The Longest August (17 page)

The long caravan started trudging before sunrise and was escorted by a squad of mounted young Sikhs carrying rifles to secure its flanks, front, and rear. When its members reached the Theekriwala Canal Rest House in the evening, they camped along the canal. They fed fodder collected from the nearby fields to the oxen and had their first meal after covering fifteen miles in fourteen hours. They obtained water from local pumps and wells, even though some wells, containing corpses, were polluted. At the next stop at Sudhir they were instructed by the district commissioner to stay put to avoid a brutal attack by a band of enraged Muslims. They did—for three days. They suffered from water scarcity because the nearby ponds and wells were polluted by floating corpses.

It was only when they reached Lyallpur that local Sikhs provided them food and water. On September 19, when the caravan was a mile short of Balloki Head, it was fired on by an armed band of Muslims. Its mounted Sikh guards responded in kind. Nonetheless, a Hindu resident of Rattan was killed. (Instead of being cremated, he was buried in an open field.) The episode heightened fear among the refugees, surrounded as they were by burning villages and intermittent cries of “
Allah-u-Akbar
” (“God is great”). After they had crossed the Ravi River and camped along its other bank, the Sikh men armed all women, Sikh and Hindu, with a sheathed
kirpan
, held by a strip of cloth across the torso. If assaulted, the women were to kill the attacker, failing which they were instructed to turn the deadly weapon on themselves. Mercifully, such an eventuality did not come to pass.

After four more days of dreary marching, and the deaths of many children and elderly people from diarrhea caused by drinking polluted water, the caravan crossed the unmarked Indo-Pakistan border at Khem Karan on September 25. That was the end of their two-week-long life-saving trek.
42

Earlier, the displaced Muslims from East Punjab and the neighboring areas trekking their way on foot or in caravans to West Punjab had faced the additional strain of observing the daytime fast during the month of Ramadan, which started on July 19. Because of the delayed monsoon rains, the temperature was often 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.

“There is another sight I am not likely to easily forget,” reported the Punjab correspondent of the Madras-based, English-language weekly
Swatantra
:

a five mile long caravan of 20,000 Muslim refugees crawling at a snail's pace into Pakistan over the Sutlej Bridge, with bullock carts piled high with pitiful chattels, cattle being driven alongside, women with babies in their arms and wretched little tin trunks on their heads. 20,000 men, women and children trekking into the promised land—not because it is the promised land, but because bands of Hindus and Sikhs in Faridkot [Princely] State and the interior of Ferozepur district had hacked hundreds of Muslims to death and made life impossible for the rest.
43

During Governor-General Jinnah's visit to Lahore, his rehabilitation minister, Mian Iftikharuddin, and editor of the
Pakistan Times
, Mazhar Ali Khan, flew him over the divided Punjab. On sighting the endless streams of people pouring into and out of West Punjab, he reportedly struck his forehead with a hand in a sign of remorse and said, “What have I done?”
44

It was not until the end of October that the population exchange in the partitioned Punjab was completed. And it was not until a year later that there was a one-way exodus of a million Hindus from Sindh to different parts of India. By then an equal number of Hindus had moved to West Bengal from East Pakistan. According to India's 1951 census of displaced persons, 7.226 million Muslims migrated to East and West Pakistan from India, while 7.249 million Hindus and Sikhs moved in the other direction.
45

Daunting though these challenges were for Nehru's cabinet, they paled before the steep hurdles Jinnah and his government had to surmount at the birth of Pakistan.

Pakistan: Year Zero

When Pakistan's finance minister Ghulam Muhammad arrived in his Karachi office for his first day's work on August 15, 1947, he found it bare except for a single table. Everything else dispatched by train from Delhi had been looted en route.
46
As for his treasury, it had only Rs 200 million on hand. Pakistan was entitled to 18.75 percent of the current cash balances in Delhi, a little over Rs 4,000 million, amounting to Rs 750 million (worth $2.4 billion today), to be paid in two installments. For the present, Pakistan's available cash was barely enough to pay the Pakistani army for four months. Its outstanding debts amounted to almost Rs 400 million.

Jinnah, who had a flair for handling his own money skillfully, deployed all means to keep Pakistan solvent. His entreaty to the Nizam of Hyderabad, Sir Osman Ali Khan, resulted in an eagerly welcomed loan of Rs 200 million. Patel and his cohorts in Nehru's government were determined to strangle the nascent Muslim homeland at birth. Jinnah's appeals to other members of the British Commonwealth, including Britain, for financial assistance drew a blank. “Every effort is being made to put difficulties in our way by our enemies to paralyze or cripple our State and bring about its collapse,” he complained to Attlee in his letter of October 1. “It is amazing that top-most Hindu leaders repeatedly say that Pakistan will have to submit to the Union of India. Pakistan will never surrender.”
47

Besides serving as the governor-general, president of the Constituent Assembly, and president of the Pakistan Muslim League, Jinnah took charge of dealing with the princely states and the tribal agencies of the NWFP. He also laid out foreign policy guidelines. Pakistan, he stressed, should develop friendly relations with the United States and Britain while projecting itself as a buffer zone between communist Soviet Union and dubious India, and a vantage point between China, then in the midst of a bloody civil war, and the Middle East.

