Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  In one of the most famous incidents, a party of Mahsud tribesmen from South Waziristan overran the town’s Catholic mission and killed a British couple as well as two others, and gravely wounded the mother superior. “These men came from all directions, climbing over the compound wall,” one of the survivors, a child at the time, told the journalist Andrew Whitehead. The fierce, unkempt fighters were armed with rifles, huge daggers, and axes, which they used to hack apart the chap­el’s altar and statues of saints. “They smashed everything in sight. . . . Any adult person they just stabbed or shot, and there were screams and cries.”3

  The tribesmen more than likely raped some of the surviving nuns, who had been locked into a dormitory along with the mission’s medical patients and several terrified townspeople. During the rampage, the invaders seemed not to distinguish among Christians, Hindus, or even Muslims. A Muslim shopkeeper caught passing information to Indian forces was crucified in the town square as an example to others.4 Reports of the lashkar’s brutality so appalled officials in Pakistan that they sent in more responsible tribal figures to restore order.5 It is impossible to calculate an accurate death toll, but according to Indian troops, barely a thousand of the town’s normal population of fourteen thousand remained after the tribesmen had finally been driven off.

  You are the golden earring in our ears. . . . To Nehru, who had not visited Kashmir since his July 1945 hiking trip with Sheikh Abdullah, all of the ugliness and brutality of the past three months seemed concentrated in these “great, wild, black beasts,” as one of the mission priests described them.6 They had descended upon the pristine Kashmir Valley crying “Allah-o-Akbar!” and seeking to impose medieval rule by the sword. Kashmiris had now gotten “a taste of what Pakistan means,” Nehru bitterly informed a crowd in Baramulla on 12 November.7

  By contrast, the apparently happy picture that greeted him in Srinagar thrilled Nehru. With the collapse of the maharajah’s administration, Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference had quickly organized a people’s militia made up of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs to maintain order in the city and guard critical bridges and intersections. The volunteers wore red armbands and bright smiles, and had restored calm within twenty-four hours. Schoolchildren ran through the streets yelling pro-Abdullah slogans.8

  Such scenes reassured Nehru that he had not been wrong about the glorious unity of the Indian peoples after all. The savage Punjab massacres had shaken his faith. But now he thanked a huge, enthusiastic audience in the Kashmiri capital for reaffirming it: “You have not only saved Kashmir, you have also restored the prestige of India, your mother country,” he declared. The harmony displayed by Srinagar’s communities had “brought hope to my disappointed heart. Kashmir has set an example to the whole of India.”9

  Too often Nehru’s undeniable obsession with Kashmir is written off as sentimentalism. Although he had never lived in his ancestral homeland, the Indian prime minister clearly felt invigorated there as he did nowhere else on the subcontinent. He contributed to this impression with comments like the ones he made to Edwina Mountbatten in June 1948, when his letters to the former vicereine had become as frilly and romantic as those he had written to Padmaja Naidu a decade earlier: “Kashmir affects me in a peculiar way; it is a kind of mild intoxication—like music sometimes or the company of a beloved person.”10

  Yet the fact that Indians remain ferociously defensive about Kashmir a half-century after Nehru’s death makes clear that the issue represents more than one man’s obsession. As Nehru retorted when Lieutenant-General Bucher suggested that “the romanticism of mountain and snow” too greatly influenced him in Kashmir, “This is something much more than romanticism for a mountain. There are plenty of mountains in India.”11

  Much as Afghanistan would serve for the United States many dec­ades later, Kashmir became the stage for a morality play. At stake was a particular idea of India. If the people of a predominantly Muslim kingdom chose willingly to join a predominantly Hindu nation, Jawaharlal would disprove not just Jinnah’s hateful ideology—a “poisonous plant,” Nehru had called it in his 28 October letter to his sister—but also Sardar Patel’s suspicion that India’s Muslims were disloyal. “Through Kashmir,” Gandhi declared at one of his prayer meetings while Dakotas filled with Indian troops roared overhead, “that poison might be removed from us.”12 This was Nehru’s own holy war.

