WHO HAS NOT HEARD OF THE VALE OF CASHMERE?
FOR THE NATIONS OF the Indian subcontinent, as for the rest of the colonial world, the twentieth century peaked at Independence. Triumph in the freedom struggle brought its expected rewards-self-determination, international recognition, more accountable government and a new pride of purpose. But the subsequent enjoyment of these rewards, the constraints encountered in their exercise and the means taken to safeguard them produced half a century of erratic progress marred by internal discord and mutual aggression. In both of the successor states – and all three after 1971 – prime ministers were assassinated and constitutions suspended. India and Pakistan fought three wars in as many decades, then left a nuclear fourth well within the bounds of possibility. And all governments repeatedly felt obliged to deploy their military might against their own subjects. Looking back, the century’s first fifty years of struggle and sacrifice seem more admirable than the last fifty years. Wisdom and energy have not been lacking, nor achievement. It is just that the horrors that accompanied Independence, the hatreds they stirred and the fears they fuelled are still capable of generating suspicion and triggering violence. The Partition of the subcontinent remains unfinished business.
Such was the impact of Partition, both politically and psychologically, that it came to be regarded as the century’s defining event, a periodising landmark worthy of a capital letter just like ‘Independence’. Indeed the currency of the term ‘post-Partition India’ soon eclipsed that of ‘post-Independence India’. For many, an experience so catastrophic had, like Hiroshima or the Holocaust, to be constantly recalled and re-emphasised if it was not to be repeated. For others, its grim logic of two irreconcilable communities had to be pursued to the bitter end through further acts of provocation and assertion. Either way, Partition stalked the collective memory and still moulds the thinking of the entire subcontinent.
‘There are no full stops in India,’ declared Mark Tully in his 1991 collection of contemporary Indian parables.1 In a land better known for continuities and commas, the course of history was not so much halted by Partition’s clumsy punctuation as plagued by it. There was in fact a succession of partitions – that of all British India in 1947, that which immediately followed it of the erstwhile provinces of Panjab and Bengal, that in 1971 of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and that still unendorsed and hence ongoing of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. In addition to ‘partition’ – a decidedly flimsy term with a hint of impermanence about it – words like ‘vivisection’ (Gandhi’s coinage), ‘amputation’ (another Delhi favourite) and ‘surgical separation’ (as of conjoined twins – Pakistan’s preference) were freely bandied about. To Hindus it seemed as if Mother India had herself been ‘dismembered’, ‘violated’ and ‘disfigured’, just like the raped women and bayoneted children whom confessional zealots of both sides had regarded as soft targets. There were scars to prove the pertinence of such grisly imagery and they were as much personal as public. For the pen and the knife had sundered not just territory but cosy lives, promising careers, protective families, bosom friendships and interdependent communities. In bustling businesses, convivial common rooms, hallowed mess halls, dank prison cells and even the odd lunatic asylum the parting of the ways left gaping voids.
More obviously the consequences of so many partitions, the reluctance to accept them and the fear of more dictated the foreign relations and slewed the economic development of both successor states. The risk of lesser partitions also haunted domestic politics and dominated the language of internal dissent. As if rocked by identical earth tremors, India and Pakistan would lurch from one separatist crisis to the next for fifty years.
In October 1947 no sooner were the horrors of Panjab’s partition beginning to subside than the two countries found themselves at war over Kashmir. Each had assumed that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir would pledge allegiance to itself; anything less they regarded as secession; and since neither would compromise, there began the most protracted partition of all. In the weeks prior to Independence most of the princely states had acceded to the new Indian Union and were now being bundled into digestible entities, like Rajasthan, prior to being merged into the Union with the former provinces. The princes accepted these arrangements reluctantly and in return for generous personal allowances (or ‘privy purses’) plus various fiscal and civil privileges. Technically they could opt for either Pakistan or India, and the few princely states that lay west of the Panjab frontier did indeed join Pakistan. But the vast majority were within, or contiguous to, the new India and duly became part of it.
