by Dilip Hiro
Within a month of the end of the Sino-Indian War, Kennedy and Macmillan agreed to provide Delhi with $120 million worth of emergency military aid. To fulfill the US-UK obligation to Ayub Khan for staying his hand during the Sino-Indian conflict, US special envoy Averell Harriman and British foreign minister Duncan Sandys urged Nehru to enter into talks with Pakistan.
At first Nehru refused to include Kashmir, but later he relented. On November 30 he and Ayub Khan issued a joint statement that effort must be made to resolve outstanding differences between the two countries on “Kashmir and other related matters.” But characteristically Nehru told the Lok Sabha the next day that to upset the present arrangements regarding Kashmir would be harmful to future Indo-Pakistan relations.42
The Indian delegation led by Foreign Minister Swaran Singh met its Pakistani counterpart led by Muhammad Ali Bogra in Rawalpindi in mid-December, with the resident US and British envoys monitoring the talks by staying in the same building. The two sides decided to hold a second round in Delhi in late January 1963. By then Bogra would be dead, and Zulfikar (aka Zulfi) Ali Bhutto would succeed him as Pakistan’s foreign minister. The talks in Delhi led nowhere. Bhutto suggested third-party mediation to Galbraith and Gore-Booth. Nehru rejected this promptly.
On the eve of the next round in Karachi on February 8, 1963, Ayub Khan in his interview with an American reporter repeated his statement of March 22, 1961: Pakistan was open to a solution other than a plebiscite in Kashmir, but such a proposal should come from India.43 The latest session between the two delegations ended with a joint communiqué that referred to “various aspects relevant to the settlement of the Kashmir problem.”
On March 2, 1963, following two years of negotiations, the Ayub Khan government signed a border demarcation treaty with China that involved Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Unlike India, Pakistan renounced previous claims based on obsolete British India maps. China reciprocated by ceding 750 square miles of the territory it had been administering. Beijing acquired legitimacy over its control of the Khunjerab Pass in the Karakoram mountain range on the northern border of Pakistan’s federally administered Gilgit-Baltistan. This mountain pass was of vital, strategic importance to the China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
When India objected to the Pakistan-China treaty, Bhutto asserted that his country had not ceded any territory to China. Responding to the pressure of Galbraith and Gore-Booth, the Indian and Pakistani delegations kept up the ritual of talking to each other. The Kennedy administration intervened directly. It referred Nehru to the growing demand by the US Congress to tie its military aid to India to the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. Two more sessions followed in April and May. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.
Despite this lack of progress, after their meeting at Macmillan’s country house in Sussex, Kennedy and Macmillan decided to give India an Anglo-American air umbrella to familiarize the Indian air force with supersonic fighter bombers and draft plans to assist the bolstering of India’s defenses against the threat of a renewed Chinese attack. The Pentagon agreed to modernize some mountain army divisions of India.44 The tightening of these defense ties alarmed Pakistani leaders, who could do no more than lodge written protests.
The Washington-London military aid enabled India to double its army divisions to twenty-two and expand its air force and navy.45
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped India raise a secret Special Frontier Force (SFF) composed of dissident Tibetans under the command of Brigadier Sujan Singh Uban to harass the Chinese troops in Tibet.46 The SFF was renamed Establishment 22 (so called because Uban was the commander of 22 Mountain Regiment during World War II), located next to the headquarters of the Defense Ministry in Delhi.
The Anglo-American bounty to Delhi left Ayub Khan and the fiery Bhutto fuming. The goodwill Kennedy had generated among Pakistanis by welcoming Ayub Khan with grand gestures evaporated. In July 1961 Kennedy had honored the Pakistani president with a ticker-tape parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue and a state dinner at Washington’s Mount Vernon. In September 1962 the US president hosted him at his family mansion in Rhode Island and at his farm in Middleburg, Virginia.
But bolstered by the generous US-UK military aid to India, Nehru put the Kashmir question on the backburner, leaving Ayub Khan to wring his hands in frustration.
On the other hand, defeat at the hands of the Chinese left Nehru a shattered man. His health suffered. In the summer and autumn of 1963 he spent considerable time in the salubrious climate of Kashmir to repair his failing physical and mental powers.
