In April 2025, gunmen walked into the Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam—a meadow so cinematic that Bollywood has used it as a backdrop for love songs—and asked twenty-six tourists a simple question before shooting them: Are you Hindu?
India named its retaliatory military operation “Sindoor.”
Sindoor is the vermilion powder Hindu married women apply to their hairline as a sign of marriage. India named a bombing campaign after the symbol of married womanhood because the Pahalgam attack had left wives widowed.
Then the ceasefire came. Then Donald Trump, asked about the crisis, said the two countries had been fighting “a thousand years”—an observation that is not only historically wrong by approximately 953 years but also somehow captures the exact quality of intellectual engagement the Kashmir dispute has attracted since 1947.
This is where we are in 2026. This is where we have always been.
And if you want to understand why we are here—why two nuclear-armed democracies (one of them nominally so) have been unable to resolve a territorial dispute about seventeen million people for nearly eight decades—you have to go back. Not a thousand years. Seventy-eight. And before that: one week.
The Week Britain Owned a Country
Here is the founding document of the Kashmir problem, and it is, at its core, a livestock invoice.
On March 9, 1846, the Sikh Empire—having lost the First Anglo-Sikh War—signed the Treaty of Lahore. Because the defeated Sikhs could not pay the war indemnity imposed upon them, they ceded to the British East India Company “the hill countries, including the Provinces of Kashmir and Hazara” as equivalent payment. One crore rupees’ worth of mountains, rivers, valleys, and several million people who were not consulted.
Seven days later—literally seven days—on March 16, the British signed the Treaty of Amritsar, which transferred those same mountains, rivers, valleys, and uncontested millions to Gulab Singh, the Raja of Jammu. Price: seventy-five lakh rupees.
The annual tribute was as follows: one horse, twelve shawl goats of approved breed (six male, six female), and three pairs of Kashmiri shawls.
No Kashmiri signed. No Kashmiri was asked. Britain had held legal sovereignty over Kashmir for seven days before selling it, and one is entitled to wonder whether they had the legal right to sell what they’d seized from people who’d seized it from the Afghans who’d seized it from the Mughals who’d been contesting it since forever. But nobody asked that question in 1846, because nobody was asking that kind of question in 1846.
Gulab Singh paid the money, received a receipt, and became the Maharaja of a Muslim-majority state ruled by a Hindu dynasty. His great-grandson, Hari Singh, would inherit this arrangement—and then have to decide what to do with it when the British finally left a century later.
He was not well prepared for the responsibility. As we shall see.
Mr. A
In 1919, the young Crown Prince of Kashmir visited Europe for the first time, traveling with approximately four million dollars’ worth of cash and jewelry and accompanied by his aide-de-camp, an Irishman named Captain C.W.A. Arthur.
Captain Arthur introduced the prince to a charming London widow named Maudie Robinson, described in contemporary accounts as “bewitching.” The prince and Mrs. Robinson went to Paris for Christmas. On Boxing Day, a man burst into their hotel room, introduced himself as her husband, and demanded an enormous settlement to avoid citing the prince in divorce proceedings.
It was a classic honeytrap. Captain Arthur, it turned out, was in on it. The prince wrote two cheques totaling £300,000—equivalent to roughly £14.5 million today—and paid.
The scandal eventually ended up in London’s King’s Bench Division in 1924. At this point, the India Office intervened and asked the court to keep the young ruler’s identity secret, because the optics of an Indian prince paying what amounted to the GDP of a small county to emerge from a Parisian honey-trap were not considered ideal for British India’s image. The prince was referred to throughout the proceedings as “Mr. A.”
Lord Birkenhead, the Secretary of State for India, had specifically requested this discretion. The story was so explosive that the India Office classified its files for one hundred years—not the standard thirty—”because espionage was involved.”
In the end, other Indian princes complained that the secrecy was generating damaging rumors about them. On December 3, 1924, the India Office finally permitted the disclosure of his identity. It was first announced on London radio station 2LO, which interrupted its music programming for the news. Time magazine ran the full story. The Daily Express, the Daily Chronicle, and papers in Australia, Jamaica, and beyond all published.
When the prince returned to India, his uncle—still the reigning Maharaja—sent him to a remote jungle estate for six months of religious penance. The terms of his humiliation included the shaving of his moustache.
This man—Maharaja Hari Singh, the former Mr. A, the shaved-moustache penitent, the man whose full official title was Shriman Inder Mahinder Rajrajeswar Maharajadhiraj Shri Hari Singhji Jammu & Kashmir—was the person who, twenty-three years later, would sign the document upon which India’s entire legal claim to Kashmir rests.
