Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  In his mind the ideal situation would have been independence. There is a body of evidence to suggest that the Maharaja had, by the 1940s, become increasingly detached from reality. His uncle, Pratap, had assembled a motley collection of Hindu swamis, gurus, astrologers and assorted holy men round his court whom Hari Singh had for twenty years banished from his presence. Now, in 1944, he summoned back one of the most influential and charismatic of these men, Swami Sant Dev, a mystic who had enjoyed high prestige in the reign of the Maharaja’s uncle. Hari Singh restored his allowance and, from May 1946 until October 1947, the Swami was always in residence in various houses within the palace compound in Srinagar. The Maharaja had turned, in the sunset of the Raj, to Hindu mysticism, under whose influence he believed he could build a new kingdom once the British had departed. Some called this fantastical kingdom ‘Dogistan’, which would, Hari Singh hoped, rekindle the glory of his royal house. This absurd fantasy was nursed by the Swami. The Prime Minister, a Brahmin named Pandit Kak, told the Maharaja frankly that it was a ‘futile and impractical’ idea, since the nationalism which was pushing out the British would not allow the princes of India to retain their former power. The Maharaja pressed on with his grandiose scheme, though he never forgave or forgot the impertinence of his prime minister. He had already ‘at great cost’ prepared a new crown of diamonds and emeralds for his coronation as ruler of this new kingdom.48 He still cut a dashing figure. Though fat, he had a regal style about him. On a visit to Kashmir in 1945, he and his wife dazzled the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, who had been impressed by what he saw as the Maharaja’s ‘liberal-minded’ attitude. Wavell was especially taken with Tara Devi: ‘I quite fell for the Maharani who is attractive and has obviously a good deal of character. Her jewels must be seen to be believed; she wore a fresh set every day we were there.’49 Wavell stayed more than a week.

  As independence drew nearer, the fate of Kashmir was still unclear. It had been decided that independence would be granted to India on 15 August 1947. Under the Government of India Act 1935, it was the maharajas and nawabs, the rulers of the princely states, who would decide which country they would accede to. Still the Maharaja of Kashmir had not decided, and it was at this point that Lord Mountbatten, who had replaced Wavell as viceroy in April 1947, made an interesting intervention. In the Pakistani demonology of the tragedy of Partition and the communal violence which followed, Mountbatten plays a special role. Several historians have detected in him a pro-Indian bias, from which the subsequent tragedy of Kashmir is believed to flow. It is true that Mountbatten got on well with Nehru, whom ‘he both admired and trusted’.50 It is also true that Nehru had a very close relationship with Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, to whom Nehru later wrote that ‘some uncontrollable force, of which I was only dimly aware, drew us to one another’. A Mountbatten biographer has even opined on the precise nature of the relationship, airily declaring that if ‘there was any physical element it can only have been of minor importance to either party’.51 Whatever the nature of that relationship, the closeness of the Mountbattens to Nehru is well known. Historians have therefore assumed that Mountbatten was on India’s side during the Kashmir conflict from the outset. ‘The key to understanding Mountbatten’s stance over Kashmir . . . was his anti-Pakistan bias,’ wrote Andrew Roberts in his acclaimed book, Eminent Churchillians.52 The documentary evidence presents a less clear picture. When Mountbatten visited Kashmir at the end of June 1947, it was to urge the kingdom’s accession to Pakistan. He advised Pandit Kak, the Maharaja’s beleaguered Prime Minister and, like Nehru, a Kashmiri Brahmin, to ‘consider your geographical position, political situation and composition of your population and then decide’. ‘That means that you advise us to accede to Pakistan. It is not possible for us to do that,’ the Kashmiri replied.53

  In Srinagar, Mountbatten spent five days from 18 to 23 June with the Maharaja. The Viceroy was a pragmatist and, in keeping with this pragmatism, he frankly told Hari Singh, ‘it’s up to you, but I think you should consider it very carefully since after all 90 per cent of your people are Muslims’. Even though the true figure was just shy of 80 per cent, the force of the argument remained. ‘I don’t want to accede to Pakistan on any account,’ the Maharaja replied. The problem was that he was unwilling ‘to join India either’. Everyone knew that Congress, the dominant party in India, would end the Maharaja’s powers, but he could not join Pakistan, because his position as the Hindu ruler of a predominantly Muslim state would surely have been terminated by any Pakistani government. Yet Mountbatten squashed any idea of independence. ‘You just can’t be independent. You are a land-locked country. You are over-sized and under-populated.’

