Instrument of Accession
The 1947 document by which Kashmir's Hindu maharaja joined Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir to India, the contested paper at the root of the dispute.
The Kashmir dispute, which has outlasted four wars and survives to this day, turns on a single sheet of paper signed under pressure in October 1947. That sheet is the Instrument of Accession, the document by which Maharaja Hari Singh, the Hindu ruler of the Muslim-majority princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, tied his kingdom to India.
The choice no ruler wanted
When British India was partitioned in August 1947, the more than 560 princely states lost their imperial protector and had to join one of the two new dominions, India or Pakistan, with geography and religion the expected guides. Hari Singh wanted neither master. He hoped to rule an independent Kashmir and signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan, and sought the same from India, to buy time. His state touched both countries, and its population was largely Muslim, which led many to assume it would fall to Pakistan.
The gamble collapsed in October 1947, when armed tribesmen from Pakistan's northwest frontier poured across the border and drove toward the capital, Srinagar. Hari Singh begged Delhi for troops. India replied that it could not send soldiers to defend a state that had not joined it. On 26 October the maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession, handing India control of defense, foreign affairs, and communications; Indian troops were airlifted in the following day.
Two readings of one signature
India treats the accession as legal and final. It was executed under the very same law that absorbed every other princely state, and once Governor-General Mountbatten accepted it on 27 October, Kashmir became Indian territory.
Pakistan rejects it. It argues the signature was coerced while invaders were at the gates, that it came from an unelected Hindu ruler who did not speak for a Muslim-majority people, that a standstill agreement with Pakistan was still in force, and that Partition's own logic pointed a Muslim-majority land bordering Pakistan the other way. Hovering over both readings is Mountbatten's covering letter, which said that once order returned, the accession should be confirmed by a reference to the people. India came to argue that later elections and events settled the matter; Pakistan holds that the promised plebiscite, endorsed by United Nations resolutions in 1948, was never actually held.
A signature that never settled
More than seventy years on, no plebiscite has taken place, the Line of Control still cuts the old kingdom in two, and both governments teach their citizens that the law is plainly on their side. One maharaja's rushed signature, meant to save his throne from a tribal army, instead fixed the terms of a quarrel that has sent two nuclear-armed neighbors to war over the same mountains again and again, and that no court, treaty, or vote has ever put to rest.