As the Indo-Pak confrontation lurches forward, and the world tries to avoid an unnecessary and terrible catastrophe, it is perhaps a good idea to look at the heart of the issue, and see how we got here. The main bone of contention between India and Pakistan is the status of the province of Kashmir, a Muslim majority province whose control is split between the two countries as the result of the war of 1948. Despite India’s claim of Pakistan being under the sway of an “anti-India mentality”, the issue is not primarily one of psychology or prejudice. In the next few columns I will look closer at the history of Kashmir, its present situation, and what prospects there may be for forward movement.
Kashmir lies in the northern corner of the Indian Subcontinent, and is almost entirely made up of the Himalayan mountains. The modern history of Kashmir begins in the early 1800’s, when the British conquered the province from its Sikh rulers in about 1846, and then sold its figurehead throne to a Hindu who had helped them for the meager sum of 7.5 million rupees. The Hindu ruler was atrocious, and presided over a famine in 1877 that killed one-third of his subjects.
The southern portion of Kashmir (Jammu region) is 70% Hindu, while the eastern end (Ladakh) is sparsely populated by Muslims and Buddhists. But the bulk of the population resides in the Vale of Kashmir, a mile high lush mountain valley that features some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet and includes the capital, Srinagar. In the Vale, over 5 million Muslims find themselves under the watchful eye of 500,000 Indian soldiers.
Kashmir contributed greatly to the birth of both Pakistan and India. Muhammad Iqbal was a Kashmiri born to an illiterate family of tailors. His family’s decision to educate him and send him to Cambridge had a profound impact on the Muslims of South Asia, as he was the intellectual godfather of the two-nation theory that eventually led to the creation ofs Pakistan. The other important Kashmiri family was the Nehrus, who moved to Delhi just a few decades before the birth of their most famous son, Jawaharlal.
In colonial India, the social system of Kashmir was atrocious. Below the absentee Hindu Maharajah was a small Hindu landlord and professional class that ran and owned everything, while the Muslims lived as landless illiterate farmworkers. The few Muslims who aspired to higher education had to go to far off Aligarh University, as only Hindus could pursue education in Kashmir.
Kashmiri Muslims gained a leader in 1930 in the person of Sheik Abdullah, a newly minted Aligarh graduate, who would dominate Kashmiri politics for the next fifty years. Abdullah led an agitation against the Maharajah. He quickly caught the attention and gained the support of Nehru, thus forging a relationship that would last for many years.
As independence approached in 1947, Nehru was determined to hold on to Kashmir. Jinnah assumed that Kashmir would be awarded to Pakistan. But interestingly both Abdullah and the Maharajah were leaning toward independence, although with wildly different ideas of who should run Kashmir. Three months after the partition of the subcontinent and the emergence of independent India and Pakistan, Kashmir was still in a state of limbo, with the Maharajah entertaining visits from both Pakistani and Indian emissaries. At this point, terrible anti-Muslim riots broke out in Jammu, as tens of thousands of Muslims were murdered by Hindus and Sikhs. Muslim refugees poured into tribal areas across the border in Pakistan. These volatile folks declared a jihad against the Maharajah. At a time when Pakistan was trying to talk the Maharajah into accession to Pakistan, some elements in the new Pakistani army gave weapons and provided officers to the tribal mob as it surged across the border. The mob quickly pushed all the way to Srinagar, and the Maharajah panicked as it approached. He begged India to save his skin, but Nehru would not lift a finger until he signed accession to the Indian Union. That of course happened, the Indian army entered Srinagar in October, and India and Pakistan spent much of 1948 involved in a war that ended with a January 1, 1949 cease-fire along the present Line of Control.
The defense of Srinagar from the tribal mob was led by Sheik Abdullah. He endorsed the accession to India, and became the Prime Minister from 1948-1953, during which he passed a revolutionary land reform that took the land from the Hindu landlords and distributed it to the Muslim tenants. From this a Muslim peasant landholding class was created. When their children got education 30 years later, they would expose the contradictions of keeping a Muslim majority state in the Indian Union.
(This is the first of three articles on Kashmir).