The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  The Congress Party’s Blunders

  The next such event occurred in 1937. After the Muslim League had won two-thirds of the Muslim seats in the Bombay legislature and two-fifths in United Provinces’, Jinnah offered the League a partnership with the Congress. But Vallabhbhai Patel, who controlled the party machine, demanded the merger of League legislators with the Congress before any of them could be appointed minister. The haughty behavior of Congress officials made even neutral Muslim leaders suspicious of their real intentions toward Muslims.

  Leaving aside the exceptional case of the small, Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province, the Congress won an average of one Muslim seat in each of the ten provinces. With practically no Muslim lawmakers on its benches, the Congress ruled six provinces. This made non-League Muslim legislators realize that the Congress would exercise power on the basis of a majority in the general (Hindu) constituencies. Non–Muslim League leaders started collaborating with the League.

  The performance of the Congress ministries provided examples of insensitivity toward Muslims’ beliefs and feelings. Congregational singing of “Vande Mataram” (Sanskrit: I bow to Mother) as part of the official protocol in schools, colleges, and elsewhere was one. According to Rabindranath Tagore, a nationalist poet and philosopher, the core of “Vande Mataram” was a hymn to the goddess Durga. In Islam, deifying or worshiping anyone or anything other than the One and Only (unseen) God constitutes idolatry and is forbidden.

  The two-year-plus rule of the Congress gave Muslims a foretaste of what to expect in an independent India. Support for the Muslim League grew rapidly. In the 1945–1946 elections, it garnered all 30 Muslim places in the Central Legislative Assembly, securing 87 percent of the Muslim vote. In the provincial legislatures its size quadrupled to 425 out of 485 Muslim seats.2

  By then the League’s resolution asserting that Muslims were “a nation by any definition,” and that the Muslim-majority areas in the northwestern and eastern zones of India, “should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units will be autonomous and sovereign,”3 was six years old.

  More significantly, the term “Pakistan” had become irresistibly attractive to Muslims of all classes and persuasions. Orthodox Muslims envisaged a Muslim state run according to the Sharia. Muslim landlords felt assured of the continuation of the zamindari (landlord) system, which the Congress had vowed to abolish. Muslim businessmen savored the prospect of fresh markets in Pakistan free from Hindu competition. Civil servants foresaw rapid promotion in the fledgling state. These perceptions among Muslims grew in an environment in which Hindus were much better off economically than Muslims.

  Astonishingly, there was a singular lack of perception among Congress leaders of the economic factors bolstering the League’s appeal. Jawaharlal Nehru made passing remarks about peasants, whether Muslim or Hindu, suffering at the hands of landlords. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi failed to grasp that it was that section of the Muslim population that felt it could not compete with Hindus in getting government jobs and in commerce and industry that backed the League.

  On the political front, what made partition inevitable was Nehru’s boastful declaration on July 8, 1947, about Britain’s Constitutional Award of May 16. It envisaged united India with a constituent assembly, elected by existing provincial legislatures, convening briefly in Delhi, and then dividing into Sections A (Hindu majority), B (Muslim-majority, northwestern region), and C (Muslim-majority, Bengal-Assam) to frame a constitution for three subfederations into which federal, independent India was to be divided. Nehru announced that the Congress had agreed to participate in the Constituent Assembly and, once convened, the Assembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award’s provisions, if it so wished, and that the grouping scheme would most likely not survive. This led Jinnah to withdraw the League’s acceptance of the Constitutional Award.

  The savage butchery that Muslims and non-Muslims—Hindus and Sikhs—perpetrated on one another in Punjab left five hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand people dead and caused the largest mass exodus in history. When communal frenzy gripped Delhi, with Muslims bearing the brunt, Nehru stuck firmly to his secular beliefs, while Patel and Rajendra Prasad disapproved of the Indian army protecting Muslim citizens.

