The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  But Shaikh Abdullah’s overnight arrest in early August led to a change in the timing. Anti-India protests in the Kashmir Valley at Abdullah’s detention were suppressed with a heavy hand by his successor, Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad. Across the border, Abdullah’s incarceration turned him into a hero. The demonstrators in major Pakistani cities demanded urgent and strong action by their government on Kashmir.

  Pressed by Bogra, Nehru agreed to meet in Delhi on August 16. Their joint communiqué referred to a fair and impartial plebiscite agreed to “some years” ago and a lack of progress because of certain “preliminary issues.” It was decided to appoint committees of military and other experts to advise the prime ministers to resolve the “preliminary issues” as a preamble to appointing the plebiscite administrator by the end of April 1954. The administrator would then outline preparations for holding a plebiscite in “the entire State [of Jammu and Kashmir].”26

  This communiqué went down badly in West Pakistan. Its critics denounced the sidelining of the United Nations, the proposed replacement of Admiral Chester Nimitz of the United States as the plebiscite administrator, and the possibility of zonal plebiscites. Popular disapproval and the lack of unanimous backing by his cabinet tied Bogra’s hands. His initial enthusiasm died when Nehru repudiated his agreement about the return of refugees to their homes because of “practical difficulties.” That meant disfranchising hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from the Jammu region who had migrated to West Pakistan out of fear.

  As US arms poured into Pakistan, Nehru, in his letter to Bogra on December 3, 1953, said that American military aid would have direct bearing on the Kashmir issue, and advised the Pakistani government to stay away from power blocs. Later, when the delegates of the two countries met in Delhi to discuss demilitarization, the Indians insisted that the issue of US military assistance be discussed first. The Pakistanis refused. The meeting ended with the agenda untouched.

  In his letter of March 29, 1954, Bogra explained to Nehru that Washington’s military aid had nothing to do with either the Indo-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir or the right of self-determination for Kashmiris. Nehru ignored the argument. Two weeks later he informed Bogra that the situation had changed as a result of the US-Pakistan military pact and that the deadline of appointing the plebiscite administrator by the end of April had become redundant. “It is with profound regret that I have been led to the conclusion that our talks regarding Kashmir have failed,” concluded Bogra in his letter of September 21.27

  If, by some miracle, Bogra would have seen the note Nehru addressed to Kashmir’s prime minister Abdullah on August 25, 1952, from Sonamarg in Kashmir, he would have concluded that his “elder brother” was just going through ritualistic motions about a plebiscite. In it Nehru virtually conceded that he had decided against a plebiscite “towards the end of December 1948.” He had accepted the UN Commission for India and Pakistan’s plebiscite proposals on December 23, 1948, in order to achieve a cease-fire, since the Indian Army had reached the desired line on the ground. He was determined to maintain “the status quo then existing” by force. “We are superior to Pakistan in military and industrial power,” he wrote. “But that superiority is not so great as to produce results quickly either in war or by fear of war. Therefore, our national interest demands that we should adopt a peaceful policy towards Pakistan and, at the same time, add to our strength.”28 In short, Nehru, a self-righteous moralizer, sacrificed morality and legalism on the altar of power politics.

  Compared to this sensational admission, his revelation in April 1956 that about a year earlier he had made an unsuccessful offer to Bogra involving a permanent de jure partition of Kashmir along the cease-fire line was bland.29

  Nehru’s Henchman in Srinagar

  While Nehru conducted diplomatic dialogue with Bogra, in Srinagar Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad proved more pro-India than Indians themselves. Led by him, 64 of the 74-strong Constituent Assembly members ratified the state’s accession to India on February 15, 1954. “We are today taking the decision of final and irrevocable accession to India and no power on earth could change it,” declared Bakshi Muhammad.30 Later that year he said that Shaikh Abdullah would be “detained as long as the future of Kashmir remains undecided.”31

  In Moscow, the communist leadership was alarmed by the way the US-led alliance was circling the USSR with regional defense pacts. It noted that Pakistan had the distinction of belonging to both SEATO and CENTO. By contrast, Nehru was unswervingly committed to his doctrine of nonalignment. After the death of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in March 1953, relations between Moscow and Delhi had improved, with the two nations inking a trade pact at the end of the year. In 1954 the Kremlin agreed to build a steel plant in India’s public sector. Four months later, Nehru undertook a sixteen-day official tour of the Soviet Union.32 Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, the Soviet premier, paid a return visit to India from November 18 to December 1.

