Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  8

  Ad Hoc Jihad

  A FAIRYLAND RINGED by Himalayan peaks and dotted with startlingly clear rivers and lakes, Kashmir seems too idyllic to be the source of decades of tensions, skirmishes, and militancy. Yet with the passage of time, memories of the unimaginable slaughter in the Punjab would fade into the subcontinent’s collective subconscious. Delhi’s Muslims would depart en masse for Pakistan; the Indian capital is today in many ways a Punjabi city, its culture remade by the hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Sikh refugees who took their place. In most current histories, neither Junagadh nor Hyderabad rates more than a few pages.

  The wound that keeps the paranoia and hatreds of 1947 fresh for both Pakistanis and Indians is Kashmir. The state has been the cause of two outright wars between their nations since 1947, and remains the likeliest spur to another. Without Kashmir, a border might separate the South Asian rivals today, rather than a violent, unbridgeable chasm.

  Jinnah had last visited Srinagar, the garden-filled playground of the Mughals, in the summer of 1944. K. H. Khurshid was then an eager, twenty-year-old local stringer for the Orient Press, the only Muslim-owned news agency in India. Each morning, Khurshid would climb into a small rowboat and glide across glassy, mist-covered Dal Lake to the Queen Elizabeth, the flat-bottomed houseboat where the Quaid spent several weeks relaxing.1 The young man faithfully delivered what Jinnah called “the gup”—the day’s gossip—and tried vainly to extract a newsworthy quote from the League leader. Jinnah, impressed by Khurshid’s persistence, hired him.

  Now, at the beginning of October 1947, Khurshid quietly returned to Srinagar on a mission. In recent weeks, Maharajah Hari Singh had been sending out disturbing signals. He had replaced his former, pro-Pakistan diwan with one who was known to have close ties to the Congress leaders. He had refused Jinnah permission to visit the state, even for vacation. Most worrying, on 29 September, the king had without warning released his bête noire—Nehru’s protégé, Sheikh Abdullah—from prison. Jinnah needed to know what was happening inside the palace in Srinagar.

  The news wasn’t good. “The position appears to be that the Maharaja is dead set against Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan,” Khurshid wrote to Jinnah from Srinagar on 12 October. “He is reported to have said that even though his body be cut into 700 pieces, he would not accede to Pakistan.”2

  Radcliffe’s award of Gurdaspur to India had made it possible for Kashmir to join either dominion. Pakistan still had the plainer case to make, and by many measures, the stronger. Kashmir’s population was more than three-quarters Muslim, a figure that rose above 90 percent in the legendary Vale. For five centuries, the lush Kashmir Valley, bursting with cherry orchards and saffron fields, had been ruled by Islamic Mughal emperors; Hari Singh’s Dogra ancestors had administered only the Jammu region until 1846, when the British had sold them the rest of the kingdom for 7.5 million rupees as a reward for their loyalty in the Anglo-Sikh Wars.3 Almost all of Kashmir’s economic life flowed up and down the rivers and roads leading into what was now Pakistan territory.

  On the other hand, if Kashmiris had been asked their opinion in October 1947, they might well have preferred to join India. The one-sided population statistics were somewhat misleading. It’s true that ethnically and culturally, Muslims in the southwestern Poonch region were almost indistinguishable from their compatriots across the border in West Punjab. But Jammu, the Dogra heartland, was nearly half Hindu. Other parts of the state, like snowy Ladakh on the Chinese border, contained many Buddhists. Even the majority who lived in the Vale were not orthodox Muslims: they practiced a softer, more easygoing form of Islam greatly influenced by Sufism.

  Most critically, Sheikh Abdullah’s pro-India National Conference was the only real organized political force in the state. The rival, pro-Pakistan Muslim Conference was “essentially defunct,” Khurshid admitted; most of its leaders were in jail.4 A free and fair election would quite likely have put Nehru’s ally into power. Certainly India, which remained home to tens of millions of Muslims even after the creation of Pakistan, could make a plausible case for the state’s accession.

