Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  At lunch on 24 November, Patel assured Ismay, “India had no desire to strangle Pakistan. Indeed, it was in their interests that Pakistan should be prosperous and peaceful.”41 A few days earlier, Liaquat had told British diplomat Paul Grey that “he would seek every means of settlement” with India, even though “his extremists were pushing him the other way.”42 At least the deputy leaders of both dominions seemed to recognize that pouring resources into an unending conflict in Kashmir served neither of their nations.

  On 26 November, Liaquat came to Delhi for the first Joint Defence Council meeting in India since early October. The Pakistani prime minister was haggard and still weak; during meetings he sat in an armchair with a rug warming his knees. The two sides made good progress on nearly every administrative issue remaining from the Partition, including the one most critical to cash-starved Pakistan: how to divide the Raj’s sterling balances and international debt. Pakistan got a larger share of the reserves than it had expected—550 million rupees, or nearly $2 billion in today’s dollars—and in turn accepted responsibility for more of the debt.

  During the talks, Liaquat and Nehru met five different times and began to sketch out a deal on Kashmir, too. In broad strokes, Pakistan would work to pull out all the tribesmen, while India drew down its forces to a token presence. The two sides would agree to have the United Nations design and supervise a plebiscite.

  Mountbatten thought that both Nehru and Liaquat were happy with the outlines of the deal. “Things have been ‘happening’ here,” Ismay told British high commissioner Sir Terence Shone.43 That night, Mountbatten was ecstatic. He said that when Patel had agreed to give Pakistan the 550 million rupees, the Sardar had remarked, “That ought to show Pakistan that India was not out to throttle her.”44 Everyone seemed to agree it had been a good day.

  Patel, however, had a clear idea of what he expected to buy with that money. As Shone later learned, Patel had vowed to rescind the offer unless Pakistan agreed to a final deal on Kashmir. He “said something to the effect that India had to show her strength,” the British ambassador reported.45 At a cocktail party at the American embassy, the Sardar pulled out a box containing two small bottles of pills. It had been taken off a “raider” in Kashmir, he told Shone sarcastically. It was a kit for sterilizing water—standard issue for Pakistani soldiers.

  No one hoped for a rapprochement between India and Pakistan more than Pug Ismay. The chief of staff prided himself on his impartiality, on which point, “I could not yield an inch,” he had written to Mountbatten several weeks earlier.46 Unlike the former viceroy, whose loyalty to Nehru had only deepened through India’s first months of crisis, Ismay had refused to become a partisan of one dominion or the other. In his note he announced that it was time for him to return to England before his position was further compromised.

  Now it looked like he might be leaving on a high note. At a farewell party for Ismay on 30 November, Nehru’s private secretary suggested that “the corner had been turned” in relations between the dominions, though he added a major caveat: “There was always the spectre of Mr. Jinnah in the background.”47

  As a matter of fact, the Quaid appears to have been displeased with the draft agreements Liaquat brought back from Delhi. In Jinnah’s papers is a note also dated 30 November 1947 sternly reminding Pakistani ministers, “No commitments should be made without my approval of terms of settlement. Mr. Liaquat has agreed and promised to abide by this understanding.”48 If his genial lieutenant was ready to compromise with Nehru, clearly the Quaid was not.

  Jinnah had chosen an inopportune moment to rise from his sickbed. The next day, he finally returned to Karachi, a month after falling ill. His military secretary, Col. E. St. J. Birnie, was shocked at the Quaid’s appearance: “He left here five weeks ago, looking 60 years of age. Now he looks well over 80.”49 Jinnah continued to insist that he was suffering only from “mental strain” and exhaustion, yet at a garden party at Government House a fortnight later, he was still “so ill that his aides declined to permit anyone to shake hands with him or to converse with him,” the American chargé d’affaires, Charles W. Lewis, reported.50 Margaret Bourke-White, who had come to Karachi to photograph the Quaid, could not erase the image of his “unsteady step, listless eyes, the white-knuckled, nervously clenched hands.”51

  Illness and the isolation of the past few weeks had inflamed Jinnah’s already bitter paranoia. Repeated assassination attempts did not help: during the last one, assailants had almost managed to break through his security cordon, killing one guard and seriously injuring another before being apprehended.52 The atmosphere at Government House, never welcoming, had grown to be “frigidly megalomaniacal,” according to the British ambassador.53 Ministers and servants alike were terrified of crossing the Quaid. He dined with his shrewish sister Fatima, coldly and formally, while his aides scrounged for what scraps they could find in the kitchen.

