Nehru served as his own foreign minister and throughout his life remained the chief architect of India's foreign policy. The dark cloud of partition, however, hovered for years in the aftermath of India's independence, and India and Pakistan were left suspicious of one another's incitements to border violence.

The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir triggered the first undeclared war with Pakistan, which began a little more than two months after independence. Prior to partition, princes were given the option of joining the new dominion within which their territory lay, and, thanks to the vigorous lobbying of Mountbatten and Patel, most of the princes agreed to do so, accepting handsome pensions as rewards for relinquishing sovereignty. Of the some 570 princes, only 3 had not acceded to the new dominion--those of Junagadh, Hyderabad, and Kashmir. The nawab of Junagadh and the nizam of Hyderabad were both Muslims, though most of their subjects were Hindus, and both states were surrounded by India. Junagadh, however, faced Pakistan on the Arabian Sea, and when its nawab followed Jinnah's lead in opting to join that Muslim nation, India's army moved in and took control of the territory. The nizam of Hyderabad was more cautious, hoping for independence for his vast domain in the heart of South India, but India refused to give him much more than one year and sent troops into the state and its palace in September 1948. Both invasions met little, if any, resistance, and both states were swiftly integrated into India's union.

Kashmir, lying in the Himalayas, presented a different problem. Its maharaja was Hindu, but three-quarters of its population were Muslims, and the state itself was contiguous to both new dominions, sitting like a crown atop South Asia. Maharaja Hari Singh tried at first to remain independent, but in October 1947 Pashtun (Pathan) tribesmen from the North-West Frontier of Pakistan invaded Kashmir in British trucks, heading toward Srinagar. The invasion triggered India's first undeclared war with Pakistan and hastened the maharaja's decision to opt for accession to India. Mountbatten and Nehru airlifted Indian troops into Srinagar, and the tribesmen were forced to fall back to a line that has, since early 1949, partitioned Kashmir into Pakistan-held Azad Kashmir, the western quarter of the state, and India's state of Jammu and Kashmir, which includes the Vale of Kashmir and Ladakh. Nehru initially agreed to Mountbatten's proposal that a plebiscite be held in the entire state as soon as hostilities ceased, and a UN-sponsored cease-fire was agreed to by both parties on Jan. 1, 1949. No statewide plebiscite was held, however, for in 1954, after Pakistan began to receive arms from the United States, Nehru withdrew his support.

India's foreign policy, defined by Nehru as nonaligned, was based on "Five Principles" (Panch Shila): "mutual respect" for other nations' "territorial integrity and sovereignty"; nonaggression; noninterference in "internal affairs"; equality and mutual benefit; and "peaceful coexistence." These principles were, ironically, articulated in a treaty with China over Tibet in 1954, when Nehru still hoped for Sino-Indian "brotherhood" and leadership of a "Third World" of nonviolent nations, recently independent of colonial rule, eager to save the world from Cold War superpower confrontation and nuclear annihilation. China and India, however, had not resolved a dispute over two areas of their border: the section demarcating a barren plateau in Ladakh called Aksai Chin, which was claimed by India as part of Jammu and Kashmir but never properly surveyed, and the section known as the McMahon Line, which stretched from Bhutan to Burma (Myanmar) and followed the crest of the high Himalayas. The latter was formed in 1914 by an agreement between Arthur Henry McMahon, the British foreign secretary for India, and Tibetan officials but was never accepted by China. After China invaded and reasserted its authority over Tibet in 1950, it began appealing to India--but to no avail--for negotiations over the border. This Sino-Indian "cartographic war" exploded in the late 1950s after India discovered a road in Aksai Chin built by the Chinese to link its province of Sinkiang with Tibet, and the tension was further heightened by India's 1959 asylum to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader. Full-scale war blazed in November 1962 when a Chinese army moved easily through India's northern outposts and advanced virtually unopposed toward the plains of Assam before Peking ordered their unilateral withdrawal.

