In the dynamics of history and the variables which govern the course
of political sociology, historians do not make history. They only record
its course and describe the forces and narrate the events, which are a
reality that the historians cannot distort or deny. There is a method in
all historical processes. And there is a method in all political development.
For Hitler, the invasion of Russia was a historical necessity. Nazism
was an ideology and Germany was an ideological state. So were Italy and
Japan. Japan also struck Pearl Harbor out of a historical necessity.
That they would be defeated is a matter of the course, history of the
Second World War took. Historical facts cannot be manipulated.
There was a time, a century before the Second World War, which
ushered in the worldwide movement for decolonization, when the flag
bearers of the Concert of European Imperialist Powers, manipulated
history to serve their power interests. The British called India a
geographical expression. So did the Muslim League. Both sought to bat
for the perpetuation of the British Empire in India. They realized deep
inside them, that India was a nation, the expression of a six-thousand
year old civilisational grid, an incredible continuity of history and a
stunning expanse of civilisational frontiers, when they faced India in
revolt in 1942, the Naval Mutiny of 1946, and the dogged resistance the
State Army of Jammu and Kashmir offered to the invading forces of Pakistan for five days, till the Indian Army arrived in Srinagar.
History is relentless. It doesn’t forgive. It doesn’t forget.
Political Commentator A G Noorani and many like him in India have
rationalized Muslim separatist movement in India of which the Muslim
separatist movement of Jammu and Kashmir has been a part. Jinnah agreed
with the Congress leaders, till the Congress leaders professed faith in
Indian destiny within the British Empire. Why should the Muslim League
have taken birth in 1906, when the Swaraj and Swadeshi resolution of the
Indian National Congress was adopted the same year? Why did Sir
Mohammad Iqbal, in his presidential address to the Muslim League Session
at Allahabad in 1930 call for a Muslim confederacy in the North-West,
North-East, the north and south of India, after the Indian National
Congress adopted the Purna Swaraj Resolution in early 1930? Why did
Jinnah threaten Gandhi with non-cooperate with the Congress, if the
Congress extended its movement to the princely States and virtually
compelled the latter to exclude the States peoples’ movements from the
national movement of India, a course the Congress adopted, which brought
it to the brink of disaster
in 1947? Why should the Muslim League have adopted the Lahore Resolution
for Pakistan in 1940 when the British were fighting with their back to
the wall? Had the Muslim League realized that the end of British Empire
in India had come?
Jinnah was no votary of the Indian freedom from the British rule, nor
did he visualize a united India. Instead when he insisted upon the
lapse of the Paramountcy, he envisioned Pakistan, spread across the
whole of India, with its mainland constituted of the Muslim majority
areas of the British India in the north-east and north-west and pockets
of its territory constituted of the Muslim majority States and the
Muslim ruled States, interspersed among the provinces and the acceding
States of the Indian Dominion.
Noorani, the author of the two volumes of Kashmir Dispute, and many
like him who masquerade as experts on Jammu and Kashmir have perhaps
been never aware of the fact that Jammu and Kashmir was geographically a
part of the northern India and not the North West of India. It formed
the central spur of the frontier of India in the north, which is
crucially important for the unity of India and the security of its
entire northern frontier. Only a small part of the borders of Jammu and
Kashmir were contiguous to the borders of Pakistan in the south and
north-west. A larger part of the border of the State stretched along the
borders of Afghanistan, mainly the Wakhan Valley, Chinese Sinkiang in
the north-east and the Tibet in the east, with a long border contiguous
with East Punjab in the south and the Punjab Hill States in the
south-east. The much maligned Radcliff Award, did not do anything wrong
in its Boundary Award. Sir Radcliff was not a British politician and he,
contrary to the fond hopes of the Muslim League leaders, that he would
oblige them on the biding of the British, at home and in India, did not
do so.
Pathankot the largest Tehsil of the Gurdaspur District was
predominantly Hindu and could by no stretch of mind be included in the
West Punjab. Contrary to the figures quoted by the author in his book,
the Gurdaspur District had a minimal 0.8 per cent Muslim majority. The
Boundary Commission did not follow District boundaries as the basis of
the demarcation of the dividing line between the West Punjab and the
East Punjab. Most of the experts in India including Noorani, who have
sought to influence the discourse on Jammu and Kashmir and give it a
dangerous direction, have been completely ignorant of the fact that
besides the Jhelum valley road connecting Srinagar with Rawalpindi, a
railway link connected Jammu with Sialkot and a tarmac road ran along
the railway line, connecting Sialkot with Jammu. These experts, if their
writings on Jammu and Kashmir are an indicator, do not seem to be aware
of the fact that a cart-road, which was improvised by the ruler of the
State, stretched between Jammu and Madhopur in Pathankot, over which
transport moved without any difficulty, taking few hours to travel from
Jammu to Madhopur.
The author of ‘Kashmir Dispute’ does not accept and in fact takes a
reverse position on the basic fact that neither the partition of India
nor the lapse of the Paramountcy created a prior right for the Muslims
of the State of Jammu and Kashmir to opt for an alternative to the
accession to India, independence or accession to Pakistan. There are
many in India who have been making assertive reference to the intention
of Hari Singh to assume independence. These assertions are a total
surmise and a travesty of history.