Serious problems arose in respect of just three states. One, Junagadh in the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat, was too insignificant to provoke an international crisis. Predominantly Hindu, surrounded by Indian territory, proudly possessed of that Ashoka rock inscription at Girnar and once the home of the Sanskrit-loving Rudradaman and the brightly toed Maitrakas, little Junagadh was never going to be other than part of the new India. Nor, aside from his personal preference as a Muslim and his consequent declaration for Pakistan, was Junagadh’s ruler of a stature to give Congress and Vallabhai Patel, its strong-arm negotiator, too much trouble. At the time an estimated 11 per cent of Junagadh’s revenues were earmarked for the upkeep of the royal kennels where around 800 canine pensioners lived in a luxury denied to most of Junagadh’s other subjects. To the nuptials of a favourite golden retriever the prince is said to have invited 50,000 dog-loving guests, including the viceroy. His decision to declare in favour of Pakistan partook of a similar indifference to convention and, however piously intended, met with short shrift from Delhi. A show of strength duly sent him winging his way to Karachi with just four wagging companions and a like number of wives. Pakistan of course protested. Although unwilling to risk war on behalf of such a maverick, it continued to regard the state’s accession as legal – which it was. To this day maps printed in Pakistan record the fact with a little patch of green in the middle of Indian Gujarat. Less remembered is the role played in this affair by Shahnawaz Bhutto, the chief minister of Junagadh in 1947. Having encouraged the prince to accede to Pakistan, it was this Bhutto who, after his employer’s flight, cleared the way for Indian intervention. Twenty-four years later Shahnawaz’s son, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, would play a similarly ambivalent role in respect of East Bengal/Bangladesh.
A situation like that of Junagadh but of wider import arose in the great state of Hyderabad. With more diamonds than dogs, Hyderabad’s nizam was a devout Muslim, a reclusive patron of Islamic culture and the legatee of the illustrious Deccan sultanates. Yet he held sway over a land-locked chunk of the now otherwise wholly Indian peninsula and over a considerable population that was predominantly Hindu. To Nehru and Patel it was therefore unthinkable that he should do other than join the new India. But the nizam’s advisers prevaricated – not so much in this case between India and Pakistan as between joining either or making a bid for independence. Technically independence was not an option, though Hyderabad had as good a case for it as anywhere having at one time been slated as ‘Usmanistan’, a possible sovereign component along with Pakistan and Hindustan (that is, the new India) in an all-India federation. With international attention focused on the fate of the nizam, Delhi backed down and offered a year’s grace in which Hyderabad was to come to its senses. It proved to be but a stay of execution. No decision being forthcoming, in September 1948 Indian troops unceremoniously rolled across the state’s borders. Naturally Pakistan again protested; but the nizam, confronted by Delhi’s so-called ‘police action’, had little choice other than to spare his people bloodshed and plump for India. He duly signed on the dotted line; and Pakistani maps duly memorialise his plight with a much bigger green blob in the heart of peninsular India.
By then a precedent for such strong-arm tactics had already been set in the composite state of Jammu and Kashmir. There, however, the situation was reversed: a Hindu maharaja ruled a mainly non-Hindu state. Parts, notably Ladakh on the Tibet border, had a Buddhist majority, while others, like Jammu on the Panjab border, contained a large Hindu component. But the vast mountain territories beyond the Indus that had been awarded to past maharajas for Britain’s strategic convenience were overwhelmingly Muslim, and so was the densely populated ‘vale of Cashmere’. On the principle, adopted in Panjab and Bengal, that contiguous Muslim majority areas automatically pertained to Pakistan, Jinnah had no doubt that the whole state should accede to his new republic. Without the ‘k’ in the acronym that was ‘Pakistan’, the name of that country would be a mockery and the ‘two-nation theory’ on which its existence was based would be discredited. Moreover if the states of Junagadh and Hyderabad were being claimed by Delhi regardless of the wishes of their rulers and purely on the basis of their Hindu majority, then the state of Jammu and Kashmir belonged to Pakistan regardless of its ruler’s wishes and purely on the basis of its Muslim majority.
