Midnight's Descendants
Page 14
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Back in October 1947, when news of India’s intervention had first broken, not the least of Jinnah’s complaints had centred on New Delhi’s reluctance to communicate. It had failed to inform Pakistan of the Maharajah’s accession until after it had been accepted, and it had failed to give warning of the airlift of Indian troops until after it was under way. Both accession and intervention contravened the terms of Pakistan’s standstill agreement with the Maharajah; and neglecting to inform Pakistan of its proposed action was not how a fellow member of the Commonwealth was supposed to behave. Moreover, India’s silence looked to Pakistan like duplicity. For if New Delhi was so certain that Pakistan was responsible for the tribal incursion – the reason given for both the accession and the intervention – why had it not cautioned Pakistan that intervention was imminent unless the ‘raiders’ were recalled? Why too, after the intervention, was Nehru so reluctant to accept the advice of those who urged him to meet with Liaquat Ali Khan, his opposite number, and explain India’s position and bring an end to the fighting?
With Nehru unwilling to make a move, it had fallen to India’s Governor-General to break the ice. On 1 November 1947 Mountbatten had flown to Lahore for talks with Jinnah. Mountbatten explained that the Maharajah’s appeal and India’s lightning response had constituted an emergency situation. Srinagar had been under threat; its airport might at any minute have fallen to the ‘raiders’; the airlift of troops had therefore to go ahead immediately; there had been no time for consultation with Pakistan. Nehru had, though, found the time to alert the Prime Minister of Britain. In a communication dated 25 October (so after the Maharajah’s appeal but before the airlift) he had told Attlee that India was actively considering military intervention but that such a move was not ‘designed in any way to influence the state to accede to India’.18 Evidently the accession, far from being a prerequisite for intervention as Mountbatten maintained, was for Nehru just the icing on the cake. It could, then, have been deferred, and Pakistan could have been alerted.
Jinnah did not mince his words. He called the Indian fait accompli a clear case of ‘fraud and violence’, and insisted that only a complete withdrawal of Indian troops could now redeem the situation. Citing the case of Junagadh, he also indicated that Pakistan would not object to a referendum in Junagadh if a similar poll could be held throughout Jammu and Kashmir – but not while Indian forces were in occupation of the Valley and not while Sheikh Abdullah, supposedly India’s ‘quisling’, was in government. Only if both were removed would a free and fair plebiscite be possible.
Jinnah also objected to Mountbatten’s suggestion that the whole matter be referred to the United Nations Organisation. The UN was something of an unknown quantity at the time. It was barely two years old (it had celebrated its second anniversary on the day the Maharajah issued his appeal to Delhi). It had no permanent headquarters and no track record in such disputes. Mountbatten nevertheless persevered. With neither India nor Pakistan prepared to compromise, a third party’s involvement seemed to offer the only hope. Over several meetings in December 1947 he formulated an ingenious – possibly too ingenious – plan whereby both sides would embrace UN involvement, although for quite different reasons.
He convinced Liaquat Ali Khan that a plebiscite might indeed be the only way forward and that some form of UN supervision would be the best guarantee of its being conducted fairly. In assessing the prospects for such a plebiscite it was also likely that the UN would look into the status of Kashmir, the validity of the accession and the role of the Indian military. Meanwhile he encouraged Nehru to undertake the actual reference to the UN. This was to take the congenial (to India) form of a complaint about Pakistan’s support for the ‘tribal invasion’, and would be submitted under the terms of Article 35 of the UN’s charter. The article entitled members to alert the Security Council to any situation ‘likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace’; yet it gave the Council no right to impose a solution, merely to examine the situation and make suggestions for defusing it. India might thus register its plight as the injured party without exposing itself to any mandatory directives and with a fair chance that its complaint would be upheld. Hopefully this would also deflect attention from the disputed nature of the accession, the proportionality or otherwise of India’s intervention, and any other contentious matters that Pakistan might introduce.
