When Nehru and Ghaffar Khan revisited Srinagar as Abdullah’s guests in the summer of 1945, it was evident that divisions between the different nationalists were acute. The Lion of Kashmir had laid on a Mughal-style welcome. The guests were taken downriver on lavishly decorated shikaras (gondolas). Barred from gathering on the four bridges along the route, Abdullah’s local Muslim opponents stood on the embankment, dressed in phirens, long tunics which almost touched the ground. In the summer months it was customary not to wear underclothes. As the boats approached, the male protesters, who had not been allowed to carry banners, faced the guests and lifted their phirens to reveal their pencils of creation, while the women turned their backs and bared their buttocks. Muslims had never protested in this way before, and have not done so since. Ghaffar Khan roared with laughter, but Nehru was not amused. Later that day Ghaffar Khan referred to the episode at a rally and told the audience how impressed he had been by the wares on display. Nehru, asked at a dinner the next day how he compared the regions he had visited most recently, replied: ‘Punjabis are crude, Bengalis are hysterical, and the Kashmiris are simply vulgar.’
The confessional movement was gaining strength, however. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, had left the Congress in the 1930s, partly because he was uneasy about Gandhi’s use of Hindu religious imagery. He had then joined the Muslim League in a partially successful attempt to wrest it from the collaborationist landlords of the United Provinces. Jinnah had half-hoped, half-believed that Pakistan would be a smaller version of India, but one in which Muslims would dominate, with Hindus and Sikhs still living there and forming a loyal minority. Had a confederal solution been adopted this might have been possible, but once the decision to split the country had been accepted as irrevocable by the departing British, it was out of the question. Bengal and the Punjab were mixed provinces, and so they, too, would have to be divided. As they were.
Crimes were committed by all sides. Those who were reluctant to abandon their villages were driven out or massacred. Trains carrying refugee families were attacked by armed gangs and became moving coffins. There are no agreed-upon figures, but according to the lowest estimates, the slicing of the subcontinent cost nearly a million lives. No official monument marks the casualties of Partition; there is no official record of those who perished. Amrita Pritam, an eighteen-year-old Sikh, born and brought up in Lahore but now forced to become a refugee, left behind a lament in which she evoked the medieval Sufi poet and freethinker Waris Shah, whose love epic Heer-Ranjha was (and is) sung in almost every Punjabi village on both sides of the divide:
I call Waris Shah today:
‘Speak up from your grave,
From your Book of Love unfurl
A new and different page.
One daughter of the Punjab did scream,
You covered our walls with your laments.’
Millions of daughters weep today
And call out to Waris Shah:
‘Arise you chronicler of our inner pain
And look now at your Punjab;
The forests are littered with corpses
And blood flows down the Chenab.’
Kashmir is the unfinished business of Partition. The agreement to divide the subcontinent had entailed referendums and elections in the Muslim-majority segments of British India. In the North-West Frontier Province, which was 90 per cent Muslim, the Muslim League had defeated the anti-Partition forces led by Ghaffar Khan. It did so by intimidation, chicanery and selective violence. The Muslim League never won a free election there again, and Ghaffar Khan spent much of the rest of his life – he died in the 1980s – in a Pakistani prison, accused of treason. His defeat seemed to prove that secular Muslim leaders, despite their popularity, were powerless against the confessional tide. Would Sheikh Abdullah be able to preserve a united Kashmir?
In constitutional terms, Kashmir was a ‘princely state’, which meant that its maharaja had the legal right to choose whether to accede to India or to Pakistan. In cases where the ruler did not share the faith of a large majority of his population, it was assumed he would nevertheless go along with the wishes of the people. In Hyderabad and Junagadh – Hindu majority, Muslim royals – the rulers wobbled, but finally chose India. Jinnah began to woo the maharaja of Kashmir in the hope that he would decide in favour of Pakistan. This enraged Sheikh Abdullah. Hari Singh vacillated.
Kashmir’s accession was still unresolved when midnight struck on 14 August 1947 and the Union Jack was lowered for the last time. Independence. There were now two armies in the subcontinent, each commanded by a British officer and with a very large proportion of British officers in the senior ranks. Lord Mountbatten, the governor-general of India, and Field Marshal Auchinleck, the joint commander-in-chief of both armies, made it clear to Jinnah that the use of force in Kashmir would not be tolerated. If it were attempted, Britain would withdraw every British officer from the Pakistan army. Pakistan backed down. The League’s traditional toadying to the British played a part in this decision, but there were other factors: Britain exercised a great deal of economic leverage; Mountbatten’s authority was resented but could not be ignored; Pakistan’s civil servants hadn’t yet much self-confidence. And, unknown to his people, Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis. Besides, Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, an upper-class refugee from India, was not in any sense a rebel. He had worked too closely with the departing colonial power to want to thwart it. He had no feel for the politics of the regions that now comprised Pakistan and he didn’t get on with the Muslim landlords who dominated the League in the Punjab. They wanted to run the country and would soon have him killed, but not just yet.
