In December 1963, with the higher court still considering the conspiracy charges, the single hair from the Prophet’s head was stolen from the Hazrat Bal shrine in Srinagar. Its theft created uproar: an action committee was set up and the country was paralysed by a general strike and mass demonstrations. A distraught Nehru ordered that the strand of hair be found – and it was, within a week. But was it the real thing? The action committee called on religious leaders to inspect it. Faqir Mirak Shah, regarded as ‘the holiest of the holy men’, announced that it was genuine. The crisis abated. Nehru concluded that a lasting solution had to be found to the problem of Kashmir. He had the conspiracy case against Abdullah dropped, and the Lion of Kashmir was released. His second stay in prison had lasted six years. A million people lined the streets to mark his return; Nehru spoke of the necessity of ending hostilities between India and Pakistan.
Kashmir troubled Nehru’s conscience. He met Abdullah in Delhi and told him that he wanted the problem of Kashmir resolved in his lifetime. He suggested that Abdullah visit Pakistan and sound out its leader, General Ayub Khan. If Pakistan was ready to accept a solution proposed by Abdullah, then Nehru would too. For a start, India was prepared to allow free movement of goods and people across the cease-fire line. Abdullah flew to Pakistan in an optimistic mood. After a series of conversations with Ayub Khan he felt progress was being made. On 27 May 1964 he reached Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and was cheered by a large crowd. He was addressing a press conference when a colleague rushed in to inform him that All India Radio had just announced Nehru’s death. Sheikh Abdullah broke down and wept. He cancelled all his engagements and, accompanied by Pakistan’s foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, flew back to Delhi to attend his old friend’s funeral.
Fearing that there would be no peaceful solution without Nehru, Abdullah travelled around the world, trying to get international support, and was received in several capitals with the honours accorded a visiting head of state. His meeting with the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai (‘Chew and Lie’ in the ultra-patriotic sections of the Indian press), created a furore in India. And so, on his return, Abdullah was imprisoned again. This time he and his wife were sent to prisons far away from Kashmir. The response was the usual: strikes, demonstrations, arrests and a few deaths.
Encouraged by this, the military regime in Pakistan dispatched several platoons of irregulars in September 1965, hoping to spark off an uprising. As usual, they had misjudged the situation. The unrest was not an expression of pro-Pakistan sentiment. The Pakistan army crossed the Line of Control, aiming to cut Kashmir off from the rest of India. The military high command was confident. On the eve of the invasion, the self-appointed field marshal Ayub Khan had boasted that they might even be able to take Amritsar – the Indian town closest to Lahore – as a bargaining chip. A senior officer present (another of my uncles) muttered loudly: ‘Give him a few more whiskies and we’ll take Delhi as well.’ The Indian army, caught by surprise, suffered serious reverses. They responded dramatically by crossing the Pakistan border near Lahore. Had the war continued, the city would have fallen, but Ayub Khan appealed to Washington for support. Washington asked Moscow to bring pressure on India, and a peace agreement was signed in Tashkent under the watchful eye of Alexei Kosygin.
The war had been Bhutto’s idea. Ayub Khan, publicly humiliated at home and abroad, sacked his foreign minister. Bhutto had always been the most awkward member of the government and, embarrassed at having to serve under a general, he had ratcheted up his nationalist rhetoric. Government ministers, fearing trouble, tended to avoid the universities, but a few years before this, in 1962, Bhutto had decided to address a student meeting on Kashmir at the Punjab University in Lahore, a meeting at which I was present. He spoke eloquently enough, but we were more concerned with domestic politics. We began to talk to each other. He was offended. He stopped in mid-flow and glared at us aggressively. ‘What the hell do you want? I’ll answer your questions.’ I raised my hand. ‘We’re all in favour of a democratic referendum in Kashmir,’ I began, ‘but we would like one in Pakistan as well. Why should anybody take you seriously on democracy in Kashmir when it doesn’t exist here?’
He glared at me angrily but wouldn’t be drawn, pointing out that he had only agreed to speak on Kashmir. At this point the meeting erupted, with everyone demanding a reply and chanting slogans. At one point Bhutto took off his jacket and challenged a heckler to a boxing match outside. This was greeted with jeers, and the meeting came to an abrupt halt. That night Bhutto cursed us roundly as he hurled one drained whisky glass after another against the wall, an affectation he had picked up during an official trip to Moscow. Many months later he told me that the encounter had made him realize how powerful the students were.