  Khurshid’s conclusion was blunt. “In the light of the above,” he continued in his report to Jinnah, “I am personally of the opinion, Sir, that Pakistan must think in terms of fighting . . . as far as Kashmir is concerned.” Khurshid suggested a strategy similar to the one India was pursuing in Junagadh: a proxy war. “All that Pakistan has to be ready for in such an eventuality is to supply arms and foodstuffs to the tribes within and without the State who are already sharpening their weapons,” he claimed. He even had a commander in mind—the man Jinnah had earlier entrusted with reorganizing the League’s paramilitary. “I may say, Sir, that Major Khurshid Anwar (of Muslim [League] National Guards) is already in Rawalpindi and he can very well be trusted with the work of liaison.” Anwar just needed orders to move.5

  What Khurshid didn’t know was that the Guards commander had already received his orders. For the past month, while attention had focused on the drama unfolding in the Punjab, Delhi, and Junagadh, a struggle over the future of Kashmir had quietly begun.

  Back in early August, when he had met with Gandhi in Srinagar, Maharajah Hari Singh had still believed vaguely that Kashmir could remain independent, maintaining relations with both neighboring dominions like some Himalayan Switzerland. Inside the palace, though, his wife appears to have been pushing him to seek Indian protection. Then in early September, shipments of gasoline, sugar, and other vital goods that usually arrived via the western Punjab had mysteriously started to dry up. The king feared that Jinnah was deliberately turning the screws on him.

  At the maharani’s urging, Hari Singh had hired as his new diwan a Punjabi judge named Mehr Chand Mahajan, who was close to India’s new leaders. (Mahajan had argued the Congress case before Radcliffe’s Punjab Boundary Commission.) On 19 September, the diwan flew to Delhi to confer with Patel and Nehru. Kashmir, he told them, wanted to accede to India.

  The Sardar seized on Mahajan’s offer. Less than a week earlier, Patel had told Defense Minister Baldev Singh that he wouldn’t complain overmuch if Hari Singh chose Pakistan over India.6 But Jinnah’s power grab in Junagadh had changed Patel’s thinking. He immediately set about bolstering Kashmir’s defenses. The only “road” connecting the state to India was a barely usable jeep track that led north from Gurdaspur across numerous bridgeless tributaries of the Ravi River, up and over the 9,000-foot Banihal Pass—closed by snow several months of the year—and into Srinagar. Patel ordered crews to improve this pitted track. He arranged to send wireless equipment so that the short runway at Srinagar could be used through the winter, and to fly in loads of gasoline to make up for the shortfall from Pakistan.7 He told Baldev Singh to collect weapons for the maharajah’s army out of Indian stores.8

  Nehru wanted his ancestral land to join India even more desperately than Patel did. But he still did not trust Hari Singh, and he had no interest in propping up the unloved Dogra monarchy. If Kashmir really wanted to accede, Nehru wrote to Mahajan after their meeting, the king should first release Sheikh Abdullah and take steps to establish a popular government under his leadership.9 Only if offered by their own chosen representatives would any accession look legitimate to the Kashmiri people. This was not a matter of religion or ethnicity—it was about power and democratic principle. Reluctant to surrender any of his authority, Hari Singh balked at Nehru’s demands.

  The delay would be enough to seal Kashmir’s fate. For across the border in Pakistan, a parallel set of machinations were also taking place. A few weeks earlier, in the Poonch region, Hari Singh’s troops had put down a series of protests in favor of joining Pakistan. Poonchis were proud and tough; like the Sikhs, they had served in large numbers during World War II. They deeply resented the maharajah’s rule, not to mention the raft of new taxes that his administration had imposed after the war. There were taxes on cows and buffalo, sheep and goats, windows and hearths. There were taxes on imports and expor
ts, extra wives, and even widows.10

  Kashmir authorities estimated that at most twenty protesters had been killed in the unrest. Still, at the end of August, Poonchis had inundated Jinnah with telegrams urging him to back their petty rebellion.11 “Atrocious military oppression in Poonch,” one read. “Public being looted and shooted at random. Kindly intervene.”12 Preoccupied with the Punjab riots, the Quaid had not heeded the request.

  Taking matters into his own hands, a Poonchi named Sardar Mohammad Ibrahim Khan crossed the border into Pakistan in mid-September. A thirty-four-year-old London-educated barrister, Ibrahim was looking for weapons and Pakistani volunteers to help launch a full-scale uprising against the maharajah. In Rawalpindi, he met with Col. Akbar Khan, the director of weapons and stores for the Pakistan Army. In a memoir, Khan recalled that he put together a plan to divert four thousand rifles meant for the Punjab police to Ibrahim’s guerrillas, and shared the draft with a West Punjab minister.

