30These paragraphs summarize a story told over several hundred pages in Menon, Integration of the Indian States.
31Menon to V. Shankar (private secretary to Vallabhbhai Patel), 9 August 1949, in G. M. Nandurkar, ed., Sardar’s Letters – Mostly Unknown: Post-Centenary, vol. 2 (Ahmedabad: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Smarak Bhavan, 1981), pp. 74–6.
32As told to me by C. S. Venkatachar, who succeeded V. P. Menon as secretary of the Ministry of States.
33Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 367–8.
34The Travancore story has been principally reconstructed here from TOP, vol. 12, pp. 76–7, 203–4, 232–3, 281–2, 298–9, 335–6, 414, 421–2, 453; supplemented by A. Sreedhara Menon, Triumph and Tragedy in Travancore: Annals of Sir C. P.’s Sixteen Years (Kottayam: Current Books, 2001), esp. pp. 231–53. But see also A. G. Noorani, ‘C. P. and Independent Travancore’, Frontline, 4 July 2003, and K. C. George, Immortal Punnapra-Vayalar (Thiruvananthapuram: Communist Party of India, 1975).
35The best, presumably, was Jawaharlal Nehru.
36Draft letter dated 18 July 1947 from Nawab of Bhopal to Lord Mountbatten, Mss Eur D1006 (Major A. E. G. Davy Papers), OIOC.
37My account of the Bhopal case is based on TOP, vol. 12, pp. 144–5, 291–7, 436–8, 644, 671–2; Copland, The Princes of India, pp. 235–6, 253; Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 365, 375; Menon, Integration of the Indian States, pp. 118–19.
38TOP, vol. 12, pp. 603–4, 659–62, 767; Menon, Integration of the Indian States, pp. 116–18; K. M. Pannikar to Vallabhbhai Patel, undated, but probably from late July 1947, in G. M. Nandurkar, ed., Sardar’s Letters – Mostly Unknown, II: Birth Centenary, vol. 5 (Ahmedabad: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Smarak Bhavan, 1978), pp. 55–6.
39R. M. Lala, ‘Junagadh’, the Current, 27 September 1950; Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, pp. 191–2; Mosley, Last Days, pp. 181–3.
40Shah Nawaz was the father of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and grandfather of Benazir Bhutto, both future prime ministers of Pakistan.
41Patel’s feelings on Junagadh are described in Malcolm Darling to Guy Wint, 7 December 1947, Box 60, Darling Papers, CSAS.
42‘Report by Secretary, Ministry of States, on Junagadh’, in SPC, vol. 7, pp. 688–95.
43This account is principally based on Menon, Integration of the Indian States, pp. 124–49; Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 427–40.
44Rafi Ahmed, ‘Hyderabad Politics’, Swatantra, 29 November 1947.
45K. M. Munshi, The End of an Era (Hyderabad Memoirs) (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1957), pp. 10–11.
46TOP, vol. 12, pp. 31–2, 87; ‘Viswamitra’, ‘Monckton and Mountbatten’, Swatantra, 15 May 1948.
47Coupland, quoted in V. B. Kulkarni, K. M. Munshi (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1983), p. 117; Patel, quoted in Munshi, End of an Era, p. 1.
48Lucien D. Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration: Political Developments in Hyderabad State (1938–1948) (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000), esp. chapter 5.
49Amit Kumar Gupta, The Agrarian Drama: The Leftists and the Rural Poor in India, 1934–51 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996), pp. 291–317, 412–22 etc.
50See Swami Ramananda Tirtha, Memoirs of Hyderabad Freedom Struggle (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967), pp. 181–2.
51Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration, p. 178.
52See TOP, vol. 12, pp. 613–15.
53Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration, pp. 230, 235; ‘Viswamitra’, ‘Monckton and Mountbatten’.
54See TOP, vol. 12, p. 121.
55Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration, pp. 208–10.
56‘Conflict in Hyderabad’, The Times, April 1948, clipping in Theodore Tasker Papers, Mss Eur D798/30–36, OIOC.
57Wilfrid Russell, Indian Summer (Bombay: Thacker and Co., 1951), p. 210.
58C. H. V. Pathy, ‘A Close-up of Syed Kasim Razvi’, Swatantra, 29 May 1948.
59A vivid account of the society and politics of Hyderabad, c. 1947–8, is contained in Asokamitran’s novel The Eighteenth Parallel, translated from the Tamil by Gomathi Narayanan (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993).
60O. V. Ranga Rao, ‘Exodus of C. P. Muslims to Hyderabad’, Swatantra, 11 October 1947; Lanka Sundaram, ‘Nizam’s Acts of War and India’s Duty’, Swatantra, 1 November 1947.
