India After Gandhi (69 page)

Abdullah seems not to have said anything indiscreet in the United Kingdom. He proceeded to Mecca and stopped in Algiers on his way home. There he did something far worse than speak carelessly to a British journalist; he met with the Chinese prime minister, Chou En-lai, who also happened to be in the Algerian capital. The content of their conversations was not disclosed, but it was enough that he had supped with the enemy. It was assumed that (as in 1953, when he met Adlai Stevenson) Sheikh Abdullah had discussed the possibility of an independent Kashmir. Back then it took four months for the Sheikh to be jailed. Now he was placed under arrest as he got off the plane at New Delhi s Palam Airport. He was taken to a government bungalow in the capital and, a little later, transported across the country to the southern hill town of Kodaikanal. Here he was given a charming cottage, with fine views of hills not nearly as grand as those in Kashmir, but forbidden to travel outside municipal limits or meet visitors without official permission.

The news of the Sheikh’s arrest was greeted with loud cheers in both Houses of Parliament. He was seen as having betrayed India not just by talking to a Chinese leader, but by doing so while the other foe, Pakistan, was nibbling away at the borders. For while Abdullah was on pilgrimage a conflict broke out over the Rann of Kutch, a salt marsh claimed both by Pakistan and India. In the first week of April troops exchanged fire in the Rann. The Pakistanis used their American tanks to shell enemy positions – successfully, for the Indians had to withdraw some forty miles to dry land. Angry telegrams were exchanged before the two sides agreed to international arbitration under British auspices.
²¹

One person dismayed by the rise of jingoism was Horace Alexander. He wrote to Mrs Indira Gandhi and received a reply putting the inflamed sentiments in perspective. ‘What Sheikh Sahib does not realize’, said Mrs Gandhi, ‘is that with the Chinese invasion and the latest moves in and by Pakistan, the position of Kashmir has completely changed.’ For the frontiers of the state touched China and the USSR as well as India and Pakistan. And ‘in the present world situation, an independent Kashmir would become a hot-bed of intrigue and, apart from the countries mentioned above, would also attract espionage and other activities from the USA and UK.’
²²

Abdullah’s arrest and the clash in Kutch had put an idea into the head of the Pakistani president, Ayub Khan. This was to foment an insurrection in the Indian part of Kashmir, leading either to a war ending with the state being annexed to Pakistan, or in international arbitration with the same result. In the late summer of 1965 the Pakistan army began planning ‘Operation Gibraltar’, named for a famous Moorish military victory in medieval Spain. Kashmiri militants were trained in the use of small arms, with their units named after legendary warriors of the Islamic past –Suleiman, Salahuddin, and so on.
²³

In the first week of August, groups of irregulars crossed the ceasefire line into Kashmir. They proceeded to blow up bridges and fire-bomb government installations. The intention was to create confusion, and also to spark unrest. Radio Pakistan announced that a popular uprising had broken out in the Valley. In fact, the local population was mostly apathetic – some intruders were even handed over to the police.
²⁴

When the hoped-for rebellion did not materialize, Pakistan launched its reserve plan, codenamed ‘Operation Grand Slam’. Troops crossed the ceasefire line in the Jammu sector and, using heavy artillery and mortar, made swift progress. The Indians fought back and, in the Uri sector, succeeded in capturing the pass of Haji Pir, a strategic point from where they could look out for infiltrators.
²⁵

On 1 September the Pakistan army launched a major offensive in Chhamb. An infantry division with two regiments of American Patton tanks crossed the border. Catching the Indians by surprise, they occupied thirty square miles within twenty-four hours. Their aim was to capture the bridge at Akhnoor, thus to sever links between Jammu and Kashmir and the state of Punjab. The defenders now called in their air force, with some thirty aircraft raining down bombs on the enemy. The Indian Vampires were answered by Pakistani Sabre jets.

