Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  By now Nehru also had a pretty good idea of how ugly a wider conflict might become. Back in October, Pakistan had accused Indian forces of presiding over a massacre of Muslim civilians in Hyderabad. Nehru had denied the charge vehemently. Yet privately, he, too, was receiving reports from trusted friends—including his onetime lover Padmaja Naidu, a native Hyderabadi—that “Hindu hooligan elements were misbehaving” in the aftermath of the invasion, as he wrote to Sardar Patel on 5 October.125

  Nehru quietly dispatched a fact-finding mission to the state; their devastating report landed in Delhi at the end of December. The investigation confirmed that RSSS militants and Congress volunteers—some of the same armed men who had been conducting raids from across the border for months—had flooded into Hyderabad in the wake of the Indian Army and launched a reign of terror.126 “Razakar ‘suspects’ who tried to give themselves up or even those who were herded together by the army, were, in many instances, slaughtered by the thugs,” wrote Mohammed Hyder, echoing the panel’s findings.127 While not partaking in the killings themselves, some Indian troops were accused of encouraging the looting of Muslim shops and houses, and the rape of Muslim girls.

  The twenty-four-page report documented incidents of forced conversions, abductions, rapes, desecration of mosques, beatings, and forced imprisonment. Panel members would conclude “at a very conservative estimate that in the whole state at least 27,000 to 40,000 people lost their lives during and after” the invasion. “When we talk of killed we do not include those who died fighting, but only those murdered in cold blood,” the authors added.128 The Indian government would suppress the report for more than half a century.

  In the last week of December, Nehru asked General Bucher to cable his counterpart General Gracey and say that the Indian government “was of the opinion that senseless moves and counter-moves with loss of life and everything else were achieving nothing in Kashmir.”129 To the eternal outrage of Indian and Pakistani commanders on the ground—all of whom believed they could have won the war given a few more weeks and a few more men—the two British generals agreed to stop the shooting one minute before midnight on 1 January 1949. ­Nehru’s long battle with Jinnah had ended. The rivalry they had bequeathed their nations, and the world, had barely begun.

  EPILOGUE

  Deadly Legacy

  BY NOVEMBER 1949, UN mapmakers had drawn a formal ceasefire line in Kashmir. Over the years, with some adjustments, this would settle into the Line of Control that now serves as the de facto border between India and Pakistan. The frontier mirrors the conflict between the two countries—it is confused, contested, and indefinite. It wends its way north from the Punjab, leaving Poonch town in Indian hands and the rest of the district in Pakistan’s, skirts the Indian-occupied Vale of Kashmir, and eventually trails off and disappears in the far north and east, swallowed up by the Himalayan vastness of ice, rock, and snow. On maps the border begins—but it does not end.

  The American journalist Phillips Talbot visited both India and Pakistan exactly one year after the cease-fire was signed. In contrast to the chaos and confusion of the early Partition months, he found the government in Karachi functioning reasonably well. Pakistanis had enjoyed a good harvest. They appeared cautiously optimistic about their nation’s prospects.

  The notion that had seized Jinnah and his citizens within weeks of independence, however—the sense that India hoped to “strangle” its sister dominion—had congealed into an idée fixe. Talbot heard it not only from Pakistan’s top leaders but from “petty officials, university instructors, business men, and—in simple form—even taxi drivers, cycle-rickshaw peddlers, and refugee hawkers.” Whereas many Indians, particularly those in the south and east of the country who had escaped Partition’s worst horrors, seemed ready to strike a deal over Kashmir, the idea of compromise appeared to most Pakistanis as ignoble surrender. If Jinnah’s death had left them with any sort of national mission, it was to defy their bigger neighbor and survive. “Hatred of India,” wrote Talbot, voicing a common sentiment, “is the cement that holds Pakistan together.”1

