Even after Delhi was subdued the situation outside Government House remained dire. The camps had not been prepared: there was no water, no food, no sanitation, no security. Anees Kidwai, the widow of a murdered government official and sister-in-law of Communications Minister Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, went to work in the camp at the Purana Qila. She described a shambolic mass of tents among which ‘naked children, unkempt women, girls without their heads covered and men overcome with anger wandered up and down endlessly’.62 Still no one kept count of how many Muslim refugees there were. By the middle of September, around 60 per cent of the Muslims of Old Delhi and 90 per cent of the Muslims of New Delhi were thought to have left their homes. There were thousands clustered into each of the biggest camps, at the Purana Qila and Humayun’s Tomb: perhaps 60,000 in each, perhaps 80,000, perhaps even 100,000. Thousands more had been killed – was it 20,000 now? 30,000? No one knew.63 Someone had counted 137 mosques damaged, a few of which had been forcibly converted into Hindu temples, looted for their libraries, and hung with flags of the fundamentalist Hindu Mahasabha. Gandhi mourned, and condemned the desecration as ‘a blot on Hinduism and Sikhism’.64
To the north and east, Pakistan fared ill. Like India, it suffered riots; trains full of dead bodies turned up in its stations; rich Hindu merchants streamed out of its cities, despite efforts by the Pakistani government to persuade them to stay.65 Grim conditions prevailed at West Pakistan’s refugee camps. Richard Symonds remembered gaunt women with half-starved babies throwing themselves at his feet, their ration in some camps just two ounces of flour a day – enough to make one single chapati.66 Unlike India, Pakistan had to deal with these problems on an empty treasury. The Punjab, its only profitable region, had collapsed. As a result of the migrations, Pakistan had lost 4 million people who had been settled, established and productive, and gained 5 million destitute refugees.67 British India had not been poor, but the dominions had not yet agreed on the details by which its assets would be divided between them. In the meantime, India held on to the lot, while Pakistan struggled to cope. Even at the most basic level, the logistics of setting up the new government had proven impossible. When Ghulam Mohammed, the Finance Minister, had turned up in his Karachi office on 15 August for his first day’s work, he had found it bare except for one table. Everything else had been sent on a train from Delhi, and looted en route.68
Jinnah was livid at what he saw as a deliberate sabotaging of Pakistan. In early September, Ismay had visited him in Karachi and, according to Alan Campbell-Johnson, found the Quaid-e-Azam seething on the brink of ‘precipitate action’.69 He wrote irate letters to Attlee, demanding the help of the Commonwealth; but Attlee had no intention of wading into a fight between two dominions.70 Jinnah appealed to all the other Commonwealth governments directly, and Ismay began to suspect his aim was to push India out of the Commonwealth altogether.71 At the beginning of October, Jinnah sent another long letter to Attlee. By then, the strain was making him ill. Jinnah’s writing was full of spelling mistakes and repetition. ‘I regret to say that every effort is being made to put difficulties in our way by our enemies in order to paralyse or cripple our State and bring about its collapse’, he began. ‘It is amazing that the top-most Hindu leaders repeatedly say that Pakistan will have to submit to the Union of India. Pakistan will never surrender’.72 At the bottom, the usually sharp ‘M.A. Jinnah’ was signed with a tremulous hand.
