Part of the problem in Kashmir was the personality of Hari Singh himself. His Dogra family who, it will be remembered, had effectively purchased Kashmir from the British in 1846, were seen as interlopers. They could not command the sort of respect that rulers like Rajput princes could, families who had grown from their own kin and ruled them for centuries in what was perceived to be their common interest. Even his own son was strongly critical of the way he handled the coming crisis. His father could not, Karan Singh thought, ever accept that the British were going. He was ‘very insulated from the rest of India. One of the problems of feudalism is that you tend to get isolated’.6 Hari Singh’s trick when he didn’t want to do something or see someone was to feign illness, as Mountbatten and Ismay had discovered. The notion of an independent Kashmir allowed an indecisive man an excuse not to accede to either India or Pakistan.
Communal trouble had started in Kashmir in September in the district of Poonch, south and east of Srinagar, a particularly beautiful and remote area of lakes and hills where the mountain ranges start to give way to the plains. It was a strongly Muslim area with a long military tradition; estimates vary but it is thought Poonch contributed between 40,000 and 60,000 troops to the Indian Army in the Second World War. This meant that there was a considerable degree of residual military expertise. In late August and early September there were a series of Muslim protest meetings demanding that Kashmir join Pakistan. When the maharajah’s state forces tried to break these up on 26 August there was rioting and they began firing on the crowds, causing a furious reaction. By mid-September Poonch was in open revolt, the Muslim community were organised under an Azad Kashmir party, literally ‘Free Kashmir’, led by local barrister Sardar Mohammed Ibrahim, and the state forces were expelled apart from a besieged garrison in Poonch town itself. The Muslim irregular forces were led by a young landowner, Abdul Qayyum Khan, whose troops were around 75 per cent ex-regular soldiers and whose job was made easier by the state forces’ indiscriminate atrocities. Their motivation, Qayyum said, ‘was not so much to join Pakistan as to get rid of the Dogra monarchy’.7 At the same time there were atrocities against the non-Muslim population.
The situation was reversed in Jammu, with its Hindu majority, where Sikh and Hindu refugees from West Punjab had been heading since mid-August. Here the local Muslim population was less well organised. Tens of thousands were rounded up by the maharajah’s forces and told to start moving towards Sialkot in Pakistan. The resultant refugee columns were attacked, their property looted and their houses and farms taken over by Punjabi incomers. There was some cross-border support from Pakistan for the Muslim irregulars in both Poonch and Jammu, with stories of armed groups of up to three hundred men coming to their assistance and there was some sporadic assistance from the Pakistan Army. Pakistan had deployed troops into the border area to prevent raids by the maharajah’s forces into the Pakistani district of Gujrat. 11th Cavalry, a Pakistani armoured car regiment, for example, assisted Azad forces in taking Mirpur where they were besieging the Dogra garrison. Yet this fell far short of full intervention; Pakistan was simply not organised enough nationally to have effected this. Mostly these were sympathetic local groups coming to help their threatened Muslim comrades.
The more serious trouble, which was to lead to the coming crisis, started on 20 October. There was a well-established annual migration of tribesmen from the North West Frontier and the Afghan borderlands south at the end of the hot weather to find winter employment in the plains. This year they were driven on by the rumours of loot to be had as a result of the communal fighting, and also by stories circulated by men such as the Pir of Manki that Muslims were being massacred by non-Muslims. A large group of assorted tribesmen, known as a lashkar, had gathered near Abbottabad, capital of the Hazara tribal region and an important staging post north of Rawalpindi on the Srinagar road; it was named after Major James Abbott who had been the local British commissioner after the annexation of the Punjab. Initially it was estimated that there were about a thousand Hazara tribesmen, around five hundred Afridis and some Muslim League National Guards, although this number would soon swell to nearer seven thousand. They were travelling in a fleet of lorries and had a plentiful supply of arms and ammunition.
