The curious case of Gilgit-Baltistan

There isn’t a more comprehensive dilation of the Kashmir issue than by the most eminent Alastair Lamb, a British historian, who had access to classified Papers of the Partition in 1947 when India and Pakistan gained their independence. Jammu and Kashmir continues to be a lingering dispute and a festering wound which extract its cost in blood and treasure on both sides of the divide, now labeled a nuclear flashpoint. Lamb explains the history of Kashmir’s constitution as a state which came into being in the mid-nineteenth century under Raja Gulab Singh, Kashmir’s Hindu Dogra ruler through its expansion and formulation.

The period of Kashmir’s composition is of notable interest. Under the Sikhs the area now recognised as Jammu and Kashmir and Northern Areas — I include both the IIOJK and AJK in this characterisation — was a collection of territories ruled by respective Rajas, Princes and Fief-Lords who swore allegiance to Lahore; it was almost an expanded Punjab. Some Northern Areas were outside this remit of the Sikhs though. Ladakh and Baltistan were more linked to their adjacent territories. Ladakh had heavy presence of the Buddhists and was a territorial extension of Tibet — the reason why and how China lays her claim over it. Baltistan abutted Ladakh but was overwhelmingly Muslim and associated itself more with its northern Muslim neighbour, Chinese Sinkiang.

When the British conquered Punjab the vanquished Sikhs had no ways to pay them off in fulfillment of the terms of the treaty. The British sold the Vale of Kashmir to Mahraja Gulab Singh in 1846 to realise their money while retaining their suzerainty. Jammu formed the core of Maharaja’s state from which he expanded north to Ladakh and Baltistan incorporating the two territories. The British leased Gilgit from the Maharaja in 1935 and managed it wholly per their strategic interests along territories of influence under the Soviet Union, Afghanistan and China. Lamb: “It was administered by a Political Agent at Gilgit responsible to Delhi, initially through the British Resident in Kashmir, and by 1947, through the British PA in NWFP. The Maharaja’s rights in the leased territory were nominal. He no longer kept troops there.” Gilgit Scouts, a locally recruited Corp with British officers, kept security. It was British owned and financed.

In 1947 with their planned departure from India British Paramountcy over the Princely states lapsed. Rather than pass on the control of the tracts and areas under British control to the succeeding governments, in this case Pakistan, Mountbatten and Nehru decided to revert the control of Gilgit to the Maharaja. The Maharaja placed his governor in Gilgit on August 1, fourteen days ahead of the separation. The people and the Scouts both rose in open rebellion. The Office-in-Charge Major Brown heading the Scouts was able to keep a lid on both. Soon however independent states within Gilgit, Hunza and Nagar declared their accession to Pakistan. Soon after Major Brown too declared accession to the state of Pakistan. On November 4, 1947 Pakistan’s flag was raised over Gilgit one week after Indian troops landed in Srinagar.

As soon as news of Indian highhandedness over Kashmir and the forced accession gained from the Maharaja, now Hari Singh, became public the Gilgit Scouts and their new commander Col Aslam Khan appointed by the government of Pakistan began advancing along the Skardu-Leh axis to reclaim what were the Gilgit-Baltistan-Ladakh geographical delineations. Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) was fully secured and Ladakh’s capital Leh “was only missed by a whisker”. GB was never Kashmir and always defined the Northern Areas of British India; even so when it was briefly annexed by Maharaja Gulab Singh.

Lamb: “There can be no doubt that the events in Gilgit … were to transform the nature of the Kashmir conflict. (The conflict in 1948) stretched to the upper Indus and then ended inconclusively in the glaciers of the Karakorum, where its terminus, is still in the Siachen Glacier. Pakistan would retain a direct territorial contact with China. India would not acquire a direct territorial contact with Afghanistan, or with the NWFP.” This fact of history and geography has “without doubt contribute(d) towards the survival of (West) Pakistan”. There is no denying GB’s even greater criticality to today’s Pakistan.

This is to place in context the debate over provisional formalisation of GB as Pakistan’s fifth province. Lamb’s historical account of the area and the chronicled timeline suggest that the GB for most part of its existence was always independent of the larger construct of the state of Jammu and Kashmir and was composed of independent Princely states. The accession of those states to Pakistan proves the point. This situation was exactly mirrored in Hyderabad, India, where its composite tract, Berar, was similarly leased away from the Nizam by the British but not reverted when Paramountcy ended as GB was by the Mountbatten-Nehru duo. Hyderabad and all its territories now stand subsumed by the Indian state per their internal structure. What keeps Pakistan from following the same logic? Why the apprehension?

Will this act of formalising GB as a provisional province weaken Pakistan’s stance on J&K as envisaged in the UNSC Resolutions? Surely not. Most adjustments of territories in the un-demarcated northern areas abutting GB — between China and Pakistan on Aksai Chin, or the proposed restructuring of GB as a province, or for that matter the separation of Ladakh from IIOJK — may be internal reordering but of essence do not alter the larger construct of the Kashmir issue which retains its life under the moral and legal justness of the UNSC Resolutions and the matchless struggle of the Kashmiris to gain freedom from under the yoke of forced Indian occupation. In Aksai Chin for example the agreement recognises that it shall attain finality only after the issue of J&K is resolved between India and Pakistan.

Do these changes, inter alia, impose a default road to a possible solution to this complex and lingering dispute? Probably, and probably not. But what it does is to make China an active claimant from a reticent one for its claims over Ladakh on the issue of Kashmir. If indeed a war occurs in Ladakh it will for sure alter the status quo imposing the logic of the victor in defiance of the larger principle outlined by the collective wisdom in the UN Resolutions. The other possibility is that a resolution of the issue is realised as a median adjustment to give finality to how the territories exist except that AJK and the predominantly Muslim Valley within the IIOJK retain some form of unified existence as a joint protectorate of both India and Pakistan. But we are getting far ahead of us here and the conditions are unlikely to be conducive to such creative options in the short to medium term. That shouldn’t stop GB from gaining its new political and administrative recognition in fulfillment of the aspirations of its people. After all they are the ones who saved it from forced usurpation of an imposed Maharaja.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 27^th, 2020.

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