India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  This was an airmail letter, but one does not know whether it reached Madras before the 5th, on which day Abdullah finally met Rajaji. They spoke for a full three and a half hours, provoking this front page headline in the Hindustan Times: ‘Abdullah, CR, Evolve Kashmir Formula: Proposal to Be Discussed with Prime Minister’. Rajaji did not say a word to the press, but Abdullah was slightly more forthcoming. Speaking to the wise old man, he said, ‘had helped clear his mind about what would be the best solution which would remove this cancer from the body politic of India and Pakistan’. Pressed for details, the Sheikh said these would have to await further talks with the prime minister. He did let on, however, that Rajaji and he had worked out ‘an honourable solution which would not give a sense of victory either to India or Pakistan and at the same time would ensure a place of honour to the people of Kashmir’.

  While Abdullah was in Madras, word reached him that President Ayub Khan had invited him to visit Pakistan. On returning to Delhi on 6 May he went straight to Teen Murti House. He spent ninety minutes with Nehru, apprising him of what was being referred to, somewhat mysteriously, as ‘the Rajaji formula’. The prime minister next directed Abdullah to an informal committee of advisers. This consisted of the foreign secretary, Y. D. Gundevia, the high commissioner to Pakistan, G. Parthasarathi, and the vice-chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University, Badruddin Tyabji.

  Over two long days, Abdullah and the prime minister’s men discussed the Kashmir issue threadbare. All kinds of alternatives were mooted. These included a plebiscite for the entire, undivided state of Jammu and Kashmir as it existed before 1947; the maintenance of the status quo; and afresh division of the state, such that the Jammu and Ladakh regions went to India, Azad or northern Kashmir went to Pakistan, with a plebiscite being held in the Valley alone to decide its future. Abdullah told the officials that while they could work out the specifics of the solution, it must (1) promote Indo-Pakistani friendship; (2) not weaken the secular ideal of the Indian Constitution; (3) not weaken the position of the minorities in either country. He asked them to give him more than one alternative, which he could take with him to Pakistan.

  The Sheikh’s conditions more or less ruled out a plebiscite, the result of which, whatever it might be, would leave one country dissatisfied and minorities on both sides more vulnerable. What about the Rajaji formula? This, it appears, was for a condominium over Kashmir between India and Pakistan, with defence and external affairs being the joint responsibility of the two governments. (The model here was Andorra, a tiny but autonomous enclave whose security was guaranteed by its two large neighbours, France and Spain.) Another possibility was of creating a confederation among India, PakistanandKashmir.33

  The trinity advising Nehru were selected for their ability and knowledge; it is noteworthy nonetheless that they came from three different religious traditions. It is noteworthy too that all were officials. Recall that when there was a chance to settle the dispute with China, the jingoism of the politicians compelled Nehru to take positions more hardline than he otherwise might have done. Now, in seeking a settlement with Pakistan, Nehru sought to work with his officials, rather than his ministers. The wisdom of this approach was made clear in a letter written to Rajaji by the writer and parliamentarian B. Shiva Rao. This noted that

  There is a clear attempt both from within the Cabinet and in Parliament to prevent the Prime Minister from coming to terms with Sheikh Abdullah if it should mean the reopening of the issue of accession. Many of these Ministers have made public statements while the discussions between the two are going on. It’s a sign of the diminishing prestige and influence of the PM that they can take such liberties.

  This was interesting, but the reply was more interesting still. This gave more flesh to the ‘Rajaji formula’, while locating Nehru’s predicament in proper perspective. Thus, wrote Rajaji,

  Asking Ayub Khan to give a commitment in advance about Azad Kashmir now will break up the whole scheme. He will and cannot give it. He is in a worse situation than Nehru in regard to public pressures and emotional bondage . . . Any plan should therefore leave the prizes of war untouched . . . Probably the best procedure is for Sheikh to concentrate on the valley leaving Jammu as a counterpoise to Azad Kashmir, to be presumed to be integrated to India without question.