Under the circumstances, Jinnah saw that he would have to cultivate international allies. On 7 September, he had told a cabinet meeting that communism could ‘not flourish in the soil of Islam’, and that Pakistan’s interests would best be served by friendship with ‘the two great democratic countries, namely, the U.K. and the U.S.A., rather than with Russia’.73 Jinnah sought to present his new nation as a crucial strategic ally: a buffer zone between Communist Russia and dubious India, and a vantage point between China and the Middle East. For most of the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia had played the ‘Great Game’ for primacy in Central Asia. Now a new Great Game was beginning, and elements in the United States government were already beginning to realize that Pakistan – though they had opposed its creation – presented a more amenable prospect than India. From Jinnah’s point of view, this had one great advantage: money. The Pakistani Finance Minister had already brought up the question of possible financial aid with the American Embassy in Karachi. Pakistan now asked the United States for a massive $2 billion loan, for the purposes of development and defence. In December, to the great disappointment of the Pakistani government, the Americans would offer a more realistic $10 million. But the Cold War was only just beginning; Pakistan’s argument that it should be supported for being anti-Russian would be taken more seriously by the late 1950s, with happy results for its treasury.74
In the meantime, Jinnah was forced to go begging. He sent a letter to the Nizam of Hyderabad on 15 October, reminding him of the ‘special claim’ Pakistan had on his state, and that ‘the resources of the Dominion of India are very vast whereas Pakistan is starting from scratch’. He concluded: ‘Please do not think that I am trying to get more money. God is great, and we shall go through this dire calamity which has overtaken us.’75 Three months later, he would ask the Nizam directly for a large loan.76
The status of Hyderabad troubled India, too. To Patel’s embarrassment, Nehru put Mountbatten rather than him in charge of negotiation. Patel’s relationship with Nehru, never great, was rapidly souring. Patel made it clear that he thought Nehru was too soft on Muslims. Nehru made it clear that he disliked Patel’s Hinduchauvinist tone. With almost half of his cabinet tending towards the establishment of India as a Hindu nation, Nehru had to fight an increasingly hard battle against the swell of fundamentalist feeling.77 ‘As long as I am at the helm of affairs India will not become a Hindu state,’ Nehru announced in a public speech, with a deliberate dig at the orthodox members of his government. ‘The very idea of a theocratic state is not only medieval but also stupid.’78 Lord Addison visited Delhi and Karachi in October, and reported back to Attlee his fears about Patel. If Nehru’s government fell, he warned, Patel would probably take over and install ‘an iron-handed system’, openly hostile to Pakistan.79
While the bigger problem of Hyderabad fermented, the Indian and Pakistani governments had their opening skirmish over another princely state. Junagadh was a small state wedged firmly amid Indian territory in Kathiawar. The Nawab of Junagadh was a Muslim, ruling over a population that was over four-fifths Hindu. Accession to Pakistan, while tricky, was not impossible: Junagadh had a port on the Arabian Sea, within reach of Karachi.80 The Nawab wavered, before on 16 September his Muslim League government acceded to Pakistan.
Coming so soon after the great insurrection in Delhi had been quelled, the petty affair of Junagadh provoked a far more serious reaction than it warranted. Patel wanted to send troops in immediately. Nehru was more circumspect. Mountbatten suggested to Nehru and Liaquat that both India and Pakistan should abide by the results of a plebiscite, a procedure he hoped they would follow for any state. Nehru nodded dejectedly, but Liaquat’s eyes lit up. Mountbatten noted that ‘There is no doubt that the same thought was in each of their minds – “Kashmir!”‘81 Shortly afterwards, the Nawab packed up his beloved dogs – of which there were 800, each with its own keeper – and absconded to Pakistan, leaving his government and his subjects in some confusion.82 At the beginning of November, India sent troops in at the invitation of the Junagadh administration, to the fury of Pakistan. The promised plebiscite, held in February 1948, would count only 91 votes for Pakistan, against 190,779 for India.83
Lord Addison’s assessment of the situation between India and Pakistan made uncomfortable reading for those back in London. Jinnah was in such a weak position financially, militarily and administratively ‘that he would be quite unable to take any action against India even if he wanted.’ Rather, Addison believed, the Quaid-e-Azam was anxious to maintain, and possibly even increase, British involvement in Pakistan
. ‘I think it cannot be doubted that the danger to the British connection, and to the eventual success of our policy for the establishment of a progressive Indian democracy, comes much more from India than from Pakistan,’ he concluded.84 As far as the government in London was concerned, Mountbatten might well be on the wrong side.
By October, there were thought to be around 400,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees from the Punjab in Delhi. Thousands could not even fit into the tent city that Nehru had set up outside the capital, a sad and grimy echo of the gorgeous campsite that had been pitched there for his wedding, thirty-one years before. Delhi’s own population had been devastated: 330,000 Muslims had left, representing around one third of the city’s population.85 Many refugees were obliged to sleep rough on Delhi streets, and courtyards, doorways and gutters were filled with their huddled bodies. The death toll continued to rise, not only from the epidemics of cholera, typhus and smallpox that issued forth from the unsanitary camps, but also from traffic accidents. Dozens of refugees who had collapsed, worn out, to sleep on the streets were run over each night.
