India After Gandhi (17 page)

The fragility of the Pakistani state and its ideology was personalized in the ambivalent identities of its main leaders. The governor general, M. A. Jinnah, was a Gujarati who had married a Parsi. The prime
minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, was an aristocrat from the United Provinces who was married to aChristian. Neither was, in any sense of the term, apractising Muslim. The top civil servants of Pakistan were, like Jinnah and Liaqat, ‘mohajirs’, migrants whose ancestral homes lay on the Indian side of the border. The ruling class had no roots in what was now their state. This, one suspects, made them even more fervent in their desire to make Kashmir part of Pakistan.

However, the new Indian nation-state was not so robusteither. Its insecurity was manifest in its anointing, as a secular hero, of a Muslim officer who had died fighting in Kashmir. True, unlike the Pakistani army, the Indian army was drawn from men of all religions. Among its senior commanders were a Sikh, a Parsi and two Coorgs, these last from a south Indian hill community that likes to see itself as ‘not-Hindu’. Yet the commander who was to be venerated most was a Muslim. This man, Brigadier Usman, was educated in Allahabad and Sandhurst, and chose to stay with India at the time of Partition. It was claimed that Pakistan had dubbed hima ‘kaffir’, and that the Azad Kashmir government had puta price of Rs50,000 on his head, dead or alive.

In January–February 1948 Brigadier Usman and his men repulsed a fierce attack on Nowshera. In July of that year he died in action.An Indian journalist wroteof his death that ‘a precious life, of imagination and unswerving patriotism, has fallen a victim to communal fanaticism. Brigadier Usman’s brave example will be an abiding source of inspiration for Free India.’
⁷²
His death was publicly mourned by Congress leaders, from Jawaharlal Nehru downwards. The tributes that poured in praised not merely his bravery but also his character: he was, the Indian public was told, an army officer who was withal ‘a vegetarian,a non-smoker, and a teetotaller . His body was brought back from Kashmir to Delhi and buried with full military honours. His grave was placed next to that of Dr M. A. Ansari, a legendary Nationalist Muslim of the previous generation.
⁷³
One might say that Brigadier Usman was to the Indian army what Sheikh Abdullah was to Indian politics, the symbol of its putatively inclusive secularism, the affirmation of it being, if it was anything at all, the Other of atheologically dogmatic and insular Pakistan.

Both sides had invested men and money in the battle for Kashmir. More crucially, they had invested their respective ideologies of nationhood. The clash of these ideologies was captured in a debate on the
future of Kashmir organized by a leading Bombay weekly, the
Current.
The protagonists were both young journalists – both Muslim, but one Indian,the other Pakistani. Both were asked to answer the question: which way would the Kashmiris vote if the United Nations did succeed in holdinga plebiscite?

Speaking on India s behalf was the gifted novelist and scriptwriter Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. One-fourth of Kashmir’s population, he said, were squarely behind Sheikh Abdullah and hisNational Conference – these were the politically conscious, ‘progressive’ elements. Another quarter were just as resolutely opposed to the Sheikh – these consisted of those ‘fully indoctrinated by the Pakistanideology’. Half the voters were undecided – they could go either way.These were attracted to the person of Abdullah, but also ‘susceptible to the cry of Islam in Danger’. When the day of reckoning came, Abbas thought that the memories of the raiders brutalities and the appeal of the progressive ideology of secularism would tilt the balance in favour of India. However, if India ‘wanted to make absolutely sure of a comfortable and convincing majority , then the maharaja and his dynasty had to be removed, and the Sheikh allowed to implement fully his economic programme.
⁷⁴

The next week Abbas was answered by a Karachi-based journalist named Wares Ishaq. He thought that the pull of religion would ensure a Pakistani victory in any plebiscite in Kashmir. Islam, he argued, was not just areligion, but aculture and a way of life. There was only one circumstance in which the Kashmiris would disregard the call of the faith – if India actually lived up to its claim of being a secular state. However, after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the position of minorities was fraught with danger. In particular, wrote Ishaq, the lifting of the ban on the Hindu chauvinist body, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, ‘has finally convinced Muslims all over India, and specially in Kashmir, that their position in India will always be that of a downtrodden minority’. Thus, when the crunch came, the bulk of the Kashmiris would vote to join ‘the Islamic comity of nations’ .
⁷⁵