  This reduced shape of the problem is good enough, if solved as we desire, to bring about an improvement in the Indo-Pakistan relationship. And being of reduced size, would be a fitting subject for UN trusteeship partial or complete.34

  On the Indian side, the best hope for peace was Jawaharlal Nehru. Sheikh Abdullah appears to have thought that Nehru was also the last hope. On 11 May the Sheikh told reporters that ‘I do not want to plead for Nehru but he is the symbol of India in spite of his weakness. You cannot find another man like him.’ He added that ‘after Nehru he did not see anyone else tackling [the problems] with the same breadth of vision’.

  For his part, Nehru was also quite prepared to give his old comrade and sometime adversary a sterling certificate of character. Speaking to the All-India Congress Committee in Bombay on the 16th, the prime minister said that the Sheikh was wedded to the principles of secularism. Nor did he believe in the two-nation theory. Both Nehru and he hoped that ‘it would be possible for India, holding on to her principles, to live in peace and friendship with Pakistan and thus incidentally to put an end to the question of Kashmir’. ‘I cannot say if we will succeed in this’, said the prime minister, ‘but it is clear that unless we succeed India will carry the burden of conflict with Pakistan with all that this implies.’

  VII

  On 20 May, Sheikh Abdullah returned to Delhi, to stay at Teen Murti House and have a final round of talks with Nehru before travelling to Pakistan. At a press conference on the 22nd, Nehru declined to disclose the details, saying that he did not want to prejudice the Sheikh’s mission. But he did indicate that his government was ‘prepared to have an agreement with Pakistan on the basis of their holding on to that part of Kashmir occupied by them’.35

  Nehru’s own papers on this subject are closed to scholars, but a letter written by his foreign secretary gives a clue to his thinking at the time. The prime minister had apparently asked legal experts to explore the implications of a confederation between India, Pakistan and Kashmir, ‘as a possible solution to our present troubles’. Such an arrangement would not imply an ‘annulment’ of Partition. India and Pakistan would remain separate, sovereign states. Kashmir would be part of the confederation, with its exact status to be determined by dialogue. There might be a customs union of the three units, some form of financial integration and special provisions for the protection of minorities.36

  To keep the discussion going, India was prepared to concede Pakistan’ s hold over Azad Kashmir and Gilgit, the two parts of the state that it had lost in the war of 1947-8. Would Pakistan concede anything in turn? As Abdullah prepared to depart for Rawalpindi, Minoo Masani wrote to A. K. Brohi, sometime Pakistani high commissioner to India and now a leading Karachi lawyer, a certified member of the Pakistani Establishment who had the ear of President Ayub Khan. ‘The nature of the response which he [the Sheikh] is able to evoke from President Ayub’, said Masani to Brohi, would ‘have a decisive influence in strengthening or weakening the hands of those who stand for Indo-Pakistan amity here’. Nehru’s Pakistan initiative was bitterly opposed from within his party and outside it. For it to make progress, for there to be a summit meeting between the prime minister and President Ayub Khan, it was ‘of the highest moment that Sheikh Abdullah should come back with something on which future talks could be based’. Masani urged Brohi to use his influence with Ayub and other leaders, so that their talks with Abdullah might ‘yield fruitful results in the interests of both countries’.37

  Meanwhile, Abdullah proceeded to Pakistan. He hoped to spend two weeks in that country, beginning with the capital, Rawalpindi, moving on to Azad Kashmir and ending with East Pakistan, where he intended, among other things, to check
on the feelings of the Hindu minority. On 24 May he touched down in Rawalpindi to a tumultuous reception. He drove in an open car from the airport to the town, the route lined by thousands of cheering Pakistanis. The welcome, said one reporter, ‘surpassed in intensity and depth that given to Mr Chou En-lai in February’.38

  Later, talking to newsmen, Abdullah called his visit ‘a peace mission of an exploratory nature’. He appealed to the press to help cultivate friendship between India and Pakistan. ‘He said he had come to the definite conclusion that the armed forces of both the countries facing each other on the ceasefire line must be disengaged and that the edifice of a happy and prosperous Kashmir could be built only on permanent friendship between India and Pakistan’. As in New Delhi, here too he emphasized that any solution to the dispute must not foster a sense of defeat for either India or Pakistan; must not weaken India’s secularism or the future of its 60 million Muslims; and must satisfy the aspirations of the Kashmiris themselves.