There were, though, other considerations. Kashmir had a particular resonance for the Nehru family who, as Kashmiri pandits (Hindu teachers), originally hailed from the valley. A temperate land of lotus lakes, alpine pastures and snow-tipped mountains, it had always appealed to the Indian imagination; it had often been the prize of Delhi’s rulers; and as part of the new India it could expect star billing in every tourist brochure and a locational role in every Bollywood romance. Additionally, the accession to the new India of such a notably Muslim state would be seen as triumphant vindication of the secular (that is, neutral as to religion) stance adopted by Congress in contradiction of Pakistan’s unashamedly confessional appeal. To this end Congress had earlier forged links with a local movement known as the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. A political front under the leadership of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, the National Conference had been demanding from the maharaja, Hari Singh, greater popular representation ever since the 1930s. Moreover Abdullah, an imposing figure otherwise known as ‘Sheikh Sahib’ or the ‘Lion of Kashmir’, was friendly with Nehru, shared his leftist sympathies and deemed the easy-going Islam of most Kashmiri Muslims more compatible with India’s avowed secularism than with Pakistan’s obvious sectarianism. Abdullah, if anyone, could claim to speak for a substantial number of Kashmiris; and popular support (in so far as such a thing could be ascertained) being a desideratum of accession, his role in deciding the state’s future was as crucial as that of Maharaja Hari Singh himself.
Independence Day found both men in trouble. Sheikh Abdullah was in a Srinagar gaol for advocating that the maharaja ‘Quit Kashmir’, and Maharaja Hari Singh was in a dilemma. The sheikh’s National Conference had fallen foul not just of the maharaja but of a rival party with close links to Jinnah’s Muslim League, while Hari Singh, facing popular opposition as a hereditary autocrat plus mounting Muslim suspicion as a Delhi-inclined Hindu, could neither decide between India and Pakistan nor expect his subjects to respect his decision. The case of Switzerland, another land-locked mountain playground, was sometimes cited, and arguably both Sheikh Sahib and the maharaja would have preferred such a neutral and independent status. But as with Hyderabad this was not an option, especially in the case of somewhere whose frontiers marched not only with both of the successor states but also with China and very nearly with the Soviet Union. Neither Delhi, Karachi nor the British cared to contemplate such a strategically vital region conducting its own affairs. Nor was the idea of an independent Kashmir something around which its communally fractured and faction-ridden peoples could be expected to unite.
For two months Kashmir’s fate hung in the balance. Delhi and Karachi traded claim and counterclaim; Hari Singh writhed on the horns of his Himalayan dilemma. Then on 22 October 1947 events overtook them. A truck-mounted incursion of Islamic partisans from the Pathan tribal regions of what was now Pakistan rumbled up the only road into the Kashmir valley and so, by claiming to be its liberators, pitched the maharaja into the open arms of his Indian co-religionists. Fearing that his rule was about to be overthrown, he appealed to Delhi for help and agreed that the just-released Sheikh Abdullah should treat with Nehru. Four days later the state’s accession to India as signified by the maharaja’s assent and the sheikh’s involvement brought its due reward. To resist the invaders, Indian Dakotas, twenty-eight a day, began airlifting troops into Srinagar, the state capital. The first Indo-Pak war had begun.
More Muslim volunteers from northern Pakistan poured into the Kashmir valley, there to be joined by levies from the Indus peoples in the far west of the state. But neither side officially declared war. In Pakistan’s case, although high-level collusion with the invaders undoubtedly existed, no regular military units were deployed; and the Kashmiris themselves proved as indifferent to their Pakistani ‘liberators’ as to their Indian ‘saviours’. Unwelcomed by the natives and unaided by the deployment of Pakistani regulars, the invaders were slowly driven back down the valley. But when in late 1948 the United Nations brokered a ceasefire, an extensive arc of mountainous terrain surrounding the valley remained outside India’s control (it would henceforth be known as Pakistan’s ‘Northern Areas’), as did the western end of the valley itself. Hailed as Azad -‘Free’ – Kashmir, this last entity was constituted as a self-governing but Pakistan-sponsored ‘state’ pending settlement of the status of the whole state. India held the rest – Jammu, Ladakh and most of the Kashmir Valley – and immediately began building and tunnelling a road link through the mountains (the valley was otherwise accessible only from Pakistan) plus two summeronly roads over the high passes to Ladakh.
The ceasefire line remained, and though readjusted and reformulated as the ‘Line of Control’ in 1972, still remains just that, the line at which the firing was supposed to have ceased. It obeyed no geographic or strategic logic, let alone economic or social convenience. And though implying a de facto partition, it was not recognised as an international frontier by either India or Pakistan. Nor, therefore, did transgressing it constitute an act of war. The firing would not in fact cease, and the Line itself would continue to be contested. When in 1965 Pakistan provoked a second war with India, it was Kashmir that would provide both pretext and battleground. Then when in 1971 a third Indo-Pak conflict resulted from Indian intervention in East Bengal/Bangladesh, it was along the Kashmir Line that India made its only, albeit modest, gains.