Mountbatten flew to Srinagar in the third week of June, not more than
three weeks after the 3 June Declaration of 1947, and shook the
Maharaja out of his wits by tendering him the advice to come to terms
with Pakistan. Hari Singh used stratagem to send the Crown
Representative back to the Indian capital, empty handed. Accession to
Pakistan was the last act he was prepared to perform. Hari Singh was not
the man to have misunderstood Mountbatten, who warned him against any
attempt to assume independence. In fact there is not the slightest of
hints or pronouncements of Hari Singh on record to suggest that Hari
Singh intended to assume independence. Four personal emissaries of
Jinnah, met Hari Singh secretly, and to everyone he told that he would
take a decision by himself and his decision would keep in view the
interests of his people. Ram Chand Kak, a devout confident of Hari
Singh, acted as his interface, with the Muslim League and his strategy
worked to save the State from being plunged into a civil war during the
crucial months intervening between the 3 June Declaration and the date
of the transfer of power.
In his controversial book, Noorani has conveniently omitted to refer
to and discuss the implications of the proclamation of a “Provisional
Government of Azad Kashmir” by the Muslim Conference leaders and cadres
at Tradkhel in Mirpur on 28 August 1947, only thirteen days after the
transfer of power in India. After the proclamation of the “Provisional
Government of Azad Kashmir”, anti-Hindu riots spread across the Muslim
majority districts of Jammu province bordering Pakistan.
Facts of History cannot be bent to rationalize political events or
influence their course. The Indian partition was foisted on the people
of India by the Muslim League with the support of the British. The
opinion of the people of India was not elicited on the partition of the
country. Had the partition been referred to them, they would have
rejected it and Pakistan would have never come into existence. The lapse
of Paramountcy was also foisted on the people of the States, and when
the Congress leaders beseeched the Muslim League leaders and the British
to seek the opinion of the people of the princely States about the
right to determine their future, Jinnah as well as Mountbatten did not
listen to the Congress entreaties.
Had the people of the States been accorded the right of determining
their future the crisis which overtook Junagadh, the war in Hyderabad
and Jammu and Kashmir would have never taken place. In Jammu and
Kashmir, the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists constituted nearly twenty
eight percent of the population of the State at that time while the
Kashmiri speaking Muslims comprised two thirds of the population of the
State. The Kashmiri-speaking Muslims were dead set to evade accession to
Pakistan, because they had opposed the Muslim League struggle for
Pakistan and they knew that dreams of their freedom would be scuttled
with the ascendance of the Muslim Conference, supported by the
non-Kashmiri speaking Muslims of the Jammu province, to power in the
State, if it acceded to Pakistan. It is a misnomer that the accession
of the State to India was brought about with the support of the Muslims
alone. In fact it was because of the Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists along
with the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims that the accession of the State to
India was brought about.
In the resistance against the invasion of the State by Pakistan, the
Hindus and Sikhs formed the frontline of defence against it in the
provinces of Jammu and Kashmir and the Buddhists in the Frontier
Division of Ladhakh. In Ladhakh, the Buddhists kept the invaders at bay
under the leadership of the legendary soldiers Captain Pirthi Chand and
Captain Thapa. The left flanks of the National Conference largely
constituted of the Hindus of Kashmir amongst whom were ideologues of
National Conference and veteran fighters of freedom in Jammu and
Kashmir. Niranjan Nath Raina Saraf, Pran Nath Jalali and Omkar Nath
Trisal, defended Srinagar. The National Conference rank and file
brought the rear of the resistance. Nearly forty thousand Hindus, Sikhs
and Buddhists were killed in the invasion of the State. More than ten
thousand of Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist women were abducted by the invading
hordes and those who escaped death, were driven out of the territories
that the invaders overran. The refugees of the territories occupied by
Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs, a million people, live in Jammu on the
Indian side of the Line of Actual Control, still awaiting
rehabilitation.
The premise that the Kashmir dispute revolves round the freedom of
the Muslims living in the part of the State on the Indian side of Line
of Control, is only the half truth of the Kashmir dispute. The whole
truth is that the Kashmir dispute revolves round the freedom of the
Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists of the State who constitute four million
of the ten million population of the state, easily comparable with the
six million of the Muslims who live on the same side. The dispute also
revolves round the future of nearly two million of the Hindu and Sikh
refugees, who form nearly half of the population of the Hindus, Sikhs,
and Buddhists of the State. Among them are more than a million refugees
from the territories occupied by Pakistan, half a million of Hindus of
Kashmir-Kashmiri Pandits and non- Kashmiri Pandit Hindus, who were
driven out of the Kashmir province by the Jehad launched by Pakistani
Jehadi-war groups operating from that State, the militant regimes and
the Muslim separatist forces in Kashmir and the Hindus and Sikhs
refugees driven out of the border areas of Jammu province from time to
time, besides the Hindus of the Muslim majority areas of Jammu province
driven out of their homes and hearths by the Jehad , as it spread into
Jammu province in 1990, and after.
The Kashmir dispute also revolves round the territories of the Jammu
and Kashmir State, which are under the occupation of Pakistan. They
comprise of the parts of the province of Kashmir and the province of
Jammu and the Gilgit- Baltistan regions of the frontier divisions of
Ladhakh along with the Dardic Dependencies of the State, Hunza, Nagar,
Punial, Yasin, Ishkoman, Darel and Koh Gizir, which formed the part of
the Jammu and Kashmir State and which constituted the strategic outer
flanks of the western horn of the northern frontier of the State and the
northern most outposts of the British Empire in India.
