Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  The Hashemites were thrown out in a bloody coup, after which the IPC’s days were numbered. The governments that succeeded the monarchy were of an aggressive, nationalist kind which barred foreign companies from Iraq’s oil. It was perhaps inevitable that the reaction to the IPC’s failure, when it came, would be severe.

  Saddam, in his reckless self-regard, used Iraq’s newfound oil wealth to build up his army and invade the lands of his neighbours, Iran and Kuwait. In this sense, he was more akin to a conqueror from the ancient or medieval worlds than a sophisticated, modern political operator. The problem can be simply expressed: how can a stable regime be established in Iraq, on the basis of the popular will, while at the same time allowing foreign capital a chance to develop its abundant oil resources? The Hashemite kings did indeed allow foreign capital to exploit Iraq’s oil, but they were grotesquely out-of-touch, almost pantomime, figureheads. Saddam and his nationalist predecessors who overthrew the Hashemites were undoubtedly more popular in their appeal; they had come from the people and were more in tune with what the average Iraqi citizen felt and thought. They did not, however, allow foreign expertise to develop Iraq’s oil. Saddam abused his abundant oil resources by pursuing a reckless foreign policy that led to war, bankruptcy and the death and ruin of his family. It remains to be seen how the problem of oil and power in Iraq will be resolved. How can Iraq and the international community balance the legitimate aspirations of the Iraqi people with the natural desire of foreign capital to exploit Iraq’s native wealth?

  PART II

  KASHMIR: MAHARAJA’S CHOICE

  5

  Land for Sale

  The battle was over. The Sikhs had been defeated. They would now have to agree terms with the British, in the form of the East India Company. The company, like any modern company, existed to make money. It had only got into politics, making war and signing treaties, to promote its commercial activities. Until 1858, however, it basically governed India. Now, in 1846, it had defeated the Sikh Empire in the Punjab; this meant that the ‘English were masters of Cashmere’, according to contemporary reports.1

  Kashmir, or Cashmere as it was spelt until the second half of the nineteenth century, was a beautiful and much prized place. It had been contested by the Afghans and by the Mughal emperors. The physical grandeur of its environment, with its high mountains and stunning valleys, was such that the Afghans, who often invaded, thought of it as a ‘mistress’. They enshrined this feeling in a proverb: ‘Unto every man his own country is Kashmir.’2 Kashmir had been conquered in 1819 by Ranjit Singh, the Sikh Raja. He died from a ‘stroke brought on by excessive drinking’ in 1839, aged about sixty. He had had many wives and concubines, but no strong heir had been found to take over his legacy. With his death the Sikh Empire he had built up over forty years ‘began to unravel’.3 The sons he had were killed and a little boy, aged eight, was now the maharaja. His forces had just been humiliated, so the East India Company, whose job it was to make money, imposed an indemnity of £1 million on the Sikhs for all the trouble they had caused.

  They could not afford this sum outright, but a sly cunning man called Gulab Singh, Raja of Jammu and a courtier of Ranjit Singh, came up with a plan. Why didn’t the British allow him to rule Kashmir in exchange for a proportion of the money the Sikhs owed? Gulab had served at Lahore, the capital of the Sikh Empire, but he owed little loyalty to the Sikhs. A payment of £500,000 was suggested and then he would be the proud possessor of Kashmir. How he acquired the money for this is still a mystery. At a time, in the 1840s, when the richest men in England, the Duke of Devonshire and the Marquess of Westminster, had an income of £100,000 a year, £500,000 was a huge amount of capital. It would be the equivalent of about £50 million today. Henry Hardinge, the Governor General, was clearly impressed by Gulab’s resources and by his cunning. The Raja’s income was £600,000 a year4–six times, it should be added, the income of the richest peer in England. Like the military men of this period, he was a practical man who once said that he didn’t mind enlisting ‘native’ soldiers since the ‘colour of the face cannot be ascertained at 60 yards’, the range at which a rifle would be fired.5

