Empire: World History - 282. Partition: The Birth of The Kashmir Conflict (Part 5)

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

What happened to the 565 princely states within British India when it became independent from the empire? How are the current conflicts in Balochistan and Kashmir linked to the partition of the princely states? Why have copies of the Lonely Planet been burnt because of their maps of Kashmir?  William and Anita are joined once again by Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions And The Making of Modern Asia, to discuss how the division of the princely states created a territorial dispute between nuclear nations which has continued ever since. Become a member of the Empire Club via empirepoduk.com to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnden. And me, William Durimple. And we are joined again by Sam Durunple, the author of the rather marvellous new book, Five partitions, it's brilliant. And it talks about areas of the partition that most of us talk about between India and Pakistan,

but also other areas, which, you know what, they are really important and they remain important and they are in the news even today. So I don't know how many times I've been asked. What are the roots of the problems that almost led these two countries to a direct war? Only one month ago, yeah. Just over a month ago, exactly right. And there are two sort of princely states which will figure in this, which are really important, which were central to all of that on the brink of situation that we found ourselves in. Kashmir, of course, being one, which is where the violence started and precipitated a much bigger conflict between these two countries where everybody was on the edge of their seats to see what would happen and how long it would go on for. But also Balochistan, which is a place in Pakistan, which you may be less familiar with. Anyway, Sam, thank you very much for being with it. again. So look, we mentioned and we touched upon this idea of, you know, there wasn't just the one

Cyril Ratcliffe line that was a partition line in India after independence, because there were also the partitions of princely states as well. And you touched upon what princely states were. They were supposedly notionally independent of the Raj. And yet, I think, I don't know if we pointed this out. There was always a British resident there directing what was allowed and what was not allowed. So, I mean, some may argue, yes, okay, there was some degree of autonomy, but there was also a high degree of control by the Raj, even over the princely states. We should make clear that the decisions that the princes made about whether they would remain independent, whether they would go to India, or whether they would go to Pakistan, would determine over half the Indian

Pakistan border or more than 80% if you exclude modern Bangladesh. So this is a crucial bit of the story, which is often not completely forgotten, but not given the emphasis that I think you quite rightly do, Sam, in your book. And you talk about it being a separate partition. Your book, Shattered Lands talks of five partitions. And one of those is the partition of Prince of India. Why did you think, Sam, that it was worth calling that a separate partition from the main 1947? Because it happens more or less simultaneously. Yeah. So, In 1947, you have British India being divided along religious lines. But the division of territories that constituted princely states was an entirely separate process that did not happen on religious lines.

Right. And it's why Kashmir today, large parts of Muslim majority regions have fallen under Monday India. And likewise, you've got Hindu, you know, certain Hindu majority bits of what's now sinned that joined Pakistan as a result of the decisions of princes. The entire border from the Arabian Sea up to the borders of Punjab near Amritsa, none of that section of the India-Pakistan border, 80% of it, was drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, the British lawyer. That entire region was determined by the decisions of princes who were offered to go one way or the other. And I think that in the standard nationalist stories of Indian and Pakistani independence, It's assumed that the princely states were also divided along religious lines.

I had always assumed that, I have to say. Yeah. And you look into the archives and virtually, I think, of 565 princely states, there is one prince who's the prince of Bikeneer who thought along those lines. Virtually everyone else tries to basically see what's on offer. The blue city of Jodpur in India or the lovely kind of desert city of Jaisalmir, Both of those states were in negotiations with Jinnah to see what they could get if they joined Pakistan, despite virtually none of the population being Muslim. And Jinnah does offer Jodhpur, all sorts of things. He gives us a port, doesn't he? He says you can have the whole of, you have the stretch of land down to the sea.

Yeah. And also, you know, a lot of the border between India and Bangladesh, which was East Pakistan, is also determined by princely states. the entirety of the border with the Indian state of Meghalia was made up of these kind of these states that were neither Hindu nor Muslim, but sort of, you know, local indigenous religions and Christian religions. And so a lot of these states felt that they fell into neither camp, neither Hindu nor Muslim, and they wanted to see what each state could offer them. And so I think the key thing to emphasize here is that the map of India and Pakistan that we see today is not the map that emerges on Independence Day. Almost a third of India and Pakistan are missing on Independence Day. The map of India on Independence Day does not include all of

Rajasthan, all of Gadirat, all of Telangana, and the map of Pakistan does not include any of Balochistan. Kashmir is not on maps of either India or Pakistan on Independence Day. Extraordinary, against all nationalist expectations. And one of the things that we forget is, we forget, is that neither the government of India nor the government of Pakistan wanted to recognize the legitimate independence of these princely states as independent. They wanted to absorb them up. And so as late as 1948, I think March, neither state is still printing maps of themselves. You still don't get official Indian maps of India or official maps of Pakistan because they refuse to draw maps that don't include the Pritzley states. But as a result,