The occupied territories are an integral part of the Indian state of
Jammu and Kashmir, which were invaded by Pakistan against all tenets of international
law as reported by the United Nations Commission for India and
Pakistan, and accepted by the Security Council. The Security Council
resolution envisaged the evacuation of the occupation forces from the
occupied territories before the bulk of the Indian forces would begin to
withdraw. The restoration of the administrative control of the occupied
territories to the State Government was a precedent condition for the
induction of the United Nations Plebiscite Administration into the
State. The claim, that the bulk of Indian forces were to commence
evacuation when the occupation forces were nearing the completion of
their evacuation, virtually suggesting that the evacuation of the
occupation forces was proposed to be concurrent, is a gross distortion
of facts. The United Nations documents and the Indian correspondence in
regard to them are unambiguous and clear, leaving no room for such
misinterpretation that many in India including the author of ‘Kashmir
Dispute’, have attempted mainly to prove that India was on the wrong
foot.
Pakistan and the Western powers dragged the Kashmir issue into Cold
War, because the western powers needed to turn Gilgit-Baltistan into an
advance military post, in their policy of the containment of the
communist influence in Asia, and Pakistan sought to turn the United
Nations intervention in Jammu and Kashmir into an instrument to
destabilize the part of the State on the Indian side of the cease-fire
line, to put India on a defensive and consolidate its hold over the
territories under its occupation. In fact Britain and its allies in the
Security Council shifted their basic stand to push India to accept the
induction of a Plebiscite Administration while the invading forces
remained in the occupied territories along with the Muslim militia of
thirty thousand men raised in the occupied territories by Pakistan
there. The Indian leaders were persuaded to allow Pakistan retain a part
of its forces, about one third of the forces that India retained in the
State. The agreement fell through because the United Nations military
mediators tampered with the figures of the quantum of troops to be
retained by the two armies in the State, forcing India to stall the
agreement and the fiasco came to be known as the notorious “Delvoi
Affair”.
Neither Pakistan, nor the British and their allies were interested in
an impartial plebiscite in the State. They were interested in enabling
Pakistan to swallow the occupied territories and then use them as a
spring- board to dislodge India from the rest of the State, establishing
their hold on the Shivalik plains west of river Ravi. In the post war
configuration of power in Asia, the whole stretch of Kashmir valley, the
rugged mountain fastnesses of the Pahar and Jhupal regions of the Jammu
province and the Shivalik plains stretching to the west of the river
Ravi had assumed the strategic importance, they had never acquired
earlier, even in the days of the Great Game. For India, Jammu and
Kashmir was central to the defence of its northern frontiers and its
strategic interests in the Sanskrit Himalayas.
The stand taken by the British and their allies in the Political
Committee of the United Nations General Assembly in the debate on
Tibetan complaint against the Chinese aggression delivered a severe blow
to the outlook of the Indian leaders about Asian solidarity. Nehru
ducked for some time under the shield of Panchsheel. But he learnt a
bitter lesson when the Chinese repudiated the McMahon Line. In the post
Cold War balance of World power, India cannot go the way A. G Noorani
apparently suggests. All demands for separate freedom, for whoever they
are made, conflict with the unity of India.
It must be understood by everybody in India, whatever, the station he
has in the Indian political class, that the British divided India at
the bidding of Muslim League, to create a Muslim power on the
subcontinent to safeguard their own interests in and around India. The
Indian people, the people of British India as well as the people of
Indian princely States, were not the retainers of the British colonial
rule in India. They had fought for a united India and its independence.
How should they have allowed the Balkanization of the rest of British
India and the Indian States, which were geographically contiguous with
India and which were placed outside the territories earmarked for
Pakistan? In fact, the League leaders had lost little time to smother
into submission all the princely States within its territories, some of
them including the State of Kalat, against the wishes of their rulers as
well as their people. Why should the Indian people have allowed
Pakistan to grab Jammu and Kashmir, which would have demolished the
entire northern frontier of India?
The Indian princely States were placed outside the partition of India
and virtually detached from British India by the lapse of British
Paramountcy, which like the partition of India was foisted upon the
people of the Indian States by the Muslim League and the British against
their will and against the remonstrations of the Congress leaders. The
partition of India did not, even remotely, create any prior right for
Pakistan to claim the State of Jammu and Kashmir, on the basis of the
Muslim majority composition of its population. The Muslim League
leaders, even when they were still in India or had left India, could not
question the right of the Indian people to unite the remaining parts of
the British India and the Indian States within its territories and
contiguous with the Indian borders, to undo the wrong done to them by
the Muslims and the British by foisting the partition on them against
their will. They had turned down the entreaties of the Congress
leadership and the leadership of All India States People’s Conference,
to recognize the right of the people of the States to determine their
future.
Noorani notes right at the outset in his book, “A plebiscite in
Kashmir was a moral imperative, besides being a democratic imperative.”
This has been the position of many Kashmir experts in India who have
tirelessly tried to influence the opinion of Government of India by
putting forward this assertion. If the plebiscite was a moral imperative
and a democratic necessity in Kashmir, was it not a moral imperative
and a democratic necessity in not forcing the partition on the people of
the British India? Was a plebiscite in the princely States not a moral
imperative and a democratic necessity, when the lapse of the Paramountcy
was imposed upon the people living in the princely States? Was a
plebiscite not a moral imperative and a democratic necessity to
determine the future disposition of all the States?