  A few days later, sometime in the third week of September, Khan was summoned to a meeting at Government House in Lahore. Among those he claimed were present were Liaquat himself; Pakistan’s finance minister, Ghulam Mohammad; Guards commander Khurshid Anwar; and several provincial ministers and civil servants. “The conference lacked the businesslike precision that we are used to in the Army,” Khan—the only serving soldier in the group—noted diplomatically. “But it was to some extent compensated by the enthusiastic willingness” of the would-be conspirators.13

  At the time, Tara Singh’s Sikhs were still blockading Amritsar, and trainloads of dead Muslim children were rolling into Lahore. Liaquat allegedly jumped at the chance to strike back at India in Kashmir, even offering to try and procure some Bren light machine guns for the would-be rebels from American war dumps in Italy. (When they finally showed up these “Bren guns” turned out to be Italian-made Stens, with a range of only 200 yards.)14 No operational details were discussed at the meeting, and, Khan added, “in the atmosphere of cheerfulness and confidence that prevailed, it did not seem right for me to strike too serious a note by drawing attention to even such elementary matters as the need for ammunition.”15 But very soon thereafter, the Kashmir state forces began noticing armed irregulars coming across the border from West Punjab, launching hit-and-run raids in Poonch.

  Pakistan’s unofficial support for the attacks was hardly a secret, and it marked the first use of the armed proxies that Pakistan’s leaders would employ throughout the country’s history. NWFP governor Sir George Cunningham, who had replaced Caroe after independence, noted in his diary on 6 October that Pakistani officials were “wink[ing] at very dangerous activities on the Kashmir border, allowing small parties of Muslims to infiltrate into Kashmir from this side.”16 The rebels quickly announced the formation of a “Provisional Republican Government” in Muzaffarabad, the first sizable town after crossing the Jhelum River into Kashmir, and decreed that henceforth, “no citizen or any other officer or subject of the state shall obey any order issued by Hari Singh or any of his relatives, friends, or any other person acting under his instructions.”17

  The insurgents claimed that they had taken up arms to defend Kashmir’s Muslims against Dogra oppression. At the end of September, reports of Muslim villages being burned in Kashmir proliferated. Jathas from Patiala state and Hindu RSSS extremists had supposedly crossed the border and were massacring Muslims. The maharajah’s Dogra soldiers were accused of joining in. On 30 September, the British chiefs of the Kashmir Army and police both quit, saying that the queen’s brother was issuing orders to their men behind their backs.18 Hari Singh insisted that his forces were merely defending themselves against raiders from across the border in Pakistan. Mahajan and Liaquat began an acrimonious correspondence, trading accusations about who had first attacked whom.

  Given the paucity of unbiased accounts, the question—while endlessly debated over the next six decades—is impossible to answer. What’s important is that the confused and often hysterical reports coming out of Kashmir made leaders in both Delhi and Karachi intensely paranoid. The wildest rumors were easily believed. On 9 October, Patel received an intelligence report from a “fairly reliable source” who claimed that Pakistan had deployed over thirty thousand armed Pathans along the border with Kashmir. “It had been given out that they had been sent out for ‘defensive’ and not ‘offensive’ purposes,” the source noted, adding that local officials had been told to provide them with as many guns as they could spare.19 Nehru had received similar reports earlier, and had warned Patel that the Pathan tribesmen meant to infiltrate Kashmir quietly and seize power once snows blocked the road to India.20

  On the other side of the border, Jinnah, too, saw shadows everywhere. The release of Sheikh Abdullah at the end of September—clearly a sop to Nehru, although the maharajah remained reluctant to share power—seemed to foretell Kashmir’s imminent accession to India. A Pakistani military intelligence assessment concluded that if Pakistan did not act, India would seize the state as soon as the new road to Srinagar was completed.21

  Around this time—on or about 10 October—Pakistan’s defense secretary, Iskander Mirza, tried to brief the Quaid on the brewing insurgency in Kashmir. Liaquat and the others had approved a second offensive as well, north of Poonch, under Khurshid Anwar’s command. Anwar had indeed begun to rally and arm a lashkar, or levy, of Pathan tribal fighters from the NWFP to help unseat the maharajah.22

