During September and October 1947, the Maharaja’s Dogra-led troops carried out a campaign of sustained harassment, arson, physical violence, and genocide against Muslim Kashmiris in at least two areas – Poonch, right on the border with Pakistan, and pockets of southern Jammu.14 Just as in the Punjab, precise numbers were impossible to assess. According to some sources, more or less the entire Muslim population of Jammu, amounting to around half a million people, was displaced, with around 200,000 of those disappearing completely, ‘having presumably been butchered, or died from epidemics or exposure’, noted Ian Stephens, the editor of the Calcutta Statesman.15 The Maharaja meant to create a buffer zone of uninhabited land, approximately three miles wide, between Kashmir and Pakistan.16 Muslims were pushed into Pakistan, or killed. Hindus were sent the other way, deeper into Kashmir. India would deny that any holocaust had taken place, perhaps because it had secretly been providing arms to the Dogra side: the figures are open to question, but the fact that Muslim civilians were persecuted by the Maharaja’s troops is not.17 C.B. Duke, the British Deputy High Commissioner in Lahore, went to assess the situation in the third week of October. He saw around twenty burnt-out villages along the Chenab River inside the Kashmir border, and noted that many of them contained the ashes of a mosque – ‘it was the Muslims who were suffering,’ he concluded.18 The Maharaja had ordered ethnic cleansing under the guise of a defensive strategy.
Thousands of refugees, mostly Muslims from Jammu, began to pour into Pakistan’s Sialkot district, bringing with them sickening tales of atrocities. As it happened, Sialkot was on the frontier of Pathan tribal territory. In driving out the Muslims on his borders, the Maharaja had driven them straight into the arms of the most fearsome Islamic fighting force on earth. ‘This is a dangerous game for the Maharaja to play,’ noted Duke, ‘and is likely to lead to large-scale disturbances in Kashmir and incursion by neighbouring Muslim tribesmen.’19 He was right. The Pathans, who had for months been hearing tales of Sikh and Hindu outrages against their Muslim brothers and sisters in the Punjab, were already gearing up for what they did best: making war.20 Thousands of Pathan tribesmen were raised by former railway guard Khurshid Anwar, described by a British diplomat as ‘a complete adventurer’, who had made a fortune during the war, though no one was clear as to how.21 The tribesmen, mostly Afridis and Mahsuds from the North-West Frontier, tied a bright strip of cloth around their rifles, a sign of their oaths not to return home until they had avenged the deaths of Muslims in the Punjab.22 In tribal groups, the warriors swept down from the mountains and massed on the Kashmir border.
British observers were convinced that the government of the North-West Frontier Province was doing its best to hold Anwar’s tribesmen back, though without much success. Kashmir, warned Duke, ‘has always been regarded by the lean and hungry tribesmen of the North West Frontier as a land flowing with milk and honey, and if to the temptation of loot is added the merit of assisting oppressed Muslims the attractions will be well nigh irresistible’.23 Meanwhile, Pakistani officials on the borders stopped the supply of petrol, sugar and other goods to Kashmir. India would allege that the officials were acting with the knowledge and consent of the Pakistani government, a charge Pakistan hotly denied. Either way, according to the British High Commissioner to Pakistan, the responsibility on the ground lay with Rawalpindi’s District Commissioner, one Abdul Haq, who ‘appears to be conducting a private war of his own against Kashmir’ along with his brother, a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence.24
By 20 October, a more public war seemed inevitable. The Maharaja’s troops crossed the border into Pakistan, and attacked four large villages with mortars, grenades and automatic fire. A British officer on the scene estimated the casualties at 1750, excluding those who had been taken to hospital.25 The following night, around 2000 of the massed tribesmen left Pakistan from the Hazara district of the North-West Frontier Province, and marched on Kashmir via the Jhelum Valley. Despite extensive research by the Indian government, the United Nations and independent researchers, no conclusive evidence has ever been found to confirm Indian suspicions that Jinnah was directing this invasion.26
The tribesmen headed for Srinagar, sacking towns and villages on the way, and recruiting local Muslim troops which had deserted from the Kashmir Army. They were held at Baramula by the Maharaja’s army on 25 October. The result was a massacre, during which the town was reduced to ashes by Mahsud tribesmen. In their frenzy, the Mahsuds failed to distinguish between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri kaffirs. Among the dead was a Muslim youth, nailed to a cross in the town square.27 Khurshid Anwar suggested that the tribesmen stop looting, and consequently lost control of them. The tribal council spent two days debating whether to have him killed and replaced. This gave the Maharaja, trembling in Srinagar, time to consider his next move.28
India’s top civil servant, V.P. Menon, was dispatched to Srinagar to speak to the Maharaja and his Prime Minister. According to the British High Commissioner, Menon ‘so alarmed them that they were convinced that accession to India offered the only hope of salvation’.29 The two of them packed up and bolted for Jammu in the small hours of 27 October in a fleet of American limousines, leaving no administration in the capital.30 Public order collapsed. In Delhi, pressure to send troops grew, led by the hawkish Vallabhbhai Patel. Mountbatten insisted that troops could not be sent in unless Kashmir formally acceded to India first. It was a curious condition to demand. Had the Maharaja, as head of an independent state, asked India to help defend against an invasion, his action would have been legal. Had India responded to such a call, its action would have been legal, too.31 Many in Pakistan smelled a rat.