You get people, entire states that don't know where they are, like don't know whether they're under princely rule or Indian rule or Pakistani rule. One of the earliest books I read about this period in history. People have questioned some of the history in it. But it does do this very well. And it was hugely influential freedom at midnight. Which is more or less a Mountbatten's sort of PR job. Hageography, yes. I mean, a lot of people think it was sort of Mountbatten whispering into the ears of the authors. But they do talk very well about the wheeling and dealing that goes on, the seduction of the princes to try and get them on side. Or, you know, sort of the big stick that is wielded in some, you know, states where you've got people like Sadaar Patel, who sort of basically turn up with sort of almost like heavy saying you will do this or something terrible might happen. You know, so there's all of that, you know, it feels very goodfellers-ish, you know, sort of on both sides, people using stick and the carrot and the same going on from Pakistan, join us or else. I mean, the princes were in a difficult position, but they were out for what they could get. Just remind us, though, why did they never become enfolded in the Raj? Because we're talking about someone like Hyderabad, for example, one of the richest monarchs in the world. Why did they never get enveloped? Give us a brief picture, Sam, if you would, while answering that question.

of the sheer scale of some of these princely states, because I don't think one will understand quite how rich, for example, the Zambhidribat was. Yeah, so the princely states range enormously. You've got states as small as Kamadir in modern-day Gujarat, where it's basically a kind of private estate, and there's photographs of the entire population of Kamadya in a single photograph. You know, it's basically the king and his 30 retainers are the population of the state, and it's three acres big. But then on the other side of the scale, you've got Hyderabad state, which was roughly the same size as France, with an economy roughly the size of Belgium's economy, and the ruler of which is the richest man in the world after the death of J.D. Rockefeller

and the fifth richest man in history. In 1947, the Nizab of Hyderabad is arguably the world's foremost Muslim ruler. And the capital is the most prominent Muslim city of learning outside of the Arab world. You've got all these states that range hugely. You've got the Maharaja of Mysore is this celebrated philosopher whose state modernized faster than many British ruled territories, whilst you've got the Nawab of Rampur building up the most extensive library in Asia. So I think although several British tellings of the princes and indeed Indian and Pakistani nationalist tellings, often dismiss the princes as these absurd feudal rulers, with an average of 11 titles, 5.8 wives, you know, 9.2 elephants shot and 3.4 Rolls Royces each. Many of these

princes are actually significant rulers of countries in their own right. And again, we must remember that the list of princely states include Nepal, Bhutan, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar. So it's not like these states could never have gone independent. They could have. And I think it's also equally important to remember that the Brits do try and integrate these states at various points. Throughout the 1930s, there are several pushes to create an Indian federation that links British India with the princely states in exchange for certain privileges. And I think Viceroy Lindithko makes the biggest leaps forward in this regard and very almost gets all the princes to sign up for a federation when World War II happens and suddenly,

you know, it's just not on the political cards anymore. He organizes a sports day for all the Maharajas to try and get them to meet all the Indian bureaucrat. brilliant scheme. Faberjeic and spoon races and things like that. I mean, I just can't imagine what this looks like. It goes actually very well, except one of the Maharajas tries to bowl in a cricket match and accidentally kind of has a heart attack or something. It has to be wheeled off to hospital trying to relive his younger years. But there are several attempts to merge these states into the Raj. But the crucial thing is that as a result of World War II, pushing the Federation idea away, in 1940s.

There is no constitutional link between British India and any of these states. On 14th and 15th of August, at Independence Day, it's not two states that become independent. It's something like 568 states that become independent. I mean, that is just such a tremendous fact, which people don't know at all, I think. But also, all of these princely states or the majority of these princely states think, Well, hey, the viceroy is Mountbatten. He knows what it is to be royal. He's going to make it all right for us.

I mean, they do have this sort of emotional connection, and they think everything will be fine, because Mountbatten is linked to the royal family. He understands, he understands this business. He understands about our firms. And we're going to be fine. Nothing much is going to change for us. And they weren't so far wrong.