And so it continues. In 1984 India grabbed a frozen wilderness known as the Siachen Glacier that had hitherto been uncontested, then in 1999 Pakistan infiltrated the heights above the strategic Srinagar-Leh road at Kargil. Each incident was deemed a ‘war’ by the aggrieved party, provoking retaliatory counter-strikes and fuelling fears of a wider engagement – fears that assumed horrific dimensions with the testing of nuclear weapons by both countries in 1998 and the radicalisation of the Kashmiris themselves in the jihadist fall-out from the wars in Afghanistan. Meanwhile the UN corps in Kashmir, perhaps the longest-serving on record, has no peacekeeping role; it merely observes and monitors violations. Other contentious issues dividing the successor nations have been laboriously resolved. But Kashmir has not. ‘Peace processes’ are no sooner identified than a new outrage brings their suspension amid recrimination and further troop deployments. The tragic saga of Indo-Pak relations since 1947 still revolves around the issue of Kashmir.
All along, India has rested its case on the maharaja’s accession, plus the popular support supposedly afforded by Sheikh Abdullah’s endorsement. The first, the maharaja’s decision, might have been conclusive had not India emphatically rejected princely preference in the case of Junagadh (and arguably of Hyderabad). As for the sheikh, somewhat shaky were his credentials as the representative of all shades of Kashmiri opinion and even more shaky was his subsequent attitude towards integration with India. Over the next quarter of a century, more of which he spent in Indian detention as a separatist than in government as an integrationist, these two factors seemed to be related. His support among Kashmiris waxed with his increasingly outspoken criticism of Delhi and waned with his occasional endorsement of the status quo.
Pakistan’s case rested on the surer, but not decisive, grounds of the state’s undisputed Muslim majority, plus Nehru’s failure to honour a pledge given to the UN as part of the 1948 ceasefire deal that a plebiscite would be held to ascertain the wishes of the people. Delhi countered with the argument that a plebiscite was not possible until Pakistan withdrew all troops from the state (some had been stationed in the Northern Areas), nor was it in fact necessary since the wishes of the people could be inferred from the sheikh’s participation in the act of accession and from later Indian-sponsored elections in the Indian-held part of the state. Certainly a 1948 plebiscite throughout the whole of the erstwhile state would have strained to breaking point the resources of the UN, not to mention the good faith of the interested parties. On the other hand, so insensitive was Delhi’s treatment of the sheikh – and of the state – that a plebiscite which in 1948 might conceivably have gone in its favour would subsequently almost certainly have gone against it. Delhi dismissed such thoughts. The matter was now closed; there was no ‘Kashmir problem’; India’s claim to those parts of the state outwith its control was not pressed, and the existing Ceasefire Line/Line of Control was touted as semi-permanent. But in assuming closure on terms that took no account of popular sentiment in Pakistan, nor of the existential threat that an alienated Kashmir posed to that state, Delhi was being hopelessly unrealistic. The Kashmir problem was not about to go away.
DIVIDING AND SPOILING
Partition meant a division of British India’s institutions, assets and responsibilities as well as of its people and territory. Everything from the air force to the exchequer and from the stationery stores to the national debt had to be meticulously apportioned between the successor states. Overall the new India, by virtue of a population more than five times that of Pakistan and a landmass more than four times, did well out of this division of the spoils. It inherited most of the country’s infrastructure, nearly all its industrial, mineral, commercial and agricultural enterprises and a disproportionate share of its private capital. Because Hindus and other non-Muslims were especially well represented in education, the law and the administration, it also inherited the staff for an effective government, including the vast majority of those non-Britons who had gained entry to the elite Indian Civil and Political Services.
