The Longest August
Read The Longest August Online
Authors: Dilip Hiro
Also by
Dilip Hiro
Nonfiction
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(short-listed for Mirabaud Prize, Geneva, 2011)
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Fiction
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Copyright © 2015 by Dilip Hiro
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hiro, Dilip.
The longest August : the unflinching rivalry between India and Pakistan / Dilip Hiro.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-56858-734-9 (hardcover) â ISBN 978-1-56858-503-1 (e-book) 1. IndiaâForeign relationsâPakistan. 2. PakistanâForeign relationsâ India. I. Title.
DS450.P18H57 2014
327.5405491 dc23
2014045994
ISBN: 978-1-56858-515-4 (INTL)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
1 The Modish Dresser Meets the Mahatma
2 Gandhi's Original Sin: Injecting Religion into Politics
3 The Two-Nation Theory: A Preamble to Partition
8 Nehru's “Forward Policy”: A Step Too Far
9 Shastri's Tallest Order: Pakistan's Nightmare Comes Alive
10 Indira Gandhi Slays the Two-Nation Theory
11 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: The Savior of West Pakistan
12 Islamist Zia ul Haq, Builder of the A-Bomb
13 Rajiv-Benazir RapportâCut Short
14 Gate-Crashing the Nuclear Club
15 General Musharraf Buckles Under US Pressure
16 Nuclear-Armed Twins, Eyeball-to-Eyeball
17 Manmohan Singh's Changing Interlocutors
South Asia and Its Neighbors
United Punjab in 1946 with the Partitioning Line of August 14, 1947
Pakistan Excluding Pakistan-Administered Jammu and Kashmir
Jammu and Kashmir
The first colony of the British Empire that was partitioned at the time of acquiring a Dominion status within the British Commonwealth of Nations was Ireland. On December 6, 1922, exercising its right under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, Protestant-majority Northern Ireland seceded from the Irish Free State to remain part of the British Empire. It was the historic tension between Protestants and Catholics, dating back to the Battle of Boyne in 1690 between Protestant William III of Orange and Catholic James II, which led to the division of Ireland.
A quarter century after Ireland's partition, the Indian subcontinent became the next colony of Britain to end up divided into the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. Irreconcilable tensions between majority Hindus and minority Muslims were the cause of this. The buildup to this partition, its enforcement, and its immediate and later consequences were of far greater import to the region and the world at large than the division of Ireland.
What was common between the two partitions was religious affiliation. In the case of Ireland, it was different sects within Christianity, whereas in united but colonized India it was a clash between polytheistic Hinduism and monotheistic Islam. In sheer numbers, there were 250 million Hindus and 90 million Muslims in the subcontinent on the eve of the partition. Together, they formed nearly one-fifth of the human race.
As a result of the two-way migration of minorities across the new borders created in August 1947, millions of families were uprooted from their hearths and homes of centuries. They left behind their immovable properties and most of the movable goods. The respective governments confiscated the assets of the departed with a plan to compensate those on the other side who had lost their worldly possessions because of the
partition. This scheme worked well in the two parts of Punjab and adjoining Delhi, even though the aggregate assets of the Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab exceeded those of the Muslims in East Punjab and Delhi.
The case of the small province of Sindh differed from Punjab's in two ways. It remained united, and it was spared the communal carnage of Punjab. But in two major cities of Sindh the limited violence against Hindus, who were far better off economically and educationally than Muslims, was enough to cause a steady exodus of Sindhi Hindus. Unlike the Hindus and Sikhs of West Pakistan, however, they did not have a part of Sindh retained by pre-independence India to which they could migrate. As a consequence, traveling in comparatively small numbers over many months by train and ship, they ended up in Indian cities and large towns along an arc in western India, stretching from Delhi to the southern reaches of Bombay province, which was populated solely by the Marathi-speaking people.
My family, based in the Sindhi town of Larkana, belonged to this category of refugees from West Pakistan. We traveled by ship from Karachi to the Port of Okha in north Gujarat and ended up in a sprawling, empty military barracks built during World War II, thirty-five miles southeast of central Bombay. These were now called Kalyan (Refugee) Camps, numbered 1 to 5. Here, in a row of single rooms fronted by a veranda, accommodation was free, with the large room serving as the living-cum-sleeping space, and an area in the veranda allocated for cooking.
Like refugees elsewhere before and since then, we built up our lives slowly. I managed to pursue a university education, thanks to government loans to the children of refugees from Pakistan. There was no hope or wish to return to what had become the “other” country. That door remained shut.
The story of my personal journey from serving as a qualified engineer on a tube well drilling project in Gujarat to becoming a self-taught professional writer in London belongs to another category of my output than the one to which the present work does.