Once Paul H. Alling had been named the US ambassador to Pakistan on September 20, Jinnah directed his appeal for funds to Washington. But before the State Department got around to sanctioning $10 million (Rs 48 million) as aid to the nascent nation in December 1947,
48
Jinnah found himself faced with a political-ideological challenge of enormous import—in Jammu and Kashmir. At the center of this crisis was Maharaja Sir Hari Singh.

6: The Infant Twins at War

Born in Jammu as the only child of General Sir Amar Singh and Rani Chib Devi, Hari Singh showed promise as a teenager. After attending the Princes' Mayo College in Ajmer, he graduated from the Indian Defense Academy in 1915 at the age of twenty. He was immediately appointed commander in chief of the Jammu and Kashmir state armed forces by Maharaja Partap Singh, his richly bearded, heavily turbaned uncle. His big-boned, muscular frame, topped by a jowly face, lent him gravitas beyond his age.

Fourteen years before Hari Singh's birth, Jammu and Kashmir became the largest princely state in India, at 84,470 square miles. Its constituent vassal territories of Gilgit Wazarat and Ladakh Wazarat, occupying three-quarters of its area, were sparsely populated because of high mountains, creating an inhospitable climate with an arid, treeless terrain. In 1941 only 311,500 people lived there. By contrast, the Jammu Province, abutting Punjab, was home to almost 2 million souls and the Kashmir Province to nearly 1.75 million. Overall, the state was 85 percent Muslim. The Jammu region, predominantly Muslim in the west, contained a Hindu-Sikh majority in the east. But in Kashmir, non-Muslims were a puny minority of 6 percent.
1

Sir Hari Singh Versus Shaikh Abdullah

After the death of the childless Partap Singh in 1925, Hari Singh ascended the throne in Srinagar. The tension between this autocratic Hindu
ruler and the largely Muslim population came to the fore with the formation of the Muslim Conference in 1932. Presided over by Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, it demanded an end to the discrimination against Muslims in civil service. Two years later, responding to popular discontent, the maharaja established a State Assembly of 75 members, with only 30 members elected by a limited franchise.
2
In 1939 he raised the number of elected representatives to 40. But the gesture was meaningless since the Assembly lacked power.

The rising star in Kashmiri politics was Shaikh Abdullah. Since his father died soon after Abdullah's birth in a village near Srinagar, he grew up in poverty.
3
Yet he managed to obtain a master's degree in science from Aligarh Muslim University. He was a gangling young man, six-foot-four, oval-faced, with a sharp straight nose and a middle-distance gaze. He made his living as a schoolteacher.

In 1937, the thirty-two-year-old Abdullah was introduced to Jawaharlal Nehru in the waiting room of the Lahore railway station while the latter was en route to a tour of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). Their cordial talks became so engrossing that Nehru asked Abdullah to accompany him to Peshawar. He did. Nehru—a descendant of Kashmiri Brahmins who was born in the north Indian city of Allahabad—told Abdullah that he regarded himself a Kashmiri and advised him to open the Muslim Conference to all Kashmiris.
4
As a result of Abdullah's lobbying, the Muslim Conference's General Council changed the name to the National Conference in June 1939 and opened its doors to all those living in Kashmir. The dissidents, led by Ghulam Abbas, retained the original title of the party.

During World War II, thanks to Sir Hari's active encouragement of his subjects to join the British Indian Army, 71,667 signed up. Seven-eighths of them were Muslim, chiefly from the Poonch-Mirpur area of the Jammu region.
5
Aware of this, and the maharaja's military background, Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill invited him to a meeting of the War Cabinet in April 1944. He felt honored.

After his return to Srinagar later in the year, he was presented with the National Conference's manifesto, titled “Naya Kashmir” (Urdu: New Kashmir), by Shaikh Abdullah. It demanded a fully democratic government with a constitutional monarch. Its economic blueprint called for the abolition of
zamindari
(Urdu: landlordism) under the slogan “Land to the Tiller.” The autocratic Sir Hari rejected the manifesto summarily.