  To register their disapproval of Pakistan’s foreign policy, the Soviet dignitaries visited Srinagar. “The people of Jammu and Kashmir want to work for the well being of their beloved country—the Republic of India,” said Khrushchev. “They do not want to become toys in the hands of the imperialist powers. This is what some powers are trying to do by supporting Pakistan on the so-called Kashmir question. . . . That Kashmir is one of the States of the Republic of India has already been decided by the people of Kashmir.”33 While the Soviet leader’s statement was thunderously lauded in Delhi, the disillusioned top officials in Karachi called it “extraordinary.”

  Bogra and his succeeding prime ministers rejected anything less than a plebiscite. They were confident that in any fair plebiscite the predominantly Muslim population would opt for Jammu and Kashmir acceding to Pakistan.

  This point was conceded, implicitly, by Arthur Lall, India’s representative to the United Nations, in his private meeting with James W. Barco, counselor in the US delegation at the United Nations, in New York in early January 1957. “Lall maintained that the only way Pakistan could win [the plebiscite] would be on religious issue and this would fan religious tensions among Moslems in India and could produce another round of communal riots,” read the telegram sent by the American mission at the United Nations to the Department of State on January 10.34

  Working in close cooperation with Delhi, Muhammad used bribes, repression, and election rigging to consolidate his power. On November 17, 1956, the Constituent Assembly adopted the state’s constitution, which came into effect on January 26, 1957. Section 3 stated that “the State of Jammu and Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India.” This section was declared immune from any amendment in the future.

  Responding to Pakistan’s lobbying of SEATO, three of its members—the United States, Britain, and Australia—submitted a resolution at the UN Security Council on February 20, 1957, backing its proposal for the deployment of “a temporary United Nations force in connection with demilitarization” in Kashmir. It won 9 out of 11 votes, but the Soviet Union vetoed it, arguing that the two contending parties had not exhausted bilateral means of resolving the dispute.35 As a result, the prestige of the Soviet Union in India rocketed. In October it was boosted further with Moscow’s successful launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, named Sputnik.

  In March 1957, in a blatantly rigged election in Indian Kashmir, the National Conference won 68 of the 75 seats in the Legislative Assembly.

  Shaikh Abdullah was released from house arrest in January 1958. He became the chief patron of the Plebiscite Front. Formed by his deputy Mirza Afzal Beg during his incarceration, the Front demanded a referendum under the aegis of the United Nations to decide the issue of Kashmir’s sovereignty. Abdullah blasted Muhammad’s government as one composed of goons, opportunists, and thieves. Delhi attributed his uncompromising stance to contacts with Pakistan, which was allegedly funding him. He w
as rearrested in late April and charged, along with twenty-two others, of hatching a conspiracy to bring down the government through chaos and violence. Livid at Abdullah’s rearrest, Muslim Conference activists from Azad Kashmir decided to cross the cease-fire line into Indian Kashmir. President Mirza did not want to provoke India. So the Pakistani authorities arrested hundreds of Muslim Conference volunteers and their leaders.

  The trial against Abdullah and others, which started in March 1959, involving 223 prosecution witnesses and nearly three hundred exhibits, would drag on until early 1964, when it would be withdrawn.

  Differing Priorities

  Ayub Khan’s first priority was to consolidate and legitimize his authority at home. He set in motion a process to draft a new constitution. At the same time he needed to assure the military and the public that he was not neglecting the emotionally and ideologically charged issue of Kashmir.

