Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  Only two Pakistan officials—both Britons—appear to have made any minimal attempt to halt the invasion. On Friday evening, 17 October, Cunningham called in his chief minister, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, and “faced [him] with everything I knew about Kashmir,” asking point-blank “whether he was in it.” A Kashmir-born barrister with a wide, friendly face, Qayyum was an opportunist above all. He had belonged to the Congress until the 1945–1946 elections, when he had seen the writing on the wall and switched sides. Now Qayyum played innocent, saying that while he personally believed it would be a “very good thing if Kashmir could be filled up with armed Muslims to the greatest possible extent,” officially civil servants and the police should of course “give no support or sympathy to the movement, and prevent any kind of mass movement towards Kashmir.”32

  Unpersuaded of his chief minister’s sincerity, Cunningham phoned Gen. Sir Frank Messervy, now Pakistan’s commander in chief, on Saturday.33 Messervy—not coincidentally, he later suspected—had just been ordered to return to England to beg for more arms for Pakistan’s army. He had heard some of the same reports as Cunningham, and agreed to take up the matter with Liaquat the following day before flying to London.

  Liaquat was bedridden when he met Messervy on Sunday, having suffered a massive coronary thrombosis earlier in the week. From his sickbed, he reassured the British general that there had been no change in Pakistan’s policy of noninterference toward Kashmir. The prime minister was similarly unperturbed when Cunningham rang up on Monday, 20 October, to report that over a thousand tribesmen had left that morning for the Kashmir border. Liaquat said he saw no need to say anything publicly about the matter, nor for the government to try and intercept the fighters.34

  By this point, Pakistani officials had had at least a week to put a stop to Anwar’s jihad. Jinnah later argued that there would have been no way to hold back the tribesmen other than to have the army shoot them. “The result,” Cunningham wrote to Mountbatten several months later, “would without a particle of doubt have been such an outburst of popular feeling in the Province that not one of our Hindus and Sikhs (I suppose 120,000 of them) would have been left alive.”35 The fact that no one bothered to alert Hari Singh to the storm headed his way, however, suggests that Pakistan’s leaders were at the very least curious to see what the lashkar could accomplish. On 20 October, Jinnah drafted an uncharacteristically silky note—which, of course, he later released to the press—inviting the Kashmir diwan, M. C. Mahajan, to come to Karachi for a friendly visit.36 The letter would be Jinnah’s alibi, proof that he had gone out of his way to seek a peaceful rapprochement.

  Khurshid Anwar led his column of fighters across the rushing, mineral-blue Jhelum River before first light on Wednesday, 22 October. When Cunningham had the news relayed to Liaquat’s secretary, the aide asked only two questions: “How many men have we there?” and “Are they getting supplies all right?” The next day, Liaquat himself went on the radio to reaffirm Pakistan’s neutral stance toward Kashmir. He made no mention of the lashkar, whose assault had not yet been reported. “This was a pleasant little bit of comedy to start the day with!” Cunningham recorded.37

  Over the next twenty-four hours, a motley cavalcade of vehicles rumbled into Hari Singh’s kingdom—jeeps, station wagons, military trucks, and ranks of dented, smoke-belching buses flying green-and-white Pakistan flags. Cunningham thought the lashkar probably numbered some two thousand frontier tribesmen, another two thousand from the Ha­zara district bordering Kashmir, and “many thousands” of gunmen from West Punjab.38 Other estimates vary widely. A British businessman, Wilfrid Russell, bumped into the convoy on the Grand Trunk Road near the village of Hassan Abdal. A uniformed Pakistani policeman was calmly directing the stream of vehicles eastward. Russell’s driver strolled over and asked the officer where the column was headed. “Kashmir, sahib,” the driver reported, grinning, when he returned to the car.39

  The rebel fighters displayed little organization and even less discipline. Each petty mob of guerrillas boasted its own “commander.” They were fearsome in appearance, though, with matted beards and rough turbans tied loosely around their heads—and they were remorseless in their advance. Within a day, the lashkar had secured Muzaffarabad and pressed on toward the capital. “We shot whoever we saw,” an Afridi fighter told the British journalist Andrew Whitehead, many decades later. “We didn’t know how many were killed. We forced Hindus to run for their lives.”40

