India: A History. Revised and Updated (98 page)

With a pride that was as much intellectual as national, Nehru rightly saw India’s emancipation from colonial rule as the first of many such liberations and as marking the dawn of a new era in international relations. In his Independence oration he had pointedly dedicated himself to the service of
‘the still larger cause of humanity’. The anti-colonial struggles of others (Indonesians, Vietnamese, Algerians, Palestinians etc) were assured of Indian support; and to safeguard their post-colonial futures Nehru championed the idea of a third bloc of nations, unaligned as between Moscow and Washington and pledged to the noble ideals of peaceful coexistence, mutual respect for one another’s borders and non-interference in one another’s affairs. This was the nub of the ‘five principles’, or
panchshila,
to which New Delhi and Beijing signed up in 1954 and which were then incorporated into the charter of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Bandung conference of Afro-Asian states in 1955. Bandung (in Java) witnessed the first great gathering of leaders of the post-colonial world. Sukarno of Indonesia presided. Nasser (Egypt), Makarios (Cyprus), Sihanouk (Cambodia), Pham Van Dong (North Vietnam), U Nu (Burma) and Zhou Enlai (China) attended. Nehru (India) starred. With a smiling Indira by his side, the leader of the world’s largest democracy was fêted on a world stage of his own making.

But the heady days were short-lived. Nehru had accepted that both communist and anti-communist governments might be considered as non-aligned; ideology was a matter of individual choice, a bit like religion; the criterion for membership of the Movement should just be anti-imperialism, preferably as demonstrated by a cold-shouldering of the ‘security pacts’ being sponsored by Washington and Moscow. According to Nehru, such pacts brought only insecurity and increased the likelihood of a nuclear conflagration. As so often, he had his sights on Pakistan, already a member of the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and about to join the Baghdad Pact (later CENTO), both of them US backed. But this analysis also had implications for China. Linked to the Soviet Union through a treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance, China ought scarcely to have qualified either. Having overrun Tibet in 1950, it ought, arguably, to have been disqualified. Nehru thought otherwise. Despite inheriting British undertakings in respect of the autonomy of Tibet, he had registered no objection to that country’s occupation. Rather had he preferred vague Chinese promises about a favourable settlement of the disputed Indo-Tibetan frontier, plus the glorious prospect of Asia’s two mega-nations working hand in glove for a new world order.

Additionally, had he contested Beijing’s declared ‘resumption’ of its sovereignty over Tibet he could have been accused of hypocrisy; for on not dissimilar grounds New Delhi had been pressing the French and the Portuguese to vacate their respective enclaves on the subcontinent’s coastline. After Indian provocation, then French prevarication, Paris had eventually complied, Pondicherry being handed over in 1954. But Lisbon had not.
Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, turned a deaf ear to Congress-backed rallies thronging the normally somnolent purlieus of Panjim, the Goan capital, and reminded Delhi that Portugal’s 500-year rule predated not only that of the British, to which the new India had succeeded, but very nearly that of the Mughals. Passionate about history, Nehru might just conceivably have accepted this argument. The conservation of Portuguese rule over Goa’s church-ridden congregation could have been of antiquarian interest and was no more menacing to the Indian republic than was the Vatican to the Italian republic. But he was also passionate about ousting colonialism, demonstrating commitment to India’s territorial integrity (Pakistan would take note) and currying popular favour. In 1961 therefore, notwithstanding peaceful coexistence and non-interference, Indian troops rolled into Goa much as they had into Hyderabad and Kashmir, though without the figleaf of formal accession.

Fifteen years later, for doing exactly the same in respect of Portuguese East Timor, the Indonesian government of General Suharto would be universally condemned and its troops expelled by UN forces. The difference lay in the indulgence extended by the international community to a civilian aggressor with impeccably democratic credentials, plus the evident relief with which Indian intervention was greeted by Portugal’s ex-subjects. Nehru had judged the situation well. Critics, mostly in the West, were silenced by the minimal resistance and mass welcome extended to the invaders. Clearly the ‘conquest’ of Goa met with the approval of Goans themselves.

The same could not be said of Chinese intervention in Tibet. In 1955 Sino-Indian friendship had been popularly celebrated with the catchphrase
Hindi Chini bhai bhai
(something like ‘India, China, inseparable brothers’). But by early 1959, with a major Tibetan uprising having just been ruthlessly repressed, 100,000 refugees pouring over the Himalayas, the non-communist world up in arms, right-wing parties in India talking of Delhi’s Buddhist betrayal and the Dalai Lama himself fleeing his homeland, the fraternal sloganeering froze in the thin Himalayan air. Nehru, though deeply embarrassed by the attitude of his friend Zhou Enlai, rose to the occasion by providing the Dalai Lama with asylum and rebuffing Beijing’s protests.

