Why Pakistan’s new map is an opportunity for India

Several areas of PoK were indeed under the control of Maharaja Hari Singh, under differing arrangements with ‘Mirs’ or kings of Chitral, Hunza and Skardu among others. Pakistan denied this entirely, and once it established its foothold in the area in 1947, it refused to move despite a UN Security Council Resolution asking it to do so. This area, abutting Afghanistan, China, and then-Soviet Union, was strategic enough for the British to become part of the ‘Great Game’. The newly formed Pakistan was quick to realise this, and it secretly signed the Karachi Agreement of 1949, which took a small rump of area to create the notional ‘Azad Kashmir’, with some 75 per cent of an estimated 78,000 sq km territory innocuously called the ‘Northern Areas’. Decades later, Pakistan renamed it Gilgit-Baltistan.