There's a lovely story in your book, Sam, that the last thing that Mountbatten does, on the night of independence, when Nehru's about to make that famous, his speech about the trip with destiny. Mountbatten, first of all, watches a Bob Hope movie and then thinks what's the last thing he can do is viceroy when he has his power? And he makes some random Australian her highness. He gives the Nawab of Palampur's Australian wife the title Her Highness as his last piece of official duty. The last thing the British were to do in

South Asia. But he doesn't, I mean, if they're looking for him or looking towards him to maintain their independence, there's literally no way he can do that. Whatever they think he is in his gift, that is not it. And you have this wonderful quote in the book that, you know, he does make it clear to any of the princes who refuse to accede to either India or Pakistan, that Britain's not going to come and help you. You know what? If you want to maintain your independence, we're not there for you. And there's this moment when the Prime Minister of Cutch says, you know, his state is on the border. He needs to ask his prince, which dominion he wants to join. And he's sort of hinting that, you know, look, we might want to just stay out of this and will you

help us. And Mountbatten picks up a large round glass paperweight from his desk and says, I will look into my crystal and give you an answer. Then 10 seconds of silence, dramatic silence followed, where you could have heard a pin drop. And then he says, His Highness asks you to sign the instrument of accession, meaning basically your problem, you bloody sort it out because we're not here for you at all anymore. The moment that you're talking about is on 25th of July, in 1947. It's in the heat of summer and he gathers roughly 100 princes in a room. And this is the moment that it becomes clear to many princes that they're not going to remain independent until basically two and a half weeks before independence. Most of the princely states thought

that they would emerge completely independent and that they would not be pressured to join India or Pakistan. This was the prevailing assumption. That's completely written out of his It's an extraordinary discovery there. One of the things that the British do, and this is something that happens from the period I've studied in the East India Company, is that all these independent states, as early as the late 18th century, are given what are called British residents. And they're meant to be just a diplomatic mission from the East India Company and then the Raj to sort of keep channels of communication open.

In reality, what happens is that the British resident sits on the head of the Nawab or Maharaj. and quite often randomly deposes them, they organise palace coups and get some nephews more pliable to replace them. So those guys actually leave on the night of August the 14th, 15th, and the princes genuinely are independent for a period. More or less, yes. And the crucial thing is that on the 25th of July,

Mountbatten introduces this idea called the instrument of the session, which basically says, if you sign this document, you can merge with India or Pakistan. You can hand over your foreign policy, your defence and your communications, but internally you will remain independent, but you'll be under the protection of the Indian government or the Pakistani government or actually the Burmese government, several of the princes actually joined Burma. But this is a way that you can preserve your internal independence and essentially end up with more or less the same arrangement as you had under the Raj, where you're internally sovereign. I thought Burma was a separate country by this point. How have they got the option of joining Burma? Well, as in India and Pakistan, we're also separate countries at this point.

These are all countries that emerged from the British Raj, including Burma, as we mentioned in episode one. And you get the 20 Shan states, which were Indian princely states, that do join Burma and become the future Shan state. And the Maharaja of Manipur. Moneypur is on the border between India and Burma. And frankly, although increasingly Hindu by this point, had probably been under Burmese empires more than it had been under Indian empires. The crowning ceremony of every king of Burma ever, they were crowned by Manipuri Brahmits. Right.

Again, this is one of the documents that I managed to dig out of the archives. Ong San, Ongsang Suchi's father and the founding father of Burma, tries to fly into Manipur, to try and kind of basically lobby for its secession to Burma. The Congress strongman, Sadar Patel, who basically threatens, that we're going to put to blockade on Burma if it tries to absorb any more states that border India, because we want this state. So there's all sorts of different ways

that the border could have been drawn, I think. Just on that, Sardar Patel point, I mean, Mountbatten makes the observation that, you know, Indians politicians may have gone on about nonviolence a lot while getting the British out, but they had taken to using threats of violence against the princes to get them to do what they wanted. So he says, you know, you always talk about wooing people,

and yet in the case of the states, you threaten. And he says this to Gandhi. Would you woo a girl if you wanted to marry with a stick and expect her to accept? So, you know, there is this sort of notion that, you know, look, I see you. I see what you're doing, but actually he can do nothing about it. And he also can't promise them that they can remain independent. He doesn't know what's going to happen between these newly born nation states and whether they're going to allow it or not. But there is also farce involved in it. I mean, some of the farce is hilarious. So you do tell the story about the Kasi states in the northeast, and you just mention them again.

They try to join Pakistan because, as you said, you know, there's an affinity there. There's a Muslim population there. But the Pakistani officials lose the paperwork. And so, in frustration, what, they join India. So if you can't keep our papers safe, we're going to go with India. If you can't even keep the papers safe, what are we doing with you? So this is to do with Pakistan operating out of shipping containers, as we mentioned in the previous episode. So the Pakistani bureaucracies in such chaos at this time that they never received the letter of accession from these Kasi states.

