Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  At best the decision only temporarily staved off a war. “Situation remains explosive and highly dangerous,” Auchinleck cabled to the chiefs of staff in London. Jinnah was “very angry and disturbed.”67 Around noon, the Quaid met secretly at Liaquat’s bedside with just the two British governors, Mudie and Cunningham. The Quaid was at his most self-righteous, Cunningham recalled: “When talking even in a small intimate conference like this, Jinnah talks as if he were making a speech at the Bar.” He called Hari Singh’s accession “fraudulent and impossible to accept.” (“I couldn’t quite follow his reasoning here,” Cunningham admitted.)68 Both Liaquat and the Quaid said they feared the response in the wider Islamic world if they stood by and did nothing as Muslims were butchered by Sikh and Dogra troops in Kashmir.

  In Delhi that morning, Nehru was leading a meeting of the cabinet’s Defence Committee. The Indian ministers were also in a belligerent mood. They quickly approved the dispatch of an entire brigade group to Srinagar by air. Patel commandeered nearly three dozen more civilian airliners to help fly in the reinforcements.69

  In the middle of the meeting, an aide called Mountbatten away: Auchinleck was on the line from Lahore. The Auk wanted to get the Indian and Pakistani leaders together in a room before matters spun further out of control, and he told Mountbatten that Jinnah had consented to meet in Lahore the next day. Mountbatten immediately sent for Nehru, who, “after some thought,” agreed to make the trip.70

  News of a summit “seemed to have cleared the air somewhat tonight,” New York Times journalist Robert Trumbull reported from Delhi.71 When word of Nehru’s acceptance reached Lahore, Cunningham recorded, the conversation around Liaquat’s bedside turned from Pakistan’s military options to Jinnah’s negotiating stance.72 The Quaid agreed that he would demand an immediate plebiscite in Kashmir, administered jointly by the Indian and Pakistani militaries. Nehru had already pledged that India would abide by the results of any popular vote. The gap between the two dominions seemed bridgeable.

  That evening, however, when the full Indian Cabinet met, Nehru’s colleagues rounded on him angrily, Patel in particular. “For the Prime Minister to go crawling to Mr. Jinnah when we were the stronger side and in the right would never be forgiven by the people of India,” the Sardar told Mountbatten later.73

  If Jinnah believed India had conspired to win Kashmir for itself, many Indians thought the same of Pakistan. Rumors that the Quaid had been dangling potential real estate and construction contracts in the kingdom as bait for a massive American loan were so widespread that the U.S. embassy wondered whether the Soviets had planted them.74 (There was just enough truth to the claim to make it dangerous. Jinnah had repeatedly emphasized Pakistan’s strategic location when pitching for money abroad, and Gilgit—in the far northwest of Kashmir—nearly touched the Soviet Union.)

  Hard-liners saw no reason why India should parley with Jinnah now that his supposed plot had been exposed. Nehru, torn between his promise to Mountbatten and his colleagues’ adamant opposition, took to his bed that night “looking very seedy and sorry for himself,” Mountbatten later wrote.75 The Briton had to send a message to Lahore calling off the conference.

  Jinnah felt suckered, as he had so many times before in dealing with the capricious Nehru. When Cunningham saw the Quaid at ten o’clock the next morning, Jinnah “was very angry with Mountbatten and Nehru, and said that this was just a plot to delay things while more Indian troops were flown into Kashmir. . . . He said he felt his hands were now free, legally as well as morally, to take any line he liked about Kashmir.”76 In other words, if India was not going to play straight, why should Pakistan?

  For the next six decades, a succession of Pakistani leaders would invoke that question to justify all manner of covert operations, from the country’s nuclear program to its sponsorship of the Taliban. Legitimate doubts exist about the Muslim League’s role in the Calcutta Killing, the Punjab bloodbath, even Khurshid Anwar’s lashkar. Jinnah’s conscience may well have been “clear.” From this moment on, however, there is no question that the Quaid personally approved the funding and sponsorship of a proxy war in Kashmir.

