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Kashmir dispute began with a stomachache

JAMMU: India’s former maharajahs evoke awe, envy and sometimes adulation, but Kashmir’s last ruler is most remembered for merging the state with India, setting off more than a half-century of war and bitterness with Pakistan.

The accession to India by Maharajah Hari Singh was preceded by months of vacillation, including a diplomatic stomachache to avoid seeing visitors, and many blame his indecisiveness for the current tensions.

As the two subcontinental rivals began tentative efforts last week to pull back from the brink of another war, which this time could have led to a nuclear conflagration, only a handful of people visited Singh’s former palaces in Jammu, the winter capital of his kingdom.

One is a museum, another a dilapidated hotel with bad air conditioning and faded carpets that struggles to pull in visitors.

Raghubir Singh Pathani, assistant secretary of the trust, which manages the museum, said most of the visitors were from out of the state. Few of Hari Singh’s former subjects care.

“There is respect but not much love,” Pathani says of Kashmir’s royal family.

In 1947, British-ruled colonial India was hurtling toward independence and division into Hindu-majority India and Islamic Pakistan.

While the British provinces were to be divided along religious and contiguous lines, the 565 princes and maharajahs who were given nominal independence by colonial authorities were told to join either of the two new nations.

Kashmir was one of them, and Hari Singh wasn’t sure what to do. He was a Hindu, his people were mostly Muslim and he wanted independence.
That was not an option on offer and the last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, visited Singh in Srinagar, his summer capital, in July 1947 to ask him to choose. Mountbatten wanted an answer the next day, and was promised one.

But he left Kashmir without seeing Singh again because the maharajah suddenly developed a stomach ache and refused to see visitors.

“A problem which would embitter India-Pakistan relations and imperil world peace had found its genesis in that diplomatic stomach ache,” wrote Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in “Freedom at Midnight”, their book on partition and independence in the subcontinent.

Continued to vacillate: Singh continued to vacillate for a few more months, staving off demands from a man he hated but who was the most popular Kashmiri leader at the time, Sheikh Abdullah. Abdullah was a secular Muslim who wanted to join India.

Singh hurriedly acceded to India when Pakistani irregulars invaded Kashmir and reached the doorstep of Srinagar. Indian soldiers then pushed them back part of the way, but not all, and Kashmir has since been divided into Indian- and Pakistani-ruled sectors and is wholly claimed by both nations.

“Kashmir is the crux of our problem,” Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said last week. “If we resolve that, there is no confrontation.” —Reuters

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