Instead of heading south into the plains, the lashkar, under Khurshid Anwar’s loose direction, turned north and east. On 22 October they sacked Muzaffarabad, wrecking and looting non-Muslim property, then headed due east across the River Jhelum to the small Kashmiri town of Uri which they reached on 23 October. Here they came up against an advance party of the maharajah’s forces, led by Brigadier Rajendra Singh, who had replaced Scott as the maharajah’s chief of staff. The Kashmiri forces were no match for the tribesmen, who significantly outnumbered them. Sydney Smith of the Daily Express was forward with Rajendra Singh and reported them covering the last few miles into the town in
one hour of non-stop gunfire. Houses on the route of their advance went up in flames and thick black smoke blanketed the valley. The raiders mopped up any Sikhs and Hindus who stayed behind in a desperate attempt to shoot it out. Then the firing died as looting began. Through field glasses I watched mobs of black-turbaned and blanketed figures rushing through Uri’s bazaar street. The raiders went on shooting up the town for three hours.8
Rajendra Singh sensibly withdrew his outnumbered force back east, down the road to Srinagar, now littered with refugees and the detritus of their flight. On 25 October the lashkar had reached Mahura, the site of Kashmir’s main hydroelectric power station. The same day Rajendra Singh was killed and, with the majority of their number still committed in Poonch and Jammu, the maharajah’s forces became militarily ineffective. The road to Srinagar now lay open.
Maharajah Hari Singh and Prime Minister Mahajan had been away in Jammu and arrived back in Srinagar on 23 October to be told of the invasion. Immediately they sent Deputy Prime Minister Ram Lal Batra to Delhi where he arrived the next evening. Nehru and Mountbatten were giving a dinner party for a visiting delegation from Siam when they were interrupted by the news. The new Indian Defence Council met the next morning. This body, recently established, was, like the Refugee Committee, chaired by Mountbatten at Nehru’s request. Nehru and Patel appear to have been rattled at the military failure in the Punjab and Congress’ lack of military experience was becoming evident to them. It was a providential choice as Mountbatten was, again, in his element, and in a position to offer the Indian Cabinet direct advice.
The Defence Council meeting on 25 October decided to rush arms and ammunition to the Kashmir state forces, ignorant of the fact that they had collapsed. There was much discussion as to whether India could intervene if Kashmir had not acceded; it was generally agreed that they could. Nehru was afraid that Jinnah had set Junagadh as a trap. If India had threatened armed intervention there to help a majority Hindu population, Pakistan would justify intervention in Kashmir on the same basis. They also decided to send that inveterate troubleshooter of all Indian problems in 1947, V. P. Menon, to Kashmir that day to find out exactly what was happening. An aeroplane was found and Menon, accompanied by a small army and air force delegation, duly took off.
They arrived at a deserted Srinagar airfield with no sign of any troops. Making their way to the modern and rather utilitarian summer palace beside Dal Lake, they found Hari Singh in a state of panic and about to flee. He had been holding some sort of durbar, an important ‘bi-annual event when he sat on a golden throne and everybody paid him homage’, remembered Karan Singh, who was in a wheelchair having hurt his hip. Suddenly Srinagar was plunged into darkness as the lashkar cut off the power supply. Then ‘there was this terrible cacophony of jackals, howling in the darkness. It was a really a very eerie, sort of weird moment’. Hari Singh said he expected the tribesmen in Srinagar within twenty-four hours and that he would do anything India might ask in order to save his throne. Lieutenant Colonel Sam Manekshaw, one of Menon’s party, had ‘never seen such disorganization in my life. The Maharajah was running
around from one room to the other. I have never seen so much jewellery . . . pearl necklaces, ruby things, lying in one room; packing here, there and everywhere. There was a convoy of vehicles’ outside. The court had commandeered what transport there was and left for Jammu. ‘All through that dreadful night we drove’, continued Karan Singh, ‘slowly, haltingly, as if reluctant to leave the beautiful valley that our ancestors had ruled for generations. Our convoy crawled over the 9,000 foot Banihal Pass just as first light was beginning to break’. His father travelled in stony silence. When they arrived next evening at the palace in Jammu he uttered one single sentence, ‘We have lost Kashmir’.9
