by John Keay
An autonomous ‘Usmanistan’ (a more nation-like name for Hyderabad) had been touted in some of the Muslim League’s pre-Partition propaganda. With a population of sixteen million – so about the same as that of Sri Lanka and Nepal combined – with a division-sized army and an illustrious history dating back to Mughal times, Hyderabad had as good a claim to independence as anywhere. To realise it, the Nizam was prepared to defy New Delhi and even dip into his bottomless coffers. At great expense he enlisted the legal services of a King’s Counsel from the English Bar, plus that Bar’s favourite tactic of aggressive procrastination.
In Hyderabad, however, as in Kashmir, the ruler’s authority was already being challenged. Hyderabad was no peripheral backwater like Junagadh. A local Congress-affiliated party was demanding full democratic representation plus an end to hereditary rule; a socialist party chimed in by urging outright accession to India; Communist cadres were dismantling the larger landholdings in the turbulent Telengana region of the state; and in the main cities Islamist paramilitaries (Razakars), with or without the tacit support of the Nizam’s government, were terrorising pro-India communities, most of them Hindu. Thus while, in the aftermath of Partition, Muslim refugees poured into the state from central India, Hindu refugees poured out into the neighbouring Madras and Bombay provinces. As in the Punjab and Bengal, though on a smaller scale, powerful constituencies were being created by the crude expedient of repositioning people.
In this exercise, time might be thought to favour the Nizam. Accordingly, in October 1947 the Nizam’s legal counsel, backed by Mountbatten, began to lobby Nehru and Patel for a one-year extension of Hyderabad’s standstill agreement. The Congress leaders reluctantly concurred, and Mountbatten chalked up another triumph. No longer Viceroy but a decidedly hands-on Governor-General, in the same month Mountbatten enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing his nephew and protégé, Philip of Greece, preparing to wed Princess Elizabeth, the heir presumptive to the British throne. As one who was about to be even more closely related to the House of Windsor, Mountbatten was confident that by playing on the Nizam’s regard for the British monarchy he could get him to sign a document which, though neither an Instrument of Accession nor a treaty, yet combined enough of both to satisfy all parties.
There matters stood – with the Indian and Hyderabadi governments supposedly sworn to avoid provoking one another, the Nizam and his supporters still nursing hopes of independence, and Mountbatten as buoyant as ever – when, in late October, reports came from the other end of India that up through the apple-laden orchards on the hillsides of the outer Himalayas lorryloads of ragtag soldiery were advancing with the intention of taking a large bite out of the juiciest fruit of all. Kashmir, it seemed, was being invaded. Homesteads were aflame, villages were being pillaged and bridges captured. In less than a week, with his outposts fallen, his army on the run and his state in peril, the Maharajah of Kashmir would be propelled into India’s arms. And so, as if from nowhere, there began a conflict that would rumble on into the next century and comfortably outlast even Ghulam Mohamed’s drone of woe.
‘It was a case of retaliation,’ Ghulam Mohamed always claimed. ‘See, Kashmiris had nothing to do with it. These people with guns, they were Pathans from Yaghistan. We were the victims.’
Launched on 22 October 1947, what Indians regard as an unprovoked Pakistani-backed invasion of the Kashmir Valley and what Pakistanis regard as a spontaneous expression of Muslim solidarity in the face of the Maharajah’s oppression, rapidly escalated into open warfare. The invaders would overrun about a third of the entire state, threaten Srinagar itself and bring India’s army and air force rushing to the rescue. Thousands died, tens of thousands were displaced, and for generations to come millions would pay the price. Because of Kashmir, Indo–Pakistan hostility would become the defining motif in South Asian relations. A new generation, ‘Midnight’s Children’, and then another, ‘Midnight’s Grandchildren’, would imbibe the mythologies constructed around the Kashmir crisis and grow up in its atmosphere of irreconcilable claims and counter-claims. This near-existential enmity would spawn its own national heroes in succession to the freedom fighters of old and induce a myopia that is as puzzling to foreigners as it is troubling to neighbours. The policies subsequently pursued by India and Pakistan in respect of Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and especially Afghanistan were, and still are, heavily influenced by the unfinished business over Kashmir.
