Sonal Singh
Seventy-nine years ago, on 26 October 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession with India. Had he signed it with Pakistan instead, the people of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh would not be debating statehood, elections or development today. Many of them would be asking for something far more basic: the right to exist as who they are.
In August 1947 the ruler of J&K had three options: India, Pakistan or independence. He hesitated, signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan and kept talking to both dominions. Pakistan did not wait for his answer. On 22 October it sent armed tribal columns across the border to settle the question by force.
Faced with an invasion that had already burned Muzaffarabad and was sacking Baramulla, the Maharaja chose India. Indian troops landed at Srinagar on 27 October, and the Valley, Jammu and Ladakh were saved.
This article imagines the other choice. Little needs to be invented. The answer to "what if" is written in the first days of the invasion, in Pakistan's treatment of its own minorities and provinces, and above all in the daily lives of the people of Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan.
The first taste of Pakistani "liberation" came in Baramulla. Under the codename Operation Gulmarg, Pashtun tribal lashkars moved down the Rawalpindi-Muzaffarabad-Baramulla road from 22 October, accompanied by Pakistani soldiers in civilian clothes and supplied with trucks and fuel. The events moved with frightening speed. On 22 October 1947, tribal columns crossed into J&K along the Muzaffarabad road. By 24 October, Muzaffarabad had fallen, and massacres and looting followed. On 25 and 26 October, the raiders reached Baramulla and sacked the town. On 26 October, Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession. The next day, 27 October, India accepted the accession and the first Indian troops landed at Srinagar airfield. It took until 9 November for the Indian Army to retake Baramulla.
The violence did not spare Muslims either. Kashmiri Muslims were looted and killed alongside their neighbours, which is why many of them, even some sympathetic to Pakistan, welcomed Indian soldiers (Deccan Herald). That was the face of Pakistani rule in its first week. There is little reason to believe the decades after would have been kinder.
Accession to Pakistan would not have been a change of flag. It would have meant living inside a state built on the two-nation theory, run for long stretches by its army, and governed from Punjab. Every community in J&K would have paid a price.
Jammu had a large Hindu and Sikh population in 1947. Mirpur shows what awaited them. In November 1947 its Hindu and Sikh residents were massacred, abducted or driven out, and the town has had almost no non-Muslim residents since. Multiply Mirpur across Jammu, Kathua, Udhampur, Rajouri and Poonch, and the result is one of the largest uprootings of the Partition era, on top of the millions already displaced in Punjab.
The Pandits are the Valley's oldest community. Under Pakistan they would have become a tiny minority in a state that declared itself an Islamic Republic in 1956. Pakistan's own record is the guide. Its Hindu population has shrunk to a fraction of what it was at Partition, and Hindu girls in Sindh still face forced conversion and marriage. Most Pandits would have left or been forced out decades earlier, with no Indian state to receive them and no Jammu to shelter in.
Leh's monasteries, its language and its way of life would have been absorbed into a state with no place for them. Across the mountains, Baltistan, once part of the same Ladakh wazarat, has already lost much of its Buddhist heritage. A Pakistani Ladakh would most likely have followed the same path.
Kargil's Shia majority would have shared the fate of Gilgit-Baltistan's Shias. In 1988, Gilgit saw armed sectarian attacks that killed scores of Shias, and Shia travellers on the Karakoram Highway have been pulled off buses and shot in later years. Pakistan's wider record of attacks on Shias, Ahmadis and Christians would have become J&K's record too.
The Valley's majority would have fared little better. Under Pakistani rule, Kashmiri leaders would have the choice PoJK's politicians provided: swear loyalty to accession to Pakistan, or be shut out of public life. Kashmiri, a language with a thousand-year literary tradition, would have been pushed aside by Urdu, as Bengali was in East Pakistan.
Pakistan has been under direct military rule for over three decades: 1958, 1969, 1977 and 1999. J&K would have lived through every coup, every suspended constitution and every round of political arrests, with no Indian Supreme Court or Election Commission to turn to.
East Pakistan exemplifies what would have happened if Kashmiris, with their own language and culture, demanded a fair share of identity. The answer in 1971 was a military crackdown that killed huge numbers of civilians. A restless Kashmir, demanding its rights from Islamabad, could have faced the same answer.
In 1963, Pakistan handed the Shaksgam Valley, part of the old princely state, to China. A Pakistani J&K would have had no say over such deals. Today, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor runs through Gilgit-Baltistan, while its own people protest that they have been left out of its benefits.
PoJK has for decades hosted training camps for militant groups aimed at India. In a Pakistani J&K, the Valley's youth would not have been building careers in Delhi, Bengaluru or abroad. They would have been the recruiting ground and the battlefield.
None of this is guesswork. Across the Line of Control, the people who did come under Pakistan in 1947 live it every day.
PoJK is called "Azad" (free), but it runs under the AJK Interim Constitution Act of 1974, drafted in Islamabad. Section 7(2) bars any person or party from activity prejudicial to "the ideology of the State's accession to Pakistan" . Candidates must swear allegiance to that accession before they can contest even a local election
The Mangla Dam in Mirpur displaced tens of thousands of families and still lights up Pakistan. Yet PoJK residents pay tariffs far above the cost of production and live with daily power cuts. Flour, the staple of every home, became unaffordable as subsidies vanished.
Since 2023, the Joint Awami Action Committee, a coalition of traders, lawyers, transporters and students, has led mass agitations for cheaper electricity and subsidised flour . In May 2024 and again from 29 September 2025, the region was shut down. In early October 2025, nine people were killed in clashes, troops poured into Muzaffarabad and communications were cut. Crowds chanted for Pakistani forces to leave, and the committee was branded a terrorist organisation .
Gilgit-Baltistan is not mentioned in Pakistan's constitution. Its people have no seats in Pakistan's parliament and no recognised constitutional rights, yet federal taxes are imposed on them. In 2025, when they opposed new land and minerals laws, at least 13 leaders of the local Awami Action Committee were arrested . One local activist told Asia Times that people had hoped for rights "similar to what the Indian Kashmiris enjoy" .
That last sentence says it all. The people Pakistan claims to have "freed" in 1947 now look to Indian J&K as the standard of rights they want for themselves.
Both sides began in 1947 as parts of the same princely state, with the same people, languages and poverty. Their paths since show what the accession protected.
Life in Indian J&K has not been easy. It has suffered Pakistan-backed militancy, long security deployments, internet shutdowns and political detentions, and many Kashmiris have real grievances. But its people kept what their neighbours across the LoC never had: a constitution that protects them, courts they can reach, and the power to vote out their government.
Pakistan disputes the validity of the accession, points to the UN's unheld plebiscite, and raises its own concerns about human rights in Indian J&K. Some historians also question the exact timing of the signature relative to the airlift. A counterfactual cannot be proven. But the record of the past seventy-nine years on both sides of the LoC is not a counterfactual, and it is the strongest evidence of what Pakistani rule would have meant.
Had the Maharaja signed with Pakistan, Jammu's Hindus and Sikhs would have met Mirpur's fate. The Pandits would have been driven from the Valley a generation earlier. Ladakh's Buddhists and Kargil's Shias would have lived as targets. And Kashmiri Muslims would have inherited the life of Muzaffarabad and Gilgit, an assembly that cannot set its own power tariffs, elections closed to anyone who questions Pakistan, and protests answered with bullets and blackouts.
Today the people of PoJK march for what the accession secured on this side of the LoC by default: a vote that counts, courts that listen, and a fair share of the wealth of their own rivers. On Accession Day, their struggle is the clearest answer to the question "what if".
