The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Besides serving as the governor-general, president of the Constituent Assembly, and president of the Pakistan Muslim League, Jinnah took charge of dealing with the princely states and the tribal agencies of the NWFP. He also laid out foreign policy guidelines. Pakistan, he stressed, should develop friendly relations with the United States and Britain while projecting itself as a buffer zone between communist Soviet Union and dubious India, and a vantage point between China, then in the midst of a bloody civil war, and the Middle East.

  Once Paul H. Alling had been named the US ambassador to Pakistan on September 20, Jinnah directed his appeal for funds to Washington. But before the State Department got around to sanctioning $10 million (Rs 48 million) as aid to the nascent nation in December 1947,48 Jinnah found himself faced with a political-ideological challenge of enormous import—in Jammu and Kashmir. At the center of this crisis was Maharaja Sir Hari Singh.

  6: The Infant Twins at War

  Born in Jammu as the only child of General Sir Amar Singh and Rani Chib Devi, Hari Singh showed promise as a teenager. After attending the Princes’ Mayo College in Ajmer, he graduated from the Indian Defense Academy in 1915 at the age of twenty. He was immediately appointed commander in chief of the Jammu and Kashmir state armed forces by Maharaja Partap Singh, his richly bearded, heavily turbaned uncle. His big-boned, muscular frame, topped by a jowly face, lent him gravitas beyond his age.

  Fourteen years before Hari Singh’s birth, Jammu and Kashmir became the largest princely state in India, at 84,470 square miles. Its constituent vassal territories of Gilgit Wazarat and Ladakh Wazarat, occupying three-quarters of its area, were sparsely populated because of high mountains, creating an inhospitable climate with an arid, treeless terrain. In 1941 only 311,500 people lived there. By contrast, the Jammu Province, abutting Punjab, was home to almost 2 million souls and the Kashmir Province to nearly 1.75 million. Overall, the state was 85 percent Muslim. The Jammu region, predominantly Muslim in the west, contained a Hindu-Sikh majority in the east. But in Kashmir, non-Muslims were a puny minority of 6 percent.1

  Sir Hari Singh Versus Shaikh Abdullah

  After the death of the childless Partap Singh in 1925, Hari Singh ascended the throne in Srinagar. The tension between this autocratic Hindu ruler and the largely Muslim population came to the fore with the formation of the Muslim Conference in 1932. Presided over by Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, it demanded an end to the discrimination against Muslims in civil service. Two years later, responding to popular discontent, the maharaja established a State Assembly of 75 members, with only 30 members elected by a limited franchise.2 In 1939 he raised the number of elected representatives to 40. But the gesture was meaningless since the Assembly lacked power.

  The rising star in Kashmiri politics was Shaikh Abdullah. Since his father died soon after Abdullah’s birth in a village near Srinagar, he grew up in poverty.3 Yet he managed to obtain a master’s degree in science from Aligarh Muslim University. He was a gangling young man, six-foot-four, oval-faced, with a sharp straight nose and a middle-distance gaze. He made his living as a schoolteacher.

  In 1937, the thirty-two-year-old Abdullah was introduced to Jawaharlal Nehru in the waiting room of the Lahore railway station while the latter was en route to a tour of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). Their cordial talks became so engrossing that Nehru asked Abdullah to accompany him to Peshawar. He did. Nehru—a descendant of Kashmiri Brahmins who was born in the north Indian city of Allahabad—told Abdullah that he regarded himself a Kashmiri and advised him to open the Muslim Conference to all Kashmiris.4 As a result of Abdullah’s lobbying, the Muslim Conference’s General Council changed the name to the National Conference in June 1939 and opened its doors to all those living in Kashmir. The dissidents, led by Ghulam Abbas, retained the original title of the party.

  During World War II, thanks to Sir Hari’s active encouragement of his subjects to join the British Indian Army, 71,667 signed up. Seven-eighths of them were Muslim, chiefly from the Poonch-Mirpur area of the Jammu region.5 Aware of this, and the maharaja’s military background, Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill invited him to a meeting of the War Cabinet in April 1944. He felt honored.

  After his return to Srinagar later in the year, he was presented with the National Conference’s manifesto, titled “Naya Kashmir” (Urdu: New Kashmir), by Shaikh Abdullah. It demanded a fully democratic government with a constitutional monarch. Its economic blueprint called for the abolition of zamindari (Urdu: landlordism) under the slogan “Land to the Tiller.” The autocratic Sir Hari rejected the manifesto summarily.