  This was how the Treaty of Amritsar came about. The treaty was signed on 16 March 1846, and is one of the more bizarre documents in the history of the British Empire. It stipulated that Kashmir would be given to Gulab Singh and ‘his heirs’ in exchange for £500,000 sterling, or 75 lakh rupees, in the Indian currency (a lakh was 100,000), and an annual token tribute of ‘one horse, twelve goats (six male and six female) and six pairs of shawls’.6 The deal was a strange one but it made sense for the East India Company. The company didn’t want to have the expense of running Kashmir, so why not get a local feudal lord to govern the province? The local lord could then act as a buffer, a watchdog keeping an eye on the troublesome Sikhs. As a Kashmiri acidly pointed out at the time, ‘the grant of Kashmir to Gulab Singh was purposely to create enmity between him and the Sikhs’. Had Gulab refused to take it, the English would have given it to someone else ‘to prevent its being in the hands’ of the Sikhs.7 The company needed the money and Hardinge, the Governor General, was ‘short of powder’. He didn’t have the resources to keep Kashmir.

  Sir Charles Napier was in no doubt that selling Kashmir to Gulab was a mistake. ‘It is a crime’, he thundered, ‘to have left the Punjab and Kashmir in the hands of such murdering villains as Gulab Singh and the other ruffians who torment the poor.’8 Napier was a no-nonsense imperialist of the old school. Now in his sixties, he had been a soldier since the age of twelve. He was now a general, famous for his great hook-nose, his brusque arrogance and his quickness to take offence. He also loathed Gulab Singh and didn’t understand why Britain had ‘adorned his head with a crown’. His view of the empire was simple and pragmatic. ‘It is true we have won that empire most unjustly, but it is now impossible to abandon our position. We may not retreat, and can only hold our ground by skill and courage.’9

  Everyone, even his best friends, acknowledged that Gulab Singh, the new Maharaja of Kashmir, was a difficult man. He had been born in 1792 and so was in his mid-fifties when he bought his kingdom. He had no formal education, couldn’t read and write, but he could shoot and wield a sword. He was savage–he liked, it was said, to flay his enemies alive–but he was also courteous. He knew about power. He recognized that the British were strong and he was perhaps the most obsequious servant the British Empire ever had. The elegant Lord Dalhousie, who took over as governor general after Hardinge in 1848, would laugh at Gulab’s cringing sycophancy. In a letter thanking Queen Victoria for his marquessate in July 1849, Dalhousie reported a conversation with Gulab, in which the Maharaja had expressed his delight that ‘the British flag has for ever been planted in the sky’. Gulab went on and on, saying that if ‘the whole surface of the earth were to become paper, the trees pens, and the rivers ink; they would all be insufficient to express his unbounded pleasure’.10

  By the time Queen Victoria received the letter, two months later, the Sikh kingdom had ceased to exist. After a series of battles which had taken place since the end of the previous year, Sikh ministers gathered at Lahore on the morning of 29 March 1849 and read a proclamation from Dalhousie himself which simply stated: ‘The Kingdom of Punjab is at an end. All the territories of Maharaja Dalip Singh are now and henceforth a portion of the British Empire.’11 The last Maharaja, the eleven-year-old Duleep Singh, was taken to England, where he later purchased the 17,000-acre Elveden estate on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk. The initial reason for creating the Kashmir state, as a buffer against the Sikhs, had vanished within three years. After 1849, there was really no reason to keep the maharajas of Kashmir. The kingdom could have been annexed outright. This didn’t happen, with consequences which are still felt today.

  Dalhousie didn’t trust Gulab for one minute: ‘I do not, never have trusted, and never will trust him.’ He added with the irony for which British imperialists were famous, that ‘I am not unskilful enough open
ly to exhibit distrust.’ Dalhousie was a pragmatic Scot, though he had gone through the usual ruling-class treadmill at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a short, capable and highly ambitious politician, who had been made governor general at the age of thirty-five. He understood that Gulab Singh’s attachment to Britain was one forged purely by self-interest. As he explained in a later letter to Queen Victoria, ‘Whatever may have been the character and conduct of this man during his adventurous life, from the time when he ran as an orderly by the side of Ranjeet’s horse, till the present day when he reigns over wide dominions, his interests are now too closely and too clearly united with ours.’ Britain had cast its lot with Gulab; they sank or swam together. Gulab’s sycophancy knew no bounds. Dalhousie relayed to the Queen other obsequious remarks which had poured from Gulab’s lips. The British government was ‘now seated in the heavens: I have laid hold of its skirts and I will never quit my grasp’. Gulab was wondering if the Queen would accept as a gift the collection of cashmere shawls he had sent for the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace.12

  Gulab had been both lucky and shrewd. It was true that he was a clever man, though he almost certainly was not the ‘cleverest man ever India produced’, which an Indian had told Napier.13 Hardinge’s son, who had visited Kashmir with his father in 1846, remembered Gulab as a ‘fine handsome old man with a long beard’.14 The Maharaja was shrewd in picking his friends. Hardinge, the practical military man, supported him, even though he knew he wasn’t an ideal ruler. Gulab was even more friendly with Sir Henry Lawrence, the political officer in the Punjab.

