by John Keay
No sooner, though, was one ‘separatist’ tendency silenced than another piped up in the formidable shape of Sheikh Sahib. To Nehru’s dismay the Sheikh too seemed to be having second thoughts, and this despite recent concessions. For without giving an inch on the legitimacy of the Maharajah’s accession (and therefore India’s sovereignty in Jammu and Kashmir), Nehru had accepted the Sheikh’s contention that Kashmiri opinion must be mollified by some recognition of the state’s special status. Article 370 of India’s 1950 Constitution did just that. J and K being as yet ‘not in a position to merge with India’ (as the proposer of the article put it), the state was to have its own constituent assembly, its own flag, its own Prime Minister (other states had only Chief Ministers) and its own commercial tariffs. And though its people were to enjoy the rights of Indian citizens, it was not necessarily to be subject to the jurisdiction of India’s Supreme Court. In effect, the state was being granted semi-autonomy. Its Prime Minister, the redoubtable Sheikh himself as of 1949, had a free hand, and he had begun to play it.
In October 1951 the Sheikh’s popularity won him a thumping majority in elections to the state’s constituent assembly. This should have been gratifying to Nehru as vindicating his longstanding confidence in his ‘twin’. But it was not. For already the Sheikh was, as Nehru saw it, ‘behaving in a most irresponsible manner’. In fact the Indian Prime Minister was becoming so exasperated with his Kashmiri counterpart as to complain that ‘The most difficult thing in life is what to do with one’s friends.’ While on a visit to Washington back in 1948 the Sheikh had apparently sounded out US representatives as to a possible declaration of Kashmiri independence. Nothing had come of this, nor of some desultory contacts with the leadership of Azad Kashmir. But, when addressing the state’s new constituent assembly, the Sheikh revived these options, declaring that it was the assembly alone – not New Delhi – that would determine J and K’s relationships, whether with India, Pakistan, or neither. On the whole he still favoured India, he said, but only if it remained true to Gandhi’s legacy of sectarian harmony and the even-handed treatment of India’s Muslims.
This emphasis on non-discrimination was in part prompted by divisions within J and K state. In Jammu the Praja Parishad, a party representing Jammu’s Hindu majority, opposed the Sheikh’s socialist policies as much as it distrusted his Muslim sympathies. It looked back to the good old days of its Dogra rulers and, finding no champion in young Karan Singh, turned increasingly to Hindu sympathisers in the rest of India. Foremost among these was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, an emphatically Hindu party newly formed by Dr Shyama Prasad Mookherjee in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination and the disgrace of the RSS. Mookherjee, a venerable Bengali and once of the Hindu Mahasabha, needed an emotive issue over which to improve his party’s electoral standing. Kashmir provided it. He took Nehru to task over the Indian military’s failure to secure all of Jammu and Kashmir state and over the constitutional indulgence that left J and K virtually autonomous under Sheikh Abdullah as its ‘King of kings’. Jammu wanted only to be integrated with the rest of India. How could any Indian patriot not sympathise?
Rising to his theme, and with his supporters now taking to the streets in Delhi as well as Jammu, Mookherjee visited the state in 1952 and then again in 1953. On the first occasion he condemned the Sheikh’s National Conference, praised the loyalty of the Praja Parishad and vowed to secure the release of those of its activists who had been arrested. On the second visit he was himself arrested and detained in Srinagar gaol. There, not helped by the conditions, he died of a heart attack and pleurisy. The Hindu cause had its first distinguished martyr. Vast processions accompanied his obsequies. Threats like those levelled at Gandhi during his final fast were made against both the Sheikh and Nehru. Clearly the non-communal India that Abdullah had made a prerequisite of J and K’s full accession had yet to materialise.
Coincidentally, in April 1953 the Sheikh welcomed to the Valley Mr Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois and US presidential candidate. Stevenson was on holiday, but nevertheless spent several hours closeted with the Sheikh. It was assumed that Kashmir’s future was discussed, though no explanation was forthcoming. Nehru again wrung his hands and wished himself rid of his troublesome friend.
