The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  On the diplomatic front, Kashmir’s prime minister Mahajan sidestepped Jinnah’s offer of an impartial inquiry by a third party to investigate his government’s allegation of armed infiltration into Poonch by Pakistan. Instead, on October 18 he sent Jinnah a telegram threatening to ask for “friendly” assistance by India if the Pakistanis continued their armed infiltration into Poonch while blockading the border for transport of goods and persisted in their anti-maharaja propaganda.14

  Jinnah responded by sending a telegram to the maharaja. “The real aim of your Government’s policy is to seek an opportunity to join the Indian Dominion through a coup d’état by securing the intervention and assistance of that Dominion,” he said. Then he offered to invite his prime minister to visit Karachi “to smooth out the difficulties and adjust matters in a friendly way.”15

  On October 20 relations between Karachi and Srinagar deteriorated when the maharaja’s soldiers assaulted four villages inside West Punjab with mortars, grenades, and automatic fire, causing heavy casualties.16

  That day, as previously planned, the tribal warriors began marching from Abbottabad toward Kashmir. So far Sir George, the governor of NWFP, had been in the dark about the preparations Anwar had made with the cooperation of his chief minister, Qayyum Khan. When he learned about the march the following day, he immediately informed Prime Minister Ali Khan.

  “On October 21, Liaquat Ali Khan told me in a state of unusual excitement that a tribal lashkar [Urdu: army], some thousands strong, was on the way to Kashmir,” wrote Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, the chief secretary of Pakistan, in his book The Emergence of Pakistan. “I asked him if he had informed the Quaid-i-Azam and he said, ‘Not yet,’ as he had just received the report.”17

  Did the prime minister mislead his topmost civil servant? The answer is to be found in Anwar’s statement, as cited later by his friend M. Yusuf Buch, a Pakistani expert on Kashmir since 1947. “The old man never gave it the green light,” Anwar told Buch after he had retired and set up an ice factory in Rawalpindi. “The old man” was Jinnah, who had not been kept fully briefed by Ali Khan.18

  The Denouement

  After crossing into western Kashmir along the Jhelum Valley road on October 22, (Retired) Major Anwar launched Operation Gulmarg by leading a convoy of two hundred trucks filled with sturdy Pashtuns armed with small weapons and mortars. His strategy was to advance along the axis of Muzaffarabad, Domel, Uri, and Baramula to capture the Srinagar airfield and the city, and then proceed to secure the Banihal Pass to block the road from Jammu and cut off the state from the rest of India. Following his capture of two outposts, the Muslim companies of the state’s army started defecting to his side.

  When the news of the tribal attack reached the maharaja on the afternoon of October 22, he ordered Brigadier Jamwal to fight the invaders to the last man and the last bullet. Jamwal’s company of 150 men encountered the raiders at Garhi, forty-five miles west of Uri, in the early hours of the next day. Heavily outnumbered and weakened by the earlier defection of the Muslim units, he withdrew to Uri after blowing up the bridge. That delayed the attackers by one day. His soldiers then fought them at Baramulla, straddling the Jhelum, thirty miles east, on October 24. They were all killed in action.

  That day, the local insurgents in the Poonch-Mirpur region formed the independent government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir—shortened to Azad Kashmir—under the presidency of Muhammad Ibrahim Khan of the Muslim Conference in Palundari. Announcing the aim of his government as liberation of the rest of the state, he appealed to Pakistan for assistance.

  The Indian government learned of the extent of the invasion on the evening of October 24, when Kashmir’s deputy prime minister, R. L. Batra, arrived with letters addressed to Nehru and Patel and seeking military assistance. The next morning, October 25, the defense committee of the Indian cabinet met under Governor-General Lord Mountbatten. He argued that sending troops to a neutral state would be a great folly in the eyes of the world.

  The committee then dispatched Vapal Pangunni Menon, along with civil and military officials, to Srinagar to assess the situation on the ground and find out whether or not the maharaja was prepared to accede to India.

  After his meeting with Prime Minister Mahajan, Menon and Mahajan conferred with the maharaja, who was in a nervous state. Giving credence to the rumors that some invaders had infiltrated Srinagar, Menon advised the maharaja to drive to the winter capital of Jammu posthaste.