61S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (London: Cape, 1979), pp. 40–1; SPC, vol. 5, pp. 236–9; SPC, vol. 7, pp. 150–1, 186–7, 194 etc.
62See Mirza Ismail, My Public Life: Recollections and Reflections (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954), pp. 105–28.
63Quoted in Munshi, End of an Era, p. 176.
64Ibid., pp. 230–1; Gandhi, Patel, pp. 482–3; Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration, pp. 236–7.
65Sri Prakasa, Pakistan: Birth and Early Days (Meerut: Meenakshi Prakashan, 1965), p. 122.
66Pattabhi Sitaramayya, ‘The Hyderabad Tangle’, Swatantra, 12 June 1948.
67Abbas, ‘Three Days in Hyderabad’, Swatantra, 24 June 1950.
68P. J. Griffiths, ‘India and the Future’, The Nineteenth Century, August 1947.
69See editorial in the Economic Weekly, 8 January 1955.
70Democracy on the March (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1950), pp. 1, 9–10 etc.
71Menon, Integration of the Indian States, p. 493.
4. A VALLEY BLOODY AND BEAUTIFUL
1For an overview, see Alastair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 1846–1990 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2Karan Singh, Autobiography, revised edn (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 18–19.
3Quoted in Ajit Bhattacharjea, Kashmir: The Wounded Valley (New Delhi: UBS, 1994), p. 67.
4V. K. Chinnammalu Amma, ‘Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’, Swatantra, 22 May 1948; Trilok Nath Moza, ‘Sher-i-Kashmir Sheikh Abdullah’, Swatantra, 5 June 1948.
5These paragraphs on Kashmir politics in the 1930s and 1940s draw largely from Bhattacharjea, Kashmir, pp. 65–76, and Lamb, Kashmir, pp. 89–95.
6Malika Pukhraj, Song Sung True: A Memoir, ed. and trans. Saleem Kidwai (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003), pp. 200–1.
7S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 1: 1889–1947 (London: Cape, 1975), pp. 322–3.
8SPC, vol. 1, pp. 13–15.
9TOP, vol. 9, p. 71.
10SPC, vol. 1, pp. 29–30; Hasan Zaheer, The Times and Trials of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy, 1951: the First Coup Attempt in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 72–3.
11Mountbatten to Sir Akbar Hydari (governor of Assam), 17 June 1947, Mountbatten Papers, Mss Eur F200/13, OIOC.
12See Ramchandra Kak’s note, ‘Jammu and Kashmir in 1946–47’, written in 1960 as a retrospective defence of the idea of independence. Copy in R. Powell Papers, Mss Eur D862, OIOC.
13TOP, vol. 11, p. 592.
14TOP, vol. 12, pp. 3–5, 368.
15D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 2nd edn (1963; reprint New Delhi: Publications Division, 1990), vol. 8, pp. 67–8.
16Michael Brecher, The Struggle for Kashmir (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 23–4.
17Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel: A Life (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Press, 1991), p. 439.
18SPC, vol. 1, pp. 45–7.
19See Josef Korbel, Danger in Kashmir, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 70–1.
20SPC, vol. 1, pp. 56, 62.
21Quoted in Prem Shankar Jha, Kashmir, 1947: Rival Versions of History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 32–3.
22R. B. Batra, quoted in Sisir Kumar Gupta, Kashmir: A Study in India–Pakistan Relations (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966), p. 106.
23Lamb’s Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy is the best case for Pakistan; Jha’s Kashmir, 1947 an answer from the Indian point of view.
24See Richard Symons, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1942–1949 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 78–9.
25This and the next few paragraphs are based on Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Le
gacy, pp. 122–34; Brecher, Struggle for Kashmir, pp. 25–33; Gupta, Kashmir, pp. 110–15; Zaheer, Rawalpindi Conspiracy, pp. 82–7, 94–6 etc.
26Lt. Gen. L. P. Sen, Slender was the Thread: Kashmir Confrontation, 1947–48 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1969), pp. 34–8.
27Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 348.
28Untitled typescript dated 3 November 1947 by Major J. E. Thomson, Powell Papers, Mss Eur D862, OIOC; extracts from report in Daily Express, 11 November 1947, in White Paper on Jammu and Kashmir (New Delhi: Government of India, 1948), pp. 24–5.
29Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, p. 143.
30Amar Devi Gupta, ‘A 1947 Tragedy of Jammu and Kashmir State: The Cleansing of Mirpur’, Mss Eur C705, OIOC.
31Lord Birdwood, ‘Kashmir’, International Affairs, July 1952.
32See the eyewitness accounts reproduced in Dewan Ram Prakash, Fight for Kashmir (New Delhi: Tagore Memorial Publications, 1948), pp. 34–9.
