“To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will.” Rousseau wrote that in The Social Contract two centuries before a letter reached Maharaja Hari Singh in Jammu bearing Lord Mountbatten’s signature and, buried inside it, an admission that the document he had just signed did not actually settle anything. That admission is still the least discussed part of the Instrument of Accession, an artefact everyone argues about and almost no one reads past the signature line.

Even accepting every fact India has ever claimed about the timing and execution of the Instrument exactly as stated, the text still does not resolve the dispute it is supposed to end, because the man who accepted it on India’s behalf wrote, in the same letter, that the underlying question would be settled later, by the people themselves. That is the argument worth making. It does not depend on proving the document was forged. It depends on reading what the document, and the letter attached to it, actually say.

The legal mechanics are not seriously disputed. Under the Indian Independence Act 1947, a princely state acceded by the Ruler executing an Instrument in the prescribed form, an offer that became binding only once the Governor-General accepted it. Hari Singh’s letter and Instrument are dated 26 October 1947. Mountbatten’s acceptance is dated 27 October. Around 560 other rulers signed the same form without incident, and Indian authorities are right that nothing in the statute required a popular vote before a ruler could sign. That argument deserves to stand on its own terms rather than be dismissed: as a matter of 1947 constitutional procedure, an offer was made and an acceptance was recorded.

What complicates it is the record of exactly when and how. The British historian Alastair Lamb argued in 1993 that the Instrument could not have been signed on 26 October as dated, since Hari Singh was travelling the roughly 350 kilometres from Srinagar to Jammu that day, and that a document signed only after Indian troops had already landed at Srinagar airfield on the morning of the 27th would have been produced under duress rather than freely offered. Indian researchers have since countered Lamb with a facsimile of the Instrument released through Right to Information requests, consistent in form with other rulers’ documents and bearing Mountbatten’s characteristic green-ink acceptance notation. The exact hour remains genuinely contested among historians on both sides. It is not, however, where the strongest argument in this dispute sits.

That argument sits in Mountbatten’s own letter, delivered the same day the acceptance was recorded. After confirming that India would take Kashmir’s accession, Mountbatten added that this was “consistently with their policy” for any state where accession was disputed, and that his government’s wish was for the question to be “settled by a reference to the people” once order had been restored and the state cleared of the invader. That is not a stray sentence. It converts a document India now treats as final and unconditional into an arrangement with an unmet condition attached by India’s own Governor-General, on the day of acceptance, in writing. Nehru’s own government initially agreed: at the Security Council in January 1948, India described accession as provisional pending that vote, a position Nehru himself continued to affirm in Parliament and before the UN well into the early 1950s before New Delhi’s position hardened toward treating the Constituent Assembly’s endorsement as sufficient on its own.

There is also a straightforward disagreement about what international law makes of duress itself. Indian legal defenders correctly note that international law in 1947 did not treat coercion the way municipal contract law does: an agreement extracted under pressure was not automatically void merely because one side held the stronger hand, and a great many treaties in history were concluded exactly that way. But the law has moved since. Article 52 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, adopted in 1969, holds that a treaty procured by the threat or use of force is void. The Convention cannot be applied retroactively to a 1947 accession, and no serious lawyer claims otherwise. What it shows is that the international community has since formalised precisely the concern raised from the outset, that consent extracted under military pressure is not the same thing as consent freely given.

There is a capacity problem sitting alongside the conditionality one. By the time Hari Singh signed, he had already fled Srinagar for Jammu and no longer controlled the Kashmir Valley, the part of the state the accession was meant to secure. A ruler executing a legal instrument while his capital lay outside his effective control is a different kind of signatory than one acting from a position of settled authority, whatever the statute technically permitted.

None of this requires treating the Instrument as fiction, and a credible case for Kashmir should not need to. What it requires is reading the document whole. Mountbatten did not need a treaty convention to flag the problem. He said it himself, in the same letter that recorded India’s acceptance, when he made settlement conditional on a vote that was promised and never held. India’s claim to Kashmir rests on a document whose own author did not consider the matter closed. Seventy-nine years on, the document still says so. India has simply stopped reading that part of it.

The author is a graduate in International Relations from the International Islamic University, Islamabad and is currently serving as a researcher at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations, Islamabad.