Article #45: The Story of Kashmir

“Agar Firdaws ba roy-i zamin ast, hamin ast-u hamin ast-u hamin ast”, these were the words about Kashmir by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. It means, “If there is Paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” That is the beauty of Kashmir.  

As part of this article, I am going to narrate the story of Kashmir that includes its origin and history. There is one more article coming next that talks more about the valley’s beauty, the current situation, culture, food and economy of Kashmir. 

It is believed that the word Kashmir was derived from the name of the Vedic sage Kashyapa who settled people in this land. Historically, Kashmir referred to the Kashmir valley. Today, it denotes a larger area comprising of Jammu and Kashmir, Azad Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan, Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract or Saksham Valley. 

In the first half of the 1st millennium, the Kashmir region became an important center of Hinduism and later of Buddhism; later in the ninth century, Shaivism arose. Islamization in Kashmir took place during 13th to 15th century and led to the eventual decline of the Shaivism in Kashmir. However, the achievements of the previous civilizations were not lost. 

In 1339, Shah Mir became the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir, inaugurating the Shah Mir dynasty. For the next five centuries, Muslim monarchs ruled Kashmir, including the Mughal Empire, who ruled from 1586 until 1751, and the Afghan Durrani Empire, which ruled from 1747 until 1819. That year, the Sikhs, under Ranjit Singh, annexed Kashmir. In 1846, after the Sikh defeat in the First Anglo-Sikh War, the Treaty of Lahore was signed and upon the purchase of the region from the British under the Treaty of Amritsar, the Raja of Jammu, Gulab Singh who belongs to the Dogra Dynasty, became the new ruler of Kashmir.  

The Dogras were loyal to the British. During the revolt of 1857, the first Indian war of Independence, the dogras gave English women and children shelter in Kashmir and even sent Kashmiri troops to fight on behalf of the British. British in return rewarded them by securing the succession of Dogra rule in Kashmir. After the death of Gulab Singh, his son Ranbir Singh became the new ruler of Kashmir. He added the emirates of Hunza, Gilgit and Nagar to the kingdom. 

The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir ruled by the Dogra Dynasty consisted of many regions, religions and ethnicities. To the east, Ladakh was ethnically and culturally Tibetan and its inhabitants practiced Buddhism; to the south, Jammu had a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs; in the heavily populated central Kashmir valley, the population was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, however, there was also a small but influential Hindu minority, the Kashmiri brahmins or pandits; to the northeast, sparsely populated Baltistan had a population ethnically related to Ladakh, but which practiced Shi'a Islam; to the north, also sparsely populated, Gilgit Agency, was an area of diverse, mostly Shi'a groups; and, to the west, Punch was Muslim, but of different ethnicity than the Kashmir valley. 

Despite being in a majority the Muslims were made to suffer severe oppression under Hindu rule in the form of high taxes, unpaid forced labor and discriminatory laws. Many Kashmiri Muslims migrated from the Valley to Punjab due to famine and policies of Dogra rulers. The Muslim peasants lacked education, awareness of rights and were chronically in debt to landlords and moneylenders, and did not organize politically until the 1930s. 

Ranbir Singh's grandson Hari Singh, who had ascended the throne of Kashmir in 1925, was the reigning monarch in 1947 at the conclusion of British rule of the subcontinent and the subsequent partition of the British Indian Empire into the newly independent Dominion of India and Dominion of Pakistan. An internal revolt began in the Poonch region against oppressive taxation by the Maharaja. In August 1947, Maharaja's forces fired upon demonstrations in favor of Kashmir joining Pakistan, burned whole villages and massacred innocent people. The Poonch rebels declared an independent government of "Azad" Kashmir on 24 October 1947.  

In the meantime, Rulers of Princely States all over the British Indian Empire were encouraged to accede their States to either Dominion – India or Pakistan, taking into account factors such as geographical contiguity and the wishes of their people. In 1947, Kashmir's population was "77% Muslim and 20% Hindu". To postpone making a hurried decision, the Maharaja signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan, which ensured continuity of trade, travel, communication, and similar services between the two. Such an agreement was pending with India.  

Following huge riots in Jammu, in October 1947, Pashtuns from Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province recruited by the Poonch rebels, invaded Kashmir, along with the Poonch rebels, allegedly incensed by the atrocities against fellow Muslims in Poonch and Jammu. The tribesmen engaged in looting and killing along the way. Their aim was to frighten Hari Singh into submission.  

Instead the Maharaja appealed to the Government of India for assistance, and the Governor-General Lord Mountbatten[c] agreed on the condition that the ruler accede to India. Once the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession, Indian soldiers entered Kashmir and drove the Pakistani-sponsored irregulars from all but a small section of the state. India accepted the accession. 