  Both Mountbatten and Pug Ismay feared that the Indian leaders were getting carried away by their initial victories over the tribesmen. “They have won a small battle, and they think that they have won a war! Such is the intoxication of a slight military success,” Ismay, who knew something about winning wars, wrote in his diary.13 Triumphant headlines declared that Srinagar had been saved. Indian brigadiers gloated over the headlong retreat of the “groggy and disorganised” tribesmen.14

  Even before Nehru traveled up to Kashmir, Mountbatten had warned him against mission creep. Snows would soon block the Banihal Pass—along the only road link to India—and also hamper flights into Srinagar. To pursue the tribesmen much beyond Baramulla would threaten the precarious Indian supply lines. Mountbatten argued especially strongly against trying to occupy the Poonch region, where insurgents had bottled up several detachments of the maharajah’s army. The front there would run parallel to the Indians’ line of communication; the enemy could slice through it at any point.15 If Indian forces tried to do more than hold the Vale and Jammu, Ismay predicted, they would almost certainly “get a bloody nose.”16

  Yet all across the subcontinent, dominos suddenly seemed to be falling in India’s favor. A couple of days before Nehru’s trip, Indian troops had marched unopposed into pesky Junagadh. Quite unnoticed amid the rapid-fire events in Kashmir, Delhi had been fomenting its own little lashkar on the Kathiawar Peninsula. A local Indian official confirmed on 22 October—the same day the tribesmen crossed into Kashmir—that he had distributed one hundred rifles as instructed to the “gentleman who came [to] Delhi.”17 Presumably the guns were meant for Samaldas Gandhi’s provisional government. Within a week, Gandhi’s militia had seized sixteen villages that belonged to Junagadh but were separated from the state proper.18 On 1 November, India had quietly moved forces into the disputed principalities of Barbariawad and Mangrol.

  Feeling the noose tightening, Junagadh’s nawab had fled to Karachi, bringing with him his wives, his dogs, and most of the contents of the state treasury. By 7 November, his diwan, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, could see that no aid would be forthcoming from beleaguered Pakistan, so he secretly sent his chief of police to discuss a deal with Samaldas Gandhi. The next day, Bhutto cabled Delhi saying he would rather hand over power to the Indian government directly than to Gandhi’s unruly rebels. Sardar Patel accepted with alacrity. If Mountbatten and Ismay hadn’t raised objections, the Indians might not even have informed Pakistan before marching their troops across the Junagadh border. “I reminded [the Indian leaders] of Hitler’s technique and told them that the world would think they were copying it” if they did not explain their actions, Ismay later recorded.19 Patel mocked the Englishmen as “sissies” for being so conscientious.20

  Even the mighty kingdom of Hyderabad was beginning to sound more humble. After the mob attack on Sir Walter Monckton’s house, the nizam had dispatched a new negotiating team to Delhi to demand changes to the nearly completed standstill agreement. Ittehad leader Qasim Razvi had assured the nizam that the Indians would buckle, given how preoccupied they were with Kashmir. Instead, the negotiators had returned empty-handed, while the Indians crowed about their victory in Srinagar.

  Hyderabad’s eccentric monarch rapidly rediscovered the virtues of compromise. He penned a series of repentant notes to Monckton, who had decided to return to England; the nizam begged him to stop off in Pakistan and convince Jinnah to rein in Razvi—that “rascal!”—before the Ittehad leader pushed Delhi too far.21 “The Hindus are watching the situation with open eyes and are bent on making mischief in case a handle is given to them,” the nizam warned dark
ly.22 By the end of November, he had signed the very same standstill agreement he had rejected a month earlier.

  As for Kashmir, Nehru returned from his visit there determined to press the fight to its finish. Although he continued to pledge that India would abide by a plebiscite, he now insisted that every single “raider” had to be expelled before any vote was held. The demand was especially open-ended because by “raider,” Nehru meant anyone taking up arms against the interim administration Abdullah had established in Srinagar. Privately, Nehru had begun to doubt the feasibility of holding a vote, particularly with winter approaching. If fighting continued for several months, he wrote to Abdullah, prospects for a plebiscite would “automatically fade out.”23 The National Conference leader was even more explicit. Visiting Baramulla, he told reporters that after what Kashmiris there and elsewhere had suffered, they “might not even bother” about a referendum.24

  Cabling London, British ambassador Sir Terence Shone described the Indian leaders as deliriously “cock-a-hoop,” confident that they had “practically settled the business on their own.”25 Indian troops quickly pushed forward another 25 miles past Baramulla, retaking the town of Uri and reconnoitering the road that led all the way to the Pakistan border.