The so-called ‘Kashmir problem’ also necessitated massive troop deployments, hasty weapons purchases and an incipient arms race. Defence spending would in turn devour slender budgets, frustrate much-needed social reform programmes, stunt economic growth and alike discredit the Mahatma’s non-violent legacy, Nehru’s lofty boast of international non-alignment and Jinnah’s pledge of sectarian inclusiveness. As if the post-Partition slaughter of the previous two months had not been enough, in late 1947 India and Pakistan hovered so close to all-out war as to put Partition itself in jeopardy. But whether this opened a new chapter in South Asian relations, or simply prolonged an old one, is open to debate.
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The British-drawn maps must bear some of the responsibility. Jammu and Kashmir state was not, and never had been, the confident entity that it appeared on paper. It was a more arbitrary, complex and disparate creation even than its composite name suggests. Most of the state was within, and much of it beyond, the high Himalayas, and so arguably not part of the South Asian subcontinent at all. Nor was it simply a combination of mountain valley (Kashmir) and submontane glacis (Jammu). Scholars tend to divide the state into four or five distinct socio-geographic regions, each having little in common with one another, other than the Maharajah’s overarching claim to sovereignty.
Jammu, in the plains, is indistinguishable from the neighbouring Punjab. At the time its considerable population included slightly more Hindus and Sikhs than Muslims, and had it not been part of a princely state, Radcliffe’s red pen would surely have awarded it to New Delhi. Yet Jammu was not just some appendage of the Jammu and Kashmir state that could be quietly lopped off. It was in fact integral to it. The Hindu Dogra Maharajahs originally hailed from Jammu, and Jammu city still served them as the state’s winter capital.
The more populous Kashmir Valley, on the other hand, lies 2,000 metres higher, is hemmed in by snow-capped mountains and feels a world away from the Punjab and the Indian subcontinent. Though largely Muslim, it had seldom been aggressively so. Indeed, it accommodated an influential class of Brahmin landowners and intellectuals, otherwise known as pandits (like the Nehrus’ ancestors), who had prospered under Dogra rule. With its own language, cuisine and costume, plus a reputation for fine crafts and outrageous salesmanship, the Valley boasted a distinctive culture (Kashmiriyat) and an enviable tradition of communal harmony.
Before its incorporation into the Mughal empire in the late seventeenth century the Valley had often been an independent kingdom. It had come under the rule of its Hindu Dogra Maharajahs only in the 1840s when the British, in cynical mode, had chosen not to administer directly such a far-flung and indeterminate territory. Instead, and in return for their allegiance and a large cash indemnity, the Dogra Maharajahs had been confirmed in their lately-won inheritance. Their often unsavoury rule was thus prolonged; and though the British frequently had occasion to regret Dogra excesses, they found compensation in adopting the Valley as a holiday-home-from-home where, sallying forth from Henley-style houseboats, they might embrace the alpine scenery with rods, guns, cameras and picnic baskets.
To the south of the Valley, and to the west of the Bannihal Pass and Jammu, lesser valleys and pine-clad ridges border the plains of what is now Pakistan. Comprised of several one-time fiefs, this third segment of Jammu and Kashmir state was loosely referred to as Poonch (or sometimes ‘Punch’), that being the main administrative centre. Comparatively well populated and, like the Valley, largely Muslim, Poonch had a claim to autonomy under a related Dogra dynasty, plus a history of resistance to rule from
Srinagar/Jammu. Notoriously turbulent, and an important recruiting ground for the British Indian army, it was in Poonch that the trouble started.
Such were the three core regions of the state – Jammu, the Kashmir Valley and Poonch. But north and north-west of the Valley, among and beyond the glaciers of the Karakorum range, there nestled and perched numerous lesser chiefdoms and statelets. These had been lumped together by the British as the Gilgit Agency, and had even less in common with the Valley and its Dogra rulers, who were here heartily detested. Sparsely populated and again Muslim, though more Shi’i than Sunni, the Gilgit region had been attached to Jammu and Kashmir state purely for British strategic convenience. In 1935, for the same reason, much of it had been leased back by the British. Accessible from the Valley for only part of the year – and then not without considerable effort – the Gilgit region’s status in the wake of the British withdrawal could best be described as uncertain.