History, as a rule, is not run by the best-prepared people.
The Signature That Launched Seventy-Eight Years of War
By August 1947, Hari Singh had a problem. Actually, he had several problems, but the main one was this: the British were leaving, and every princely state had to decide which of the two new countries to join. Hari Singh didn’t want to join either.
He had signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan. He had tried to get India to sign one too; India declined. He kept hoping for a third option—independence, with friendly relations with both sides. He wrote to Mountbatten explaining his position: Kashmir had ties to both dominions, shared borders with Soviet and Chinese territory, and he needed time.
Mountbatten told him to make up his mind. Hari Singh did not make up his mind.
On October 22, 1947, Pakistan launched “Operation Gulmarg.” Pashtun tribal fighters from the Northwest Frontier Province poured across the border toward Srinagar, traveling in, as Hari Singh later described, “motor trucks.” They were armed, organized, and moving fast. Baramullah fell. Eleven thousand people were killed there. The tribesmen were within hours of Srinagar.
Hari Singh panicked and fled his summer capital for Jammu by car.
He sent an urgent message to India requesting military assistance. India’s response, delivered by V.P. Menon, was essentially: Sign first. Troops later.
On October 26, 1947—according to the official account, at some point after Menon flew to Jammu carrying the Instrument of Accession—Hari Singh signed. Menon flew back to Delhi. The next day, Indian troops were airlifted to Srinagar airport.
This is the document. This is the signature. This is India’s legal title to Kashmir.
Now observe the structure of the paradox:
Pakistan sent in the tribal raiders to prevent Kashmir from going to India. The invasion panicked Hari Singh into requesting Indian military help. India made accession the condition of help. Pakistan’s invasion created the document that India uses to justify holding the territory that Pakistan wanted.
Pakistan called the document fraudulent. Pakistan is the reason the document exists.
Even Mountbatten, accepting the accession on October 27, added a caveat: once law and order is restored and the invader cleared, “the question of the State’s accession should be settled by a reference to the people.” India’s own first acceptance of Kashmir contained a promise of a vote.
Hari Singh was subsequently banished from the state he’d just signed away. He departed Jammu in 1949 and never returned. He died in Bombay in 1961, reportedly farming polo ponies.
Shriman Inder Mahinder Rajrajeswar Maharajadhiraj Shri Hari Singhji ended his days raising horses in Bombay.
The Lawyer and the Theologian
Here is the core of the Kashmir dispute, and it is almost too neat to be real—but it is real, and it has been real since 1947, and almost nobody states it this plainly.
India’s claim is legal. Kashmir is Indian because Hari Singh, a ruling Maharaja with recognized legal authority, executed the Instrument of Accession under the established procedures of the Indian Independence Act 1947. The process was followed. The paperwork is valid. The border is settled.
Pakistan’s claim is demographic-religious. Kashmir is Pakistani because Kashmir’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim, and the entire logic of Partition—the two-nation theory, the founding principle of Pakistan—is that the Muslims of the subcontinent constitute a separate nation and deserve their own state. Muslim-majority areas belong to Pakistan. This is literally why Pakistan exists.
India argues like a lawyer. Pakistan argues like a theologian.
Neither is entirely wrong. That’s the actual problem.
Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir is the direct logical extension of its own founding philosophy. You cannot say “Muslim-majority territories belong to Pakistan” as your reason for existing and then refuse to apply that logic to the largest Muslim-majority state that didn’t go to Pakistan. Pakistan is being consistent. Annoyingly, infuriatingly consistent.
India’s claim requires you to accept that the legal acts of Hindu hereditary monarchs determine the nationality of Muslim-majority populations without their consent—which is... also a defensible legal position, and also somewhat uncomfortable.
But here is where it gets genuinely dizzying. Stick with me.
India’s legal position depends on the principle that religion is irrelevant to Indian identity. You are Indian because you are Indian—because you live in India, because a legal instrument incorporated your territory. It doesn’t matter what religion you are, what language you speak, what ethnicity you belong to. India is a secular state. That’s the whole point. That’s Nehru’s entire project. That’s the constitutional architecture.