  That afternoon, Jinnah and the two British governors gathered around Liaquat’s bedside again. They decided to maintain a force of at least five thousand tribesmen in the Kashmir Valley, sending up drafts to relieve tired fighters.77 The West Punjab authorities would supply arms and ammunition; Cunningham would provide 100,000 rounds from village stocks. The tribesmen would be paid in cash when they came back from the front. A few serving army officers would be enlisted in the effort, including Col. Akbar Khan, one of the original conspirators, though they would technically be put on leave. Otherwise, the regular military would stay clear of the fight: the point was not to start a war with India but rather to gain Pakistan some leverage in negotiations.

  The official line would be that the tribes could not be called off unless they were convinced that Kashmir’s Muslims would get to choose freely whether or not to join Pakistan. “We must avoid suggesting that we can influence [the tribesmen] by Government pressure,” Cunningham noted.78 At the same time, a committee of civilian officials led by the district commissioner of Rawalpindi would oversee recruiting, supplies, and the dispatch of reinforcements.

  Pakistan’s backing for the jihad quickly became apparent to impartial observers. “Whatever Jinnah and others may say the fullest assistance is in fact being given to the tribesmen,” British diplomat Hugh Stephenson reported a few weeks later. According to an Englishman sympathetic to the effort, “officers were going up in mufti to the front and Abbottabad had all the appearance of a base Headquarters.”79 C. B. Duke visited Abbottabad at the end of November and found that “the tribesmen were conspicuous with their rifles over their shoulders, girt with bandoliers and looking thoroughly piratical.” To keep them focused on fighting India instead of robbing their fellow Pakistanis, officials had housed them in a former Government Stud Farm, 3 miles outside of town. From there a steady stream of trucks departed for the border at night to avoid Indian fighter planes. The sympathetic Englishman “described the idea of there being any opposition to their passage as laughable.”80

  Top Pakistan Army officials knew generally of the scope of operations. When Messervy returned from England, he wrote to Mountbatten many years later, Liaquat had come up to visit Rawalpindi. Messervy walked over to the prime minister’s bungalow one night and “saw a bearded figure rush out of the room where Liaquat was and disappear round the corner of the house. I said to Liaquat, ‘That was Akbar, wasn’t it?’ He hesitated and said, ‘Yes.’” The prime minister admitted that several Pakistani officers had been given leave and sent to Kashmir to impose some order on the tribal offensive. “I agreed to this,” Messervy admitted, “and in fact I expect that the number of officers seconded to the tribal forces was increased.”81

  Jinnah’s covert support for the tribesmen destroyed any hope of a quick resolution to the crisis. It prompted wild reports in Delhi, including that the lashkar was being supplied with trucks and heavy weapons, “even flame-throwers.”82 Nehru had agreed to a compromise suggested by Mountbatten—that the two men fly to Lahore for a 1 November meeting of the Joint Defence Council so that they could discuss Kashmir with Jinnah on the sidelines. But the day before they were to travel, the Quaid released a statement decrying Kashmir’s accession to India as “based on fraud and violence.”83 Even Ismay, normally sympathetic, agreed this was a direct slap in the face. When he and Mountbatten left for Lahore the next morning, Nehru did not accompany them.

  Jinnah greeted the two Englishmen coldly—he not only refused to meet them at the airport but declined to rise from his chair when they entered the room. The trio spent three and a half hours together, engaged in “the most arduous and concentrated conversation.”84 Jinnah, Ismay wrote, “was at his most obstinate and on his highest horse.”85 He condemned the Indian intervention as “the end of a long intrigue,” and claimed that Congress figures were backing a campaign
by Hari Singh to cleanse Jammu of Muslims. The accession “would never be accepted by Pakistan,” the Quaid declared. He said he could not come to Delhi for talks, that he was “too busy” in Lahore now that Liaquat was laid up. Instead, he suggested the two governors-general fly up to Kashmir and order both sides to withdraw, then organize a plebiscite themselves. “He said that the two of us could settle this in one day,” Mountbatten recorded.86

  When Ismay stepped out of the room, Mountbatten lacerated the Quaid for his uncompromising attitude. Jinnah was unmoved. “Mr. Jinnah became extremely pessimistic and said it was quite clear that the Dominion of India was out to throttle and choke the Dominion of Pakistan at birth, and that if they continued with their oppression there would be nothing for it but to face the consequences,” Mountbatten recorded. “However depressing the trouble might be he was not afraid of them; for the situation was so bad that there was little that could happen which would make it worse.”87 On that point at least, Jinnah could not have been more wrong.