This book on the troubled relations between India and Pakistan chronicles not only political and military events and the principal players, but also trade and cultural links. It covers the involvement of major powers of the globeâthe United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of Chinaâin shaping the relations between these South Asian neighbors, which together form one-fifth of humanity.
In the introduction I explain that the sixty-five-year-old Kashmir dispute has its roots in the tensions between Hindus and Muslims dating
back eight centuries. The subjugation of the Indian subcontinent by Britain after 1807 gave rise to Indian nationalism within a century. The aim of the anti-imperialist movement that rose sharply after World War I was open to two different interpretations. One was to end Britain's imperial rule and transform enslaved India into a sovereign state. The other was to end the subjugations that the majority Hindusâthree-quarters of the populationâhad borne since 1192; they were now ready to administer a free India on the basis of one person, one vote. The two interpretations overlapped because the foremost anti-imperialist party, the Indian National Congress, was overwhelmingly Hindu.
In 1915 the return home of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a Gujarati Indian lawyer, from South Africa sowed a seed in national politics that would grow into a tree covering much political space. His rivalry with another Gujarati-speaking lawyer, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, would come to dominate subcontinental politics for three decades. This is the gist of Chapter 1.
A deeply religious man, Gandhi made an alliance with the Muslim leaders of the Khilafat movement, which was committed to the continuation of the caliphate based in Istanbul that had come under threat after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Allied Powers in 1918. The Khilafat leaders backed the noncooperation campaign Gandhi launched in 1920. Its sudden suspension by Gandhi disappointed and bewildered them. The Hindu-Muslim unity forged to oppose the British Raj proved transitory. During the rest of the decade, Gandhi took up the causes of exploited peasants and workers; he garnered much publicity by launching such nonviolent campaigns as making salt from seawater without official permission. In the face of Gandhi's spiraling fame, Jinnah moved his legal practice to London. This analytical narrative forms Chapter 2.
Chapter 3 covers the return of Jinnah from London to take up the leadership of the Muslim League and his articulation of the Two-Nation Theory. Though the League performed poorly in the 1937 elections, the policies of the Congress ministries, composed almost wholly of Hindus, gave a preview of the insensitivity of Congress officials toward the beliefs and mores of Muslims. The non-League Muslim leaders closed ranks with the League. In the 1945â1946 elections, the League won 73 percent of Muslim ballots, a giant leap from the previous 5 percent.
Britain's decision to quit India after World War II intensified the rivalry between the Congress and the League: the former wished to inherit a united India from the British, and the latter resolved to establish a homeland for Muslims by partitioning the subcontinent. Communal
tensions turned into violence. The chronology of this period constitutes Chapter 4.
Chapter 5 narrates the communal frenzy that gripped Punjab at the time of the birth of independent India and Pakistan in August 1947 and soon after. As a breakaway political entity, Pakistan faced many hurdles to get established.
Although the communal bloodbath that marked the birth of independent India and Pakistan on August 14â15, 1947, subsided after a few months, the dispute over Kashmir that broke out soon after has continued to vitiate relations between the neighbors. Indeed, their subsequent chronology has been peppered with so many challenges, crises, proxy wars, ongoing attempts to covertly exploit ethnic and other fault lines in their respective societies, hot wars, and threats of nuclear strikes that a historian is moved to encapsulate Indo-Pakistan relations as “the longest August.”
The next chapter outlines the fight between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir, whose Muslim majority was ruled by a Hindu maharaja. When threatened by the incursion of armed tribal irregulars from Pakistan, the maharaja acceded to India, subject to a referendum when normal conditions had been restored. The issue was referred to the United Nations, but it would prove insoluble for many decades.
The two neighboring countries developed differently. Democracy based on a multiparty system and universal suffrage took hold in India. By contrast, political life deteriorated in Pakistan to the extent that General Muhammad Ayub Khan imposed military rule in 1958. His efforts to seek a satisfactory solution to the Kashmir problem in consultation with Indian premier Jawaharlal Nehru got nowhere. Chapter 7 provides the narrative of this period.
Since, according to India, China had occupied a part of Kashmir, Nehru had to deal with the Chinese government, which, independently, disputed the border delineating northeastern India from the Tibet region of China. When Nehru tried to assert India's claim by making military moves, war broke out between China and India in October 1962. It ended a month later, after China, having proved its military superiority, declared a unilateral cease-fire and withdrew its forces to prewar positions. This armed conflict created a bond between China and Pakistan that has endured ever since. This is the essence of Chapter 8.
The succeeding chapter recounts the war that Pakistan started in India-held Kashmir in September 1965. The three-week hostilities failed to deliver what Pakistan had hoped: the destruction of the status quo in
Kashmir. Indeed its failure in this war led to the toppling of Ayub Khan and then to the secession of East Pakistan. Chapter 9 describes the buildup to the war, the actual fighting, and its consequences.