And India’s current government—the BJP, whose ideological roots run through the RSS and whose project is explicitly Hindu nationalist—has spent the past decade suggesting, through its actions, rhetoric, laws, and bulldozers, that actually, religion is quite relevant to Indian identity. That there are “infiltrators.” That certain people are “termites.” That the Citizenship Amendment Act should fast-track everyone’s citizenship except Muslims from neighboring countries. That temple-mosque disputes have a correct answer that happens to align with Hindu claims. I explored this domestic rewriting in Post 18A, The Third Rail—the slow, grinding conversion of a secular republic into something its founders would not recognize.
Which means India is simultaneously arguing:
“Religion doesn’t determine nationality—that’s why Kashmir is India” (the secular-legal Kashmir argument)
and
“Religion does determine who really belongs here” (the domestic Hindutva argument)
You cannot hold both positions. They are mutually exclusive. The party currently in power in New Delhi is using the logic of Pakistan’s founding philosophy domestically while using the logic of India’s secular founding philosophy internationally to justify holding Kashmir.
The intellectual whiplash is audible from space.
The Algorithm That Cannot Terminate
On January 1, 1948, India took the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations Security Council. This seemed reasonable. The UNSC passed Resolution 39. Then Resolution 47. The resolutions were quite clear: Pakistan would withdraw its forces and tribal fighters; India would reduce its forces to minimum necessary levels; a free and impartial plebiscite would be held.
Both India and Pakistan said yes, great, wonderful, very much in favor of this.
Then they negotiated about the sequence.
Pakistan said India needed to go first. India said Pakistan needed to go first. Both parties claimed the other had not fulfilled the preconditions for the next step. The UN appointed mediators. Five of them, in fairly rapid succession. The mediators reported back that the situation was complex.
It is now 2026. The United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan—UNMOGIP—still exists. Its headquarters rotates between Islamabad in winter and Srinagar in summer. A UN audit document summarizes the current state of play: India maintains UNMOGIP’s mandate has lapsed following the 1972 Simla Agreement. Pakistan maintains it remains essential. The UN Secretary-General’s position is that only a Security Council resolution can terminate it. India disagrees. Pakistan disagrees with India’s disagreement.
This is the geopolitical equivalent of two software teams in a perpetual deployment freeze because each insists the other must merge their branch first. Except instead of sprint reviews, there are wars. Three full ones. Multiple partial ones. A four-day conflict in May 2025 that ended in a ceasefire—except India says the ceasefire was not brokered by anyone, it was entirely bilateral, and Pakistan says it was brokered by Donald Trump, and Pakistan nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pause here.
India says nobody brokered it. Pakistan says Trump brokered it and deserves a Nobel. Trump, who had said the two countries had been fighting “a thousand years,” apparently solved in four days what seventy-nine years of diplomacy could not—or didn’t, depending on which of the two parties you ask.
Then the plot thickened in ways a novelist would be embarrassed to submit to an editor.
The relationship between Modi and Trump had been, until approximately May 2025, one of the great bromances of authoritarian-adjacent governance. “Is baar, Trump ki Sarkar”—”This time, it’s Trump’s government”—Indian BJP supporters had chanted when Trump won in 2024, with a warmth that suggested they viewed his victory as somehow also theirs. The two men had held rallies together. They had exchanged compliments of extraordinary sincerity. Trade negotiations had been proceeding with the ambient goodwill of men who genuinely liked each other’s energy.
And then came Kashmir. And then came the ceasefire India says didn’t happen. And then—in the coup de grâce, the chef’s kiss, the final absurdity that completes the collection—General Asim Munir, the Pakistan Army Chief who had given that speech about Hindus and Muslims being fundamentally different peoples, the man whose theological worldview makes the Taliban look nuanced, the architect of Pakistan’s “moral and diplomatic support” for the groups India had just bombed—that man was received at the White House with great acclaim.
The man Modi had implicitly accused of sponsoring the killing of twenty-six Hindu tourists was a guest of honor in Washington within months.
You genuinely cannot make this up. India’s closest great-power friendship, shattered. Pakistan’s General, feted. The Nobel nomination, pending. The ceasefire, simultaneously real and fictional depending on your nationality.
The Kashmir dispute does not merely resist resolution. It actively destroys the attempts.
And yes, the plebiscite was promised. By Mountbatten in his acceptance letter. By Nehru at the UN. By multiple Security Council resolutions. The people most enthusiastically promising the plebiscite were the same people most enthusiastically not holding it.
“Geopolitics,” as a concept, should probably come with a disclaimer about implied promises.
“Thence North to the Glaciers”
Not all of Kashmir’s absurdities are philosophical. Some are literally ink on paper.
The 1949 ceasefire agreement described the line between Indian and Pakistani positions in meticulous detail—named points, coordinates, measured distances. And then, at a certain point near coordinate NJ9842, the text continued: “thence north to the glaciers.”
