The Unfinished Partition

When British India was partitioned in 1947 into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir — Muslim-majority but ruled by a Hindu maharaja — became the great unresolved question. The maharaja's accession to India, disputed by Pakistan, triggered the First Kashmir War of 1947–48, which ended with a UN-brokered ceasefire line splitting the region between the two new nations. Neither accepted the division as final, and Kashmir became the running sore of South Asia.

By the mid-1960s Pakistan's military rulers saw an opening. India's humiliating defeat by China in the 1962 border war seemed to have exposed the Indian army as weak and demoralised. A sharp clash between the two countries in the marshes of the Rann of Kutch in early 1965 — in which Pakistan's American-supplied forces performed well — deepened the impression in Rawalpindi that India could be beaten.

Hawks in Ayub Khan's government, led by the ambitious foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, argued that a bold stroke could liberate Kashmir before India recovered its strength. Their plan was audacious: infiltrate the Indian-held valley with disguised soldiers to spark a popular uprising, then intervene to 'liberate' the region. It rested on the assumption that the Kashmiri people would rise. That assumption would prove fatally wrong — and the miscalculation would ignite the largest war the subcontinent had yet seen.