  Unfortunately, subsequent developments would not erode this animosity—quite the opposite. Throughout his tenure as prime minister over the next decade and a half until his death in 1964, Nehru offered few concessions on Kashmir. He refused to contemplate holding a plebiscite in the state unless all of Pakistan’s troops had withdrawn and its proxy forces had been disbanded. Even former compatriots suffered his wrath: in 1953, he approved the detention of his old ally Sheikh Abdullah, who was accused of promoting Kashmiri independence. “The most difficult thing in life is what to do with one’s friends,” Nehru wrote sadly to his sister Nan.2

  India could afford stalemate. The country had started out more fortunate than Pakistan. Its economy was bigger and more diversified. Its political and judicial institutions were stronger. Whatever one thinks of his economic stewardship, with its heavy emphasis on centralized planning, Nehru’s long stint in office blessed India with the kind of continuity and stability that Pakistan would never enjoy.

  At the same time, Pakistan’s unsettled internal politics made rapprochement no easier. After Jinnah, a succession of weak and uninspiring politicians took turns trying to lead the country. Many had spent all their lives in what was now India and had little connection to their adopted homeland. All the perplexing questions and inconsistencies about Pakistan that Jinnah had so cavalierly brushed aside since 1940 could no longer be ignored. Regional resentments flared, especially between Bengali eastern Pakistan and the Punjabi-dominated western half of the country. Class divides split farmers and landlords on the question of land reform, while pressure for greater autonomy bred tensions between provincial leaders and Karachi.

  Conflict and political drift left the door open for the army, which was easily the most powerful and capable institution in Pakistan. The military swallowed up the bulk of the national budget. Its top officers, now Pakistani rather than British, considered themselves to be the true guardians of the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Many remained bitter about the way Liaquat and civilian leaders had halted the fighting in Kashmir before India had been ousted from the Vale. In 1951, Akbar Khan—the former “General Tariq” and now a major-general—tried to overthrow Liaquat’s government, in part because of resentment over Kashmir. A successful putsch in 1958—led by Gen. Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first non-British commander in chief—would usher in the first of several long stretches of military rule. Pakistani generals would helm the country for thirty-two of the next fifty years.

  The soldiers gave many justifications for their dominance, from the incompetence and corruption of civilian leaders to the need to combat regional separatism and ethnic strife. Above all, though, they elevated the “threat” from India. Ironically, the army’s own misadventures would inflate this sense of menace. In 1965, less than a year after Nehru’s death, Ayub would try to retake Kashmir by using Pakistani troops to stage a covert rebellion within the state. The Indian response included a successful thrust across the Punjab border to the gates of Lahore, which brought a humiliating end to the hostilities and redoubled Pakistanis’ fears for their security. Six years later, when another military dictator, Gen. Yahya Khan, sent troops to suppress an uprising in East Pakistan, the Indian intervention didn’t just injure Pakistan’s psyche but redrew the map. After an ugly conflict in which as many as 300,000 Bengali civilians were slaughtered by West Pakistan troops, Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation, shrinking Jinnah’s “moth-eaten” Pakistan by more than half.

  Embarrassed on the battlefield, Ayub and subsequent dictators needed some other appeal with which to unite their populace behind junta rule. They settled on Islam, striking an implicit bargain with Pakistan’s mullahs to promote religious fervor and, as a result, antipathy toward India. “Pakistan’s secular elite used Islam as a national rallying cry,” writes Pakistani historian and diplomat Hussain Haqqani in his incisive book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military:r />
  Unsure of their fledgling nation’s future, the politicians, civil servants, and military officers who led Pakistan in its formative years decided to exacerbate the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims that had led to partition as a means of defining a distinctive identity for Pakistan, with “Islamic Pakistan” resisting “Hindu India.” . . . Ironically, religious fervor did not motivate all Pakistani leaders who supported this strategy; in most cases, they simply embraced Islam as a politico-military strategic doctrine that would enhance Pakistan’s prestige and position in the world.3

  From its defeats, the military also learned the necessity of having powerful allies. Ayub thrust Pakistan firmly into the West’s camp in the Cold War, joining as many anti-USSR alliances as possible and convincing American officials like Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Pakistanis were ready to battle Communists with their “bare hands” if necessary.4 The tens of millions of dollars in U.S. aid and equipment this attracted did more to feed Pakistan’s delusions about confronting India than to challenge the Soviets. (Unfortunately, Washington quickly realized as much and temporarily suspended military aid to Pakistan as well as India during the 1965 and 1971 wars.)

