Freedom at Midnight (66 page)

The gathering closed with a stern warning from the prime minister. The operation must be a complete secret. Finances would be provided by secret funds from his office. Neither the officers of Pakistan's army nor her civil service nor, above all, the British officers and administrators in the service of the new state were to know.

Three days later, in the cellar of a ramshackle building in Peshawar's old walled city, a group of tribal leaders met the man chosen to arouse their emotions and lead them on

the march to Srinagar, Major Kurshid Anwar. Anwar, a volatile character with a taste for weird disguises, seemed an unlikely choice. His conventional military career had ended when he had been cashiered from the Indian Army for appropriating mess funds to his own use. The tribal leaders around him, with their loose robes and untrimmed beards, looked like the warriors of Saul and David. Sipping their scented tea, drawing on their hookahs, they listened to Anwar's somber assessment of the situation in Kashmir. The infidel Hindu maharaja was about to join his state to India. If something was not done quickly, India, he warned, would soon occupy Kashmir, and millions of their Moslem brothers would fall under Hindu rule. They must, he said, assemble their tribal laskars, or levies, to begin a holy war for their brothers in Kashmir. Implicit in his invitation to join that patriotic crusade was another equally ancient but less heroic lure, more likely to galvanize the ardor of the Pathans than any spiritual appeal— the promise of loot.

Within hours, in the mud-walled morkhas, or compounds, their villages, in encampments, in Landi Kotal, along the Khyber, in the hidden grottos where for decades they had manufactured their rifles, in the secret depots of their smugglers' caravans, the Pathans passed the ancient call of Islam for holy war, jihad. From bazaar to bazaar, secret emissaries began to buy up stocks of hard tack and gur, a mixture of corn meal, ground chickpeas and sugar. A few mouthfuls of that mixture taken two or three times a day with water or tea could sustain a Pathan for days. Gradually, the men, the weapons and the supplies began to flow to the secret assembly points from which they would launch their crusade to save their Kashmiri brothers from the inequities of Hindu rule, and slake their ancestral thirst for pillage.

Not only were the voices at both ends of the telephone line English, but they belonged to two of the most important men in Pakistan. Sir George Cunningham was the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, and the man to whom he was telephoning from his office in Peshawar was Lieutenant General Sir Frank Messervy, the commander in chief of the Pakistani Army.

"I say, old boy, I have the impression," Cunningham

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told Messervy, "that something strange is going on here." For days, he said, trucks crowded with tribesmen chanting "Allah Akhbaf 9 had been pouring through Peshawar. His own chief minister seemed to be the man stirring up the Pathans. Everyone in the city except him seemed to be aware of the destination of that enthusiastic armada.

"Are you absolutely certain," he asked Messervy, "that the government is still opposed to a tribal invasion of Kashmir?"

Cunningham's telephone call had caught the general in the middle of his preparations for a trip. The government of Pakistan had made certain that when the tribal invasion began the British commander in chief of the nation's army would be six thousand miles away in London trying to purchase arms to replace those that India had failed to deliver.

"I can assure you I'm opposed to any such idea," Messervy told his colleague, "and the Prime Minister has personally given me his assurance he is, too."

"Well," Cunningham said, "you'd better inform him of what's going on up here."

A few hours later, on his way to London, Messervy called on Liaquat Ali Khan, who reassured the commander of his army. His fears were groundless, he said. Pakistan would never tolerate such an action. He would immediately contact the chief minister of the Province and order him to stop his outrageous actions. Thus reassured, Messervy flew off to London to purchase the shells and cannon to sustain the conflict that had been so carefully designed to erupt during his absence.

The Pakistanir-Kashmir Frontier, October 22-24,1947

Its lights out, its motor cut, the prewar Ford station wagon slid through the glacial night to draw to a stop a hundred yards from the bridge. Behind it stretched a chain of dark shadows, a column of trucks each filled with silent men. The noise of the torrents of the Jhelum river rushing through its rocky bed below them filled the night. In the station wagon, Sairab Khayat Kahn, a twenty-three-year-old leader of the Moslem League's Green Shirts, nervously picked at the tip of his

flaring mustache. The territory of the state of Kashmir lay at the other end of the bridge before him.