Pakistan was not created in accordance with any moral imperative and
its creation was not a democratic necessity. And if Pakistan would not
have been created, the people of the five hundred and sixty-two States,
including, not only Jammu and Kashmir, but Hyderabad and Junagadh would
have united with India and repudiated the princely rule.
The partition of India was a political maneuver in which the Muslim
League and the British were partners and which was intended to Balkanize
India and reduce it to a geographical expression. In fact for the
Indian people, it was a moral imperative and democratic necessity to
unite, whatever was left of India after the partition, without any
consideration of whether any use of forces was involved. They had to
defeat the designs of the Muslim League as well as the British. Had they
faltered, they would have been defeated instead. Jammu and Kashmir was
crucial to their efforts to recreate a united India. The author of
‘Kashmir Dispute’ has rightly pointed out, “Truth to tell, India and
Pakistan launched a cold war even while they were in the embryo of
history.” The bitter truth is that Pakistan launched an offensive right
from the time the partition plan was accepted to Balkanize India and
recommence the process of a second partition of India by seeking to
support Muslim separatism in Jammu and Kashmir.
The partition of India was the greatest betrayal of the Indian people
by the British and the Muslim League. The British had ruled India for
more than a century and when they decided to quit India, after the
Second World War, out of their own compulsions, they divided India in
collusion with the Muslim League. The Kashmir dispute is a legacy of the
partition of India. The Kashmir dispute does not have its origin in the
Treaty of Amritsar, with which many Kashmir experts including Noorani
have tried to link it, without any historical justification.
The Treaty of Amritsar was a fall out of the defeat of the Sikhs in
the first Anglo-Sikh War, fought in 1846, which the East India Company
imposed upon Sikhs to dismember the Sikh Empire and in which Gulab Singh
played a role, to save the territories of the Sikh State to be annexed
by the British. The British finally succeeded in doing so, after the
Second Anglo-Sikh War, fought in 1848. The British offered the
territories of the Sikh State- the province of Kashmir, Jammu, Ladhakh
and Hazara to Gulab Singh provided he paid the indemnity, the British
imposed on the Sikh State, on behalf of the Sikhs. Gulab Singh made good
the indemnity on behalf of the State to save the Sikh territories from
being annexed by the British, in consequence of which the Treaty of
Amritsar was signed between him and the British, in continuation of the
earlier treaty, The Treaty of Lahore, concluded between the British and
the Sikhs. The Kashmir dispute is a part of the territorial claims, the
Muslim League made for the separate Muslim homeland of Pakistan which
the Muslims in India sought to achieve to ensure them a separate
freedom. The Treaty of Amritsar could never be linked with the Muslim
demand for Pakistan.
The Muslim League claimed the part of British India which was
inhabited by a majority of the Muslims for the separate homeland of
Pakistan where they were assured the separate freedom they yearned for.
The Muslim League claimed the Muslim majority princely States as well as
the Muslim ruled princely States for Pakistan on the same religious
principle, which they had used as the anchor of their demand for the
inclusion of Muslim majority provinces of the British India in the
Muslim homeland of Pakistan. The Kashmir dispute underlines the same
religious principle, the claim to a separate freedom in which the
Muslims of Kashmir are ensured the realization of their Islamic destiny.
The assumption that the partition of India was a legitimate process
of the transfer of power in India is an attempt to re-write history.
Beginning the narrative on Kashmir from a disconnect, which deliberately
presumes separation of the problem of Junagadh, Hyderabad and Jammu
and Kashmir, from the division of India, that broke up the unity of a
nation and a people, which had fought for freedom of their country for
half a century. Such an assumption, without accepting it expressly,
underlines the British belief that India was only a geographical
expression and not a nation.
Noorani writes, “Truth to tell, India and Pakistan launched a cold
war even when they were in the embryo of history. Restless to cease
power, each leadership was out to do the other down. In the three cases
of disputed accession, Junagadh, Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir, each
side adopted inconsistent stands on (1) the relevance of the instrument
of accession ;( 2) plebiscite; (3) territorial integrity or the
geographical factor; and (4) the religious factor. Both practiced
deception. Both used armed forces as an instrument of policy.”Not a cold
war alone, it was a struggle for survival, which commenced for the
Indian people, when the Muslim League and the British foisted the lapse
of Paramountcy on them. The Indian people were faced with the
frightening prospect of the Balkanization of India with the reversion of
the powers of the Paramountcy and the powers to determine the future of
the States to their rulers, among them the Muslim rulers, whose States
were spread across the length and breadth of India and who were dead set
against the unification of their States with India.
Actually the cold war between the Muslim League and the Congress
leadership had a longer history. The Congress leaders out of their sheer
self-righteousness, misread the demand the Muslim League made for a
separate freedom, as a part of British strategy to contain the national
movement in India. They even went to the extent of offering to the
Muslim League to accommodate separate freedom for the Muslims in India
and went as far as to accept the Cabinet Mission Plan- a contrivance
which could have never kept India united. The Congress leaders did not
realize that the Muslim demand for a separate freedom was the expression
of an obscure commitment to reclaim a separate sphere of power in India
if and when British left India. Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the other
Muslim League leaders cooperated with the Congress leadership only so
long, the Congress leadership professed loyalty to the British Empire
and constitutional reform within the broad structure of the British
colonial authority.