“Thence north to the glaciers.”
That phrase—that lazy, elegant, catastrophically incomplete phrase—is why the Siachen Glacier became a battlefield. The ceasefire line stopped at a named coordinate, and beyond that, the treaty offered only vague directional poetry. When strategic incentives changed in the 1980s, both India and Pakistan decided “north to the glaciers” meant something favorable to their position. India moved first, in 1984. Pakistan protested. Both countries have maintained forces at altitudes above 6,000 meters, where temperature regularly drops to minus fifty degrees, ever since.
The strategic analyst Stephen P. Cohen once described the Siachen dispute as “a struggle of two bald men over a comb.” The glacier has no strategic value, no resources, no population, no particular beauty that couldn’t be found somewhere warmer. It is an uninhabited refrigerator at the edge of the atmosphere, and it has been militarized because someone in 1949 couldn’t be bothered to specify a coordinate north of NJ9842.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s the actual explanation.
The Missing Protagonist
There is a population of approximately thirteen million people in the Indian-administered portion of Jammu and Kashmir. There are roughly four million more in Pakistani-administered Azad Kashmir—”Azad” being the Urdu word for “free” or “independent,” which is either the most optimistic place name in human history or the most ironic, depending on your familiarity with how Pakistan administers it. These people have been argued about, administered, militarized, censused, democratically excluded, and periodically shot at since 1947. Their preferences are rarely the first item on any agenda.
When they have been asked what they want, the answers are inconvenient for everyone.
A Chatham House poll found that support for independence in the Kashmir Valley runs between 74 and 95 percent. Support for joining India in the Valley: approximately 2 percent. Support for joining Pakistan: approximately 6 percent. A Hindustan Times survey found that 66 percent of Valley residents wanted “complete freedom to entire [sic] Jammu and Kashmir as a new country.” Another poll, conducted in Srinagar specifically, found that 90 percent wanted independence, 7 percent wanted India, and 3 percent wanted Pakistan.
The option that both India and Pakistan are disputing—join us—is, in the area most people think of as “Kashmir,” the least popular option on offer.
This is the definitional absurdity at the center of the dispute. Two countries have been fighting for seventy-nine years over who gets to govern a population that, to a remarkable degree of consistency across decades of polling, wants neither of them.
The Kashmiris want to be left alone. This is the one option neither country is willing to offer.
After the Pahalgam massacre in April 2025—after the gunmen asked tourists their religion before pulling the trigger, after Operation Sindoor, after the Indian Army deployed hundreds of thousands of troops and arrested thousands of Kashmiris in the aftermath—ordinary Kashmiris in Srinagar came out to mourn the dead and condemn the killings. The Muslim majority of the Valley, with striking consistency, refused to become the anti-Indian mob that Pakistani state narrative requires them to be. They condemned the attack. They lit candles.
They do this every time. And every time, they are ignored—because they are not useful to either national narrative as complex human beings. They are useful as a population to be governed, a statistic to be cited, a grievance to be deployed.
The Thing Nobody in Delhi Can Say
Let me return to the philosophical contradiction, because it matters more now than it did in 1947.
In August 2019, the Modi government revoked Article 370—the constitutional provision that had given Jammu and Kashmir special autonomous status since 1949. The legal mechanism was exquisite. Since the state’s Constituent Assembly (which had to give consent to constitutional changes) had dissolved in 1957, the government issued a Presidential Order that simply redefined the phrase “Constituent Assembly” to mean “Legislative Assembly.” Since Kashmir was then under President’s Rule, the “state government” that gave “concurrence” was the Governor—appointed by the Union government.
India asked itself permission. India said yes.
The Supreme Court upheld this in 2023, on the grounds that Article 370 was always intended as a “temporary provision” and that Parliament’s action was constitutional. The Chief Justice noted it was “an interim arrangement due to war conditions in the state.”
Fine. Perhaps it was temporary. Perhaps the revocation was legally valid. Let’s assume it was.
But then observe the coincidence: the argument India uses externally (Kashmir is Indian because of a secular legal document) was simultaneously being strained by the argument India was making internally (the reason Kashmir was special is being eliminated; the state that signed the accession in exchange for specific terms is having those terms unilaterally revised).
Former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah called it “a total betrayal of the trust that the people of Jammu and Kashmir had reposed in India when the state acceded to it in 1947.” That is a fairly precise description. The accession came with conditions. The conditions were modified without consent. The legal instrument that grounded the accession explicitly contemplated a reference to the people. The reference to the people was never made.
