A new book recounts events leading up to the first Kashmir war fought immediately after Partition

By the late summer of 1947, Jammu and Kashmir was already under sustained pressure, well before the first tribal columns crossed its borders. The deterioration of security within the state did not occur in isolation, nor was it confined to communal unrest. It was the outcome of a coordinated process in which political mobilisation, economic strangulation, and covert military preparation converged to weaken the state from within and render it vulnerable to external assault.

The pattern of instability was geographically uneven. While the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh remained relatively calm through August and September 1947, conditions in Jammu Province deteriorated rapidly. The violence that accompanied the Partition in Punjab spilled across the border, particularly after the announcement of the Punjab Boundary Award on August 17. Refugees fleeing attacks in West Punjab, especially from the Hazara district, poured into Jammu in large numbers, overwhelming administrative capacity and fuelling cycles of reprisal and counter-reprisal.

This instability was neither accidental nor self-contained. Even as communal tensions escalated, political and military mobilisation against the state was already underway. In the Mirpur–Poonch belt, Sardar Muhammad Ibrahim Khan had begun organising ex-servicemen much before Partition. Drawing upon former soldiers of the British Indian Army, he sought to create...

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