By the 5th the Indian position was getting desperate, with the Pakistanis pressing hard on Akhnoor. To relieve the pressure, New Delhi ordered the army to open a new front. On the morning of the 6th, several tank regiments, supported by infantry, crossed the international border that divided the Punjab. They were heading straight for Pakistan’s first city, Lahore. Pakistani troops and tanks were hastily redeployed from the Kashmir operation. Now commenced perhaps the most bitter tank battle seen anywhere since the end of the Second World War. The two sides fought each other inch for inch, sometimes in barren soil, at other times in the middle of sugar-cane fields. The Indians routed the Pakistanis around Asal Uttar but then, attempting to recapture Khem Karan, were badly mauled in turn. The Indian commander, a veteran of the Second World War, said that he had ‘never seen so many tanks destroyed, lying there in the battlefield like abandoned toys’.
²⁶

Overhead, the aeroplanes screamed en route to attack the enemy’s bases. A large tonnage of bombs was dropped by both sides, but –as an Indian chronicler later wrote – ‘luckily or unluckily some of the bombs failed to explode – they were old and had been supplied to the contending parties mostly by the same source’.
²⁷

As the battles raged, the Chinese weighed in with words in support of the Pakistanis. On 4 September Marshal Chen Yi, visiting Karachi, condemned ‘Indian imperialism for violating the Cease-Fire Line’, and endorsed ‘the just actions taken by the Government of Pakistan to repel India’s armed provocations . Three days later Peking issued a statement claiming that India was ‘still entrenched’ over large sections of Chinese territory. The next day Chou En-lai stated that ‘India’s acts of aggression pose a threat to peace in this part of Asia’.
²⁸

Back in New Delhi, a surge of patriotic sentiment had overcome the population. At the daily press briefing, newsmen would ask the government spokesman: ‘(Has Lahore airport fallen?’ ‘Is the radio station under our control?’ Lahore never fell, although why this was so remained a matter of dispute. The Indians argued that capturing the city was never on the agenda – why get into a house-to-house operation with a hostile population? The Pakistanis claimed that the Indian chief of army staff had bragged that he would have his evening drink at the Lahore Gymkhana – but the brave defenders of the city never allowed himto.
²⁹

The escalation of hostilities alarmed the superpowers, and on 6 September the United Nations Security Council met to discuss the matter.
The UN secretary general, U Thant, flew to the subcontinent, and after meeting leaders in both capitals got them to agree to a ceasefire. The decision was made easier by the fact that in the Punjab the two sides had fought themselves to a stalemate. On 22 September hostilities were finally called off.

The battle stook place principally in two sectors in the north-west – Kashmir and the Punjab. There were some exchanges in Sindh, but the eastern border – dividing the two halves of Bengal – stayed quiet. As is common in such cases, both sides claimed victory, exaggerating the enemy’s losses and understating their own. In truth, the war must be declared a draw. As a reasonably independent authority had it, the Pakistanis lost 3,000 to 5,000 men, about 250 tanks and 50 aircraft, whereas the casualties on the Indian side were 4,000 to 6,000 men, about 300 tanks, and 50 aircraft. With their much larger population, and bigger army, the Indians were better able to absorb these losses.
³⁰

For the Western public, the
Reader’s Digest
magazine provided this colourful summary of the war far away: ‘The blood of Pakistani and Indian soldiers stained the wheat-lands of the Punjab and the stony ridges of Kashmir; vultures hung over corpses on the Grand Trunk Road, the immortal highway of Kipling’s
Kim
; and refugees huddled against tilting bullock carts, hesitant to start the journey home.’
³¹

Before the war Shastri and Ayub Khan had met once, at Karachi in October 1964, when the Indian leader stopped there on his way home from Cairo. There is a photograph of the two together, the army man dressed in a suit, towering over the little Gandhian in his
dhoti
. Ayub was deeply unimpressed by the Indian, telling an aide: ‘So this is the man who has succeeded Nehru!’
³²

