Treaty of Lahore (1846)

Who: Frederick Currie and Major Henry Lawrence for the East India Company, acting for Governor-General Hardinge, and for the seven-and-a-half-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh a group of Lahore Darbar signatories: Bhai Ram Singh, Raja Lal Singh, Sardar Tej Singh, Sardar Chattar Singh Attariwala, Sardar Ranjodh Singh Majithia, Dewan Dina Nath and Fakir Nur-ud-Din.

What: Signed on 9 March 1846, a month after Sobraon, the treaty gave the Company all forts, territories and rights in the Jalandhar Doab, between the Beas and the Sutlej, and renounced Lahore's claims south of the Sutlej. The Company demanded an indemnity of one and a half crore rupees. Lahore could not pay it, so the hill country between the Beas and the Indus, including Kashmir and Hazara, was ceded in place of one crore.

• The regular army was capped at 25 battalions of infantry, 800 men each, and 12,000 cavalry.
• No European or American could be employed by Lahore without British consent, and Lahore's borders could not change without British agreement.
• The treaty recognised Gulab Singh of Jammu as an independent ruler over the hill territories to be made over to him. A separate Treaty of Amritsar on 16 March 1846 gave him Kashmir.
• Additional articles of 11 March kept a British force in Lahore until the end of 1846.

Where: Lahore, the capital of the Sarkar-i-Khalsa.

Why it mattered: The treaty left a Sikh child on the throne but took away territory, capped the army and limited Lahore's freedom to act. The British force that was meant to leave did not. After Maharani Jind Kaur was pushed aside, the Treaty of Bhyrowal, agreed on 16 December and ratified on 26 December 1846, gave a British Resident full authority to direct and control every department of the state. It set up a regency council that could not change without the Resident's consent, and gave Jind Kaur a pension of 1.5 lakh rupees a year. The arrangement was to last until Duleep Singh turned sixteen, on 4 September 1854. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism describes the result as a virtual British protectorate.

The resentment this left among Sikh soldiers and chiefs fed the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848-49 and the annexation of the Punjab.