The narrative in the next chapter deals with the run-up to the two-week-long Bangladesh War in December 1971, the combat, and its aftermath. In ideological terms, Indian premier Indira Gandhi slew the two-nation theory of Jinnah by showing that ethnicity overrides religion. This was also a setback for the cause of the Muslim separatists in Indian Kashmir.
Chapter 11 shows how Zulfikar Ali Bhutto salvaged West Pakistan. Even though he held weak cards in his negotiations with Gandhi in Shimla in June 1972, he managed to deprive her of her aim to bring the Kashmir issue to an official closure. In Pakistan, as a result of the rigged election in March 1977, he faced huge protests in the streets, which he failed to curb. This provided an opportunity to his Islamist army chief general, Muhammad Zia ul Haq, to overthrow the government and return Pakistan to a military administration. It lasted as long as Zia ul Haq livedâuntil August 1988. During his rule he Islamized state and society, thereby moving Pakistan further away from secular India. The Soviet Union's military involvement in Afghanistan turned Pakistan into a front-line state in the Cold War, helping Zia ul Haq accelerate the nuclear weapons program in which China provided Pakistan with vital assistance. In early 1984 it tested an atom bomb assembled in Pakistan at its nuclear testing site.
Rajiv Gandhi's succession in the footsteps of his assassinated mother, Indira, in October 1984, went smoothly. He found a congenial political partner in Benazir Bhutto, a daughter of Zulfikar Ali, after her election to the premiership of Pakistan in December 1988. The bonhomie dissipated as separatist insurgency in Kashmir intensified from 1989 onward, with India resorting to brutish methods to squash it. The protests of Bhutto and her successor Muhammad Nawaz Sharif fell on stony ground. During the premiership of P. V. Narasimha Rao after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, the international scene changed radically. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991 signaled the victory of the United States in the Cold War. Delhi strengthened its links with Washington, which saw no need to downgrade its historic ties with Pakistan. Rao accelerated India's nuclear arms program. Chapter 13 relates these events.
Rao's plan to test three nuclear devices in late 1995 was thwarted by US president Bill Clinton, who was committed to stopping the spread
of nuclear arms. But to consolidate his thin majority in Parliament, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leader of the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ordered the testing of nuclear bombs. These tests occurred in mid-May 1998. Two weeks later Pakistan followed suit. With that Pakistan acquired parity with India in its power of military deterrence, thus offsetting its military inferiority in the conventional area. A reassured Pakistani prime minister Sharif welcomed Vajpayee in Lahore in February 1999. Visiting the site where the Muslim League had passed its Pakistan resolution on March 23, 1940, Vajpayee noted that a stable, secure, and prosperous Pakistan was in India's best interests. But once again this proved to be a false dawn. Three months later Pakistan's army chief general, Pervez Musharraf, tried to capture the Kargil region of Indian Kashmir by stealth. He failed. But his surreptitious unveiling of nuclear-tipped missiles was detected by Clinton, who then intervened. Following tense negotiations in Washington, he had Sharif agree to withdraw his troops to the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. Sharif's deal paved the way for his overthrow by Musharraf. This narrative appears in Chapter 14.
The following chapter describes how in the aftermath of 9/11 and the failed terrorist attack on the Parliament House in Delhi three months later, the United States succeeded in getting Musharraf to jettison the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and stop providing military training and weapons to Kashmiri separatists. But the subsequent lowering of Indo-Pakistan tensions in January 2002 did not last. Following the terrorist assault on a military camp at Kaluchak in Kashmir in May, Vajpayee authorized the bombing of training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir. The lack of enough laser-guided bombs delayed the execution of the order and gave the United States and Britain a chance to douse passions. They ordered their eighty thousand citizens to leave India and Pakistan immediately, cooling Vajpayee's fervor. The nuclear-armed neighbors stepped back from a nuclear brink.
Chapter 17 covers the dealings of Congress prime minister Manmohan Singh from 2004 onward. He and Musharraf set up a back channel to reach an accord on Kashmir. Their personal envoys forged a plan that Musharraf outlined in December 2006. It envisaged “open borders” in Kashmir followed by a phased withdrawal of troops from both sides of the LoC. Since this did not mean changing the present borders, the plan received careful examination by the Indian cabinet. But before it could take a definite stand, Musharraf was forced to step down as army chief prior to being sworn in as a civilian president in November 2007. And in August
2008 he resigned as president to avoid being impeached by Parliament, which was dominated by anti-Musharraf parties. Once again the hopes of resolving the Kashmir conundrum were dashed. Three months later, a sixty-hour siege of luxury hotels in south Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists froze Delhi-Islamabad relations. The freeze lasted two-and-a-half years.