  India’s apparent coup exhilarated Nehru. “If we had vacillated and delayed even by a day, Srinagar might have been a smoking ruin,” he wrote to his sister Nan on 28 October. “We got there in the nick of time.” He praised the lightning-fast deployment of Indian troops as “a very fine piece of work.”88

  In fact, Srinagar’s fate remained far more uncertain than Nehru seemed to realize. That very afternoon, the Sikh colonel commanding the Indian contingent, Dewan Ranjit Rai, was shot in the head and killed by a Pathan marksman. Rai had led 140 men to the town of Baramulla, at the mouth of the Kashmir Valley, to intercept the raiders. Indian newspapers compared them to the Spartans at Thermopylae. In a furious battle on the 28th, the tribesmen blew the Indians off the ridge where they had taken up position, using 3-inch mortars and machine guns. The Sikh troops hastily buried their commander by the side of the road and retreated, and the lashkar continued to advance on Srinagar.

  In these first few days, chaos prevailed at the Kashmiri capital’s tiny airport. Planes trying to land from India had to dodge crates of ammunition and supplies along the edges of the runway—not to mention dozens of cars abandoned by fleeing refugees.89 Tempests and Spitfires crowded the tarmac after strafing missions, lacking the crews, equipment, or bullets to reload.

  As troops piled out of the big Dakotas, they were immediately bundled into civilian trucks and rushed to the front, now less than 20 miles away. Headquarters officers struggled to organize Srinagar’s defenses, ripping old maps off the walls of Nedou’s Hotel and the Srinagar Club to plan out deployments.90 Communications were so bad that one Sikh officer had to drop orders to his unit from a low-flying plane. To the south, Indian engineers frantically tried to slap together a pontoon bridge over the Ravi in order to open the land route to Srinagar to heavy vehicles.

  After Jinnah approved support for the lashkar on 29 October, Akbar Khan had dashed to Rawalpindi to scrounge up more ammunition, then headed into Kashmir himself on a reconnaissance mission. He came across a surge of tribal reinforcements as he raced to the front: “The lorries were full to the brim, carrying forty, fifty and some as many as seventy. Men were packed inside, lying on the roofs, sitting on the engines and hanging on to the mudguards. They were men of all ages from gray­beards to teenagers. Few were well-dressed—many had torn clothes, and some were even without shoes.” One decrepit station wagon with no roof, no headlights, and “doubtful brakes” carried the headquarters staff of the Swat Army.91 The fighters were armed with an assortment of British, French, German, and locally made rifles; some carried only daggers.

  Indian fighter planes had forced the tribesmen to scatter off the main road leading to Srinagar. But the swelling ranks of the lashkar still outnumbered the Indian forces. Indeed, now that they had dispersed into smaller, more mobile units, the insurgents were almost more dangerous than before. Some of the tribesmen adopted Kashmiri garb and pretended to be refugees in order to sneak up on Indian positions. Probing attacks drew nearer and nearer to the airfield. When a new Sikh officer flew into Srinagar to replace the fallen Rai, he ordered his pilot to do a low pass first, to make sure that the Indians still controlled the landing strip.92

  On 30 October, Khan joined a band of Mohmand tribesmen as they sniped at an Indian position just a few miles from the center of Srinagar itself. He was convinced that the capital, defended with flimsy barbed wire, could easily be overrun. Khan quickly returned to Pakistan to beg for a few armored cars to lead the assault. A fellow army officer volunteered to drive a squadron into Kashmir in mufti, with or without permission.93

  The tribesmen nearly broke through on their own. On 3 November, around seven hundred of them massed and attacked an Indian patrol less than 5 miles from the Srinagar airfield, pinning the troops down with mortar fire. Outnumbered six to one, the Indians suffered fifteen killed including an officer and another twenty-six wounded.94 Khurshid Anwar later claimed that he and twenty of his men closed to within a mile of the airport before they were driven off.