  Lawrence was the middle of three brothers who had all gone to serve with the East India Company in the 1820s and 1830s. The Lawrences were a special breed of British hero, Christian warriors who combined deep religious conviction with a tough-minded pragmatism. When Gulab asked Sir Henry how it was that the British always conquered their foes, Lawrence, a little embarrassed, refused to answer. But he then asked for a sheet of paper and wrote ‘IHS’ on it. He did not explain that these letters stood for the Latin words ‘Iesu Hominum Salvator’, Jesus Saviour of Men. The Maharaja thought that the letters were a mystical sign and had them stamped on the silver rupee coins in newly acquired Kashmir. The Lawrences were one of those Anglo-Irish families who were often drawn to service in the empire. Henry, his elder brother George and his younger brother John, who would be viceroy of India in the 1860s, were all educated at Londonderry’s Foyle College, which has been described as a ‘tough, no-nonsense, God-fearing institution that produced boys ideally matched to the East India Company’s needs’.15

  To the soldier-diplomat Herbert Edwardes, on the other hand, Gulab was the ‘worst native’ he had ‘ever come in contact with’; he was a ‘bad king, a miser, and a liar, and the dirtiest fellow in all India’. For the Kashmiris the sale of their homeland to Gulab Singh was a misfortune. The British officials themselves were never entirely comfortable with the decision to support Gulab and his family, a Hindu dynasty, in their rule of a predominantly Muslim state. Napier had written a ditty about Gulab’s new kingdom:Oh Gulab Sing

  We made you king

  All out of moderation!

  But says Cashmere

  You shan’t come here

  And all is botheration!16

  Others were more seriously critical. They knew even in the 1850s that the company had made a big mistake. As early as 1851, Colonel Henry Steinbach, a British officer of German origins, was highly critical of the British policy and even let Lord Dalhousie know what he thought. He had ‘a mean opinion’ of Gulab’s talents. ‘In no single thing that he does, can I detect ability.’ The whole policy Britain had pursued was wrong. If Dalhousie visited Kashmir, he would find ‘the entire population . . . prostrating themselves at your Lordship’s feet to beg to be relieved from the Maharajah’s rule’. Steinbach’s letter was prescient and direct, though he tried to cover himself with an air of tact and diplomacy: ‘Far be it from me to animadvert upon the policy of the British Government,’ he began. ‘I will merely observe, en passant, that the Government made a great mistake in assigning over to the Maharajah so beautiful a country.’

  The British had handed over ‘a whole people to the Maharajah’s oppressive rule’. This had happened even though everyone knew what kind of ruler he would be. Gulab was indeed rich. But there was a catch. He was rich because he was an avaricious, unscrupulous ruler. Steinbach continued, they ‘make an outcry in England about the abolition of slavery, whereas the British Government have in reality . . . given over an entire people to a slavery of the most oppressive description’. It was Gulab’s greed, more than anything else, which oppressed the people. ‘The Maharajah has taken everything into his own hands, and is, with the exception of 5 or 6 shawl merchants, the only trader in Cashmere.’ Taxes were exorbitant; from every 100 acres’ worth of grain cultivated, Gulab ‘takes 90, leaving 10 to the cultivator . . . upon shawls and every other article of manufactured goods he takes exactly half of its sale price’. The result of all this greed was that the people lived in the ‘most abject poverty’.17

  Not that any of this bothered the Lawrence brothers. Sir Henry, who has been described as the ‘virtual ruler of the Punjab from 1847’, perfected what was known as the Lawrence system.18 He was a fatherly figure to native rulers. He wanted to keep the region quiet from a strictly external point of view. He was relatively unconcerned about what went on inside the province, as long as it didn’t give any trouble to the Raj. Under his younger brother John, this system was dubbed ‘masterly inactivity’ by its opponents. It entailed a policy, so far as was possible, of non-intervention towards both India’s neighbours and the princely states. There was little trust or love involved, but so long as things were quiet that would be sufficient. Along with the inactivity and world-weariness, these imperial bureaucrats sometimes offered penetrating insights into the men and affairs of the region. John Lawrence was bright. In 1829 he had passed out third from the East India College (which later became Haileybury), where he was remembered for having a ‘good deal of the Irish element’ in his behaviour.19 He observed of the Afghans that they would ‘bear poverty’ and ‘insecurity of life; but will not tolerate foreign rule’.