  In the summer of 1944, when Muhammad Ali Jinnah was vacationing in Kashmir, he was invited to receptions by both the National Conference and the Muslim Conference. After meeting Shaikh Abdullah, Jinnah expressed ambivalent views about his party. But he was unequivocal in his comment on the Muslim Conference. “The Muslims have one platform, one kalma (Islamic creed), and one God,” he said. “I would request the Muslims [of Kashmir] to come under the banner of the Muslim Conference and fight for their rights.”6

  Once World War II ended, Shaikh Abdullah tried to rally Kashmiris around the democratic model outlined by the New Kashmir manifesto. The pompous maharaja—given to decking himself in a much decorated military uniform—showed no sign of surrendering any of his powers.7 That led Abdullah to emulate the Congress Party’s 1942 Quit India movement and launch the Quit Kashmir campaign in May 1946. Its aim was to secure the resignation of the maharaja. Hundreds of people, including Abdullah, courted arrest.

  Nehru, accompanied by another Congress leader, Asaf Ali, a lawyer, entered Kashmir by road with the intention of defending Abdullah in court. Nehru was arrested and deported instantly. Abdullah was sentenced to three years imprisonment.

  Unsurprisingly, Jinnah dismissed the Quit Kashmir movement as “an agitation carried out by a few malcontents to create disorderly conditions in the State.”8 He urged the Muslim Conference to stay away from the campaign.

  Like the pro-British Unionist politicians in Punjab, Sir Hari was shocked to hear Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s February 1947 plan to quit India. He tried to distract himself from this news by indulging further his passion for polo and golf as well as poaching and wild game hunting.

  As Britain’s withdrawal gathered momentum, Sir Hari—influenced by his anti-Nehru prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak, who was married to a British woman—tilted toward declaring independence in order to maintain friendly relations with both India and Pakistan. In military-strategic terms, the chief of staff of the state’s armed forces, Major-General H. L. Scott, could see merit in an independent Kashmir. In addition, the maharaja’s astrologer, who claimed clairvoyant powers, declared that Maharaja Gulab Singh (ruled 1846–1857), the founder of the state, favored the inauguration of a sovereign Kashmir.

  On the other hand, during his four-day stay in Srinagar in mid-June, Viceroy Lord Mountbatten advised Sir Hari to choose India or Pakistan before August 14. On the last day of his sojourn, when the maharaja was expected to convey his decision to the viceroy, Sir Hari feigned an attack of colic and cancelled the meeting. All the same, as promised, the British Raj returned the leased area of Gilgit Wazarat to the maharaja in July.

  Nehru decided to fly to Srinagar but was dissuaded by Vallabhbhai Patel, who was in charge of the States Department. Instead, Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi was dispatched. During his meeting with Hari Singh and his pro-India wife, Tara Devi, on August 1, Gandhi repeated what the viceroy had told the Chamber of Princes a week earlier. By signing an instrument of accession with India he would continue to enjoy autonomy and receive his privy purse in exchange for surrendering foreign relations and defense to the imminent Dominion of India. Sir Hari, however, was disconsolate at the thought of Nehru settling old scores with him about his unceremonial ejection from the state a year earlier. Nevertheless, accepting Gandhi’s advice and buttressed by his wife’s inclination, he sacked the pro-independence Ka
k on August 10.

  Two days later the newly appointed prime minister Major-General Janak Singh sent telegrams to the Pakistani and Indian governments offering a standstill agreement. Pakistan agreed; India did not. As for Gandhi’s plea for the release of Abdullah, as part of his overarching counsel to the maharaja not to act against the wishes of his people, Sir Hari put it in his “pending” tray. He was not yet ready to make peace with long-time bête noire.

  Post-Midnight Births of Twins

  In July, noticing signs of discontent in the Muslim-dominated western Jammu Province, which had supplied tens of thousands of recruits to the Indian Army during the war, the maharaja urged ex-servicemen to surrender their arms to the local police. The response was lackadaisical. To the maharaja’s alarm, many Muslim farmhands, working for Hindu landlords, defiantly displayed Pakistan’s green flag, emblazoned with the star and crescent, after August 14.