Eyes fixed to that bridge, he watched for the flare that would tell him the Moslem troops of Hari Singh's army on the other side had mutinied, killed their Hindu officers, cut the telephone line to Srinagar and seized the guard at their end of the bridge. Suddenly he saw it cut an arc against the black sky. Sairab Khan started his station wagon and lurched across the bridge. The war for Kashmir had begun.

A few minutes later, his column rolled unopposed into the customs shed of the little city of Muzaffarabad. A pair of sleeping customs agents stumbled out to wave it to a halt for their inspection. Shrieking their war cries the Pa-thans leaped on them. They pursued one of them back to his shed, where he desperately tried to use his dead phone. There the angry Pathans tied him up with the cord of the useless instrument.

The young leader of the invasion's advance guard was jubilant. The route to Srinagar lay open before the Pathans, 135 miles of paved, undefended road. With the first light of dawn, thousands of Pathan tribesmen would sweep into the sleeping capital of Hari Singh. Sairab Khayat Khan and his advance guard would overwhelm the palace. He would, he thought, bring the Maharaja his breakfast tray, and with it the news that was going to fly around the world on this twenty-second of October, 1947. Kashmir belonged to Pakistan.

The young man was quickly disabused of his dream. The strategists who had conceived the invasion in Lahore had made one fatal miscalculation. When Sairab Khayat Khan wanted to set his force on the road to Srinagar, he discovered it had disappeared. There was not a single Pathan around his vehicles. They had faded into the night The crusade to deliver their Moslem brothers of Kashmir had begun with a nocturnal excursion to the Hindu bazaar of Muzaffarabad.

Because of the loot in its scores of shops, Mohammed Ali Jinnah would never again visit the Vale of Kashmir. "It was every man for himself," Sairab Khan recalled. "The tribesmen shot off locks, smashed in doors and ripped out anything of value."

Despairing, Sairab Khan and his officers tried to stop

them, literally tugging at their robes in an effort to pull them away from their loot. "What are you doing?" he kept pleading. "We have to go to Srinagar."

It was a concert for the deaf. Nothing could check that instinctive frenzy for loot. Srinagar was not going to belong to those Pathan tribesmen that October night. Ordering their advance to the rhythm of their pillage, they would require forty-eight hours to cover the next seventy-five miles to the power station, whose destruction had plunged the palace of Hari Singh into darkness.

New Delhi, October 24,1947

The first news of the tribal invasion of Kashmir reached New Delhi via a most unorthodox channel more than forty-eight hours after Sairab Khayat Khan's advance guard had seized the key bridge over the Jhelum river. Along the principal highway of the Punjab's exodus, above the road where for eight weeks the wretched millions had fled, suspended from the poles on which the bloated vultures still perched, was a telephone line linking India and Pakistan. Thanks to that line, it was still possible for number 1704 in Rawalpindi to call number 3017 in New Delhi. Those numbers were assigned to the private phones of the commanders in chief of the Pakistani and Indian armies. They were British. They were close friends. They were former comrades in the old Indian Army.

Just before five o'clock on the afternoon of Friday, October 24, Major General Douglas Gracey, replacing General Messervy, who had been sent to London, got his first intimation of what had happened in Kashmir, through a secret intelligence report. It gave the raiders' strength, armament and location. Gracey did not hesitate. He immediately went to the private phone in Messervy's quarters and communicated that precious information to the last man Jinnah would have wanted to get it, the man who commanded the only force that could deny Kashmir to the raiders, the commander in chief of the Indian Army.

Lieutenant General Sir Rob Lockhart, a Scot and a Sandhurst classmate of Gracey's, was stunned by his old friend's report He, in turn, communicated it to two more

people, both of them English, the Governor General, Lord Mountbatten and Field Marshal Auchinleck.

