Kashmir’s sovereign at the time of Partition was Maharaja Hari Singh. While he loathed the Congress party and feared that Nehru would carry out drastic land reforms, he was apprehensive about his future as a Hindu in the Muslim state of Pakistan. Like the Nizam of Hyderabad, he preferred independence. With Kashmir’s accession in the balance, Lord Mountbatten actually counseled the maharaja not to act in haste but rather to ascertain the preferences of his diverse populace before committing. “With a view to keeping options open and under Jinnah’s careful approach so as not to upset the delicate balance of accession of a number of key states that were still weighing their options … Pakistan signed a Standstill Agreement with the Maharaja of Kashmir” (Nawaz 2008b, 117). Singh’s indecisiveness disquieted India’s political leaders, who feared that the longer he dithered the more likely he would opt to remain independent or, worse, permit Pakistan to enter the state.
The disposition of Kashmir soon became entangled in a number of other crises, further complicating the maharaja’s decision-making. After World War II, some 60,000 veterans from the area of Poonch in Western Jammu had returned from World War II and found that they were no longer subjects of the maharaja of Poonch but rather the maharaja of Kashmir. While the former was a benign ruler, the maharaja of Kashmir imposed onerous taxes. The Poonchis, who were also largely Muslim, did not take this well, and they were also incensed by the communal violence against Muslims in the Punjab and elsewhere. In August 1947, the Poonchis held a public meeting in which they demanded to join Pakistan. The maharaja dispatched his (Hindu) Dogra troops, who opened fire on the meeting. During the course of the ensuing rebellion, many Poonchis fled to Pakistan; one of them was Sardar Mohammed Ibrahim Khan, a lawyer and member of the state assembly. In Pakistan he met Colonel Akbar Khan of the Pakistan Army and sought his help in liberating Kashmir (Nawaz 2008b).
Khan was the director of weapons and equipment at General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. While Pakistan hardly had a surplus of weapons, he planned to condemn working weaponry and then use it to surreptitiously arm the rapidly growing group of men who wanted to fight to liberate Kashmir. Khan could not approach the Pakistan Army’s chief (British General Sir Frank Messervy) with his scheme because Messervy may have communicated the plan with the Indian Army chief, Sir Robert McGregor Macdonald Lockhart, who was also British, or to Field Marshal Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, the supreme commander of all British forces in India from Partition until early 1948. (As described herein, the Pakistan Army suffered from a severe officer shortage and was dependent on British officers who stayed on.) Thus, Khan worked clandestinely at first. Having found a way to arm the fighters, he next focused on organizing the men. As he could not employ active Pakistani military forces without the approval of the army chief, he planned to use ex-servicemen who had joined the Indian National Army (INA)11 and who had not been reinducted after their release. Word of Khan’s plan eventually reached Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan, a minister in the Punjab government, but care was taken to ensure that Messervy was kept out of the loop.
Planning for operations in Kashmir became increasingly complex, with multiple centers of state and nonstate support at provincial and, increasingly, federal levels. Shaukat Hayat Khan, for example, wanted to use INA officers in the operations themselves rather than limit their role to training the militants. Col. Khan eventually approached the deputy director of military intelligence to get an assessment on the situation in Kashmir and arranged for another officer to collect and store the “condemned ammunition” on behalf of the fighters. Air Commodore Muhammad Khan Janjua, among others in the air force, offered help with logistics. Nevertheless, the plan was not well-conceived and continued to exclude higher army leadership as well as (officially) Jinnah. Shuja Nawaz (2008b), brother of a former Pakistani army chief and highly regarded American interlocutor for Pakistan’s current military establishment, writes that the “higgledy piggledy” plan “for Kashmir was off to a less than illustrious start, with amateur enthusiasm leavened by some military fervor and a good deal of bickering among the principals” (121).
By October 1947, the Pakistan Army concluded that the maharaja’s reluctance to join Pakistan meant that the Kashmir situation had reached a critical stage. However, it is not clear that the general headquarters of the Pakistan Army, which was operating far from the capital of Karachi and with a skeleton staff, had a well-thought-out strategy in place. After all, the prime minister continued to keep the British army officers, including the army chief, in the dark. Despite the many shortcomings of this approach, the prime minister ultimately approved the plan. Nawaz (2008b) suspects that, given the relationship between Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and Jinnah, it is “unlikely that all of this planning was being done without Mr. Jinnah’s tacit approval” although this remains a subject of debate in Pakistan (124).
Under Col. Akbar Khan’s command (who took the nom de guerre of General Tariq), Khurshid Anwar (the commander of the Muslim League National Guards), with the assistance of the Kashmiri-born chief minister of the North-West Frontier Province, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, and Khwaja Rahim, the commissioner of Rawalpindi, put together a force of some 2,000 tribesmen from the North-West Frontier Province and tribal areas. They crossed into Kashmir through the Jhelum Valley early on October 23 (Nawaz 2008b). The following evening, Nehru informed Mountbatten that the tribesmen were arriving in Kashmir on military transports. With the tribesmen pouring into Kashmir, the maharaja sought India’s help to repel them. India offered aid, but at the price of accession. Hari Singh signed the instrument on October 26, and Indian troops landed in Srinagar shortly thereafter.