  Moreover Patel and his cohorts in Nehru’s government were hell-bent on strangling Pakistan at birth. Jinnah complained about this to British prime minister Clement Attlee and vowed that the Dominion of Pakistan would “never surrender.” Despite his failing health, he helped the incipient Pakistan, composed of two wings separated by a thousand miles, to find its infant feet.

  Jinnah Fails to Woo the Maharaja

  While acting as the chief executive of Pakistan, Jinnah dealt directly with the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan and the princely states. He realized that failure to persuade the Hindu Maharaja Sir Hari Singh of the predominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir to accede to Pakistan would be a severe blow to his two-nation theory. An opponent of Jinnah’s thesis, the maharaja rebuffed his friendly approaches.

  Jinnah then assigned the Kashmir portfolio to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. He complemented his strategy of taking charge of the Azad Army formed independently by Kashmiri Muslims with a plan to secure Srinagar by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas. He informed Jinnah of the first track but not the second.

  When the invasion of the tribal irregulars led to the airlifting of Indian troops to Srinagar in October 1947, following the maharaja’s accession to India, Jinnah was distraught. His unease increased when Pakistan’s commander in chief General Sir Frank Messervy refused to obey his order to deploy Pakistani troops. Sir Frank argued that implementing Governor-General Jinnah’s order would result in British officers commanding their respective Indian and Pakistani contingents in a fight against each other.

  Jinnah’s dream of incorporating all of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan withered, accelerating his physical decline. He died in harness only a year after the birth of Pakistan.

  The outbreak of war with India in Kashmir within months of Pakistan’s inception gave its military a primacy it has maintained since then, monopolizing the drafting and implementation of national security policies after the assassination of Ali Khan in October 1951. With his death the nation lost the remaining cofounder of Pakistan. The Muslim League started to unravel, while differences between the eastern and western wings sharpened on the status of Bengali, the mother tongue of the majority of Pakistani citizens. Urdu remained the sole official language. The ongoing squabbling between politicians led to the seizure of power by General Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1958.

  This highlighted the contrasting development of Pakistan and India, where two general elections held under a republican constitution and universal suffrage returned the Congress to power, with Nehru as prime minister and foreign minister. His policy of nonalignment with the power blocs contrasted with Pakistan’s alignment with the United States. Pakistan acquired the distinction of being a member of the anticommunist South-East Asia Treaty Organization as well as the Central Treaty Organization.

  As head of a stable military administration in Pakistan, Ayub Khan was able to reach a deal on the distribution of Indus waters once the World Bank persuaded the United States 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.

  Arriving at an enthusiastic reception in the Pakistani capital of Karachi in September 1960, Nehru cosigned the Indus Waters Treaty with Ayub Khan. The successful conclusion to a long-running economic dispute encouraged Ayub Khan to broach the subject of Kashmir. But when, in the Presidential Lodge in scenic Murree, he initiated a conversation on the subject, Nehru turned his eyes away, toward the stunning scenery. He concluded the session by stating that any change in the status quo would face serious domestic opposition, and referred to the violent public
reaction to China’s occupation of India’s territory.

  Nehru’s Tussle with China

  By then China had become an integral element in the Indo-Pakistan equation because of its occupation of a part of Kashmir, as alleged by Delhi. Nehru raised the issue with Ayub Khan of Pakistan’s boundary with China. He told Nehru that they did not claim any area not covered by the actual Line of Control, as determined by their experts. On his return to Delhi, Nehru criticized Pakistan for having approached the Chinese to demarcate the border.

  Nehru was suffused with self-righteousness. This attitude had its merits when it came to sticking to such progressive concepts as secularism and democracy in India, where he enjoyed unrivaled mass popularity. But it was ill suited to diplomacy, where give and take is the universally accepted currency. This became apparent in his dealings with Pakistan on Kashmir and then with China on the border issue. Some analysts attributed self-righteousness to Nehru’s Brahminical lineage. Brahmins had claimed and exercised monopoly over knowledge in the caste-ridden Hindu society.

