India

by John Keay

  A situation like that of Junagadh but of wider import arose in the great state of Hyderabad. With more diamonds than dogs, Hyderabad’s nizam was a devout Muslim, a reclusive patron of Islamic culture and the legatee of the illustrious Deccan sultanates. Yet he held sway over a land-locked chunk of the now otherwise wholly Indian peninsula and over a considerable population that was predominantly Hindu. To Nehru and Patel it was therefore unthinkable that he should do other than join the new India. But the nizam’s advisers prevaricated – not so much in this case between India and Pakistan as between joining either or making a bid for independence. Technically independence was not an option, though Hyderabad had as good a case for it as anywhere having at one time been slated as ‘Usmanistan’, a possible sovereign component along with Pakistan and Hindustan (that is, the new India) in an all-India federation. With international attention focused on the fate of the nizam, Delhi backed down and offered a year’s grace in which Hyderabad was to come to its senses. It proved to be but a stay of execution. No decision being forthcoming, in September 1948 Indian troops unceremoniously rolled across the state’s borders. Naturally Pakistan again protested; but the nizam, confronted by Delhi’s so-called ‘police action’, had little choice other than to spare his people bloodshed and plump for India. He duly signed on the dotted line; and Pakistani maps duly memorialise his plight with a much bigger green blob in the heart of peninsular India.

  By then a precedent for such strong-arm tactics had already been set in the composite state of Jammu and Kashmir. There, however, the situation was reversed: a Hindu maharaja ruled a mainly non-Hindu state. Parts, notably Ladakh on the Tibet border, had a Buddhist majority, while others, like Jammu on the Panjab border, contained a large Hindu component. But the vast mountain territories beyond the Indus that had been awarded to past maharajas for Britain’s strategic convenience were overwhelmingly Muslim, and so was the densely populated ‘vale of Cashmere’. On the principle, adopted in Panjab and Bengal, that contiguous Muslim majority areas automatically pertained to Pakistan, Jinnah had no doubt that the whole state should accede to his new republic. Without the ‘k’ in the acronym that was ‘Pakistan’, the name of that country would be a mockery and the ‘two-nation theory’ on which its existence was based would be discredited. Moreover if the states of Junagadh and Hyderabad were being claimed by Delhi regardless of the wishes of their rulers and purely on the basis of their Hindu majority, then the state of Jammu and Kashmir belonged to Pakistan regardless of its ruler’s wishes and purely on the basis of its Muslim majority.

  There were, though, other considerations. Kashmir had a particular resonance for the Nehru family who, as Kashmiri pandits (Hindu teachers), originally hailed from the valley. A temperate land of lotus lakes, alpine pastures and snow-tipped mountains, it had always appealed to the Indian imagination; it had often been the prize of Delhi’s rulers; and as part of the new India it could expect star billing in every tourist brochure and a locational role in every Bollywood romance. Additionally, the accession to the new India of such a notably Muslim state would be seen as triumphant vindication of the secular (that is, neutral as to religion) stance adopted by Congress in contradiction of Pakistan’s unashamedly confessional appeal. To this end Congress had earlier forged links with a local movement known as the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. A political front under the leadership of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, the National Conference had been demanding from the maharaja, Hari Singh, greater popular representation ever since the 1930s. Moreover Abdullah, an imposing figure otherwise known as ‘Sheikh Sahib’ or the ‘Lion of Kashmir’, was friendly with Nehru, shared his leftist sympathies and deemed the easy-going Islam of most Kashmiri Muslims more compatible with India’s avowed secularism than with Pakistan’s obvious sectarianism. Abdullah, if anyone, could claim to speak for a substantial number of Kashmiris; and popular support (in so far as such a thing could be ascertained) being a desideratum of accession, his role in deciding the state’s future was as crucial as that of Maharaja Hari Singh himself.

  Independence Day found both men in trouble. Sheikh Abdullah was in a Srinagar gaol for advocating that the maharaja ‘Quit Kashmir’, and Maharaja Hari Singh was in a dilemma. The sheikh’s National Conference had fallen foul not just of the maharaja but of a rival party with close links to Jinnah’s Muslim League, while Hari Singh, facing popular opposition as a hereditary autocrat plus mounting Muslim suspicion as a Delhi-inclined Hindu, could neither decide between India and Pakistan nor expect his subjects to respect his decision. The case of Switzerland, another land-locked mountain playground, was sometimes cited, and arguably both Sheikh Sahib and the maharaja would have preferred such a neutral and independent status. But as with Hyderabad this was not an option, especially in the case of somewhere whose frontiers marched not only with both of the successor states but also with China and very nearly with the Soviet Union. Neither Delhi, Karachi nor the British cared to contemplate such a strategically vital region conducting its own affairs. Nor was the idea of an independent Kashmir something around which its communally fractured and faction-ridden peoples could be expected to unite.