Menon realised that Hari Singh had gone off his head. He also appreciated that there was now nothing to stop the lashkar occupying the capital and the vale, thus effectively denying Kashmir to India. He went to the government rest house to try to get some sleep; it was deserted, with nothing to eat or drink and no bedding. He decided to head back to the airport where the pilot said it was too dangerous to take off in such mountainous country until first light. He had a point; Srinagar airfield was basic in the extreme with just a grass strip and windsock. Menon also found the place now packed with desperate Hindu refugees clamouring to be taken out. A middle-aged Hindu lady approached him sobbing, begging him to take her two teenage daughters with him, pointing out in graphic detail, interspersed with shrieks and groans, what the tribesmen were sure to do to them were they to be captured. The kind-hearted Menon found space for the girls but their crying all the way to Delhi denied him the chance of catching any sleep on the flight. He arrived back exhausted to report to the Defence Council on 26 October.10
The situation that now confronted India was delicate. If they did not send troops then Kashmir would fall to the tribesmen, there would be much looting and killing and it would ultimately become part of Pakistan. However, if they did send troops then, given that Kashmir had not acceded to India, they were creating a dangerous precedent. They decided on a compromise. Troops would be sent but on the basis that they were there temporarily to save life and pending a plebiscite that would be held as soon as conditions allowed. In the meantime the maharajah should be asked whether he wanted to accede.
While the military started preparations, Menon was sent back again, this time to Jammu. When he arrived he found the situation even more chaotic than it had been in Srinagar. Hari Singh was fast asleep in his Winter Palace, a ‘Scottish baronial meets Hollywood Gothic’ building even uglier than the Summer Palace in Srinagar. Menon had him woken up. The maharajah said he was ready to accede at once. He then signed both an Instrument of Accession that Menon had prepared and a letter to India asking for military help. He told Menon that he had arrived just in time. Before he went to bed he had left instructions with his ADC that he was only to be woken if Menon returned from Delhi as that would mean India was coming to his aid; if he failed to return then the ADC had instructions to shoot him in his sleep. It is not clear which outcome the perplexed Menon might have thought the most advantageous.
Back in Delhi, at a third meeting of the Defence Council, the Indian government decided to accept the Instrument of Accession and confirmed the dispatch of troops. The military situation was, however, as delicate as the political, both practically and in terms of relations with Pakistan. General Lockhart, commander of the Indian forces, recommended sending a battalion of Gurkhas. The Defence Council did not think Gurkhas were appropriate; Nehru had a particular dislike for the Gurkhas. Lockhart then said there was a battalion of Sikhs in Gurgaon who could go. He pointed out ‘the extreme hazards of flying in troops’ on such an operation.11 Mountbatten supported him. There was no way of knowing whether Srinagar airfield was still secure, the troops could only take limited heavy weapons and no transport, resupply would be very difficult and Gurgaon would be left without any troops. The Cabinet were, however, determined and instructions were issued to Lieutenant Colonel Ranjit Rai and the 1st Sikhs. His orders were a model of brevity, if a little ambitious. He was told to ‘secure Srinagar airport, drive away the tribesmen and maintain law and order in Srinagar’.12
Major Ferris, who went with the battalion, thought the whole move was a nightmare. There was no information of any sort and nobody knew what was going on. They could only fit seventeen troops into each of the military Dakotas available, with the soldiers squatting on the back decks. Dakotas, the military DC3 that was ubiquitous in Asia after the Second World War, were the only aircraft that could land on Srinagar’s airfield. The air force didn’t have enough aircraft so they pressed civilian planes into service, ripping out ‘the luxury fittings and comfortable chairs’ and cramming in as many soldiers and equipment as they could. Many were flown by British and Australian pilots. Finally, with the 1st Sikhs crammed in, they taxied and took off north from Palam airport at first light on 27 October.