33This account is based on V. P. Menon, Integration of the Indian States (1956; reprint Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1997), pp. 397–400; Gandhi, Patel, pp. 442–4. However, Prem Shankar Jha (Kashmir, 1947, pp. 63–4) claims that the Instrument of Accession was signed by Maharaja Hari Singh in Srinagar on the night of the 25th/26th itself, that is before he fled to Jammu.
34S. N. Prasad and Dharm Pal, History of Operations in Jammu and Kashmir (1947–48) (New Delhi: Ministry of Defence, 1987), pp. 28f., 379.
35Major L. E. R. B. Ferris, quoted in Lt. Col. Maurice Cohen, Thunder over Kashmir (1955; reprint Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1994), pp. 3–4.
36Nehru to Vijayalakshmi Pandit, 28 October 1947, Vijayalakshmi Pandit Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (hereafter NMML).
37As told by the veteran Punjab politician Khizr Hyat Tiwana to the ex-Punjab civil servant Malcolm Darling. See diary note of 9 January 1948, Box 60, Darling Papers, CSAS.
38Baroo, ‘Kashmir Interlude’, Swatantra, 29 November 1947.
39Bhattacharjea, Kashmir, pp. x–xii.
40Lord Mountbatten, ‘Note of a Discussion with Mr Jinnah in the presence of Lord Ismay at Government House, Lahore, on 1 November 1947’, in SPC, vol. 1, pp. 73–81.
41Prasad and Pal, History of Operations, pp. 39–40.
42Ibid., p. 60; Sen, Slender was the Thread, pp. 111–12.
43Nehru to Hari Singh, 13 November 1947, in S. Gopal, general ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru: Second Series (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984–), hereafter SWJN2, vol. 5, pp. 324–7.
44CWMG, vol. 90, pp. 122–3.
45C. Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947–8 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002), p. 78.
46Nehru to Hari Singh, 1 December 1947, in SPC, vol. 1, pp. 100–6.
47H. V. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain–India–Pakistan (London: Hutchinson, 1969), pp. 466–7; Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, pp. 164–5.
48Brecher, Struggle for Kashmir, pp. 55–75; Reports of the United Nations Special Commission for India and Pakistan, June 1948 to December 1949 (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, 1950), pp. 53f., 281f.
49Josef Korbel, Danger in Kashmir (1954; revised edition Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 109.
50S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (London: Cape, 1979), pp. 26–7; Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy, pp. 17, 111, 134. Cf. also Rajbans Krishen, Kashmir and the Conspiracy against Peace (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1951).
51H. V. Hodson to Philip Noel-Baker, 2 March 1948, copy in Short Papers, Mss Eur F189/1, OIOC.
52See Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 469–70.
53Untitled note by Major General T. W. Rees, Rees Papers, Mss Eur F274/72, OIOC.
54Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy, pp. 144–51, 167–8, 177–83.
55Air Chief Marshal P. C. Lal, My Years with the IAF (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1987), pp. 58–67.
56Sen, Slender was the Thread, p. 242; Prasad and Pal, History of Operations, pp. 276–7.
57Penderel Moon to Major Billy Short, 18 October 1948, Short Papers, Mss Eur F189/22, OIOC, emphasis added.
58Korbel, Danger in Kashmir, pp. 146–9. Korbel was the father of Madeleine Albright, who was to herself deal with the Kashmir question in the 1990s when she was secretary of state in President Clinton’s administration.
59See material in File 74, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.
60Swatantra, 14 August 1948.
61Anon., ‘South India and Kashmir’, Swatantra, 25 February 1950.
62Sheikh Abdullah to C. Rajagopalachari, 27 April 1948, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.
63J. K. Banerji, I Report on Kashmir (Calcutta: The Republic Publications, 1948), pp. 9–10.
64Y. D. Gundevia, ed., The Testament of Sheikh Abdullah (Dehra Dun: Palit and Palit, 1974), pp. 90–1.
65V. V. Prasad, ‘New Delhi Diary’, Swatantra, 9 October 1948.
66P. N. Kaula and K. L. Dhar, Kashmir Speaks (Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1950), p. 71.
67K. A. Abbas, ‘The Enchanted Valley’, Swatantra, 23 April 1949.
68‘Marching through Kashmir’, Time, 10 October 1949.
69Korbel, Danger in Kashmir, p. 25.
70Kingsley Martin, ‘Kashmir and UNO’, and ‘As Pakistan Sees it’, The New Statesman and Nation, 21 and 28 February 1948.
71Quoted in Dewan Ram Parkash, Fight for Kashmir (New Delhi: Tagore Memorial Publications, 1948), p. 99.
