bangladesh Pakistan deployed troops in 1971 to suppress an independence movement in what is now Bangladesh, which it had governed since 1947 as East Pakistan. An estimated three million people were killed in the nine-month conflict and millions fled into India. The conflict led to the creation of the independent nation of Bangladesh. 1989-90: Kashmir An uprising broke out in Kashmir in 1989 as grievances at Indian rule boiled over. Tens of thousands of soldiers, rebels and civilians were killed in the following decades. India accused Pakistan of funding the rebels and aiding their weapons training. 1999: Kargil Pakistan-backed militants seized Indian military posts in the icy heights of the Kargil mountains. Pakistan yielded after severe pressure from Washington, alarmed by intelligence reports showing Islamabad had deployed part of its nuclear arsenal nearer to the conflict. At least 1,000 people were killed over 10 weeks. 2019: Kashmir A suicide attack on a convoy of Indian security forces kills 40 in Pulwama. India sent fighter jets which carried out air strikes on Pakistani territory to target an alleged militant training camp.
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Britain's tragic decision that sealed Kashmir's fate
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 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.