  The next day, the 25th, Abdullah and Ayub Khan held a three-hour meeting. The Sheikh would not touch on the details, saying only that he found in Rawalpindi ‘the same encouraging response as in Delhi. There is an equal keenness on both sides to come to a real understanding’.

  Later that day Abdullah addressed a mammoth public meeting in Rawalpindi. He was ‘cheered repeatedly as he spoke for two hours, bluntly warning both Indians and Pakistanis from committing wrongs which would endanger the lives of the minorities in both countries’. The time had come, said Abdullah, for India and Pakistan to bury the hatchet. For if ‘the present phase of tension, distrust and misunderstanding continued, both countries would suffer and their freedom be imperilled’.

  On the 26th Abdullah met Ayub Khan again, for four hours this time, and came out beaming. The Pakistani president, he told a crowded news conference, had agreed to a meeting with Prime Minister Nehru in the middle of June. The meeting would take place in Delhi, and Abdullah would also be in the city, available for consultation. ‘Of all the irritants that cause tension between India and Pakistan’, said the Sheikh, ‘Kashmir is the most important. Once this great irritant is removed, the solution of other problems would not present much difficulty.’

  By this time the enchantment with the Sheikh was wearing thin among the Pakistani elite. Their representative voice, the Dawn newspaper, wrote of how Abdullah’s statements, ‘especially his references to India’s so-called secularism, have caused a certain amount of disappointment among the public in general and the intelligentsia in particular’. Dawn thought that the Sheikh had been ‘lured by the outward show of Indian secularism, obviously forgetting the inhumane treatment meted out to 60 million Muslims in the so-called secular state’. But the newspaper had amore fundamental complaint, that Abdullah had ‘taken up the role of an apostle of peace and friendship between Pakistan and India, rather than that of the leader of Kashmir, whose prime objective should be to seek their freedom from Indian bondage’.39

  On the 27th Abdullah proceeded to Muzaffarabad, a town he had not seen since Kashmir was divided in 1947. He had no idea of how the Kashmiris this side of the ceasefire line would react to his proposals. Before he could find out, news reached him that, back in New Delhi, Nehru had died. Abdullah at once ‘broke into tears and sobbed’. In a muffled voice he told the reporters gathered around him, ‘he is dead, I can t meet him’. When asked for more reactions he retired to a room, to be alone with his grief.

  Abdullah drove down to Rawalpindi and got on the first flight to Delhi. When he reached Teen Murti and saw the body of Nehru, ‘he cried like a child’. It took him some time to ‘compose himself and place the wreath on the body of his old friend and comrade’. To this account of a newsman on the spot we must add the witness of a diplomat who accompanied Nehru’s body to the cremation ground. As the fire was burning the body to ashes, buglers sounded ‘The Last Post’: ‘thus was symbolized the inextricability of India and England in Nehru’s life’. Then, before the fire finally died down, ’Sheikh Abdullah leapt on the platform and, weeping unrestrainedly, threw flowers onto the flames; thus was symbolized the inextricability of the Muslim world in Nehru’s life and the pathos of the Kashmir affair’.40

  VIII

  The events of April—May 1964 have unfortunately been neglected by scholars, whether biographers of Nehru or analysts of the Kashmir dispute.41 If I have rehabilitated them here, it is because they provide fresh light on this most intractable of political problems – this ‘severe headache’ as Vallabhbhai Patel put it, this ‘cancer [in] the body politic of India and Pakistan’ in the words of Sheikh Abdullah – and because they provide a peculiarly poignant coda to the life and work of Jawaharlal Nehru.

