by John Keay
In a final throw of the dice, Nehru now appealed for direct US intervention. No US air strikes were forthcoming, but transport aircraft were supplied and the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise was diverted to the Bay of Bengal. Bombing raids on Calcutta were anticipated. ‘THIS IS TOTAL WAR’, declared a Bombay weekly.9
But even as these plans were being laid, they were becoming redundant. For on 21 November 1962 the Chinese again took New Delhi by surprise. Instead of pushing down into Assam, let alone bombing Calcutta, they announced a unilateral ceasefire, to be followed by an unconditional Chinese withdrawal to the positions occupied in 1959. In other words they would pull back to the McMahon Line in the east while hanging on to the Aksai Chin in the west.
Though this was precisely what Beijing had been hinting at from the start, it was all so unexpected in India that Nehru scarcely knew how to respond. Instead he asked for clarification while he played for time and juggled with platitudes. The US and the Soviets urged acceptance. So, given the state of his forces, did India’s Chief of Staff. The ceasefire was therefore tacitly observed and the Chinese duly pulled back.
But public opinion as represented in Parliament and the press detected just another humiliation. Indian-claimed territory, although regained in NEFA, was being surrendered in Ladakh, as was any chance of avenging the recent string of defeats and so redeeming the nation’s honour. Nehru had promised that a peace-loving India, once aroused, would surprise its foes and that ‘the war with China will be a long-drawn-out affair [and] may take years’. But the balloon of war hysteria had no sooner been launched than it was being burst. With the enemy contemptuously turning its back, a deflated India was left to lick its wounds and rue its loss of reputation. What had been billed as a ‘Chinese invasion’ had turned out to be merely a punitive exercise. Prisoners of war taken by the Chinese were swiftly repatriated, and captured vehicles were first cleaned and then left parked in line to await their Indian drivers. The war had impinged on no centres of population. It had, if anything, improved the local infrastructure. And it had lasted just thirty days.
To explain the Chinese retraction, it was suggested that with the onset of winter the Chinese high command had become mindful of the logistical problems posed by trans-Himalayan supply lines. Or perhaps it was the threat of US intervention that had done the trick. Perhaps, too, Moscow had mended its crumbling fences with Beijing long enough to exert pressure on behalf of its Indian acolyte. Even more improbably, perhaps the strength of Indian resistance and the spectacle of national mobilisation had prompted second thoughts in Beijing. Anything was better than the admission that around 3,000 Indian lives (and possibly as many Chinese) had been lost, and the nation humbled, all because New Delhi had consistently misread Chinese intentions.
Nehru never fully recovered from the shock and ‘hurt’ of the war. A year later he suffered a stroke, and in May 1964 he would die. ‘Wasted’ or not, the Nehru years ended on a sour note. While in effect accepting the terms of the Chinese withdrawal – including a twenty-mile exclusion zone either side of the 1959 lines of occupation – India had continued to decline any talks that might lead to recognition of the de facto frontier or to its demarcation. Subsequent governments would follow this example. Any agreement that implied the concession of Indian territory would remain anathema. Indian maps still showed the Aksai Chin as Indian territory, just as they showed Azad Kashmir and Pakistan’s Northern Areas as Indian territory. But the Chinese retained control. In 2011 their Xinjiang–Tibet road was being upgraded, and in 2012 they announced plans for a space observatory in the Aksai Chin.
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Ironically, in the same way as a sharp reality check in the form of military defeat heralded the end of the Nehru era in India, so would a similar defeat signal the end of the Ayub Khan era in Pakistan. The wildly divergent trajectories of the two nations often obscure an underlying parallelism. But in Pakistan’s case the consequences of a battlefield reverse, while dire for President Ayub Khan, would be even worse for Pakistan as a whole. India had rallied as one in the face of an external threat; as a result of another, Pakistan would be slowly sundered in two. A second partition loomed, and the very existence of ‘Pakistan as a whole’ was about to be challenged.