There is little question that the Pakistani leadership seriously underestimated the Indian will to fight. Operation Gibraltar was conceived in ‘the euphoric aftermath’ of the Kutch conflict, which had ‘shown the Indians in a poor light’.
³³
In the first week of June 1965 the
Dawn
newspaper carried an essay written pseudonymously by a high official, which analysed Indian troop deployment before recommending that Pakistani strategy should ‘obviously be to go for a knock-out in the
Mohamed Ali Clay style’.
³⁴
An army directive confidently stated that ‘as a general rule Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and place’.
³⁵

There was, indeed, an unmistakably religious idiom to an operation initiated by Pakistani Muslims on behalf of their brethren in Kashmir. Memories of wars fought and won ten centuries ago were evoked. The radicals in Pakistan believed that the
kafir
would be vanquished by the combination of Islamic fervour and American arms.
³⁶
The hope was that after the Kashmiris had arisen, their brothers would cut off enemy communication, and ‘start the long expected tank promenade down the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi’, forcing a humiliating surrender.
³⁷
The song on the lips of the warriors was: ‘
Hus
ke liya hai Pakistan, ladh ke lenge Hindustan
’ (We achieved Pakistan laughing, we will take India fighting).

As it happened, the attack united the Indians. Many Kashmiris stood with the army against the invaders. A Muslim soldier from Kerala won India’s highest military honour, the Param Vir Chakra. Another Muslim, this time from Rajasthan and ironically named Ayub Khan, knocked out a couple of Pakistani tanks. All across India Muslim intellectuals and divines issued statements condemning Pakistan and expressing their desire to sacrifice their lives for the motherland.
³⁸

Ayub and company were encouraged by the debacle against China in 1962. But that was in the wet and slippery Himalaya, whereas this was terrain the Indians knew much better. The army commanders in 1965 had won their first spurs fighting tank battles on flat land in the Second World War. Besides, in the years since the Chinese disaster they had been provided with more (and better) equipment. The new defence minister, Y. B. Chavan, had gone on an extensive shopping spree in 1964, visiting Western capitals and the Soviet bloc to buy the tanks, planes, rifles and submarines that his forces required.
³⁹

This defence minister was more respected by his troops than his counterpart in 1962. Chavan was no Krishna Menon and, when it came to the conduct of war, Shastri was no Nehru either. He certainly preferred peace, writing to a friend after the Kutch conflict that in his view the problems between India and Pakistan should be settled amicably, step by step. He hoped that ‘our fights and disputes do not take a form that makes battle inevitable’.
⁴⁰
But when war came he was decisive, swift to take the advice of his commanders and order the strike across the Punjab border. (In a comparable situation, in 1962, Nehru had refused to call in the air force to relieve the pressure.) And when the
conflict ended he was happy to be photographed –
dhoti
and all – atop a captured Patton tank, a gesture that would not have come easily to his predecessor.

However, in one respect Shastri was indeed like Nehru – in his refusal to mix matters of state with matters of faith. Days after the ceasefire, with patriotic feelings riding high, he spoke at a public meeting at the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi. Here he took issue with a BBC report that claimed that ‘since India’s Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri is a Hindu, he is ready for war with Pakistan’. Shastri said that while he was a Hindu, ‘Mir Mushtaq who is presiding over this meeting is a Muslim. Mr Frank Anthony who has addressed you is a Christian. There are also Sikhs and Parsis here. The unique thing about our country is that we have Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis and people of all other religions. We have temples and mosques,
gurdwaras
and churches. But we do not bring this all into politics . . . This is the difference between India and Pakistan. Whereas Pakistan proclaims herself to be an Islamic State and uses religion as a political factor, we Indians have the freedom to follow whatever religion we may choose [and] worship in anyway we please. So far as politics is concerned, each of us is as much an Indian as the other.’
⁴¹

During the Pakistan war, the prime minister coined the slogan ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’ (Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer). To salute the ordinary
jawan
in a nation given birth by Gandhian pacifism was distinctive, but so was the invocation of the humble
kisan
, in a nation taught to admire blast furnaces and high hydroelectric dams.