By the time the Indian forces had reached Srinagar, Jinnah ordered General Douglas Gracey (the acting army chief while Messervy was on leave) to launch the Pakistan Army into Kashmir. Gracey refused, citing that he would have to secure Auchinleck’s permission, which likely would have entailed the loss of British military officers in the Pakistan Army. Auchinleck issued stand-down instructions to all British officers in both militaries. By March, the Pakistan Army was fully in the fight, and the two sides waged a limited war for over a year until Nehru sought the United Nations’ (UN’s) intervention. After protracted negotiations, the UN succeeded in arranging a ceasefire, which came into effect on December 31, 1948. The ceasefire required Pakistan to withdraw its regular and irregular forces while it permitted India to maintain a minimum force for defensive purposes. Once these conditions were met, Kashmir’s future was to be decided by plebiscite. Pakistan never withdrew, and the plebiscite never took place. The terms of the ceasefire left about three-fifths of Kashmir under Indian control, with the balance of the state going to Pakistan.
Oddly, many authors in Pakistan’s military journals do not consider the 1947–1948 war to be a war at all, even though the army was clearly engaged and even though the operation had the backing of the senior most political leadership. While teaching undergraduates at the Lahore University for Management Sciences during summer 2010, I learned that those students, who came from throughout Pakistan, had never learned that a war took place in this period. Their textbooks had told them that the conflict in Kashmir was merely an extension of the violence of Partition. While this characterization is not entirely false, these students believed that the conflict involved only mujahideen and were incredulous that the army and civilian leadership were involved.
Untangling the Punjab
Pakistani concerns over the disposition of Kashmir unfolded in tandem with a growing conspiratorial understanding of how the departing British had constructed the new states of India and Pakistan. The Indian Independence Act called for the creation of two commissions: one to Partition the northern state of Punjab; and the other to Partition the eastern state of Bengal. The commissions were to be established after the Bengal and Punjab provincial assemblies voted to divide their provinces, which they did on June 20 and 23, 1947, respectively. The commissions, both chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, wer
e charged with dividing both Punjab and Bengal on “the basis of ascertaining contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims. In doing so, [they would] also take into account other factors” (Ali 1967, 204–205). Radcliffe arrived in South Asia for the first time on July 8, 1947 (Y. Khan 2007; Wirsing 1998).
At Lord Mountbatten’s urging, the various political leaders of erstwhile Pakistan and India—Jinnah and Nehru in particular—agreed to accept the boundary commission decisions before the awards were announced. The details of the Partition were not revealed until August 16, 1947, a day after the transfer of power. (Radcliffe himself left India on August 15 and never returned to South Asia.) While both sides accepted the outcome, as they had promised to do, they each had concerns about the manner in which the so-called Radcliffe line was drawn. India believed that it should have received some of the districts that were awarded to East Pakistan. Pakistan, however, was particularly unhappy with the award and thus was prone to seeing the commission’s decision in conspiratorial terms, in part because India received seven Muslim-majority tehsils (an administration subdivision of a district, a larger administrative unit) in the Punjab (i.e., Gurdaspur, Batala, Ajnala, Jullundur, Nakodar, Ferozepur, and Zira) as well as a part of Kasur district. Pakistan, in contrast, did not receive a single non–Muslim-majority tehsil (i.e., one dominated by Sikhs or Hindus) (Ilahi 2003; Y. Khan 2007; Tinker 1977; Wirsing 1998).
The Pakistan that emerged in 1947 was thus not the country that Jinnah had imagined. Talbot (1988) remarked that the Pakistan created by the Radcliffe Commission, which had awarded India the agricultural districts of East Punjab and West Bengal, was “moth-eaten” (388). In the minds of Pakistan’s leaders, the emergent Kashmir impasse, a further blow to their hopes, was inextricably linked to the commission’s division of the Punjab. The particular administrative unit of concern was Gurdaspur, which refers both to a district and the tehsil after which it was named. Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema (2000), an influential Pakistani scholar who has directed one of Pakistan’s premier think tanks and who now holds a post at Pakistan’s National Defence University, captures Pakistan’s apprehensions about the division in Punjab using conspiratorial language to denounce the Gurdaspur award:
The loss of Gurdaspur District was viewed as a major blow because it meant something much more than a simple award of additional territory to India. This was a decision which not only linked Kashmir to India but also facilitated India’s forcible occupation of the State at a later stage. The district of Gurdaspur consisted of four tehsils (sub divisions), Gurdaspur, Batala, Shakergarh and Pathankot. Apart from Pathankot which had a Hindu majority, all the others were Muslim majority tehsils. If the principle of religious affinity had been applied then the whole district should have been awarded to Pakistan. Radcliffe decided to allot three-fourths of the district to India giving an access to the State of Jammu and Kashmir (8, citations omitted).