In Pakistani eyes the culprit, inevitably, was India. Yet if any Pakistani leader appreciated the need for détente with India, it was Ayub Khan. Head of state in his role of Chief Martial Law Administrator, and head of the armed forces in his assumed rank of Field Marshal, Ayub was virtually unchallenged during his first four years in power (1958–62). Without prejudice to Pakistan’s stance on Kashmir, he could – and did – attempt to normalise relations with India. In 1959, as China’s Aksai Chin road became common knowledge, he proposed a joint Indo–Pak defence pact against external aggression. ‘Of course I wanted the future of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to be decided according to their wishes,’ he would later recall, ‘but I was … also working for co-existence, for relaxation, and for understanding.’10 It came to nothing. Despite the Chinese threat, Nehru chose to interpret the offer of a joint defence arrangement as a bid to undermine his non-alignment and even to insinuate Pakistani troops into India. Instead, New Delhi offered a no-war pact. But at the time this was unacceptable in Pakistan: it would preclude the freedom of action deemed essential by the more vulnerable of the two nations, and it might be interpreted as a weakening of Karachi’s support for the Kashmiris.
Four years later, in 1962–64, a resolution of the Kashmir issue itself looked within reach. The initiative had come from the US and the UK as a direct result of the Sino–Indian war. In return for supplying India with arms, and with a view to a united Indo–Pak front against the Chinese, the Western powers encouraged Nehru to enter into negotiations with Pakistan. This meant, above all, revisiting the question of Kashmir. Indeed, it was ‘one of the rare occasions when [the Indians] were obliged to depart from their established position over Kashmir’, this being ‘that any discussions in some way implied that the status of Jammu and Kashmir was in doubt’.11 Six rounds of talks at ministerial level aired the options. They included some form of shared sovereignty over the whole state (which appealed to neither India nor Pakistan) and some form of partition (India would settle for the existing ceasefire line, Pakistan for nothing less than the whole of the Valley). The gap was as wide as ever. None proved acceptable.
Meanwhile Ayub Khan and the young Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, his Foreign Minister as of 1963, had followed Nepal’s example by normalising relations with China in respect of their shared border. As inaccessible as any in the Himalayas, the border in question was of course that of the Northern Areas, a region which India still regarded as part of its J and K state, and which even Pakistan regarded as subject to whatever settlement might eventually be agreed for the state as a whole. According to India, the new Sino–Pak agreement involved bartering away 7,000 square kilometres of Indian territory in return for Chinese support of Pakistan’s claim to Jammu and Kashmir. According to Pakistan, India’s notions of the state’s extent were as excessive in the north as in the Aksai Chin: no territory had been ceded and some had in fact been gained. The spat did nothing to improve the chances of agreement over Kashmir, nor to reassure the Western powers.
It did, though, confirm that the Karakorums were south of the border, and that the world’s second highest mountain was therefore within the Northern Areas. But because the Northern Areas were themselves contentious, any attempt to give the mountain a name was rejected as premature. It remained just ‘K2’, the designation given it by the surveyor who first plotted its position in the 1860s.
Within Kashmir nothing much changed until, in the winter of 1963–64, a treasured Muslim relic, a hair from the Prophet’s beard, disappeared from its eponymous Hazratbal, a mosque just outside Srinagar. It was assumed it had been stolen, and Kashmiri Muslims readily accused Hindu zealots of being responsible. Angry crowds took to the streets throughout the Valley. Government forces responded with teargas and bullets
. Although the relic mysteriously reappeared, Kashmiri lives had been lost to Indian firepower, and for once Kashmiris had spoken out: evidently they were no longer under any illusions about the shortcomings of Indian secularism. Nor were their Muslim co-religionists in Pakistan. Even in East Pakistan, a province so remote from Kashmir that it seldom shared in the national obsession with that state, Muslims were so incensed by the relic’s theft and by India’s heavy-handed treatment of the protesters that they turned on Hindus in Khulna and Jessore. Some hundreds of thousands duly fled towards the porous border into India as another wave of Bengali migration got under way. This was greeted by another outpouring of anti-Muslim communalism in India itself.