Kashmir leader Sheikh Abdullah endorsed the accession as ad-hoc which would be ultimately decided by the people of the State. He was appointed the head of the emergency administration by the Maharaja. The Pakistani government immediately contested the accession, suggesting that it was fraudulent, that the Maharaja acted under pressure and that he had no right to sign an agreement with India when the standstill agreement with Pakistan was still in force. 

In early 1948, India sought a resolution of the Kashmir Conflict at the United Nations. Following the set-up of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP), the UN Security Council passed Resolution 47 on 21 April 1948. The UN mission insisted that the opinion of people of J&K must be ascertained. The then Indian Prime Minister is reported to have himself urged U.N. to poll Kashmir and on the basis of results Kashmir's accession will be decided. However, India insisted that no referendum could occur until all of the state had been cleared of irregulars. 

On 5 January 1949, UNCIP (United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan) resolution stated that the question of the accession of the State of Jammu and Kashmir to India or Pakistan will be decided through a free and impartial plebiscite. As per the 1948 and 1949 UNCIP Resolutions, both countries accepted the principle, that Pakistan secures the withdrawal of Pakistani intruders followed by withdrawal of Pakistani and Indian forces, as a basis for the formulation of a Truce agreement whose details are to be arrived in future, followed by a plebiscite; However, Pakistan never withdrew its intruders or the armed forces in the first place and illegally occupied the region of Kashmir. 

In the last days of 1948, a ceasefire was agreed under UN auspices; however, since the plebiscite demanded by the UN was never conducted, relations between India and Pakistan soured and eventually led to three more wars over Kashmir in 1965, 1971 and 1999. India has control of about half the area of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir; Pakistan controls a third of the region, governing it as Gilgit–Baltistan and Azad Kashmir. 

The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 began following Pakistan's Operation Gibraltar, which was designed to infiltrate forces into Jammu and Kashmir to precipitate an insurgency against Indian rule. India retaliated by launching a full-scale military attack on West Pakistan. The seventeen-day war caused thousands of casualties on both sides and witnessed the largest engagement of armored vehicles and the largest tank battle since World War II. Hostilities between the two countries ended after a United Nations-mandated ceasefire was declared following diplomatic intervention by the Soviet Union and the United States, and the subsequent issuance of the Tashkent Declaration. Much of the war was fought by the countries' land forces in Kashmir and along the border between India and Pakistan.  

India had the upper hand over Pakistan when the ceasefire was declared. Although the two countries fought to a standoff, the conflict is seen as a strategic and political defeat for Pakistan, as it had neither succeeded in fomenting insurrection in Kashmir nor had it been able to gain meaningful support at an international level. 

The Indo-Pakistani war of 1999 was the infiltration of Pakistani soldiers disguised as Kashmiri militants into positions on the Indian side of the LOC. During the initial stages of the war, Pakistan blamed the fighting entirely on independent Kashmiri insurgents, but documents left behind by casualties and later statements by Pakistan's Prime Minister and Chief of Army Staff showed involvement of Pakistani paramilitary forces, led by General Ashraf Rashid. The Indian Army, later supported by the Indian Air Force, recaptured a majority of the positions on the Indian side of the LOC infiltrated by the Pakistani troops and militants. Facing international diplomatic opposition, the Pakistani forces withdrew from the remaining Indian positions along the LOC. 

When the west part of the Kashmir experienced the wars between India and Pakistan due to the illegal occupation of Pakistan and the promotion of cross border terrorism by Pakistan, the east part of the Kashmir was nowhere an exception to the boundary dispute.  

In the late 19th- and early 20th centuries, although some boundary agreements were signed between Britain, Afghanistan and Russia over the northern borders of Kashmir, China never accepted these agreements, and the official Chinese position did not change with the communist revolution in 1949. By the mid-1950s the Chinese army had entered the north-east portion of Ladakh. By 1956–57 they had completed a military road through the Aksai Chin area to provide better communication between Xinjiang and western Tibet. India's belated discovery of this road led to border clashes between the two countries that culminated in the Sino-Indian war of October 1962. China has occupied Aksai Chin since 1962 and, in addition, an adjoining region, the Trans-Karakoram Tract or the Saksham Valley was ceded by Pakistan to China in 1965. 

Thus, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was divided among three nations, India, Pakistan and China. But what do the people of Kashmir need? Why is it one of the most militarized zones on the planet? Do we have a solution to this Kashmir conflict? Let’s find out in the next article that is going to be a sequel to this one.