In the summer of 1944, when Muhammad Ali Jinnah was vacationing in Kashmir, he was invited to receptions by both the National Conference and the Muslim Conference. After meeting Shaikh Abdullah, Jinnah expressed ambivalent views about his party. But he was unequivocal in his comment on the Muslim Conference. “The Muslims have one platform, one
kalma
(Islamic creed), and one God,” he said. “I would request the Muslims [of Kashmir] to come under the banner of the Muslim Conference and fight for their rights.”
6

Once World War II ended, Shaikh Abdullah tried to rally Kashmiris around the democratic model outlined by the New Kashmir manifesto. The pompous maharaja—given to decking himself in a much decorated military uniform—showed no sign of surrendering any of his powers.
7
That led Abdullah to emulate the Congress Party's 1942 Quit India movement and launch the Quit Kashmir campaign in May 1946. Its aim was to secure the resignation of the maharaja. Hundreds of people, including Abdullah, courted arrest.

Nehru, accompanied by another Congress leader, Asaf Ali, a lawyer, entered Kashmir by road with the intention of defending Abdullah in court. Nehru was arrested and deported instantly. Abdullah was sentenced to three years imprisonment.

Unsurprisingly, Jinnah dismissed the Quit Kashmir movement as “an agitation carried out by a few malcontents to create disorderly conditions in the State.”
8
He urged the Muslim Conference to stay away from the campaign.

Like the pro-British Unionist politicians in Punjab, Sir Hari was shocked to hear Prime Minister Clement Attlee's February 1947 plan to quit India. He tried to distract himself from this news by indulging further his passion for polo and golf as well as poaching and wild game hunting.

As Britain's withdrawal gathered momentum, Sir Hari—influenced by his anti-Nehru prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak, who was married to a British woman—tilted toward declaring independence in order to maintain friendly relations with both India and Pakistan. In military-strategic terms, the chief of staff of the state's armed forces, Major-General H. L. Scott, could see merit in an independent Kashmir. In addition, the maharaja's astrologer, who claimed clairvoyant powers, declared that Maharaja Gulab Singh (ruled 1846–1857), the founder of the state, favored the inauguration of a sovereign Kashmir.

On the other hand, during his four-day stay in Srinagar in mid-June, Viceroy Lord Mountbatten advised Sir Hari to choose India or Pakistan before August 14. On the last day of his sojourn, when the maharaja was expected to convey his decision to the viceroy, Sir Hari feigned an attack of colic and cancelled the meeting. All the same, as promised, the British Raj returned the leased area of Gilgit Wazarat to the maharaja in July.

Nehru decided to fly to Srinagar but was dissuaded by Vallabhbhai Patel, who was in charge of the States Department. Instead, Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi was dispatched. During his meeting with Hari Singh and his pro-India wife, Tara Devi, on August 1, Gandhi repeated what the viceroy had told the Chamber of Princes a week earlier. By signing an instrument of accession with India he would continue to enjoy autonomy and receive his privy purse in exchange for surrendering foreign relations and defense to the imminent Dominion of India. Sir Hari, however, was disconsolate at the thought of Nehru settling old scores with him about his unceremonial ejection from the state a year earlier. Nevertheless, accepting Gandhi's advice and buttressed by his wife's inclination, he sacked the pro-independence Kak on August 10.

Two days later the newly appointed prime minister Major-General Janak Singh sent telegrams to the Pakistani and Indian governments offering a standstill agreement. Pakistan agreed; India did not. As for Gandhi's plea for the release of Abdullah, as part of his overarching counsel to the maharaja not to act against the wishes of his people, Sir Hari put it in his “pending” tray. He was not yet ready to make peace with long-time bête noire.

Post-Midnight Births of Twins

In July, noticing signs of discontent in the Muslim-dominated western Jammu Province, which had supplied tens of thousands of recruits to the Indian Army during the war, the maharaja urged ex-servicemen to surrender their arms to the local police. The response was lackadaisical. To the maharaja's alarm, many Muslim farmhands, working for Hindu landlords, defiantly displayed Pakistan's green flag, emblazoned with the star and crescent, after August 14.

This was a preamble to the anti-maharaja revolt by Muslims in the Poonch-Mirpur area of western Jammu, leading to the killing of some Hindus and displacement of many more. Sir Hari responded by
unleashing his Hindu troops to quell the rebellion. They resorted to a scorched-earth policy. They fired on crowds, set alight houses and whole villages, looted, imposed curfews, and carried out wholesale arrests. There were many instances of collective punishment when, for instance, they burnt a whole village because of the rebellious act of just one family.
9

“Within a period of about 11 weeks, starting in August, systematic savageries [in Jammu] . . . practically eliminated the entire Muslim element in the population, amounting to 500,000 people,” wrote Ian Stephens, editor of the Calcutta-based
Statesman
, in his book
Pakistan
. “About 100,000 just disappeared, remaining untraceable, having presumably been butchered or died from epidemic or exposure. The rest fled to West Punjab.”
10

