Midnight's Descendants

by John Keay

  For rifles, mortars and explosives, the Poonchis – or ‘Azad Kashmiris’ [‘Free Kashmiris’] as they now preferred – sought out Pakistani intermediaries willing to supply their needs from official arsenals and from the roadside showrooms of the Pathan (Pashtun) gunsmiths of the North-West Frontier Province. Additionally, several thousand Pathans volunteered their services as fighters. Most came from the tribal areas of Hazara, Dir, Bajaur and Kurram which, though attached to the Frontier Province, had been largely abandoned to their own devices following the British withdrawal. It was these redoubtable warriors from the Frontier’s tribal areas whom Ghulam Mohamed always called ‘Yaghis’, ‘Yaghistan’ being a pejorative term for anywhere that was habitually ungovernable.

  Pathans also provided the necessary transport and fuel: their hauliers, then as now, had a monopoly of the cross-border trucking business between Afghanistan and the plains. And as was ever the case in Frontier affairs, the tribesmen’s Islamic zealotry barely disguised an inveterate rapacity. To the irregulars who headed off into the Hazara hills en route for Kashmir, the news of Muslims being massacred in Jammu excited calls for revenge and promised the sanction of jihad. But no less enticing was the promise of plunder afforded by Kashmir’s abiding reputation as a terrestrial paradise of pulchritude and plenty.

  To what extent the Pakistan government was aware of all this activity is unclear. Intelligence was scarce and there was as yet no such thing as an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate. The obvious parallels with Pakistani disclaimers of official support for subsequent cross-border interventions – whether in Kashmir or Afghanistan – are nevertheless striking. Then as later, Pakistani officials cited tribal autonomy as an excuse for their impotence, and then as later they nevertheless cultivated a nexus of informal contacts with both the tribes and their Poonchi/Azad Kashmiri sponsors.

  Retired and absconding officers from the Pakistan army were certainly involved in the Kashmir incursion, although not at first regular troops. And while Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, seems to have had some early knowledge of what was going on, Jinnah himself may have been kept in ignorance of it; either he did not wish to be informed or, already suffering from the ill-health that would soon end his life, it was thought best not to inform him. Government ministers in Karachi may also have been poorly apprised of the situation. Still living out of packing cases as they grappled with the refugee problem and the mechanics of government, they had little time for studying conditions on the far northern frontier, and were in no position to influence them.

  Pakistan’s acting Commander-in-Chief in Rawalpindi, along with the Governor of the North-West Frontier Province in Peshawar, were better placed. Both were British, and both nursed some sympathy for Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir. But under orders from their British superiors to resign rather than become involved in hostilities, they trod carefully and urged caution. Pakistan’s army was still being pieced together from elements of that of undivided India; indeed, its share of the latter’s military hardware had yet to materialise. It was in no position to mount its own invasion of Kashmir. Nor, since this could well lead to a disastrous civil war, was it keen to oppose those tribesmen intent on such an invasion. Thus the most that can be said with any confidence is that the Pakistan authorities, while not entirely ignorant of the Kashmir adventure, declined publicly to authorise it and failed signally to impede it.

  *

  Once across the Pakistan–Kashmir border, the first wave of eighty-odd trucks crammed with tribesmen and their Azad Kashmiri sponsors found their progress up the Jhelum valley eased by the desertion of Muslim troops within the Maharajah’s forces. Bridges had been left unblown, towns undefended. Muzaffarabad fell and was looted, then Uri. From there a side road led over the hills to Poonch, while ahead lay the Valley itself. The greater prize proved the stronger temptation: instead of heading off to eject the Maharajah’s forces from Poonch, the raiders pushed on for Baramula, gateway to ‘the Vale of Cashmere’. Nearing that town, the brigadier commanding the Maharajah’s retreating forces was badly wounded. Having vowed that the enemy would enter the Valley over his dead body, he was as good as his word, and took his own life. His forces looked to be in hopeless disarray. An ill-organised incursion in support of an obscure rebellion suddenly had the Valley at its mercy.