Partly to placate Kashmiri opinion, partly to right an old wrong, a Nehru chastened by the Chinese incursion had now agreed to the release of Sheikh Abdullah. During his six years behind bars the ‘Lion of Kashmir’ had been convicted of no crime; indeed, vindicated by his acquittal, he was now more respected than ever. He returned to the fray determined to convince his one-time friend Nehru to review what he called the ‘Kashmir problem’. In Delhi he was Nehru’s guest, and according to the Sheikh, the suggestion that he visit Pakistan to convince Ayub Khan to open negotiations came from Nehru. According to others, ‘it was Bhutto who stole a lead on the Indian leaders’ by issuing the invitation.12 Just back from New York, where, in the course of the UN’s 110th debate on the issue, he had excoriated the West for its inaction in Kashmir, Bhutto was now making the running on Kashmir; but Ayub Khan approved. In May 1964 the Sheikh flew to Rawalpindi and duly received a tumultuous welcome on what was his first and only visit to his Pakistani neighbour.
In amicable exchanges lasting a week, Sheikh Abdullah hinted at Nehru’s more open-minded stance while registering his own opposition to any division of the state. Rather did he propose demilitarising Jammu and Kashmir and restoring its integrity within a tripartite confederal arrangement consisting of India, Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir. This was thought impractical by Ayub, as well as being detrimental to Pakistan’s sovereignty. But a proposal for the first ever heads-of-government talks on Kashmir was agreed: Ayub in person would go to New Delhi to consult with Nehru. It was the most promising development in sixteen years of confrontation.
Tragically, it came too late. Before the month was out, Nehru suffered a second stroke and died within days. Bhutto and the Sheikh did meet up in Delhi, but it was for the Indian Prime Minister’s obsequies. The initiative then lapsed. Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, lacked the stature or the commitment to pursue it. Indeed, he approved further moves to integrate J and K state into the Indian republic, and in 1965 authorised the re-arrest of the Sheikh. Foreign Minister Bhutto responded by threatening ‘retaliatory steps’. The year thus ended not with rapprochement but with the Sheikh facing further detention, India and Pakistan more suspicious of one another than ever, and Bhutto promising ‘a thousand-year war’ to ‘liberate’ the Kashmiris.
Yet Ayub’s Pakistan and Nehru’s India were not incapable of mutual accommodation. A no less vital and contentious issue had already been partially settled. This concerned the flow of water to the irrigation-dependent farmlands on either side of Radcliffe’s Partition line in the Punjab and Bengal. In essence the new frontier sliced through the Indus river and its tributaries in the west, just as it did the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers in the east, so giving upriver India a stranglehold on the lifeblood of Pakistani agriculture. The problem had been recognised in 1947. Minor adjustments had been made by Radcliffe to ensure that the headworks of some of the affected canal schemes stayed within the territory of those dependent on them; and an arrangement based on previous usage plus an annual subvention from Pakistan had been accepted as a temporary expedient. Pakistan was happy to extend the principle of previous usage, provided that the supply could be guaranteed. But India, anticipating heavier demand from the extension of irrigation to the dry regions of south-eastern Punjab (Haryana) and Rajasthan, preferred a straight division of the waters: of the six main Indus basin feeders, the three more westerly rivers (Indus, Jhelum and Chenab) might go to Pakistan, but the three more easterly (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej) must go to India.
Discussions had opened in 1949, but in countries where around 80 per cent of the population depended on agriculture, the issue became heavily politicised. No government could afford to alienate rural voters by making concessions perceived as prejudicial to their crops. On the other hand, Pakistan clearly needed some guarantee that it would not be held to ransom by India, while India was understandably reluctant to surrender so obvious a bargaining counter. The talks dragged on until 1951, with much acrimony and minimal progress.
In 1952 they were revived on the initiative of the World Bank. Again agreement proved elusive until, in 1954, the Bank came up with its own proposal. Pakistan, already the recipient of much US aid and weaponry, had just officially aligned itself with Washington by signing a treaty of friendship and joining SEATO; the Bank’s deeper involvement, not to mention its funding, could therefore be read as a quid pro quo. But India continued to insist on a division of the main feeder rivers, and Pakistan on its prior right to water from all of them. After several more years of argument, it was the engineers who came up with a compromise, and it was Ayub Khan’s dictatorial rule that silenced the usual political opposition to it in Pakistan.