The maharaja's iron-fist policy inflamed the local Muslims, who joined the militia organized by the Muslim Conference, later to be called Azad Fauj (Urdu: Free Army) or Azad Army, with a claimed strength of fifty thousand, most of them being ex-servicemen. It would later come under the command of one General Tariq, the pseudonym of Brigadier Muhammad Akbar Khan of the Pakistan Army. “A few weeks after partition, I was asked by Mian Iftikharuddin [the minister for refugee rehabilitation] on behalf of [Prime Minister] Liaquat Ali Khan to prepare a plan for action in Kashmir,” he would reveal in his interview with the Karachi-based
Defence Journal
published in the June–July 1985 issue. “I was called to a meeting with Liaquat Ali Khan at Lahore where the plan [of mine] was adopted, responsibilities allocated and orders issued. Everything was to be kept secret from the Army.”
11
While remaining in charge of the princely states and the tribal areas, Jinnah had assigned Ali Khan the task of dealing with Kashmir.

On September 4, the Lahore-based
Civil and Military Gazette
reported an uprising in the Poonch area. And four days later the
Times
(of London) followed suit. By September 22, despite inadequate supplies of arms and ammunition, and poor communications, the Azad Army was doing so well that the outgoing Major General Scott, commanding only three brigades, informed the maharaja that his soldiers scattered in small pickets over a large area were finding it hard to control the situation against the much larger size of the insurgents. Brigadier Rajinder Singh Jamwal, who succeeded Scott, was inclined to be pro-India.

Frantic diplomatic moves were afoot in Karachi, Delhi, and Srinagar. By spurning Jinnah's offer, made in mid-September, to meet him in Srinagar, Sir Hari upset Pakistan's highest official. The offended Jinnah
retaliated by imposing a loose blockade in early October, depriving the state of such essentials as salt, edible oil, sugar, kerosene, gasoline, and cloth. He was helped by the fact that the Muslim truck drivers from West Punjab were vulnerable to attacks by Hindu and Sikh militants in Jammu.

On the Indian side, there was rapid upgrading of communications between Kashmir and India by post and telegraph, telephone, wireless, and roads. “The metaling of the road from Jammu to Kathua is also proceeding at top speed,” reported the Lahore-based
Pakistan Times
on September 27. “The idea is to keep up some sort of communication between the State and the Indian Union, so that essential supplies and troops could be rushed to Kashmir without having to transport them through Pakistani territory.”
12
The building of a boat bridge over the Ravi River near Pathankot was meant to improve access from Gurdaspur in East Punjab.

On September 27 Nehru wrote to Patel that the maharaja should make friends with the National Conference so that “there might be popular support against Pakistan.” (A day earlier the imprisoned Abdullah had expressed his written allegiance to the maharaja in a letter that was widely publicized.) Sir Hari released Abdullah on September 29. During their subsequent meeting Abdullah reportedly offered the maharaja a few gold coins as a tribute, thus accepting his paramountcy.

Abdullah's release created another track of diplomacy. On October 1 a Pakistani delegation, headed by Dr. Muhammad Din Taseer, an academic friend of Abdullah who had later settled in Lahore, conferred with Abdullah and his colleagues in Srinagar. Abdullah agreed to meet Jinnah but only after he had seen Nehru in Delhi. Nonetheless, his friend, Ghulam Muhammad Sadiq, accompanying Taseer, traveled to Lahore where Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, another colleague of Abdullah, had arrived earlier. Their various meetings with Pakistani officials climaxed with one with Ali Khan on October 8.

In Delhi, in his talks with Abdullah, Nehru reiterated Mountbatten's terms to the princely states that they would have to surrender only defense, foreign affairs, and communication to the Indian Union. In addition, he assured Abdullah that those living outside Kashmir would be barred from owning property in the state, as had been the case during the British Raj. Abdullah demanded that these guarantees be written into the Indian constitution. Nehru agreed. Referring to the reports that feudal lords in West Punjab were eyeing to buy agricultural land in Kashmir, Nehru pointed out the commonality between the Congress Party's commitment to abolish
zamindari
and the New Kashmir manifesto.

From early October, reports of rapid deterioration in law and order in Kashmir started appearing in the
Civil and Military Gazette
. By October 7 the Kashmir government had arrested the correspondent for the Associated Press of India, a major source of news about the state; imposed “rigorous pre-censorship on all news and views” published in the local press; and banned the import of four daily newspapers from West Punjab. Protesting at the official order not to print matter advocating Kashmir's accession to Pakistan, the editor of the
Kashmir Times
ceased publication.
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