  In private, Jinnah was “apoplectic” about the leaders in Delhi, according to BBC correspondent Robert Stimson. In an off-the-record conversation, Jinnah raged that Mountbatten had virtually “become a Hindu.” His wife, Edwina, had been spending a suspicious amount of time with Nehru. She “now [walked] about ‘with folded hands,’” Jinnah said mockingly. “He fully expected to see her wearing a caste mark in the center of her forehead.”54 All Hindus, Jinnah informed his Hindu friend M. S. M. Sharma, a Karachi newspaper editor, were like Kashmir’s treacherous Hari Singh: not one could be trusted.

  The very mention of Kashmir would set off a tirade, Sharma recalled. “Damn it, it is a fraud!” Jinnah would burst out, sometimes to no one in particular.55 He refused to accept that India had any role to play in the state or that a plebiscite was even necessary. He regretted having let Auchinleck talk him out of sending Pakistani troops to Srinagar immediately. Again off the record, Jinnah was blunt with the BBC’s Stimson:

  Kashmir is historically, geographically and economically a part of Pakistan and it is unthinkable and it will be unnatural and artificial to contemplate that it can accede to Hindustan. It is obvious that 95% of the Musalmans will never agree to it, and if by some manoeuvre and machinations and by suppression and oppression of the people some sort of an artificial verdict is obtained in favour of Hindustan, there will be no peace in Kashmir and so long as Kashmir does not join the Pakistan Dominion there will be no peace between the two Dominions and it will continue to be a menace not only to both the sister Dominions but to the world situation.56

  Around this time, Pakistan appears to have made the decision to escalate the Kashmir jihad. At the beginning of December, Akbar Khan returned from the front in western Kashmir to Rawalpindi, again seeking more men and weapons. In his memoir, he claims to have met with Liaquat at Command House. Messervy, listening from an adjoining room, sent in a note to the two men: “You will not have to do it with sticks alone any longer, I am going to help.”57 Less than a week earlier in Delhi, Messervy had sworn to Mountbatten that he had not been asked for, nor had he provided, any help to the tribesmen.58 According to Khan, the British commander in chief now agreed to supply a million rounds of ammunition and another dozen serving officers to lead the insurgency.

  There is no way to verify Khan’s account, but in his own memoir, the brigadier leading Indian forces in that sector, “Bogey” Sen, recalled that “during the first week of December, the tactics employed by the enemy underwent a radical change. The battle formations adopted made it obvious that the enemy . . . [now] included a percentage of either regular or irregular troops.”59 Rebels cut the road lifelines to Poonch city, where Indian troops guarded a population of 45,000 mostly Hindus and Sikhs. The soldiers had only enough food to last for five days; the city’s residents, for fourteen days. Indian commanders began to consider the disastrous prospect of having to evacuate their men under fire, using the town’s barely serviceable airstrip.60

  Liaquat seems to have thrown himself back into the cause, his ardor presumably rekindled by the Quaid. Just before his meetin
g with Khan, the Pakistani prime minister had visited the rebel staging areas in Pakistan’s Sialkot district. According to a top Pakistani civil servant, Liaquat had returned “in a state of excitement and emotion which he could not remember having seen him in before.”61 Sardar Ibrahim’s Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) insurgents had categorically rejected the proposed settlement Liaquat and Nehru had worked out in Delhi, saying they would rather fight on than leave Abdullah in power until a plebiscite. They also filled the prime minister’s ears with sensational accounts of Sikhs butchering every Muslim male in Jammu, and of camps where hundreds of naked Muslim girls were being held and raped repeatedly. After the horrors he had seen in the Punjab, Liaquat did not doubt the stories. He allegedly gave a speech encouraging more tribesmen to flock to the front, vowing that Pakistan would never surrender Kashmir.

