It was supposed to be a new world that Lord Mountbatten traversed in those last months of 1947 as British India’s last viceroy. The Indian subcontinent, so long the jewel in Great Britain’s imperial crown, had been born anew and transformed into two sovereign states. And yet, as he made his way from Delhi to Karachi, it must have occurred to Mountbatten how little things had actually changed. Decades of nationalist struggle, two world wars, a formal transfer of power and millions of deaths later, he still had to mediate between the leaders of the new subcontinent. They were still grappling with – and fighting over – a number of unanswered questions. Perched on the very top of those questions was the one of Kashmir. The British Raj in the Indian subcontinent had always been a highly complicated affair. To run an imperial enterprise spread over half a continent, the British authorities had to create and maintain several types of territorial arrangements, much like the Mughals before it. The British had to weave an intricate web of local collaborations that included a buffer zone between India and Afghanistan, hundreds of princely states of various sizes, that had a certain degree of legal and administrative autonomy from the Raj within their borders, and many directly administered provinces and territories. The decolonisation process spelled the unravelling of this web. The two new states – India and Pakistan – that emerged from the decolonisation process could not operate under the same legal, political and administrative paradigm which the British had. The geographical unity of the two states could only be maintained if they came up with new political and legal arrangements to integrate swathes of territory, both big and small, that once belonged to the princely states. In order to deal with this challenge, the two states embarked on projects to absorb such territories into their respective borders as quickly as possible. There was no universally acknowledged single instrument to achieve this. Both states used a similar repertoire of techniques — negotiating accession treaties, making deals with local elites and, in certain cases, sending in troops to snuff out opposition. The Kashmir crisis was born out of the discontents of the twin processes of decolonisation and territorial integration by India and Pakistan. Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state which the East India Company had annexed in 1846 and then transferred to Gulab Singh of the Dogra dynasty for a payment of 7,500,000 rupees. As the British exit from the subcontinent became apparent, the then ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh, wished to remain independent. This was obviously not going to be acceptable to either India or Pakistan. Four major rivers originate from the Himalayas located in Kashmir and it also shares a border with China — the two factors that make it a strategically crucial region. In other words it is a prized territory. Both states, therefore, formed strategies to lay claim to it.