  The maharajah’s army crumbled quickly. Many Muslim soldiers switched sides. The rest, battling amid the narrow, rocky gorges of the Jhelum Valley, could not slow the world’s best mountain fighters. At Uri, “the tribesmen covered the last three miles to the town in one hour of non-stop gunfire, which rolled away then came tumbling back from 10,000 ft. snow-capped peaks,” wrote Daily Express reporter Sydney Smith, who witnessed the attack. Through field glasses Smith watched “mobs of black-turbaned and blanketed figures rushing through [the] bazaar street,” seizing the loot they had been promised in lieu of pay.41 After they had stripped Uri’s shops bare, the tribesmen resumed shooting up the town, massacring what remained of its Hindu and Sikh population. Before them, the road to Srinagar filled with terrified refugees.

  Smith was the only journalist on the scene. Remarkably, no word of the invasion emerged from Kashmir for an entire day, then two. When correspondents in Lahore tried to wire out reports of the fighting on Friday, 24 October, Pakistani officials blocked or delayed the cables.42

  Desperate for help, Hari Singh dispatched an envoy to Delhi that day. He carried two letters. One begged for arms and Indian Army troops to help repel the onrushing invaders. In the other, the king formally offered to accede to India on whatever terms were being afforded to the nizam of Hyderabad.43

  Nehru received the missives on Friday evening, just before hosting a reception for the Siamese foreign minister. That same night in Srinagar, the maharajah decided to go ahead with his annual durbar banquet, a lavish celebration during which his noblemen reaffirmed their loyalty to the throne one by one.44 Chandeliers blazed in the grand Durbar Hall—which had its own generator—and musicians entertained the richly attired guests. When they emerged near midnight, though, the courtiers found Srinagar’s streets cast into a blackness so deep, the city seemed buried under a shroud. Jackals howled. The tribesmen had seized the power station that provided electricity to the capital. They were only 35 miles away.

  Rumors had unnerved Srinagar for weeks now. Around 12 October, the Californian author and adventurer Nicol Smith—a spy for the OSS during the war—had received a cryptic visitor at the houseboat he was renting on Dal Lake. Lt.-Col. R. C. F. Schomberg was a fellow writer-explorer—author of Between the Oxus and the Indus—and, according to Smith, an “English Intelligence Officer.” (He was also the friend who had sent Clement Attlee photographs of the Sikh dead from the March Rawalpindi riots.) The British spy “told me to get out of Srinagar as quickly as possible,” Smith later recounted. Schomberg was himself leaving immediately for Karachi, where he said he planned to meet with Jinnah. Asked why he was so insistent that Smith also flee, “he said he had no particular reason, but felt that it would be wise to go.”45 In the following days, Smith heard of Pakistani infiltrators floating across the Jhelum on logs under cover of darkness, among other wild tales.

  The American was nevertheless taken aback on Friday night when Srinagar’s lights blinked out. Daylight revealed scenes of panic. The capital’s Hindus and Sikhs feared a massacre at the hands of the tribesmen, who numbered anywhere from 2,000 to 26,000 depending on whom one asked. Tonga drivers were charging an extortionate 200 rupees to transport refugees by road to Jammu. The Muslims who leased out the luxurious Dal Lake houseboats set up a tidy business selling or renting the little cook boats attached to them. “Now immensely popular as a means of escape,” Smith noted, the small craft could be poled upstream faster than heavier boats, and could hide in narrow tributary canals and streams.46 Some of those who weren’t able to flee
donned European clothes in hopes of disguising themselves. Police vanished from the streets.

  In Delhi, Nehru convened an urgent meeting of the cabinet’s Defence Committee on Saturday morning to consider India’s response to the invasion. Ministers quickly agreed on the first of Hari Singh’s two requests: military aid.47 As a matter of fact, Patel had approved the dispatch of arms to the maharajah’s forces weeks earlier; the Sardar was furious to learn only now that the weapons still lay scattered in army depots around the country—held up, he was convinced, by pro-Pakistan officers in Auchinleck’s Supreme Command. Patel ordered that the guns be shipped to Srinagar immediately, flown in by civilian airliners if necessary. Nehru was ready to send Indian soldiers, too.