So the Kasi states aren't Muslim. They are a mixture of Christian and animist. And they had affinity with neither country. The Pakistan government simply loses the paperwork. And as a result, they end up joining India. And I think this is something that we need to remember is that you've mentioned Patel and Gandhi, supposedly, there's nonviolence wooing people with a stick. But I think Mountbatten has no real credits either. He is the person who's the person who's who. set into motion, this revolution, essentially, you know, 550 states are pushed into relinquishing their sovereignty as a result of him. And although no Republican, although a member of the royal family, he had just set into motion one of the great revolutions in world history, essentially. From this moment on, Patel, along with his right-hand man, Menon, would corral these states into losing their existence. And a contemporary journalist, dubs Patel, a Hindu Cromwell courteously decapitating hundreds of little King Charleses. And there's another line in your books I remember about, is it Khrushchev or one of the Soviets

looking on and saying, how could you liquidate the princely states without liquidating the princes? Exactly. He sees, my baton is effectively being a sort of Bolshevik at this point. Let's talk about some of the other areas. It won't be so familiar to our listeners. And Kalath is one of them. Tell us about Kalath and why it is important. and in the news even now.

So today, if you look at the news to do with Pakistan, you'll often hear about a kind of ongoing insurgency in a place called Balochistan in southwestern Pakistan. And the origins of the conflict in Balochistan go back to the accession of the Khan of Kalat. Kalat roughly corresponds to modern-day Balochistan. And it, like many princely states, had a parliament. It had begun to devolve power away from a single authority and to create a constitutional monarchy, more or less.

The Khan of Kalat has created this parliament, and the parliament votes to remain independent of either Pakistan or India, and go the way of Nepal and Bhutan and work out independence on your own. And we should point out that Balochistan and Kalat have a border with Iran, like Nepal, that's a state that quite easily could have chosen to be independent, would have a independent border with both Iran and Pakistan then? With a Shia majority in there? I mean, with their proximity to Iran, is there sort of a secular divide among Muslims? It's not so much a religious divide, but there's a, the parliament just sees it as, you know, by virtue of us being Muslims,

we shouldn't have to join Pakistan because, you know, other Muslim countries like Egypt aren't being asked to join Pakistan. So why should we? We're an independent country. Remember that Iran only became Shia in the 18th century under the Safavids and Balochistan was never under the Safavids, so it doesn't like Shiasm is leaching across the border. There's quite a firm divide between that. Okay. So although the parliament in Balochistan essentially votes to remain independent and Jinnah actually recognises Kallat's independence. He says, yeah, you're absolutely fine. You have a right to remain independent. But when it becomes clear that India is hoovering up all of these smaller princely states. and you can double in size as a result, Jinnah begins to change his mind

and begins to pressure the Khan of Kalat that maybe you should join Pakistan, maybe you should join Pakistan. And eventually there is this broadcast that remains unclear who broadcasts it, but India, I think it's all India radio, India broadcasts that the Khan of Kalat has made overtures to join India, which never actually happens and seems to have been just a misunderstanding.

But the Khan of Kalat is so horrified with this, and there's protests against him in the streets of Baluchistan that why are we joining India? That in an anxious moment, he essentially then sends a letter to join Pakistan and say, no, no, no, I plan to join Pakistan after all, which stops the protests against him. But there was this whole Republican side to Baluchy politics.

The parliament had voted for independence. So why is the Khan now suddenly unilaterally making us join Pakistan? So this is the roots of the whole Baluchy independence movement. It's between monarchists and Republicans. and Republicans. Essentially. And within weeks, you get a whole slew of leaders in Balutistan moving across the border into Afghanistan and Iran

and planning to start basically an independence movement from abroad. How interesting. The modern-day Balochie conflict is immensely more complicated. You know, it's 75 years down the line. You know, it's far more today to do with Pakistan not giving Balochistan the resources that it deserves and yet taking Balochistan's resources and distributing it to other provinces is where a lot of the animosity against Pakistan's government comes from today. But the very early murmurings of Baluchy independence

are a result of this complex. Should it have remained independent? Or was the Khan of Kalat? Did he have the right to unilaterally join Pakistan? And then we have Hyderabad, Sam. Tell us about this, because it's often ignored in mainstream accounts of partition, but it actually produces three more times refugees than the Palestinian Nakhpa the same year. Again, an extraordinary thought given how much trouble and how much today people are suffering because of the Nakhba. And yet, Hyderabad we've totally forgotten about. Yeah, I think one of the bizarre things is that you chat to South Indians today, and often they'll assume that partition did not affect South India.

They'll say, oh, no, it's a story that affected Punjab. And yet it's all one of the largest forced migrations in history. The story of Hyderabad is that Hyderabad state, which was the entirety of the modern state of Telangana, plus large swaths of Karnataka and Maharashtra. And Andhra Pradesh. Yeah, was a Hindu majority state that was ruled by a Muslim Nizam. And the Nizam, as I mentioned earlier, was one of the great Muslim rulers of the world at this point. And Hyderabad was one of the great seats of Muslim learning in the world. When the Ottoman caliph is deposed in the 20s, he may be made.

marries his daughter and his niece to the sons and grandson of the Nizam of Hyderabad as the other great Muslim family in the world. So today we think of, you know, Saudi and Jordan and Egypt and Dubai being the great kind of, you know, Muslim states of the world. But Hyderabad was considered that right until this point. One of the great regrets of my life was I missed a chance to interview Nilufa, the daughter, in Paris in the 1990s. And I didn't go for, for various stupid and idiotic reasons, and she died the following year. I never got that chance back again. Hyderabad tries to remain independent and begins mustering its own army, tries to get tanks and planes shipped in, and tries to become an independent nation state in its own right.