  To resolve the border dispute through negotiations, China’s premier Zhou Enlai suggested to Nehru that their troops should retreat for twelve miles from the border. Nehru rejected the proposal. Nonetheless, China unilaterally pulled back its soldiers for twelve miles. India interpreted this as China’s weakness. It occupied 1,540 square miles of Chinese territory and set up sixty forward posts, forty-three of them north of the McMahon Line in the eastern sector. On September 11, 1962, Delhi permitted all forward posts and patrols to fire on any armed Chinese who entered India’s claimed territory. This was tantamount to a declaration of war.

  On October 18, Chairman Mao Zedong addressed the Politburo of the Communist Party of China on this subject. “Now that Nehru is determined to fight us, we have no way out but to keep him company,” he said. “However, our counter-attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means.”4

  The second part of Mao’s statement proved to be the key to understand why at midnight on November 20, having established its superiority in weaponry, strategy, communications, logistics, and planning in the month-long war, China declared a unilateral cease-fire, and added that after their withdrawal, the Chinese frontier guards would be far behind their positions held prior to September 8, 1962.

  As wars go, this was a minor affair in which neither side deployed its air force. But it opened a new chapter in India’s foreign policy and relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. These superpowers set aside their rivalry and backed India, treating Communist China as their common foe. This radical realignment affected Indo-Pakistan relations. The pro-Washington Pakistan was alarmed and angered to see India being armed heavily by the United States as well as Britain—both of which had persuaded Ayub Khan not to open a battlefront against India in Kashmir or elsewhere on its western frontier during the Sino-Indian War.

  Though Nehru went through the motions in his government’s talks with Pakistan on Kashmir, nothing came of it. He had no intention of altering his stance that the current cease-fire line in Kashmir should be turned into an international border. This was unacceptable to Pakistan, which demanded a plebiscite, as Nehru had agreed initially. Nehru considered revising his policy on Kashmir only when massive anti-India demonstrations took place in Srinagar in December 1963.

  His release of the Kashmiri leader Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah from jail in the spring of 1964 and Abdullah’s flight to Rawalpindi to meet Ayub Khan showed promise. But Nehru died of heart failure in May, while Abdullah was in Pakistan. With that died the prospect of a satisfactory resolution of the Kashmir conundrum during Nehru’s lifetime.

  Overall Nehru’s inflexible stance on Kashmir for seventeen years had stoked frustration among Pakistani leaders. When they could no longer contain it, they tried to change the status quo through force. Given India’s military superiority, these attempts would fail. The setbacks in Kashmir altered Pakistan’s history radically, with the 1965 war leading to the secession of East Pakistan, and the 1999 Kargil conflict resulting in the termination of democracy. The Pakistani leadership also tried to achieve its aim by using armed infiltrators to destabilize Indian Kashmir. Delhi reacted with a ferocious response, using torture and extrajudicial killings on an industrial scale. After 9/11, however, as a victim of cross-border terrorism, India gained widespread Western sympathies, which improved its diplomatic clout.

  Second Indo-Pakistan War

  In the aftermath of the Sino-Indian War, Anglo-American military aid to India started tilting the balance of power in South Asia in India’s favor. Ayub Khan used force to expel India from the 48 percent of Jammu and Kashmir it occupied.

  The strategy he deployed was a repeat of what Ali Khan had done eighteen years earlier. Under Operation Gibraltar, Pakistan-trained militias infiltrated Indian Kashmir in August 1965, followed by the involvement of regular troops invading Indian Kashmir on September 1. The three-week-long armed conflict, which spread to Pakistani and Indian Punjab, ended with a UN-brokered cease-fire. The fear of China opening a front on India’s eastern frontier was an important factor in Delhi accepting the truce.

