Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  It was perhaps easy for Cunningham to be wise after the event. He had enjoyed a distinguished career in British India. Now nearly sixty, he was a typical member of the public school and Oxbridge elite, upon whom the government of the vast empire largely depended. He had been educated at Fettes College, the so-called Eton of Scotland, which educated a later prime minister, Tony Blair. He had followed this by getting a third-class degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he had distinguished himself, not in the stately examination halls, but on the rugby field. He captained the university rugby team in its annual match against Cambridge, and also captained Scotland at rugby before joining the Indian Civil Service in 1911. He retired from the ICS in 1948, only a year after the Raj, to which he had given his working life, had ended. Fittingly, he died on 8 December 1963, on his annual pilgrimage to the Oxford–Cambridge rugby match at Twickenham.15 He did not manage to get to the game, which Cambridge won.

  Now, at the end of 1947, Cunningham, as the governor of the North Western Frontier Province, was in the midst of great events. He had daily contact with all the leading Pakistani politicians as they formulated their response to the Kashmir crisis. His open partisanship of Pakistan is striking, and it is strange that some historians have cited him as proof of Lord Mountbatten’s Indian bias, when Cunningham himself was so clearly on the side of Pakistan and ‘our tribesmen’, as he had called the tribal invaders. At noon on 28 October, only a few days after the invasion, Cunningham went to the house of the Pakistani Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali, where the Pakistani politician was still in bed. Along with Jinnah, he and Francis Mudie, Governor of West Punjab, discussed the Kashmir situation for two and a half hours in Ali’s bedroom.16 The position of British officials in this dispute was unusual; as war loomed between Pakistan and India, a unique situation had arisen ‘in which both the opposing armies were led by nationals of a third country’–that is to say, by British generals.17

  Even in London, there was no clear line or direction on the dispute. The Labour government of Clement Attlee was itself divided into pro-Pakistani and pro-Indian factions. Cunningham himself had been told that the ‘Government at Home seemed to be divided’, with ‘Attlee etc.’ favouring Pakistan and a group, led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, supporting India. Cunningham, in his pro-Pakistan bias, cited his friend General Sir Frank Messervy, a British officer now the commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s army, who had visited Delhi at the beginning of November and had been ‘surprised to find Mountbatten directing the military operations in Kashmir’.18 But this evidence must be set against other sources which show how keen Mountbatten was to get the Maharaja to accede to Pakistan. It was only after the Pakistanis had invaded Kashmir that Mountbatten seems to have been more inclined to take the Indian side. In fact, official papers on the Kashmir conflict, dating from 1948, suggested, as has been confirmed elsewhere, that ‘Lord Mountbatten as the Crown Representative pressed the Maharaja very hard to consult the will of his people long ago, in the practically certain knowledge that this would result in a vote for accession to Pakistan [italics added].’19 This official paper, dated 4 November 1947, acknowledged that the Pakistan government had made serious mistakes in its handling of the issue, as it would have been better for it ‘to warn the Government of India of the impending invasion’. Mountbatten and the British were powerless, but on the whole, despite internal division, many tended to feel that Kashmir was obviously a state which should have acceded to Pakistan. A note, headed ‘Top Secret’ and dated 1 December, described the Kashmir situation as ‘most dangerous at the moment’. Yet its root cause, according to the memorandum, was simple: ‘Whatever errors may have been committed by both sides since trouble started, the basic cause was the action of the Hindu ruler in suppressing popular agitation in favour of Pakistan.’20

  To other officials, including Lord Mountbatten himself, the logic of the situation was equally straightforward. It was simply ‘disingenuous to say, as was said subsequently, that Kashmir had the option to accede to either Dominion. It had that option legally,’ but the plain fact was that ‘India was divided on communal grounds and the only rational course was for a state if it decided to accede, to assure itself first whether its population would support the accession.’ The British police commissioner who wrote these words later observed, in 1955, that ‘it need hardly be mentioned that were a plebiscite to be held, it would be nothing short of a miracle, if results went in favour of India’; Hindus would vote for India and Muslims for Pakistan.21