Tries to buy Goa, doesn't it? Tries to buy Goa from the Portuguese so that it's got a port, but it's surrounded on all sides by Indian territory. And India is, and particularly Saddam Patel, is not willing to let this happen. And in order to maintain his independence, increasingly the Nizam starts leaning on a Muslim paramilitary group called the Razakurs who begin terrorizing the Hindu population of the state. At the same time, there is one of the largest communist revolutions in South Asia in history, which is the Telangana uprising, where thousands of peasants revolt against the Nizam's rule and try to create a kind of a communist state, neither India nor Pakistan, but a communist state of Telangana. And so the state essentially devolves into civil war. And eventually the Indian Army just marches it. I interviewed this old man, Mir Muzim Hussein, now dead, who led the Hyderabad resistance. And he said that he was there at the border with, I think, two guns and a small regiment of soldiers.

In what's called today the police action, the Indian Army comes across the border with tanks, with air force, dropping bombs and firing missiles. And he said, all we can do was take shelter under the bridge. And he said that when the moguls invaded our territory, he said, we were able to resist for three weeks. We kept Orang Zeb back for three weeks. I was able to keep them back only for two hours, he said. Right, right. So, I mean, you get the idea that, you know, the birth pangs of these nations is painful, really painful. And it lasts well into, you know, sort of the first flush days of their new existence.

The one we haven't talked about, and we're going to take a break here, but we're going to come back, is the biggie. Kashmir. Join us then. Welcome back. Now, if there is one place that emblemises the difficulties of partition to this very day, it is Kashmir. And as we started this episode of Empire, by talking about how, you know, it was the place that brought these two nuclear nations to the brink of all out war. So let's talk about the princely state of Kashmir at the time of independence. Who was in charge? And how did it run? So Kashmir is a Muslim majority princely state ruled by a Hindu Maharaja. So essentially the opposite scenario of Hyderabad that we just saw get annexed to India in the previous section. It's a very diverse state. So although

Muslim majority, there's large sways of the territory that have a huge Hindu population. There's also the area of modern-day Ladakh that is essentially Tibetan Buddhist. You've got huge Sikh populations in the south. This is under Ranjit Singh's kingdom at one point before it got split off. So there Lots of Sikhs and Degra Hindus or Brahmin, so they're of the Brahmin priestly sect in Kashmir also. Yeah. And I think Pakistanis often forget that Gilgit Baltistan in the north of Pakistan was a part of Kashmir state. And Indians often forget that Ladakh is part of this dispute. Ladakh was also part of Kashmir state because we tend to use Kashmir to refer more specifically today to the valley of Kashmir, where there's a Kashmiri-speaking population.

But the princely state was far bigger. And it was ruled by this man, Maharaja Hari Singh, of the... Dorda dynasty and he is descended from essentially the local rulers of Kashmir under Ranjit Singh, under the Sikh Empire. And after the end of the Sikh Empire, his ancestors had bought the right to rule over the valley of Kashmir as opposed to their local valley of Jammu. They bought it for 7.5 million rupees from the East India Company. Essentially, this means that this Hindu family is ruling over this Muslim valley. Personality-wise, what was he like? Harry Singh, because again, depending on who you read and where that historian comes from,

he is either sort of a weak, chinned, vacillating greedy guts, or he's a man trying to do his best in a place that is about to be on fire. So, I mean, what did you find him to be? I think exactly both of what you said. I think he's a complex man. I think when he's brought to the throne, he's regarded with huge hopefulness. He does huge strides. So at the time, Kashmir is one of the most economically disadvantaged regions in South Asia. I think 2% of Shrinagar's residents are literate. And as far as Kashmiris are concerned, this is his dynasty's fault. This is the Hindu-Dogra dynasty's fault. But Hari Singh makes huge strides to try and educate the population, try and devolve power, etc. But then there's a sex capital that he gets

himself into, and three of his wives die in mysterious circumstances. With the suggestion that he's killed them? I don't think so. But that is where what a lot of the Kashmiri public begins to theorise. And during these mass protests against the Maharaja's rule, you get this idealistic young Kashmiri population called Sheikh Abdullah, who rises to national fame. And he's the son of the shawl weaver. He's the opposite of the Maharaja. He's essentially the local populist politician. And he's essentially actually inspired by the politics of the Soviet Union. I think today we imagine Kashmiris in 1946 thinking, oh, will we join India or will we join Pakistan? And actually, one of the strangest things is far more

