India: A History. Revised and Updated (94 page)

More obviously the consequences of so many partitions, the reluctance to accept them and the fear of more dictated the foreign relations and slewed the economic development of both successor states. The risk of lesser partitions also haunted domestic politics and dominated the language of internal dissent. As if rocked by identical earth tremors, India and Pakistan would lurch from one separatist crisis to the next for fifty years.

In October 1947 no sooner were the horrors of Panjab’s partition beginning to subside than the two countries found themselves at war over Kashmir. Each had assumed that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir would pledge allegiance to itself; anything less they regarded as secession; and since neither would compromise, there began the most protracted partition of all. In the weeks prior to Independence most of the princely states had acceded to the new Indian Union and were now being bundled into digestible entities, like Rajasthan, prior to being merged into the Union with the former provinces. The princes accepted these arrangements reluctantly and in return for generous personal allowances (or ‘privy purses’) plus various fiscal and civil privileges. Technically they could opt for either
Pakistan or India, and the few princely states that lay west of the Panjab frontier did indeed join Pakistan. But the vast majority were within, or contiguous to, the new India and duly became part of it.

Serious problems arose in respect of just three states. One, Junagadh in the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat, was too insignificant to provoke an international crisis. Predominantly Hindu, surrounded by Indian territory, proudly possessed of that Ashoka rock inscription at Girnar and once the home of the Sanskrit-loving Rudradaman and the brightly toed Maitrakas, little Junagadh was never going to be other than part of the new India. Nor, aside from his personal preference as a Muslim and his consequent declaration for Pakistan, was Junagadh’s ruler of a stature to give Congress and Vallabhai Patel, its strong-arm negotiator, too much trouble. At the time an estimated 11 per cent of Junagadh’s revenues were earmarked for the upkeep of the royal kennels where around 800 canine pensioners lived in a luxury denied to most of Junagadh’s other subjects. To the nuptials of a favourite golden retriever the prince is said to have invited 50,000 dog-loving guests, including the viceroy. His decision to declare in favour of Pakistan partook of a similar indifference to convention and, however piously intended, met with short shrift from Delhi. A show of strength duly sent him winging his way to Karachi with just four wagging companions and a like number of wives. Pakistan of course protested. Although unwilling to risk war on behalf of such a maverick, it continued to regard the state’s accession as legal – which it was. To this day maps printed in Pakistan record the fact with a little patch of green in the middle of Indian Gujarat. Less remembered is the role played in this affair by Shahnawaz Bhutto, the chief minister of Junagadh in 1947. Having encouraged the prince to accede to Pakistan, it was this Bhutto who, after his employer’s flight, cleared the way for Indian intervention. Twenty-four years later Shahnawaz’s son, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, would play a similarly ambivalent role in respect of East Bengal/Bangladesh.

A situation like that of Junagadh but of wider import arose in the great state of Hyderabad. With more diamonds than dogs, Hyderabad’s nizam was a devout Muslim, a reclusive patron of Islamic culture and the legatee of the illustrious Deccan sultanates. Yet he held sway over a land-locked chunk of the now otherwise wholly Indian peninsula and over a considerable population that was predominantly Hindu. To Nehru and Patel it was therefore unthinkable that he should do other than join the new India. But the nizam’s advisers prevaricated – not so much in this case between India and Pakistan as between joining either or making a bid for independence. Technically independence was not an option, though Hyderabad had as good a case for it as anywhere having at one time been slated as ‘Usmanistan’, a
possible sovereign component along with Pakistan and Hindustan (that is, the new India) in an all-India federation. With international attention focused on the fate of the nizam, Delhi backed down and offered a year’s grace in which Hyderabad was to come to its senses. It proved to be but a stay of execution. No decision being forthcoming, in September 1948 Indian troops unceremoniously rolled across the state’s borders. Naturally Pakistan again protested; but the nizam, confronted by Delhi’s so-called ‘police action’, had little choice other than to spare his people bloodshed and plump for India. He duly signed on the dotted line; and Pakistani maps duly memorialise his plight with a much bigger green blob in the heart of peninsular India.

