India After Gandhi (14 page)

The idea of independence had taken strong hold over the maharaja. He loathed the Congress, so he could not think of joining India. But if he joined Pakistan the fate of his Hindu dynasty might be sealed.
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In April 1947 a new viceroy took over in New Delhi. As it turned out, he was an old acquaintance of Maharaja Hari Singh; they had served together on the Prince of Wales’s staff back when the prince visited India in 1921-2. In the third week of June 1947, after the decision was taken to divide India, Lord Mountbatten setoff for Kashmir,('largely to forestall Nehru or Gandhi from doing so').
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He wanted to make his own assessment of where the state might be going. In Srinagar, the viceroy met Kak and advised him to tell the maharaja to accede to either dominion – but to accede. The prime minister defiantly answered that they intended to stay independent.
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The viceroy then fixed a private meeting with the maharaja. On the appointed day, the last of Mountbatten’s visit, Hari Singh stayed in bed with an attack of colic, this most probably a ruse to avoid what would certainly have been an unpleasant encounter.
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Nehru now told Mountbatten that ‘your visit to Kashmir was from my particular point of view not a success’; he wanted to go and break the political deadlock himself. Gandhi also wished to go. Hari Singh, expectedly, wanted neither.
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In the event, Nehru was busy with other matters, so the Mahatma went instead. At the maharaja’s request he
addressed no public meetings during his three days in Srinagar. But he met delegations of workers and students, who demanded Abdullah’s release and Prime Minister Kak’s dismissal.
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On 15 August, Jammu and Kashmir had not acceded to either India or Pakistan. It offered to sign a ‘stand still agreement’ with both countries which would allow the free movement of peoples and goods across borders. Pakistan signed the agreement, but India said it would wait and watch. However, in the middle of September the rail service between Sialkot in West Punjab and Jammu was suspended, and lorry traffic carrying goods for the state was stopped on the Pakistan side of the border.
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As relations with Pakistan deteriorated, the maharaja sacked two prime ministers in quick succession. First Kak was replaced with a soldier named Janak Singh; then he in turn gave way to a former judge of the Punjab High Court, Mehr Chand Mahajan, who had better relations with the Congress bosses. Of these, the two top ones were crucial: the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (who was himself an ethnic Kashmiri), and the home minister and minister of states, Vallabhbhai Patel. Notably, while Nehru always wanted Kashmir to be part of India, Patel was at one time inclined to allow the state to join Pakistan. His mind changed on 13 September, the day the Pakistan government accepted the accession of Junagadh. For ‘if Jinnah could take hold of a Hindu-majority State with a Muslim ruler, why should the Sardar not be interested in a Muslim-majority State with a Hindu ruler?’
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On 27 September 1947 Nehru wrote along letter to Patel about the ‘dangerous and deteriorating’ situation in the state. He had heard that Pakistan was preparing to send infiltrators ‘to enter Kashmir in considerable numbers’. The maharaja and his administration could hardly meet the threat on their own, hence the need for Hari Singh to ‘make friends with the National Conference so that there might be this popular support against Pakistan’. Releasing Abdullah, and enlisting the support of his followers, would also help ‘bring about the accession of Kashmir to the Indian Union’.
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On 29 September Sheikh Abdullah was released from prison. The next week, in a speech at the great Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar, Abdullah demanded a ‘complete transfer of power to the people in Kashmir. Representatives of the people in a democratic Kashmir will then decide whether the State should join India or Pakistan’. A popular government in Kashmir, he added, ‘will not be the government of any
one community. It will be a joint government of the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Muslims. That is what I am fighting for.’
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Pakistan naturally expected Kashmir, with its Muslim majority, to join it. India thought that the religious factor was irrelevant, especially since the leading political party, the National Conference, was known to be non-sectarian. By early October, as Patel wrote to Nehru, there was no ‘difference between you and me on matters of policy relating to Kashmir’: both wanted accession.
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What were the feelings of the Kashmiris themselves? Shortly after Abdullah’s release, the British commander of the state forces noted that ‘the vast majority of the Kashmiris have no strong bias for either India or Pakistan’. However, while there was ‘no well-organized body in Kashmir advocating accession to Pakistan’,the ‘National Conference has been pro-Congress and anti-Pakistan’.
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As for Maharaja Hari Singh, he still clung to the dream of independence. On 12 October the deputy prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir said in Delhi that ‘We intend to keep on friendly relations with both India and Pakistan. Despite constant rumours, we have no intention of joining either India or Pakistan . . . The only thing that will change our mind is if one side or the other decides to use force against us . . . The Maharaja has told me that his ambition is to make Kashmir the Switzerland of the East – a State that is completely neutral.’
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The only thing that will change our mind is if one side or the other decides to use force against us.
Two weeks after these words were spoken a force of several thousand armed men invaded the state from the north. On 22 October they crossed the border that separated the North-West Frontier Provinces from Kashmir and briskly made their way towards the capital, Srinagar.