  Religious enthusiasm, and the strong identification people have with their religion, was a phenomenon which the Congress Party, in its secular liberal way, had never really confronted. As so often, religious feeling had been used as a pretext, an excuse for rape and pillage, but it was still an effective rallying cry. Throughout November, minor Pakistani feudal lords were preaching jihad. The Nawab of Dir, one such petty prince, had persuaded a number of mullahs to issue a fatwa commanding their followers to wage jihad against the Maharaja of Kashmir. A couple of weeks later, the official report referred to the ‘mullah element’ of a province in Pakistan ‘exhorting the general public’ to invade Kashmir.22

  The situation over Kashmir had by the end of 1947 reached deadlock, a position under which it has laboured ever since. It was Lord Mountbatten’s idea to refer the dispute to the United Nations, and he urged Nehru to take this step. On 20 December 1947 Nehru succumbed. Given what we know about Mountbatten’s views earlier in the year, it seems quite likely that he knew the United Nations would incline towards the Pakistan point of view. He himself had been convinced by the argument that, because the overwhelming majority of the population was Muslim, the people of Kashmir wanted their land to accede to Pakistan. The United Nations, at the beginning of 1948, seem to have taken the same view. On 1 January 1948, India took the issue to the UN Security Council. The received wisdom among Indians is that this was a mistake. They have always felt that they failed to get a fair hearing at the United Nations. It has become part of the Indian mythology that Pakistan, in Sir Zafarullah Khan, had ‘a superbly gifted orator’, and that Philip Noel-Baker, a member of the British delegation at the United Nations, was a ‘vigorous’ supporter of Pakistan. One enterprising Indian historian has even stated that British support for Pakistan’s position was somehow ‘compensation’ for the recent creation of the state of Israel, ‘after which there was a need to placate Muslims world wide’.23 The simpler explanation was that, on the face of things, the Pakistanis had a powerful case. As early as the beginning of February 1948, Nehru was complaining that the United Nations was totally dominated by the Americans, whose representative, Senator Warren Austin, in Nehru’s opinion had made ‘no bones about his sympathy for the Pakistan cause’. For Nehru, Noel-Baker, an athlete who had represented Britain at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, wasn’t that much better, just ‘more polite’.24

  In 1948, Noel-Baker, a Labour MP who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959, was firmly placed in the demonology of India. The Indians felt isolated and unloved by the international community. Sardar Patel in a letter of 3 July 1948 to Arthur Henderson, the son of a former Labour Party leader who was now a Foreign Office minister in Attlee’s government, complained of British bias against India. Patel was wary of the British, as he believed that ‘prejudicial correspondents’ from Britain continued ‘deliberately [to] misrepresent our attitude and make it out as if we are indulging in coercive tactics’. It was his experience ‘that the attitude of an average Englishman in India is instinctively against us’. He believed that going to the United Nations, where the dispute had been merely prolonged, had been a mistake. The ‘merits’ of the Indian case had been ‘completely lost in the interaction of power politics’. Mountbatten had ‘helped us to his best capacity’. The villain of the piece had been Noel-Baker, whose ‘attitude’ had ‘tilted the balance against us’. ‘But for his lead,’ Patel concluded, ‘I doubt if the USA and some other powers would have gone against us.�
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  In addition to the argument that the majority of the population of Kashmir was Muslim, there was the issue of the Maharaja himself. He was an embarrassment to the Indian case. The Security Council of the United Nations thought it odd that this one feudal dignitary should have decided the fate of millions of Kashmiris. Nehru, in his astute way, saw the problem very clearly. At the beginning of February 1948 he was writing to Sardar Patel on the subject of Hari Singh. The Maharaja’s ‘wisest’ policy, Nehru felt, was to ‘do nothing at all’. He added that Sardar would surely have ‘noticed the repeated references made in the Security Council about the so-called autocratic rule of the Maharaja’ which meant that ‘the system of Indian States finds little favour in foreign countries’. The important role played by feudal dignitaries like the Maharaja of Kashmir in the period before independence was exposed and ridiculed by the Pakistani delegation. 26 At the end of January, within a month of the referral to the United Nations, the Maharaja indulged in feelings of self-doubt and self-pity. In a long, doleful letter he blamed everyone and everything for the plight in which he now found himself. He complained that a strong feeling had grown that ‘the UN Security Council will take an adverse decision and that the state will eventually have to accede to Pakistan’. He threatened to withdraw the accession that he had made, suggesting darkly that he might have had ‘better terms from Pakistan’. He recognized, of course, that in the long run accession to Pakistan would ‘mean an end of the dynasty and an end of the Hindus and Sikhs in the State’. The Maharaja even complained to Sardar Patel, a hero of the Indian Congress Party and an ardent follower of Gandhi’s philosophy, that the Indian army had been hopeless in its military engagements in the Kashmir dispute. The Indian army, so he claimed, had done nothing in the three months it had been in Kashmir. He said that the ‘name of the Indian Army is getting into the mud’ and referred to the Great War when, he argued, the ‘name of the Indian Army was at its highest pitch’. It now pained His Highness that the ‘name of that Army has become a topic of every tongue during these days and it is daily losing prestige’.