  In defence of the pragmatists, they were always having to consider the wider picture, the geopolitical situation. Kashmir was an important part of the so-called Great Game–the name, immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim, for the battle over Central Asia which was being fought almost continuously, on an informal basis of espionage and posturing, by Russia and Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century. A local ruler was needed to preserve a figleaf of independence. If Britain annexed Kashmir outright, the Russians might be offended. In the 1860s Lord Mayo, who had been appointed viceroy in 1868, was writing to the Duke of Argyll, the Liberal Secretary of State for India under Gladstone, that Russia ‘can be truly told that our only object is commerce and peace’. To Mayo, geopolitical manoeuvring in Central Asia was hazardous: ‘Russia hardly seems to be aware of the dangerous game she is trying to play in Central Asia.’20 The term ‘the Great Game’ describes pithily the strategic dimension of imperial politics in which Kashmir played an important part. It is in the context of this kind of realism in foreign affairs that the granting of Kashmir to Gulab Singh can be more precisely understood.

  In this far-sighted letter Mayo pointed out to Argyll something which he felt the Russians did not understand. There were, in India, ‘such differences of Religion and Race as enable us to play Mahomedan and Sikh, Hindoo or Buddhist against each other’. In Central Asia, Russia ‘is now face to face with millions of poor fanatical and warlike Races inhabiting almost inaccessible mountains or half desert plains–who . . . are to a man almost Sunie [Sunni] Mahometans’. These tribes and warlike people needed only ‘some Prophet of influence . . . to lead them against the infidel invader’. This was a shrewd assessment of Central Asian politics, and of the unifying and galvanizing power of Islam. Mayo quoted the Moscow Gazette o
f 5 April 1869, which referred to the Russian plan ‘to make Central Asia a strong strategical point against England in the event of an Eastern War’.21

  What went on inside Kashmir was not nearly as important as its role in the great theatre of Central Asian politics. The Kashmir maharajas were also well aware of their strategic value. Gulab Singh, a diabetic, died in 1857. He was succeeded by his son Ranbir Singh, who irritated the British by trying to curry favour with the Russians, just as his father had been expert at winning the favour of the British. When the Russians occupied the city of Tashkent in today’s Uzbekistan in 1865, it was Maharaja Ranbir Singh who was the first Indian prince to send secret emissaries to convey his ‘congratulations’ to the Russian General responsible for this success. Ranbir was very careful not to enter into any written communications with the Russians. All contact would be oral; he even established a Russian-language school in Kashmir.22

  Ranbir was every bit as wily as his father. While trying to ingratiate himself with the Russians, he was also keeping the British satisfied. Given his machinations, it is interesting to see that Lord Mayo was not very impressed by his abilities: ‘My interview with the Maharaja was satisfactory –he is a very good man but weak.’23 Ranbir had clearly perfected the art of playing the stupid innocent when dealing with the British, while sending congratulations and marks of affection to the Russians. For the Maharaja, independence was paramount. For the British, a quiet life and the promotion of greater trade were what mattered. Sir Charles Napier had remarked that the British object in ‘conquering India, the object of all our cruelties, was money’.24 This was cynical, but there was a large element of truth in the claim. Lord Mayo was anxious, at the beginning of 1870, to secure a treaty with the ‘Rajah of Cashmere which will have the effect of creating a free Road from our frontier to the borders of Eastern Turkestan’. Trade with eastern Turkestan, the area we would call Azerbaijan or Armenia, was of ‘daily increasing importance to the subjects of the British Government and those of the Maharaja’. The Maharaja was worried about his independence, whereas Mayo was fantasizing about establishing ‘for the first time a secure and duty free route from Central Asia to India’ within twelve months.25