  The question remains how serious were the three campaigners for peace in April—May 1964? The one who did not reveal his mind at all, at least not in the public domain, was Field Marshal Ayub Khan. We know nothing about what he really thought at the time, whether he was indeed serious about a negotiated settlement on Kashmir, and whether he could then, so to say, ‘sell’ an agreement with India to his people. Sheikh Abdullah, on the other hand, was forthcoming with his views, expressing them to the press and in countless public meetings and orations. Some thought his words a mere mask for personal ambition. Writing in the Economic Weekly, one commentator claimed that ‘even a superficial study of his political behaviour convinces [one] that he is embarked on a most ramified plan to win an independent State by skilfully exploiting the hates and the prejudices, conscious and unconscious, and the power political tangles which provide the background to Indo-Pakistan relations’.42

  This seems to me to be too cynical by far. For Abdullah’s words, and still more his actions, make manifest his commitment to secularism, his concern for the minorities in both India and Pakistan. He was ambitious, certainly, but while in 1953 he seems to have fancied himself as the uncrowned king of Kashmir, in 1964 he saw himself rather as an exalted peacemaker, the one man who could bring tranquillity and prosperity to a poor and divided subcontinent.

  About Jawaharlal Nehru’s motives there should be no doubt at all. He felt guilty about Abdullah’s long incarceration, worried about the continuing disaffection in Kashmir, sensible of the long-term costs of the dispute to both India and Pakistan. The question was not then of his motives, but of his influence. Would his colleagues listen to him? Had he and Ayub Khan, with a little help from Abdullah, actually worked out a settlement, would it have passed muster with the Congress Party, or the Indian Parliament?

  Possibly not. But even if it did, would it have worked in the long run? The legal expert consulted by Nehru’s office on the idea of a confederation delicately pointed out that ‘historically, confederations have been dominated by one member or united under stress’.43 In sheer size India swamped both Pakistan and Kashmir. Would it then have behaved like Big Brother? Relevant here is a cartoon by Rajinder Puri that appeared in the Hindustan Times the day Abdullah met Ayub Khan. It showed the Field Marshal standing ruminatively, finger on chin, with the Sheikh expansively gesticulating, and saying: ‘You’re afraid Delhi will try to dominate Pindi? My dear chap, when Delhi can t dominate Lucknow or Chandigarh. . .’ .44

  Here then were a host of imponderables – Ayub’s motives, Abdul-lah s beliefs, Nehru s strength, the viability of a condominium or a confederation. In the end it was Nehru’s strength that gave way – literally. And, as a Pakistani newspaper noted, his passing away meant ‘the end of a negotiated settlement of the Kashmir issue’. For whoever succeeded Nehru would not have ’the stature, courage and political support necessary to go against the highly emotional tide of public opinion in India favouring a status quoin Kashmir’.45

  17

  * * *

  MINDING THE MINORITIES

  The first law of decency is to preserve the liberty of others.

  FRIEDRICH SCHILLER

  I

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF 27 May 1964, as the news of Jawaharlal Nehru’s death spread through New Delhi, one of the people
it reached was an American graduate student named Granville Austin. Austin was writing a thesis on the making of the Indian Constitution, and thus had a more than ordinary interest in what Nehru stood for. He made his way to Teen Murti House, there to join an already large crowd of Indian mourners. As Austin wrote in his diary the next day, ‘all wanted to go in, but they were prepared to wait’. The crowd stood, ‘orderly and not noisy’, as diplomats and ministers were ushered in by the prime minister’s staff. Among the VIPs was Dr Syed Mahmud, a veteran freedom fighter who had been with Nehru at Cambridge and in jail. Like the others, he had to disembark from his car and walk up the steeply sloping lawn that fronted the prime minister’s residence. Austin saw a weeping Mahmud given a helping hand by Jagjivan Ram, a senior Congress politician and Cabinet minister of low-caste origin. This was truly ‘a scene symbolic of Nehru’s India: a Muslim aided by an Untouchable coming to the home of a caste Hindu’.1

  Between them, Muslims and Untouchables constituted a quarter of the population in free India. Before 1947, two leaders had most seriously challenged the Congress’s claims to represent all of India. One was a Muslim, M. A. Jinnah, who argued that the party of Gandhi and Nehru represented only the Hindus. The other was a former Untouchable, B. R. Ambedkar, who added the devastating rider that the Congress did not represent all Hindus, but only the upper castes among them.

  These claims were stoutly resisted. Gandhi himself had struggled against untouchability from long before Ambedkar had entered politics. And he had given his life in the cause of Hindu—Muslim harmony. For the Mahatma, swaraj (freedom) would have meaning only if it came to all Indians, regardless of caste or creed (or gender).