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Almost everyone who has followed the history of Indian policy on Kashmir is intrigued by at least three questions. Why did India, which today has made a mantra of bilateralism, take the issue to the UN in 1948? Why did India not vacate Pakistan-sponsored aggression from all of Kashmir before accepting the UN Security Council's cease-fire call in 1949? And why did India not respond to Pakistan's invasion by taking the war into enemy territory, as it did later in 1965?

WAR AND DIPLOMACY IN KASHMIR, 1947-48 By C. Dasgupta Sage Price: Rs 250 Pages: 239

Much of the blame for these decisions has often been put on India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Many have suggested it was Nehruvian idealism that prompted Delhi to move the issue from the Valley, where India had a comfortable advantage, to the hostile terrain of the UN. Nehru, it has been vigorously argued, believed Delhi would get real justice from the multilateral body. Similarly, it is often argued that Nehru did not want to permanently scar relations with Pakistan by taking the war into its territory, believing as he did that India and Pakistan needed to begin their history on a relatively harmonious note. And that it was Sheikh Abdullah who forced him to stop the army from moving the aggressors even further from what is now the Line of Control as Abdullah's influence did not extend beyond the Valley.

LORDING OVER INDIA: Mountbatten

C. Dasgupta rejects this conventional wisdom. Through the sheer force of new evidence, in the form of the Mountbatten papers and other recently declassified papers at the India Office Library in London, he shows convincingly it was British intrigue rather than Nehruvian idealism that was responsible for many of the Indian follies in the first years of the conflict over Kashmir.

Dasgupta's argument is simple. Most of the early decisions were not made by the full Indian cabinet, but by the cabinet's Defence Committee chaired by governor-general Lord Mountbatten, whose "affection for India never interfered with his pursuit of British interest". And British strategic interests had a distinct pro-Pak tilt. Therefore, it was the British who, through persuasion, manipulation and often deceit stopped India from expanding the war and made it approach the UN.

But Mountbatten's treachery was of a lesser order compared to the skulduggery of Lord Noel-Baker, then secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, who won a Nobel Peace Prize later. He advanced proposals in the Council that "involved the unqualified acceptance of Pakistan's demands and the outright rejection of Indian views". Indeed, if he had succeeded, Kashmir would have been placed under effective UN control. The book is essential reading for not just concerned Indians, but Tony Blair and other Brits who portray themselves as peacemakers in Kashmir. Without British Machiavellian policies there would have been no Kashmir dispute.