  The next morning, Sardar Patel and Defense Minister Baldev Singh flew into Srinagar to take stock of the situation. They held an emergency conference on the tarmac with Brig.-Gen. L. P. “Bogey” Sen, the local commanding officer. Sen flatly declared that without more men, he could lose the city.95 When the Sardar returned to Delhi, he was “despondent.”96

  India quickly redoubled its commitment to the fight. The cabinet ordered the dispatch of another two battalions of troops by air. A squadron of armored cars and a battery of field artillery set off along the just-completed road from Pathankot in East Punjab to Srinagar.

  In his 28 October letter to his sister, Nehru had claimed loftily that he would “not mind if Kashmir [became] more or less independent,” though, he added, “it would have been a cruel blow if it had become just an exploited part of Pakistan.”97 Now, however, he demanded that Indian commanders go on the offensive: he wanted Baramulla retaken “at every cost and every consequence”—and within three days.98 He found it “absurd” that troops could not distinguish between tribesmen and locals, he wrote to Sheikh Abdullah after Patel’s visit. Reinforcements were on the way, but Nehru decried the prevailing “spirit of not taking action till more troops come.”99

  Before dawn on 6 November, the tribesmen made one more attempt to break into Srinagar. Colonel Khan’s plea for reinforcements had been unsuccessful: his superiors had vetoed the idea of sending in an armored-car squadron for fear of provoking an outright war with India. Years later, the Pakistani officer was still resentful. “India herself was intervening,” he wrote in his memoir. “She was already calling us aggressors and she had squarely accused us of bringing the tribesmen in across 200 miles of Pakistan—would a couple of armored cars make that accusation any worse? . . . What difference would another incident make? More shouting, more complaining, more cursing—that is all.”100 After several hours of fighting on the western outskirts of the city, the outgunned guerrillas had to break off and retreat.

  By now India’s own armored cars had arrived by road from the Punjab, and some three thousand Indian troops had stiffened Srinagar’s defenses. Early on 7 November, the Indian forces surrounded the tribesmen, who had regrouped near the village of Shalateng just outside the capital, and attacked from multiple directions as well as from the air. “I gave the word GO,” Sen claimed in a boastful memoir, “and hell broke loose. . . . There was complete confusion in the enemy positions. . . . Trying to escape the fire that was hitting them from three sides, and seeing the bayonet charge descending on them, [the raiders] rushed in all directions and, crashing into one another, turned and fled westwards.”101 Indian accounts claimed the guerrillas left nearly 500 dead on the battlefield and another 150 more on the road as they staggered back toward Baramulla.

  The battered station wagons and wheezing buses that had carried the flag-waving jihadists into Kashmir now turned tail and trundled back toward Pakistan. “The only impression they left behind was that the tactics of some were ‘hit
and run,’ of some ‘see and run’ and of some just ‘run,’” Khan wrote disgustedly.102 Heeding Nehru’s orders, the Indian forces pressed forward against the collapsing resistance. By 8 November, they had reoccupied Baramulla—just barely making Nehru’s deadline.

  Pakistani newspapers continued to publish fantastical accounts of the raiders’ glorious victories. “The Liberation Forces’ three-pronged advance on Srinagar continued unabated in spite of strong opposition,” Dawn reported the day after the Shalateng rout.103 Jinnah surely knew better. For him, yet another humiliating defeat at Nehru’s hands loomed.

  His health could not stand the strain. The seventy-year-old Jinnah’s yellowed lungs now showed unmistakable signs of tuberculosis. On doctor’s orders, he would spend the next month bedridden. At one of his last public appearances—a visit to a Lahore refugee camp on 6 November—he looked so cadaverous that a local official pleaded to transfuse his own “healthy blood” into the ailing Quaid.104 His role in the Partition drama had not ended yet. But from this point on, whether he or his followers recognized it, the Quaid’s days were numbered.

  9

  Himalayan Quagmire

  FOUR DAYS AFTER Baramulla fell, Nehru paid a visit to the once-cheerful riverside town. Scenes of devastation greeted him. “It looked as if an earthquake had shaken it,” Colonel Khan, who had passed through a week earlier, recalled in his memoir. “Shops were empty, doors and windows were gone—brick, stone and paper littered the ground.”1 When the lashkar reached the town, some of the uneducated tribesmen seemed to believe that they had arrived at Srinagar, or even Amritsar, the Sikh stronghold.2 They lingered for two days, burning and killing. They looted everything they could find, even prying loose the bracelets on women’s wrists and the earrings from their ears.