  Jinnah interrupted before learning more details of what would in effect be an invasion, by Pakistani citizens, of a sovereign state. “Don’t tell me anything about it,” he said, while making no move to stop the operation. “My conscience must be clear.”23

  A few hundred miles west of the Kashmir border lay another past and future trouble spot. The Pathan tribes that straddled the badlands of the Afghan frontier—birthplace of the Taliban—loomed large in the imagination of British India. Since the late nineteenth century, thousands of troops, including a young Winston Churchill on one of his first overseas adventures, had been deployed to keep them in check. The British exerted what little political control they had through payoffs to tribal chieftains, or maliks. Periodically, the subsidies proved insufficient incentive, and rifle-toting swarms of fighters would descend on Peshawar and other settled towns in the Northwest Frontier Province in search of loot. More rarely—but most dangerously—a rabble-rousing preacher would rise up and call on the devoutly Islamic tribesmen to defend their faith against the infidel British.

  During earlier terms as NWFP governor between 1937 and 1946, Sir George Cunningham had been renowned for his sway over these notoriously difficult figures. Among the dog-eared manila folders that contain Cunningham’s official papers is one dating back to the early years of World War II marked “Secret—In H.E.’s [His Excellency’s] personal custody.” It details a series of bribes authorized by the British governor to mullahs all along the frontier. In exchange, the clerics agreed to preach not against the Raj but against her enemies—first the godless Soviets and their then-allies the Nazis, later the brutal Japanese, and, after 1942, the rebellious Congress. In effect, Cunningham had bought himself a pro-British jihad. Even he had been surprised at the results. “In some areas,” the governor marveled in one note, “religious Talibs [students] were encouraged to go into the Army—a thing which, I believe, was unknown before.”24

  Now Cunningham was quick to recognize the signs of a new holy war developing. On 13 October, the governor noted in his diary that tribes in the Hazara region were rallying “for Jehad against Kashmir.” Preachers were inciting the volatile tribesmen to defend their fellow Muslims across the border: “They have been collecting rifles, and have made a definite plan of campaign.”25 Two days later, Cunningham learned the name of the man behind the covert operation. “A Punjabi called Khurshid Anwar, something in the Muslim National Guard, is on the Hazara border organising what they call a three-pronged drive on Kashmir,” he wrote.26

  A frontier lashkar was a fierce, uncontrollable thin
g. Whether driven by burning religiosity or visions of loot, the tribesmen were not likely to be satisfied with the kind of pinprick, cross-border raids on Kashmiri police stations that had taken place so far in Poonch. Some of those involved in the alleged plot would later claim that Anwar had been warned not to stir up especially unpredictable tribes like the Wazirs and Mahsuds.27 But on the other hand, he had clearly been picked for his frontier ties, having earlier helped to organize the League’s “direct action” disobedience campaign in the NWFP.

  Everyone involved in the plot also knew that the tribes were in a warlike mood. Since August, tribal maliks had been begging Jinnah to be allowed to go kill Sikhs in the Punjab. “I think I would only have to hold up my little finger to get a lashkar of 40,000 or 50,000,” Cunningham had written in his diary on 22 September.28 Now the tribesmen were hearing tales of Hari Singh’s troops setting fire to Muslim villages along the Kashmir border, driving refugees into Pakistan. Kashmir, wrote the Peshawar-based British diplomat C. B. Duke, “has always been regarded by the lean and hungry tribesmen of the North West Frontier as a land flowing with milk and honey, and if to the temptation of loot is added the merit of assisting the oppressed Muslims the attraction will be well nigh irresistible.”29

  Far from trying to head off the budding invasion, Cunningham noted in his diary, his own provincial officials appeared to be lending a hand. They had “sanctioned quite a lot of petrol and flour” to be dispatched from the capital, Peshawar.30 Trucks belonging to the paramilitary Frontier Scouts were transporting fighters from the tribal areas to the Kashmir border, 300 miles away. Police were guarding gasoline pumps in Bannu, on the edge of untamed Waziristan, and Peshawar to ensure that enough fuel was available. In Abbottabad, barely 30 miles from the border, the deputy commissioner was distributing “large quantities of grain . . . as rations for the tribal expeditionary forces.” “It was also at Abbottabad that the Civil Surgeon informed one of his official patients that he would be unable to attend to him for some time as he was off to Kashmir to establish advanced dressing stations,” C. B. Duke later reported.31