Srilanka, May 2 -- United States President Donald Trump is right when he said India and Pakistan would figure out the current crisis between them one way or the other. Then he displayed his historical illiteracy by saying that the two countries had been fighting over Kashmir for 1,500 years, putting history professors in a spin and making them scour the books they have read.

But the issue at hand is not the US president's inaccuracies on the subcontinent's history. Both India and Pakistan, in their present geographical form, have existed since the 1947 partition, although civilisation in the subcontinent has flourished for over 5,000 years.

Unlike Trump's flawed history, the Kashmiri problem has its origins in the 1947 partition. The ...