The new India had much else in its favour. At the provincial level the long-established governments of the Madras, Bombay, Central and United provinces remained fully operational, largely unaffected by Partition and little depleted by emigration. In addition, India’s portion of partitioned Bengal brought with it Calcutta, still the country’s greatest metropolis; its portion of partitioned Panjab brought Simla, the summer retreat of the raj; and in New Delhi its incoming government succeeded to a custom-built capital of majestic dimensions complete with parliament building, secretariat, head of state’s residence, embassies, archives, monuments and all the other emblematic structures of statehood. The Union, and soon to be Republic, of India (after the 1950 adoption of a new constitution) was thus a going concern from day one. The reins of power had but to be gathered up. Constitutional experts, social scientists and economic planners could begin work immediately recasting the state as the strong, socialist, secular and non-aligned democracy of Nehru’s dreams. As the Congress-wallahs in their Gandhi caps and Nehru jackets streamed through the secretariat’s colonnades on Delhi’s Raisina Hill, few of them doubted that their new India was the direct and undisputed successor of the mighty raj.
It was very different in the two extremities of the ex-raj that constituted Pakistan. Separated by 1500 kilometres of an already hostile India, bipolar Pakistan lacked not just physical integrity but almost every other requisite of statehood. Here the power being transferred by the British was more potential than actual. The organs of government had to be created from scratch, staffed from a mere handful of senior administrators with the necessary qualifications and experience, and funded from a pitiful share of undivided India’s cash balances. Of the five provinces and part-provinces that composed the new country, none furnished a reassuring example of stability; nor did any of them have much in common with the others save, of course, religion. The two most populous were maimed products of partition: East Bengal with an economy heavily dependent on jute came minus Calcutta, the processing centre and port for all jute exports, while west Panjab with its prosperous canal colonies came minus a guarantee of adequate water from what were now the Indian-held rivers on which its irrigation depended. As for the other provinces, Sind was a recent creation still economically dependent on the Bombay province from which it had been carved twelve years earlier, and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) boasted a record of such hostility to the Muslim League that at the time of Partition it still had a Congress ministry. Finally Baluchistan, most of it either a tribal region or under princely jurisdiction, was openly defiant. In 1948 a deal was struck between its principal ruler and Jinnah but large parts remained semi-autonomous for the next thirty years.
Formulated with more enthusiasm than precision, and then realised far sooner than expected, Pakistan was further hobbled by a set of fundamental contradictions. The nation’s premise was its shared faith, yet the role that Islam was to play remained undefined, as did the preferred form of that faith. Addressing Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly just before Independence Jinnah had sounded much like Nehru:
You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan … You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.2
If this was meant to reassure the commercially influential non-Muslim community in Sind (Panjab and the NWFP were already being confessionally cleansed), it failed; most of Karachi’s Hindus migrated to Bombay or Gujarat. Secular sentiments – like ‘religion having nothing to do with the business of the state’ – though congenial to many and much quoted by opponents of Islamicisation, barely survived Partition in public utterances. Within six months they were being contradicted by Quaid-i-Azam (‘Supreme Leader’) Jinnah himself when he casually invoked the goal of an Islamic state, in fact ‘a truly great Islamic state’. The rationale was simple: any nation defined by its faith must, if it was to realise its full potential, adopt principles and policies in conformity with that faith.
Yet the prospect of a doctrinal state was widely contested and was problematic in itself. For while protestations of Islamic intent were always useful in papering over the divisions and insecurities that beset the new state, they also exposed the credentials of any government that dabbled in them. In the ideal Islamic state sovereignty lies with Allah, laws are preordained by the sharia and their interpretation rests with the scholarly ulema. A role for the masses and their legislating representatives depends on the questionable assumption that this sovereignty has been devolved to the people by some divine dispensation. Even then the recipients of such delegated authority are generally taken to be the worldwide Muslim community, the dar-ul-Islam, an entity that transcends all lesser loyalties, political, ethnic or territorial. Quranic sanction for the competitive instincts of a localised ‘nation’-state, albeit one based on the Muslim component of a subcontinent, would be hard to discern. Thus in the run-up to Partition most of the doctrinal parties (orJamaat), far from supporting the call for Pakistan, had in fact opposed it.