  A bomb splinter had crippled Khurshid Anwar, leaving Akbar Khan in charge of the lashkar. To mask his identity, he had given himself an impressive-sounding nom de guerre—“General Tariq,” after an eighth-century Muslim invader who had sailed from North Africa to Spain and then ordered his boats burned in order to eliminate any thought of retreat. In reality, though, Khan’s forces had dwindled to around a thousand tribesmen who could do little more than take potshots at the Indians from the hills.26 The guerrillas blew up small bridges across the winding Jhelum River to slow the Indian advance.

  Pakistan was in an awkward place when it came to support for the lashkar. Government decision-making had more or less frozen the moment the Quaid had taken to his sickbed in Lahore. “Any file sent by me to the Private Secretary is either not shown him at all . . . or else comes back with the remark that he cannot attend to it until he returns here,” Jinnah’s military secretary in Karachi noted in his diary. “Even the Ministers are devastated as they can get no decisions on anything.”27 “General Tariq” could not expect to drum up any additional forces or weapons.

  Still recovering himself, Liaquat floated the idea of asking the fledgling United Nations to consider the question of all three disputed states—Kashmir, Hyderabad, and Junagadh. The Indians ignored him. On 18 November, with Mountbatten away in England for the wedding of his nephew Philip to Princess Elizabeth, Ismay spent two hours with Nehru, trying to convince him merely to sit down with his Pakistani counterpart. “Nehru made it clear that whereas a meeting was desirable in principle there was no real hurry,” Sir Terence Shone reported to London. “In fact, the impression left on Ismay was that Nehru thought things were going so well in Kashmir that the longer the discussion with Liaquat was deferred the stronger would be India’s own position.”28

  Nehru brushed aside Ismay’s warning that by expanding military operations in Kashmir, India might overreach. He breezily promised to reconvene the cabinet’s Defence Committee again soon. “There was,” he noted, “an important paper on the organisation of cadet corps which required early consideration.”29

  Nehru should have known better than to be so cavalier. That very day, an envoy he had sent to Jammu had filed a disturbing report. RSSS ca­dres were infiltrating the Kashmiri province, with the help of elements in the Indian Army. “Almost every official is secretly in sympathy with them and would probably turn a blind eye on their entry,” wrote Kanwar Sir Dalip Singh, a former High Court judge from Lahore. The Indian military had launched a massive operation to ship equipment and stores to Jammu to last troops through the winter, and the Hindu extremists were hitching rides on army trucks headed north. “They are prepared to work,” Singh noted. “Their boys have been lengthening the air strip. This kind of thing naturally makes them popular.”30

  The influx of militants added a dangerous destabilizing factor to the conflict. Rumors persisted that the maharajah was using them not just as manual laborers, but as shock troops to rid Jammu of its Muslims. Although Hindus made up only around 40 percent of the province’s population, in eastern areas and the capital they outnumbered Muslims three to one. In addition to the incoming RSSS fighters, thousands of revenge-minded Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab had taken up temporary residence in Jammu. The maharajah of Patiala had sent a battalion of Sikh troops to reinforce Hari Singh’s Dogra army.

  British embassy reports talk of Muslims in Jammu being frightfully “oppressed” by these various forces but provide few details. As in the Punjab, the scale of any carnage is impossible to pinpoint with accuracy. Pakistani accounts claim that 300,000 of Jammu’s 500,000 Muslims fled across the border into West Punjab, and the rest must have been killed. With some justification, Nehru responded that such crude calculations “did not hold water.”31 Yet a confidential estimate provided to the American embassy by a former and still well-connected British intelligence operative remains indisputably grim. Sikhs and Hindus, he said, “undertook a wholesale massacre of the local Muslims [in Jammu], and it is stated that up to 20,000 were killed at the end of October. This matter is . . . being kept strictly secret.”32

  Nehru did not deny the most egregious attacks. On 5 and 6 November, with all eyes on the defense of Srinagar, Dogra troops in Jammu city had piled five thousand Muslim men, women, and children onto buses and told them they were being escorted to Pakistan. Instead of heading for the border, though, the soldiers had driven deeper into Kashmir, then forced the civilians out of the vehicles. As the disoriented Muslims huddled in a clearing, Hindu and Sikhs—most likely Akali and RSSS extremists—rose out of the underbrush and laid into them with rifles and kirpans. A couple hundred Muslims escaped into the fields.33 The rest were either raped or killed outright.

