History

 Of The region to 1947

     According to legend, an ascetic named Kashyapa reclaimed the land now comprising Kashmir from a vast lake. That land came to be known as Kashyapamar and, later, Kashmir. Buddhism was introduced by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, and from the 9th to the 12th century CE the region appears to have achieved considerable prominence as a center of Hindu culture. A succession of Hindu dynasties ruled Kashmir until 1346, when it came under Muslim rule. The Muslim period lasted nearly five centuries, ending when Kashmir was annexed to the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab in 1819 and then to the Dogra kingdom of Jam mu in 1846.

Thus, the Kashmir region in its contemporary form dates from 1846, when, by the treaties of Lahore and Amritsar at the conclusion of the First Sikh War, Raja Gulag Singh, the Dogra ruler of Jam mu, was created maharajah (ruling prince) of an extensive but somewhat ill-defined Himalayan kingdom “to the eastward of the River Indus and westward of the River Ravi.” The creation of this princely state helped the British safeguard their northern flank in their advance to the Indus and beyond during the latter part of the 19th century. The state thus formed part of a complex political buffer zone interposed by the British between their Indian empire and the empires of Russia and China to the north. For Gulag Singh, confirmation of title to these mountain territories marked the culmination of almost a quarter-century of campaigning and diplomatic negotiation among the petty hill kingdoms along the northern borderlands of the Sikh empire of the Punjab.

Some attempts were made in the 19th century to define the boundaries of the territory, but precise definition was in many cases defeated by the nature of the country and by the existence of huge tracts lacking permanent human settlement. In the far north, for example, the maharajah’s authority certainly extended to the Karakorum Range, but beyond that lay a debatable zone on the borders of the Turkestan and Xinjiang regions of Central Asia, and the boundary was never demarcated. There were similar doubts about the alignment of the frontier where this northern zone skirted the region known as Aksai Chin, to the east, and joined the better-known and more precisely delineated boundary with Tibet, which had served for centuries as the eastern border of the Ladakh region. The pattern of boundaries in the northwest became clearer in the last decade of the 19th century, when Britain, in negotiations with Afghanistan and Russia, delimited boundaries in the Pamirs region. At that time Gil git, always understood to be part of Kashmir, was for strategic reasons constituted as a special agency in 1889 under a British agent.

The Kashmir problem

 long as the territory’s existence was guaranteed by the United Kingdom, the weaknesses in its structure and along its peripheries were not of great consequence, but they became apparent after the British withdrawal from South Asia in 1947. By the terms agreed to by India and Pakistan for the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the rulers of princely states were given the right to opt for either Pakistan or India or—with certain reservations—to remain independent. Hari Singh, the maharajah of Kashmir, initially believed that by delaying his decision he could maintain the independence of Kashmir, but, caught up in a train of events that included a revolution among his Muslim subjects along the western borders of the state and the intervention of Pashtun tribesmen, he signed an Instrument of Accession to the Indian union in October 1947. This was the signal for intervention both by Pakistan, which considered the state to be a natural extension of Pakistan, and by India, which intended to confirm the act of accession. Localized warfare continued during 1948 and ended, through the intercession of the United Nations, in a cease-fire that took effect in January 1949. In July of that year, India and Pakistan defined a cease-fire line—the line of control—that divided the administration of the territory. Regarded at the time as a temporary expedient, the partition along that line still exists.