In response,
@ice_man @WAJsal , I would like to take you back to the construction of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Nothing like that state existed before; nothing like that is likely to exist again.
It started with the jagir of Jammu, which was an independent state before being conquered by the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh. The existing Raja fled, and found a jagir for himself in British India, in Akhrot. He was replaced by Kishore Singh, a distant relative, whose sons fought for Jammu against the Sikhs, then, on being defeated, joined their victors. When Kishore Singh died, his son, Gulab Singh, became Raja.
Under Gulab Singh, the Jamwal Dogras captured Bhadarwah, then Rajauri, then Kishtwar, then Ladakh. Kishtwar and Ladakh fell to a good general working for the Jammu darbar, Zorawar Singh. Zorawar Singh then circled around the Vale of Kashmir, which was then ruled by a governor directly reporting to the Lahore darbar, and defeated the Raja of Skardu, annexing Gilgit. However, during a series of invasions and counter-invasions throughout the period, until late in the century, the Indus was the northern boundary of the Dogra state.
Mirpur, which was nothing to do with Kashmir, with not a single Koshur speaker, and filled with Potoharis and Sudhans, was annexed sometime around that time, in the 1830s - I am writing in a great hurry, as there are 40 papers to be corrected. Poonch, a subsidiary state (the ruling families of Poonch and Jammu were related), was under the thumb of the Jammu regime. In Jammu itself, the west of the province was Muslim majority, the east Hindu, Sikh and Jain.
How Kashmir - the Vale - came into Dogra hands is known to every script kiddy who wants to re-write history; the Dogras acquired it for 75 lakhs of Nanakshahi rupees through the Treaty of Amritsar, exactly one week after the Treaty of Lahore stripped it from the Lahore darbar.
Finally, in a series of Anglo-Kashmiri campaigns and in Kashmiri support of the Chitral regime against Afghan attacks, the Pamir Emirates, Chitral, Hunza and Nagar, and other smaller inter-related state-lets such as Puniyal and Yasin were mopped up. The three first-named became subsidiaries of the Jammu durbar.
With this history, when Gilgit, and the three Emirates broke away, and when Mirpur rose in armed revolt against the Maharaja's forces, it was a case of the Dogra principality splitting along the exact borders of the annexed states.
Jammu and Kashmir was a military kingdom, held by military might. Once the British took over Gilgit as the Gilgit Agency in 1877, and once they panicked at the Russian occupation of eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang to the uninitiated), and converted the Gilgit Agency and additional portions into the Gilgit Lease, and expelled every Dogra soldier and administrator from there until June or July in 1947, it was very clear that the Dogras could not re-establish their military domination of these conquered territories within the month or so remaining. And so it proved.
My case is that the split happened along the appropriate lines. Gilgit and Mirpur were reluctant annexures to the Dogra kingdom, the Vale was pro-Congress under Sheikh Abdullah, and Leh and Jammu were clearly pro-Dogra. There is nothing to be gained by a plebiscite, and there is nothing to compel India to hold a plebiscite which was flouted by Pakistan at the outset, contrary to Pakistani urban legend declaring that India refused to hold the plebiscite.
Junagadh dispute & Kashmir