  Baramula is only sixty kilometres from Srinagar. From there an attack on the capital itself was clearly on the cards; but this being manifest to the panic-stricken Maharajah, he too changed tack. On 24 October he sent an urgent appeal for military assistance to New Delhi. He was aware that the quid pro quo might be that he sign a pro-forma Instrument of Accession, and he indicated his willingness to do so, ‘subject to the condition that the terms of accession will be the same as would be settled with H[is] E[xalted] H[ighness] The Nizam of Hyderabad’.12 An airlift of Indian troops followed on 27 October. Srinagar airport was secured, and from there Indian Air Force planes launched sorties down the Valley, strafing the invaders, attacking their transport and bombing their supply lines. Although Baramula was put to the sword in a final act of wanton attrition, the main enemy advance was there halted. Meanwhile the Maharajah had duly signed the Instrument of Accession.

  Despite sharing a religion with the invaders, the Valley’s civilian population had shown themselves largely indifferent to the incursion. They welcomed neither their Azad brethren nor their Pathan colleagues, and often suffered from their depredations. As yet they showed no inclination to fight for the right to decide their future, and they were soon sceptical about the invaders’ claim to be doing it for them.

  For if the invaders’ intent was to pre-empt India’s designs on the state, it had spectacularly misfired. Instead, it was precipitating the Indian action. New Delhi had prepared the ground well. Both Gandhi and more recently Mountbatten had paid personal visits to Srinagar. At the time they had failed to get a pro-India decision out of the Maharajah, but they had at least prevailed on him to sack his independence-minded Prime Minister and release Sheikh Abdullah from detention; in fact the Sheikh was now rallying his Srinagar supporters to resist the invaders.

  On 25 October, within hours of the Maharajah’s appeal to India, V.P. Menon arrived in the Valley. He clarified the terms of Indian military intervention, namely temporary accession of the state pending confirmation by a plebiscite, plus the installation of Sheikh Abdullah as a Minister in the Maharajah’s government. He also persuaded the Maharajah and his family to leave Srinagar immediately. They did so in convoy soon after midnight on 26 October, heading over the Bannihal Pass for Jammu. Ostensibly this was for the Maharajah’s safety. From an Indian point of view it would also ensure that, should the city fall to the raiders, its ruler would not. But in Pakistani eyes the Maharajah’s departure contravened the standstill agreement, was tantamount to flight and so constituted an abrogation of his authority; whatever he signed thereafter was therefore deemed irrelevant.

  It has also been questioned whether the signing of the Instrument of Accession took place before the airlift of Indian troops began, or whether the official record was simply doctored to make it seem so.13 Mountbatten, as India’s Governor-General, had been invited to chair the top-level Defence Committee that considered the Maharajah’s appeal. Eager to include Jammu and Kashmir in his ‘basket’ of princely states and so notch up another triumph before his governor-generalship ended, Mountbatten had supported the Indian action, although with reservations. It was he who insisted that the act of accession must precede the movement of troops, and that a plebiscite must follow it. With British army officers still serving in both Pakistan and India, ‘[his] major concern was to prevent an inter-Dominion war’.14 The legal niceties were therefore critical; India’s case for intervention had to be cast-iron. Yet even Mountbatten’s official biographer concedes that attaching so much importance to the accession was a grave mistake.

  If there had been no accession, the Indian presence in Kashmir would have been more evidently temporary, the possibilit
y of a properly constituted referendum have become more real. By exaggerated legalism the Governor-General helped bring about the result he most feared: the protracted occupation of Kashmir by India with no attempt to show that it enjoyed popular support.15

  Critics of hereditary rule like Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah also accepted that some form of popular endorsement was desirable. The problem was, and would long remain, how to make it convincing. That a formal plebiscite would, in fact, never be held was less because New Delhi resisted it than because, with its troops in permanent occupation, no such vote would be deemed free and fair. In effect Mountbatten’s insistence on formal accession as a prerequisite for intervention precluded his other condition of a democratic vote to endorse accession.

  Twenty years later, even Ghulam Mohamed could see little merit in the idea of a plebiscite. Sucking smoke from a clenched fist out of which protruded a perpendicular cigarette – he claimed it made it more like a hookah – he tended to see things in personal terms.