Nehru cabled to Attlee in London: ‘I should like to make it clear that the question of aiding Kashmir in this emergency is not designed in any way to influence the state to accede to India.’32 The integrity of Nehru’s sentiments was undermined when, the very next day, the Maharaja wrote to Mountbatten agreeing to do just that.33 There is some muddiness in the evidence as to whether Indian troops were sent in before the instrument of accession was signed or delivered, and even as to whether it was signed or delivered at all.34 The original seems to have disappeared from the Indian archives. But the question of when exactly the Maharaja signed the instrument is a red herring. He had already deserted his capital by the time he even requested the instrument, and had lost control of his state. Under such circumstances, it is doubtful that he was still the Maharaja in any meaningful sense, and whether he had the authority to accede to either dominion.35 But Nehru’s mind was filled with visions of losing his ancestral state to a plague of murderous tribesmen. Their faith did not matter to him; their brutality did, and the thought of yet more destruction, rape and slaughter impelled him to act rashly. The British High Commissioner in Pakistan telegraphed urgently to London that India should not accept Kashmir’s accession without a plebiscite, but it was too late.36 Nehru and Mountbatten accepted the accession, and prepared to fly Indian troops to Kashmir.
The fact of the Maharaja’s personal involvement in genocide was not known in Delhi at this point, but this cannot entirely excuse Nehru’s action.37 Nehru had spent much of his adult life excoriating the British for defending ‘princely rights’. The Maharaja’s antecedents had purchased their territory from a regime that Nehru had long held illegitimate. He had ruled autocratically over a population, much of which was hostile to his authority. Nehru would have pointed out that his friend Sheikh Abdullah had also requested that Indian troops be sent. This is true, but held little weight with the Pakistani government, which believed Abdullah to be a Congress stooge. Moreover, Abdullah’s opinion had no impact on India’s legal case for Kashmir, which rested solely on the flimsy fact of the Maharaja’s acquiescence.
Sam Manekshaw, India’s Director of Military Operations, remembered the meeting that took place in Delhi at this time. Nehru, as usual, was attempting to contextualize the Kashmir situation, talking about it in relation to Russia, the United States, the Unite
d Nations and so on. Eventually, Patel exploded: ‘Jawaharlal, do you want Kashmir, or do you want to give it away?’
‘Of course I want Kashmir,’ replied Nehru.