A week after Bhutto’s dismissal, in spring 1966 – by which time I was a student in the UK – I received a phone call from J. A. Rahim, Pakistan’s ambassador to France. He needed to see me in Paris the next day. He would pay my return ticket and offered the bribe of a ‘sensational lunch’.
An embassy chauffeur picked me up at Orly and drove me to the restaurant. His Excellency, a cultured Bengali in his late fifties, greeted me with a conspiratorial warmth, which was surprising since we had never met. Halfway through the hors d’oeuvres he lowered his voice and asked, ‘Don’t you think the time has come to get rid of the Field Marshal?’ Concealing my surprise, not to mention fear, I asked him to elaborate. He raised his hand above the table, pointed two fingers at me and pulled an imaginary trigger. He wanted me to help organize Ayub Khan’s assassination. My instinctive reaction was to forget the main course and leave. How could this be anything other than a set-up? Rahim ordered another bottle of Château Latour, courtesy of the Pakistan government. I pointed out the danger of removing an individual military leader while leaving the institution intact. In any case, I added, it would be difficult for me to organize the assassination from Oxford. He glared at me. ‘Drastic action is needed,’ he said, ‘and you’re just trying to avoid the issue. The army is enfeebled after this wretched war. Everyone is fed up. Remove him and anything is possible. I’m surprised at you. I don’t expect you to do it yourself. One of your uncles is always boasting about the hereditary assassins in your villages who’ve acted for your family in the past.’
I tried to talk about Kashmir, but Rahim wasn’t interested. ‘Kashmir’, he said, ‘is irrelevant. It’s the dictatorship we’re after.’ A week later, Rahim resigned his ambassadorship. A few months after that, he turned up in London with Bhutto and summoned me to the Dorchester. I had heard that Bhutto was depressed, but there was no trace of it that day. Conscious of the shortness of life, he was the sort of man who was determined that it should flash by with brilliance, romance and verve. He could also be silly, arrogant, childish and vindictive – defects that cost him his life.
At one point, when Rahim was out of the room, I began to describe our lunch in Paris, but Bhutto already knew about it. He laughed and insisted that Rahim had just been testing me. Then he whispered, ‘When you met Rahim in Paris, did he introduce you to his new mistress?’ I shook my head regretfully. ‘I’m told she’s very pretty and very young. He’s hiding her from me. I was hoping you might have . . .’ Rahim came back with a bulky typescript. It was the manifesto of the Pakistan People’s Party, which he had drafted on Bhutto’s instructions.
‘Go into the next room, read it carefully and tell me what you think,’ Bhutto ordered. ‘I want you to become a founding member.’ I was halfway through it when the author walked in with an apologetic smile. ‘Bhutto wants to be alone. He’s booked a call to Geneva. Did you know he’s got a Japanese mistress there? Have you met her?’ I shook my head. ‘He’s hiding her from me,’ Rahim said. ‘I wonder why.’
I finished reading the manifesto. It was strong on anti-imperialist rhetoric, self-determination for Kashmir, land reform, and nationalization of industry, but far too soft on religion. I said I couldn’t associate mysel
f with a party that wasn’t 100 per cent secular, and Rahim smiled in agreement, but Bhutto was angry and denounced us both. Later that evening, during dinner, I asked why he had embroiled the country in an unwinnable war. The reply was breathtaking: ‘It was the only way to weaken the bloody dictatorship. The regime will crack wide open soon.’
Subsequent events appeared to vindicate Bhutto’s judgement. In 1968, a prolonged uprising of students and workers finally toppled it. The traditional parties on the left had not grasped the importance of what was happening, but Bhutto put himself at the head of the revolt, promised that after the people’s victory they would ‘dress the generals in skirts and parade them through the streets like performing monkeys’, and prospered politically.
When I met him in Karachi in August 1969, he was in an ebullient mood. The stopgap dictator had promised a general election, and Bhutto was sure his party would win. Once again he mocked me for refusing to join. ‘There are only two ways: mine or Che Guevara’s. Are you planning to start a guerrilla war in the mountains of Baluchistan?’
