India After Gandhi (63 page)

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

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

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

FRIEDRICH
SCHILLER

O
N
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).

These were commitments Jawaharlal Nehru shared with Gandhi. In other matters, he might have been a somewhat wayward disciple. With his fellow intellectuals he chose to take India down the road of industrial modernization, rather than nurture a village-centred economy (as Gandhi would have wanted). But when it came to preserving the rights of minorities he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Mahatma. His was likewise a nationalism that was both composite as well as egalitarian.

Inspired by Gandhi, and guided by Nehru, the Indian Constitution both abolished untouchability and proclaimed the state neutral in matters of religion. Such was the law; how was the practice? Among all the tests faced by the new state this, perhaps, was the sternest. Since Hindus were both in a numerical majority and in positions of political pre-eminence, the idea of India would stand scrutiny only if they respected the rights and liberties of Indians different from themselves.

The idea of Pakistan had as its justification the need for minorities to be free of the fear of Hindu domination. Paradoxically, though, the state of Pakistan was created out of Muslim majority areas where this problem did not exist in the first place.

After 1947 there were large populations of Muslims scattered all over peninsular India – as they had been before that date. Several million Muslims migrated across the borders to East and West Pakistan, but many more than this elected to stay behind in India. The creation of Pakistan had made their position deeply vulnerable. This was the view, ironically, of two men who had played critical roles in the making of Pakistan: the Bengali Muslim Leaguer H. S. Suhrawardy and his United Provinces counterpart Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman. On 10 September 1947 – less than a month after Independence and Partition – Suhrawardy
wrote to Khaliquzzaman in horror that ‘the Muslims in the Indian Union have been left high and dry’. The antagonism caused by the formation of Pakistan had been heightened by the flight into India of Hindu and Sikh refugees. Suhrawardy now feared that ‘there may be a general conflagration which can well destroy the Muslim minority in the Indian Union’. As for Khaliquzzaman, he had reached the melancholy conclusion that ‘the partition of India [had] proved positively injurious to the Muslims of India, and on along-term basis for Muslims everywhere’.

To protect their interests and their lives – Suhrawardy drafted ‘a declaration of co-operation and mutual assistance between the two Dominions’, committing both to protecting their minorities and to not making provocative statements against each other. Suhrawardy got Gandhi to endorse the declaration, but failed to get Jinnah to consent, despite begging him to do so, ‘for the sake of the helpless and hapless Muslims of the Indian Union’.
²

As we have seen, the creation of Pakistan provided a fillip to the forces of Hindu communalism. The RSS and its ilk could now argue that the Muslims were betrayers who had divided the nation. In the view of the extremist Hindu, these Muslims should either go to Pakistan or face the consequences. The RSS grew in strength immediately after Partition, and although the murder of Gandhi in January 1948 stemmed its rise, the organization continued to exercise considerable influence in northern and western India.