Rarely does history hinge on a few words. But when US Ambassador Sergio Gor visited Srinagar earlier this week and declared, “This is an important part of India,” he was signalling the end of an era. It was his first visit to the Valley, and he had just finished meeting Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. He followed up the statement by suggesting that the US travel advisory could be reviewed by Washington because of improvements in the security situation. There was an irony no one seemed to have noticed. Seventy-three years ago, American emissaries came to the Valley to whisper the possibilities of independence to Sheikh Abdullah. On August 19, an American ambassador, with the Sheikh’s grandson standing beside him, seemed to have ended all ambiguity about the American position on Jammu and Kashmir.
A statement by an ambassador is not definitive. It is not a treaty, a presidential proclamation, or even a formal repudiation by the State Department of every position Washington has espoused since 1947. But diplomacy is about vocabulary, and no objective student of Kashmir can fail to notice how far America has come. Almost exactly 73 years ago, on August 9, 1953, Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed as prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir by Sadr-i-Riyasat Karan Singh, amid mounting suspicions in New Delhi about his commitment to the accession and his growing interest in an independent Kashmir. His contacts with prominent Americans fed those suspicions and later became part of the political atmosphere surrounding what came to be known as the Kashmir Conspiracy Case.
Then came Adlai Stevenson in May 1953. Twice the Democratic Party’s candidate for the presidency, Stevenson was one of the most influential American internationalists of his era. He visited Kashmir and talked to Abdullah. Those meetings sent shockwaves of suspicion through New Delhi. Indian leaders believed Stevenson may also have encouraged Abdullah to think about an independent Kashmir. American diplomatic records show that Nehru believed Stevenson’s conversations had encouraged Abdullah’s growing intransigence. But the point is less to revive conspiracy theories about 1953. More important is that “independent Kashmir” was then conceivable enough in American diplomatic parlance for Nehru to worry that Washington might act to encourage it.
These apprehensions were rooted in the genesis of the Kashmir problem. UN Security Council Resolution 47, which America supported in 1948, placed the dispute in an international context and anticipated a plebiscite after a process of demilitarisation. The prescribed sequence, which required Pakistan to secure the withdrawal of the “tribal invaders” from the territory under its occupation, was never implemented. But for years afterwards, the resolution provided Pakistan with the diplomatic scaffolding it wanted: J&K was not an Indian question alone; it was an international dispute to be settled. America was at the centre of that scaffolding.
In fact, American thinking went much further in those early years. Take this State Department memo from February 1950: Describing Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India as “contested”, it concluded that “in our legal assessment at the time… the Maharaja’s Instrument of Accession could not by itself have finally settled the state’s future”.
This thinking continued well after the Cold War was over. In October 1993, Robin Raphel, freshly minted assistant secretary of state for South Asian Affairs in the Clinton administration, called Kashmir a “disputed territory” and said Washington did not recognise the legal validity of the Instrument of Accession as meaning that Kashmir was forever part of India. India was aghast. Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao called such efforts at diplomatic suasion “pinpricks and minor mischief”.
But the larger fact that emerged was this: Nearly five decades after 1947, the US was unwilling to couch its discussion of Jammu and Kashmir in terms that accepted India’s political description of the state without qualification. That is what makes Gor’s description in Srinagar in 2026 so noteworthy. The venue matters as much as the words he used, and not surprisingly, Pakistan did not just protest, but lodged a formal demarche.
That does not mean New Delhi should start conducting itself triumphantly. Our case in Kashmir has ultimately been made most strongly by the people of J&K. And the test has always been India’s ability to deepen constitutionalism, expand democracy and political reconciliation, deliver development and ensure civil liberties for all citizens. That is why Srinagar’s elected government matters. And why a return to normal democratic politics and restoration of statehood is essential.
But we should not downplay what has occurred. For there is a historical arc here that is quite remarkable. It reflects India’s own transformation and the gradual exhaustion of the idea that Jammu and Kashmir is best handled through international mechanisms conceived in the bloodshed of Partition. America has not overwritten history. Gor signalled something far more important: It accepts reality. For decades, Washington dealt with Kashmir as if it were a problem in search of a permanent political resting place. In Srinagar last week, it implicitly acknowledged that history had already made a choice.
The writer is dean and professor, SIS, JNU and former vice chancellor, University of Jammu
