Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War

In 1846, under the terms of the Treaty of Amritsar, the British sold the beautiful valley of Kashmir to the Hindu Dogra ruler, Gulab Singh. As Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, he was at last able to include Kashmir as the ‘jewel’ among his other territorial possessions, which included Jammu, Ladakh, Baltistan and numerous hill states, through which flowed the river Indus and its tributaries to the east. Thus, people of different linguistic, religious and cultural traditions were all brought under the jurisdiction of one ruler. The inclusion of the predominantly Muslim, and more densely populated, valley meant that Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists were in the minority. When, a century later, the sub-continent was partitioned at independence in 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh, Gulab Singh’s great-grandson, could not decide whether to join the new dominion of Pakistan or India. For over two months, his state remained ‘independent’. In October, after large numbers of tribesmen from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier invaded the state, he finally agreed to join India. His decision was immediately contested by Pakistan on the basis of the state’s majority Muslim population. War between India and Pakistan was finally halted in 1949 by a ceasefire supervised by the recently founded United Nations.

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