  Mountbatten, to his credit, presented the Maharaja with the facts, however unpleasant they may have been to His Highness’s ears. The Viceroy always fancied himself as the imperial statesman and, despite the criticisms of his detractors, in his assessment of the Kashmiri situation he was far-sighted and statesmanlike. He told the Maharaja bluntly: ‘What I mind is that your attitude is bound to lead to strife between India and Pakistan. You are going to have two rival countries at daggers drawn for your neighbours. You will be the tug-of-war between them. You will end up being a battlefield. That is what will happen. You will lose your throne, and your life too, if you are not careful.’

  Mountbatten spoke truly. Hari Singh spent the next two days fishing, and finally refused to meet Mountbatten formally, as the Viceroy had proposed; the Maharaja was suffering from a ‘stomach upset’, so he claimed, whereupon Mountbatten left Srinagar without any firm commitment from the Maharaja to join either India or Pakistan.54 In reality, given Hari Singh’s character and the heritage he represented, there was never any question that he would accede to Pakistan. This was the central political fact about Kashmir: it was a state in which a Hindu minority ruled over a Muslim majority and it would have been too much to hope that the ruler of that state would willingly accede to another which had been explicitly founded as a Muslim state. The British, particularly Mountbatten, saw this very clearly. It was obvious to Wavell, Mountbatten’s immediate predecessor, that Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan. In a letter written in December 1949, less than six months before his death, Wavell could not have been less equivocal on this question: ‘If only this wretched Kashmir business could be settled . . . Of course it ought to have gone to Pakistan from the first, with possibly some adjustments in frontier on the south . . . But I am afraid the prospects of settlement do not look good at present.’55

  The last two viceroys of India, Lords Wavell and Mountbatten, were at the time convinced that Kashmir’s future should lie with Pakistan. That this failed to happen was the result of one man’s choice. Under the rules of the game, the Maharaja in effect had the sole authority to decide to which state Kashmir should accede. His possession of Kashmir, his power, was not based on any idea of democracy or of the popular will. It was an accident of birth and, more than that, an accident of history. The Maharaja’s power, like that of the other Indian princes, was a product of convenience and snobbery. It was unfortunate that in the case of Kashmir, his decisions mattered. The consequences of his vacillating character and his final decision to accede to India still shape Kashmir and politics in the subcontinent more than sixty years after independence. Yet the Kashmir dispute, in the last months of 1947, would become even more toxic and this was a direct consequence of Pakistan’s own folly, not of the Maharaja’s stubborn will.

  7

  Deadlock

  India became independent on 15 August 1947, but the position of Kashmir was still unsettled. Despite the persuasive powers of Lord Mountbatten, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of his subjects were Muslim, the Maharaja resolutely refused to accede to Pakistan. Accession to India also posed its own problems. Congress, under the leadership of Nehru and Gandhi, was determined that the power of the Indian princes would not outlive the Raj, which itself had disintegrated more quickly than anyone had expected. As one writer has observed, ‘it too
k the British more than three hundred years to build up their Indian Empire. They dismantled it in just seventy days in 1947.’1 The parallel to the rapid disintegration of Soviet power in Eastern Europe in 1989 is a striking one.

  Hari Singh’s dream of creating an independent mountain state in Kashmir was unrealistic and was made more difficult by the significant detail that the Congress leader, Nehru, was a Kashmiri Brahmin. Nehru loved Kashmir like a ‘supremely beautiful woman whose beauty is impersonal and above desire’.2 As he told Edwina Mountbatten, Kashmir affected him in ‘a peculiar way; it is a kind of mild intoxication–like music sometimes or the company of a beloved person’.3 Nehru, as a consequence of his devotion to his native land, desperately wanted India to keep Kashmir, which obviously remained an important object of desire for the new Pakistan government. Through the late summer months of 1947, the Kashmir issue remained in the balance, and the longer it remained undecided, the less likely a peaceful solution would become.

