Jammu and Kashmir: In the Shadow of Imperialism Home
Maharaj K. Kaul
[Taken from Essays in Inequality and Social Justice (Essays in honor of Ved Prakash Vatuk), Edited by Kira Hall, Archana Publications, Meerut, India, 2009]
INTRODUCTION
On the eve of freedom from colonial rule, India was divided into two political and administrative groups: British India (the Provinces ruled directly by the British Crown through the Secretary of State for India in London and the Governor General and Viceroy in India) and the 562 local kingdoms called the Princely States.
The basis for the relationship between British India and the Princely States was governed by the Doctrine of Paramountcy. This doctrine made the Princely States subservient to British India but allowed the rulers local autonomy in civil administration and taxation policies. Defense and foreign relations rested with the British Government of India; few States were allowed to have their own armed forces. The relationship between the British Crown and the Princely States replaced the older Doctrine of Lapse, an aggressive annexation policy put forward by Lord Dalhousie, East India Company’s Governor General of India during 1848-1856. Dalhousie’s policy legitimized the annexation of any native Indian State whose ruler did not have a male heir. Half a dozen of the Princely States had been annexed between 1848 and 1856 under this policy. Feeling threatened, rulers of some of the Princely States joined the great popular uprising of 1857, throwing the biggest challenge until then to the British authority in India. After the rebels were defeated, the British Crown took direct control of India from the East India Company and, in 1858, the Doctrine of Lapse was finally abandoned in favor of the new Doctrine of Paramountcy.
Over 60% of the area and the population of India were under British control in the Provinces of India. The Princely States ranged from small city states to large states. Hyderabad was the largest of the Princely States in terms of population, with over 16 million residents in 1941. Jammu and Kashmir State, formed in 1846, was the largest in area, occupying over 85,000 square miles.
At the end of World War II, a considerably weakened Britain found itself facing a freedom movement in India that it could no longer suppress. The British government sent a Cabinet Mission to the subcontinent to propose the terms of its withdrawal from the subcontinent. The Cabinet Mission proposal, made public on May 16, 1946, suggested a three-tier loose federal structure for India. The structure consisted of provinces at the lowest rung, groups formed by these provinces at the next rung, and finally, a weak union at the top that controlled only defense, foreign affairs, and communication. The Princely States were advised to join any of the groups but were assured that under this three-tier arrangement they would retain considerable autonomy.
There were aspects of the Cabinet Mission Plan that neither the Congress Party nor the Muslim League liked. But it was the Direct Action Day—launched by the Muslim League on August 16, 1946—that was decisive in burying the Plan: tens of thousands were butchered in communal riots in India in its aftermath. On June 3, 1947, a new plan to partition India into two Dominions was made public. This became the Indian Independence Act of 1947. Section 2 of the Act defined the territories of the new Dominions of India and Pakistan. Section 7 of the Act terminated the relationship of the British Crown and the British Government of India with the Princely States, except that “effect shall, as nearly as may be, continue to be given to the provisions of any such agreement as is therein referred to which relate to customs, transit and communications, posts and telegraphs, or other like matters.” In other words, relationships would continue between the States and the two successor Dominions, just as they had between the States and the British Government of India. Subsection 1 of Section 2 stated that “nothing in this section [Section 2], shall be construed as prevention, the accession of Indian States to either of the new Dominions.” Together with the Government of India Act 1935, then, the 1947 Act provided the basis for India’s independence.
The two new Dominions, India and Pakistan, came into existence when India was partitioned on August 15, 1947. By the time the Constitution of India took effect on January 26, 1950, most of the Princely States had acceded to either India or Pakistan. But Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir State, was unable to decide which course of action to take. He entered into a Standstill Agreement with Pakistan on August 15, 1947, in order to continue relations in the areas of “customs, transit and communications, posts and telegraphs, or other like matters,” as provided for in Section 7 of the Indian Independence Act of 1947. These relations had existed between the State and the British Government of India through the western part of Punjab, which had become part of Pakistan after August 15, 1947.