Meanwhile, something had to be done about Kashmir. There was unrest in the army, and even secular politicians felt that Kashmir, as a Muslim state, should form part of Pakistan. The maharaja had begun to negotiate secretly with India, and a desperate Jinnah decided to authorize a military operation in defiance of the British high command. Pakistan would advance into Kashmir and seize Srinagar. Jinnah nominated a younger colleague from the Punjab, Sardar Shaukat Hyat Khan, to take charge of the operation.
Shaukat had served as a captain during the war and had spent several months in an Italian POW camp. On his return he had resigned his commission and joined the Muslim League. He was one of its more popular leaders in the Punjab, devoted to Jinnah, extremely hostile to Liaquat, whom he regarded as an arriviste, and keen to earn the title Lion of the Punjab, which was occasionally chanted in his honour at public meetings. An effete and vainglorious figure, easily swayed by flattery, Shaukat was a chocolate-cream soldier. The unexpected death of his father, the elected prime minister of the old Punjab, had brought him to prominence. He was not one of those people who rise above their own shortcomings in a crisis. I knew him well: he was my uncle. To his credit, he argued against the use of irregulars and wanted the operation to be restricted to retired or serving military personnel. He was overruled by the prime minister, who insisted that his loud-mouthed protégé, Khurshid Anwar, take part in the operation. Anwar, against all military advice, enlisted Pashtun tribesmen in the cause of jihad. Two extremely able brigadiers, Akbar Khan and Sher Khan from the 6/13th Frontier Force Regiment (‘Piffers’ to old India hands), were selected to lead the assault.
The invasion was fixed for 9 September 1947, but it had to be delayed for two weeks: Khurshid Anwar had chosen the same day to get married and wanted to go on a brief honeymoon. In the meantime, thanks to Anwar’s lack of discretion, a senior Pakistani officer, Brigadier Iftikhar, heard what was going on and passed the news to General Messervy, the commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army. He immediately informed Auchinleck, who passed the information to Mountbatten, who passed it to the new Indian government. Using the planned invasion as a pretext, the Congress sent Nehru’s deputy, Sardar Patel, to pressure the maharaja into acceding to India, while Mountbatten ordered Indian army units to prepare for an emergency airlift to Srinagar.
B
ack in Rawalpindi, Anwar had returned from his honeymoon, and the invasion began. The key objective was to take Srinagar, occupy the airport and secure it against the Indians. Within a week the maharaja’s army had collapsed. Hari Singh fled to his palace in Jammu. The 11th Sikh Regiment of the Indian army had by now reached Srinagar, but was desperately waiting for reinforcements and didn’t enter the town. The Pashtun tribesmen under Khurshid Anwar’s command halted after reaching Baramulla, only an hour’s bus ride from Srinagar, and refused to go any further. Here they embarked on a three-day binge, looting houses, assaulting Muslims and Hindus alike, raping men and women and stealing money from the Kashmir treasury. The local cinema was transformed into a rape centre; a group of Pashtuns invaded St Joseph’s Convent, where they raped and killed four nuns, including the mother superior, and shot dead a European couple sheltering there. News of the atrocities spread, turning large numbers of Kashmiris against their would-be liberators. When they finally reached Srinagar, the Pashtuns were so intent on pillaging the shops and bazaars that they overlooked the airport, already occupied by the Sikhs.
The maharaja meanwhile signed the accession papers in favour of India and demanded help to repel the invasion. India airlifted troops and began to drive the Pakistanis back. Sporadic fighting continued until India appealed to the UN Security Council, which organized a cease-fire and a Line of Control (LOC) demarcating Indian and Pakistan-held territory. Kashmir, too, was now partitioned. The leaders of the Kashmir Muslim Conference shifted to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, leaving Sheikh Abdullah in control of the valley itself.
If Abdullah, too, had favoured Pakistan, there wouldn’t have been much that the Indian troops could have done about it. But he regarded the Muslim League as a reactionary organization and rightly feared that if Kashmir became part of Pakistan, the Punjabi landlords who dominated the Muslim League would stand in the way of any social or political reforms. He decided to back the Indian military presence, provided the Kashmiris were allowed to determine their own future. At a mass rally in Srinagar, Nehru, with Abdullah at his side, publicly promised as much. In November 1947, Abdullah was appointed prime minister of an emergency administration. When the maharaja expressed nervousness about this, Nehru wrote to him, insisting that there was no alternative:
The only person who can deliver the goods in Kashmir is Abdullah. I have a high opinion of his integrity and his general balance of mind. He may make any number of mistakes in minor matters, but I think he is likely to be right in regard to major decisions. No satisfactory way out can be found in Kashmir except through him.
In 1944 the National Conference had approved a constitution for an independent Kashmir, which began:
We the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and the Frontier regions, including Poonch and Chenani districts, commonly known as Jammu and Kashmir State, in order to perfect our union in the fullest equality and self-determination, to raise ourselves and our children forever from the abyss of oppression and poverty, degradation and superstition, from medieval darkness and ignorance, into the sunlit valleys of plenty, ruled by freedom, science and honest toil, in worthy participation of the historic resurgence of the peoples of the East, and the working masses of the world, and in determination to make this our country a dazzling gem on the snowy bosom of Asia, do propose and propound the following constitution of our state . . .