It was the least he could do, though no less provocative for that. A year earlier reports had come from the remote Ladakh-Tibet border that Chinese engineers had constructed a military road across a bit of uninhabited trans-Himalayan tundra known as the Aksai Chin. Delhi protested that the region was a salient of Ladakh, therefore of Jammu and Kashmir state, and therefore of India; Beijing responded that the Aksai Chin had always been part of Tibet and therefore of China. The sensitive issue of the 3000-kilometre
Himalayan frontier was thus thrown wide open. China did not recognise even sections that had actually been demarcated, like the McMahon Line north of Assam; as relics of British imperialism and products of ‘unequal treaties’, they were ‘invalid’. India’s reception of the Dalai Lama strained relations further. By late 1959 both sides were tinkering with their border posts; clashes were being reported and Indian lives lost.

There followed two years of recrimination masquerading as negotiation. Delhi spurned a possible settlement involving the cession of the Aksai Chin in the west in return for the recognition of the McMahon Line in the east. Indeed it is probable that the Goa invasion was launched in 1961 to deflect the domestic criticism that might result from such a swap. Yet in the Himalayas nothing much was done to reinforce the Indian position. Most of the Indian army remained ranged along the frontier with west Pakistan or ready to strike into Kashmir. Few if any units were equipped and trained for the high altitudes of Ladakh, while, like Pakistan, India had never accorded a top priority to its north-eastern defences. The Himalayas themselves were presumed a sufficient deterrent to an all-out invasion. Instead, therefore, of massively reinforcing existing positions, a strategy was adopted of discreetly establishing new ones. These were designed to counter Chinese claims and create a more advantageous situation if and when, as the Chinese repeatedly urged, terms for disengagement and withdrawal were agreed.

But in mid-1962 the Chinese tired of this game just as the Indians began to push their luck too far. After patrols had clashed in Ladakh, what had been a loudspeaker war between the heavily manned posts east of Bhutan erupted when an intended Indian assault provoked the Chinese into a preemptive strike. Surprised and overwhelmed the Indian troops suffered heavy casualties. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had chalked up its first Himalayan victory and in October began advancing in strength at both extremities of the range. Nehru now conceded that the nation faced ‘what is in effect a Chinese invasion of India’. The five principles of non-alignment had been flouted and ‘nothing in my long political career has hurt me more’.
⁶
An Indian counter-thrust in November only triggered another Chinese advance. The upper Brahmaputra valley in Assam now lay at the invaders’ mercy. Whole towns were being evacuated; blood banks and recruitment centres throughout India were besieged.

In Delhi too, the unthinkable was happening. Communists, Hindu nationalists and Muslims stood shoulder to shoulder with Congress stalwarts in defence of the motherland. Meanwhile Nehru, gagging on a lifetime of anti-imperialist rhetoric, went Gandhi cap in hand to beseech the US and the UK for an airlift of arms, plus a diplomatic offensive. Both were forthcoming.
Indian fatalities already stood at two to three thousand with twice as many taken prisoner. Any Western misgivings about Nehru’s sudden conversion to ‘free world’ values were stilled by genuine alarm; an Asian armageddon seemed possible.

Then quite suddenly, without warning or explanation, the PLA vanished, back into the Himalayan cloud cover. The actual ‘invasion’ had lasted little more than a month. By the end of the year the Chinese were ensconced in their original positions along the McMahon Line and in the Aksai Chin. All gains had been abandoned, presumably because the onset of winter would prevent their resupply. Yet no claims had been withdrawn. The border issue had still to be settled and the threat it posed could no longer be ignored by a horribly humiliated India.

Nehru never recovered from the shock. Personally ‘hurtful’ and politically devastating, the Chinese betrayal had dented his confidence and undermined his health. Just over a year later, in January 1964, he suffered a minor heart attack; and in May of that year he died.