The Prophet’s Missing Hair: A Turning Point
The people in the troubled state were transfixed by the “Kashmir Conspiracy” case involving Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah and twenty-three others accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Initiated in 1958, the case dragged on for years, against the background of the return to power of Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad’s team. As a result of a glaringly rigged election in February–March 1962, his National Conference garnered 70 of the 75 Assembly seats. In September the special magistrate trying the accused transferred the case to a higher court.
Over the years, the corruption and tyranny of Muhammad’s regime, mitigated somewhat by a generous food subsidy and rapid expansion in educational facilities funded by Delhi, had become unbearable. In October 1963, under the guise of implementing a plan to reinvigorate the Congress Party and its allies (which included the National Conference), Nehru got several chief ministers, including Muhammad, to resign and take up party work.
His successor, Khwaja Shamsuddin, had hardly settled in his job when the Kashmir Valley was rocked by massive antigovernment demonstrations that followed the disappearance of a hair of Prophet Muhammad’s beard from Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine on December 26. The missing hair provided a trigger for popular disaffection, which had been building up since Shaikh Abdullah’s arrest a decade earlier, to burst into the open like a volcanic eruption. Protestors took to the streets on a massive scale in the Vale of Kashmir. This shook a fast-aging, perpetually tired Nehru.
Until then, thanks to the complicit press’s grossly biased reporting on Kashmir, Indians in general had been complacent about the situation there. Most of them associated their northernmost state with images of snow-capped mountains, gushing cold streams, and cypress and poplar trees, which provided an idyllic background to the duets sung by a heart-broken hero and the love of his life—stunningly shot in such Bollywood movies as Kashmir Ki Kali (Hindi: Kali of Kashmir) and Mere Sanam (Hindi: My Love). Cinema, which arrived in the subcontinent in 1913, when only one in sixteen Indians was literate, had become a vital tool to mold popular perceptions and culture. As for radio broadcasts, the popular medium for news, these were controlled by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. State-run television news would start in Bombay and Amritsar only a decade later.
Though the missing relic in Srinagar was recovered on January 4, 1964, popular agitation did not subside even after Shamsuddin stepped down in favor of the older, more experienced Ghulam Muhammad Sadiq almost two months later. He and Nehru decided to withdraw the “Kashmir Conspiracy” case against Abdullah in April and released him and the others.
Abdullah was invited to Delhi by Nehru as a personal guest and lodged in his official residence. The two discussed the Kashmir problem. During a cabinet session, attended by Abdullah, Nehru told fellow ministers that he wanted to resolve the Kashmir issue during his lifetime. In the course of his meeting with Pakistan’s high commissioner in Delhi, Abdullah received an invitation from Bhutto to visit Pakistan’s capital. Nehru recommended acceptance. After consulting several other Indian leaders outside of Delhi, Abdullah returned to Nehru’s residence on May 20.
Abdullah and his party boarded the special plane sent by Ayub Khan on May 23. Eleven years of incarceration by the Indian government had transformed Abdullah from a traitor to Islam and Kashmiri Muslims in the eyes of Pakistanis into a fearless ch
ampion of Kashmiris. He received a hero’s reception in Rawalpindi.
On May 25, a Friday, he addressed a rally of almost two hundred thousand people, presided over by his lifelong rival, Chowdhury Muhammad Abbas of the Muslim Conference.47 The next day, during his long session with the Pakistani president, Abdullah broached the idea of a quadrangular confederation of the subcontinent, India–West Pakistan–Kashmir–East Pakistan, which had earlier interested Nehru. After this meeting, he announced that Ayub Khan would hold talks with Nehru in Delhi in mid-June to resolve the Kashmir dispute.
On May 27, as Abdullah was on his way in an official convoy to Muzaffarbad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, news came that following a stroke, Nehru had died in the early afternoon of a heart attack. When Abdullah heard the news, he broke down and sobbed. Nehru’s death killed any chance of India’s amicable settlement with Pakistan on Kashmir.