  Any chance Pakistan might break free of this self-destructive dynamic dissolved in the 1980s. Dictator Zia ul-Haq accelerated the Islamization of the army and society, funding madrassas and promoting especially devout officers. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan presented an opportunity to further all of his goals. In exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid annually—which he could use to build up Pakistan’s arsenal against India, including a covert nuclear weapons program—General Zia armed, trained, and provided logistical support for a jihad against the Soviets. Nearly 100,000 mujahedin passed through Pakistani training camps on their way to the front.5 A “Kalashnikov culture” came to dominate the Northwest Frontier.

  From its inception, Pakistan had looked upon Muslim proxy warriors as legitimate tools of state, given India’s overwhelming advantage in conventional forces. “Lack of military formalities in the eyes of military experts seems to detract from the respectability of irregular warfare. But actually, it is this lack of formal logic and system which is making it increasingly important in this age of missiles and nuclear weapons,” reads an intelligence report produced during Ayub Khan’s dictatorship.6 The Afghan jihad not only attracted extremists from around the Muslim world, including a twentysomething Osama bin Laden, but gave a renewed boost to militants seeking to liberate Kashmir from Indian rule. Thousands of them trained in the same camps as the Afghan mujahedin, sponsored by Pakistan’s fearsome Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.

  For Pakistan, unlike the United States, the jihad thus did not end with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. In the 1990s, the ISI would throw its support behind the budding Taliban movement in Afghanistan, hoping to thrust into power an ally that would ensure the country fell within Pakistan’s sphere of influence and not India’s. At the same time, the agency fueled a vicious cross-border insurgency in Kashmir using militants like Lashkar-e-Taiba. In 1999, a year after tit-for-tat nuclear tests had made clear to the world that both India and Pakistan were nuclear powers, then–Army Chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf nearly provoked another war by sending regular Pakistani troops disguised as homegrown rebels to retake the high ground in Kashmir’s snowy Kargil district.

  Musharraf, who seized power himself after having been forced by civilian leaders to withdraw from Kargil, promised the United States after 9/11 that he would cut off any Pakistani support for the Taliban and other militant groups. What Washington failed to appreciate at the time was how little Pakistan’s strategic calculus had changed. The enemy remained India, not the Taliban or Osama bin Laden or some vaguely defined threat like “Islamo-fascism.” Kashmiri militant groups changed their names but continued to raise funds and recruit openly in Pakistan. The ISI gave safe haven to fleeing Taliban leaders and helped to rebuild their movement. While happily accepting billions of dollars in aid from the United States, Pakistan for years refused to divert troops from the border with India in order to confront these extremists. Indeed, American officials have described the Pakistan-based Haqqani network of jihadists, which has been responsible for some of the deadliest attacks on U.S. and Indian targets in Afghanistan, as a “veritable arm” of the ISI.7

  A decade of war and insurgency in the region has vastly complicated the task of improving relations between India and Pakistan. Fitful attempts have been made to resolve their differences over the years, even under Musharraf, who reportedly reached a rough agreement with Indian negotiators over Kashmir in 2008.8 By now, though, the nexus of jihadist groups has grown dramatically and extended its tentacles throughout the country. The militants share recruits, equipment, intelligence, and training. Groups like Lashkar, previously focused on the fight in Kashmir, are feared to have developed global ambitions. India accuses the ISI of sponsoring the Lashkar attack on Mumbai in 2008 and is loathe to negotiate on other issues until such covert support is definitely ended.