Most of these raiders were Pathans from what was now a province of Pakistan. This much is undisputed; what is not so certain is
why
they came and
who
was helping them. These two questions lie at the heart of the Kashmir dispute; sixty years later, historians still cannot provide definitive answers to them. One reason for this was that the northern extremity of Kashmir was both obscure and inaccessible. No railways or
roads penetrated these high mountains. No anthropologists had come here, nor any journalists either. There are thus no independent eyewitness accounts of what came to be known as the ‘tribal invasion of Kashmir’.

There are, however, plenty of loaded accounts, biased in one direction or the other. At the time, and later, Indians believed that the tribals were pushed across the border by Pakistan, who also supplied them with rifles and ammunition. The Pakistanis disclaimed any involvement in the invasion -they insisted that it was a ‘spontaneous’ rushing of Pathan Muslims to the aid of co-religionists persecuted by a Hindu king and a Hindu administration.
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There was, indeed, discontent in one part of Kashmir. This was the district of Poonch, which lay to the west of Srinagar. Until 1936 Poonch had been ruled by a subsidiary clan of the Dogra ruling family, but in that year the district came directly under the control of the maharaja in Srinagar. The loss of autonomy hurt, as did the new taxes imposed by the king. There were cesses on individual goats, sheep and cattle and a tax on entering the forest. Hardest hit were the pastoralists of Poonch, almost all of whom were Muslim.
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During the Second World War many Muslims from Poonch served in the British Indian Army. They came back, as demobilized soldiers tend to do, as highly conscious political beings. The rule of the Maharaja of Kashmir had already been challenged in the Valley by Sheikh Abdullah and his party. To that was now added the independent challenge of the men of Poonch.

On 14 August several shops and offices in Poonch had flown Pakistani flags, indicating that their allegiance lay to that country, and not to the still unaffiliated state of Kashmir. In the following weeks clashes between Dogra troops and local protesters were reported. By the beginning of September dozens of Poonch men had equipped themselves with rifles obtained from ‘informal sources in Pakistan’. They had also established a base in the Pakistani town of Murree; here were collected arms and ammunition to be smuggled across the border to Kashmir. Pakistani accounts acknowledge that both the prime minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, and a senior Punjab Muslim League leader, Mian Iftikharuddin, knew and sanctioned assistance to the Poonch rebels. Overseeing the operation was Abkar Khan, a colonel in the Pakistan Army. Khan had collected 4,000 rifles from army supplies and diverted them for use in
Kashmir. More fancifully, he had adopted the nom de guerre ‘General Tariq’, after a medieval Moorish warrior who had fought the Christians in Spain.
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Within Poonch, Muslim officials and soldiers had left their jobs in the state administration and joined the rebels. So, by the end of September, there were intimations of a serious conflict between a dissenting district and the government of Maharaja Hari Singh. But, although there were clashes here and there, there was no major eruption, no head-on battle. Poonch bordered West Punjab; Pakistani cities such as Rawalpindi were easily reached from there. However, the North-West Frontier Province is some distance to the west. Did the raiders from that province hear of the brewing insurrection in Poonch? Or were they planning to come anyway?