  ‘We trust Sheikh Sahib, see. He is Kashmiri. We vote for him, not for India or Pakistan. Kashmir is for Kashmiris. What need to vote for someone else?’

  At the time Sheikh Abdullah welcomed the Indian intervention. As the state’s Emergency Administrator, and soon Prime Minister, he would bestride the Valley’s politics and waste no time in introducing a radical redistribution of landholdings and other populist reforms. Given his appeal, his apparent approval of the accession could be taken to signify that of most Kashmiris. What need, then, for a plebiscite? Nehru’s confidence in the Sheikh seemed to have paid off. Delhi had cause to rejoice.

  *

  Karachi, of course, did not rejoice. News of the Indian airlift and of the state’s official accession brought howls of protest plus a demand from Jinnah for the Pakistan army to be immediately sent into the Kashmir Valley. Seemingly Pakistan was no sooner born than it was confronted with the prospect of a lobotomy. For if Nehru valued Jammu and Kashmir’s accession as corroboration of India’s secular stance, no less did Jinnah contest that same accession as contravening the two-nation principle on which Partition had been based. Moreover, without the ‘k’ of ‘Kashmir’, ‘Pakistan’ would be not just unpronounceable but indefensible. Its claim to be a homeland for all South Asia’s Muslim majorities lay in tatters. Worse still, the addition of Jammu and Kashmir so expanded India’s territory that on paper it now encircled northern Pakistan and abutted both the unruly tribal areas and an unpredictable Afghanistan. Pakistan’s security was hopelessly compromised. In the face of what amounted to an existential threat, Jinnah had had little choice but to order out the army.

  But his British Commander-in-Chief objected. The army wasn’t ready, he claimed, and anyway all those British officers on whom its formation depended would have to stand down if Pakistan invaded what India now held to be its own territory. War was risky, and it was potentially prejudicial to any favourable settlement. Under the circumstances, therefore, the most that could be done was to consolidate the gains already made by the Azad Kashmiris and their Pathan accomplices. Arms, ammunition, supplies and advisers would be made available to them and reinforcements allowed to reach them; meanwhile the government in Karachi would explore a variety of diplomatic options on their behalf.

  Six months later, in May 1948, by which time the Pakistan army was in better shape, the C-in-C did authorise a deployment of forces. But it was on the understanding that they were to avoid direct contact with Indian troops and simply deter any Indian encroachments into Pakistan itself. That might still involve their entering Kashmir territory, and it gave them no immunity from Indian air attack. Willy-nilly, India and Pakistan were now engaged in mutual hostilities that amounted to war in all but name.

  To Pakistan’s frustration over the uncooperative attitude of its British officers there was one notable exception. High in the valleys of the far north-west of Jammu and Kashmir, in what had been the British-leased Gilgit Agency, news of the state’s accession to India had gone down badly. The Gilgit Scouts, a British-officered frontier corps of battalion strength and mostly Pathan in composition, had already shown itself averse to being transferred from British command to that of the Dogra Maharajah. The threat that, following the Maharajah’s accession to India, it might now be incorporated into the Indian army, was the final straw. Having ascertained that both the local population and the assorted Mirs (rulers) of the neighbouring statelets (Hunza, Nagar, etc.) felt much the same way about Indian rule, the Scouts resolved to take matters into their own hands.

  With the active encouragement of their twenty-four-year-old commanding officer, a lanky Scots major called William Brown, on the night of 31 October they staged what Brown called a coup d’état. Claiming the support of all the region’s scattered peoples, the Scouts relieved Gilgit’s Dogra Governor of his authority, cut the telephone line to Srinagar, picketed all the main passes, found safekeeping for the region’s few non-Muslims and announced the formation of a provisional government. In a breathless telegram to the Chief Minister of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, Brown relayed the news: ‘Entire pro-Pakistan populace have overthrown Dogra regime.’ But this was misleading: according to the historian of the Scouts, Brown himself was ‘the only person in authority who had unequivocally declared in favour of Pakistan’.16 Others were toying with the idea of an independent confederation of Karakorum states; most were just happy to have cast off the Maharajah’s claim to sovereignty and forestalled that of India.