But the 1947–8 war had made independence impossible, and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution recognized only Kashmir’s ‘special status’. True, the maharaja was replaced by his son, Karan Singh, who became the nonhereditary head of state, but it was a disappointed Abdullah who now sat down to play chess with the politicians from Delhi. He knew that most of them, apart from Gandhi and Nehru, would like to eat him alive. For the moment, though, they needed him. Since the split with the confessional element in the Jammu and Kashmir Conference, Abdullah had moved to the left. As the elected chief minister of Kashmir he pushed through a set of major reforms, the most important of which was the ‘land to the tiller’ legislation, which destroyed the power of the landlords, most of whom were Muslims. They were allowed to keep a maximum of twenty acres, provided they worked on the land themselves; meanwhile, 188,775 acres were transferred to 153,399 peasants, and the government organized collective farming on ninety thousand more. A law was passed prohibiting the sale of land to non-Kashmiris, thus preserving the basic topography of the region. Dozens of new schools and four hospitals were built, and a university was founded in Srinagar that has perhaps the most beautiful location of any campus in the world.
In the United States these reforms were regarded as communist-inspired, a viewpoint used to build support for America’s new ally, Pakistan. A classic example of US propaganda of the time is Danger in Kashmir, written by Josef Korbel. Korbel had been a Czech UN representative in Kashmir before he defected to Washington. His book was published by Princeton in 1954, and in the second, 1966 edition, he acknowledged the ‘substantial help’ of several scholars, including Mrs Madeleine Albright of the Russian Institute at Columbia University – his daughter.
In 1948 the National Conference had backed ‘provisional accession’ to India, on condition that Kashmir would be accepted as an autonomous republic with only defence, foreign affairs and communications conceded to the centre. A small but influential minority, made up of the Dogra nobility and the Kashmiri Pandits, both fearful of losing their privileges, began to campaign against Kashmir’s special status. In India proper, they were backed by the ultra-rightist Jan Sangh (which in its current reincarnation as the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, heads the coalition government in New Delhi). The Jan Sangh provided funds and volunteers for agitation against the Kashmir government. Abdullah, who had gone out of his way to integrate non-Muslims into every level of the administration, was enraged. His position hardened. At a public meeting in the enemy stronghold of Jammu, on 10 April 1952, he made it clear that he was not willing to surrender Kashmir’s partial sovereignty:
Many Kashmiris are apprehensive as to what will happen to them and their position if, for instance, something happens to Pandit Nehru. We do not know. As realists, we Kashmiris have to provide for all eventualities . . . If there is a resurgence of communalism in India, how are we to convince the Muslims of Kashmir that India does not intend to swallow up Kashmir?
Abdullah was mistaken only in his belief that Nehru would protect them. When the Indian prime minister visited Srinagar in May 1953, he spent a week trying to cajole his friend into accepting a permanent settlement on Delhi’s terms: if a secular democracy was to be preserved in India, Kashmir had to be part of it. Nehru pleaded. Abdullah wasn’t convinced: Muslims were a large minority in India even if Kashmiris weren’t included. He felt that Nehru shouldn’t be putting pressure on him but on politicians inside the Congress who were susceptible to the chauvinistic demands of the Jan Sangh.
Three months later, Nehru gave in to the chauvinists and authorized what was effectively a coup in Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed by Karan Singh, and one of his lieutenants, Bakhshi Ghulam Mohammed, was sworn in as chief minister. Abdullah was accused of being in contact with Pakistani intelligence and arrested. Kashmir erupted. A general strike began which was to last for twenty days. There were several thousand arrests, and Indian troops repeatedly opened fire on demonstrators. The National Conference claimed that more than a thousand people were killed; official statistics record sixty deaths. An underground war council, organized by Akbar Jehan, orchestrated demonstrations by women in Srinagar, Baramulla and Sopore.
The unrest subsided after a month, but now Kashmiris were even more suspicious of India. The situation was no happier in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, which had the additional disadvantage of being made up of the least attractive part of the old state, a barren moonscape. Appalling living conditions gave rise to large-scale economic migration. Today, more Kashmiris live in the English cities of Birmingham and Bradford than in Mirpur or Muzaffarabad. An Islamist Kashmiri s
its in the House of Lords as a New Labour peer; another Kashmiri stood as a Tory candidate in the 2001 British general elections.
Sheikh Abdullah, detained for four years without trial, was released without warning one cold morning in January 1958. Declining the offer of government transport, he hired a taxi and was driven to Srinagar. Within days he was drawing huge crowds at meetings all over the country, which he used to remind Nehru of the promise he had made in 1947. ‘Why did you go back on your word, Panditji?’ Abdullah would ask, and the crowds would echo the question. By spring, he had been arrested again. This time the Indian government, using British colonial legislation, began to prepare a conspiracy case against him, his wife and several other nationalist leaders. Nehru vetoed Akbar Jehan’s inclusion: her popularity made it inadvisable. The conspiracy trial began in 1959 and lasted more than a year. In 1962 the special magistrate transferred the case to a higher court with the recommendation that the accused be tried under sections of the Indian penal code for which the punishment was either death or life imprisonment.