There were other contradictions that were inherent in the two-nation theory on which Pakistan was based. The theory had originally been formulated and championed by the Muslim elite in UP (the United Provinces, later Uttar Pradesh). As a vocal but vulnerable minority within an overwhelmingly Hindu province, UP’s Muslims had espoused the idea of a separate Muslim nationhood in order to challenge the supremacist claims of Congress and safeguard the electoral advantage afforded them by the British system of separate electorates for Muslim minorities. When in 1940 Jinnah’s Muslim League made the two-nation theory its own, UP was therefore its natural constituency and provided many of its leaders, including Liaquat Ali Khan, its general secretary. On the other hand, provinces with a Muslim majority like Bengal, Panjab, Sind and the NWFP had shown little interest in the idea; indeed they opposed it, being happier with the opportunities and leverage already available to them as Muslim majorities in autonomous provinces. Not until 1945 and the advent of a Labour government at Westminster did the likelihood of an imminent British withdrawal shift the focus from the provinces to New Delhi and lend urgency to the question of who was to control power at the centre.
Jinnah had taken full advantage of this twist. The Muslim League mobilised as never before and its propagandists poured into the Muslim majority provinces. Their message was simple: unless all Muslims rallied behind the League’s ‘Pakistan’, a ‘Hindu raj’ at the centre would ride roughshod over both Muslim rights and provincial autonomy. This did the trick. At last, and with the exception of the NWFP, the Muslim majority provinces responded. Jinnah’s triumph in the 1946 elections was rightly hailed as a‘breakthrough’ and a ‘turnaround’. The League’s claim to represent Muslims throughout the subcontinent had been vindicated, as had Jinnah’s claim to be their ‘sole spokesman’.
But this ‘breakthrough’ had been hastily contrived, the ‘turnaround’ might be easily reversed and with the achievement of nationhood the ‘sole spokesman’ would need a new script. Lacking an organisational base in the Muslim majority provinces, the League had relied heavily on accommodations with existing parties and power-brokers plus the appeal of ‘Pakistan’, a cry so emotive that few had cared to define it. Had they done so, they would have realised that the two-nation theory when applied to the provinces of Panjab and Bengal, both of which had nearly as many non-Muslims as Muslims, might well mean their dissection. Thus the two most productive provinces of the notional Pakistan would be deprived of their existing integrity regardless of what happened to their autonomy. Meanwhile Muslim minorities in provinces far from Pakistan’s core territories and so not susceptible to partition, like UP, could only wring their hands in despair – or pack their bags. In effect, Partition meant that the Muslim majority provinces that had been most ambivalent about separate nationhood got to enjoy it and those in the Muslim minority provinces who had championed it were left to fend for themselves.
Much followed from this paradoxical outcome. For one thing, the Muslim League in Pakistan, in marked contrast to the Congress in India, lacked an organisational base and a political pedigree. It was more like a single-issue coalition of assorted landowning and service elites than the mouthpiece of a nation or the product of a groundswell of grievances and aspirations. Though indeed riding a wave of popular support, the League, once its objective of nationhood had been achieved, could neither presume on whole-hearted support in Pakistan’s provinces nor rely, like Congress, on an elaborate country-wide structure of elected party delegates and boards committed to the implementation of its policies.
Nor, for that matter, had the League a pre-agreed programme awaiting implementation. In Pakistan’s peculiarly fraught circumstances, establishing an effective government came first; and for that the immediate priority was simply survival. Despite expectations of collapse – gloatingly aired in India, gloomily confided in Pakistan – it did survive, though the same could not be said of its seniormost leadership. Tragically, within thirteen months of Independence, M. A. Jinnah, the founding father, first governor-general (effectively president), living embodiment of the League and undisputed ‘supreme leader’ of the nation, lay dead of cancer (September 1948). Then three years later Liaquat Ali Khan, his long-serving deputy and the nation’s first prime minister, was assassinated (October 1951). The League was left leaderless and the nation spokesmanless. In India it was the other way round: ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi was assassinated within months of Independence (January 1948), while natural causes claimed Vallabhai Patel three years later (December 1950). The loss and the sense of national bereavement tinged with guilt were identical on both sides. But whereas India retained the services of another founding father in the redoubtable Jawaharlal Nehru, Pakistan was orphaned into the care of ill-assorted godfathers, many of them in uniform.
Wider issues of survival were paramount on both sides of the new border. In the midst of these leadership crises the new governments were grappling with a monumental refugee problem. Over a period of weeks in the west (Panjab, Rajasthan and Delhi) but of years in the east (Bengal, Bihar and Assam), up to 7 million Muslims are thought to have fled India for Pakistan, and rather more than 7 million non-Muslims to have fled Pakistan for India. They arrived, if they did in fact arrive, in a state of destitution. The reception, feeding, accommodation, rehabilitation and re-employment of such numbers would have taxed the resources of a superpower. Both governments rose heroically to the challenge; there was even some mutual collaboration in dealing with it. But Pakistan was at a marked disadvantage. For while 7 million into India’s 300 million was manageable, 7 million into Pakistan’s 70 million was less so, especially when another 60 million Muslims marooned in India might take it into their heads to follow them.
