Paradise Lost.

• Author: Rose, Alexander

The Ordeal of Kashmir

IN KASHMIR, this year's "annual spring exercises"--as the more worldly local commentators like to joke--escalated into the most severe and sustained bout of fighting since 1971, when India and Pakistan clashed for the third time since Partition. In the Kargil Mountains, at an altitude of 17,000 feet, where the air is so thin the trajectory of artillery shells cannot be predicted and helicopter rotors have difficulty generating lift, Pakistani-backed "freedom fighters", mostly imported from Afghanistan, battled with Indian troops. After eight weeks of fighting, many hundreds of deaths, and international alarm over a possible nuclear exchange, the ceasefire line remains basically where it had been before the fighting began, and Kashmir stays partitioned.

Divided between three nuclear-armed powers--India, Pakistan and China--Kashmir remains one of the great unsolved, perhaps insoluble, questions in world politics. In this Himalayan Kosovo, Kashmir's owners cannot give an inch for fear of setting off a chain reaction of ethno-religious turmoil within their own countries and the surrounding region. Indeed, all but the unfortunate Kashmiris (and even they are divided between Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists) may emerge better off if Kashmir is sacrificed on the altar of regional stability. This predicament may be unfair, but it lends a semblance of order and balance to South Asia.

How did tiny, paradisiacal Kashmir end up in this terrible position? History and geography go a long way toward providing an answer. Indeed, for centuries before the current dispute began in 1947, geography alone practically foreordained that Kashmir would become a pivotal space on the earth's surface.

In 1320, after twenty-one dynasties of ruling Hindus, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and Jains, and five centuries after Hamim the Syrian brought Islam to Kashmir, the first Muslim sultan of Kashmir ascended the throne, and over the next few generations most of the population converted to their lords' religion. The Muslim sultans were replaced in 1586 by the Moghul Emperors, who were in turn supplanted by the Afghans in 1753. Then in 1819 the martial Sikh Empire of Lahore--the creation of the one-eyed Maharajah Ranjit Singh--turned Kashmir into a tributary.

One of those who marched in the Sikh army was an illiterate twenty-seven year-old Hindu chieftain, Gulab Singh, described by a contemporary as a fine tall portly man.... To all appearance the gentlest of the gentle, and the most sincere and truthful character in the world ... but he is the cleverest hypocrite in existence, as sharp and acute as possible, devoured by avarice and ambition and when roused horribly cruel. He had already distinguished himself in battle, and as reward in 1820 or thereabouts the Maharajah conferred upon him the small, hilly principality of Jammu.

By 1840 the freshly minted Raja had brought most of the surrounding principalities and kingdoms under his sway. Gulab Singh's expanding empire brought him into contact with the British, who were equally intent upon expanding theirs. In December 1845 a Sikh army crossed the Sutlej and, after fighting four battles in fifty-four days, was finally defeated by the British and their Indian sepoys. As a prize for remaining neutral during the Anglo-Sikh war, the East India Company allowed Gulab Singh, now raised to Maharajah, to purchase the Sunni Muslim-populated Vale of Kashmir for a knockdown price--on condition that he "and the heirs male of his body" acknowledge "the supremacy of the British Government." It was laid down in the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar that Gulab Singh's annual rent to the governor-general, Sir Henry Hardinge, was to be a horse, twelve perfect goats and three pairs of cash-mere shawls.

Hardinge was no fool: there was now a powerful, pro-British ruler with a proven army sitting on the Sikhs' flank. At the time, the fact that the ruler was a Hindu and most of the people he ruled were Muslim did not seem particularly important. After Gulab's death in 1857, his son extended Jammu and Kashmir's border northward into Gilgit. Maharajah Ranbir Singh was, in many ways, a typical Victorian, in that he built schools and funded public works. But unfortunately his tax reforms failed miserably, and corruption set in among the ruling Hindu bureaucratic class. Within four years of Ranbir's death in 1885, Kashmir was bankrupt.

Nevertheless, Ranbir's son, Pratab Singh, held a trump card that ensured continued British support for the Singh dynasty: Kashmir's strategically unique position as the guardian of the ancient invasion routes into British India at a time when the Great Game--the struggle for supremacy in Central Asia between the jostling Russian and British Empires--was in full swing.

IN 1925 the childless Pratab was succeeded by his nephew, Han Singh, whose time in England had not been wholly unremarkable (he was blackmailed over his love life). During Hari's reign two Kashmiri men came to prominence in India: the first was a Hindu, Jawaharlal Nehru, who issued a call for Purna Swaraj (Indian independence from Britain) at the 1929 Indian National Congress; the second, Sir Mohammad Iqbal, was a Muslim intellectual who in 1930 declared the millions of Muslims throughout the subcontinent a distinct political, cultural and religious entity. Iqbal's goal of creating a separate, post-Raj Muslim state was excitedly pursued in Kashmir, where Hindu rule was becoming more...