  By October 1947, it seemed that some incident or act of spontaneous folly could make the situation worse. Already, at the end of September, Nehru had written to Sardar Patel, a leading figure in the Congress Party, to stress that the situation in Kashmir was ‘dangerous and deteriorating’. Nehru was also conscious that some in Pakistan were quite willing to take matters in hand and act swiftly, and by means of violence, to impose their will. ‘The Muslim league in the Punjab and the North West Frontier Province are making preparations to enter Kashmir in considerable numbers,’ he wrote, adding that the ‘approach of winter’ would ‘cut off Kashmir from the rest of India’. Nehru, at this relatively early date, believed that ‘something should be done’, before winter conditions set in, by the end of October or, at the latest, early November.4

  In Pakistan, Sir George Cunningham, who was the Governor of the North West Frontier, expressed similar thoughts in his diary, observing on 6 October that there is ‘quite a lot of talk now of the danger of actual war between Pakistan and India’. He noted that the Pakistan government seemed ‘to wink at very dangerous activities on the Kashmir border, allowing small parties of Muslims to infiltrate Kashmir from this side’. The religious nature of the dispute was never really in any doubt from the Pakistani point of view, as militants on the Pakistan side were openly courting religious enthusiasm to launch a jihad against the infidel. On 13 October, Cunningham observed that there was ‘a real move in Hazara [a district in the west of Pakistan] for Jehad against Kashmir’. Two days later, he simply commented that the ‘Kashmir affair is boiling up’. That an actual invasion was likely to happen was perhaps the most open secret in international politics at that time. Certainly Nehru, in Delhi, and Cunningham, in Pakistan, knew that an act of aggression was imminent. In India, as early as 7 October, Sardar Patel hoped that ‘arrangements are in train to send immediately supplies of arms and ammunition to Kashmir’. He added that there was no time to lose ‘if the reports which we hear of similar preparation for intervention on the part of the Pakistan Government are correct’. Patel was confident that such an intervention would be ‘true to the Nazi pattern’.5 How much Cunningham, a British civil servant and therefore supposedly impartial, knew about the Pakistani plans has been a subject of debate. It is clear that he was very well informed of what was happening, although he was powerless to do anything about it. On 18 October he summoned Abdul Qayum, now the Pakistani Prime Minister of the North West Frontier Province, to confront him about the ‘Kashmir business’. Cunningham ‘told him everything’ and ‘asked him frankly whether he was in it or not’. A rather cynical and subtle politician, Qayum replied evasively that while it would be a ‘very good thing if Kashmir could be filled up with armed Muslims to the greatest possible extent, our line here must be that all officers and our police etc. give no support or sympathy to the movement’.6

  Everyone, it appeared, knew what was coming, but the news was still shocking when it finally broke. On the evening of Friday 24 October, Lord Mountbatten and the Foreign Minister of Siam were dinner-party guests of Pandit Nehru, the leader of the Congress Party. In the course of the evening Mountbatten was taken to one side by Nehru, who informed him that news had come of ‘a large scale invasion of tribesmen from the North-West Frontier into Kashmir’.7 In Srinagar, at the onset of the invasion, the Maharaja was literally heading for the hills. On the night of the 25th, a Saturday, Hari Singh had been entertaining 200 people in his palace when all the lights suddenly went out. This in itself was quite common, but when the palace was still in darkness after a couple of hours the guests began to feel uneasy. The blackout had been caused by the invading tribesmen burning down the power station at Mohra, only thirty miles down the road.8 The following night, the Maharaja’s servants began to empty his strongboxes of his pearls, emeralds and diamonds. The Maharaja himself frantically searched his palace for the two objects he prized above all others, his two Purdey shotguns. Once these had been found they were packed into his car. Now, accompanied by his friend Victor Rosenthal, a Russian Jewish jeweller and financier, Hari Singh was driven away, never to return to his palace in Srinagar.9 The palace itself would be sold in 1954 to the Oberoi hotel chain by Hari Singh’s son Karan.