  For a man who hoped that India would preserve his authority and the power of his family, the Maharaja was now behaving with a staggering arrogance towards the Indians. His conduct throughout 1948 became increasingly eccentric as he harassed and embarrassed his Indian friends. In the letter he wrote to Patel at the end of January, he candidly said that he had acceded to the ‘Indian Union with the idea that the Union’ would not ‘let us down’, in the belief that his ‘position and that of [the] dynasty would remain secure’.27 Years of command and authority had blinded him to where, in post-independence India, real power lay. In April he was ordering Patel, a seventy-three-year-old former president of the Indian National Congress, to charter a ‘special plane’ to take him from Jammu to Delhi. Urgent decisions needed to be taken, but these had to be delayed, because the Maharaja could not be reached; it appeared that he did not know how to use a telephone ‘properly’.28 Later in the year, in September, the Maharaja was lecturing Sardar on the correct protocol to be observed in celebration of His Highness’s birthday. He pointed to the occasions when it was ‘usual in the state [of Kashmir] to fire gun salutes’, one of which, of course, occurred on the Maharaja’s birthday. Naturally, there was ‘no difficulty about this when the control of the Army’ had been with him, but now the Indian army was in charge. ‘My birthday is on the 27th September. Therefore very early instructions may very kindly be issued,’ he graciously warned Patel on the 9th of that month.29

  The sadness was that the Maharaja still believed that his rank and family were important considerations in the political affairs of the new county, even though, as everyone knew, the Raj had ended. He found it difficult to adapt to the new situation, while the United Nations, as would become customary, merely fudged the issue, simply endorsing the current position, which had been achieved initially by military stalemate, without any adjudication of right or wrong. A ceasefire was imposed on 1 January 1949, signed by Messervy’s successor General Sir Douglas Gracey on behalf of Pakistan and by General Sir Roy Bucher on behalf of India. The United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan did, however, state that the question whether the State of Jammu and Kashmir would accede to India or Pakistan would be decided through the ‘democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite’.30

  The position of the Maharaja, at the beginning of 1949, was still not clear. Thanks to his pomposity and tactlessness, he was antagonizing the Indians who were, after all, supporting his throne with their army. By the middle of 1948, Nehru could see that Hari Singh was hopelessly incompetent. ‘My study of the Kashmir situation has led me to believe that the Maharaja cannot play,’ he wrote to Sardar Patel. The Maharaja was fixated on small things; he didn’t get the big picture: ‘when there is an obvious possibility of his losing everything he still wants to hold on to relatively simple things’.31 To secular-minded modern Indian nationalists, the Maharaja had shown absolutely no leadership. He had not led ‘his people in the hour of crisis’, but had ‘left in the night for Jammu’, where his winter palace was situated. (His summer palace was in Srinagar.) He had left, moreover, ‘in a caravan of cars and trunks carrying his family, his jewels’, as well as ‘costly furniture and carpets from his palaces’. This had been an ‘ignominious betrayal’.32 The Pakistanis were implacably hostile to the Maharaja, because he had signed his state over to India. The Indians had grown weary of his vanity, his grand airs and his greed, as he kept complaining and asking for money.

  In May 1949, Patel proposed to the Maharaja that he should leave the state and appoint his son, the Yuvraj Karan, regent. This suggestion alarmed the Maharaja, who left the audience with Patel in a state of ‘shock and bewilderment’. He was, in his own words, ‘completely taken aback by this proposal’ which he hoped would ‘not be a prelude to any idea of abdication’, though that is exactly what it turned out to be. In May 1949, Nehru was finalizing the details of a house in Bombay which would be put at the Maharaja’s disposal. Throughout the rest of 1949, Hari Singh, Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, quibbled about which bits of which properties belonged to him and not to the state of Kashmir. As an Indian politician acidly remarked, ‘it would be difficult to find any sane person in India who would agree that fishing rights or fishing lodges . . . were essential to the dignity of a ruler’.33 Meanwhile, the Maharaja had planned the wedding of his eighteen-year-old son Karan to a Nepalese princess. Tara Devi begged for the Indian state to settle an allowance on the young couple, and to pay for her son’s wedding. The letter may have been written by the Maharani, but no one doubted who had inspired the initiative.34