Relief came three months later, when the post-Mookherjee disturbances were at their peak. On 8 August the Sheikh was ousted, apparently by a pro-India faction within his own party, and then immediately arrested. Nehru claimed to know nothing about it, but neither did he this time go rushing to his old friend’s rescue. Save for brief tastes of freedom in 1958 and 1964, the Sheikh would remain in detention for the next twenty-two years. And though the charges against him varied, none was ever proven.
To Kashmiris, the plight of the Sheikh seemed analogous to their own. They too were India’s captives, and the Valley was their prison. Makeshift arguments advanced by Indian spokesmen were treated with scorn. With the Maharajah now persona non grata and the Sheikh behind bars, the twin pillars on which the Indian case for incorporation rested lay at the bottom of Srinagar’s Dal Lake. The contention that the need for a plebiscite had been eliminated by a subsequent vote of the J and K constituent assembly in favour of integration was laughable. In Kashmiri eyes its supporters were little better than traitors. The occupying Indian troops remained in the Valley, Pakistan clung on to Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas, the imprisoned Sheikh was as popular as ever, the UN proposals lay gathering dust, and UNMOGIP merely monitored violations of the Ceasefire Line. ‘Few UN forces can have spent so much effort over so many years to so little purpose.’22 Even as the tourists kept coming and investment trickled in, Kashmir festered.
In India and Pakistan the issue refused to go away. But with both countries facing formidable obstacles to national integration elsewhere, efforts to resolve the conflict were sporadic and often hostage to domestic affairs. From the nation-building of the 1950s and early ’60s India and Pakistan would emerge as two very different states; and it was these differences – constitutional, international and psychological – that would propel Kashmir back to the top of the South Asian agenda and set both nations on a new collision course.
4
Past Conditional
Historical judgements are notoriously unreliable; often they say more about the present than the past. By the 1980s the period in India known as the Nehru years (1947–64) was reckoned to have been a nation-building success, while the Ayub Khan years in Pakistan (1958–69) were accounted a calamitous precedent. Yet by the end of the century it was the other way round: Nehru’s ‘Years of Hope and Achievement’ were being portrayed as ‘wasted years’ and the Ayub Khan era was hailed as Pakistan’s ‘golden decade’. A ‘Shining India’ poised to dazzle the world with its economic performance was wondering why it had taken half a century to get there, while a guttering Pakistan looked back with near nostalgia to the promise and comparative prosperity that had illuminated its adolescence.
Contemporary history, with its reliance on prolific comment but restricted-access documentation, can be made to say pretty much what one wants. All that can be safely ventured in respect of the Nehru and Ayub years is that, at the time, it is likely that neither matched up to any of the above characterisations. Wafts of doubt obscured their wider import. Images of the period convey as much uncertainty as confidence; their never-bright shades of Pakistani green and Indian vermillion have been touched up by posterity’s preference for hard acrylic glosses.
In Pakistan, despite the fervour engendered by statehood, there were grounds for gloom right from the start. In fact the country’s first crisis of confidence came almost immediately and, by furnishing a pretext for the Ayub era, contributed to the later contest over that era’s significance. Few if any new nations can have found the odds so heavily stacked against them. To the obvious challenges – those of agreeing a constitution, forging an administration, accommodating a deluge of refugees, bridging the 1,500 kilometres that divided the two halves of the country, integrating
peoples sharing neither ethnicity nor language, conciliating elites unaccustomed to accountability, planning a modern economy, balancing a hopelessly lopsided budget and conducting a war with India – to all of these was added the still greater conundrum of defining what the new nation actually stood for.
Even Jinnah seems to have had no clear vision of what sort of state Pakistan should aspire to be. Proclaimed as a haven and homeland for South Asia’s ‘Muslim nation’, the country would have been swamped had all sixty million of India’s Muslims moved there. Hence no appeal for such an exodus had been issued. On the contrary, in 1950 a pact with India was belatedly signed that discouraged migration, both of Muslims into Pakistan and of non-Muslims out of Pakistan. Luckily, in the immediate aftermath of Partition only a fraction of India’s Muslims had actually crossed the border. But of Pakistan’s slightly smaller non-Muslim community nearly all of those in its western wing had removed to India.