  Not everyone agreed. Menon argued against dispatching troops unless Kashmir acceded to India first. If the state’s legal status remained in limbo, Pakistan could just as easily send its own forces across the border to “help” local Muslims in their supposed uprising. And tactically, Jinnah faced a much easier task. Srinagar lay only 150 miles from Abbottabad, down a fairly good road now mostly controlled by tribesmen. India, by contrast, would have to airlift all of its troops and supplies to the small airport in Srinagar—whose runway could fall to the invaders at any moment.

  Typically, Patel didn’t see the point in fussing over a slip of paper. Kashmir, an independent state, had been invaded and had asked for help. Nothing legally prevented India from responding. Nehru, for his part, still had the same concerns as before: if India accepted an offer of accession from the maharajah—even conditionally, premised on a later referendum, as Mountbatten suggested—its motivations would be suspect among ordinary Kashmiris. “There was bound to be propaganda to the effect that the accession was not temporary and tempers might be inflamed,” Nehru said.48 The committee decided to table the decision for the time being and to dispatch V. P. Menon to Srinagar that evening to assess the situation.

  Menon returned to Delhi the next morning and drove straight from the airport to Nehru’s York Road bungalow. Sardar Patel was already there. “It could be said that the Maharajah had gone to pieces completely—if not gone off his head,” Menon reported.49 The palace in Srinagar had been in an uproar when he arrived the previous evening: doors flung open, clothes and possessions strewn everywhere. Menon had found Hari Singh rushing into and out of rooms, packing up his pearls and rubies, vowing to join his troops on the front lines.50 At two o’clock in the morning, the king had leaped into his car and, with his Bombay jeweler Victor Rosenthal by his side, led a speeding convoy 200 miles south to his winter capital in Jammu.51

  Menon had brought M. C. Mahajan back to Delhi with him to negotiate on the king’s behalf. “Give us the military force we need,” the diwan begged Nehru. “Take the accession and give whatever power you desire to [Abdullah’s] party.” This was India’s last chance: “The Army must fly to save Srinagar this evening or else I will go . . . and negotiate terms with Mr. Jinnah.”52

  Nehru’s temper blazed at the threat. Patel quickly intervened, murmuring soothingly, “Of course, Mahajan, you are not going to Pakistan.” Then, an aide walked in and handed Nehru a note. “Sheikh Sahib also says the same thing,” Nehru announced after reading it, according to Mahajan’s memoir.53 Abdullah had arrived in Delhi the previous afternoon and had eavesdropped on the argument from an adjoining room.

  The sheikh’s approval settled the issue. Later that morning, ministers approved the deployment of Indian troops. General Lockhart laid out all of the difficulties involved with the complicated airlift, and asked Nehru whether he believed the mission was worth the risk. “The future of Kashmir is vital to India’s very existence,” Nehru told the army chief.54 On short notice, the air force could muster only four Dakotas to ferry troops. Patel rounded up another half-dozen civilian airliners. Soldiers had to rip out the cushioned passenger seats to make room for their ammunition and equipment.

  The cabinet also instructed Menon to draft a formal accession agreement for Hari Singh to sign, as well as a rider pledging to put Sheikh Abdullah in charge of an interim government. Menon finished both documents a little after 3:30 p.m. and raced back to the Palam airport—but missed his flight. It is a sign of just how fraught Kashmir remains that for decades, India tried to obscure the simple fact of ­Menon’s tardiness. Indian historical accounts commonly assert that he made it up to Kashmir and secured the maharajah’s signature that same day—before Indian troops flew to Srinagar.

  In fact, at least two British officials attested to the fact that he did not. Trudging back from the airport, Menon met at five o’clock on Sunday evening with Alexander Symon, the No. 2 at the British embassy. Menon spoke vaguely about his delayed mission, saying only that India was prepared to stop the tribesmen’s advance “at all costs.”55 He caught the first flight out the next morning. Another embassy official—Maj. William Cranston, a military attaché on his way to Srinagar to organize the evacuation of British citizens—was on the same flight, and witnessed Menon and Mahajan disembark at Jammu at 8:35 a.m. on Monday.56 By the time Cranston landed in Srinagar forty minutes later, four Royal Indian Air Force Dakotas sat on the tarmac. Heavily armed Sikh troops guarded the airfield.