  The Maharaja stopped being a factor in Kashmir’s affairs at the end of 1949, when he departed to live in exile in Bombay. There he sank back into indolent irrelevance, as new political forces emerged to shape the destiny of the land he had once ruled. The Maharaja of Kashmir became a recluse and, in the long days of his exile, loved nothing better than to read ‘illustrated books on castles and mansions of England, Europe and America’. He also devoured books on architecture and engineering, on racing and polo. With this sedentary lifestyle, Hari Singh became even more obese, eventually developing diabetes. He died in Bombay on 26 April 1961, aged sixty-five. He had refused to take the insulin injections prescribed for him. A long bout of coughing brought on a heart attack and, when the doctor had arrived, his last words were simply ‘Doctor, I am going.’35

  The death of the former Maharaja moved Kashmir no closer to a solution to its problems. Certainly, as already noted, no popular vote has ever ratified the accession to India, the most important decision the Maharaja ever made. By 1956, Kashmir had been integrated into India, and Nehru had abandoned his earlier commitment to a plebiscite.36 In addition to the war fought between India and Pakistan in 1948, two further wars, in 1965 and 1971, have been waged between the two countries, in both of which Kashmir was a crucial issue in dispute. Relatively minor incidents have had the potential to agg
ravate an already volatile situation. In December 1963, the most sacred Muslim relic in Kashmir, a strand of hair from the beard of the Prophet, was stolen from the mosque at Hazratbal. Soon thousands were marching through the streets of Srinagar, demanding that the thieves be caught and punished. Outraged Kashmiris even set up a Sacred Hair Action Committee. Nehru sent the Chief of the Intelligence Bureau to help recover the relic.

  The Indian attitude to Kashmir has accorded with the comment of the civil servant V. P. Menon, an ally of Sardar Patel, ‘now that we’ve got it, we’ll never let it go’.37 Pakistani governments have adopted increasingly warlike measures in trying to get back what they feel is rightfully theirs. The current situation has barely changed in more than sixty years. Indian-controlled Kashmir, which includes the stunning Valley of Kashmir itself, has a population of 7.7 million, while Azad Kashmir, the Pakistani-controlled region, has a population of 2.8 million.38 The boundary between these two regions is a ceasefire line that was determined by the United Nations in 1949.

  Today the situation in Kashmir is still tense. In 1989 an insurgency began in Kashmir. On 13 February that year there was a large anti-Indian demonstration, in which the Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was denounced for his book The Satanic Verses. Even though the government had banned the book, the whole of Srinagar went on strike.39 By the following January, the rebellion had grown into a mass resistance to Indian rule. There followed an exodus from the Valley of the Kashmiri Pandits, the people who, under the maharajas, had largely governed the state. According to the 1981 Indian government census, there were only 124,000 Pandits at that time. This represented just 4 per cent of the Valley’s population of a little more than 3 million people. As the uprising broke out in February and March 1990, approximately 100,000 Pandits left the Valley for Jammu and Delhi. Since 1991 bands of Islamic guerrillas, partly funded and encouraged by Pakistan, have fought Indian troops. By the end of 2010, Kashmir was one of the most militarized regions in the world, although Kashmiri aspirations for greater independence remain largely unrealized. The frustration felt by Kashmiris has found expression in violence and in the popularity of the independence movement. The years 1992 and 1993 saw the rise of the pro-Pakistan Islamist guerrilla group Hizb-ul Mujahideen, which means ‘party of the warriors’, or ‘party of the jihadists’ in Arabic. (The words ‘jihad’ and ‘mujahideen’ have the same roots.) The continuing war in Kashmir has cost tens of thousands of lives, though Indian and Pakistani figures differ. The circumstances today are very different from those of 1947. The conflict in many ways has, in the words of one commentator, ‘taken on a life of its own’.40 A rampant gun culture pervades what was once a favourite tourist destination, described as a ‘heaven on earth’, with its ‘clear streams, snow-clad mountains and green valleys’.41