Finally, to the north-east and east of the Kashmir Valley, beyond even snowier passes, the valley of the upper Indus opened out into the arid wastes of Baltistan and Ladakh. The former was once Buddhist, the latter still so, and both were more Tibetan in aspect than Indian. But they had been under Dogra rule for over a century, and although they contained a negligible fraction of the state’s population, they accounted for about three-quarters of its land area, as well as almost its entire border with Tibet and Chinese Xinjiang. The social, cultural and commercial ties of Ladakh were as much with this Inner Asian world as with South Asia, and prior to the Chinese intervention in Tibet in 1950, Ladakh showed more interest in an association with Lhasa than with New Delhi or Karachi.
In sum, here was a highly artificial state but one which, when taken as a whole, was of great geo-strategic interest to both India and Pakistan and which, fringing the two, might go either way. Its religious complexion argued for its joining Pakistan; New Delhi had expectations that its Maharajah, the sole embodiment of its tenuous unity, would prefer India; yet its composition lent itself to dismemberment; and its history and general ambivalence, no less than its contested status, argued for some form of autonomy, particularly in respect of its core southern regions.
Two other factors were relevant. In the Valley, the Maharajah’s authority had long been under threat from populist political parties; and in Poonch it was contested by a junior claimant to the Maharajah’s throne backed by one or more of Poonch’s militaristic clans. Among the Valley’s several political parties, the most effective was the National Conference under the leadership of Sheikh Mohamed Abdullah. The term ‘Sheikh’ was in this case one of popular respect rather than religious orthodoxy. A commanding figure, son of a shawl merchant and educated at the prestigious Muslim university of Aligarh (in UP), the Sheikh espoused a socialism that was radical, not an Islamism. His National Conference had been so named when in 1938 it had broken with its parent Muslim Conference, a party that subsequently allied itself with Jinnah’s Muslim League and was generally in favour of Pakistan. In contrast, the Sheikh’s National Conference, while spearheading the grievances of the Valley’s Muslims against their Dogra rulers, adopted a less sectarian stance more in tune with that of India’s Congress Party.
‘They say that Sheikh Sahib [this being a doubly respectful moniker for Abdullah] was Nehru’s friend. What kind of friend? What did Nehru do for Kashmir? Nothing, see, nothing.’
With the passage of time Kashmiris like Ghulam Mohamed had conveniently forgotten that in 1947 Sheikh Abdullah had owed his pivotal role, indeed his lionisation (‘the Lion of Kashmir’ being another of his sobriquets), almost entirely to Nehru. In fact it was his regard for Nehru, and Nehru’s for the Sheikh, that would undermine any chance of the state going it alone. The two men had much in common. ‘There can be no doubt that Jawaharlal Nehru saw Sheikh Abdullah as his political twin,’ writes Alastair Lamb, an authority on Kashmir, adding cryptically that the relationship ‘may well have involved more than shared political opinions’.7 With the six-foot-four Sheikh towering over his Indian counterpart they made an ill-assorted pair; but, secular in outlook, socialists and democrats by conviction, they were both immensely proud of their Kashmiri heritage, and had nothing but contempt for the blatantly discriminatory regime of the thoroughbred-loving Maharajah in his Savile Row suits.
In May 1946, not for the first time, the Sheikh had faced trial for sedition. He had demanded that the Maharajah ‘Quit Kashmir’, and followed this up by advocating a redistribution of landholdings and more jobs for Muslims. Riots had followed, protesters had been killed and Srinagar put under curfew. Greatly alarmed for his friend, Nehru had absented himself from the Cabinet Mission’s deliberations and rushed up to Kashmir to defend the Sheikh in court. On this occasion he was turned back at the border (on a later occasion he was hauled back by Mountbatten and Patel). The Sheikh had been duly convicted and imprisoned; and there he still was, in Srinagar’s gaol, when in 1947 the momentous events of 14 and 15 August came and went. In the Valley the Pakistan flag was raised, then hastily removed; in parts of Poonch it flew for longer, as did the Indian flag in Jammu.
