The Kashmir case: Why the Instrument of Accession was Kept Secret until 2016

For decades, researchers visiting the National Archives of India in New Delhi could consult the Instruments of Accession signed by the rulers of princely states that joined India after the end of British rule in 1947. The documents were there, available for scholars to examine.

There was, however, one conspicuous exception: Jammu and Kashmir.

The Instrument of Accession attributed to Maharaja Hari Singh, arguably the most consequential of all such documents because it became the legal foundation of India’s claim over Jammu and Kashmir, was not similarly accessible. Its absence generated a mystery that endured for decades.

Repeated attempts by researchers to obtain the document failed. Even after India enacted the Right to Information Act in 2005, access remained difficult. I personally filed an RTI application seeking access to the Instrument of Accession, along with the Supreme Court file relating to Maqbool Bhat. Both requests were rejected on national security grounds.

The obvious question was difficult to avoid: if accession documents belonging to other former princely states could be examined in the National Archives, why was the Kashmir document treated differently? And why did a document cited repeatedly by the Indian government as the legal basis of Jammu and Kashmir’s accession remain beyond normal scholarly scrutiny for so long?

It was only in 2016 that Right to Information campaigner Venkatesh Nayak secured formal access to the document. By then, nearly seven decades had passed since the dramatic events of October 1947.

The controversy is important because the precise sequence of events between 26 and 27 October 1947 has long divided historians. The official Indian narrative has been that Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October. Governor-General Lord Mountbatten accepted it, and Indian troops were then flown into Srinagar on 27 October.

British historian Alastair Lamb challenged that chronology. Lamb, one of the most prolific historians of the Kashmir dispute, argued from archival records that the Instrument was signed only after Indian troops had begun landing in Kashmir and securing Srinagar. That distinction is not merely a matter of a date. It goes to the heart of a historical question: did India send troops to Jammu and Kashmir after obtaining a legally executed accession, or did the military intervention precede the completion of the accession process? The inability of researchers to freely inspect the document inevitably added to the controversy.

What Happened Before 26 October?

The conventional narrative usually begins with the tribal invasion from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province in October 1947. But evidence subsequently brought into the public domain suggests that New Delhi’s engagement with Maharaja Hari Singh had begun considerably earlier.

An intriguing account emerged from the family of G. Parthasarathy, a diplomat and close confidant of Jawaharlal Nehru and later Indira Gandhi. In 2018, his son Ashok Parthasarathy published GP: 1912–1995. His account suggests that efforts to bring Kashmir into India were underway by September 1947, about a month before the tribal invasion.

According to Ashok Parthasarathy, Nehru sent Gopalaswami Ayyangar on a secret mission to Srinagar on 23 September 1947, in an effort to end Maharaja Hari Singh’s indecision. Ayyangar was uniquely suited for such a mission. He had served as prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir and knew both the state and its ruler. According to Parthasarathy’s account, Ayyangar spent two days in Srinagar and persuaded Hari Singh that his future as a Hindu ruler would be more secure with India. When Ayyangar returned to Delhi and briefed Nehru, the prime minister reportedly told him that he had been confident Ayyangar would return with good news.

If this account is correct, the political groundwork for accession was being laid well before the tribal forces entered Kashmir. There is another intriguing element. According to the account cited in the source article, between 12 and 17 October, the Indian government sent four commando platoons of the Indian Army’s 50th Parachute Brigade and personnel of the Patiala forces to Kashmir, with Srinagar airport placed under protection. These developments complicate the familiar compressed chronology in which everything begins with the tribal invasion and culminates almost immediately in accession and India’s military airlift.

The October Crisis

By October 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh’s position had become increasingly precarious. He had initially avoided joining either India or Pakistan. But an uprising had developed in Poonch and adjoining areas. Then armed Pashtun tribesmen from what was then the North-West Frontier Province entered Kashmir. As the tribal fighters advanced towards Srinagar, the Maharaja appealed to India for military assistance.

What happened during the next 48 hours has remained the subject of controversy for nearly eight decades. V.P. Menon, secretary in the States Department and one of the central architects of India’s integration of the princely states, provided what became the standard account. In his 1956 book, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, Menon wrote that he flew from Delhi to Jammu on 26 October, obtained Hari Singh’s signature on the Instrument of Accession, and returned to Delhi.

Lamb argued that this chronology was physically implausible. Hari Singh had left Srinagar for Jammu with his family on 26 October. Given the condition of the Srinagar-Jammu road, then known as the Banihal Cart Road, and eyewitness accounts of the royal convoy’s journey, Lamb calculated that the Maharaja could not have reached Jammu before approximately 7 PM. Jammu airport did not have facilities for night operations. How, Lamb asked, could Menon have flown from Delhi to Jammu, met a Maharaja who arrived only in the evening, obtained his signature and then flown back to Delhi that same night?

The British Record

Lamb found another piece of evidence in British records. According to records of the British High Commission preserved in the India Office Records, British Deputy High Commissioner Alexander Symon met Menon in New Delhi on 26 October. Menon reportedly told Symon that he intended to travel to Jammu the following day, 27 October.

If that contemporary record is accurate, it raises an obvious problem with Menon’s later account of having obtained the Maharaja’s signature in Jammu on 26 October. More significantly, 27 October was also the morning Indian troops began landing at Srinagar airport. Lamb therefore argued that Menon travelled to Jammu to obtain the accession only after the Indian military operation had begun.

The document itself could potentially have helped resolve some of these questions. But researchers could not freely examine it.