  In retrospect, the precaution proved unnecessary. According to Operation Gulmarg, the tribal warriors should have reached Srinagar by October 25 to celebrate Eid al Adha in the city along with local Muslims. As a result of unexpected delays, on that day they found themselves in Baramulla. Home to fourteen thousand people, it was the commercial gateway to the Vale of Kashmir, with a high proportion of non-Muslims. The population included the staff and patients at Joseph’s College, Convent, and Hospital, built on a hill, some of them being European.

  Before being recruited, the tribal men had been told by Anwar that in the absence of any remuneration upfront, they were entitled to loot the properties of infidels in the conquered parts of Kashmir. Now, given the opportunity, the invaders went beyond pillaging non-Muslim possessions. They snatched jewelry from local women (irrespective of their religion), plundered the bazaar and homes, and vandalized Hindu and Sikh temples. They shipped their plunder back to Abbottabad in trucks. They used the local cinema as a rape center. Among those they shot dead were Lieutenant Colonel D. O. Dykes and his English wife, ready to leave the hospital that day with their newborn baby, and two European nuns. They abducted hundreds of girls, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim alike. They ignored the pleas of Anwar to advance to Srinagar, only thirty miles away along a level road. In desperation, Anwar led a few bands of regular Pakistani soldiers in civilian clothes to the capital.

  The two days’ delay by the main force in order to indulge in an orgy of plunder, rape, and murder made all the difference between success and failure of this armed venture.

  After the maharaja along with his entourage and valuable possessions fled to Jammu in a convoy of cars around two am on October 26, Menon and his party, accompanied by Mahajan, boarded a Dakota to fly to Delhi. Once Menon had apprised the Defense Committee of the dire situation in Kashmir, a debate followed. Mountbatten pointed out that Indian soldiers could not be dispatched to the state until and unless the maharaja had signed the Instrument of Accession. He added that he would accept the accession subject to ascertaining the will of the people in a plebiscite after law and order had been restored. Nehru, Patel, and other members of the committee agreed.

  Menon flew back to Jammu. At the royal palace he woke up the maharaja, slumbering after a night-long drive from Srinagar. Maharaja Sir Hari Singh signed the instrument of accession, which specified autonomy for the state. (Later, an article in the Indian Constitution would specify that the Indian parliament would need the state government’s agreement to apply laws in other administrative areas to the state’s territory.) In his forwarding letter to Governor-General Mountbatten, he said that, following the acceptance of the accession, he would ask Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, lodged in a Delhi hotel as an official guest for the previous week, to form an interim government.

  That evening Defense Minister Baldev Singh sent a message to the military command in Delhi to airlift troops to Srinagar early the following morning. Overnight, supported by the swift acquisition of all civilian aircraft by Patel, about a hundred civilian and air force planes were mobilized to ferry men, weapons, and ammunition to Srinagar. The first airplane carrying Indian soldiers arrived at ten thirty am on October 27 at the unguarded Srinagar airport, eight miles from the city center.

  While accepting the Instrument of Accession by the maharaja on October 27, Lord Mountbatten wrote in his cover letter:

  In the circumstances mentioned by Your Highness, my government has decided to accept the accession of Kashmir State to the Dominion
of India. In consistence with their policy that in the case of any State where the issue of accession has been subject to dispute, the question of accession should be decided in accordance with the wishes of the people of the state, it is my government’s wish that, as soon as law and order have been restored in Kashmir and its soil is cleared of the invaders, the question of the state’s accession should be settled by a reference to people.19

  On October 28 Nehru sent a long telegram to his Pakistani counterpart. After summarizing the background to the signing of the Instrument of Accession by the maharaja, he added: “In regards to accession, it has been made clear that it is subject to reference to people of the State and their decision. The Government of India have no design to impose any decision and will abide by people’s wishes. But those cannot be ascertained till peace and law and order prevail.” Two days later Ali Khan replied by telegram. He alluded to the killings of Muslims in Poonch and their massacres in Jammu, and how those atrocities and the earlier butchering of Muslims in East Punjab had inflamed feelings among the tribes. “When there was evidence that there was to be repetition of that in Kashmir as in East Punjab, it became impossible wholly to prevent the tribes from entering Kashmir without using troops which would have created a situation on the frontier that might well have got out of control,” he explained. “The Pathan [aka Pashtun] raid did not start until 22 October. It is clear therefore that Kashmir’s plan of asking for Indian troops . . . was formed quite independently of this raid, and all evidence and action taken shows [that] it was pre-arranged.”20

  The sharply divergent ways in which the two leaders presented their respective cases on Kashmir foreshadowed the severity of the challenge the neighboring nations would face in resolving this dispute over the next many decades.