Since its eastern wing (in which Hindus still made up around 18 per cent of the population) was habitually discounted by Pakistan’s leadership, this rather upset the equilibrium whereby one country would treat its main minority – Muslims in India, Hindus in Pakistan – as ‘hostages’ for the fair treatment of its outnumbered brethren in the other. It also raised a question mark over what Jinnah had intended in his much-quoted speech on the eve of Independence about religion being ‘nothing to do with the business of the state’ (‘You are free to go to your temples … your mosques or to any other place of worship … we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State’). Was he indicating that an inclusive Pakistan was to be as doctrinally neutral as Nehru’s India? Or was he simply responding to the needs of the moment by reassuring the Hindu community that there was no need for them to leave? In later speeches he took a more partisan line, praising the Quran as a comprehensive guide to all human activity and referring to Pakistan’s future as that of ‘a truly great Islamic state’. He may have experienced a change of heart; more probably he was just glossing the obvious – that Pakistanis being mostly Muslims, the Quran must be honoured, and that the state could be described as Islamic in the general sense in which the British Isles, say, were Christian. And even supposing he had finally come round to the idea that the state must actually privilege Islam, what form should an Islam-based state take?
Jinnah himself, a Shi’i by birth but decidedly Westernised in his tastes and ‘famously ambivalent about his understanding of the relationship between Islam and politics’, offered no answer to this question.1 Nor seemingly did anyone else. According to Mazar Ali Khan, a distinguished Pakistani journalist (and the father of another, Tariq Ali), sometime in the late 1960s the question received a public airing. A.K. Brohi, the lawyer who would become ‘the midnight counsellor’ to President Ziaul Haq, placed an advertisement in the Pakistan press.
To anyone who could derive from the teachings of Quran a pattern for a constitution for Pakistan he would give a prize of rupees 5,000. This was when 5,000 meant something – that is before heroin [fuelled inflation]. But nobody did. I’m no scholar of Islam but this much I know: Islamic teachings offer nothing which could be read as a constitutional blueprint or a pattern for the government of a country.2
If anything, Quranic exegesis suggests that an Islamic nation state is a contradiction in terms. Sovereignty lies with Allah; laws are preordained by the sharia, whose interpretation rests with the scholarly ulama. ‘A role for the masses and their legislating representatives depends on the questionable assumption that this sovereignty has been devolved to the people by some divine dispensation.’3 Even then the recipient of this sovereignty is said to be the umma of dar-ul-Islam, or the worldwide Muslim community, a supranational entity that transcends all lesser ethnic, territorial and political loyalties. ‘[The] uncertainties that stemmed from conflicting perceptions of Pakistan’s identity as a nation-state defined by territorial borders and as a Muslim state created in opposition to territorial nationalism’ were not about to go away.4 Islam, instead of cementing Pakistan’s integration, would prove highly divisive.
Jinnah and the Muslim League had certainly established a state for over half of British India’s Muslims; yet Muslim doctrine, when not undermining that state’s legitimacy, directed its subjects to look beyond national frontiers and in a spirit of brotherhood to engage in the struggles of the wider dar-ul-Islam. Hence intervention in Kashmir, whether by warlike volunteers or the government, was as much about fulfilling a religious duty as securing more territory for Pakistan, and similarly in respect of confrontation with India over any perceived injustices inflicted on its Muslim minority. It is such contradictions between the universal Islam of Quranic orthodoxy and the Islamic nationalism of the Muslim League that led Farzana Shaikh, writing in 2009, to identify the search for a consensus about the meaning of Islam as ‘the cancer that threatens Pakistan’s body politic’.5
The problem had surfaced within weeks of Partition when in 1947 Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly had met to formulate a Constitution. Quranic reasoning, with its emphasis on the influential role of the scholarly ulama and its ambivalence about democratic sovereignty, had previously persuaded doctrinally-based parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami to oppose the League’s demand for a sovereign Pakistan. They were nevertheless keen to be consulted now that Pakistan was a reality. Well represented within the provincial assemblies and the Constituent Assembly, they would press hard for constitutional acknowledgement of Islam’s role and for the ulama’s right to advise on government policy.