  In March 1959 he cosigned the Pakistan-US Cooperation Agreement. After stating that the United States “regards as vital to its national interests and to world peace the preservation of independence and territorial integrity of Pakistan,” Article 1 added that “in case of aggression against Pakistan . . . the United States of America . . . will take such appropriate action, including the use of armed forces, as may be mutually agreed upon, and as is envisaged in the [March 9, 1957] Joint Resolution to Promote Peace and Stability in the Middle East in order to assist Pakistan in its requests.”36

  In Delhi, escalating tensions between India and China on their border dispute, which had been building up since 1954, had made Nehru pliable to discuss the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan and set aside his objections about the Pakistan-US Cooperation Agreement.

  Thus, on September 1, 1959, Ayub Khan, now a self-promoted field marshal, stopped over at New Delhi’s Palam airport on his way from Rawalpindi to Dacca to meet Nehru. (On that day Indian newspapers splashed the news of the resignation of the chief of army staff, General K. S. Thimayya, in protest of the government’s tepid response to China’s inroads in the Aksai Chin region of Kashmir.) The Nehru–Ayub Khan communiqué stated that “there was need to conduct their relations with each other on a rational and planned basis, and not according to the day-to-day exigencies as they arose, and that their outstanding issues and other problems should, in mutual interest, be settled in accordance with justice and fair play in a spirit of friendliness, cooperation and good neighborliness.”37

  The conciliatory approach led to a successful end to the long, tortuous negotiations on the distribution of the waters in the Indus River basin. In May 1948 the two neighbors had signed the Inter-Dominion Accord on apportioning the waters of the Indus basin, whereby India agreed to release sufficient waters to West Pakistan for an annual payment. This was a temporary arrangement. When it came to negotiating a permanent accord, Pakistan realized anew that with the source of all six major rivers of the basin being in India, it held weak cards. Yet it insisted on perpetuating its prepartition right to the waters of all the Indus tributaries, arguing that the absence of this resource would turn the eastern zone of West Punjab into a desert. India maintained that the previous distribution of waters should not determine future allocation. Pakistan suggested referring the matter to the International Court of Justice. India rejected the idea.

  Instead, in 1952 both agreed to invite the World Bank initially to offer advice on the technical aspects of the problem. Two years later, however, the World Bank came up with its own award. It offered India the three eastern tributaries of the basin—Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi—and Pakistan the remaining three western ones: Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab. To compensate Pakistan for ceding its (partial) rights to the eastern tributaries, India was required to build canals and storage facilities to transfer water from the eastern Indian rivers to West Pakistan. Whereas Delhi was amenable to the bank’s proposal, Karachi rejected it.

  Bilateral negotiations reached a breaking point but were not called off. The successive short-term Pakistani governments realized that ending the talks would raise tensions with India to a boiling point, which they could not risk. In the absence of a permanent treaty, Delhi was forced to put on hold large development projects in the Indus basin area.

  Now that he headed a stable military government in Pakistan, President Ayub Khan was able to clinch the deal on Indus waters once the World Bank persuaded America and Britain, along with Australia and New Zealand, to finance the construction of canals and storage facilities in India to transfer water from the eastern Indian rivers to West Pakistan.

  Ayub Khan proposed Karachi as the site for the formal signing of the accord by Nehru and him. Nehru concurred. On September 19, 1960, more than one hundred thousand people greeted Nehru at the Karachi airport. The ten-mile route from the airport to the Presidential House was lined by crowds shouting, “Nehru zindabad” (Urdu: Long live Nehru), at the slow moving motorcade led by Nehru and Ayub Khan in an open car. There was a ceremonial signing of the Indus Waters treaty at the President’s Office. In the evening, after a reception attended by a thousand invited guests on the spacious, manicured lawns of the Presidential House, Nehru hailed the treaty as “memorable” because “in spite of the problem and harassing delays, success has come at last.” He described it as “a symbol of unity and cooperation between two neighboring countries.”38

  The successful solution to this critical economic conundrum encouraged Ayub Khan to try to resolve the pivotal political issue of Kashmir. To discuss the thorny dispute in a salubrious climate, Ayub Khan flew Nehru to the Presidential Lodge in the hill station of Murree on September 21. But their one-on-one talks proved sterile.