  This was a preamble to the anti-maharaja revolt by Muslims in the Poonch-Mirpur area of western Jammu, leading to the killing of some Hindus and displacement of many more. Sir Hari responded by unleashing his Hindu troops to quell the rebellion. They resorted to a scorched-earth policy. They fired on crowds, set alight houses and whole villages, looted, imposed curfews, and carried out wholesale arrests. There were many instances of collective punishment when, for instance, they burnt a whole village because of the rebellious act of just one family.9

  “Within a period of about 11 weeks, starting in August, systematic savageries [in Jammu] . . . practically eliminated the entire Muslim element in the population, amounting to 500,000 people,” wrote Ian Stephens, editor of the Calcutta-based Statesman, in his book Pakistan. “About 100,000 just disappeared, remaining untraceable, having presumably been butchered or died from epidemic or exposure. The rest fled to West Punjab.”10

  The maharaja’s iron-fist policy inflamed the local Muslims, who joined the militia organized by the Muslim Conference, later to be called Azad Fauj (Urdu: Free Army) or Azad Army, with a claimed strength of fifty thousand, most of them being ex-servicemen. It would later come under the command of one General Tariq, the pseudonym of Brigadier Muhammad Akbar Khan of the Pakistan Army. “A few weeks after partition, I was asked by Mian Iftikharuddin [the minister for refugee rehabilitation] on behalf of [Prime Minister] Liaquat Ali Khan to prepare a plan for action in Kashmir,” he would reveal in his interview with the Karachi-based Defence Journal published in the June–July 1985 issue. “I was called to a meeting with Liaquat Ali Khan at Lahore where the plan [of mine] was adopted, responsibilities allocated and orders issued. Everything was to be kept secret from the Army.”11 While remaining in charge of the princely states and the tribal areas, Jinnah had assigned Ali Khan the task of dealing with Kashmir.

  On September 4, the Lahore-based Civil and Military Gazette reported an uprising in the Poonch area. And four days later the Times (of London) followed suit. By September 22, despite inadequate supplies of arms and ammunition, and poor communications, the Azad Army was doing so well that the outgoing Major General Scott, commanding only three brigades, informed the maharaja that his soldiers scattered in small pickets over a large area were finding it hard to control the situation against the much larger size of the insurgents. Brigadier Rajinder Singh Jamwal, who succeeded Scott, was inclined to be pro-India.

  Frantic diplomatic moves were afoot in Karachi, Delhi, and Srinagar. By spurning Jinnah’s offer, made in mid-September, to meet him in Srinagar, Sir Hari upset Pakistan’s highest official. The offended Jinnah retaliated by imposing a loose blockade in early October, depriving the state of such essentials as salt, edible oil, sugar, kerosene, gasoline, and cloth. He was helped by the fact that the Muslim truck drivers from West Punjab were vulnerable to attacks by Hindu and Sikh militants in Jammu.

  On the Indian side, there was rapid upgrading of communications between Kashmir and India by post and telegraph, telephone, wireless, and roads. “The metaling of the road from Jammu to Kathua is also proceeding at top speed,” reported the Lahore-based Pakistan Times on September 27. “The idea is to keep up some sort of communication between the State and the Indian Union, so that essential supplies and troops could be rushed to Kashmir without having to transport them through Pakistani territory.”12 The building of a boat bridge over the Ravi River near Pathankot was meant to improve access from Gurdaspur in East Punjab.

  On September 27 Nehru wrote to Patel that the maharaja should make friends with the National Conference so that “there might be popular support against Pakistan.” (A day earlier the imprisoned Abdullah had expressed his written allegiance to the maharaja in a letter that was widely publicized.) Sir Hari released Abdullah on September 29. During their subsequent meeting Abdullah reportedly offered the maharaja a few gold coins as a tribute, thus accepting his paramountcy.

  Abdullah’s release created another track of diplomacy. On October 1 a Pakistani delegation, headed by Dr. Muhammad Din Taseer, an academic friend of Abdullah who had later settled in Lahore, conferred with Abdullah and his colleagues in Srinagar. Abdullah agreed to meet Jinnah but only after he had seen Nehru in Delhi. Nonetheless, his friend, Ghulam Muhammad Sadiq, accompanying Taseer, traveled to Lahore where Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, another colleague of Abdullah, had arrived earlier. Their various meetings with Pakistani officials climaxed with one with Ali Khan on October 8.