It has been already clarified above that the Muslim leadership drew
away from the national movement in India, as the Indian national
movement drew closer to the demand for independence of India from the
British rule and finally gave a call for separate homeland constituted
of the territories of the Indian empire which were either populated by
the Muslim majorities or ruled by the Muslims in India of the princely
States. The demand for a separate freedom outside an Independent India
underlined the Pakistan Resolution adopted by the All India Muslim
League in 1940. The Pakistan Resolution formed the basis on which India
was divided and the Muslim power of Pakistan created on the Indian soil.
The transfer of power underlined the division of the entire British
Empire into two successor States: the Indian Dominion and the Dominion
of Pakistan. The Dominion of Pakistan was created of the Muslim majority
provinces or the Muslim majority parts of the Muslim majority provinces
and the Sylhet Division of the Hindu majority province of Assam. The
princely States which spread over one-third of the territory of India
and constituted one-fourth of the population of the Indian people were
left out of the partition plan to be integrated with either of the two
Dominions. Presumably, the States which were situated within the
territories of Pakistan were expected to join the state of Pakistan and
the remaining States, which spread across the rest of India including
Jammu and Kashmir, which were contiguous to the borders of India, were
expected to be integrated with India. That was exactly the spirit of the
agreement on the partition of India, arrived at Simla, among the
British, the Indian leaders and the leaders of the Muslim League. In
fact Nehru and the other Congress leaders, who expressed serious
misgivings about the lapse of the Paramountcy and the reversion of the
powers the Paramountcy to the rulers vesting in them the power to
determine the future disposition of their States in respect of their
accession, were given assurances by the British that the Indian leaders
would be free to unite the rest of India—the British Indian Provinces
and the princely States into one indivisible Union of India.
Evidently, the British gave assurances to the Congress leaders to
force the partition of India down their throats. However, after the June
3 Declaration of 1947, the Muslim League leaders lost little time to
smother into submission the princely States situated within the
territories of Pakistan with the support of the British, and no sooner
had they completed that task they turned to claim the Muslim majority
princely States as well as the Muslim ruled princely States, situated
all over the territories of India, for the Muslim homeland of Pakistan.
As the plan of Muslim League, surreptitiously supported by a section
of the British leadership at home and the British officials in whose
hands, the reins of Indian Government were, unfolded, the Congress
leaders and the people of India realized that after their defeat in
consequence of which they had accepted the partition of India, they were
face to face with another defeat: a major offensive mounted by the
Muslim League of which the objective was to create territorial pockets
of the Muslim power of Pakistan all over India interspersed within its
provinces and the States which acceded to it. While the Indian leaders
grappled desperately with the problem of integration with Mountbatten
laughing in his sleeves, the people of the Indian States, whom the
British as well as the Muslim League leaders had left of their reckoning
, rose to the occasion and drove their rulers , mainly those who were
more recalcitrant among them, to join India.
The Muslim League had insisted upon the lapse of Paramountcy and
stubbornly refused to accept the right of the peoples of the princely
States to determine their future disposition in respect of their
accession to either of the two Dominions in pursuance of the plan to use
the Muslim ruled States, of which a large number was spread across
India, to Balkanize the whole country, and establish territorial pockets
of Pakistan everywhere on the sub-continent. Pakistan invaded Jammu and
Kashmir, occupied nearly half of the State and was pressing to annex
the remaining part of it, and then deal with Junagadh and Hyderabad from
a position of strength. In both the States: Junagadh and Hyderabad, the
people were in a state of revolt against their rulers: in Junagadh for
the decision of their ruler to accede to Pakistan and in Hyderabad for
the intransigence of their ruler and his efforts to remain out of India
and align his State with Pakistan against their wishes.
In circumstances, where British and the Muslim League spared no
efforts to break up the unity of India and in which the Indian people
were fighting with their back to the wall to retrieve Junagadh and
Hyderabad to keep the South and West of India united and struggling to
save Jammu and Kashmir from being swallowed by Pakistan, to protect
their frontier in the north, the only moral imperative and democratic
necessity was to keep India united and defeat the designs of Muslim
League and the British , who sought to impose a plebiscite in Jammu and
Kashmir on the terms laid down by Pakistan and not in accordance with
the United Nations resolutions on Kashmir. The alternative proposals
made by the British and their allies in the Security Council, which
virtually proposed the holding of a plebiscite while half of the State
remained under the occupation of invading forces of Pakistan, including
the McNaughtan proposals and the Dixon Plan, were a prescription to
handover the State to Pakistan on a platter.
Noorani, intriguingly, does not mention anything about what the
United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan, did behind the scenes,
in the State, in sheer transgression of its terms of reference. The
author does not question the necessity of revising the original
proposals envisaged for the withdrawal of the invading army of Pakistan.
Nor does he explain the reasons for the United Nations Commission for
India and Pakistan to propose “a modification in the original plan of
demilitarization.” The author makes no comment on the recommendations
that, “the problem of demilitarization should be treated as a whole,
eliminating all distinctions, and comprising questions concerning the
final disposal of all armed forces in the State of Jammu and Kashmir.”
No government of India could have accepted the British and the American
proposals to throw out the Indian troops from Jammu and Kashmir, allowed
the State government to be set aside, and hand over the State to them
to decide its fate in a way, which suited their strategic interests in
the new bipolar balance of power in the post war world. Why should Nehru
have agreed to accept the McNaughton proposals and Dixon Plan, which
virtually underlined the repudiation of the agreement envisaged by the
United Nations resolutions on the demilitarization in Jammu and Kashmir
and seek the withdrawal of the Indian Army from the State, dissolution
of the State Government and a division of the State as suited their
interests in Asia? Nehru was saved by his intuition or intelligence he
must have received, which he kept to himself alone, about the role the
British were surreptitiously preparing to play in respect of the
Chinese preparations to annex Tibet and expose the Himalayas, more
specifically the Sanskrit Himalayas, to hitherto unknown pressures.
