Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  The British deferred a decision on dividing the army until it was unavoidable (Greenwood 1990). When it was finally determined that, by the time Pakistan and India became independent states (August 14 and 15, 1947, respectively), the new countries would have operational control of their own independent armed forces, the British had a mere 72 days to accomplish the gigantic task of dividing the army (Rizvi 2000b). On July 2, 1947, Auchinleck laid down the principles that would guide the reconstitution of the armed forces. The order had five main features. First, the armed forces of Pakistan and the Union of India would be predominantly composed of the two states’ own subjects and would operate within their two separate territories and under their respective control. Second, administrative control of the armed forces would be unified at first, with a gradual devolution of authority to the two dominions as they became competent to manage their own forces (Khan 1963; Rizvi 2000b).

  The reconstitution process also would unfold in two phases, the first of which was a crude division of the existing armed forces on a communal basis. This meant that the Muslim-majority units stationed outside of Pakistani territory would be moved to Pakistan, while similarly situated non-Muslim-majority units would be moved to India. In the second phase, every Indian officer and enlisted man would be classified as Muslim or non-Muslim and allowed to choose which state he would serve. There were some important restrictions on free choice, however. Muslims from the areas that would go to form Pakistan could not opt for India, and a non-Muslim in the territory that became India could not opt for Pakistan. There was no restriction on Muslims in India choosing Pakistan or non-Muslims in Pakistan going to India. A few non-Muslims opted to stay in Pakistan, and a comparatively greater number of Muslims chose to stay in India; however, the communal violence that marked Partition compelled some to reverse their decisions. British officers were encouraged to opt for service in either of the states, in the hope that their continued service would help ensure a successful reorganization (Jalal 1990, 39; Rizvi 2000b).

  The British order also attempted to guarantee that there would be no fundamental change in the organization and nomenclature of formations, units, infrastructure, or the class composition of the units until after this process of division was complete. Finally, the three services’ liabilities, such as pensions and annuities, up to August 14–15, 1947, would be borne by the new governments (Rizvi 2000b).

  The colonial government established an armed forces reconstitution committee to execute this complicated task. This committee was to work in consultation with the Steering Committee, a subsidiary of the Partition Council, the body ultimately responsible for partitioning. The Armed Forces Reconstitution Committee was composed of the commander in chief, Auchinleck; the service chiefs of the air force and navy; the chiefs of the general staff; and one representative of each of the states in waiting. Phase 1, the division of the troops, was completed without much difficulty. By August 15, 1947, the future disposition of the various units had been decided (with the exception of troops that were either abroad at the time of Partition or serving in the Punjab Boundary Force, both of which were divided later). The ratio for division was 64:36 for India and Pakistan, excluding the Gurkhas, who were divided among the British and Indian armies. This was roughly the ratio of Muslims to Hindus in undivided India (Jalal 1990; Rizvi 2000b).

  The assets of the Raj were also divided according to this ratio. As the smaller, succeeding state, Pakistan was always slated to receive substantially fewer personnel, stores, supplies, and facilities. However, Maj. General Fazul Muqeem Khan (1963), who served in the army during Partition and who wrote The Story of the Pakistan Army while serving as the commandant of the Pakistan Military Academy, stated that in the end “Pakistan was forced by events to accept only one-third of the assets” (29). Pakistan inherited some 150,000 of the former Indian Army’s 461,800 personnel. These men, including an officer corps, were distributed over 500 units of varying size, almost all of which were incompletely staffed (Cheema 2002; Cohen 1984). Pakistan received 6 armored regiments (compared with India’s 14), 8 artillery regiments (compared with India’s 40), and 8 infantry regiments (compared with India’s 21) (Cohen 1984). As Khan (1963) wrote with dismay, the most immediate problem facing Pakistan was that India held the majority of the army stores, ordnance factories, and training institutions and thus stood to gain by delaying the division. Equally disconcerting for Pakistan’s military and political leadership, Nehru insisted that India was the only successor state to British India and therefore that Pakistan should be treated as a dissident province seceding from the union (23). The beliefs that India never accepted the legitimacy of Pakistan and that Pakistan was deprived of its fair share of the Raj’s assets are still articles of faith both within and beyond the Pakistan military.