If this was indeed the gist of Mountbatten’s scheme, it was well received. Alastair Lamb has likened it to the sort of arrangement sometimes favoured by divorcing couples when, to satisfy the requirements of the law, one party agrees to be portrayed as the transgressor and the other as the aggrieved.19 It was therefore not without an element of collusion that on 1 January 1948 an India seeking condemnation of Pakistan plus the withdrawal of its surrogate troops made a submission to the UN; and a Pakistan seeking the withdrawal of Indian troops as the prerequisite for a plebiscite coyly concurred.
Each side duly presented its case before the Security Council later in January 1948. But there events took an unexpected turn. The indictment of Pakistan’s interference as delivered by India’s spokesman was politely received, but elicited no demand for a Pakistani withdrawal until three months later. On the other hand, with Britain and the US as suspicious of Nehru’s relations with the Soviets as of his actions in Kashmir, the Pakistani spokesman’s five-hour denunciation of the Maharajah’s rule and of India’s perfidy was received more favourably. A Commission of Inquiry (UNCIP) was quickly set up and immediately got down to work. It would spend the next six months touring the region, verifying the facts of the dispute, offering advice and exploring a variety of possible solutions. ‘Not only has the dispute been prolonged,’ complained India’s Sardar Patel, ‘but the merits of our case have been completely lost in the interaction of power politics.’20
It was not just the Cold War that was responsible for the frosty attitude towards New Delhi’s case. In the course of 1948 events in Delhi had a significant bearing on international attitudes. On 13 January, in the midst of the discussions at the UN, the ailing Mahatma Gandhi embarked on another fast. This, his last great protest, had nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the Kashmir situation, but everything to do with the ongoing plight of Muslims in India and of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. For with the two countries now as near to war as made no difference, the loyalties of these minorities looked to rabid nationalists more suspect than ever. In India, and especially Delhi, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a youth ‘army’ with a Hindu-supremacist agenda and operating on what Nehru called ‘the strictest Nazi lines’, denounced the Muslim ‘enemy within’ and found enthusiastic support among the more embittered of the city’s post-Partition refugees.21
The Congress Party responded with a resolution in which it reaffirmed its commitment to a secular India of ‘many religions and many races’. But its current hostility towards Pakistan did not exactly bear this out. In retaliation for the Kashmir incursion, India was currently withholding Karachi’s share of undivided India’s military hardware plus some half a billion rupees owing to Pakistan from undivided India’s ‘sterling balance’ (funds, that is, accumulated by India in the UK for services rendered during the World War). Feelings ran high, and the RSS zealots were placated neither by the anti-Pakistan statements of a Muslim like Sheikh Abdullah nor the lofty talk of Kashmir as an exemplar of India’s multi-faith credentials from secularists like Nehru. In Delhi, Ajmer and elsewhere, Muslims continued to be attacked, their mosques trashed and their property appropriated. The Mahatma’s fast was thus a plea for religious tolerance, for an end to the victimisation of Muslims in India and for fair treatment in respect of the resources owing to Pakistan.
If Nehru’s secularism was of the head, Gandhi’s was of the heart. The non-religious Nehru opposed sectarian sentiment on principle; the intensely devout Gandhi condemned it by example as incompatible with that spirit of humanity he believed common to all faiths. And as usual Gandhi’s tactic worked; th
e frail embodiment of India’s freedom struggle got his way. Already perilously weak, after just five days he extracted the reassurances needed to end his fast; neither the government nor the nation could risk having the death of the country’s redeemer on its hands. The government capitulated over the sterling funds owed to Pakistan; and even the RSS signed the all-party declaration promising that Muslims and their property would henceforth be respected.
Not everyone, though, was reconciled. Rogue elements connected to the RSS made no secret of their belief that Gandhi had ‘blackmailed’ the government into ‘pandering to Muslims’ and so betrayed the nation. By ‘nation’ they actually meant the Hindu nation, and this at a time of war with the Muslim Pakistan. Such evident ‘treachery’ could not go unavenged. Within hours of ending his fast the apostle of non-violence narrowly escaped the attentions of an inept bomber; and within days he was dead, shot at point-blank range by a Brahmin assassin called Nathuram Godse. A one-time member of the RSS, Godse was neither an impressionable underling nor a crazed maverick. Until the day of his execution he would insist that by his ‘patriotic’ action he had rid the nation of a dangerous traitor.