In signing the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960, Ayub and Nehru endorsed one of the very few international water agreements to be reckoned an abiding success. Neither two wars nor later near-wars, and neither the continued tension over Kashmir nor sundry terrorist outrages, would interrupt the operation of the treaty. To those who supposed India and Pakistan incapable of sharing anything, the slosh of the sluices was a salutary reminder that enmity need not inhibit development.
The treaty conceded India’s argument for exclusive rights to the three eastern rivers. On the other hand it also awarded to Pakistan a one-off payment for relinquishing them, plus an elaborate system of canals, dams and reservoirs designed to offset the loss of the eastern rivers by diverting water from its western rivers to the areas affected. More important still, it set up a permanent commission to monitor the agreement, and procedures for the settling of disputes. Both have been sorely tested over the years. Moreover, the treaty applied only to the Indus basin; in the east there was no such agreement on apportioning the waters of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra between India and Pakistan. There India’s construction of, for example, the Farakka barrage (to divert the main flow of the Ganges down the Hooghly river to Calcutta), would antagonise East Pakistanis and then Bangladeshis. In fact, Karachi’s failure to defend the water rights of its eastern province with anything like the energy devoted to those of its Punjab province rated highly among the grievances being vehemently aired in Dhaka.
The Indus Waters Treaty would serve its purpose well, and would have interesting side effects. Central to Pakistan’s acceptance of it was the construction of the Mangla dam across the Jhelum at a point where that river emerges from Azad Kashmir into Punjab province. Three kilometres long and thirty-eight metres high, with a hydro-electric capacity of 1,000 megawatts, the dam was inaugurated in 1967 and was one of the largest then built. The World Bank and the international community shouldered the brunt of the expense, leaving Pakistan to bear the human cost, which was considerable. The Mangla reservoir flooded an area of around 250 square kilometres, most of it in Azad Kashmir. The important town of Mirpur was completely inundated as were countless villages. In all some 100,000 people were displaced, most of whom either moved to the cities of the Punjab or emigrated, their principal destination being Britain.
Under a work-voucher scheme, admission to the UK of Commonwealth citizens was comparatively unrestricted in the early 1960s. Moreover, Mirpuris had already established some links with the country through pre-war employment in shipping and wartime service in British India’s armed forces. Partition and the 1947–49 war in Kashmir had led others to migrate, and the Pakistani
government now endorsed further migration as a solution to the displacement caused by the dam. There ensued a rapidly growing exodus from the affected Mirpur area to Pakistan’s Punjab and to the cities and mill towns of northern Britain. The scale of this migration could hardly compare with the upheavals occasioned by Partition, yet its narrow focus and international character highlighted certain specifics of the post-Partition diaspora, and had a notable impact in parts of the UK.
With the addition of spouses and dependants, migrants of ‘Pakistani’ origin would come to constitute the UK’s largest South Asian community; and of these so-called British Pakistanis, ‘somewhere in the region of two-thirds [were] in fact of Azad Kashmir origin’, mostly from Mirpur.13 The majority of the UK’s South Asian intake thus came to consist not, as commonly supposed, of Pakistani Punjabis, but rather of Mirpuri Kashmiris, people who, though seldom Kashmiri-speakers, hailed from what was once part of the troubled Poonch region of Jammu and Kashmir state and was now Azad Kashmir.
Similar source-specific and destination-specific flows of migration would characterise the whole diaspora. In the UK, Sikh immigrants, many from Jalandar, would make for west London while East Bengalis would concentrate in parts of east London. Among the latter, whether known as East Bengalis, East Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, over 95 per cent originated from Sylhet, a district of Assam during British rule but which had been detached in 1947, when its Muslim-majority areas voted to join Pakistan. Like Mirpur and like the Gurkha recruiting districts in Nepal, Sylhet was an agriculturally marginal region with a large percentage of owner-cultivators and a tradition of work-seeking away from home. But while Mirpuris and Gurkhas had often enlisted in the British Indian army, Sylhetis had invariably opted for the navy and especially the merchant navy. Arriving in London’s dockland, some had jumped ship and settled there. The skills learned at sea in engine rooms or galleys enabled them to find work in the engineering and catering industries.