However, in September of 1947, Pakistan cut off supplies to Jammu and Kashmir State to coerce the Maharaja to accede to Pakistan. Jawaharlal Nehru had foreseen what Maharaja’s vacillation could lead to. In a letter to Sardar Patel on September 27, 1947, Nehru wrote:
One month later, on October 22, 1947, Pakistan launched a full-scale invasion of Jammu and Kashmir State. They equipped and trained an army of tribal marauders, who swept through the western part of the state, massacring thousands of people, raping, looting, and burning whatever they encountered along the way. Unable to stop this massive invasion, the desperate Maharaja—together with the most popular political organization in the state, the National Conference—appealed to India for help. The state of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India on October 26, when the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession. The following day the first contingent of Indian troops was flown to Srinagar to defend Kashmir. Soon after, Pakistan sent its army into Kashmir, and India and Pakistan found themselves engaged in their first military confrontation.
Under the advice of Mountbatten, independent India’s first Governor General, India took its complaint against the Pakistan-sponsored invasion on Jammu and Kashmir to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on January 1, 1948. Much to India’s disappointment, the USNC turned India’s complaint into a dispute between India and Pakistan. On January 20, 1948, it passed a resolution establishing the United Nations Commission of India and Pakistan (UNCIP) to investigate and mediate the ‘dispute.’ The Commission passed a resolution on August 13, 1948, ordering a cease-fire and laying down the basis for the subsequent truce agreement between India and Pakistan. After the cease-fire took effect on midnight of January 1, 1949, UNCIP passed a second resolution on January 5, 1949, supplementary to their August 13, 1948 resolution, which set the terms of a plebiscite in the state. Although the resolutions were accepted by both India and Pakistan, the plebiscite never took place. Pakistan dragged its feet and refused to implement truce terms of the August 13, 1948 UNCIP resolution, which were a precondition for plebiscite. The truce terms required Pakistan to withdraw all of its troops from the state and secure the withdrawal of all tribesmen and other fighting forces that had entered the State. This never happened, however, and the cease-fire line became frozen in its January 1, 1949 location.
Pakistan’s attempts to take possession of all of Jammu and Kashmir by force resulted in three more invasions of the state: first in 1965, again in 1971, and finally in 1999.
Jammu and Kashmir State has been not only a target of Pakistani military invasions since 1947, but also a victim of imperialist intrigue ever since its formation a hundred years earlier because of its location in Asia. The region is surrounded by China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Central Asian states of the erstwhile Soviet Union. This location was important to the British during their push towards Central Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and later to the Anglo-American combine in their efforts to encircle the socialist states on Jammu and Kashmir’s northern borders during the Cold War years. 
After 1947, imperialism worked primarily through Pakistan, its most loyal ally in that part of the world. Pakistan, the most reactionary and violent state in South Asia, has since its founding been driven by the ideology of two-nation theory and pathological hostility towards India. It has been obsessed with the possession of Jammu and Kashmir simply because of its Muslim majority. In the 1980s, at the behest of the United States and funded both by it and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan put together, equipped, and trained an international jehadi force to destabilize the government in neighboring Afghanistan. Emboldened by its success in destroying this forward-looking country, Pakistan then turned its jehadi forces east towards India. In 1989, it launched a proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir State. Tens of thousands of people have since been killed, and they continue to be killed, even nineteen years after the beginning of this proxy war.
Pakistan could undertake these adventures without fearing a massive retaliation from India precisely because of the support that it enjoyed from imperialism. The current turmoil in Jammu and Kashmir is no doubt a direct consequence of Pakistan’s covert and overt interference in the affairs of the State. But it also has to be understood as a culmination of imperialist meddling in the State’s affairs from the time of its formation in 1846. This interference continued on through the decolonization of the Indian subcontinent and the subsequent decades in which Pakistan, together with its founding organization the Muslim League, became the tools that imperialism created and nourished to do
its dirty work in the subcontinent.
It is obvious to me from the many reports that I have received that the situation there [Kashmir] is a dangerous and a deteriorating one. The Muslim League in the Punjab and the N.W.F.P. are making preparations to enter Kashmir in considerable numbers. The approach of winter is going to cut off Kashmir from the rest of India. … I understand that the Pakistan strategy is to infiltrate into Kashmir now and to take some big action as soon as Kashmir is more or less isolated because of the coming winter. (Nehru 1947, cited in Dasgupta 2002:17)