VI

One might say of the conflict of 1947–8 that it had only losers. The indecision – with neither nation succeeding in acquiring the whole of
the state – hurt bothsides then, and it hurts them now. Hence the prevalence and persistence of conspiracy theories. On the Indian side the finger is pointed at the British governor general, who dragged the case to the UN,and at the British general in command of the Indian army, who is believed to have stopped his troops from going into northern Kashmir.
⁷⁶
But the Pakistanis blame Mountbatten too; they think he conspired with Sir Cyril Radcliffe to gift the district of Gurdaspur to the Indians, so as to allow them a road into Kashmir.
⁷⁷
And they chastise their own government for not helping the raiders even more. As a senior civil servant lamented in 1998:

[T]he only chance of Pakistan obtaining Kashmir was by ablitzkrieg, combining the call of jihad, speed, and surprise, to present the enemy with a fait accompli before it could recover from the shock. The tribal invasion was well conceived as the only means to counter the Indian designs and compensate forPakistan’s military weakness . . . The one single element which decided the issue against Pakistan was the faulty leadership of the tribal horde . . . This was the only mistake, and a decisive one at that, for which those who organized the invasion . . . should bear responsibility.
⁷⁸

This book will return to Kashmir at regular intervals. But let me end this investigation of the dispute’s origins with some prophetic statements made at the time.The quotes below come from observers speaking not in 1990 or 2000, but in the very early years of the conflict.
⁷⁹

Kashmir is the one great problem that may cause the downfall of India and Pakistan (Henry Grady, United States Ambassador to India, January 1948).

So long as the dispute over Kashmir continues it is a serious drain on the military, economic and, above all, on the spiritual strength of these two great countries (General A. G. L. McNaughton, UN mediator, February 1950).

So vital seems its possession for economic and political security to Pakistan that her whole foreign and defence policy has largely revolved around the Kashmir dispute . . . Far more than the Punjab massacres, which, though horrible, were short lived, it is the Kashmir dispute which haspoisoned every aspect of Indo-Pakistan relations (Richard Symonds, British social worker and author, 1950).

Kashmir is one situation you could never localize if it should flare up. It would influence the whole Muslim world. [It is] potentially the most dangerous in the world (Ralph Bunche, senior UN official, February 1953).

Refugees are [being] sent all over India. They will scatter communal hatred on a wide scale and will churn up enormous ill-will everywhere. Refugees have to be looked after, but we have to take steps to prevent the infection of hatred beyond the necessary minimum which cannot be prevented.

C. R
AJAGOPALACHARI
, governor of Bengal, 4 September 1947

May the blood that flowed from Gandhiji’s wounds and the tears that flowed from the eyes of the women of India everywhere they learnt of his death serve to lay the curse of 1947, and may the grisly tragedy of that year sleep in history and not colour present passions.

C. R
AJAGOPALACHARI
,
20
March 1948

I
N THE
I
NDIAN IMAGINATION
Kurukshetra occupies a special place. It was the venue for the bloody battles described in the epic Mahabharata. According to the epic, the fighting took place on an open plain northwest of the ancient city of Indraprastha (now known as Delhi). The plain was called Kurukshetra, a name it retains to this day.

Several thousand years after the Mahabharata was composed, the place of its enactment became the temporary home of the victims of another war.This, too, was fought between closely related kin: India and Pakistan, rather than Pandava and Kaurava. Many of the Hindus and Sikhs fleeing West Punjab were directed by the government of India to a refugee camp in Kurukshetra. A vast city of tents had grown up on the plain, to house waves of migrants, sometimes up to 20,000 a day. The camp was initially planned for 100,000 refugees, but it came to
accommodate three times that number. As an American observer wrote, ‘the army worked miracles to keep the tents rising ahead of the last refugees’. The new inhabitants of Kurukshetra consumed 100 tons of flour daily, along with large quantities of salt, rice, lentils, sugar and cooking oil – all provided free of charge by the government. Helping the state in their effort was a network of Indian and foreign social workers, the United Council for Relief and Welfare (UCRW).