By way of reassuring Muslim minorities in provinces like UP that were not destined to be part of Pakistan, the Muslim League had emphasised the vulnerability of the Hindu/Sikh minority that would be left in Pakistan. This was the basis of the so-called ‘hostage theory’: simply put, it meant ‘fair treatment for your co-religionists in our country depends on fair treatment for our co-religionists in your country’. But in fact rather few non-Muslims remained in Pakistan after the horrors of Partition, and those that did were largely confined to its remote eastern wing, otherwise East Bengal. This was not reassuring for the Muslims of UP, Bihar, Delhi, Hyderabad and the Central Provinces, who were therefore more inclined to migrate. Nor was it reassuring to the hard-pressed Pakistan authorities, who did their best to dissuade them; the hostage theory was again talked up, the two-nation theory talked down. Nevertheless, in the months immediately after Partition several hundred thousand of these Indian Muslims made the long journey to Pakistan and there often settled in Karachi. Known as mohajirs (a word loaded with religious sanction because of its etymological association with hijra denoting the flight of the Prophet from Mecca to Madina), they added another volatile element to the local demography. As a politically minded minority without landed roots or long-cultivated constituencies in the new Pakistan, the mohajirs would feel democratically disadvantaged, wary therefore of electoral arithmetic and often receptive to the vote-transcending claims of Islamic ideologues.
But of all the contradictions that beset Pakistan and prejudiced its chances of equilibrium, the most serious was the most obvious. Its two halves were hopelessly incompatible and were so far apart as to be barely within non-stop flying distance of one another. Other than mosques and madrassahs, the four north-western provinces had almost nothing in common with East Bengal. The one was predominantly rugged frontier country, the other a mostly flat backwater. It was like pairing Bulgaria and Belgium. Their peoples spoke different languages, ate different food and rejoiced in different cultures. The wheat-growing west was dominated by feudal landowners and tribal leaders, conservative in outlook and martially inclined. The rice-growing east was notable for its small landholdings and multitude of peasant proprietors whose bare subsistence generated radical leanings and populist dissent. Damned as ‘a rural slum’ by the British, the east accounted for only a sixth of Pakistan’s territory, much of it semi-submerged. It was also subject to frequent famines, had some of the worst poverty on the subcontinent, lacked infrastructure and industry and depended entirely on imported manufactures. Its contribution to the new Pakistan in terms of senior administrators came to under 18 per cent and of senior army officers to barely 2 per cent.
Yet East Bengal was far from being a liability. Thanks to its jute crop, its export earnings were Pakistan’s only source of foreign exchange and so a crucial ingredient in the whole country’s development. Its labour force was equally preponderant, dwarfing that of Pakistan’s Panjab which was the next most populous province. In fact East Bengal’s population of some 40 million in 1947 was not only greater than that of any of the north-western provinces but exceeded their combined aggregate. Economic and electoral logic therefore argued strongly for a Pakistan tilted towards the east; Bengalis rather than Panjabis should be calling the shots. But other considerations – historical profile, strategic priorities, Islamic contiguity, military recruitment and the social preferences of the League’s leadership – dictated an irresistible bias to the west. The east might provide the motive power for the new nation but it was the west that would decide its direction. The 1940 ‘Pakistan resolution’ had been passed there, the 1947 transfer of power had been conducted there, and without question the federal capital of Pakistan had to be located there.
Lahore, the Mughal city that had been the capital of the undivided Panjab, would have been the obvious choice. Unfortunately the new Indian frontier passed within an hour’s drive of it. For security reasons therefore, Karachi was preferred, and in this then sleepy port-capital of Sind, using a variety of requisitioned venues and makeshift accommodations, the new government set up shop. Tin sheds did duty for the airy offices of the Delhi secretariat; for want of desks, clerks spread their files on packing cases and, in the absence of pins, state papers were held together with thorns. Quite senior figures put up in the railway station. The arrangements were supposed to be temporary, but the acres of Panjabi scrubland that would eventually host a gleaming new capital were still being grazed by goats. Not till the 1960s would a custom-built Islamabad, conveniently sited beside the garrison city of Rawalpindi, rise from the firing ranges and be ready to receive its bureaucratic flock.