  Pakistan did get the short end of the stick in terms of the division of fixed assets, because the bulk of the infrastructure was located in India. All 16 working ordnance factories were located in India, and Pakistan failed to secure machinery for the two factories on its territory, which had not yet been completed. India eventually paid Pakistan compensation (Rs. 60 million) to set up an ordnance factory and a secure printing press (Rizvi 2000b). Training institutions became part of the state in which they were situated. For example, India retained the prized Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun, among other important schools. Pakistan kept several army training centers, including the Staff College (Quetta, Balochistan) and the Royal Indian Service Corps (Kakul, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), as well as several regimental training centers. Pakistan also inherited antiquated defense installations (British-era forts and outposts) in the Pakhtun areas and miscellaneous naval facilities at Karachi (Sindh) and Chittagong (East Pakistan) (Cohen 1984; Khan 1963).

  Pakistan and India fought bitterly over the division of financial resources and military supplies. When India declined to give Pakistan its appropriate share (according to the division of assets called for by the partition plan), Pakistan had few means of redress because most of the stores were in areas that became part of India (Rizvi 2000b). The division and transfer of the movable assets became another early bone of contention. Again, Khan’s (1963) words are both instructive and representative of Pakistan’s defense writings on this subject:

  The division of manpower and units proceeded without any hitch or hindrance. Obviously there was nothing to be gained by objecting to such a division. … However, when the question of the division of real assets and the sinews of the army—stores and factories—came up, the Indian attitude changed and all manner of difficulties began to appear, preventing or delaying the division. The Army sub-committee had unanimously recommended as early as the third week in August, that the ordnance stores must be divided in the proportion of thirty-six to Pakistan as against sixty-four to India, a proportion based on the communal percentage of strength of the army. … The Indian Deputy Prime Minister [after considerable stalling], who attended the Joint Defence Council for the Indian Union, maintained that the decision of the Partition Council only applied to personal equipment and not the stores. Auchinleck, who was responsible for drafting the principles of the division, which had been agreed upon by the Partition Council, was the best authority on the interpretation of these principles. He vehemently supported the Pakistan stand inside the Joint Defence Council and outside it. According to the Partition Council’s decision, he was the trustee of all undivided stores and equipment; and [he] vigorously maintained the principle on which the AFRC was required to work was that all stores should be divided in proportion to the strength of the armies of both Dominions. … [Even though he opposed partition,] like a good soldier, he applied himself wholeheartedly to the impossible task of its division amicably (30–32).

  India later conceded that it held up shipments of such assets, although it claimed that Pakistan owed India compensation for surplus stores that remained in Pakistani territory (Rizvi 2000b).

  Not only did this experience with India cast a permanent shadow over Pakistan
–India relations, but also some military writers have reduced the disagreement to religious stereotypes. A typical assessment of this type is afforded by the 1991 comments of Lt. Col. Anwar Shafiq Naqvi (1991) in the Pakistan Army Journal. He writes that while Pakistan tried to obtain as much as possible from the division of assets, India made equal efforts to deny Pakistan its fair share. What Pakistan did receive “was claimed, was broken and useless. Indian’s negative attitude can be accessed from their Hindu mentality. Just after partition, India charged that Pakistan was making excessive and unrealistic demands” (27). As this volume demonstrates, this tendency to conflate India with Hindu is a common trope in Pakistani military writings, and writers rarely bother explaining what precisely they mean by such expressions as Hindu mentality. It is simply assumed that the readership will understand the negative connotations of such turns of phrase.