Bhutto scored an amazing triumph in the 1970 election, but only in West Pakistan. In what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, the nationalist leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League won virtually every seat. Since 60 per cent of the population lived in East Pakistan, Mujibur gained an overall majority in the National Assembly and expected to become prime minister. The Punjabi elite refused to hand over power and instead arrested him. General Yahya (‘fuck-fuck’ in Lahori Punjabi) Khan attempted to crush the Bengalis, and Bhutto, desperate for power, supported him. It was his most shameful hour. A Bangladeshi government-in-exile was set up in neighbouring Calcutta. Millions of refugees poured into the Indian province of West Bengal, and finally, at the request of the Bengali leaders-in-exile, the Indian army moved into East Pakistan, to be greeted by the population as liberators. East Pakistan surrendered, and Bangladesh was born.
Bhutto came to power in a truncated Pakistan, but the old game was over: in 1972, at the Indian hill resort of Simla, he agreed to the status quo in Kashmir and in return got back the ninety thousand soldiers who had been captured after the fall of Dhaka, in what had been East Pakistan. In Kashmir, every political group, with the exception of the confessional Jamaat-e-Islami, was shocked by the brutalities inflicted on fellow Muslims in Bengal. Had a referendum been held at this point, a majority would have opted to remain within the Indian Federation, but Delhi refused to take the risk. Pakistan’s reputation sank further when its third military dictator, the Washington implant Zia-ul-Haq, executed Bhutto in 1979 after a rigged trial. A large rally in Srinagar turned into a prayer meeting for the dead leader.
Sheikh Abdullah, who had been released from prison on grounds of ill-health in the mid-1970s, had made his peace with Delhi. In 1977 he was again appointed chief minister, courtesy of Mrs Gandhi, who forced Congress yes-men in the Kashmir Assembly, themselves elected by dubious means, to switch sides and vote for him. The changeover was calm: Kashmiris were pleased at Abdullah’s return, but mindful of the fact that Mrs Gandhi was calling the tune.
Abdullah seemed stale and tired; his time in prison had affected both his health and his politics. He now mimicked other subcontinental potentates by attempting to create a political dynasty. It’s said that Akbar Jehan insisted he do so and that he was too old and weak to resist. At a big rally in Srinagar he named his oldest son, Farooq Abdullah – an amiable doctor, fond of wine and fornication, but not very bright – as his successor.
As he lay dying, in 1982, Sheikh Abdullah told an old friend of a dream that had haunted him for thirty years: ‘I am still a young man. I’m dressed as a bridegroom. I’m on horseback. My bridal party leaves our home with all the fanfare. We head in the direction of the bride’s house. But when I arrive she’s not there. She’s never there. Then I wake up.’ The missing bride, so it has always seemed to me, was Nehru. Abdullah had never fully recovered from his betrayal.
When I met Sheikh Abdullah’s son Farooq at a conclave of opposition parties in Calcutta, he was scathing about Delhi’s failures, but still convinced that a referendum would not go Pakistan’s way. ‘She’s getting too old,’ he said about Mrs Gandhi. ‘Look at me. Who am I? In Indian terms, a nobody. A provincial politician. If she had left me alone there would have been no problems. Her congressmen in Kashmir were bitter at having been defeated, so they began to agitate, but for what? For power which the electorate had denied them. I met Mrs Gandhi a number of times to assure her that we were loyal, intended to remain so and wanted friendly relations with the centre. Her paranoia was such that she wanted one to be totally servile. That was impossible. So she gave the Kashmir Congress the green light to disrupt our government’s functioning. It was she who made me a national leader. I would have been far happier left alone in our lovely Kashmir.’
When I passed this on to her, Mrs Gandhi snorted derisively. ‘Yes, yes, I know that’s what he says. He said similar things to me, but he acts differently. Tells too many lies. The boy is totally untrustworthy.’ Meanwhile her ‘sources’ had informed her that Pakistan was preparing a military invasion of Kashmir. Could this be so? I doubted it. General Zia-ul-Haq was brutal and vicious, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that to provoke India would be fatal. In addition, the Pakistan army was busy fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. To open a second front in Kashmir would be the height of irrationality.