‘At times I could not believe my eyes or ears,’ remembered Edwina a year later. ‘All I can tell you is that the people I was privileged to work with did a superhuman job and I would like to say that they were of all religions, of all nationalities, and of all beliefs. I worked with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsees, with people from India, Pakistan, Canada, China and America.’86 She and Amrit Kaur continued to coordinate the relief effort, ensuring that vaccines were flown in from Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, and organizing campaigns to inoculate the migrants before they reached Delhi. Edwina also kept Betty Hutheesing on call to visit hospitals, clinics and camps. ‘It was amazing to see her in those terrible places,’ remembered Betty, ‘neither patronizing, nor oversympathetic, but just talking naturally to the inmates. This is the hardest thing of all to do when people are destitute, hopeless or dying.’87
Edwina coped well, but the stress was exacting a terrible toll on Jawahar. ‘Ever since I assumed charge of my office, I have done nothing but tried to keep people from killing each other or visited refugee camps and hospitals,’ he said. ‘All the plans which I had drawn up for making India a prosperous and progressive country have had to be relegated to the background.’88 Speaking at the end of September, he did not yet know that arguably the greatest challenge of all was just about to begin.
CHAPTER 17
KASHMIR
KASHMIR IS OFTEN CALLED THE LOVELIEST OF THE SUBCONTINENT’S landscapes. Iced Himalayan peaks soar up from lush green valleys, dark forests sweep around the shores of glassy lakes. Before 1947, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs had worked side by side in walnut groves and cherry orchards, saffron fields and lotus gardens. In ancient legends, Kashmir was supposed to have been an inland sea, from which a wicked demon emerged to terrorize the earth. The demon was finally quelled by the goddess Parvati, who dropped a mountain on him – one of those which now forms the backdrop to the regional capital, Srinagar. But, if a spirit of rage lived on beneath the mountain, the events of 1947 would awaken it.
Kashmir had come into existence as a princely state on 16 March 1846. The British had acquired the territory following the First Sikh War, but lacked the resources or the inclination to administer it. Instead they sold it under the Treaty of Amritsar to Gulab Singh, the Raja of Jammu, for 750,000 rupees. It is sometimes said that this sale was the root cause of the Kashmir conflict; either because Gulab Singh was a Dogra Hindu and most of the people were Muslims or because he was, in the words of the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, ‘the greatest rascal in Asia’.1 But Kashmir had hosted a religiously mixed population for centuries before the beginning of Dogra rule and, for 101 years following the Treaty of Amritsar, it remained comparatively peaceable. Successive maharajas had ruled despotically, and had discriminated to various degrees against Muslims, but the region did not see any major incidents of unrest except once. In 1931, there had been Muslim riots against the regime of Gulab Singh’s great-grandson, Maharaja Hari Singh; these were soon quashed, and did not inspire any widespread rebellion.2 Though around three-quarters Muslim, the population was neither homogeneous nor especially orthodox. Buddhists formed the majority in remote Ladakh, perched high among the slopes of the Himalayas; while most of the population of lower-lying Jammu was Hindu. The stripped-down, casteless Bhakti form of Hinduism found favour with many. Mystical traditions such as Islamic Sufism had extensive roots in the vale.3 When Jinnah had sent a Muslim League envoy to Kashmir in 1943 to assess its potential, the conclusion had been disheartening. ‘No important religious leader has ever made Kashmir … his home or even an ordinary centre of Islamic activities’, wrote the envoy. ‘It will require considerable effort, spread over a long period of time, to reform them and convert them into true Muslims.’4
All Kashmir’s diverse and agreeable ways of life had continued in relative stability until soon after the partition of the subcontinent. Unlike the partition holocausts, whose effect was localized in time and space, the Kashmir crisis continues to pose one of the most serious threats to international stability that the world has ever seen. Within the space of three months, one of the most enchanting places on earth was transformed into the eastern front of a slow-burning but devastating war, between Islam and kaffirs (non-Muslims) on either side of the Arabian lands, and between Islam and Islam in the centre. The western front was to erupt just weeks later, in Palestine; the central battleground, in Iraq, was already on the boil.