For these questions too one cannot supply uncontested answers. All we know for certain is that after the Pathan raiders crossed the border on 22 October they made remarkably swift progress in their march southwards. ‘The principal characteristics of the tribal invasion’, writes the historian Michael Brecher, ‘were the surprise tactics of the tribesmen, the absence of the most rudimentary defence by the Kashmir State Army, and the pillage, loot and rapine of the tribesmen inflicted on Hindus and Muslims alike.’ Or, as a British social worker familiar with Kashmir laconically put it, the invading Pathans had sensed ‘an opportunity of gaining both religious merit and rich booty’.

Once in Kashmir the tribesmen moved quickly down the Jhelum valley. Their first stop was the town of Muzaffarabad, on the Kishanganga, just seven miles from the border. A battalion of the Jammu and Kashmir Infantry was stationed here, but it was split down the middle, with half the men, Muslims from Poonch, now asserting their disenchantment with the maharaja. The garrison fell, but not before a few men escaped and phoned Srinagar to tell them what had happened. This allowed the acting commandant of the state forces, Brigadier Rajinder Singh, to gather a couple of hundred men and rush towards Uri, a town that lay roughly halfway between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad.

The raiders were on their way to Uri too. Brigadier Rajinder Singh got there first, and as a precaution blew up the bridge that linked the town to the north. This held up the invaders for forty-eight hours, but they were eventually able to cross the river and decimate the brigadier’s men. From Uri they made their way to Mahuta, the site of the power
station that supplied electricity to the Valley. There they turned off the switches, plunging Srinagar into darkness.
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It should not surprise us that estimates of the number of invaders vary. Some said that they were as few as 2,000, others that they were as many as 13,000. We do know that they had rifles and grenades, and that they travelled in lorries. Their incursion into Kashmir was openly encouraged by the prime minister of the North-West Frontier Provinces, Abdul Qayyum. The British governor, Sir George Cunningham, turned a blind eye. So did the British officers who then served with the Pakistan army. As Jinnah’s American biographer observes, ‘trucks, petrol, and drivers were hardly standard tribal equipment, and British officers as well as Pakistani officials all along the northern Pakistan route they traversed knew and supported, even if they did not actually organize and instigate, the violent October operation by which Pakistan seems to have hoped to trigger the integration of Kashmir into the nation’.
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After taking the Mahuta power station on the 24th, the raiders headed down the open road to Srinagar. En route lay the town of Baramula. Here, for the first time, we can draw upon actual eyewitness accounts of what happened. A British manager of a timber firm in Baramula saw the raiders come, ‘well supplied with lorries, petrol, and ammunition. They also have both two – and three-inch mortars.’

This manager was relieved of the Rs1,500 he had just drawn from the bank. The next target was the Convent of St Joseph. Here the visitors smashed the machinery in the hospital and shot and wounded the mother superior. A colonel who lived in the compound was killed outright. According to one report, the nuns were then lined up to be shot, but an Afridi who had studied in a convent school in Peshawar stopped his men from applying the finishing touches.
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‘There can be no doubt that for those in the way, Pathans on the warpath are bad news.’ So writes one historian of the Kashmir dispute, Alastair Lamb. He tells us that, apart from the attack on the convent, the Pathans also burnt shops owned by Hindus and Sikhs. Lamb says they did ‘what might be expected from warriors engaged on what they saw as a
jihad,
a holy war’.
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However, at Baramula the greed of the tribesmen conclusively triumphed over religious identity. For here they ‘invaded the houses of the peace-loving Kashmiri Moslems as well. They looted and plundered the latter’s houses and raped their young girls. Shrieks of terror and agony of those girls resounded across the town of Baramula.’
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