people in Kashmir seem to be writing about potentially we should join the Soviet Union, which of course is just 16 kilometres north of Kashmir over the Wakhan corridor. The Wakhan corridor is this very thin strip of land that goes into Afghanistan. It's the only thing keeping Kashmir and the Soviet Union apart at this point. Yeah. So I think we often forget that until 1947, Kashmir's popular politics, is probably ideologically closer to the Soviet Union that it is to India or Pakistan. And British communists visiting the state are constantly wondering how the people's movement of Kashmir is the strongest and most militant of any Indian state. And so today we see it as this binary, but it's not as simple as that.

And just another observation about Sheikh Abdullah, who you've just spoken of the son of the Shawweaver, he becomes the founder of a political dynasty that is active to this day in Kashmir, and you would have seen them quoted in the news. So his son is Faruq Abdullah, who serves as president of Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. His grandson is Omar Abdullah, who's the current chief minister. So you've got sort of dynastic politics, even if it isn't sort of blue-blooded initially, it is a thing in this region. It may not be Harry Singh's dynasty in the Degra's anymore.

It is a different dynasty. Harry Singh's descendant is also his elective character. is very much important figure in Delhi life today. He's very strongly, obviously, part of the Indian establishment now and the idea that he could ever, that family could ever have chosen anything else. It's hard to imagine. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. So look, where we left off, Kashmir is trying to get closer to the USSR. That's going to set alarm bells off all over the place. But now you've got the race for Harry Singh. And that is really a scramble for Kashmir because Nairu is very fond of Kashmir. We've heard this story many times told.

He's a Kashmiri. He's a Kashmiri pundit. He spends a lot of his time that he really cannot stand the idea of losing Kashmir for him. It's like an amputation. But for Jinnah, also, Kashmir is one of the jewels in the newly created Pakistan. How can he be without it? And the K of the acronym, Buck is done. The name means land of the pure, but the letters were meant to spell out the different provinces imagined as part of this Pakistani Muslim nation. And the K is Kashmir alongside the P is Punjab, for example. And, you know, I think as one of the biggest Muslim majority regions in the subcontinent, most people assumed that it would join Pakistan. But opinion is divided. There are all sorts of Muslims who think it should join India and there are all sorts of Hindus who think it should join Pakistan. And it's not actually as clear as we think which side it will go.

And ultimately, Hari Singh, the Maharaja, decides to keep it independent. Nepal and Bhutan have just basically been allowed to retain their independence as Himalayan states on the basis that they are on the borders with Tibet and they should be allowed to remain independent if they so wish. And he thinks that he can do the same. He thinks that he can keep Kashmir as the Switzerland of the East. And Karin Singh, who you mentioned, has reflected on his father's decisions, saying it always seemed to me so tragic that a man as intelligent as my father should have so grievously misjudged the political situation. In retrospect, he says, the only rational solution would have been a peaceful partition of his state between the two new

nations, but that needed clear political vision and careful planning over many years. As it turned out, the state was in fact partition, but in a manner that has caused untold suffering and bloodshed, poisoning relations between India and Pakistan right down to the present day. OK, so the beginning of the Kashmir conflict, can you put a finger on actually when that begins? There are a date where it becomes absolutely. clear that this is going to be one of the world's most dangerous flashpoints. It's difficult to know exactly when that starts, but it begins to start probably in August 1947, soon after independence, when the pogroms, the religious pogroms that have been

spreading across British India spread into Kashmir State for the first time. And you get the city of Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir, that sees a huge swath of its Muslims murder or forced out of the city. And so Jammu was actually a kind of a Muslim majority area in 46. It's one of the very bloodiest partition massacres, isn't it? Exactly. And all the Muslims are forced out. And Pakistan's government sees this as, you know, one of the worst atrocities against Muslims

and begins to worry that under a Hindu Maharaja, there's all these conspiracy theories. Maybe these pogroms were sponsored by the Maharaja himself, who's trying to make it Hindu majority, etc. etc., etc. Around this time, young Kashmiris have begun to contact the Pakistani army for help, specifically this guy Siddhar Ibrahim Khan, who we know contacts the Pakistani army in September 1947. So what happens is that funded by soldiers in the Pakistani army, but crucially without Jinnah's knowledge, without the knowledge of Pakistan's founding father, the army in Pakistan begins to offer weapons to these tribal militias

who dressed as civilians will enter Kashmir state, declare a jihad, and get Kashmir to join Pakistan by force. This, just to pause there, is this first crucial moment when the Pakistani army starts operating on its own, defying political authority for the first time, and for the first time, supporting non-state actors, arming them, and sending them across the border. This, of course, is the two things that will absolutely bedevil Pakistani politics until the present day.