  On 21 November, Nehru raised the subject of the massacre in his reply to Dalip Singh. He had been “shocked” by reports of the killings, Nehru wrote, in particular evidence that there had been a “great deal of trickery and very probably connivance” by Hari Singh’s troops in the massacre. He demanded an inquiry, lamenting the incident as a “black stain” on India.34 Indian commanders were given strict instructions to ensure that no Kashmiri Muslims were harmed in areas where their troops were deployed.

  If Nehru thought India could distance itself from such outrages, he was mistaken. Indian soldiers posted in Srinagar had already shot and killed National Conference volunteers, mistaking them for tribesmen as they approached a checkpoint on the edges of the city. The more troops India sent, and the longer they stayed, the greater the chance they too would be accused of committing atrocities.

  Widening the war only increased that risk. Muslims in the Poonch region genuinely supported accession to Pakistan. Any fighting there would be against locals, not just Pakistani irregulars. Before leaving for England, Mountbatten had reluctantly agreed to send Indian relief columns to the region, to try and free three trapped garrisons of Kashmir state troops. The Indians rescued two; the third was overrun. But India unwisely decided to leave units behind to hold the towns of Poonch and Mirpur, which were full of non-Muslim refugees.

  The precariousness of the Indian positions quickly became apparent. The detachments were virtually surrounded by hostile forces. One of the relief columns had to fight a rearguard action just to make its way back to its base in the town of Uri.35 Distracted, the Indians let up on their drive westward toward the Pakistan border, which lifted pressure on the remnants of the lashkar.

  Yet when the Defence Committee met again on 24 November, Nehru adamantly refused to withdraw from Poonch. “The Prime Minister replied that we could not be strong everywhere,” the minutes read, “but we must be firmly established in such places . . . from where we could attack and take the initiative.” The stakes, in Nehru’s mind, could not have been highe
r: “In his opinion any reverse in that theatre would have most serious psychological repercussions in the whole of India.”36

  India’s expanding goals began to worry Nehru’s military commanders. As anti-Soviet mujahedin would prove in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 2000s, insurgents could fight on indefinitely if they had safe havens across the border in Pakistan to which they could retreat. Lieutenant-General Bucher, now No. 2 in the Indian Army, grimly advised the Indian leaders that the task of asserting authority over every corner of Kashmir would require six to eight divisions of troops and two to three years, with all of India on a war footing.37 Otherwise, Pakistan could sustain a guerrilla war indefinitely.

  Many British observers thought the solution was to partition the kingdom. The heavily Muslim areas that bordered West Punjab, as well as Gilgit in the frigid north of Kashmir, were eager to join Jinnah’s dominion. Eastern Jammu and Buddhist Ladakh would no doubt prefer India. The problem was the Kashmir Valley, where the bulk of the population lived. When Abdullah suggested that the region be separated administratively from Jammu, where the king continued to rule, Nehru resisted vehemently. Like many others, he considered the Vale to be Kashmir itself and would not risk losing it. Even to suggest the possibility of splitting the two regions, he wrote, was “dangerous.”38 In Lahore, Mudie similarly failed to impress the logic of partition on the ailing Quaid: “Jinnah was disgusted with the Award of the Punjab Boundary Commission and he said, ‘I will not have more Boundary Commissions now.’”39

  Diplomacy offered the only other chance of avoiding a quagmire. When the two sides finally met at the end of November, a month after the lashkar’s invasion, they nearly reached a breakthrough. By that point, Sardar Patel was assured and “in good heart” about the situation in the subcontinent, Mountbatten reported upon his return from London.40 Hyderabad had at last approved the yearlong standstill agreement, one that would, in theory, prevent Jinnah from interfering in the state’s affairs. Junagadh was now firmly in the Indian fold, and the raiders appeared to be on the run in Kashmir.