Just under a year after that, in April 1965, India’s borders were again under attack. This time the invaders came from Pakistan. An India militarily disgraced by the Chinese, shattered by the loss of Nehru, further weakened by dissension within Congress and now under the stopgap leadership of the untried and electorally untested Lal Bahadur Shastri was proving a temptation too far for the military men in Rawalpindi. If ever there was a moment to embarrass India into conceding Pakistan’s interest in the Kashmir valley it was now. New Delhi itself had seemed to signal as much. In May 1964 a deathbed initiative from Nehru had brought the release of his old friend Sheikh Abdullah and the despatch of the latter to Pakistan with a set of new options for resolving the crisis. Though China had been Nehru’s biggest mistake, Kashmir was his greatest failure. A last-gasp settlement would have redeemed his damaged reputation and been a fitting legacy. The options on offer included a possible federation of India and Pakistan with an autonomous Kashmir. It was 1947 all over again. Maharaja Hari Singh’s contested accession was back on the table, so was the UN’s plebiscite. In Kashmir itself, as in Pakistan, hopes soared.

They were dashed within days. Nehru died, his colleagues got cold feet and the sheikh was returned to detention. The second India-Pakistan war, opportunistically launched but conceived in disgust at this failure, would prove inconclusive. It would solve nothing, least of all the status of Kashmir. Yet its political fall-out, by maiming the aggressor and rewarding the aggrieved, would reshape the subcontinent.

21
The Spectre of Separatism
1962-1972

AYUB PLUS ACOLYTE

A
ID WORKERS AND
hippies criss-crossing the subcontinent in the 1960s often reported more favourably of Pakistan than of India. If travelling by land, they tackled the border formalities near Ferozepur in the Panjab, where a checkpoint of watchtowers and roadblocks had been improvised beneath a clump of gum trees in the middle of nowhere. It lacked the arresting contrasts of, say, the Brandenburg Gate but lesser differences soon struck the onward traveller and they were seldom to India’s advantage. On the Pakistan side the roads were neater and the traffic brisker. Billboards were not exclusively reserved for official injunctions and any available wall space was not entirely covered with the grimy collage of poster peelings and graffiti that is democracy’s downside. The phones worked and the shops were well stocked. There were fewer strikes, fewer beggars and many fewer unattended cows.

Confounding the Jeremiahs, Jinnah’s creation looked to be doing all right. A first decade notable for the breakdown of parliamentary politics had given way to a second of ill-disguised military dictatorship, but neither had been terminally disastrous. Save for Kashmir, the nation’s territory remained intact and its armed forces unbowed. Elections at the provincial level had been successfully conducted, a constitution had eventually emerged and, though quickly abrogated, some form of democracy remained the accepted ideal. After a slow start, manufacturing output had picked up and the economy was at last enjoying sustained growth. Some large landholdings had been broken up for redistribution; a more liberal family law was improving the lot of women; and reactionaries and zealots who objected to these reforms were being contained. Notwithstanding the dearth of meaningful representation, the 1960s would be remembered as Pakistan’s ‘golden decade’. Meanwhile good relations with the West and the Islamic
world were being augmented by understandings with China and the Soviet Union. By 1965 few countries in the world had a wider circle of well-wishers. Comparing Pakistan with an India beset by austerities, humbled by the Chinese and now rudderless without Nehru, the cynic might reasonably have wondered whether democratic mandates were all they were cracked up to be.

Admittedly conditions were worse in East Pakistan, as East Bengal was now called. They always had been, though in the early 1950s the Korean War had given a brief fillip to the jute business by boosting the demand for hessian, especially as sacking for sandbags. Developing Pakistan’s otherwise negligible industrial capacity had been a high priority from the start. Only by staunching the flow of imports and generating more exports could foreign exchange be conserved and deficits reduced. In this connection much excitement had attended Pakistan’s refusal to follow the rest of the Commonwealth, including India, in a 1949 devaluation of sterling-based currencies against the dollar. Hailed at the time as a courageously defiant stance, non-devaluation of Pakistan’s rupee inflated the value of its exports, like jute to India, leaving a handsome surplus for imports, like munitions, which would be cheaper from the sterling area or unaffected from the USA. That was the theory. But since India was Pakistan’s main trading partner, New Delhi had taken non-devaluation as an irresponsible and decidedly hostile act – or non-act. It responded accordingly, slapping heavy duties on exports to Pakistan that ‘brought interdominion trade to a standstill’ and obliged Karachi to look elsewhere for essential items like textiles and coal.
¹
Developing new sources of supply obliged Pakistan to incur additional costs in tendering, transport and profiteering that defeated the whole purpose of non-devaluation. The import bill had risen, the trade gap had widened and inflation had hit the consumer hard.