Kashmir Exposé

While reading Freedom at Midnight decades back, I was too young and so taken in by the flow of the events and characters that one question never occurred. If all the princely states of British India had to make a choice (India or Pakistan?), how come Kashmir got to not make a choice at the time of independence? Surely, Sardar Patel and the British could have forced Kashmir to make a choice, the way they did with all the other princely states, right?

 

Shashi Tharoor answers that in An Era of Darkness. While highly critical of British rule, one area he acknowledges the positiveness of British rule was to introduce and allow for continuation of the printed news. While not fully free, they were still allowed to criticize the “policies and actions of the government in a responsible manner”. For the most part, that is (There were obviously times when the British would step in and censor or even ban entire outlets. And structurally, the British demanded a sizable “security deposit” which could be forfeited if they overstepped, aside from press closure and prosecution of the owners). But yes, says Tharoor, these papers (English and vernacular) played a role in the spread and rise of nationalist sentiment, though they were constrained by the number of literate people in the country.

 

But what have newspapers got to do with the Kashmir question? Even back then, in 1891, journalists had to scour for the scoop. One of them from Amrita Bazar Patrika rummaged through the wastepaper basket at the office of the Viceroy, found a torn up letter, which he pieced back together. It contained in great detail the Viceroy’s plans to annex Jammu and Kashmir. The paper published it on its front page. The Maharaja of Kashmir was rattled, promptly set sail to London and vehemently lobbied the authorities to honour their predecessor’s guarantees of the state’s “independence”.

“The Maharaja was successful, and Indian nationalists congratulated the Patrika on having thwarted the colonialists’ imperial designs.”

 

An unintended consequence of this exposé haunts us to this day. Since Kashmir remained outside British control, it was not in scope of the carving up of British India…

 

History (and present) is sometimes shaped by such events.