The war was a blow to Nehru's most cherished principles and ideals, though as a result of swift and extensive American and British military support, including the dispatch of U.S. bombers to the world's highest border, India soon secured its northern defenses. India's "police action" of integrating Portuguese Goa into the union by force in 1961 represented another fall from the high ground of nonviolence in foreign affairs, which Nehru so often claimed for India in his speeches to the UN and elsewhere. During his premiership, Nehru tried hard to identify the country's foreign policy with anticolonialism and antiracism. He also tried to promote India's role as the peacemaker, which was seen as an extension of the policies of Mahatma Gandhi and as deeply rooted in the indigenous religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. Like most foreign policies, India's was, in fact, based first of all on its government's perceptions of national interest and on security considerations.

region of the northwestern Indian subcontinent that has been in dispute between India and Pakistan since the partition of India in 1947. The territory of Jammu and Kashmir is bounded on the northeast by the Uighur Autonomous Region of Sinkiang and by Tibet (both parts of China), on the south by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, on the northwest by Afghanistan, and on the west by Pakistan. The region has a total area of 85,806 square miles (222,236 square km); of this area, the northern and western portions are occupied by Pakistan, the northeastern section is held by China, and the southern and southeastern portions are a state of India. The Indian portion holds most of the region's population and arable land, however. (For treatment of the Indian portion, see Jammu and Kashmir).

Pakistan's portion of the region consists of three regions: Azad Kashmir, Gilgit, and Baltistan. The capitals of these three areas are at Muzaffarabad, Gilgit town, and Skardu, respectively. The Pakistan-held area lies directly north of undisputed Pakistan and is bounded north and west by Afghanistan and on the east by the Indian-held part of the territory. Azad Kashmir has a government protected and financed by Pakistan and headed by a state president and a State Council. This government is overseen by Pakistan's Ministry of Kashmir Affairs. The Gilgit Agency and Baltistan are administered by political agents of the Pakistani government.

China began conducting military maneuvers in the Aksai Chin and Ladakh area of eastern Kashmir in the 1950s. The northeastern part of Ladakh (in northern Jammu and Kashmir territory) has been occupied by China since its victory over India in the Sino-Indian war in October 1962. The disputed territory includes a Chinese-built road that is strategically important to China because it connects Sinkiang with Tibet.

The region of Jammu and Kashmir as a whole is predominantly mountainous with deep, narrow valleys and high, barren plateaus. The Jammu plain in the extreme southwest is separated by the Lesser Himalayas from the larger, more fertile, and more heavily populated Vale of Kashmir to the north, which is situated at an elevation of 5,300 feet (1,600 m) and is formed by the basin of the upper Jhelum River. The Vale contains the city of Srinagar. Both these lowland areas lie in the Indian portion of the territory. Aside from them, Jammu and Kashmir consists from southwest to northeast of the following dominant features: the foothills and outer ranges of the western part of the Himalayas; the peaks of the Himalayas themselves, which reach heights of 20,000 feet (6,100 m) or more; a high, mountainous plateau region known as Ladakh, which is cut by the rugged valley of the northwestward-flowing Indus River; and the peaks of the Karakoram Range, including K2 (28,251 feet [8,611 m]), which is the second highest peak in the world after Mount Everest. The climate of the territory ranges from subtropical in the southwestern lowlands to alpine throughout the high mountain areas.

The people in the Jammu area are Muslim in the west and Hindu in the east and speak the Hindi, Punjabi, and Dogri languages. The inhabitants of the Vale of Kashmir are mostly Muslim and speak Urdu and Kashmiri. The sparsely inhabited Ladakh region and beyond is home to Buddhist Mongoloid peoples speaking Balti and Ladakhi.

state in northwestern India. The state is part of a larger region of the same name that has been in dispute between India, Pakistan, and China since the partition of India in 1947. The Indian state is bounded on the west and north by the Pakistani portions of Jammu and Kashmir, on the northeast by the Chinese-held portion of Jammu and Kashmir, and on the southeast and south by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. The Indian state occupies the southern half of the region and has an area of 39,145 square miles (101,387 square km). It also holds three-quarters of the region's population and the majority of its arable land. Its summer capital is Srinagar, and its winter capital is Jammu.

According to legend, an ascetic named Kashyapa reclaimed the land of Kashmir from a vast lake, and the reclaimed land came to be known as Kashyapamar and, later, Kashmir. Buddhism was introduced by Ashoka (c. 265-238 BC), and later the region gained prominence as a centre of Hindu culture. A succession of Hindu dynasties ruled over Kashmir until 1346, when it came under Muslim rule; it was annexed to the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab in 1819 and to the Dogra kingdom of Jammu in 1846. The (Hindu) Dogra dynasty ruled the region until 1947, when British India was partitioned into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan.