  Menon himself later admitted to Phillips Talbot that “soldiers were being flown toward Kashmir before the Maharajah’s accession reached Delhi.”57 The legal implications of the delay are disputable at best. Hari Singh had asked for Indian help, accession or no; the troops did not technically need to wait for Menon to complete his mission. On the other hand, some Pakistan partisans argue that the king, by abandoning his Srinagar palace, had already lost any right to rule and to summon outside aid.

  The delay did have one crucial repercussion, however. Nehru had agreed to alert Liaquat to the Indian intervention. Without a signed accession in hand, though, Nehru stalled. He did not cable the Pakistani prime minister until eight o’clock on Monday morning, he later admitted to Pug Ismay, by which point “the military operation was a fait accompli.”58 The Indian government made no public announcement of the operation until Menon returned to Delhi that evening with the signed papers in hand.59 Given the still-snarled communications in Lahore, it is not clear when exactly Liaquat received Nehru’s message.

  By dinnertime on Monday, Jinnah still didn’t know about the Indian airlift.60 He had flown into Lahore the night before on a previously scheduled trip and had reason to be pleased with the way events were unfolding. The tribesmen had reached the outskirts of Srinagar. Hari Singh’s administration had quite visibly crumbled.

  Jinnah’s efforts appeared to have borne fruit in Hyderabad, too. Sir Walter Monckton had persisted in his efforts to reach an accommodation with India, and had nearly persuaded the nizam to sign a one-year “standstill agreement” freezing relations in place in order to allow time for more talks. Then, just before he left Karachi, Jinnah again met with envoys from the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen. The party’s leader, Qasim Razvi, was a birdlike demagogue with blazing eyes and a wispy, Rasputin-style beard; he was given to statements like “We Muslims rule, because we are more fit to rule!”61 A large portrait of Jinnah hung in his office.

  Whatever Jinnah told the Ittehad representatives—and he later insisted he had done little more than make small talk—at 3:00 a.m. on Monday morning, a mob of twenty thousand Ittehad supporters suddenly surrounded the villa where Monckton was staying in the Hyderabad capital, to prevent him from flying to Delhi with the signed agreement.62 By Monday night, the nizam had reversed himself and accepted Razvi’s advice to appoint a new, Ittehad-led negotiating team.

  Perhaps Jinnah really believed he might end up dominating the two biggest, richest kingdoms on the subcontinent, thus improving Pakistan’s chances of survival immensely. At Government House in Lahore, he and his host, Sir Francis Mudie, were settling into armchairs after dinner with a pair of stiff whiskeys when Mudie’s military secretary rushed in. He had heard the news on the radio: India had sent troops to Srinagar and seized the airport. Nehru had Kashmir.r />
  The report sent Jinnah into a fury. The Indians must have been scheming with Hari Singh all along, he thought: how else could they have gotten their troops into position so quickly? Mudie, who loathed Nehru nearly as much as Jinnah did, seems to have had several more whiskeys that night. He and the Quaid ran through Pakistan’s options. Close to midnight, Mudie had his military secretary ring up Command House in Rawalpindi, where Lt.-Gen. Douglas Gracey was filling in as commander in chief while Messervy was away in England.63 Jinnah had ordered two Pakistani brigades rushed into Kashmir, one to capture Srinagar and the other to cut off the road to India, to prevent Delhi from sending reinforcements. The troops were to deploy immediately. The Quaid wanted to go to war.

  Late that night, Sir George Cunningham received an urgent call from Jinnah, summoning him to Lahore. The NWFP governor flew down first thing the next morning. By the time he arrived, he noted in his diary, the halls of Government House were “buzzing with Generals, including Gracey, and a real flap.”64

  As Cunningham quickly discovered, the acting army commander had defied Jinnah’s orders the night before—invoking Auchinleck’s instructions to avoid any conflict that might pit British officers against one another. Gracey had insisted that the Auk be consulted. An obviously drunk Mudie had grabbed the phone from his military secretary and shouted abuse down the line, demanding to know “why the hell Gracey was not carrying out Mr. Jinnah’s orders. What had it got to do with the Supreme Commander?”65 Gracey had stood firm.

  Auchinleck had flown to Lahore that morning, too. Jinnah was now closeted with the two British commanders, who were desperately trying to persuade the Quaid to rescind his orders. If he did not, and all British officers quit, Auchinleck warned, the Pakistan Army would fall apart. Although “not at all convinced” of this last claim, Jinnah reluctantly backed down.66