  In Delhi, in his talks with Abdullah, Nehru reiterated Mountbatten’s terms to the princely states that they would have to surrender only defense, foreign affairs, and communication to the Indian Union. In addition, he assured Abdullah that those living outside Kashmir would be barred from owning property in the state, as had been the case during the British Raj. Abdullah demanded that these guarantees be written into the Indian constitution. Nehru agreed. Referring to the reports that feudal lords in West Punjab were eyeing to buy agricultural land in Kashmir, Nehru pointed out the commonality between the Congress Party’s commitment to abolish zamindari and the New Kashmir manifesto.

  From early October, reports of rapid deterioration in law and order in Kashmir started appearing in the Civil and Military Gazette. By October 7 the Kashmir government had arrested the correspondent for the Associated Press of India, a major source of news about the state; imposed “rigorous pre-censorship on all news and views” published in the local press; and banned the import of four daily newspapers from West Punjab. Protesting at the official order not to print matter advocating Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, the editor of the Kashmir Times ceased publication.13

  The situation changed abruptly when the maharaja replaced Prime Minister Janak Singh with Mehr Chand Mahajan, an Indian judge, on October 15. Mahajan immediately ordered A. K. Shah, Pakistan’s joint secretary of foreign affairs and states, who had tried to persuade Janak Singh to opt for Pakistan, to leave Srinagar.

  But this left intact the two-pronged scheme the Pakistani premier had devised earlier: to take charge of the Azad Army created by the local Muslim Conference and to forge an independent plan to secure Srinagar by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas.

  Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Plotter

  On September 21 Liaquat Ali Khan chaired a top-secret planning meeting on Kashmir in Lahore. It was attended by civilian and military officials, including the chief ministers of Punjab and the NWFP—Iftikhar Hussain Mamdot and Abdul Qayyum Khan respectively—as well as Mian Iftikharuddin, (Retired) Major Khurshid Anwar, and Brigadier Muhammad Akbar Khan, who was in charge of the weapons and equipment department at general headquarters in Rawalpindi. The agreed-on strategy involved intensifying the insurgency in the Poonch-Mirupr area and opening a new front in western Kashmir to be accomplished by the tribal irregulars led by Anwar. Akbar Khan was charged with arming these fighters without his British commander detecting the loss from the armory.

  A native of a princely state in Punjab, Anwar became a high-ranking official in the civil supplies department in Delhi. Because of the close asso
ciation of this department with the military during World War II, he gained the rank of major. After being discharged from the army for suspected bribe-taking while supplying scarce goods to civilians, he joined the Muslim League in Punjab. He was appointed commander of the Muslim National Guards (MNG; aka Muslim League National Guard) for the “Pakistan” provinces. He set up the MNG headquarters in Lahore. During the League’s civil disobedience campaign against the Unionist-led ministry, he went underground and kept the agitation going. After the fall of the Unionist government in March 1947, he turned his attention to the NWFP. There he worked with Qayyum Khan and other League officials to launch direct action against the Congress ministry. Operating incognito, he remained active while other leaders served prison sentences.

  Though the voters opted for Pakistan in a referendum in mid-July, the cabinet of Abdul Jabbar Khan (aka Dr. Khan Sahib), a Congress ally, maintained its majority in the legislature. And yet Jinnah ordered NWFP governor Sir George Cunningham to dismiss the ministry of Dr. Khan Sahib on August 22. That dismissal led the Muslim League’s Qayyum Khan, a Pashtun of Kashmiri origin, to form the next cabinet.

  Anwar claimed to have gotten clearance from Ali Khan in late August to turn his attention to Kashmir. He and Qayyum Khan set about raising a force of tribal men from the Tirah region and North and South Waziristan Agencies. The number of volunteers rose quickly. By early October about five thousand armed men from the Afridi and Mahsud tribes, embedded with a few hundred Pakistan soldiers on leave, would be assembled in the NWFP city of Abbottabad.

  Inside Kashmir, by mid to late October, the Azad Army controlled large parts of Poonch and Mirpur, while much of the Muzaffarabad subdistrict was being cleared of non-Muslims in reprisal for the continued violence against Muslims in eastern Jammu.