Before he could add anything else, Patel turned to Manekshaw, and said: ‘You have your orders.’ It was Patel who went off to All-India Radio and ordered a command requisitioning private aircraft, and Patel who organized the fly-in of Indian troops to Kashmir the next day. Only later did Mountbatten realize that the Home Minister must have had the whole operation planned in advance.38
That evening, Ian Stephens dined with the Mountbattens, and ‘was startled by their one-sided verdicts on affairs’, he wrote. ‘They seemed to have become wholly pro-Hindu.’39 This statement was not fair. Neither Mountbatten nor Nehru saw the situation in terms of Hindu versus Muslim, but both were profoundly opposed to religious extremism in any form, and both suspected the worst of Jinnah. Mountbatten told Stephens that Jinnah was waiting in Abbottabad, ready to drive triumphantly into Srinagar, ‘where he had hoped to have his breakfast – quite in the fashion of the Kaiser at the beginning of World War No. 1’, according to the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan.40 It has since been shown that Jinnah spent all of late October in Karachi and Lahore.41
On 27 October, India flew numbers of its 1st Sikh battalion into Srinagar, and these quickly secured the Vale of Kashmir. ‘If we had vacillated and delayed even by a day, Srinagar might have been a smoking ruin’, Nehru wrote to his sister Nan, though a British pilot reporting on the situation in Srinagar that day described it as ‘complete calm’ when the Indian forces arrived.42 Jinnah took the greatest exception to his arch-rival Nehru’s actions. Incensed, he ordered Pakistan’s troops in to defend Kashmir against India, but was persuaded to cancel his order when Auchinleck threatened to withdraw all British officers from the Pakistan Army.43
The same day, Edwina Mountbatten arrived in Lahore for a tour of refugee camps in West Punjab. Crossing the Indus, she paused for five minutes to watch the river fishermen as the sun set. It was, according to her fellow relief worker Richard Symonds, ‘the only time she knocked off on our three day tour’.44 The rest of the time she spent visiting camps, talking to refugees, and planning further extractions of supplies from the government.
The following evening, her party was in Rawalpindi when she was called upon by General Gracey, acting Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army. Gracey warned Edwina that war between Pakistan and India might break out at any point. He confessed that he would probably be required to arrest her, but chivalrously offered to take her to dinner first. She accepted. The following day, she continued to Sialkot, to see camps where Hindu Kashmiri refugees waited with increasing anxiety to be evacuated to India. They recounted stories of Muslim atrocities, and a local Sikh official told her that he had seen Pakistani troops in civilian dress crossing into Kashmir.45 That afternoon, Edwina flew back to Delhi, taking with her a frightening and one-sided view of the situation to impart to Dickie and Jawahar.
Edwina’s story, based on hearsay, of Pakistani troops being sent into Kashmir would have confirmed all Jawahar’s worst suspicions. Now Dickie began to worry about the influence his wife and Jawahar had over each other. The Mountbattens were overheard having a row about it: ‘He’s very emotional, very emotional about Kashmir,’ Dickie had warned her.46 The Kashmir situation was profoundly worsened by the deep and personal loathing between Nehru and Jinnah. Both men suspected the worst possible motives in each other. Nehru became convinced that Jinnah had organized and directed the Pathan tribesmen to invade Kashmir. According to British officials on the scene, Jinnah was innocent – though they conceded that the Pakistani government had passively supported the invasion by keeping local supply routes open.47 But the fact was that Jinnah could not have stopped the tribesmen, even had he wanted to. To send Pakistan’s army to fight the Pathans would have provoked a civil war, and that might have excited the interest of the Afghans and potentially even the Russians. Nor did he have the resources. Most of the weapons and stocks owed to the Pakistan Army were still in India.48 The correct course of action would have been for Jinnah to warn Nehru of the tribesmen’s approach and explain frankly why they could not be stopped; because he did not do this, Nehru assumed there was a conspiracy.
Similarly, Nehru failed to inform Jinnah that the Maharaja had asked for help and that he was sending troops. As a result, Jinnah became convinced that Nehru had meant all along for Kashmir to be dragged into India by force.49 Yet as late as 28 October, Nehru wrote in a private letter to Nan: ‘For my part, I do not mind if Kashmir becomes more or less independent, but it would have been a cruel blow if it had become just an exploited part of Pakistan.’50
Mountbatten attempted to resolve this situation by arranging a meeting between himself, Nehru, Patel, Liaquat and Jinnah in Delhi. Edwina told a reporter over whiskies and ginger that, ‘You can solve any problem if you work as pals,’ and her husband agreed.51 But friendly sentiment was in short supply. Jinnah refused to come to Delhi; Patel refused to leave. Instead, it was agreed that Mountbatten and Nehru would go to Lahore – a concession which Mountbatten only managed to get the Indian cabinet to allow by not telling his ministers that Jinnah had forced it on to him.52 The talks were fixed for 1 November.
