Kashmir, 1945-66: from empire to the Cold War

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the international dimensions of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan from before its outbreak in October 1947 till the Tashkent Summit in January 1966. By focusing on Kashmir’s under-researched transnational dimensions, it represents a different approach to this intractable territorial conflict.

Concentrating on the global context(s) in which the dispute unfolded, it argues that the dispute’s evolution was determined by international concerns that existed from before and went beyond the Indian subcontinent. Based on new and diverse official and personal papers across four countries, it foregrounds the Kashmir dispute in a twin setting of Decolonisation and the Cold War and investigates the international understanding around it within the imperatives of these two processes. In doing so, it traces Kashmir’s journey from being a residual irritant of the British Indian Empire, to becoming a Commonwealth embarrassment and its eventual metamorphosis into a security concern in the Cold War climate(s). A princely state of exceptional geo-strategic location, complex religious composition and unique significance in the context of Indian and Pakistani notions of nation and statehood, Kashmir also complicated their relations with Britain, the United States, Soviet Union, China, the Commonwealth countries and the Afro-Arab-Asian world.

The thesis begins with British anxieties regarding independent India’s international identity that arose in 1945-47 and covers the international involvement in the first Kashmir conflict (1947-49). Next, it undertakes a survey of the initial American attitude to India (1945-47) and situates the early American approach to Kashmir (1947-49) in that light. The thesis then shows the transformation of Kashmir from being a Commonwealth concern to becoming an American affair (1949-53). Further, it traces the dispute’s transition from the prism of Western pact-politics to that of Subcontinental package proposal (1953-61). The thesis ends with comparing the last Anglo-American intervention in Kashmir (1962-63) with its Soviet counterpart (1965-66).

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