By then a precedent for such strong-arm tactics had already been set in the composite state of Jammu and Kashmir. There, however, the situation was reversed: a Hindu maharaja ruled a mainly non-Hindu state. Parts, notably Ladakh on the Tibet border, had a Buddhist majority, while others, like Jammu on the Panjab border, contained a large Hindu component. But the vast mountain territories beyond the Indus that had been awarded to past maharajas for Britain’s strategic convenience were overwhelmingly Muslim, and so was the densely populated ‘vale of Cashmere’. On the principle, adopted in Panjab and Bengal, that contiguous Muslim majority areas automatically pertained to Pakistan, Jinnah had no doubt that the whole state should accede to his new republic. Without the ‘k’ in the acronym that was ‘Pakistan’, the name of that country would be a mockery and the ‘two-nation theory’ on which its existence was based would be discredited. Moreover if the states of Junagadh and Hyderabad were being claimed by Delhi regardless of the wishes of their rulers and purely on the basis of their Hindu majority, then the state of Jammu and Kashmir belonged to Pakistan regardless of its ruler’s wishes and purely on the basis of its Muslim majority.

There were, though, other considerations. Kashmir had a particular resonance for the Nehru family who, as Kashmiri
pandits
(Hindu teachers), originally hailed from the valley. A temperate land of lotus lakes, alpine pastures and snow-tipped mountains, it had always appealed to the Indian imagination; it had often been the prize of Delhi’s rulers; and as part of the new India it could expect star billing in every tourist brochure and a locational role in every Bollywood romance. Additionally, the accession to the new India of such a notably Muslim state would be seen as triumphant vindication of the secular (that is, neutral as to religion) stance adopted by Congress in contradiction of Pakistan’s unashamedly confessional appeal. To this end Congress had earlier forged links with a local movement known as the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. A political front under the leadership of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, the National Conference
had been demanding from the maharaja, Hari Singh, greater popular representation ever since the 1930s. Moreover Abdullah, an imposing figure otherwise known as ‘Sheikh Sahib’ or the ‘Lion of Kashmir’, was friendly with Nehru, shared his leftist sympathies and deemed the easy-going Islam of most Kashmiri Muslims more compatible with India’s avowed secularism than with Pakistan’s obvious sectarianism. Abdullah, if anyone, could claim to speak for a substantial number of Kashmiris; and popular support (in so far as such a thing could be ascertained) being a desideratum of accession, his role in deciding the state’s future was as crucial as that of Maharaja Hari Singh himself.

Independence Day found both men in trouble. Sheikh Abdullah was in a Srinagar gaol for advocating that the maharaja ‘Quit Kashmir’, and Maharaja Hari Singh was in a dilemma. The sheikh’s National Conference had fallen foul not just of the maharaja but of a rival party with close links to Jinnah’s Muslim League, while Hari Singh, facing popular opposition as a hereditary autocrat plus mounting Muslim suspicion as a Delhi-inclined Hindu, could neither decide between India and Pakistan nor expect his subjects to respect his decision. The case of Switzerland, another land-locked mountain playground, was sometimes cited, and arguably both Sheikh Sahib and the maharaja would have preferred such a neutral and independent status. But as with Hyderabad this was not an option, especially in the case of somewhere whose frontiers marched not only with both of the successor states but also with China and very nearly with the Soviet Union. Neither Delhi, Karachi nor the British cared to contemplate such a strategically vital region conducting its own affairs. Nor was the idea of an independent Kashmir something around which its communally fractured and faction-ridden peoples could be expected to unite.

For two months Kashmir’s fate hung in the balance. Delhi and Karachi traded claim and counterclaim; Hari Singh writhed on the horns of his Himalayan dilemma. Then on 22 October 1947 events overtook them. A truck-mounted incursion of Islamic partisans from the Pathan tribal regions of what was now Pakistan rumbled up the only road into the Kashmir valley and so, by claiming to be its liberators, pitched the maharaja into the open arms of his Indian co-religionists. Fearing that his rule was about to be overthrown, he appealed to Delhi for help and agreed that the just-released Sheikh Abdullah should treat with Nehru. Four days later the state’s accession to India as signified by the maharaja’s assent and the sheikh’s involvement brought its due reward. To resist the invaders, Indian Dakotas, twenty-eight a day, began airlifting troops into Srinagar, the state capital. The first Indo-Pak war had begun.