At the open-air cremation of Nehru’s corpse on the banks of the Jamuna (aka Yamuna) in Delhi, Abdullah leapt on the platform and, crying unashamedly, threw flowers onto the funeral pyre. Later, in his autobiography Aatish-e Chinar (Urdu: Flames of the Chinar), Abdullah would sum up his rocky relationship with Nehru: “Pandit Nehru’s love for Kashmir was more like love for a beautiful woman whom he wanted to possess and that he had come to regard me as a rival in love—for the possession of this beautiful valley.”48
Nehru’s Lackluster Successor
Lal Bahadur Shastri, who succeeded Nehru, had neither the charisma nor the popularity needed to win the approval of Parliament for an agreement with Pakistan, which would have inevitably involved some territorial concessions to Pakistan and/or letting Kashmiris exercise their right of self-determination for the state as a whole or by region. In polar contrast to the aristocratic background of handsome Nehru, a child of the fabulously rich lawyer Motilal Nehru and his wife, Swaruprani Thussu, the diminutive, jug-eared Shastri, mild-mannered and soft-spoken, was born into the household of a schoolteacher who died when he was a year old. He grew up as a staunch member of the Congress Party and served in Nehru’s cabinets from 1952 onward, his latest ministry being home affairs.
Realizing the dramatically altered political scene, Shaikh Abdullah openly called for a plebiscite, something he had not done before. This had an unsettling effect on Sadiq, who had simultaneously to cope with Muhammad’s maneuvers in the State Assembly against his recently formed cabinet. He was therefore driven to rely even more heavily on Delhi than Muhammad to stay in power. He actively cooperated with the Shastri government to integrate Kashmir further into the Indian Union.
On December 21, the president of India acquired powers, hitherto denied him, to take over Kashmir’s administration if he felt that the constitutional machinery had broken down. Three weeks later it was announced that the National Conference would be dissolved and that the Congress Party would establish a branch in Kashmir. The opposition declared January 15 Protest Day, when Shaikh Abdullah demanded a plebiscite to decide the state’s future.
The next month, accompanied by his wife, Akbar Jahan, and a senior deputy, Abdullah went on a hajj—a pilgrimage to Mecca—with plans to visit a few other Arab countries as well as Britain and France. In Algiers he had an unscheduled meeting with Zhou Enlai. According to his memoir, Flames of the Chinar, they discussed China’s agreement with Pakistan over the northern frontier of Gilgit. Zhou said, “At present, Gilgit is under the control of Pakistan, and therefore we entered into an agreement stipulating that the agreement shall remain valid only as long as Gilgit is under the control of Pakistan.” Abdullah revealed that he sent a summary of his conversation with Zhou to the Indian ambassador to China.49 But the news of Zhou’s invitation to Abdullah to visit China disconcerted the Shastri government.
In March, while Abdullah was abroad, the legislature, guided by Sadiq, amended Kashmir’s constitution to alter the title of head of state from Sardar-i-riyasat (Urdu: president of province) to governor, and Wazire Azam (Urdu: prime minister) to chief minister, thus removing the constitutional distinction between Kashmir and other Indian states. In short, the leading features of the “special relationship” that had existed all along between Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian Union were annulled.50
In April Abdullah published an essay in the prestigious, New York–based Foreign Affairs journal in which he argued that India, Pakistan, and Kashmiris should devise a solution that would grant Kashmiris “the substance of their demand for self-determination but with honor and fairness to both Pakistan and India.”51 He thus put India and Pakistan on a par.
Operation Desert Hawk: A Dry Run
The moves by the Sadiq-Shastri duo whipped up anti-India sentiment in Pakistan, leading to armed clashes between the two neighbors in the Rann (Desert) of Kutch along the Arabian Sea. Measuring about 2,900 square miles of sparsely inhabited marshland, originally part of the princely state of Kutch, its upland islets were used as pasture plots. It was one of the few un-demarcated tracts between Pakistan and India, each of which maintained a few armed police posts on scattered islets.
On April 9, 1965, the Pakistani army captured an Indian police post near the Kanjarkot fort and claimed all of the Rann of Kutch. Delhi deployed its army in the area to recover the lost posts. In turn, on April 24, Pakistan mounted Operation Desert Hawk by deploying an infantry division and two armored regiments equipped with superior US-supplied Patton tanks and field guns. Four inches of steel armor plating on the forty-six-ton Patton made it immune to all fire except at a very close range.52 Pakistan captured four more posts and claimed the entire Kanjarkot tract. Given their poor logistics and inferior military hardware, the Indians had no option but to withdraw after offering token resistance. To contain the fighting between two Commonwealth members, British prime minister Harold Wilson intervened. A temporary truce followed at the end of April.