Mc Naughton proposals, Dixon Plan, and the Graham’s twelve point
scheme, were all aimed to neutralize the Indian position in the State.
The government of India had by this time learnt enough of how to
safeguard its vital interests and was able to see through the proposals
which the United Nations mediators made. In 1958, Graham was deputed
again to resume his mediatory efforts to bring about an agreement on the
implementation of the demilitarization of the State. Graham drew up a
four point formulation, which in essence underlined the stationing of
the United Nations troops in the occupied territories of the State after
the invading forces were withdrawn from there. The government of India
rejected the Graham’s proposals outright.
The process of the division of India came to its end with the British
withdrawal from India. The Muslim League leaders as well as the British
themselves, realized to their chagrin, that with whatever leverage the
British and their allies had in the Security Council, they could not
influence the events in India. The rendition of Junagadh and Hyderabad
followed as a matter of course subsequent to the transfer of power in
India. A plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir was never a “moral imperative”
and a “democratic necessity” for India. For the Indian policy in respect
of Kashmir, strategic considerations were a political necessity which
no government of India could overlook.
It has been already noted that the people of the Indian States, whom
the Muslim League as well as the British had left out of their
reckoning, played the central role in defeating the designs of the
Muslim League to use the princely States to break up India further. Had
the people of the States not fought their way to unite the States,
particularly those whose rulers were opposed to the unification of their
States with India, among them rulers of Junagadh and Hyderabad, the
Indian Army would not have been able to intervene to retrieve them. In
Jammu and Kashmir as well, the Hindus , Sikhs, Buddhists and the
Muslims, who supported the National Conference and who fought shoulder
to shoulder with the State army which kept the invading hordes at bay
and earned a long reprieve of five days, for the Indian Army to be able
to reach Srinagar and beat back the invasion.
The questions raised by Noorani in his study: “Did Sheikh Abdullah
indeed wish to accede to India? How strong were his representative
credentials on the accession? What was the people’s reaction to the
accession to India, once the immediate menace of the tribal raid was
over?” are sheer clichés to twist the history of those fateful days.
Noorani must not be unaware of the meeting between Meher Chand Mahajan,
the Prime Minister of Hari Singh, whom the Maharaja had sent to Nehru
with the offer of the accession of his State to India, while the State
army was fighting the last ditch battle to hold the advance of invading
army on the Jhelum Valley road. Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, who was
present there, nudged Nehru asking him not to waste any more time in
unnecessary argument with Mahajan and accept the Maharaja’s request and
send the Indian troops without any delay to save the State. Sheikh
Mohammad Abdullah knew what he was urging Nehru to do. Not being a
witness to what happened in Kashmir those days, the author would have
done himself good to have read the account of the National Conference
leaders or met them in order ascertain the support Abdullah received not
only from the Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists in the State, but the Muslims
of Kashmir as well.
Noorani’s book underlines the inevitability of the partition as a
historical necessity because the Muslims in India demanded a separate
freedom for themselves on the basis of their territorial claim to that
part of India where they formed a majority. The study also underlines
the inevitability of the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to Pakistan on
the same basis that it was a Muslim majority princely State and
therefore rightfully belonged to Pakistan.
The Hindus and other non-Muslim communities in India had not claimed
freedom from the British rule on the basis of their demographic
composition. They had claimed the freedom for India, on the basis that
India was an indivisible unity, which had a right to freedom from the
British colonial rule. The division of India, imposed upon them by the
Muslim League, in collusion with the British, to secure the Muslims of
India, who formed a small fraction of the population of India, a
separate freedom, which was different from the freedom they had fought
for, was an irreparable wrong done to them. The territorial claim the
Muslim League made on the basis of the Muslim majority composition of
the British Indian provinces and the Muslim majority States or the
Muslim ruled States, was fictitious claim, original to the Muslims of
India, a distortion of history. The allegation that wrong was done to
the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir, for not recognizing their separate
freedom, is also a distortion of history and a part of the fictitious
claim to a separate freedom, which formed the basis of the foundations
of Pakistan.
The argument which pervades the whole length of the author’s study
was then, as it is now, inconsistent with the way, the partition of
India was foisted on the Indian people and the insistence of the Muslim
League on the lapse of Paramountcy, which the British supported in their
own interests. The author is, however, unable to come out of the time-
warp in which the Muslim homeland of Pakistan was not able to assume the
territorial proportions, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League
envisioned for it.
Noorani notes in his study: “Myths were spawned and still persist.
Few know that it was India which invoked the religious factor in a
formal proposal on Novemeber1, 1947, and spoke stridently of the
religious principle underlying the partition. India’s pain at the
dismemberment of its territorial integrity was justified. But that very
factor justified Pakistan’s pain at Kashmir’s accession to India, which
only Cyril Radcliff’s controversial award of Gurdaspur in August 1947,
made possible. Genuinely or otherwise Mountbatten rued the award later
in his talks with Dominique Lapierrie and Larry Collins. The road and
river communications were with Pakistan exclusively.” The content of
the quote from the author’s study formed the main burden of the
Pakistan’s propaganda broadcast from its radio network in Pakistan as
well as the “Azad Kashmir Radio” from Muzaffarabad in the occupied
territories those days in 1947, which followed the accession of Jammu
and Kashmir to India. Obviously, except propaganda and perpetration of
falsehood, who in India and Pakistan believed then or would believe now,
that the religious criterion for the transfer of power in India, was
not made on the foundation of the demand for a separate homeland of
Pakistan, or the inclusion of the Muslim majority princely States, as
well Muslim ruled princely States in its territories.