72A. Lakshmana Rao, ‘Brigadier Usman’, Swatantra, 10 July 1948.
73Parkash, Fight for Kashmir, p. 174.
74K. A. Abbas, ‘Will Kashmir Vote for India?’, the Current, 26 October 1949.
75Wares Ishaq, ‘Kashmir Will Vote for Pakistan’, the Current, 2 November 1949.
76Representative here are the interpretations in Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy.
77On Gurdaspur see Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, esp. pp. 115–16; and, for a rebuttal, Jha, Kashmir, 1947, p. 81.
78Zaheer, Rawalpindi Conspiracy, pp. 144–5.
79The quotes that follow are taken from Brecher, Struggle for Kashmir, pp. ix–x.
5. REFUGEES AND THE REPUBLIC
1Donald F. Ebright, Free India, the First Five Years: An Account of the 1947 Riots, Refugees, Relief and Rehabilitation (Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1954), pp. 46–7, 62–3 etc.
2A. N. Bali, Now it Can be Told (Jullundur: The Kashvani Prakashan Ltd, 1949), esp. chapter 9.
3V. V. Prasad, ‘New Delhi Diary’, Swatantra, 25 December 1947.
4This account is principally based on M. S. Randhawa, Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Punjab in Rural Areas of East Punjab (Bombay: privately published, 1954); and Gyanesh Kudaisya, ‘The Demographic Upheaval of Partition: Refugees and Agricultural Resettlement in India, 1947–67’, South Asia, vol. 18, no. 1, 1995.
Of the roughly 2.5 million farmers who came from West Punjab about 80 % were resettled in East Punjab. Others were given land in the Ganganagar area of the former Bikaner state, and in the Terai regions of Uttar Pradesh. In both places there are now flourishing communities of Sikh farmers.
5Ian Stephen, ‘A Day in Qadian’, The Statesman, 9 January 1949. Mohammad Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan’s eloquent spokesman in the UN on the Kashmir question, was an Ahmadiya. So was the physicist Abdus Salam, the only Pakistani to be awarded a Nobel Prize. In the 1980s, under the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, the Ahmadiyas were declared as heretics (for their belief in a living Prophet), and have since faced discrimination and persecution.
6See L. C. Jain, The City of Hope: The Faridabad Story (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Co., 1998), which also describes the corrosion of the co-operative spirit by the bureaucracy. See also ‘Experiments in Living: Faridabad–Nilokheri– Etawah’, The Times of India, 14 February 1952.
7Dorothy Jane Ward, India for the Indians (London: Arthur Barker Ltd, 1949), pp. 187–9.
8See V. N. Dutta, ‘Punjabi Refugees
and the Urban Development of Greater Delhi’, in R. E. Frykenberg, ed., Delhi through the Ages (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).
9Anon., ‘A Glimpse into Crowded Bombay’, Swatantra, 7 August 1948.
10H. L. Mansukhani, ‘The Resettlement of Sind Refugees’, Swatantra, 11 September 1948.
11Anon., ‘A Glimpse into Crowded Bombay’.
12R. M. Lala, ‘Kolwada: Landmark of Swaraj’, the Current, 3 May 1950.
13Gardner Murphy, In the Minds of Men: The Study of Human Behavior and Social Tensions in India (New York: Basic Books, 1953), pp. 170–5.
14Taya Zinkin, Reporting India (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), pp. 25–6, 31.
15Prafulla K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal (Calcutta: Naya Udyog, 1999), p. 33.
16Joya Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–50’, in Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 99.
17Sir Jadunath Sarkar, ‘Brothers from over the River: The Refugee Problem of India’, The Modern Review, September 1948.
18Chakrabarti, Marginal Men, chapter 3.
19See letters and statements of 1948–50 in Voice of New India, A Tale of Woes of East Pakistan Minorities (Calcutta: D. R. Sen, 1966), pp. 13–51.
20The Current, 4 February 1953.
21‘Squatters’ Colonies’, Economic Weekly, 5 June 1954.
22See undated memorandum (c. 1954?) in File 6, Meghnad Saha Papers, Seventh Instalment, NMML.
23See ‘Report of a Tour of Inspection of some of the Refugee Homes in North-west India’ (1955), reproduced in Seminar, no. 510, February 2002.
24‘Congress may Lose West Bengal – if Refugees Remain Unsettled’, Economic Weekly, 10 July 1954.
There is now a growing literature of memoirs written (or spoken) by Bengali refugees. For a sampling of works in English, see Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, eds, The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India (Kolkata: Stree, 2003); Gargi Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (New Delhi: Bluejay Books, 2005); Manas Ray, ‘Growing Up Refugee’, History Workshop Journal, no. 53, 2002.
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