The death of the Mahatma on 30 January 1948 shocked the world. When over the radio Nehru noted how ‘the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere’, he seemed to speak for all humanity. In the twentieth century perhaps only the shooting of President John F. Kennedy would attract more universal condemnation. In both cases, tributes to the man and grief at his loss were matched by horror over his death at the hands of a fellow countryman. Independence was supposed to consolidate nations; democratic accountability and liberal values were supposed to forestall violence. How could it have happened?
As the subcontinent’s first post-colonial political assassination – the first in what would become a dismal record of such outrages – it particularly appalled South Asians. Pakistanis, though noting how the ‘Hindu nation’ rhetoric of the RSS echoed the Muslim-nation thesis beloved of the Muslim League, regretted the loss of Gandhi’s bridge-building efforts and drew their own conclusions about India’s commitment to sectarian equality. Indian revulsion went deeper. It reunited both government and people in condemnation, and brought a strong reassertion of secular values. The RSS was banned, its leadership arrested; political parties that were sympathetic to it like the Hindu Mahasabha were discredited; and Nehru and Patel, whose differences over policy and tactics often mirrored those of Congress and the Mahasabha, were reconciled.
But the triumph of moderation was short-lived. A year later the ban on the RSS was lifted, its leaders released and its political affiliates eagerly re-entered the electoral fray. Meanwhile in Kashmir the fighting had resumed. At the UN the point-scoring went on; and in the far-off but not forgotten princely state of Hyderabad matters edged towards a new crisis.
There the Islamist paramilitary Razakars on the one hand, and the Indian government on the other, ratcheted up the pressure on the reclusive Nizam. His existing standstill agreement with Delhi was little respected. The Nizam’s advisers toyed with referring the matter to the UN; Indians blockaded the delivery of essential supplies to the state; arms were nevertheless supposed to be reaching it.
Perhaps more crucially, in June 1948 Mountbatten stood down as India’s Governor-General. With both Kashmir and Hyderabad in turmoil, he departed the scene of his earlier triumphs with a brace of resounding failures and a sense of good-riddance; the fate of the two most hotly contested of the princely states still rested in the balance. But as a result of Mountbatten’s resignation, New Delhi was relieved of the cautionary counsels of another respected architect of independence; and by the same token the Nizam’s hopes of sympathy and support from Windsor, if not Whitehall, were effectively dashed. ‘With Mountbatten gone, it became easier for [Sardar] Patel to take decisive action,’ notes Ramachandra Guha. This Patel did on 13 September 1948. Following violent Congress-led demonstrations within the state and a draconian crackdown by the Nizam’s security forces, regular units of the Indian army rolled across the border heading for Hyderabad city. Euphemised as ‘a police action’, the Indian offensive lasted just four days and was accounted a total success: the Razakars were routed and the Nizam acceded to India. Several thousand, both combatants and non-combatants, lost their lives in the fighting, though far worse was the sectarian violence that followed. According to the official but never publicised Sunderlal Report, in scenes reminiscent of the worst excessed in the Punjab, somewhere between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims were massacred by their Hindu neighbours in retaliation for the earlier excesses of the Razakars.
Pakistan, though ignorant of these atrocities, would of course protest against the accesion. It claimed, not unreasonably, that the Nizam had signed the Instrument of Accession under duress; the document was therefore invalid, just like that signed by the Maharajah of Kashmir; and lest anyone think differently, for decades thereafter maps printed in Pakistan would show a gaping hole in the middle of peninsular India where the erstwhile state had been. But in reality the Nizam had been no more enthusiastic about joining Pakistan than had Kashmir’s Maharajah. Indian spokesmen had magnified Hyderabad’s contacts with Karachi for their own purposes; and Jinnah had unwisely responded with occasional overtures designed principally to antagonise India. On one occasion he had famously declared that, should Congress lay hands on the state, one hundred million Muslims ‘would rise as one man to defend the oldest Muslim dynasty in India’. It was more bluster than threat; they had no interest in doing so and they didn’t.
