India and Pakistan have a complex and largely relationship.Two years after World War 2nd, the United Kingdom formally dissolved British India dividing it into two new sovereign nations, the Union of India and Pakistan. One million people as Hindus and Muslims migrated in opposite directions across the Radcliffe line to reach India and Pakistan. While both countries established full diplomatic ties shortly after their formal independence, their relationship was quickly overshadowed by the mutual effects of the partition as well as by the emergence of conflicting territorial claims over various princely states, with the most significant dispute being that of Jammu and Kashmir.
Since 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three major wars and one undeclared war.
The India-Pakistan border is one of the most militarized international boundaries in the world.
Northern India and most of modern day Pakistan overlap with each other in terms of their common Indo-Aryan demographic, natively speaking a variety of Indo Aryan languages. Although the two countries have linguistic and cultural ties, the size of India Pakistan trade in very small relative to the size of their economic and the fact that they share a land border.
The partition of British India split the former British province of Punjab and Bengal between the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. The mostly Muslim western part of the province became Pakistan’s Punjab province, the mostly Hindu and Sikh Eastern part became India’s Eas Punjab State.
According to the British plan for the partition of British India, all the 680 princely states were allowed to decide which of the two countries to join. With the exception a few, most of the Muslim majority princely -states acceded to Pakistan while most of the Hindu-majority princely states joined India. However the decisions of some of the princely states would shape the Pakistan-India relationship considerably in the years to come.
Kasmir was a Muslim-majority princely state, ruled by a Hindu Ring, Maharaja Hari Singh. At the time of the partition of India, Maharaja Hari Singh,the ruler of the state, preferred to remain independent and did not want to join either the Dominion of India or the Dominion of Pakistan.