More Muslim volunteers from northern Pakistan poured into the Kashmir valley, there to be joined by levies from the Indus peoples in the far west of the state. But neither side officially declared war. In Pakistan’s case, although high-level collusion with the invaders undoubtedly existed, no regular military units were deployed; and the Kashmiris themselves proved as indifferent to their Pakistani ‘liberators’ as to their Indian ‘saviours’. Unwelcomed by the natives and unaided by the deployment of Pakistani regulars, the invaders were slowly driven back down the valley. But when in late 1948 the United Nations brokered a ceasefire, an extensive arc of mountainous terrain surrounding the valley remained outside India’s control (it would henceforth be known as Pakistan’s ‘Northern Areas’), as did the western end of the valley itself. Hailed as Azad -‘Free’ – Kashmir, this last entity was constituted as a self-governing but Pakistan-sponsored ‘state’ pending settlement of the status of the whole state. India held the rest – Jammu, Ladakh and most of the Kashmir Valley – and immediately began building and tunnelling a road link through the mountains (the valley was otherwise accessible only from Pakistan) plus two summeronly roads over the high passes to Ladakh.

The ceasefire line remained, and though readjusted and reformulated as the ‘Line of Control’ in 1972, still remains just that, the line at which the firing was supposed to have ceased. It obeyed no geographic or strategic logic, let alone economic or social convenience. And though implying a
de facto
partition, it was not recognised as an international frontier by either India or Pakistan. Nor, therefore, did transgressing it constitute an act of war. The firing would not in fact cease, and the Line itself would continue to be contested. When in 1965 Pakistan provoked a second war with India, it was Kashmir that would provide both pretext and battleground. Then when in 1971 a third Indo-Pak conflict resulted from Indian intervention in East Bengal/Bangladesh, it was along the Kashmir Line that India made its only, albeit modest, gains.

And so it continues. In 1984 India grabbed a frozen wilderness known as the Siachen Glacier that had hitherto been uncontested, then in 1999 Pakistan infiltrated the heights above the strategic Srinagar-Leh road at Kargil. Each incident was deemed a ‘war’ by the aggrieved party, provoking retaliatory counter-strikes and fuelling fears of a wider engagement – fears that assumed horrific dimensions with the testing of nuclear weapons by both countries in 1998 and the radicalisation of the Kashmiris themselves in the jihadist fall-out from the wars in Afghanistan. Meanwhile the UN corps in Kashmir, perhaps the longest-serving on record, has no peacekeeping role; it merely observes and monitors violations. Other contentious
issues dividing the successor nations have been laboriously resolved. But Kashmir has not. ‘Peace processes’ are no sooner identified than a new outrage brings their suspension amid recrimination and further troop deployments. The tragic saga of Indo-Pak relations since 1947 still revolves around the issue of Kashmir.

All along, India has rested its case on the maharaja’s accession, plus the popular support supposedly afforded by Sheikh Abdullah’s endorsement. The first, the maharaja’s decision, might have been conclusive had not India emphatically rejected princely preference in the case of Junagadh (and arguably of Hyderabad). As for the sheikh, somewhat shaky were his credentials as the representative of all shades of Kashmiri opinion and even more shaky was his subsequent attitude towards integration with India. Over the next quarter of a century, more of which he spent in Indian detention as a separatist than in government as an integrationist, these two factors seemed to be related. His support among Kashmiris waxed with his increasingly outspoken criticism of Delhi and waned with his occasional endorsement of the status quo.

Pakistan’s case rested on the surer, but not decisive, grounds of the state’s undisputed Muslim majority, plus Nehru’s failure to honour a pledge given to the UN as part of the 1948 ceasefire deal that a plebiscite would be held to ascertain the wishes of the people. Delhi countered with the argument that a plebiscite was not possible until Pakistan withdrew all troops from the state (some had been stationed in the Northern Areas), nor was it in fact necessary since the wishes of the people could be inferred from the sheikh’s participation in the act of accession and from later Indian-sponsored elections in the Indian-held part of the state. Certainly a 1948 plebiscite throughout the whole of the erstwhile state would have strained to breaking point the resources of the UN, not to mention the good faith of the interested parties. On the other hand, so insensitive was Delhi’s treatment of the sheikh – and of the state – that a plebiscite which in 1948 might conceivably have gone in its favour would subsequently almost certainly have gone against it. Delhi dismissed such thoughts. The matter was now closed; there was no ‘Kashmir problem’; India’s claim to those parts of the state outwith its control was not pressed, and the existing Ceasefire Line/Line of Control was touted as semi-permanent. But in assuming closure on terms that took no account of popular sentiment in Pakistan, nor of the existential threat that an alienated Kashmir posed to that state, Delhi was being hopelessly unrealistic. The Kashmir problem was not about to go away.