  Six months later, on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in London, Ayub Khan chatted with Rajeshwar Dayal, his friend of prepartition days who later served as India’s high commissioner in Karachi. “Woh mujhe hiqarat ki nazar se dekhta hain” (Urdu: He looks at me with contempt), he told Dayal, referring to Nehru and their meeting in Murree. The Pakistani president added that being the head of a large state, he should not have been treated that way. “Ayub Khan revealed that when he tried to open a conversation about Kashmir, Nehru simply stared out of the window at the scenery and ‘shut up like a clam.’”39 By then Nehru had made it a standard practice to turn his gaze to open space or stare at his feet when any foreign leader mentioned Kashmir in their conversation.

  As an intellectual who had authored Glimpses of World History—a thousand-page tome written during his imprisonment in 1931–1933—without reference to any library as well as The Discovery of India, penned in five months during his incarceration from August 1942 to June 1945, Nehru was disdainful of leaders of lesser knowledge. In his public life he had dealt mainly with lawyer-politicians, often trained in Britain. Of the five Pakistani prime ministers Nehru met or corresponded with, all except one was a lawyer or an Oxbridge graduate, or both. Though Ayub Khan had a distinguished career in his own right, he did not fall into any of these categories.

  Born into the household of Mirdad Khan, an ethnic Pashtun noncommissioned officer of the British Indian Army, in a village near Haripur in NWFP, Ayub Khan had the distinction of being the first nonwhite cadet at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, England. He graduated as a second lieutenant and joined the British Indian Army. During World War II he was promoted to colonel. In 1947, when he opted for the Pakistan army, he was the tenth ranking senior officer. Further promotions made him the chief of army staff four years later. A bluff, broad-shouldered man with a clipped mustache, he was a contrast to the slight figure of Nehru.

  While unable to mask effectively his disdain for Ayub Khan, Nehru summarized his talk with him in Murree in fifteen paragraphs penned on September 21, 1960. “He [Ayub Khan] spoke at some length on this subject [of Kashmir] and laid stress on as speedy a solution as possible,” noted Nehru. “In dealing with Kashmir we had to take a realistic view of the situation. Not to do so would land us in greater difficulties. It woul
d be most unfortunate for us to try to take a step which might create numerous upsets and emotional upheavals.”40 Nehru was a master of obfuscation when it suited him.

  In his memoirs, Friends Not Masters, published in 1967, Ayub Khan referred to the Murree meeting and Kashmir. “Mr Nehru finally asked what, accepting the fact that there was need for peace between the two countries and also that the room for maneuver for settlement of the Kashmir dispute was limited, I thought should be our first step,” wrote Ayub Khan. “I told him that this would depend on the objective we had before us. Once the objective was determined, an organization could be established to work out the method. Mr Nehru said that he foresaw serious political opposition in his country. He mentioned that Indian public opinion had reacted violently to Chinese ‘occupation’ of [the] ‘Indian territory.’”41

  Having used the external factor of the US-Pakistan Mutual Security Pact as his excuse to renege on the holding of a plebiscite in Kashmir earlier, Nehru now shifted his argument to the domestic scene. In essence, he had come to subscribe to the idea of turning the cease-fire line into a de facto partition of Kashmir, which he first mentioned to his Pakistani counterpart, Bogra, in May 1955. This was unacceptable to Pakistan because it would have legitimized Delhi’s control of the Vale of Kashmir, the coveted prize in the increasingly bitter struggle.

  By then China had become an integral factor in the Indo-Pakistan equation because of its occupation of a part of Jammu and Kashmir, as alleged by Delhi. Unsurprisingly, therefore, at the Murree meeting, Nehru raised the issue of Pakistan’s boundary with China. Ayub Khan recalled: