THE LION FINDS HIS HISTORIAN

Major General Goverdhan Singh Jamwal (Retd)

The Betrayal of Kashmir: Maharaja Hari Singh, British Imperialism, and the Politics of Exile, 1931-1949 (Jammu: Saksham Books International, 2026), 320 pp.

Name of Author: Brig Dr Vijay Sagar Dheman

I have lived long enough to watch a reputation being taken apart, and long enough to watch the dismantling harden into settled history. I was a young man when Maharaja Hari Singh left Jammu for Bombay in 1949, and I have spent the seventy-seven years since then reading what was written about him. The verdict never varied. Indecisive. Autocratic. Out of his depth. A feudal remnant to whom 1947 simply happened.

What has always struck me is not that the verdict was harsh, but that it was unanimous. Indian nationalist writers, Pakistani nationalist writers, British revisionists, American Cold War academics. The men and women who agreed on nothing else about Kashmir agreed on this. In a contested field, such unanimity ought to have invited suspicion decades ago. It did not. And the reason it did not is simple: no one had ever sat down and made the case for the defence. Neither any Dogra scholar nor Maharaja Hari Singh himself.

That is what Brigadier Dheman has done, and that is why this book is not just another volume on Jammu and Kashmir.

I want to be precise about the originality, because the word is used too loosely. Four things in this book have not been done before.

The first is the basic choice of subject. The existing literature contains biographies of the Maharaja and histories of the dispute. What it does not contain, not once in seventy-five years, is a sustained evidentiary defence in which Maharaja Hari Singh is the subject of the inquiry rather than an obstacle within someone else's narrative. Every previous account asks what was done about him. This one asks what was done to him, and then goes to the archives to find out.

The second is the way the author uses the Maharaja's letter of 16-17 August 1952 to President Rajendra Prasad. Scholars have known this document existed. Not one of them has analysed it. Dheman makes it the spine of his argument, and the effect is remarkable. Here is a deposed sovereign, three years into exile, setting out his own dispossession not as a wounded man's complaint but as a constitutional brief, quoting Sheikh Abdullah's written pledge of 26 September 1947 of loyalty to his "person, throne or dynasty" against the documented record of what followed, and reconstructing the mechanism of his removal with the exactness of an officer who had kept every paper. Anyone who still believes the Maharaja was constitutionally illiterate should read those pages and then say so again.

The third is where the book begins. Almost every account of Kashmir opens in October 1947. Dheman opens at the Round Table Conferences of 1930-32 and argues that the Maharaja's intervention on 16 November 1931, proposing a federal framework that anticipated the logic of the Instrument of Accession by sixteen years, converted him, in British eyes, from a manageable asset into a strategic obstacle. Everything that follows becomes intelligible in that light: the agitation of 1931, the Glancy Commission, the cultivation of Sheikh Abdullah. Moving the causal origin back sixteen years is the book's most consequential analytical decision, and no one had made it.

The fourth is Chapter Five, on Gilgit. The reversion of the Agency to the Maharaja on 1 August 1947, followed within months by a revolt executed through a command structure. That which had never, in practice, ceased to be British is reconstructed here from the India Office Records, the Political Agent's own account, and eyewitness testimony. As a soldier I will say this plainly: that chapter is the most operationally convincing thing I have read on the subject. It moves from pattern to action, and it is very hard to explain away.

On method, the author has done what his critics will not expect. He draws on the India Office Records, the National Archives at Kew, the Nehru Memorial collections, the Command Paper series, and the twelve volumes of the Transfer of Power, the first-order (tier1) sources throughout. He states openly that no single founding document exists and that his case rests on convergence judged by the standard of historical rather than legal proof. He names the still-restricted files that could confirm or modify his strongest claims. He concedes that Muslim representation in state service remained inadequate (though the improvement figures are better than any other Indian state) and that the handling of 1931 was a failure of political judgement. A man building a hagiography does not make those concessions. He makes them because he applies to Maharaja Hari Singh the same evidentiary standards the field applies to everyone else, which is all that was ever asked and all that was never given.

I do not claim the argument is beyond challenge; the cumulative case will convince some readers and not others, and it should be argued over. That is what serious history invites.

But this book discharges one more debt, and it is personal to me. To diminish the Maharaja was to diminish the Dogras, and we were diminished thoroughly. Brigadier Rajinder Singh, MVC, held the road with a handful of men in October 1947 and bought the days that made the airlift to Srinagar possible, and died doing it. A nation that remembers its founding should remember him. This book returns him, and the community that produced him, to the record.

I have waited a long time for someone to do this work with the documents in hand rather than the grievance alone. Brigadier Dheman has done it. In that 1952 letter, the Maharaja asked that history and posterity be allowed to judge between him and those who removed him. Posterity has taken seventy-five years to answer. The answer, at last, is here.