  For two months Kashmir’s fate hung in the balance. Delhi and Karachi traded claim and counterclaim; Hari Singh writhed on the horns of his Himalayan dilemma. Then on 22 October 1947 events overtook them. A truck-mounted incursion of Islamic partisans from the Pathan tribal regions of what was now Pakistan rumbled up the only road into the Kashmir valley and so, by claiming to be its liberators, pitched the maharaja into the open arms of his Indian co-religionists. Fearing that his rule was about to be overthrown, he appealed to Delhi for help and agreed that the just-released Sheikh Abdullah should treat with Nehru. Four days later the state’s accession to India as signified by the maharaja’s assent and the sheikh’s involvement brought its due reward. To resist the invaders, Indian Dakotas, twenty-eight a day, began airlifting troops into Srinagar, the state capital. The first Indo-Pak war had begun.

  More Muslim volunteers from northern Pakistan poured into the Kashmir valley, there to be joined by levies from the Indus peoples in the far west of the state. But neither side officially declared war. In Pakistan’s case, although high-level collusion with the invaders undoubtedly existed, no regular military units were deployed; and the Kashmiris themselves proved as indifferent to their Pakistani ‘liberators’ as to their Indian ‘saviours’. Unwelcomed by the natives and unaided by the deployment of Pakistani regulars, the invaders were slowly driven back down the valley. But when in late 1948 the United Nations brokered a ceasefire, an extensive arc of mountainous terrain surrounding the valley remained outside India’s control (it would henceforth be known as Pakistan’s ‘Northern Areas’), as did the western end of the valley itself. Hailed as Azad – ‘Free’ – Kashmir, this last entity was constituted as a self-governing but Pakistan-sponsored ‘state’ pending settlement of the status of the whole state. India held the rest – Jammu, Ladakh and most of the Kashmir Valley – and immediately began building and tunnelling a road link through the mountains (the valley was otherwise accessible only from Pakistan) plus two summer-only roads over the high passes to Ladakh.

  The ceasefire line remained, and though readjusted and reformulated as the ‘Line of Control’ in 1972, still remains just that, the line at which the firing was supposed to have ceased. It obeyed no geographic or strategic logic, let alone economic or social convenience. And though implying a de facto partition, it was not recognised as an international frontier by either India or Pakistan. Nor, therefore, did transgressing it constitute an act of war. The firing would not in fact cease, and the Line itself would continue to be contested. When in 1965 Pakistan provoked a second war with India, it was Kashmir that would provide both pretext and battleground. Then when in 1971 a third Indo-Pak conflict resulted from Indian intervention in East Bengal/Bangladesh, it was along the Kashmir Line that India made its only, albeit modest, gains.

  And so it continues. In 1984 India grabbed a f
rozen wilderness known as the Siachen Glacier that had hitherto been uncontested, then in 1999 Pakistan infiltrated the heights above the strategic Srinagar – Leh road at Kargil. Each incident was deemed a ‘war’ by the aggrieved party, provoking retaliatory counter-strikes and fuelling fears of a wider engagement – fears that assumed horrific dimensions with the testing of nuclear weapons by both countries in 1998 and the radicalisation of the Kashmiris themselves in the jihadist fall-out from the wars in Afghanistan. Meanwhile the UN corps in Kashmir, perhaps the longest-serving on record, has no peacekeeping role; it merely observes and monitors violations. Other contentious issues dividing the successor nations have been laboriously resolved. But Kashmir has not. ‘Peace processes’ are no sooner identified than a new outrage brings their suspension amid recrimination and further troop deployments. The tragic saga of Indo-Pak relations since 1947 still revolves around the issue of Kashmir.

  All along, India has rested its case on the maharaja’s accession, plus the popular support supposedly afforded by Sheikh Abdullah’s endorsement. The first, the maharaja’s decision, might have been conclusive had not India emphatically rejected princely preference in the case of Junagadh (and arguably of Hyderabad). As for the sheikh, somewhat shaky were his credentials as the representative of all shades of Kashmiri opinion and even more shaky was his subsequent attitude towards integration with India. Over the next quarter of a century, more of which he spent in Indian detention as a separatist than in government as an integrationist, these two factors seemed to be related. His support among Kashmiris waxed with his increasingly outspoken criticism of Delhi and waned with his occasional endorsement of the status quo.

  Pakistan’s case rested on the surer, but not decisive, grounds of the state’s undisputed Muslim majority, plus Nehru’s failure to honour a pledge given to the UN as part of the 1948 ceasefire deal that a plebiscite would be held to ascertain the wishes of the people. Delhi countered with the argument that a plebiscite was not possible until Pakistan withdrew all troops from the state (some had been stationed in the Northern Areas), nor was it in fact necessary since the wishes of the people could be inferred from the sheikh’s participation in the act of accession and from later Indian-sponsored elections in the Indian-held part of the state. Certainly a 1948 plebiscite throughout the whole of the erstwhile state would have strained to breaking point the resources of the UN, not to mention the good faith of the interested parties. On the other hand, so insensitive was Delhi’s treatment of the sheikh – and of the state – that a plebiscite which in 1948 might conceivably have gone in its favour would subsequently almost certainly have gone against it. Delhi dismissed such thoughts. The matter was now closed; there was no ‘Kashmir problem’; India’s claim to those parts of the state outwith its control was not pressed, and the existing Ceasefire Line/Line of Control was touted as semi-permanent. But in assuming closure on terms that took no account of popular sentiment in Pakistan, nor of the existential threat that an alienated Kashmir posed to that state, Delhi was being hopelessly unrealistic. The Kashmir problem was not about to go away.