Nor, as it happened, was Jinnah able to raise his own howl of protest over the ‘police action’ in Hyderabad. Indeed the Pakistani reaction in general was muted, the whole nation being plunged in mourning. This was not because of Hyderabad’s fall, but because of a far greater loss. For even as Indian troops crossed the border into Hyderabad, the Quaid-i-Azam lay dead in his Karachi residence. A combination of cancer, pneumonia and nicotine had finally felled him.
A Pakistan without its ‘sole spokesman’ was even more bereft than an India without its mahatma. Jinnah’s reputation was unassailable, though his legacy was far from certain. While credited with having fathered a nation, created a state and carved out a country, ‘the Great Leader’ had exercised control of its affairs for little over a year. A constitution had still to be drawn up, a capital chosen, and policy directives determined. He can scarcely be blamed if the nation he fathered proved so prone to fragmentation, if the state he founded would so nearly fail, and if the country he carved out would so soon be carved up.
Jinnah had died in the night of 11 September 1948, less than two days before the Indian assault on Hyderabad began. Insofar as Karachi’s incontrovertible tragedy deflected attention from New Delhi’s controversial triumph, the news was not unwelcome in India. But whether the near coincidence of the two events was in fact pure chance has yet to be revealed. India’s contingency plans for a military intervention in Hyderabad had been hatched as early as the previous March, although it seems unlikely that the actual invasion could have been mounted at just thirty-six hours’ notice. On the other hand, Jinnah’s worsening condition had been public knowledge since 1 September, on which day he had been rushed from his hill-station retreat to the gubernatorial residence in Karachi. This news of an impending crisis in Pakistan, if not the crisis itself, may well have triggered the build-up to the Indian takeover of Hyderabad.
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The move on Hyderabad, though immensely popular in India, did nothing to bolster New Delhi’s international bona fides in respect of Kashmir. UNCIP, the UN Commission for India and Pakistan, had now completed its enquiries and was flitting back and forth across the Atlantic while drawing up its proposals. A ceasefire being the obvious priority, a resolution to that effect was adopted in August 1948. But with both sides intent on last-minute gains in the field, Liaquat Ali Khan prevaricated over guarantees in respect of the plebiscite while Nehru toyed with the idea of partitioning the state. Not until 1 J
anuary 1949 did the ceasefire become operative. A UN Military Observer Group (UNMOGIP) was set up to monitor it and the plebiscite was supposed to follow, although no date was set and no agreement reached about the removal of troops prior to its implementation.
Meanwhile, in Indian parlance the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir became the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (or ‘J and K’), with Azad Kashmir and the Pakistan-controlled Northern Areas being treated merely as temporarily alienated territories. All the former princely states that had opted for India were now being absorbed into the constituent provinces (now known as ‘states’) of the Indian Union. J and K’s status was thus brought into conformity with them, despite the fact that its accession had yet to be endorsed by the plebiscite to which all were supposedly committed.
Nehru was still counting on the Sheikh’s popularity as India’s best guarantee of a plebiscite proving favourable. He therefore stood by the Sheikh when the latter’s radical land reforms alienated Hindu opinion, especially in Jammu, and when his populist rhetoric further riled the Maharajah. Though named sadr-i-riyasat (nominal head of state), Maharajah Hari Singh was being so blatantly sidelined by both Nehru and the Sheikh that he was beginning to regret his hasty accession. He therefore reminded Patel that the accession had in fact been provisional, and that it was high time to negotiate a permanent settlement with all options on the table, including that of independence. This threatened the entire Indian position in Kashmir and at the UN; it was quite unacceptable; the Maharajah must go. In May 1949 Sardar Patel advised him to take a holiday and, while away, to relinquish his role as Kashmir’s head of state in favour of his eighteen-year-old son. Hari Singh took the hint and never again set foot in the state. His son, Karan Singh, also got the message. Thereafter he would prefer life as a Congress stalwart and avid student of Hindu scripture to that of a gadfly in Kashmir’s constitutional ointment.