Pakistani skepticism about the commission’s true affinities persists and has been fueled by the speculation of authors such as Lord William Birdwood, who served in the Indian Army for much of his career, including a term as commander in chief from 1925 to 1930. In 1952, Birdwood wrote that he did not believe that India would have fought a war in Kashmir had it not received Gurdaspur.12
The commission’s decision to set aside its general guidance and award the two Muslim-majority tehsils to India could have been justified by legitimate apprehensions about the safety of Sikh and Hindu minorities who lived there as well as by concerns regarding the division of the canal waters (Ilahi 2003; Korbel 1954; Lamb 1967; Tinker 1977; Wirsing 1998). Indeed, no scholar has marshaled conclusive evidence to support Pakistan’s contention that the British awarded Gurdaspur to India in an effort to influence the eventual territorial disposition of Kashmir (Ilahi 2003; Tinker 1977). Nonetheless, Pakistanis continue to harbor the belief that the award of Gurdaspur was meant to ensure that Kashmir had adequate land communication with India and thus to force the maharaja’s hand (Ziegler 1985). In 2000, Cheema wrote that “the Radcliffe Award was indeed unjust and more political than judicial. The Award of two contiguous Muslim majority tehsils of Gurdaspur district to India not only deprived the Pakistanis [of] the legitimate Muslim majority areas but it also provided the valuable road and rail link from India to Kashmir” (23).
What is astonishing about this persistent claim is that it is so easily debunked with a closer examination of the Gurdaspur award itself. First, not all of Gurdaspur district went to India (Shakergarh went to Pakistan, becoming part of Sialkot district in the Punjab). Second, and most importantly, Pathankot had a Hindu majority and thus would have gone to India, even if the principle of communal majorities had been applied without consideration of other factors. As long as India had Pathankot it would have had access to Kashmir, as it was this tehsil that contained the important land links. The Indian railways ran to Pathankot, and Pathankot was the location of the bridge that spanned the Ravi River, the sole land route from India to Kashmir (Ilahi 2003).
The creation of the new states of Pakistan and India from the body of the Raj was accompanied by extensive violence and what is likely the largest migration in recent human history. While exact assessments of the number of displaced persons and the level of bloodshed do not exist, scholars believe that somewhere between 10 and 12 million people crossed the between India and Pakistan in 1947. Brass (2003, 75) says of the carnage:
It has proven much more difficult to arrive at a consensus figure on the numbers of persons who died as a consequence of violence that occurred during the impending partition, the partition itself, and after it in the misery of the refugee camps. Estimates range from around 200,000 at the low end to a million and a half at the high end. A consensus figure of 500,000 is often used, but the sources that are most likely closer to the truth give figures that range between 200,000 and 360,000 dead.
These figures are all the more appalling given that these were “peacetime” deaths. Pakistan and India had not yet gone to war, although war over Kashmir was on the horizon (ibid.).
For a number of reasons, Bengal fared better than the Punjab during the crisis. First, Muslims were the predominant population in the eastern districts (which became East Pakistan), while Hindus dominated the western districts (which remained in India). Population distribution also made it obvious that Calcutta would go to India. Brass (2003, 78) remarks, “Once the decisions were made to partition the country as a whole, and Bengal as well, and once it was accepted that Calcutta could not be placed anywhere but in West Bengal, the demarcation of the boundaries between the two states was relatively simple. There was, therefore, no point in further large-scale violence nor any need or desire for cross-migrations that would be of no benefit to either side.”
In contrast, partitioning the Punjab was far more complex, largely because it was home to an important third group: the Sikhs. While the Sikhs supported the Partition of the Punjab, they did not want their communities or sacred sites to be separated by an international border. The boundary commission was to decide the boundary only on the basis of Muslim and non-Muslim populations, without reference to the Sikhs, who were classified as “non-Muslim.” Although Sikh equities could be included in the “other considerations” that could inform an award, there was no way that the Punjab could be divided according to the location of Muslim populations without also separating Sikh communities and holy sites. The Sikhs, like the Muslims and Hindus, had a variety of militias and political organizations through which they could coordinate violence against religious minorities in their localities. Many of the gangs in the Punjab were even led by retired military personnel, who were widely available given the traditional British reliance upon the Punjab for recruitment (Brass 2003; Jha and Wilkinson 2012).
Breaking Up the Indian Army
With the looming division of the empire, the fate of the armed forces came into question. For some two centuries, the British had invested in the security of South Asia in an attempt to fend off Russian and other
intruders. British security managers had hoped that this system could be perpetuated through some kind of joint defense arrangement that would preclude dividing up the armed forces. Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, the commander in chief of the pre-independence Indian Army, was a strong proponent of keeping the armed forces undivided. He feared that a dismemberment of the army would cause such an administrative rupture that the subcontinent would be left defenseless (Cohen 1985; Jalal 1990; Rizvi 2000b). Jinnah, however, along with other Muslim League leaders, insisted on a separate military. Liaquat Ali Khan (a confidant of Jinnah and Pakistan’s first prime minister) believed that without an army Pakistan “would ‘collapse like a house of cards’ ” (Jalal 1990, 38). The Muslim League’s leadership was more adamant about the division than were the Congress leaders because they feared that in any collective defense mechanism, Pakistan would be a junior partner, dependent on the Congress and India.
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