As hazardous as the military operation was thought to be in itself, it also posed a huge risk in relations with Pakistan. Nehru and the Indian Defence Committee were sure that the tribesmen’s invasion was inspired and supported by the Pakistan military. ‘It must’, he told his colleagues, ‘have the full assistance of the Pakistan authorities’. He said that he had information, the source of which was never forthcoming, that the invasion had been planned a fortnight previously at a meeting in Rawalpindi. What was happening in Junagadh was ‘intended as a screen for Pakistan’s operations against Kashmir’.13 In fact, although the Pakistan Army undoubtedly knew about what was happening, and Cunningham had got wind of it in Peshawar, they had not actually organised it. It is difficult to overemphasise the teething problems that Pakistan was having as a nation; to organise and plan an invasion of a neighbouring state by an irregular force, to equip it and direct it, was simply beyond their existing capability. Individual Pakistani officers, like Brigadier Akbar Khan, in charge of weapons and equipment in the new Pakistan Army headquarters, did undoubtedly assist, by sending the lashkar four hundred rifles intended for the Punjab police, and 11th Cavalry, the armoured car regiment which was already deployed along the border in Gujrat to the south, was sent to relay reports of the lashkar’s progress and, later, to cover their withdrawal but there was no full-scale structured support from the government as such.14 What Pakistan could have done, as Jinnah would later tell Mountbatten, is to have made it very difficult for the tribesmen to continue by sending ‘large forces along their lines of communication’.15 This did not happen as Jinnah’s reaction was to do something very different.
The conflict also put the high command of both the Indian and Pakistani armies in a difficult position. Both Lockhart, in India, and Messervy, his counterpart in Pakistan, were British officers as were many of their subordinates, although these now comprised a more dwindling component in the Indian Army than in Pakistan’s. Both also were theoretically still subject to the Joint Defence Council and Auchinleck as supreme commander; although Nehru had sacked Auchinleck in September, he had not yet gone and the Joint Defence arrangements from June were still in place, much to Patel’s fury. Auchinleck’s headquarters was, he told Mountbatten, ‘throttling the initiative of Headquarters Indian Army and acting as the advance outpost of Pakistan’.16 Messervy, who was absent on military business in London, had, like Cunningham, thought that something was afoot. Before he left he had seen Liaquat and told him that the authorities should do all they could to disperse the gathering lashkar. Lockhart had already had an altercation with Nehru over Junagadh. When the Indian government had first considered military action, Lockhart and his naval and air-force colleagues had written to Nehru stating that they belonged to ‘the British fighting services and it would be impossible for any of them to take part in a war between two Dominions or to be the instrument of planning or conveying orders to others should the operations now contemplated result in such a war, or appear likely to do so’.17
The Indian government’s reaction had been predictably furious. The chiefs of staff were ‘invading political ground’. They were in effect saying that
if ‘a political decision was taken they would not carry it out; this was highly improper and disloyal’.18 The chiefs had subsequently withdrawn their paper but the core issue remained unresolved. Now up-to-date news of what was happening in Kashmir was coming to Delhi mostly from Pakistan Army headquarters, where General Douglas Gracey was deputising for the absent General Frank Messervy, via Auchinleck’s headquarters in Delhi. It was a curious position when India and Pakistan could go to war, but that was exactly why those arrangements had been made. War was not something that was envisaged; the two countries had been intended to be two parts of the same and peaceful whole.
Jinnah flew to Lahore on 26 October, the evening before Colonel Rai’s Sikhs took off from Delhi. He would stay with Sir Francis Mudie for three weeks, partly because in Lahore he felt nearer to the Kashmir problem but also because he was too weak to move. He was confined to bed throughout although he ‘never, even by a sign, indicated that he would not shortly be alright again’, remembered Mudie.19 Jinnah’s reaction to the Indian move was, initially, to meet force with force. He told Mudie to bring Gracey to a conference in Lahore. Pakistani troops were to be sent immediately into Kashmir. The plan was that they would seize the Banihal Pass, through which Hari Singh and his entourage had just laboured, thus cutting the Vale of Kashmir and Srinagar off from Jammu and from India. It was, as a military strategy, rather sensible. By controlling Banihal the Pakistan Army would also have secured Poonch, and would be able to resupply their troops from Rawalpindi. To take it, however, would lead to a direct confrontation with Rai’s Sikhs even now en route to Srinagar and war with India.
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