‘I’m surprised at you,’ Mrs Gandhi said. ‘You of all people believe that generals are rational human beings?’
‘There is a difference between irrationality and suicide,’ I said (a judgement I have since had cause to revise).
She smiled, but didn’t reply. Then, to demonstrate the inadequacies of the military mind, she described how after Pakistan’s surrender in Bangladesh her generals had wanted to continue the war against West Pakistan, to ‘finish off the enemy’. She had overruled them and ordered a cease-fire. Her point was that in India the army was firmly under civilian control, but in Pakistan it was a law unto itself.
Later that evening – I was staying in Delhi – I received a phone call from a civil servant. ‘I believe you had a very interesting discussion with the PM. We have an informal discussion club meeting tomorrow and would love you to come and talk to us.’ The members of the club were civil servants, intelligence operatives and journalists from both the US and Soviet lobbies. They tried to convince me that I was wrong, that the Pakistani generals were planning an attack. After two hours of argument and counter-argument I began to tire. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘if you lot are preparing a pre-emptive strike against Zia or the nuclear reactor in Kahuta, that’s your decision. You might even win support in Sind and Baluchistan, but don’t expect the world to believe you acted in response to Pakistani aggression. It’s simply not credible at the moment.’ The meeting came to an end. Back in London I described these events to Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir. ‘Why did you deny that Zia was planning to invade Kashmir?’ she interrupted.
Four months later, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. A civil servant I met in Delhi the following year told me they had evidence linking the assassins with Sikh training camps in Pakistan that had been set up with US assistance with a view to destabilizing the Indian government. He was sure the United States had decided to eliminate Mrs Gandhi in order to prevent a strike against Pakistan that would have derailed the West’s operation in Afghanistan. Bhutto had certainly believed that Washington had orchestrated the coup which toppled him. He smuggled out a testament from his death cell which included Kissinger’s threat to ‘make a horrible example’ of him unless he desisted on the nuclear question. Many people in Bangladesh still insist that the CIA, using the Saudis as a conduit, was responsible for Mujib’s downfall. Mujib’s daughter Haseena, currently prime minister of Bangladesh, was out of the country at the time, and thus the only member of the family to survive. The United States may or may not have been involved, but it was a remarkable hat trick: in the space o
f a decade, three populist politicians, each hostile to US interests in the region, had been eliminated.
After the break-up of 1971, Pakistan appeared to lose interest in Kashmir and South Asia as a whole. A young and ambitious State Department official visited the country in 1980, a year after Bhutto’s execution, and advised Zia to look toward the petrodollar surplus being accumulated by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Pakistan’s large army was well positioned to guarantee the status quo in the Gulf. The Arabs would pay the bill. Francis Fukuyama’s position paper ‘The Security of Pakistan: A Trip Report’ was taken very seriously by the military dictatorship. Officers and soldiers were dispatched to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to strengthen internal security. Salaries were much higher there, and a posting to the Gulf was much sought after. Pakistan also exported carefully selected prostitutes, recruited from elite women’s colleges. Islamic solidarity recognized no bounds.
With Islamabad’s attention elsewhere, the Indian government could have reached an amicable settlement in Kashmir. But during the 1980s India interfered in the region with increasing ferocity, dismissing elected governments, imposing states of emergency, alternating soft and hard governors. Delhi’s favourite despot, Jagmohan, was responsible for the suppression of the ultra-secular Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and the imprisonment and torture of its leader, Maqbool Bhat. Young Kashmiri men were arrested, tortured and killed by Indian soldiers; women of all ages were abused and raped. The aim was to break the will of the people, but instead many young men now took up arms, without bothering about where they came from.
I had met Bhat in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir in the early 1970s. He seemed equally hostile to Islamabad and New Delhi and determined to remake a Kashmir that would not be a helpless dependent of either. He was a great admirer of Che Guevara, and when I talked to him, in the euphoric aftermath of the 1969 uprising in Pakistan that had led to the fall of Ayub Khan, he was dreaming of a quick victory in Kashmir. I suggested that the rickety enthusiasm of a tiny minority was not enough. He reminded me that every revolutionary group (in Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria) had started off as a minority.