It is impossible to tell the story of what happened in Kashmir in 1947 without upsetting at least one or, more likely, all of the factions that remain involved. The following year, the Indian and Pakistani governments presented their cases to the United Nations: their irreconcilable accounts of what had happened each lasted six hours.5 Even at the time, international observers repeatedly complained that facts were hard to come by, and harder yet to prove. Sixty years of furious debate has fogged the view yet further.
It had always been assumed by the British, by the Muslim League, and indeed largely by Congress apart from Nehru himself, that Kashmir would eventually go to Pakistan.6 Kashmir was the ‘K’ in Pakistan. Its population was predominantly Muslim. Its lines of trade and communication ran into Pakistan. Around one quarter of Kashmir’s total revenue came from timber, which was floated down the Jhelum and Chenab Rivers and collected in towns in Pakistan. Other major exports were fruit and vegetables, also exported through Rawalpindi; and woollens, including the prized cashmere, pashmina and shahtoosh wools, which were sold through the West Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province.7 There were only three roads running in and out of Kashmir. Two of them went into Pakistan, and one into India – but it was the Maharaja’s private route, a crumbling track described optimistically on the Ordnance Survey maps as ‘jeepable’, and snowbound for five months of each year.8
Nehru held out hope that Kashmir would come into India. On 27 September, he had written to Patel that he thought Pakistan would infiltrate Kashmir soon, with a view to a full annexation just before the snows of winter made the region impossible to defend; and that therefore its accession to India should be assured at the earliest possible minute.9 ‘Kashmir affects me in a peculiar way’, Nehru would write to Edwina Mountbatten a few months later; ‘it is a kind of mild intoxication – like music sometimes or the company of a beloved person’.10 His family’s descent from Kashmir is the first thing he describes on the first page of his 1936 autobiography. During the struggle for independence, he would often recuperate after his prison sentences with a vacation in the Kashmiri mountains. For a person who had never quite fitted in – too British for India, too Indian for Britain – he had a powerful sense of belonging in Kashmir. ‘I have a sense of coming back to my own’, he wrote to his daughter, Indira, in 1940; ‘it is curious how race memories persist, or perhaps it is all imagination’.11 His love for the state was about more than its beauty and harmony, though these were powerful pulls. The implication of some histor
ians that India claimed Kashmir because Nehru liked going there for his holidays is a little unfair. Nehru had long been a passionate supporter of the Congress-aligned National Conference in Kashmir, an overwhelmingly Muslim political party led by his friend Sheikh Abdullah that constituted the effective opposition to the Maharaja. To him, the state was a powerful symbol of his belief that India could not become a Hindustan, that Congress was a party for all faiths, and that Muslims were no less Indian than Hindus. In the context of a subcontinent that had descended into all-out holy wars, it is easy to see why such principles might have become an obsession with the secular Nehru. Unfortunately, the same principles allowed him to be manipulated by Vallabhbhai Patel, who was by now talking along openly Islamophobic lines and eyeing an aggressively anti-Pakistan foreign policy. While Nehru thought in terms of high ideals, Patel was concerned with enlarging Hindu India at the expense of Pakistan.
The decision of the Maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, not to accede to Pakistan by 15 August had been based on what was generally seen as a whimsical notion of remaining independent. Both the British and Pakistani governments assumed that the Maharaja would soon enough come to his senses and throw his lot in with Pakistan. But the Maharaja was showing little sign of coming to his senses, and every sign of losing his grip. He was under pressure from his wife and her brother, who served as his Household Minister – both of whom were strongly in favour of joining India. Torn, he consulted his astrologer, who held out for independence in picturesque terms, telling him that the stars showed the flag of Gulab Singh flying from Lahore to Ladakh.12 The Maharaja consequently dismissed his moderate Prime Minister, who had apparently recommended accession to Pakistan, and the British officers who had remained in his armed and police forces.13 He restocked his ranks from among his own Dogra people. Noting a change in the wind, Muslim units swiftly began to desert the Kashmir Army.
Indian Summer Page 33