  Jinnah noted with growing anxiety the events in Kashmir. When Indian soldiers flew into Srinagar, he ordered his commander in chief General Sir Frank Messervy to dispatch troops to Kashmir. Messervy was a subordinate of the Delhi-based Field Marshal Sir Claude Achinleck, the supreme commander of the British forces remaining in India and Pakistan.21 His superior ruled out such a move because that would have resulted in British officers commanding their respective Indian and Pakistani contingents fighting one another. Messervy therefore refused to implement Jinnah’s order, arguing that the presence of the Indian forces in Kashmir was justified since the maharaja had acceded to India and that introducing Pakistani forces into Kashmir would compel him to withdraw all British officers from Pakistan’s military. Thus Jinnah, a lawyer by training, found his hands tied. His subsequently tense relations with Messervy would lead the general to take an early retirement, in February 1948.

  The Day After

  On October 30 Pakistan said that since Kashmir’s accession to India was based on “fraud and violence,” it could not be recognized. That day Jinnah met Mountbatten in Lahore. They failed to agree on the modalities of the plebiscite on the state’s future. In his broadcast to the nation on November 2, Nehru reiterated his promise to hold a plebiscite in the state under international auspices after law and order had been established. Two days later Ali Khan responded in a broadcast from Lahore, describing Kashmir’s accession as immoral and illegal.

  Once Shaikh Abdullah—popularly called Sher-i-Kashmir (Urdu: Lion of Kashmir)—formed an interim administration as its chief administrator, on October 30, his party activists greeted the incoming Indian soldiers with slogans such as Hamlavar Khabardar, Hum Kashmiri Hai Tayar (Urdu: Invaders beware, we Kashmiris are ready), and Sher-i-Kashmir Ka Kya Irshad, Hindu Muslim Sikh Ittihad (Urdu: What’s Lion of Kashmir’s guidance—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs are united).

  On October 31 the vanguard of Azad Kashmir’s army reached the outskirts of Srinagar and engaged Indian troops. They fared badly. Once the Indian force had retaken Baramulla on November 8 and cut off the supply lines of the enemy forces, their opponents withdrew.

  The recaptured Baramulla, now a deserted town of a thousand people, was opened to local and foreign journalists. “The once lovely town . . . was heaped with rubble and blackened with fire,” wrote Margaret Bourke-White, a reporter-photographer for Life magazine, in her book Halfway to Freedom, published in 1949. “The deserted [St. Joseph’s] Convent on the hill was badly defaced and littered. . . . We made our way into the ravaged Chapel, wading through the mass of torn hymnbooks and broken sacred statuary. The altar was deep in rubble.” She described what happened when the town was raided by the armed tribesmen:

  The nuns, their hospital patients, and a few stray townspeople who had taken refuge at the Mission were herded into a single dormitory and kept under rifle guard. On one of these days, after an air attack from the Indian Army had left the tribesmen in a particularly excited and nervous mood, six of the nuns were brought out and lined up to be shot. [But] one of their chiefs arrived; he had enough vision to realize that shooting nuns was not the thing to do, even in an invasion, and the nuns were saved.22

  On November 11 the Indian soldiers recaptured Uri, and the raiders withdrew from the nearby towns of Gulmarg and Tanmarg. On the other side, Azad Kashmir forces intensified their campaign and captured Mirupr on November 26.

  That day the Joint Defense Council of India and Pakistan meeting in Delhi decided to maintain the council, despite London’s decision to close down the Joint Supreme Command (JSC) of the British forces in India and Pakistan on November 30.