  Pakistan encountered even greater difficulties than India in reconstituting and reorganizing the army because at the time of Partition there was not a single exclusively Muslim battalion. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (sometimes also called the First War for Indian Independence), for which the British blamed the Muslims, they resolved to prevent future such crises by eliminating all-Muslim units. Consequently, Pakistan did not receive any full-strength units because the non-Muslim soldiers had been removed. As Khan (1963) summed up the situation, Pakistan inherited a “paper army of 150,000 officers and men. It consisted of 508 units of various sizes. On August 14, 1947, 40 percent of these units were stationed outside Pakistan” (42). Indeed, many of the units with large Muslim representation were located in areas that would become part of India. Some of these Muslims could have chosen to move to Pakistan, but many remained in India. In contrast, virtually no Sikh or Hindu officers within Pakistan’s territory elected to stay in the Pakistan Army. The Gurkhas were divided evenly between India and Britain (Cohen 1984).

  To ameliorate this problem, Pakistan first amalgamated the regiments that had common recruiting areas, class composition, and traditions. The remaining gaps were filled with new recruits. It was therefore not uncommon to find regiments in which officers and soldiers had never met before and lacked the esprit de corps that the British regimental system sought to instill (Rizvi 2000b). Thus, the army focused on building morale and a sense of corporate cohesion. Equally problematic, it faced a dire shortage of officers, especially those with staff experience. The planned force size of approximately 150,000 required 4,000 officers, but only 2,500 were available. Pakistan had one major general, two brigadiers, and six colonels, but the army required 13 major generals, 40 brigadiers, and 52 colonels. While Pakistan needed 600 officers to fill engineer billets, only 100 were available, “most of them unqualified” (Cohen 1984, 7; see also Cheema 2002; Rizvi 2000a). To bridge the shortfall, the Pakistan Army retained 355 British officers already in Pakistan and recruited another 129 from England (Cohen 1984; Rizvi 2000a).

  So the Pakistan Army—weak, poorly organized, and ill equipped—inherited most of the Raj’s problematic frontiers “without the strategic depth of resources to withstand serious pressures from the northwest” (Cohen 1984, 7). Pakistan also was in a far more precarious financial situation than India. Pakistan had to fight tooth and nail to extract even modest foreign exchange reserves from India and needed to mint a new currency. Despite these institutional, financial, and geographic problems, from the first day of Pakistan’s independence the new army was responsible for contending with the violence of Partition and the burgeoning refugee crisis. In addition, in connivance with provincial and national leaders and bureaucrats, the new army embroiled the country in its first war with India (Khan 1963; Nawaz 2008a; Rizvi 2000b).

  In 1947, the Pakistan Army’s commander in chief appointed a Nationalization Committee to study the best way of indigenizing the Pakistan armed forces by 1950. Competent officers from all the services obtained accelerated promotion, and many officers were recruited on an emergency or short-term basis. Several junior commissioned officers were promoted to the commissioned ranks. In addition, men who had been released from the army and were not employed in essential government service were asked to come back as enlisted personnel. The armed forces also issued a temporary stop-loss order. Finally, they instituted emergency commissions (generally in the case of specialist positions) and even began to accept qualified officers who had previously served in those princely states that opted for Pakistan (Rizvi 2000a). Pakistan also established new training institutions to replace those now located in India. The Pakistan Military Academy was set up in Kakul in January 1948 to replace the Indian Military Academy, the Air Force College for training pilots was resumed in Risalpur in fall 1947, and the navy established its own institutions (Cheema 2002).

