Kashmir Pdf

[Auriville Cha]

Kashmir (/ˈkʃˌmɪər/) is the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term "Kashmir" denoted only the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal Range. Today, the term encompasses a larger area that includes the India-administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the Pakistan-administered territories of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, and the Chinese-administered territories of Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract.[1][2][3]

In 1820, the Sikh Empire, under Ranjit Singh, annexed Kashmir.[4] In 1846, after the Sikh defeat in the First Anglo-Sikh War, and upon the purchase of the region from the British under the Treaty of Amritsar, the Raja of Jammu, Gulab Singh, became the new ruler of Kashmir. The rule of his descendants, under the paramountcy (or tutelage[5][6]) of the British Crown, lasted until the Partition of India in 1947, when the former princely state of the British Indian Empire became a disputed territory, now administered by three countries: China, India, and Pakistan.[1][7][8][2]

The word Kashmir is thought to have been derived from Sanskrit and was referred to as kśmīra.[9] A popular local etymology of Kashmira is that it is land desiccated from water.[10]

An alternative etymology derives the name from the name of the Vedic sage Kashyapa who is believed to have settled people in this land. Accordingly, Kashmir would be derived from either kashyapa-mir (Kashyapa's Lake) or kashyapa-meru (Kashyapa's Mountain).[10]

The word has been referenced to in a Hindu scripture mantra worshipping the Hindu goddess Sharada and is mentioned to have resided in the land of kashmira, or which might have been a reference to the Sharada Peeth.

The Ancient Greeks called the region Kasperia, which has been identified with Kaspapyros of Hecataeus of Miletus (apud Stephanus of Byzantium) and Kaspatyros of Herodotus (3.102, 4.44). Kashmir is also believed to be the country meant by Ptolemy's Kaspeiria.[11] The earliest text which directly mentions the name Kashmir is in Ashtadhyayi written by the Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini during the 5th century BC. Pāṇini called the people of Kashmir Kashmirikas.[12][13][14] Some other early references to Kashmir can also be found in Mahabharata in Sabha Parva and in puranas like Matsya Purana, Vayu Purana, Padma Purana and Vishnu Purana and Vishnudharmottara Purana.[15]

The Government of India and Indian sources refer to the territory under Pakistan control as "Pakistan-occupied Kashmir" ("POK").[17][18] The Government of Pakistan and Pakistani sources refer to the portion of Kashmir administered by India as "Indian-occupied Kashmir" ("IOK") or "Indian-held Kashmir" (IHK);[19][20] The terms "Pakistan-administered Kashmir" and "India-administered Kashmir" are often used by neutral sources for the parts of the Kashmir region controlled by each country.[21]

In the first half of the first millennium, the Kashmir region became an important centre of Hinduism and later of Buddhism. During the 7th-14th centuries, the region was ruled by a series of Hindu dynasties,[22] and Kashmir Shaivism arose.[23] In 1320, Rinchan Shah became the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir, inaugurating the Kashmir Sultanate.[4] The region was part of the Mughal Empire from 1586 to 1751,[24] and thereafter, until 1820, of the Afghan Durrani Empire.[4]

In 1819, the Kashmir Valley passed from the control of the Durrani Empire of Afghanistan to the conquering armies of the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh of the Punjab,[25] thus ending four centuries of Muslim rule under the Mughals and the Afghan regime. As the Kashmiris had suffered under the Afghans, they initially welcomed the new Sikh rulers.[26] However, the Sikh governors turned out to be hard taskmasters, and Sikh rule was generally considered oppressive,[27] protected perhaps by the remoteness of Kashmir from the capital of the Sikh Empire in Lahore.[28] The Sikhs enacted a number of anti-Muslim laws,[28] which included handing out death sentences for cow slaughter,[26] closing down the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar,[28] and banning the adhan, the public Muslim call to prayer.[28] Kashmir had also now begun to attract European visitors, several of whom wrote of the abject poverty of the vast Muslim peasantry and of the exorbitant taxes under the Sikhs.[26][29] High taxes, according to some contemporary accounts, had depopulated large tracts of the countryside, allowing only one-sixteenth of the cultivable land to be cultivated.[26] Many Kashmiri peasants migrated to the plains of the Punjab.[30] However, after a famine in 1832, the Sikhs reduced the land tax to half the produce of the land and also began to offer interest-free loans to farmers;[28] Kashmir became the second highest revenue earner for the Sikh Empire.[28] During this time Kashmir shawls became known worldwide, attracting many buyers, especially in the West.[28]