It was not to be. On the afternoon of 31 October, the Pakistani government issued a lengthy and provocative press release, accusing the Maharaja and Sheikh Abdullah of ‘conspiring’ with the Indians, while refusing its own overtures of ‘friendly co-operation’. Moreover, it alleged, the Indian government had deliberately used the tribesmen’s incursion to justify ‘the pre-planned scheme for the accession of Kashmir by India troops with the object of holding down the people of Kashmir who have been driven to rebellion by this well-calculated and carefully planned oppression.’53 Lord Ismay arrived at the British High Commission in Delhi at midnight to inform the High Commissioner, Sir Terence Shone, that Nehru would not be going to Lahore after all. Shone reported to the Commonwealth Relations Office that Mountbatten ‘has no doubt that this decision is right since [the] Indian Cabinet feel so strongly on this matter that if Nehru were to insist on going in the face of this gross defamation he would undoubtedly be thrown out.’54
At a more reasonable hour of that morning, Mountbatten telephoned Jinnah and told him that Nehru was unwell.55 Mountbatten turned up in Lahore alone, with no power to negotiate a settlement. Consequently, the talks were of little use, and the main result of them seems to have been that the rankling dislike of the Governors-General for each other increased. Both left the meeting with a new distrust of the other’s motives: Mountbatten believing that Jinnah was directing the raiders, and Jinnah believing that Mountbatten was directing the Indian Army.56
Just three days later, the Pakistan Times reported that Mountbatten – whom it described in an epithet both politically and factually incorrect as ‘conqueror of the Japs’ – was commanding operations for India in Kashmir. Any Pakistani officers familiar with Mountbatten’s record as an operational commander might well have started planning their victory party, but the implication was that Mountbatten represented Britain, and therefore that Britain was siding with India. ‘The military colossus of the Government of India and the best British Generals and Commanders are, therefore, cooperating to crush a tiny half-organised ill-equipped and General-less force of [sic] the people of Kashmir have mustered’, it said.57 Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith and Duke, the two most senior British diplomats in Pakistan, both worried that Mountbatten’s position and attitude were stirring up ‘anti-British feeling’.58
In all the calamities of Pakistan’s young life, the hand of Dickie could be detected: the mysterious delay in the publication of the Radcliffe award; the failure to arrest known Sikh troublemakers just before partition; and now the accession of Kashmir to India. The Pakistani Minister of Finance offered Grafftey-Smith his acid congratulations on Britain’s ‘latest victory over Pakistan’. More and more Pakistanis were beginning to believe that the Briti
sh government ‘are led by the nose by Lord Mountbatten, who is himself led by the nose by Mr. Nehru, who in his turn, is frightened of Mr. Patel, Pakistan’s greatest individual enemy.’ He may as well have added, as plenty of commentators later would, an extra link in the chain: Lady Mountbatten, occupying an undefined position between her husband and the Prime Minister. ‘We have so long been the “Aunt Sally” of politics in India that our reappearance in that role is hardly surprising’, wrote Grafftey-Smith resignedly. ‘But it is regrettable.’59
In Kashmir, fighting had spread to Uri at the mouth of the valley, and into the south-west.60 On 5 November, 120 trucks mysteriously arrived in the city of Jammu. Local Muslims were rounded up and told that they would be taken to the Pakistan border, then released across it. Five thousand civilian men, women and children complied and got into the trucks. Instead of driving to the border, the trucks turned the other way, and took the Muslims further into the heart of Jammu. The convoy halted, the guards got out, and then, with machine guns and blades, massacred their charges. A few hundred escaped by hiding in fields or canals. The rest were killed.61
The physical temperature was steadily dropping. By December, the valley and surrounding hills would be icebound. Supplies to the Indian Army were already falling short. The Indian Army’s Sikh troops were becoming restive, and it was rumoured that they had demanded a Sikh state, to include Amritsar, Simla and the East Punjab. The Maharaja of Patiala was said to be encouraging the scheme.62 Against this Sikh objective was the similarly aggressive ambition of the Pathan tribesmen. Sydney Smith, a reporter for the Daily Express who had managed to get himself kidnapped by Pathans near Baramula, confirmed on his release that tribal leaders chanted prayers every night for the success of their jihad against the Sikhs. ‘Every tribal leader agrees on the war aims’, wrote Smith. ‘They are: To wipe out Sir Hari Singh’s minority rule in Kashmir; to march on and exterminate the chief Sikh State, Patiala; to capture Amritsar and try – one day – to reach New Delhi.’63
Indian Summer Page 34