Exactly. And there's all sorts of fascinating accounts of this. I think Andrew Whitehead has probably done the best work on oral histories of this whole, what's known as the entry of the Lashka. This tribal group of jihadis are known as the Lashka, the army with capital A. And you get all sorts of people like British officer Frank Lisset writes in his diary one day about seeing all of these tribesmen driving trucks en masse towards the borders of Kashmir covered in graffiti, wearing baggy trousers, roughly tied turbans, and they all have shirts hanging outside of their waistcuts. They streamed down in busloads, he writes. Momens and Massouds, Afridis and Afghans, from Bunaire and Bajor, Swat in South Waziristan, Chiba and Khost, the light of battle in their eyes, half-forgotten war cry. on their lips. So even then, it is the, from the frontier, they're sending frontier pastures into Kashmir in 1948 now, is it? 47. 47, okay. And Lashka, the army, I mean, the prescribed group, terror group regarded as terrorist group, Lashkar-a-Thoyba, is there a direct

link between those early Lashkas who are sort of trained and armed by the Pakistan army and what we have today? Is that a direct lineage between the two? In a sense, it might be considered, yes, a political successor, but there's no direct line. Not sort of that dynastic thing that's going on elsewhere. Okay. I interviewed when I was a young journalist, went up into Pakistani Kashmir, and interviewed one of Sadr Ibrahim Khan's leading associates, who was then an old man, and like Jinnah, very dressy, tall, rather handsome Muslim old man in a kind of cool hat and a Tweed jacket. And he talked very proudly about encouraging all the local people to rise up,

take their guns, arm them and head off and try, as he put it, to liberate Srinaga. So these people are only just dying offline. I think Sunderbrim Khan only died 10, 15 years ago. It's not that long ago. It really isn't that long ago. Absolutely right. There's another rather interesting thing, which is many of the leaders of the Lashka were actually former soldiers for the INA, the pro-Japanese Indian army that had been run by Sebastian. Chandra Bose, which today is held up as, you know, this great Indian army of freedom. Indian nationalist, yeah. But also very much identified as a Hindu army.

I mean, you know, Sebastian Robos is now one of the big heroes of Hindu. Exactly. And so to imagine that he had these Kashmiri soldiers or Muslim soldiers as battling. Submastanabos was actually very, very strong about having Muslims fighting for him. So on the 22nd of October, the Lushka enters Kashmir. And very quickly, I think it's when they meet, reach Muzafra. that things begin to go awry, because although many of the people organizing it are soldiers who are used to kind of regiments, etc. Many of the people who've joined the Lashgar are essentially their fallout.

And very quickly, you get minority groups being massacred, people's houses being broken into in Baramulla, although it's unclear what actually happened. There's all sorts of rumours that all the nuns in the convent there have been raped by the Lashka. that's a later story that emerges amidst the kind of fog of war. But very quickly you get the Maharaja fleeing Shrinagar and in self-defense, essentially, in order to try and bring an army to stop this Lashka, he accedes to India. And what you get in the aftermath is the Indian army going into Shrinagar and pushing back this Lashka.

And again, very importantly, from the point of view of Pakistan, Mountbatten, who is still around, I think, at this point, agrees to have British planes repainted with Indian colors and fly Indian troops up to Sri Naga. So the Pakistanis regard this as British interference on the side of Nero against them. I think what's also true is that a lot of Pakistanis until recently denied having sponsored the Lashka. and it's recently become very, very clear that the Lashka was sponsored by members of the Pakistani army, although Jinnah and the leadership had no clue. But what you eventually get in the following weeks, you get more and more Pakistani involvement, and they see this as Indian aggression.

And so Pakistan sends its official troops eventually into Kashmir. So that by around November, you have more or less all that war between two countries that were, until months ago, one country. And so there's this absurd moment when both armies finally meet on the high passes of Ladakh, the high altitude plateau in the east of Kashmir state, where the Buddhist and Islamic worlds collided on the edge of Tibet. And this is 11,500 feet up. You know, we're talking the highest plateau in the world. And suddenly where previously there had not been seen bicycles. Suddenly both governments are airlifting tanks onto this plateau to fight one another. And the place where these bicycles suddenly mysteriously appear is one that again has

so recently been in the news, Cargill. Cargill, you know, when it's sort of had the roof of the world, these two nations are fighting each other and continue to. I mean, one of the more recent, I think was it in the 90s that the Cargill conflict happened again? Exactly. Do we know how many people were lost in the battle between India and Pakistan? We don't know exact numbers again. It's everything so chaotic at this time that it's hard to really note. There's no censuses done after World War II even. So you just see the pre-World War II numbers and then the 1950 numbers.