Gulab Singh contrived to hold himself aloof till the battle of Sobraon (1846), when he appeared as a useful mediator and the trusted advisor of Sir Henry Lawrence. Two treaties were concluded. By the first the State of Lahore (i.e. West Punjab) handed over to the British, as equivalent for one crore indemnity, the hill countries between the rivers Beas and Indus; by the second the British made over to Gulab Singh for 75 lakhs all the hilly or mountainous country situated to the east of the Indus and the west of the Ravi i.e. the Vale of Kashmir.[25]

In the British census of India of 1941, Kashmir registered a Muslim majority population of 77%, a Hindu population of 20% and a sparse population of Buddhists and Sikhs comprising the remaining 3%.[34] That same year, Prem Nath Bazaz, a Kashmiri Pandit journalist wrote: "The poverty of the Muslim masses is appalling. ... Most are landless laborers, working as serfs for absentee [Hindu] landlords ... Almost the whole brunt of official corruption is borne by the Muslim masses."[35] Under Hindu rule, Muslims faced hefty taxation and discrimination in the legal system, and were forced into labor without any wages.[36] Conditions in the princely state caused a significant migration of people from the Kashmir Valley to the Punjab of British India.[37] For almost a century, until the census, a small Hindu elite had ruled over a vast and impoverished Muslim peasantry.[34][38] Driven into docility by chronic indebtedness to landlords and moneylenders, having no education besides, nor awareness of rights,[34] the Muslim peasants had no political representation until the 1930s.[38]

Ranbir Singh's grandson Hari Singh, who had ascended the throne of Kashmir in 1925, was the reigning monarch in 1947 at the conclusion of British rule of the subcontinent and the subsequent partition of the British Indian Empire into the newly independent Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. According to Burton Stein's History of India,

In the last days of 1948, a ceasefire was agreed under UN auspices. However, since the plebiscite demanded by the UN was never conducted, relations between India and Pakistan soured,[40] and eventually led to two more wars over Kashmir in 1965 and 1999.

India has control of about half the area of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which comprises Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, while Pakistan controls a third of the region, divided into two provinces, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh are administered by India as union territories. They formed a single state until 5 August 2019, when the state was bifurcated and its limited autonomy was revoked.[41]

Although there was a clear Muslim majority in Kashmir before the 1947 partition and its economic, cultural, and geographic contiguity with the Muslim-majority area of the Punjab (in Pakistan) could be convincingly demonstrated, the political developments during and after the partition resulted in a division of the region. Pakistan was left with territory that, although basically Muslim in character, was sparsely populated, relatively inaccessible, and economically underdeveloped. The largest Muslim group, situated in the Valley of Kashmir and estimated to number more than half the population of the entire region, lay in India-administered territory, with its former outlets via the Jhelum valley route blocked.[42][1]

The eastern region of the former princely state of Kashmir is also involved in a boundary dispute that began in the late 19th century and continues into the 21st. Although some boundary agreements were signed between Great Britain, Afghanistan and Russia over the northern borders of Kashmir, China never accepted these agreements, and China's official position has not changed following the communist revolution of 1949 that established the People's Republic of China. By the mid-1950s the Chinese army had entered the north-east portion of Ladakh.[42]

Jammu and Azad Kashmir lie south and west of the Pir Panjal range, and are under Indian and Pakistani control respectively. These are populous regions. Gilgit-Baltistan, formerly known as the Northern Areas, is a group of territories in the extreme north, bordered by the Karakoram, the western Himalayas, the Pamir, and the Hindu Kush ranges. With its administrative centre in the town of Gilgit, the Northern Areas cover an area of 72,971 square kilometres (28,174 sq mi) and have an estimated population approaching 1 million (10 lakhs).

Ladakh is between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south.[43] Capital towns of the region are Leh and Kargil. It is under Indian administration and was part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir until 2019. It is one of the most sparsely populated regions in the area and is mainly inhabited by people of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan descent.[43] Aksai Chin is a vast high-altitude desert of salt that reaches altitudes up to 5,000 metres (16,000 ft). Geographically part of the Tibetan Plateau, Aksai Chin is referred to as the Soda Plain. The region is almost uninhabited, and has no permanent settlements.

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