Noorani and all those who advocate concessions to Pakistan in Jammu
and Kashmir to settle the issue are not aware of the whole context of
the religious factor being brought in the discussion on the accession of
the States or have deliberately tried to hide the ugly truth behind it.
They, perhaps, do not know that Mountbatten was no votary of the unity
of the princely States with India and immediately after the 3 June
declaration of 1947, he conveyed to the princes that those among them,
who wanted to continue their existing relations with the British Crown,
could convey to him their requests to continue their relations with the
British and he would forward them for consideration of the Home
Government. After the British Government made it clear that they would
not recognize either independence of the Princely states or accord them a
Dominion Status, he lost no time to pay a visit Kashmir to persuade
Hari Singh to come to terms with Pakistan. A bewildered Maharaja, who
collected himself sooner than Mountbatten thought he would, sent the
Viceroy to the Indian capital empty handed.
The British and their Crown Representative in India were interested
in including Jammu and Kashmir in the Muslim homeland of Pakistan, to
protect their own interests in Asia and for the protection of the sea
routes across the Indian Ocean from the Gulf to the Malacca Straits. It
was with the interests of his country in view, that Mountbatten proposed
the settlement of the States on the basis of their demographic
composition A section of the Congress leadership approved of his
proposals, reluctantly though, out of the fear, which the activities of
the Muslim princes and the unscrupulous dealings of the British
officials, including the British Resident officers posted in the
princely States as well as the State Department and its chief Conrad
Cornfield, created. Mountbatten made a public announcement of his
proposals, when in his last address to the Chamber of Princes, he urged
upon them to accede to the either of the dominions on the basis of the
geographical position of their States as well as the composition of
their population.
Jammu and Kashmir did not form a part of the north-western India as
Noorani want readers of his study to believe. It formed a part of the
north of India and its borders in the north-west and north were rimmed
by Afghanistan, Chinese Sinkiang and in the north-east and east by Tibet
and India in the south-east and south. Controversy over the Radcliffe
Award was sheer propaganda made by Pakistan, and did not form a part of
the discussions in the Boundary Commission of the Punjab, which was
constituted of Justice Din Mohammad and Justice Mohammad Munir,
representing the Muslims of the Punjab and Justice Meher Chand Mahajan
and Justice Teja Singh representing the Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab
respectively, and Sir Radcliffe, who was its Chairman. Radcliffe was an
Englishman who was independent in his outlook and enjoyed great
reputation in England, and looked straight at his task and to the
chagrin the Muslim League leaders, did not listen to their
remonstrations as the friends of the British Empire in India. The
discussion in the Commission and the Award Radcliffe made, show that all
the members of the Commission knew of the actualities of the borders of
Jammu and Kashmir and their contiguity to India and Pakistan. In fact,
Din Mohammad and Muhammad Munir, unmatched in their intelligence and
understanding, told Mahajan and Teja Singh, when they made a mention of
keeping the road link between Jammu and Kashmir and Madhopur and
Pathankot Tehsils of the Gurdaspur district open, that Jammu and Kashmir
could build a road which would connect Kathua, on the Jammu Madhopur
road, directly with the nearest of the Punjab Hill States, which had
acceded to India.
The Tehsil of Pathankot could not by any means be included in the
West Punjab because it was predominantly a Hindu majority Tehsil, and
the Punjab Boundary Commission had not followed district boundaries as a
basis of the demarcation of the boundary line between the East and the
West Punjab and at many places it cut through the district boundaries.
Radcliff was conscious of the security of the district of Amritsar,
which could not go to West Punjab as well as the laying down of the
defensible border between the two countries. He gave contiguous Tehsils
of the district of Gurdaspur to East Punjab, leaving out the Tehsil of
Shakargarh for the West Punjab.
Maharaja Hari Singh, the author has admitted, played his part to
thwart the efforts of the Muslim League leaders to deprive him of access
to Madhopur in Pathankot. He made no mistake to read the intention of
the League leaders to choke him and his State by closing all
communication lines, which connected his State with India and ran into
the West Punjab. The Jhelum Valley Road, which the author notes was the
only channel of communication between the State with the outside world
is not correct.
As already noted in the first paper, there was a railway line which
connected Jammu and Sialkot with a tarmac road running alongside from
Sialkot to Jammu. Both ran into Pakistan. The impression the author
seeks to create and quotes Mountbatten’s interview in support of his
contention that Radcliff Award had given access to otherwise land locked
State, is a travesty of actual facts. Jammu and Kashmir had a long
border with the Punjab hill States and a communication line could be
built without much difficulty which would connect the State with India.
How does Mountbatten’s comment of Radcliff Award add weight to the
author’s argument? Who of the British officers in India, including the
Governors of the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province, besides
Mountbatten, were not angry with both Radcliff as well as Hari Singh?
The historical forces which compelled the British to leave India, were
bound to take their own course and the people of the princely States
determined their direction.
