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Vernon Hewitt on one of the bitterest legacies of partition that remains unsolved fifty years on.
Few commentators in 1947 would have predicted that, fifty years on, the Kashmir dispute would remain unsolved and seemingly irresolvable. The official position of both India and Pakistan remains that of each laying claim to the former Dogra Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir in its entirety, despite border adjustments between China and Pakis tan, and despite the 1972 Simla Accord which implicitly recognised the partition of the former Princely State between the two successor states of the British Raj. Pakistan still refuses to believe that the signing of the Instrument of Accession by Maharaja Hari Singh in October 1947 legitimises India's `occupation' of the area, while the Indians refuse to recognise Pakistan's control of the area known as 'Azad' Kashmir, and that the Northern Territories of Hunza and Gilgit give the state any locus standi in the dispute at all.
Since the late 1980s, the Kashmir problem has been complicated by a serious outbreak of political unrest within Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir, and the growth of a pan-Kashmiri identity, which has spawned a whole series of political and militant groups demanding a separate, sovereign state of Jammu and Kashmir Some of these call for an independent Islamic state, some for the creation of a secular republic. Yet like their proIndian and pro-Pakistani counterparts, these groups define their future sovereign state on the territorial outlines of the former Dogra kingdom without adjustments, and without seemingly recognising the cultural and social diversity of the present territory.
The relationships between British India and Princely India within the Empire was in origin, pragmatic. By the late 1930s, British India consisted of ten provinces administered in large part by Indian politicians, elected on a small percentage of the adult franchise, and working under a British constituted centre. Princely India consisted of over 600 states of varying sizes, making up almost two-fifths of the Empire. The Princely States were the remains of the various regional kingdoms conquered by the British in the expansive phases of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Essentially feudal, these states were associated directly with the Crown through the principle of 'paramountcy', a vague concept under which the...