The Muslim League, on the other hand, was at a considerable disadvantage. Unlike the Congress Party in India, it lacked organisational and ideological cohesion, and had been an effective force for barely a decade. At the provincial level, it had swept to power only in 1946 when the prospect of imminent independence had brought well-entrenched power-brokers in Punjab, Sind, the NWFP and East Bengal flocking to its standard. To them, the League was essentially a single-issue party; and once that issue – i.e. Pakistan – had been won, there was little to hold them together. Particularisms of language, ethnicity and social organisation, plus competition for jobs and investment, reasserted themselves. The League found itself with formidable opponents within its own ranks.
The League’s national leadership was at a further disadvantage in that it lacked an obvious power base in Pakistan. The arena in which Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan and most of the League’s other leading lights had come to prominence had been the All-India Muslim League, whose roots lay not in those regions in the north-west and Bengal that now comprised Pakistan but in India itself, especially UP, the Central Provinces, Bombay and Calcutta. To command support within Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly and the administration, the League’s central leadership was therefore obliged to conciliate not only the Islamic parties and various regional parties but also its own provincial leaderships.
Had Jinnah lived, his vision for Pakistan might have crystallised. His stature might then have ensured nationwide acceptance for whatever he ordained. As it was, his legacy was sufficiently ambiguous merely to fuel contention. As Prime Minister and, after Jinnah’s death, in effect President, Liaquat Ali Khan assumed the reins of power and the role of executor for the Quaid-i-Azam’s legacy. He too, while acknowledging the supremacy of Islam, continued to insist that the Constitution be based on sovereignty having been delegated to the people. This ‘naturally eliminates any danger of the establishment of a theocracy’, according to the Basic Objectives Resolution adopted in 1949 as a framework document for the Constitution. But the Objectives included no mention of secularism as such, and declared that the state should be Islamic, democratic and federal (the last being a reassertion of Jinnah’s pre-Partition preference for provincial autonomy). The secular-minded therefore saw the Objectives as a victory for the Islamic parties, and the Resolution was passed only on the understanding that new elections to the provincial assemblies would be held. These took place in 1952 and, though based on a restricted franchise, did nothing either
to ease the central government’s worries or to diminish the legitimacy of the new provincial assemblies as against that of the unchanged national Constituent Assembly.
In succession to Pakistan’s last British Commander-in-Chief, Liaquat appointed a like-minded general, the pipe-smoking Ayub Khan. Both men cultivated friendly relations with the US whose interest in Pakistan as a front-line state on the periphery of the Soviet Union promised more substantial dividends than anything on offer from the cash-strapped UK. Washington, though, was slow to respond; and barely two years into his rule, on 16 October 1951, while addressing a public meeting in Rawalpindi, Liaquat Ali Khan, like Jinnah, was lost to the cause. He was assassinated by a hired gunman who was himself killed in the hail of bullets that followed. ‘The nation’s martyr’ duly joined ‘the great leader’ in Pakistan’s founding mythology, but it was a measure of the country’s insecurity that the assassin’s paymasters were never identified. Possibly they objected to Liaquat’s US bias, possibly they feared that he was about to reverse it, or just as possibly they were serving some domestic interest that no one cared to probe too deeply.
Twice orphaned, still without a constitution, still without most of Jammu and Kashmir, and with trouble already brewing in its eastern wing, by 1952 the infant dominion looked doomed to the disillusionment predicted for it by India’s sceptics. In New Delhi, Nehru’s Congress, buoyed by a resounding victory in the first national elections, ruled unchallenged; but in Karachi factionalism and corruption discredited the League’s leadership and undermined the administration. ‘It is not surprising that Pakistan had six prime ministers and one commander-in-chief in eight years (1950–58) whereas in the same period India had one prime minister and six commanders-in-chief.’6 The institutional balance of power was already shifting decisively north, away from the political manoeuvring in Karachi to the shady swards of the military cantonments in Rawalpindi. In 1951 a bureaucrat with military connections took over as Governor-General, and in 1953 another, the ex-Ambassador to the USA, was installed as Prime Minister. Although neither had ever stood for election, their representative credentials were not that much worse than those of Constituent Assembly members who had been indirectly chosen by the provincial assemblies, themselves elected on a limited franchise back in 1946 when Pakistan was just an exciting slogan. ‘No more representative than it was sovereign, the Constituent Assembly was thus doubly vulnerable.’7