  The emergence of the so-called Pakistani Taliban—militants dedicated to the overthrow of the Pakistani government and imposition of sharia law throughout the country—has begun to change Islamabad’s calculus somewhat. By 2014 these Waziristan-based terrorists had launched direct attacks on army bases, ISI headquarters, and even the country’s largest airport. Army commanders now acknowledge that the jihadists pose a greater threat to Pakistan’s stability than India does. Yet the Pakistani state continues to distinguish between extremists like Lashkar—who are still seen as potential proxies in any war with India—and the Pakistani Taliban. Islamabad’s support for the Afghan Taliban is complex but enduring, and won’t change until Pakistan is convinced that whatever government holds sway in Kabul after U.S. forces finally leave will be friendly.

  Now no less than in 1947, India does not gain from Pakistan’s internal difficulties. Having a weak, unstable state on its border distracts strategic attention in Delhi and drains resources that could be better invested elsewhere. The conflict prevents India from playing the leadership role in Asia that Nehru and others hoped for after independence, and weakens its global clout. Kashmir remains a cauldron of discontent—and not just because of Pakistani meddling.

  A deal there is hardly inconceivable. The arrangement discussed in 2008 would reportedly have made the Line of Control a “soft” border, open to the free flow of Kashmiri goods and people. Both halves of the former kingdom would be gradually demilitarized and granted a loose autonomy. John Kenneth Galbraith, then U.S. ambassador to India, proposed something similar as far back as 1962, suggesting that Kashmir be made a zone of peace and prosperity between the two nations, much like the Saar region between France and Germany.

  What’s needed is a dose of realism and political courage—both of which have been sorely lacking, in both capitals, since 1947. Indeed, today, the border that divides India and Pakistan should be what brings them together. Trade between them stood at a paltry $3 billion in 2011—less than a tenth of its potential. Lowering tariffs and other licensing barriers, and improving transport links, would open up vast new possibilities for cross-border commerce. Just as important, closer economic ties would create constituencies on both sides of the border that have more invested in peace than in conflict. Until that happens, continued tensions are inevitable.

  The world can afford that no more than India or Pakistan can. By this point, the cold war between them may seem like a natural and immutable feature of the landscape in South Asia. But the rivalry is getting more, rather than less, dangerous: the two countries’ nuclear arsenals are growing, militant groups are becoming more capable, and rabid media outlets on both sides are shrinking the scope for moderate voices. It is well past time that the heirs to Nehru and Jinnah put 1947’s furies to rest.

  SINGAPORE

  OCTOBER 2014

  Acknowledgments

  IT WOULD NOT have been possible to tell the stories in this book without the notes, let
ters, diplomatic cables, and diaries of participants in the tragic events of 1947. For access to them, I would like to thank the following archives and their exceptionally helpful staffs: the Broadlands Archive at Hartley Library, University of Southampton; the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London; the Council of the National Army Museum of the United Kingdom; the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge University; the Master and Fellows of University College and Balliol College at Oxford University, as well as the Modern Papers Department at the Bodleian Library; the department of Asian and African Studies at the British Library, home to the India Office Records; the British National Archives at Kew; the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Library, both in New Delhi; and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.

  It would have been equally impossible to write this book without the unstinting support, advice, and patience of two people in particular: my agent, Howard Yoon, at the Ross Yoon Literary Agency, and my editor, Bruce Nichols, at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Their faith in me and in this project was strong and sustaining, and I will be forever grateful for it.

  Gail Ross provided encouragement at key moments, while Miranda Kennedy’s eyes and edits helped to carve a story line out of a sprawling first draft. I would also like to thank Ben Hyman, Lisa Glover, Martha Kennedy, and Laura Gianino at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as well as copyeditor Margaret Hogan for shepherding the manuscript into being with such grace and care.