  On December 8, Mountbatten and Nehru attended the meeting of the Joint Defense Council in Lahore. Nehru argued that letting the tribal raiders use Pakistani territory to attack India was tantamount to an act of war by Pakistan, and that it should call on the raiders to return home. Ali Khan contended that such an appeal by him would lead to the fall of his government. Mountbatten then suggested that the United Nations may be invited to mediate between India and Pakistan. His idea merited serious consideration. And Nehru would later accept it.

  As foreign minister Nehru had pursued a policy of nonalignment by sending his sister Vijay Lakshmi Pandit as ambassador to the Soviet Union on the eve of independence to balance the appointment of cabinet minister Asaf Ali as the Indian ambassador to Washington six months earlier. He was therefore confident of not falling afoul of the United States or the Soviet Union at the UN Security Council.

  Nehru referred the turmoil in Kashmir to the UN Security Council on January 1, 1948, in the form of a complaint against Pakistan under Chapter VI of the UN Charter (Pacific Settlement of Disputes), Article 35. Along with the preceding article, this one authorizes the Security Council to investigate any dispute in order to determine if it was “likely to endanger international peace and security.”23 Pakistan had armed and abetted the tribal men from its territory to attack Kashmir, and that should vacate the gains of its aggression, argued India’s representative to the United Nations.

  Two weeks later Pakistan filed a countercomplaint. It alleged that India had persistently attempted to undo the partition scheme; launched a preplanned, wide-scale genocide of Muslims in East Punjab and Punjab’s princely states; and secured Kashmir’s accession by fraud and violence. It referred to Delhi’s nonpayment of Pakistan’s share of the cash balances.24 Earlier, quite independently, in his report to Prime Minster Attlee on the eve of the closure of the JSC of the British forces in India and Pakistan, Auchinleck had said that he had “no hesitation in affirming that the present Indian Cabinet are implacably determined to do all in their power to prevent the establishment of the Dominion of Pakistan on a firm basis.”25

  Apostle of Nonviolence Felled by Gunshots

  At Pakistan’s inception,26 India paid it Rs 200 million as the first installment of its share of the cash balance in Delhi. But before the remaining balance was due—Rs 550 million—war broke out in Kashmir. India held back this payment, arguing that Pakistan would use it in its ongoing armed conflict in Kashmir. Jinnah complained to India’s governor-general, Lord Mountbatten. When he failed to convince Nehru and Patel to meet India’s
legal obligation, he turned to Gandhi. The Mahatma agreed with him.27 In a prayer meeting speech in mid-December he publicly urged the Indian government to honor its moral and legal financial agreement with Pakistan.

  On December 22 he referred to the shrine of the Sufi saint Khwaja Qutb-ud-din Chishti in the village of Mehrauli, twelve miles from central Delhi, which tens of thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims visited annually. It was “subjected to the wrath of Hindu mobs” in September, he regretfully informed his audience. As a result, the Muslims living in its vicinity for the past eight hundred years had fled. “Now though Muslims honor the shrine, no Muslim can be found anywhere near it,” he said. “It is the duty of Hindus, Sikhs and the officials of the government to open the shrine, and wash this stain off us. The same applies to other shrines and religious places of Muslims in and around Delhi.”28

  When Gandhi’s plea went unheeded, he began a fast on January 13, 1948. “I will terminate the fast only when peace has returned to Delhi,” he declared. “If peace is restored to Delhi it will have an effect not only on India but on Pakistan.” Later, he explained that his fast was “against the Hindus and Sikhs of India, and against the Muslims of Pakistan.”29

  Addressing a mammoth rally in Delhi in January 17, Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed Azad explained that people of all faiths should be able to move around the capital without fear and that the Muslims who had been chased out of the city should be advised to return. The next day a collective of political and religious leaders issued a joint statement signed in Gandhi’s presence:

  We take the pledge that we should protect the life, property and faith of Muslims and [that] the incidents that have occurred in Delhi shall not happen again. We want to assure Gandhiji that the annual fair held at Khwaja Qutb-ud-din’s shrine will be held this year as before. . . . The mosques which have been left by Muslims and are now in the possession of Hindus and Sikhs will be returned. We shall not object to the return to Delhi of Muslims who had migrated. All these things will be done by our personal effort and not with the help of the police and military.30