But the crucial thing is that all these guys fighting for the first time are friends. And this is so important because you get all these stories of people smuggling letters and cigarettes across the front line. Even during this story that's supposedly the foundational war between when, India and Pakistan finally hate each other. You get, I think it's Lieutenant General S.N. Shama writes that those relationships are very difficult to explain. It was power, not religion. The hunger for power and authority is what drove us to Madden's. He writes about having sent letters across the front line to check if his

friends were all okay. And it's this awful war. But finally, I think it's in 1949 on New Year's day. A ceasefire comes into effect. And it's the ceasefire line. that informally partitions Kashmir between India and Pakistan. And to this day, it is not accepted by either country as a border. It's known as the line of control. Today, if you print maps of India in India, the entirety of Kashmir has to be part of India. In Pakistan, the entirety of Kashmir has to legally be part of Pakistan on maps.

And many, many crates of books have been confiscated and burnt because they have the wrong maps. Issued whole print runs of the lonely planet. guide to India has been sort of put on fire because of the wrong maps. But yes, it's since this ceasefire line that the conflict over Kashmir has begun. You get India and Pakistan continue to claim the whole state in its entirety. And the conflict which we see rearing up so frequently begins. It's important also to just take a step back. Okay, so we're in 1949.

It's been two years since independence. And 556 princely states have vanished from the map. Burma's increased by a third, India's increased by two-thirds, and Pakistan's landmass has doubled. There is arguably no other revolution in world history that has ended so many monarchies in so short a time span. It's one of the great political revolutions of all time. And I think that this is accompanied by huge economic and cultural loss. I think whilst the civilising mission of the British stamped out traditions across British India, age-old traditions of music, dance, art and crafts had continued in these princely states that had retained internal autonomy.

And what you get is that at precisely the moment of decolonization, British ideas of sovereignty, government, race and religion are suddenly extended to a population several times larger than that to which the British should ever force them on to. And I think, as you said, like the Soviet Premier, Khrushchev, is amazed. He looks on with disbelief and says, how did India manage to liquidate the princely states without liquidating the princes? Yeah. Just another observation. We're going to end it here, but we're going to carry on this series. And in the next, we are going to talk about the, well, we can call it a proxy war that sort of continued to rage from this point, from the inception of both countries between India and Pakistan. But it was just one little observation I wanted to make is that you said, you say, that, you know, this is two years after independence that you have armies facing up to each other. And the same is true in 1965 when there's going to be another Indo-Pakistan war over Kashmir.

Again, we're going to talk about this in the next episode. And also slightly during Cargill, which was sort of 1999, that you have people here, senior brass, military brass, on either side who knew each other. Now, I once knew a man, very charming, and had been very senior in the Indian Army and had been involved in that 1965 conflict. And I said, what was it like? He said, well, it was kind of, you know, it was bothersome. You know, that was sort of a very alkan kind of British way of talking about something that was so much worse than you're saying. He said, it was really bothersome because, you know, in the daytime, you would be firing at some fellow across that you'd gone to school with. And it turned out that the person he was opposing and firing and trying to kill and he was trying to kill.

and who was trying to kill him, had gone to the Dune School with him at that time. And they had known each other as kids. And I said, so did you ever sort of reach out and talk to him? Yes. When all the silliness was over, at the end of the day, you often had a chat and, you know, sort of reminisce. And then, you know, the next day it's sort of help. It's back on. Off you go. And until, you know, sort of, until fairly recently, I mean, these guys are dying now because, you know, they're old. And it's a new thing now because no one knows each other across the board. So that's the thing. So now you've got, you know, you had. two sort of sides of military who had at least some knowledge of a person rather than just an

enemy. And now that human knowledge is gone. It's going. So you have sort of military top brass who just look through those binoculars and through those sites and all they see is deadly enemy. They don't see Bumpty Jones or, you know, Bupy or whatever. You know, they all had hilarious nicknames at that time who used to play cricket and had a really good spinball. So that's, I think, a kind of a depressing portland for the future. So look, if I haven't depressed you enough, join us for the next episode when we talk about the sort of deteriorating relationship between India and Pakistan, which involves Bangladesh and the creation of that country, also another country born in blood. And Sam will be with us for that. If you can't wait,

you know what to do, you have to join the club. Empirepoduk.com, Empirepodukuk.com. A wonderful, wonderful club, which you should join anyway. sell it, sell it, baby. Why should they join it? Because they love us and they would love to hear more of us. At a run, they can binge Empire and hear the whole story straight away. So please do that. It keeps us going. Yeah, basically, if you're a member of our club, you keep us going. It really, it really does. If you're a subscriber, you get to hear entire series in one go. You get a newsletter. You get heads up to any shows that we're doing and priority on tickets. And you might even get a little wee discount of a book that we're talking about. Anyway, till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnhn.

And goodbye from me, William Durhampool.