  There were substantial losses in men and military hardware on both sides. By frustrating Pakistan’s objective to alter the status quo in Kashmir, India scored a success. The domestic consequences of Ayub Khan’s failure were far reaching. During the conflict people in East Pakistan, lightly defended by their troops, were exposed. Their fear and helplessness increased their alienation from West Pakistan and boosted Bengali nationalism, which achieved its aim in the form of the sovereign state of Bangladesh, created out of East Pakistan. The controlled media in Pakistan had made people believe that their armed military was doing wonderfully well. If so, why did Ayub Khan accept the UN cease-fire resolution?, most Pakistanis wondered aloud. The military dictator’s credibility plunged, paving the way for his exit in 1969.

  But his successor, General Yahya Khan, failed to honor the result of the general election held October through December 1970 in Pakistan under universal suffrage, which entitled the Bengali nationalist Awami League leader Shaikh Mujibur Rahman to premiership. Instead he unleashed a reign of terror in East Pakistan.

  The subsequent crisis caused by the flight of millions of East Pakistanis provided the government of Indira Gandhi with an opportunity. Through adroit moves in diplomacy, training of guerrillas to undermine East Pakistan’s government, and superb military tactics, combined with breaking the Pakistani army’s code, Gandhi brought about the signing of the surrender document by General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi in Dacca on December 17, 1971.

  The predominantly Hindu Indians tapped into their religious mythology to crown their triumph. They conferred the sobriquet of Goddess Durga (Sanskrit: Inaccessible) on Indira Gandhi. According to Hindu lore, Durga is a warrior goddess who decapitates the buffalo-demon Mahisasura. Now Gandhi slew the evil of the two-nation theory on which Jinnah had built Pakistan with its two far-flung wings.

  East Pakistan’s secession proved that a common religion was not a strong enough glue to hold together two societies with different languages, dress, and cultures. The trumping of religion by ethnic nationalism was a bitter pill to swallow, not only for West Pakistanis but also for those in Indian Kashmir who advocated accession to Pakistan.

  The third Indo-Pakistan War closed a tumultuous period in the postindependence history of South Asia.

  Post-1971 Pakistan

  India now had to deal with a Pakistan that had lost more than half of its population but was more cohesive racially and religiously, with its Hindu minority reduced to less than 2 percent. It was ruled by the popularly elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had built up the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) from scratch.

  At the summit in Shimla in June 1972, he faced the victorious Gandhi, whose leading aim was to bring the Kashmir dispute to an official close. Bhutto wa
s opposed to this. When their respective delegations reached a deadlock, he had a one-on-one meeting with Gandhi. He convinced her that after the loss of East Pakistan, if he were to abandon his country’s claims to Kashmir, he would be thrown out by the military. Having agreed earlier to convert the 1949 UN cease-fire line into the LoC, Bhutto seemed willing to let it morph into an international frontier without a written declaration. On Gandhi’s insistence the final draft committed both sides to settle all their differences “by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by other peaceful means mutually agreed upon,” thus ruling out third-party mediation. And it listed a final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir “as one of the outstanding questions awaiting settlement.”5 In the subsequent decades, the 1972 Shimla Accord continued to be the basis of all Indo-Pakistan talks.

  But progress on normalizing relations and resuming trade and economic cooperation got sidetracked by turmoil in India’s and Pakistan’s domestic scenes. Bhutto faced insurgency by nationalists in Baluchistan. In June 1975, a court invalidated Gandhi’s parliamentary seat won on the corrupt practice of using government facilities and resources during her 1971 election campaign. Instead of stepping down, she imposed an emergency and ruled by decree.

  In Pakistan, the rigged March 1977 general election gave the PPP a large majority. The opposition, rallying behind the Pakistan National Alliance, resorted to massive demonstrations. Army Chief General Muhammad Zia ul Haq intervened by mounting Operation Fair Play on July 5, arrested Bhutto, and promised fair elections within ninety days. That never happened.

  An Islamist to the core, Zia ul Haq clung to power until August 1988, when he was killed, along with twenty-seven others, by an explosion in the transport plane ferrying them near the Bahawalpur airport. During his rule Pakistani state and society had undergone Islamization and drifted further away from secular, democratic India.