Noorani begins his narrative with lamentation which reflects the
commitment of the Muslims of Kashmir for a separate freedom that they
have been struggling for the last six decades. The author notes, “ If
fifty seven years later the soul of Kashmir is in torment and cry for
azadi, it is because despite the profuse professions and pledges, Nehru
cared little for, still less Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the last of all the
British. The people have been in revolt, pelting stones rather than
bullets. Nobody alleges Pakistan’s aid and complicity. The harsh truth
is that which Nehru and his successors, as well as Indian media and
academia, suppressed for long, is now out in the open.”The author is
very plaintively, repeating the claim, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the
Muslim League leaders made in 1947, that the Muslim majority parts of
India, formed a part of the Muslim homeland of Pakistan and should be
recognized so.
Nearly half of the State is already a part of Pakistan. The Gilgit-
Baltistan division of the Ladakh Frontier is now an integral province of
Pakistan. The rest of the occupied part of the State is also a part of
the Islamic Republic of Pakistan though it has a separate constitution.
The Constitution of ‘Azad Kashmir’ says that “no law shall be repugnant
to the teaching and requirements of Islam as set out in Quran and
Sunnah.” The Constitution further provides that one-third of the total
members of the Legislative Assembly of the State can refer for advice,
questions of doubt, in respect of any issue to the “Council of Islamic
Ideology constituted under the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of
Pakistan.” For the author, though he very deftly refuses to admit,
without expressly denying it, the occupied territories of the State have
joined the Muslim homeland of Pakistan in accordance with the claims of
Muslim League laid to Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Muslim
majority composition of the population of the State. The Kashmir
dispute, the author seeks to convey to the Indian people, is now reduced
to the liberation of the part of the State on the Indian side of the
Line of Control, from the Indian occupation.
Like Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Muslim league leaders, the author’s
concern is to ensure separate freedom to the Muslims of Jammu and
Kashmir, which enables them to realize their Islamic destiny. The hurt
he feels finds expression in his rhetoric about the denial of the
freedom, which the Muslims in Kashmir aspired for. He writes in the
concluding part of the first volume of his study, “the people are not
bereft of souls. They have aspirations, feelings and memories of wrongs.
2012 is not 1986. It takes about a small incident that hurts the
people’s feelings and revives memories of wrongs to set Kashmir aflame.
It happened in 2009 and 2010 and can happen any time. Only a political
settlement will satisfy the people.” The author identifies the people of
the State with Muslims. So do the entire brand of peaceniks and a
section of Indian political class identify the people of the state with
merely Muslims.
Four million of the ten million people living in Jammu and Kashmir on
the Indian side of the Line of Control are Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists.
They have, as sacrosanct a right on every inch of their land, as the
six million Muslims have. They are also not “bereft of souls”, they also
have aspirations, feelings and memories of wrongs. They have been
living in the enslavement of a situation created by Pakistan and those
who seek freedom for Jammu and Kashmir from “the Indian occupation”.
However, they are not a concern of the author, because they do not
support the freedom of the State from India. The author’s main concern
is to seek the freedom of the Muslims of Kashmir from India, which would
open the way for the Muslim power of Pakistan to reach Shivalik plains,
situated to the west of the river Ravi in the south and the Sanskrit
Himalayas in the north.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah asked for the division of the British India to
carve out the Muslim power of Pakistan. After he had secured the
division of the British India, he foisted the lapse of Paramountcy on
the Indian people to find a way to unite Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan
and break up the Indian princely States to spread Muslim power all over
India in territorial pockets, the Muslim ruled States waited for.
Jinnah had to contend with the people of the States and their
aspirations for freedom in a United India for which they had fought for
half a century. He failed in spite of the support he received from the
British to divide India further. To force the freedom of the “Muslim
Kashmir” on the people of India, Pakistan, the Muslim separatist flanks
in Kashmir and whosoever supports them, will have to contend with the
Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists of the State along with the Muslims who
stand by them. They cannot be deprived of their freedom, on the ground
that the Muslims form a majority of the population of the State on the
Indian side of Line of Control.
The freedom that the author alleges the Muslims of the State have
been denied by India is not the freedom, which nations of the world have
fought for: freedom from oppression and exploitation, and
discrimination on the basis of religion, right to liberty and freedom,
right to freedom of faith and right to protection against persecution.
Pakistan, the Muslim Separatist forces and the Jehadi war groups, which
have been waging a religious war in the State during last two decades,
are seeking a “separate freedom” for the Muslims of the State. The
freedom which the author has vexed so eloquently about in his study, is
“the separate freedom” which formed the basis of the division of
India—the “separate freedom” which lead to the creation of the Islamic
Republic of Pakistan and the “separate freedom” which is aimed to ensure
unification of the part of the Jammu and Kashmir state on the Indian
side of the Line of Control with Pakistan. The freedom, the Muslim
separatist flanks in the State are fighting for, has nothing local
emanating from the soil of Jammu and Kashmir: Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and
the Buddhists aspired for and fought for, shoulder to shoulder with the
people of India against the princely rule as well as the British
Paramountcy.
(Dr Mohan Krishen Teng retired as the Head of Department of
Political Sciences of Kashmir University. He has written extensively on
the political and the constitutional history of Jammu and Kashmir with
more than 13 books to his credit. His seminal works have been Article
370, Special Status, Myth of Autonomy, Government and Politics, and
Northern Frontiers of India. )