  DIVIDING AND SPOILING

  Partition meant a division of British India’s institutions, assets and responsibilities as well as of its people and territory. Everything from the air force to the exchequer and from the stationery stores to the national debt had to be meticulously apportioned between the successor states. Overall the new India, by virtue of a population more than five times that of Pakistan and a landmass more than four times, did well out of this division of the spoils. It inherited most of the country’s infrastructure, nearly all its industrial, mineral, commercial and agricultural enterprises and a disproportionate share of its private capital. Because Hindus and other non-Muslims were especially well represented in education, the law and the administration, it also inherited the staff for an effective government, including the vast majority of those non-Britons who had gained entry to the elite Indian Civil and Political Services.

  The new India had much else in its favour. At the provincial level the long-established governments of the Madras, Bombay, Central and United provinces remained fully operational, largely unaffected by Partition and little depleted by emigration. In addition, India’s portion of partitioned Bengal brought with it Calcutta, still the country’s greatest metropolis; its portion of partitioned Panjab brought Simla, the summer retreat of the raj; and in New Delhi its incoming government succeeded to a custom-built capital of majestic dimensions complete with parliament building, secretariat, head of state’s residence, embassies, archives, monuments and all the other emblematic structures of statehood. The Union, and soon to be Republic, of India (after the 1950 adoption of a new constitution) was thus a going concern from day one. The reins of power had but to be gathered up. Constitutional experts, social scientists and economic planners could begin work immediately recasting the state as the strong, socialist, secular and non-aligned democracy of Nehru’s dreams. As the Congress-wallahs in their Gandhi caps and Nehru jackets streamed through the secretariat’s colonnades on Delhi’s Raisina Hill, few of them doubted that their new India was the direct and undisputed successor of the mighty raj.

  It was very different in the two extremities of the ex-raj that constituted Pakistan. Separated by 1500 kilometres of an already hostile India, bipolar Pakistan lacked not just physical integrity but almost every other requisite of statehood. Here the power being transferred by the British was more potential than actual. The organs of government had to be created from scratch, staffed from a mere handful of senior administrators with the necessary qualifications and experience, and funded from a pitiful share of undivided India’s cash balances. Of the five provinces and part-provinces that composed the new country, none furnished a reassuring example of stability; nor did any of them have much in common with the others save, of course, religion. The two most populous were maimed products of partition: East Bengal with an economy heavily dependent on jute came minus Calcutta, the processing centre and port for all jute exports, while west Panjab with its prosperous canal colonies came minus a guarantee of adequate water from what were now the Indian-held rivers on which its irrigation depended. As for the other provinces, Sind was a recent creation still economically dependent on the Bombay province from which it had been carved twelve years earlier, and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) boasted a record of such hostility to the Muslim League that at the time of Partition it still had a Congress ministry. Finally Baluchistan, most of it either a tribal region or under princely jurisdiction, was openly defiant. In 1948 a deal was struck between its principal ruler and Jinnah but large parts remained semi-autonomous for the next thirty years.

  Formulated with more enthusiasm than precision, and then realised far sooner than expected, Pakistan was further hobbled by a set of fundamental contradictions. The nation’s premise was its shared faith, yet the role that Islam was to play remained undefined, as did the preferred form of that faith. Addressing Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly just before Independence Jinnah had sounded much like Nehru:

  You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan … You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.2

  If this was meant to reassure the commercially influential non-Muslim community in Sind (Panjab and the NWFP were already being confessionally cleansed), it failed; most of Karachi’s Hindus migrated to Bombay or Gujarat. Secular sentiments – like ‘religion having nothing to do with the business of the state’ – though congenial to many and much quoted by opponents of Islamicisation, barely survived Partition in public utterances. Within six months they were being contradicted by Quaid-i-Azam (‘Supreme Leader’) Jinnah himself when he casually invoked the goal of an Islamic state, in fact ‘a truly great Islamic state’. The rationale was simple: any nati
on defined by its faith must, if it was to realise its full potential, adopt principles and policies in conformity with that faith.

  Yet the prospect of a doctrinal state was widely contested and was problematic in itself. For while protestations of Islamic intent were always useful in papering over the divisions and insecurities that beset the new state, they also exposed the credentials of any government that dabbled in them. In the ideal Islamic state sovereignty lies with Allah, laws are preordained by the sharia and their interpretation rests with the scholarly ulema. A role for the masses and their legislating representatives depends on the questionable assumption that this sovereignty has been devolved to the people by some divine dispensation. Even then the recipients of such delegated authority are generally taken to be the worldwide Muslim community, the dar-ul-Islam, an entity that transcends all lesser loyalties, political, ethnic or territorial. Quranic sanction for the competitive instincts of a localised ‘nation’-state, albeit one based on the Muslim component of a subcontinent, would be hard to discern. Thus in the run-up to Partition most of the doctrinal parties (or Jamaat), far from supporting the call for Pakistan, had in fact opposed it.