With Maharajah Hari Singh apparently following the Nizam of Hyderabad’s lead and holding out for some form of independence, Nehru looked to his old friend for a more pro-India pronouncement. Sheikh Abdullah obliged. At the time he said nothing about autonomy or independence but was adamant about ‘freedom’. This he defined as freedom from Dogra rule, freedom for himself and his followers from their Srinagar detention, and the freedom for the Kashmiri people, rather than the Maharajah, to decide between India and Pakistan. Abdullah’s ‘Quit Kashmir’ call echoed that of the 1942 ‘Quit India’ movement and, just so, his freedom struggle against the Maharajah mimicked that of the Congress leadership against the British. In Kashmir too, detention merely increased the detainees’ popularity and raised the stakes. Nehru was probably right in supposing the Sheikh the nearest thing to the voice of the Kashmiri people, although the Sheikh’s popularity scarcely extended beyond the Valley into Jammu and Poonch, let alone Gilgit or Ladakh. Nehru was also confident that the Sheikh’s inclinations – democratic, socially radical, confessionally neutral and distinctly personal vis-à-vis the pro-Pakistan Muslim Conference – would be best served by opting for India.
Meanwhile the Punjab erupted in the horrors of Partition. In east Punjab, and throughout the rest of India, Muslims who were reluctant to decamp to Pakistan lived in fear for their livelihoods if not their lives. They badly needed reassurance about their future prospects in India, and to Nehru’s way of thinking, nothing would more comfort them than the spectacle of a Muslim-majority state like Jammu and Kashmir endorsing New Delhi’s non-communal stance by freely acceding to India. It would bolster India’s secular credentials while, according to Nehru, ‘any weakening in Kashmir by us would create a far more difficult communal situation’.8
Unfortunately, this far more difficult communal situation was already evident in Jammu and Poonch. In Jammu, hard by the blood-soaked Punjab, some sectarian contagion was probably inevitable. The resultant killings and expulsions replicated those in the Punjab, with the Maharajah’s Dogra troops here participating in the atrocities committed by Jammu’s non-Muslim majority on its Muslim minority. As reported by Richard Symonds, whose role as a refugee monitor now took him from the Punjab to Kashmir, the Jammu killings preceded the 22 October ‘invasion’ of Kashmir and were partly responsible for it.
From about 17 October, Muslims in villages near Jammu were rounded up [by the Maharajah’s officials], told that Pakistan had asked them to leave, and sent on foot towards the Pakistan border. On the way they were slaughtered by civilian Sikhs and the Dogra Kashmir troops, sometimes assisted by some Rajputs and depressed classes.9
As news of these killings, plus a trickle of survivors, reached Poonch, they greatly inflamed an already volatile situation there. According to Symonds, ongoing resistance to some punitive taxes levied by the Maharajah on the Muslims of Poonch had already provoked open rebellion; an
d it was these rebellious and now confessionally incensed anti-Dogra Muslims of Poonch who turned increasingly to their co-religionists in neighbouring Pakistan for arms and assistance.
In other words – and most notably those preferred by Pakistanis – the ragtag invaders who were about to enter Kashmir territory were merely responding to a call for help from fellow Muslims under threat from their Hindu overlord. The incursion was therefore spontaneous; it owed nothing to the government of Pakistan and had no designs on the Kashmir Valley itself. All of which would appear somewhat implausible in the light of subsequent events – although no more so than India’s adamant disclaimers of the prior support afforded to the Maharajah by elements of the government in New Delhi.
Such Indian support was needed because the Maharajah’s forces were no match for the Poonch rebels, most of whom had battlefield experience. ‘Of the 71,667 citizens of the state of Jammu and Kashmir who served in the British Indian forces during World War II, 60,402 were Muslims from the traditional recruiting ground of Poonch and Mirpur [i.e. southern Poonch],’ notes Victoria Schofield.10 Like the Muslim, Sikh and Dogra ex-servicemen who were responsible for the worst killings in the Punjab, Poonch’s military veterans were a force to be reckoned with. They so tested the Maharajah’s troops that, according to sources cited by Alastair Lamb, well before the ‘Pakistani’ incursion into Kashmir the Maharajah was receiving covert logistical and technical assistance from India plus the services of ‘at least one infantry battalion and a battery of mountain artillery’. Both of the latter were drawn from what had been the army of the Sikh state of Patiala but which was now, since Patiala’s accession to India, part of India’s forces.11
There was nothing particularly sinister about this. The Patiala auxiliaries were not intended for deployment against Pakistan but to uphold the Maharajah’s authority within his own state. Their presence nevertheless represented, if not a prior incursion, then certainly a provocative escalation. The uprising within the Poonch district of the still technically independent state of Jammu and Kashmir was being surreptitiously internationalised; and by the same logic that prompted the Maharajah to look to India, the Poonchi rebels looked to Pakistan.