The refugees had to be housed and fed, but also clothed and entertained. With winter approaching, the ‘Government soon recognized that the evenings and nights were hardest to bear’. So the UCRW commandeered a bunch of film projectors from Delhi, and set them up in Kurukshetra. Among the movies shown were Disney specials featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. With large cloth screens allowing for two-way projection, crowds of up to 15,000 could watch a single show. This ‘two-hour break from reality’, commented asocial worker, ‘was a lifesaver. The refugees forgot their shock experiences and misery for two golden hours of laughter. Yes, they who had been bruised and beaten, were homeless and wounded, could laugh. Here was hope.’
¹

Kurukshetra was the largest of the nearly 200 camps set up to house refugees from West Punjab. Some refugees had arrived before the date of transfer of power; among them prescient businessmen who had sold their properties in advance and migrated with the proceeds. However, the vast majority came after15 August 1947, and with little more than the clothes on their skin. These were the farmers who had ‘stayed behind till the last moment, firmly resolved to remain in Pakistan if they could be assured of an honourable living’. But when, in September and October, the violence escalated in the Punjab, they had to abandon that idea. The Hindus and Sikhs who were lucky enough to escape the mobs fled to India by road, rail, sea and on foot.
²

Camps such as Kurukshetra were but a holding operation. The refugees had to be found permanent homes and productive work. A journalist visiting Kurukshetra in December 1947 described it as a city in itself, with 300,000 people, all ‘sitting idle like mad’. ‘The one thought that dominates the peasant-refugees of Kurukshetra’, he wrote,is ‘“Give us some land. We will cultivate it”. That is what they shouted. These land-hungry peasants told us that they did not very much care where land was given to them provided [it] was cultivable. Their passion for land appeared to be elemental.
³

As it happened, a massive migration had also taken place the other
way, into Pakistan from India. Thus, the first place to resettle the refugees was on land vacated by Muslims in the eastern part of the Punjab. If the transfer of populations had been ‘the greatest mass migration’ in history, now commenced ‘the biggest land resettlement operation in the world’. As against 2.7 million hectares abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab, there were only 1.9 million hectares left behind by Muslims in East Punjab. The shortfall was made more acute by the fact that the areas in the west of the province had richer soils, and were more abundantly irrigated. Indeed, back in the late nineteenth century, hundreds of Sikh villages had migrated
en masse
to the west to cultivate land in the newly created ‘canal colonies’. There they had made the desert flourish, but one fine day in 1947 they were told that their garden now lay in Pakistan. So, in a bare two generations, these dispossessed Sikhs found themselves back in their original homes.

To begin with, each family of refugee farmers was given an allotment of four hectares, regardless of its holding in Pakistan. Loans were advanced to buy seed and equipment. While cultivation commenced on these temporary plots, applications were invited for permanent allotments. Each family was asked to submit evidence of how much land it had left behind. Applications were received from 10 March 1948; within a month, more than half a million claims had been filed. These claims were then verified in open assemblies consisting of other migrants from the same village. As each claim was read out by a government official, the assembly approved, amended, or rejected it.

Expectedly, many refugees were at first prone to exaggeration. However, every false claim was punished, sometimes by a reduction in the land allotted, in extreme cases by a brief spell of imprisonment. This acted as a deterrent; still, an officer closely associated with the process estimated that there was an overall inflation of about 25 per cent. To collect, collate, verify and act upon the claims a Rehabilitation Secretariat was set up in Jullundur. At its peak there were about 7,000 officials working here; they came to constitute a kind of refugee city of their own. The bulk of these officials were accommodated in tents, the camp serviced by makeshift lights and latrines and with temporary shrines, temples for Hindus and
gurdwaras
for Sikhs.