When Indian troops entered Kashmir in 1947 to counter the Pathan tribesmen who had invaded the Baramulla district, Hari Singh, the maharaja of Kashmir, acceded to union with India. Pakistan has consistently opposed the accession of Kashmir to India and has continued to insist on a plebiscite, which Pakistan is confident would be in its favour because of the large proportion of Muslims in the population of Kashmir. China wrested part of the Ladakh area of eastern Kashmir from India during its victory in the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

In 1949 Pakistan and India defined a cease-fire line in the region that, despite outbreaks of fighting between the two sides in 1965 and 1971, has remained as the "line of control" between the Pakistani- and Indian-controlled portions of the region. The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir became the scene of civil strife in the early 1990s when Muslim Kashmiri separatists began guerrilla actions against Indian civil authorities and troops there. These separatists favoured either union with Pakistan or the creation of an independent Kashmir state.

More than 90 percent of the state is mountainous. Physiographically the region comprises (southwest to northeast) the fertile and relatively low-lying Jammu and Punch plains, the thickly forested (coniferous) Himalayan foothills (2,000 to 7,000 feet [600 to 2,100 m]), the heavily glaciated Pir Panjal Range (12,500 feet [3,800 m]), the Vale of Kashmir at an elevation of 5,300 feet (1,600 m), the complex central Himalayan ranges (more than 20,000 feet [6,100 m]), the upper Indus River valley (11,000 feet [3,350 m]), the Ladakh plateau, and the Karakoram Range (more than 25,000 feet [7,600 m]). The Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, and Tawi are the principal rivers; Dal and Wular are the major lakes.

The climate varies from alpine in the northeast to subtropical in the southwest. Annual average precipitation ranges from 3 inches (75 mm) in the north to 45 inches (1,150 mm) in the southwest.

With less than 1 percent of the total population of India, Jammu and Kashmir is the only Indian state with a two-thirds Muslim majority. Hindus make up about 30 percent of the population, and there are smaller minorities of Sikhs and Buddhists. Urdu is the official language. The two largest cities are Srinagar and Jammu. The people in the Jammu area are mostly Dogri-speaking Hindus with close cultural links to those in neighbouring Punjab state. To the northwest, Muslims form the majority in the Punch region. The inhabitants of the Vale of Kashmir are overwhelmingly Muslim and speak either Urdu or Kashmiri.

The majority of the population pursue subsistence agriculture and grow rice, corn (maize), wheat, barley, pulses, oilseeds, and tobacco on terraced slopes. In the Vale of Kashmir large orchards produce apples, pears, peaches, mulberries, walnuts, and almonds. The Vale of Kashmir is also the sole producer of saffron in the Indian subcontinent. Transhumance of sheep, goats, yaks, and ponies is practiced by Gujar and Gaddi nomads; the well-known cashmere (pashmina) of commerce is the product of the goats raised there. Sericulture is widespread.

The state's economy is characterized by such handicraft industries as handloom weaving of local silk and wool, carpet and rug weaving, wood carving, and papier-mache. Precision instruments, metalware, sporting goods, furniture, matches, and resin and turpentine are the major industrial products. Tourism is one of the oldest industries. Transportation remains a vital problem in this rugged and forested region. Jammu is the terminus of the Northern Railway of India.

The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir retains a special status with the national government as defined by the Indian constitution. While the rest of India's states follow this constitution, the state of Jammu and Kashmir has its own constitution (adopted in 1956). Nevertheless, India's national (union) government possesses direct legislative powers in defense, external affairs, and communications in the state and indirectly deals with citizenship, Supreme Court jurisdiction, and emergency powers. The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir has a governor who is appointed by the president of India. Executive power is vested in the elected chief minister and the Council of Ministers, and there is also a bicameral legislature.

The Kashmiri language belongs to the Dardic branch of the Indo-Aryan group of languages and is rich in folklore and literature. There are two universities in the state: the University of Jammu (1969) at Jammu and the University of Kashmir (1969) at Srinagar. Pop. (1991 est.) 7,718,700.