The dialogue initiated by Gracey's telephone call that afternoon was the first in an extraordinary series of conversations. The conflict just erupting would pose for the English officers involved in it an appalling moral dilemma. As men, they were concerned with stopping the Indians and Pakistanis who had been their comrades in arms in the old Indian Army from killing each other. As officers, the orders they would receive would frequently run directly counter to those desires.

The colloquy that was opened through Gracey and Lockhart's direct phone link would continue, even when the armies they commanded were facing each other in the snows of Kashmir. Their attitude would earn for those unhappy Englishmen the severe disapproval of the governments they served and hasten their departure from the subcontinent. Yet, the fact that a full-scale war, with all the senseless killing it would have involved, did not break out between India and Pakistan that autumn was due in no small part to the secret exchanges carried by that telephone wire linking Rawalpindi to Delhi.

Mountbatten received the news as he was dressing for a banquet in honor of Thailand's foreign minister. When the last guest had left, he asked Nehru to stay behind. The Prime Minister was stunned by the news. There was scarcely a piece of information that could have upset him more. He loved his ancestral home like "a supremely beautiful woman whose beauty is almost impersonal and above desire." He loved "its feminine beauty of river and valley and lake and graceful trees." Time and again during the struggle for freedom he had gone home to contemplate the "hard mountains and precipices and snow-capped peaks and glaciers, and the cruel, fierce torrents rushing down to the valleys below."

The Governor General was to discover another Nehru on the Kashmir issue. The cool, detached intellect that Mountbatten so admired disappeared; it was replaced by an instinctive, emotional response fueled by passions even the Kashmiri Brahman could not control. "As Calais was written upon the heart of jpur Queen Mary," Nehru would cry out to him one day to explain his attitude, "so Kashmir is written upon mine."

Still another stormy interview, this one with Field Marshal Auchinleck, remained for Mountbatten. The Supreme Commander told the Governor General that he wanted to airlift immediately a brigade of British troops to Srinagar to protect and evacuate its hundreds of retired Britishers. If they weren't gotten out, he warned, they would be the victims of a frightful massacre.

"I am sorry," Mountbatten said, "I cannot agree," However ghastly that prospect was, he could not endorse the use of British soldiers on the soil of a subcontinent become independent. If there was going to be a military intervention in Kashmir, he declared, it would have to be by Indian, not British troops.

"Those people up there will all be murdered, and their blood will be on your hands," an angry Auchinleck protested.

"Well," the unhappy Mountbatten replied, "I shall just have to take that responsibility. It's the penalty of having the job. But I'm not going to answer for what will happen if British troops get involved."

The following afternoon, October 25, a Royal Indian Air Force DC-3 put down on the abandoned dirt strip of Srinagar airport. It carried V. P. Menon, the civil servant who had presided over so many princely accessions to India, Colonel Sam Manekshaw of the Indian Army, and an air force officer.

The decision to send the three men to Srinagar had been taken by an extraordinary meeting of the cabinet's defense committee that morning. The committee had been confronted with a plea for help from the beleaguered Maharaja. Worried by his conversation with Auchinleck, aware of how intense Nehru's feelings were, Mountbatten had realized that military intervention was likely. Determined that it should have a legal framework, he had convinced his government that India should not send her troops into Kashmir until the Maharaja had officially acceded, thus making his state legally a part of India.

He went even further. Just as he had always believed it would be impossible for Britain to remain in India against India's will, so he believed tjiat there could be no solution in Kashmir that ran contrary to the sentiments of its Moslem majority. He had no doubt what they were. "I am

convinced," he would write in a report to his cousin the King on November 7, "that a population containing such a high proportion of Moslems would certainly vote to join Pakistan."

Despite Nehru's reservations, he persuaded his prime minister and his Cabinet to attach to Kashmir's accession an important provision: the Maharaja's accession would be considered temporary. It would not be final until law and order had been restored and it had been confirmed by a plebiscite.

V. P. Menon was ordered to Srinagar to present the Cabinet's terms to the Maharaja, while the officers accompanying him studied the military situation. As they departed, the former Supreme Allied Commander Southeast Asia set in motion the preparations for an historic airlift to Kashmir. He ordered all India's civil air transport to leave their passengers wherever they were and head for Delhi.