The Document Researchers Could Not See

The mystery deepened because the Instrument of Accession was apparently absent from some of the earliest documentary collections in which researchers might reasonably have expected to find it. According to Lamb’s discussion in Birth of a Tragedy: Kashmir 1947, the document was not reproduced in the Indian government’s 1948 White Paper on States. Nor was a copy among the documents India submitted to the United Nations Security Council that year. For historians, this created an unusual situation. One of the most important legal documents relating to the Kashmir dispute was constantly invoked, but the primary document itself was extraordinarily difficult to examine.

BBC journalist and author Andrew Whitehead also sought access to it and was unsuccessful. My own experience at the National Archives made the anomaly even more striking. In a cupboard in a corner of the archives’ basement, researchers could examine the Instruments of Accession of the other princely states. Kashmir’s was missing.

A Rare Glimpse in 2010

There was a partial breakthrough in 2010. By then, distinguished historian and former Jamia Millia Islamia Vice-Chancellor Mushirul Hasan had become Director-General of the National Archives. A.G. Noorani, the constitutional expert and scholar of India-Pakistan relations, made a formal legal demand for access to the Kashmir Instrument. At the time, I was working with Noorani as a research associate for his two-volume work The Kashmir Dispute.

Hasan eventually permitted me to examine the Instrument in his office. But there was an unusual restriction: I could read it, but was strictly prohibited from photographing or copying it. Hasan himself appeared puzzled by the sensitivity surrounding the document. The encounter left the central question unresolved. Why was an accession document that should have been an ordinary historical record treated almost like a classified state secret?

Finally Accessible in 2016

The veil was substantially lifted only in 2016, when RTI activist Venkatesh Nayak obtained formal access to the document. Its physical appearance generated further questions. Near the Governor-General’s signature, the typed word “August” had been struck out and “October” inserted by hand in green ink. Mountbatten’s signature was also in green ink. Elsewhere, Hari Singh’s name and title were entered in blue ink. The typed reference to “August 26” had been altered to October.

Corrections and handwritten insertions in themselves do not prove that a document was fabricated. Administrative documents are frequently amended, corrected or completed by hand. But after decades in which scholars had struggled to obtain access, the alterations inevitably invited questions about when the document was prepared, when different portions were completed and when the respective signatures were actually affixed.

One possible hypothesis raised in the original article is that a document may have been prepared earlier, perhaps in connection with Ayyangar’s September mission, with Hari Singh’s signature obtained at one stage and Mountbatten’s acceptance completed later. But the available material cited here does not establish that hypothesis. It remains speculation, and should be treated as such.

Why Secrecy Mattered

This is where the mystery surrounding the Instrument becomes more important than the document’s handwriting or corrections. If the accession was completed exactly as the official chronology maintained, unrestricted archival access might have helped settle the controversy. Instead, the opposite happened. The Instruments of Accession of other princely states could be consulted. Kashmir’s could not. Researchers asked for it and were denied. RTI requests did not initially unlock it. Even when the Director-General of the National Archives allowed me to examine it in 2010, I could neither photograph nor copy it. Only in 2016 did formal RTI access finally open the document to wider scrutiny.

None of this, by itself, proves that the Instrument was forged, backdated or signed after Indian troops entered Kashmir. Secrecy is evidence of secrecy, not evidence of forgery. But in historical research, restricting access to a primary document whose date and circumstances of execution are themselves disputed inevitably feeds doubts that transparent archival access could have helped resolve.

Lamb and the Chronology of Accession

Few historians pursued these questions as relentlessly as Alastair Lamb. Born in Harbin, China, in 1930 and educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Lamb specialised in the boundaries of British India. His scholarship eventually extended from the India-China frontier to Kashmir. His major works included The Crisis in Kashmir 1947–1966, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy 1846–1990, Birth of a Tragedy, Kashmir 1947 and Incomplete Partition 1947–1948. His conclusions remain contested, particularly in India. But even scholars who disagreed with him acknowledged the depth of his archival work.

Historian Srinath Raghavan, for instance, credited Lamb with bringing attention to evidence challenging the conventional chronology and suggesting that the Instrument was completed only after Indian troops had landed on 27 October. That is precisely why access to original documents matters. The dispute should ultimately turn not on nationalist narratives from either India or Pakistan, but on contemporary records: flight logs, correspondence, diaries, military orders, diplomatic cables, eyewitness accounts and, above all, the original Instrument itself.

Nearly eight decades later, the argument over Kashmir’s accession is unlikely to be settled by discovering a single document. There are really several questions. When was the Instrument prepared? When did Hari Singh actually sign it? Where was he when he signed it? When did Menon receive it? When did Mountbatten sign his acceptance? And, crucially, had Indian troops already begun landing in Srinagar before all these legal formalities were completed?

Ashok Parthasarathy’s account of Ayyangar’s September mission suggests that negotiations over Kashmir’s political future preceded the tribal invasion. Menon’s memoir provides one chronology. British diplomatic records cited by Lamb appear to complicate it. Lamb constructed another chronology from those contradictions. The original Instrument should have been the starting point for resolving the dispute. Instead, for decades it became part of the mystery.

Perhaps the most enduring question, therefore, is not simply what happened on 26 and 27 October 1947. It is also why, whilst accession documents of other princely states were available to researchers, the document at the centre of one of the world’s longest-running international disputes remained effectively beyond ordinary scholarly scrutiny until 2016. That question deserves an archival answer, not a political one. As Lamb himself wrote in Incomplete Partition, the purpose of historical research should not be to carve conclusions in stone but to bring documentary evidence into the open so that every aspect of a dispute can be examined and debated. In the case of Kashmir, opening the archives may not end the argument. But keeping them closed ensured that the mystery endured.