Important Treaties and Pacts in Indian History

Almost every war in Indian history ended in a treaty, and almost every political quarrel of the freedom struggle ended in a pact. Examiners like this topic because each treaty is a single row of facts: a year, two parties, a place and one result. A paper can ask it as a match-the-pair question, as a which-war-did-it-end question, or as a chronology question. This note arranges the treaties in three groups: the wars of the Company's expansion, the frontier treaties, and the pacts of the national movement and after independence.

The treaties of Company expansion

The Company's rise can be read through its treaties. The Treaty of Alinagar in 1757 patched up a truce between Robert Clive and Siraj-ud-Daula a few months before Plassey. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, the Treaty of Allahabad of 1765 was signed by Clive with Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II and Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh; the Company received the diwani, the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, and this is the document from which British rule in India is usually dated. Earlier, in 1665, the Treaty of Purandar had been signed between Shivaji and Mirza Raja Jai Singh for Aurangzeb, under which Shivaji surrendered twenty-three forts and kept twelve.

The wars and the governor-general who fought them

Match the war with the man and the treaty falls into place. Hyder Ali fought the First Anglo-Mysore War, which the Treaty of Madras closed in 1769. Warren Hastings fought the First Anglo-Maratha War and the Second Anglo-Mysore War, closed by Salbai and Mangalore. Cornwallis fought the Third Anglo-Mysore War, closed by Srirangapatnam in 1792. Wellesley, the author of the subsidiary alliance system, fought the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War of 1799 in which Tipu Sultan was killed, and the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Lord Hastings fought the Anglo-Nepal War and the Third Anglo-Maratha War. Dalhousie annexed Punjab after the Second Anglo-Sikh War and Lower Burma after the Second Anglo-Burmese War.

Frontier and princely treaties

• Treaty of Amritsar, 1809: Ranjit Singh and the Company fixed the Sutlej as the limit of Sikh expansion.
• Treaty of Sugauli, 1816: ended the Anglo-Nepal War; Nepal gave up Sikkim, Kumaon and Garhwal and accepted a British Resident.
• Treaty of Yandaboo, 1826: ended the First Anglo-Burmese War; Assam, Manipur, Arakan and Tenasserim passed to the Company.
• Treaty of Lahore, 1846: ended the First Anglo-Sikh War; a second Treaty of Amritsar in the same year sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh for seventy-five lakh rupees.
• Treaty of Gandamak, 1879: signed with Afghanistan during the Second Anglo-Afghan War.
• Subsidiary alliance: first accepted by the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1798 under Wellesley, then by Mysore, Awadh and the Marathas.

Pacts of the national movement

The Lucknow Pact of 1916 brought the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League to a common demand for self-government, with the Congress accepting separate electorates; Tilak and Jinnah were its chief architects and the Congress moderates and extremists also reunited at the same session. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact, also called the Delhi Pact, was signed on 5 March 1931: Gandhi agreed to suspend the Civil Disobedience Movement and attend the Second Round Table Conference, and the government agreed to release political prisoners and permit the making of salt for domestic use. The Poona Pact of 24 September 1932 was signed between Gandhi, then fasting in Yerwada jail, and Dr B. R. Ambedkar; it replaced the separate electorates for the Depressed Classes granted by the Communal Award with a larger number of seats reserved for them in the provincial legislatures within the general electorate. Later efforts include the C. R. Formula of 1944, the Gandhi-Jinnah talks of the same year and the Desai-Liaqat agreement of 1945.

Agreements after independence

The Instrument of Accession of October 1947 brought Jammu and Kashmir into India. The Nehru-Liaquat Agreement of 1950 dealt with the protection of minorities in both countries. The Panchsheel Agreement with China was signed on 29 April 1954 and listed the five principles of peaceful coexistence. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 divided the six rivers of the Indus system between India and Pakistan with the World Bank as a party. The Tashkent Declaration of 10 January 1966 closed the 1965 war; Lal Bahadur Shastri and Ayub Khan signed it with Soviet Premier Kosygin as mediator, and Shastri died in Tashkent that night. The Simla Agreement of 2 July 1972, signed by Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after the 1971 war, converted the ceasefire line into the Line of Control and bound both countries to settle disputes bilaterally. Internal accords followed the same pattern: the Punjab Accord with Longowal and the Assam Accord in 1985, the Mizo Accord in 1986 and the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord in 1987.