  The tribal invasion itself has been a subject of intense controversy. What started as an attempt to force the incorporation of Kashmir into Pakistan became, through the intervention of Pashtun (or Pathan) tribesmen, a rallying cry for the new nation of India. The violence of the Pathan invaders is still sometimes referred to by an India seeking to justify its own military intervention in Kashmir. The Pathans, at the outset anyway, carried all before them. In his diary on 25 October, Cunningham remarked that he was ‘greatly surprised at the absence of opposition’ against people he rather bizarrely called ‘our tribesmen’.10 The remark innocently reveals how closely British officials sometimes identified with the peoples they governed. Many outrages were committed by the Pathan tribesmen, of which the storming of the convent at Baramullah, thirty miles from Srinagar, was the most notorious. On Monday 27 October, as Indian troops who had just flown in were struggling to hold the airport at Srinagar, the tribesmen gave vent to their violent fury. They arrived at the convent of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, where an assortment of French, Scottish, Italian and Portuguese nuns resided. In the clinic of the convent, tribesmen found Colonel D. O. T. Dykes, from Somerset in England, and his wife, who had given birth to a daughter only three weeks before. Dykes tried to plead with the invaders. He was shot at point-blank range and died a few hours later. His wife, sitting outside, was also shot and fell dead, crushing the baby she was still feeding. They then stripped her of her clothes and threw her body down a well. Jose Barretto, an Italian whose wife was a doctor at the hospital, was robbed and killed at his wife’s feet. Tribesmen raped some of the nuns. The convent’s Mother Superior, Sister Mary, died of her wounds, still in her final hours praying for the ‘conversion of Kashmir’ to Christianity.11

  The terrible nature of the invasion of Kashmir by the Pashtuns must be placed in the context of the appalling violence which gripped the subcontinent at the end of 1947. At the end of British rule, India was a tumultuous scene of murder and bloodshed. British intelligence reports in October that year may have referred to the ‘sufferings of the Muslims in the East Punjab’, but the outrages committed by the tribesmen were perpetrated against Muslim and Hindu alike. As one British social worker expressed it, the invading Pathans had sensed an ‘opportunity of gaining both religious merit and rich booty’.12 It was after the excessive violence experienced by Kashmiris at the end of October that the Maharaja acceded to India, though there is a lively debate about when exactly this was done.

  The accession of the Maharaja of Kashmir to India is the defining moment in modern Kashmiri history. To the Indians this piece of paper has all the binding legality of a constitutional document, which, strictly speaking, is correct, so far as the letter of the law is concerned. Yet both India and Pakistan recognized that some kind of popular endorsement of the
accession was needed, and both countries, at the time though not subsequently, were committed to a plebiscite on the issue. At the beginning of December 1947, Nehru was writing to the Maharaja about a vote which he clearly thought was likely: ‘If there is to going to be a plebiscite, then obviously we have to work in such a way as to gain the goodwill of the majority of the population of the State, which means chiefly Muslims.’ At that time, Nehru was enough of a democrat to realize that Indian control of the province could not be maintained ‘ultimately except through the goodwill of the mass of the population’.13 By the end of 1947, both Pakistan and India felt that it made sense for the Kashmiris themselves to decide to which country they should belong. The fact that no plebiscite ever took place to resolve the Kashmir dispute belies some of the wilder claims that democracy was the British Raj’s unique legacy to the Indian subcontinent; the Kashmir dispute was a direct consequence of princely rule, and no democratic resolution to the conflict has ever been sought.

  The dramatic airlift of Indian troops from Delhi to Srinagar at the end of October 1947 established the deadlock in Kashmir which has persisted to this day. The Pakistanis had been wrongfooted by India’s response. Their support, tacit or overt, of the tribal invasion of Kashmir deprived them of any moral authority, while it seemed that they had badly miscalculated by believing that the invasion would put pressure on the Maharaja to accede to Pakistan. On 18 October, before the invasion had even taken place, Abdul Qayum told Cunningham that ‘direct action against Kashmir now would tend to make the Maharaja join Pakistan than otherwise’. Yet by the end of the month Cunningham believed that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s first governor general, now saw clearly that the intervention had failed, and had produced exactly the opposite result to its intention. Cunningham, confiding in his diary, believed that ‘Jinnah is conscious of having made a blunder (having assumed that tribal intervention would not at once–as seemed obvious to me–throw Kashmir into the arms of India).’14