  Coming just days after he had left Delhi talking of peace, Liaquat’s reported call to arms enraged Nehru. The Indian prime minister had been hearing his own stories from Kashmir of abducted Hindu women being auctioned off for 150 rupees apiece, and of thousands of “tribesmen”—half of whom were Pakistani soldiers, he was convinced—massing along the border.62 The loss of Akhnur—a town just 6 miles from the maharajah’s palace in Jammu—and the plight of the trapped battalion in Poonch raised emotions in Delhi to dangerous levels.

  Indian ministers clamored for an all-out offensive. Nehru himself told his military commanders that “he was not prepared to tolerate the present state of affairs in Kashmir to continue.” He rejected any prospect of retreating from Poonch. He even backed a shocking suggestion from Patel and Baldev Singh that the air force carpet bomb a 10-mile-wide cordon sanitaire up and down Kashmir’s border with Pakistan. “The Prime Minister stated that according to Mr. Liaquat Ali Khan all the Muslims of this territory had evacuated to Pakistan and we knew that the Hindus and Sikhs had either been killed or had fled to Jammu,” read the minutes of the 3 December Defence Committee meeting. “Therefore, any destruction of life would be that of the insurgents who had moved in.”63 Only Mountbatten questioned this ludicrous assumption.

  In a letter to Hari Singh written on 1 December, Nehru had entertained the idea of eventually cutting off Poonch and giving the region to Pakistan.64 Now his position had hardened. On 6 December, he made a flying visit to Jammu and told an audience that India would not be satisfied until every insurgent had been driven from the state. “We will clear Kashmir completely of the raiders,” he promised. “We do not believe in leaving things half-done. We will send more troops . . . and fight till we succeed.”65 He refused to discuss anything else with Pakistan’s leaders until they “exercised their influence to stop this state of frightfulness.”66

  A follow-up meeting between him and Liaquat in Lahore two days later was, not surprisingly, a disaster. The two men spent five straight hours arguing before finally breaking for dinner. The transcript of the meeting is raw with anger. Liaquat accused Sheikh Abdullah’s followers of launching a witch hunt against the pro-Pakistan members of the Muslim Conference, even of abducting and raping party leader Ghulam Abbas’s wife and daughters.67 (Nehru later discovered that at least one young female relative of Abbas had indeed been carried off to Amritsar.)68 Pakistan refused to call off the “raiders” unless India agreed to replace Abdullah’s government with an impartial administration before any plebiscite.

  Hearing Abdullah criticized always made Nehru’s temperature rise. He praised the interim administration in Srinagar for uniting the city’s population and maintaining order; to remove Abdullah now was unthinkable. At one point, Nehru burst out operatically that he would rather “throw up his Prime Ministership and take the sword himself, and lead the men of India against the invasion.”69

  Discussions resumed after dinner and ran until midnight. Nehru remained stubborn, at least once repeating his threat to join the front lines himself. Mountbatten had to exert heavy pressure just to get him to agree to an announcement of the separate agreement over the Raj’s financial reserves, which had been reached previously in Delhi. The meeting ended with Nehru saying no more than that he would consider referring the dispute to the United Nations, as both Mountbatten and Liaquat were urging. The talks had been draining, Nehru wrote to Abdullah a few days after returning to Delhi, and had ended in a “complete deadlock.”70

  In the hills surrounding Uri, snow had begun to fall. The town sat at a strategically critical juncture—along the road from the border crossing at Domel, where the tribesmen had first entered Kashmir, to Srinagar; a separate spur led south to the town of Poonch. While Indian forces firmly controlled Uri itself, insurgents lurked on the ridges above. On 11 December, a fusillade of machine-gun fire rained down from a high position near the village of Bhatgiran, halting all traffic into town.

  Before dawn two days later, several companies of the 1st Sikh Battalion—the unit that had led the airlift into Srinagar—crept up the frozen hillside to clear out the enemy position. They found the ridge quiet, apparently deserted. Officers ordered them back to town. Scrambling back down the hillside, the battalion stumbled into an ambush.71 Gunfire ripped through their ranks from three sides; blood spattered the crystal-white ground. By the time the Indians fought their way out, battling hand to hand in places, they had taken more than 120 casualties, half of them killed in action. The battalion lost more men in those few hours than they had in the seven weeks since they had landed in Kashmir.