  For two weeks the fate of the region hung in the balance. Hunza and Nagar (north of Gilgit on the Chinese border) offered to accede to Pakistan, while Brown doggedly prepared the ground for the accession of Gilgit itself. India naturally suspected premeditation; it was claimed that, using Pakistan as a proxy, the British were up to their old game of geo-strategic management by reserving for themselves a vantage point on the so-called ‘Roof of the World’. But this scarcely tallied with Pakistan’s dilatory response to Brown’s appeals. Karachi was in a quandary. It was one thing to lend support to native Kashmiris in their struggle for a ‘Free/Azad Kashmir’, quite another to endorse an outright renunciation of Jammu and Kashmir’s integrity and accept the cession of a vast chunk of what was widely supposed to be its territory. The Gilgit populace might indeed be ‘pro-Pakistan’, but Karachi based its case on a still intact and unoccupied Jammu and Kashmir exercising its right, free of outside interference, to decide its future. A Pakistani acceptance of the cession of the Gilgit region would seem to undermine this. It would look as much like a piecemeal grab at the Dogra state as the Indian occupation of the Valley which Karachi was so bitterly contesting.

  On 16 November a Pakistani representative finally flew into Gilgit to oversee the administration; two months later Brown was replaced in command of the Gilgit Scouts by an Azad Kashmiri major. The status of the region continued unclear. Its peoples, having rejected Kashmir’s rule, were not willing to be tucked under the wing of the fledgling Azad Kashmir state (i.e. the ‘liberated’ areas of Poonch, Muzaffarabad and the eastern end of the Valley). They preferred Pakistan, and would accept whatever temporary tutelage it felt able to offer pending a general settlement of Jammu and Kashmir’s future. Winter was anyway closing the passes, and military operations were being wound down. According to Alastair Lamb, the forensic champion of the Pakistan case and bête noire of the Indian defence establishment, ‘The nature of the Kashmir war had, however, been changed fundamentally … it was impossible now to deny with any conviction that Pakistan had a legitimate interest in the Kashmir conflict which directly involved sectors of its sovereign territory.’17

  More obviously, a new and extremely challenging northern front had been opened in the Indo–Pak ‘war’; no longer was the conflict confined to just Poonch and the Valley. In May 1948, as the snows receded, the Scouts marched out of Gilgit and, joining with Azad Kashmiri and tribal forces, turned left up the Indus river. Baltistan was taken, and the only road from Srinagar to the Ladakhi capital of Leh was sev
ered. Ladakh itself looked doomed. Its monastic authorities, horrified at the prospect of being ‘liberated’ by fanatically Muslim Pathans, consulted their oracles but were ill-equipped to offer other than token resistance.

  Happily the lamas’ resolve went untested. In the nick of time Ladakh was reinforced by another airlift of Indian troops, many of them Nepali Gurkhas. The conflict was taking on a pan-Himalayan complexion. After further heroics and heavy losses, in October/November 1948 Indian forces reclaimed the road from Leh down to the Valley, although not Baltistan nor an inhospitable corner of northern Ladakh. These remained outside Indian control and, posing an ongoing threat to Ladakh’s lifeline with the outside world, necessitated a heavy Indian troop presence along the length of the optimistically named ‘Srinagar–Leh Highway’.

  By the end of 1948 an estimated 90,000 Indian troops were stationed in Jammu and Kashmir. The numbers opposing them must also have been in five figures. And already the climate was taking as heavy a toll as the fighting. Scaling altitudes of 3–4,000 metres, with all-year-round temperatures that plunged below –20°C, and over a distance in excess of five hundred kilometres, the new front taxed the stamina and resources of both sides. Their respective tasks had become both harder and less certain. No longer was it just a question of expelling ‘raiders’ from the Valley or abetting ‘freedom fighters’ in Poonch. The defection of the Gilgit region – or what Pakistan was now vaguely calling ‘the Northern Areas’ (of Pakistan? of Kashmir?) – had effectively split the state. It was not exactly a stalemate. The fighting continued throughout 1948; the pro-Pakistan forces, augmented by regular troops, planned an offensive into Jammu; the Indians hammered away at Poonch and reclaimed the road to Leh. But neither side was prepared for the massive offensive now needed to dislodge the other completely. It was time, high time, to talk.