But the Kashmiri background to this crisis worsened in May, when Abdullah returned home. He was arrested and interned in the hill station of Ootacamund, two thousand miles from Kashmir. The anti-India feeling that had been bubbling in the Kashmir Valley during March and April boiled over. Streets filled with huge protest demonstrations. These were crushed with a heavy hand.
The truce in the Rann of Kutch broke down. Hostilities resumed on June 15 on the eve of the weeklong Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in London. Once again Wilson intervened. A formal cease-fire was signed on June 30. Later the border issue was referred to a three-member arbitration committee.53
The purpose of Pakistan’s Operation Desert Hawk was threefold: to assess India’s military preparedness, to draw its troops away from Punjab and Kashmir, and to determine the extent of Washington’s seriousness about enforcing its ban on the use of its superior military hardware, including F4 jet fighters, in a war with India. Despite Delhi’s repeated protests, no effective action was taken by the Lyndon Johnson administration to inhibit Pakistanis’ use of US-made weaponry.
Field Marshal Ayub Khan was buoyed by his victory in the armed sparring he had with India in the Rann of Kutch. An inkling of his upbeat mood was provided by Lakshmi Kant Jha, the principal secretary to Shastri, who was present when the two South Asian leaders met on the sidelines of the Commonwealth conference in London. “You know, your chaps tried to commit aggression on our territory, our chaps gave them a few knocks and they began to flee,” Ayub Khan reportedly said. “Mr President, do you think if I had to attack Pakistan, I would choose a terrain where we have no logistic support and you have all the advantages?” asked Shastri. “Do you think I would make such a mistake or any of my generals would allow me to make that mistake?”54
Little did Shastri realize that in the previous month Ayub Khan had scrutinized a military presentation on Operation Gibraltar and that at his behest an assault on Akhnoor in India-held Kashmir was included in the subsequently code-named Operation Grand Slam. Following that, Ayub Khan approved Operation Gibraltar. Soon after, however, he had second thoughts about executing the g
rand plan. The hawks within his cabinet, led by Bhutto, pounced on this and put it about that the president did not want to disturb the status quo because that would jeopardize the freshly acquired riches of his family. That forced Ayub Khan’s hand. At the end of July, he addressed the force commanders of Operation Gibraltar as a preamble to the actual launch.55
9: Shastri’s Tallest Order
Pakistan’s Nightmare Comes Alive
Operation Gibraltar1 grew out of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s memorandum to President Muhammad Ayub Khan in early May 1965. In it he warned that as a consequence of the ramped-up Western military assistance to India, the balance of power in South Asia was tilting rapidly in Delhi’s favor. He recommended “a bold and courageous” move in Kashmir to create “greater possibility for a negotiated settlement.”2 The end purpose of the complex Operation Gibraltar was to enable the Pakistani military to capture territory in Kashmir while making it appear that it was the Kashmiri people who had finally mounted an armed rebellion to end the unbearably oppressive rule of India.
Operations Gibraltar and Grand Slam
Devised conceptually by the Kashmir Cell of the Ayub Khan regime, it was passed on to Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik, the Murree-based commander of the Twelfth Infantry Division. Along with the Azad Kashmir Armed Force, this division guarded the cease-fire line in Kashmir. The strategy was to have a sizable force of trained guerrillas and saboteurs infiltrate India-held Kashmir to carry out sabotage to destabilize the state government and spark an anti-India rebellion by Kashmiris.
If it failed to achieve the desired aim, then the complementary Operation Grand Slam was to be launched by the Pakistani military. It envisaged a rapid strike by armored and infantry units from the southern tip of the cease-fire line to Akhnoor, a town along the Pathankot-Jammu-Srinagar highway. The capture of Akhnoor would sever the critical supply line for the bottled-up Indian forces in the Vale of Kashmir, providing Pakistan with several options, one or more of which could be exploited.