You cannot hold that you have an ironclad legal title based on a specific document and then revise the terms of that document without consulting anyone. That’s not how contracts work. That’s not how sovereignty arguments work. That’s not how trust works.
And if you add to this the broader BJP domestic project—the Citizenship Amendment Act that explicitly excludes Muslims, the “anti-infiltrator” rhetoric, the demolition of mosques, the temple politics, the casual redefinition of who is “really” Indian—then the secular-legal foundation of India’s Kashmir argument is being quietly eroded by the same government that insists upon it.
You cannot argue Pakistan’s logic at home and India’s logic in Srinagar.
Pakistan’s Army Chief Asim Munir, just weeks before the Pahalgam attack, gave a speech describing Kashmir as “our jugular vein” and explicitly arguing that Hindus and Muslims are fundamentally different peoples who cannot coexist in a single nation—the two-nation theory, stated plainly in 2025, as if the subsequent seventy-nine years had produced no evidence worth considering.
What Pakistan’s Army Chief said openly, India’s ruling party is implementing quietly.
Both are wrong. Both know it and proceed anyway.
The Quantum State
I’ve argued throughout this series that India exists in quantum superposition—that any statement you make about India is true, as is its opposite. It’s the operating principle of the whole project, stated plainest in Post 1. The Kashmir dispute is quantum superposition weaponized. It is simultaneously:
A legal dispute (but the legal document was signed under duress)
A religious dispute (but both states officially deny this)
A democratic dispute (but the plebiscite was promised in 1947 and not held)
An anti-colonial dispute (but both successor states are using colonial-era legal frameworks)
A human rights dispute (but both sides are implicated in human rights violations)
In 2019, India shut down the internet in Jammu and Kashmir for 175 days—one of the longest internet shutdowns anywhere in the world that year. The people India was suppressing to maintain sovereignty were the people India’s sovereignty was nominally there to protect.
Pakistan’s Army—whose official position is that Kashmir deserves self-determination—has spent decades supporting militant groups that have made normal life in the Valley a continuous emergency, which has been India’s justification for refusing to hold the self-determination vote that Pakistan demands.
Both countries have found ingenious ways to make the thing they claim to want impossible.
Coda: The Polo Ponies and the Paperwork
Hari Singh—Mr. A, the reluctant signatory, the man with the shaved moustache and the spectacular bad judgment in European travel companions—died quietly in Bombay on April 26, 1961.
He had once wanted Kashmir to be independent. He had signed it away at three in the morning (some accounts say he was woken from sleep by V.P. Menon) while Pakistan’s tribals raced toward his capital. The document he signed has been the basis of three wars, dozens of insurgencies, one nuclear standoff, and one brief four-day conflict in 2025 named after the symbol of Hindu marriage.
Kashmir has never been independent. It has never had a plebiscite. It has been administered by India (two-thirds of the territory) and Pakistan (one-third), with China occupying a piece of Ladakh since 1962 because—as long as we’re cataloguing absurdities—why not add a third nuclear power?
The British owned it for seven days before selling it for goats.
The man who ultimately decided its fate was known, for three years, only as Mr. A.
The people who actually live there want neither country.
And the two countries arguing over them are, with increasing symmetry, borrowing each other’s worst ideas: Pakistan borrowing India’s nuclear program, India borrowing Pakistan’s approach to Muslim minorities, both countries borrowing Britain’s talent for treating a mountain valley full of real human beings as inventory.
As of early 2026, UNMOGIP still rotates its headquarters between Islamabad and Srinagar by season. The plebiscite has not been held. The ceasefire line still says “thence north to the glaciers.”
The Siachen Glacier is still militarized.
The shawl goats were presumably long ago discontinued.
Everything else continues.
If you like this, you will enjoy my book, The Science of Free Will. Among other things, I explore why we can’t trade with ants (they can detect cancer), what that has to do with the future of AI, and why we need a Supreme Court if the world is deterministic. Available on Amazon or anywhere else books are sold.
The India Paradox is a series exploring how the world’s most diverse democracy somehow functions despite—or perhaps because of—its beautiful contradictions. Previous posts available at samirvarma.substack.com.
Excellent. I've never read a better article in the topic.
I'd love to see your take on India"s invasions of Hyderabad and if Goa.
All this talk of contracts…
You own what you can defend. That is sovereignty, always was always will be.
Jammu will be India as long as India is able and willing to defend it. Simple as.