  The battle exposed the terrible vulnerability of India’s forces in Kashmir. Although better armed and trained than the insurgents, Indian troops remained outnumbered and exposed, at the distant endpoints of long lines of communication. The onset of winter meant fewer supplies could make their way through; Kashmiri laborers had to dig out the road over the Banihal Pass almost daily to keep it clear of snow. The troops at Uri and elsewhere lacked proper cold-weather gear: they had to buy locally made poshteens—knee-length leather coats with fur lining—and quilted “Gilgit boots” and share them among sentries while on duty.72

  Meanwhile, Pakistan’s support for the raiders seemed unstinting. As many as four thousand insurgents were now thought to surround Uri. British intelligence reports show that Pakistan made multiple secret attempts in December to procure arms abroad: 60,000 rifles and submachine guns and 8 million rounds of ammunition from British companies; another 10,000 guns, 200,000 hand grenades, and 30 million rounds from the United States; and trucks, radar equipment, and other weaponry from Italy and Belgium.73 Some of this materiel appears to have been intended for Hyderabad, from which Pakistan was seeking a massive loan. But the balance was presumably meant for Pakistani irregulars—a “home guard” had been proposed to patrol the border with India—and the fighters in Kashmir. The dominant role the army had assumed in Pakistan is clear from the country’s first budget. Despite the huge burden of caring for and resettling several million Muslim refugees from India, 70 percent of government spending was earmarked for the military.74

  In Delhi, Sardar Patel was not the only one wondering why India should replenish Pakistan’s coffers by handing over the 550 million rupees that represented its share of the former Raj’s reserves. At a cabinet meeting, he categorically refused to transfer any money that Jinnah could use to help kill Indian soldiers in Kashmir—“not a pie [penny],” he swore.75

  Liaquat might well have wondered what he and others had unleashed in Kashmir. After unofficially promoting the campaign there as a “holy war,” Pakistan could hardly back down now. Yet its government was running on little more than fumes; only 20 million rupees were left in its accounts.76 The jihad, Sir George Cunningham told a British diplomat, “had hopelessly undermined all discipline and mutual confidence in the services,” as junior officials were encouraged to abuse their authority, siphon off equipment, mislead their superiors—anything that could be justified as support for the shadow war.77 Cunningham himself had seriously considered resigning three times in the past month. Jinnah’s doctors were reportedly giving the Quaid only six months to live
.78 If he died, Liaquat would be saddled with a government that was broke and edging closer to disintegration.

  On Sunday, 21 December, the Pakistani prime minister returned to Delhi for another Joint Defence Council meeting “in a very chastened mood,” Mountbatten recorded. “He obviously was frightened at the situation, which appeared to me to be getting out of his control.”79 Although the financial agreement between the two countries had been reached nearly a month earlier, no money had yet changed hands. Liaquat now feared that India might repudiate the pact altogether.

  When Nehru arrived at Government House at ten o’clock that night, Mountbatten urgently pulled him aside. The governor-general, Nehru wrote afterward, was “greatly worked up” and repeatedly pressed him on “national and personal grounds” to show flexibility when he met with Liaquat.80 The Pakistani prime minister had to cool his heels for an hour while Mountbatten made his case.

  Nehru’s position remained unbending. He suggested only that India would ask the United Nations to compel Pakistan to cease its support for the raiders. No mention was made of a plebiscite. Yet by the time they parted shortly after midnight, Liaquat had “hardly raised any difficulties” and, indeed, urged that their two nations “put an end to conflict and misunderstanding.” The Pakistani prime minister seemed to Nehru “eager and anxious” to strike a deal.81

  The moment slipped away. At the conference the next day, Liaquat was furious to learn that the Indians were still not going to pay the money they owed until the Kashmir issue was settled. When Nehru tried to hand him a draft letter formally accusing Pakistan of aiding the insurgents, the normally easygoing Liaquat slapped it aside. “At one moment, indeed, he seemed near tears,” Mountbatten recorded. “He was unable to accept the position whereby he was put under financial pressure over the Kashmir settlement. . . . The cash balances did not all belong to India. The due share was the legal right of Pakistan. It should be handed over right away.”82 Nehru was unmoved.