  Historical Legacies: A Punjabi Army

  The culture and traditions of the contemporary Pakistan Army stem, in significant measure, from its colonial heritage. For example, one of the most important issues facing the Pakistan Army is the ostensible overrepresentation of Punjabis in the army. While the army recruits heavily from among Pakhtuns, the perception that the army is a “Punjabi-dominant” institution evokes great ire from non-Punjabi Pakistanis. Apprehensions that Pakistan has become “Punjabistan” are no doubt fueled by the Punjab’s prominent role in Pakistani civilian politics but also the by domineering, extraconstitutional role that the army has played in Pakistan’s governance. The belief that the army is a Punjabi army fuels distrust of the organization in places like Balochistan, where some locals see expanding army infrastructure as an effort to “colonize” it (A. Khan 2009). This perception that the army is Punjabi dominated reflects the population composition of Pakistan, where Punjabis are the largest ethnic group. However, it also is the result of a colonial concept of “martial races,”13 which was inherited by the Pakistan Army (Talbot 2002). Despite the passage of some six decades since independence, the concept survives. However, it is of diminishing importance, and the Pakistan Army has made consistent efforts not only to address the perception that the army is Punjabi dominated but also to expand its catchment area (Fair and Nawaz 2011).

  While Orientalist14 scholarship has rightly derided the discourse of martial races as an example of British essentialism, the British appropriated and reified preexisting Indian categories of race, caste, religion, and other social groupings in complex ways (Titus 1998). By the late 1890s, a central concept in British recruitment was class, which embraced ethnicity as well as religion. The army organized companies and even regiments along class lines and recruited heavily from regions that produced martial races. The British believed that members of these races were natural fighters, as opposed to members of nonmartial races, who were seen as smaller, effeminate, and not suitable for military service. The so-called martial races included Punjabis (Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims from contemporary East and West Punjab), Pakhtuns (from the North-West Frontier Province and the tribal areas), and the Gurkhas of Nepal. Conversely, the British considered South Indians and Bengalis to be nonmartial and sought to exclude them from military service. Because the British goal was to build an effective military to protect Britain’s interests in the colonies rather than to develop an ethnically representative institution, they encouraged recruitment of members of martial races and discouraged the induction of members of nonmartial races (Peers 2008; Rizvi 2000a, 2000b).

  The 1857 Indian Rebellion provided an additional impetus to this trend. First, the rebellion (sometimes also described as a mutiny) shook British (then the East India Company)15 confidence in the troops, which were drawn from the rebellion-affected north-central areas.16 The British were particularly unsure of Muslims from these areas because many British believed that Muslims had provoked the rebellion in an attempt to restore Muslim rule.17 After the mutiny, the East India Company was abolished, and the crown ruled India directly. The British sought to avoid recruiting Muslims and others from the rebellion-affected areas and redoubled their focus on recruiting in the Punjab and what was then known as the Nor
th-West Frontier. Although those regions had been conquered much later than the north-central areas of India, their populations had supported the British during the rebellion. As an added safeguard, the British made sure that Muslims were not grouped together in all-Muslim units (while allowing all-Sikh and all-Hindu units) (Cohen 1984; Rizvi 2000a, 2000b).

  After the rebellion, the British increasingly relied on the concept of martial races to identify those who ostensibly had the moral, mental, and physical faculties to become good, reliable soldiers. Lord Frederick Roberts, commander in chief of the Indian Army (1885–1893), systematically integrated the notion of martial races into military planning, remarking that apart from “Gurkhas, Dogras, Sikhs, the pick of Punjabi Mohammedans, Hindustanis of the Jat and Ranghur castes, and certain classes of Pathans, there were no native soldiers in our service whom we could venture with safety to place in the field against the Russians” (cited in Krebs 2005, 556). To this end, the army produced a number of handbooks meant to help familiarize British officers with the characteristics of the soldiers in their command. Lt. Gen. Sir George MacMunn penned a number of crude taxonomies of the peoples of India, underscoring his Orientalist obsessions with caste and race. The writings of such men as Roberts, MacMunn, and Rudyard Kipling contributed to the episteme of martial races (Peers 2008).

  Apart from their beliefs about martial races, the British had geostrategic reasons for seeking to increase recruitment from the Frontier and the Punjab. These areas formed an invasion corridor long employed by marauders who entered South Asia from Central Asia. With the British continuing to concentrate on the Russian threat, this region became an important component in the security architecture of the subcontinent.