The physical proximity of civil and military establishments would be deliberate. For though otherwise so comprehensively disadvantaged in the division of the spoils, Karachi had been better served than New Delhi in one crucial respect. Crudely put, while the new India had inherited all the trappings for a state, Pakistan had inherited the vital ingredient for an army. Like everything else, the erstwhile British Indian army had been apportioned between the two successor states. Of its weaponry, munitions, transport and stores, a miserly 17.5 per cent was earmarked for Pakistan and not all of this materialised; re-equipping would be a top priority for Karachi. But manpower was a different matter. The Muslim component – and so Pakistan’s – of undivided India’s armed forces was put at a hefty 30 per cent.
This was because in the Panjab and neighbouring parts of the NWFP the new state embraced what had been the main reservoir of British recruitment ever since the 1857 Great Rebellion. Here traditions of loyal service were deeply embedded as were military expectations of preferential treatment from the organs of state. Recruits had been drawn from the same clans and hereditary networks for generations; military remittances sustained whole villages; military service opened opportunities for advancement and for acquiring skills (in truck maintenance for example) that were in civilian demand; and pensioners had often been rewarded with access to land in the highly productive canal colonies. Some of the beneficiaries had been Sikhs, who had since opted for the new India. But most were Muslims. They included many from East Panjab who, once they were accommodated on lands vacated by non-Muslims in West Panjab, exhibited such robust attachment to their new homeland that comparisons would be drawn with other settler communities, Afrikaner, for instance, or Israeli. Whether incomers or natives, it was this mainly Panjabi-speaking constituency that furnished Pakistan with the corps of a disciplined and privileged soldiery. Politicians in Karachi no less than landowners in Lahore and jute growers in Bengal saw the army as representing the vanguard of the new state, a guarantee of stability and the nation’s oustanding attribute of statehood. So did its generals.
GROUND RULES
Nothing in the acrimony occasioned by the division of undivided India’s spoils necessarily launched the successor states on opposed trajectories. On the contrary, by each freely enrolling as a dominion within the British Commonwealth, they seemed to signal a willingness to collaborate. Commonwealth membership was meant to promote understanding and parallel development. Ideally it secured a future in both countries for liberal values, representative government and mutual non-aggression, not to mention British exports and Indo-Pakistani co-operation in matters of imperial defence and communications. Likewise Pakistan’s inbuilt contradictions – its physical division, demographic imbalance, political fragility and ambivalence about the role of Islam – argued as much for cohabitation as for confrontation. Communications, for instance, between the east and west of Pakistan depended on Indian goodwill for both an air corridor and overland transit rights. Even Pakistan’s military potential could be seen as a stabilising factor, since only with a formidable army would it be able to defend the vulnerable north-west frontier that was as much the new India’s as its own.
Yet all this turned out to be wishful thinking. The fear and loathing engendered by the horrors of Partition could not be laid to rest. They easily negated the platitudes of the Commonwealth charter and trumped even Nehru’s lofty commitment to non-interference in the affairs of other nations. By 1948 ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi was almost alone in rising above the Pakistan paranoia that gripped India. In January that year he undertook a protest-cum-fast aimed at forcing Delhi to honour its financial obligations to Karachi and to afford protection to Muslims in India. His demands enraged not only the millions who had just fled Muslim atrocities in Pakistan but most of his Congress colleagues. A few days later he was assassinated. Nathuram Godse, the Brahmin who fired the shots, had once been involved with the RSS, an allegedly ultra-Hindu and paramilitary organisation, descriptions that they deny. But Godse had also been a Gandhian disciple and seems to have been acting not as the witless pawn of ‘Hindu nationalist’ hotheads (whose cause would suffer by his action) but as a sincere, if deluded, patriot. As he explained at his trial, only the death of ‘Gandhiji’ would silence counsels of ‘Muslim appeasement’ and so ‘save the nation from the inroads of Pakistan’. Naturally his action was universally condemned and he himself executed. But his point was not lost. The RSS and its allies were soon exonerated, Muslims in India continued to be treated with suspicion or worse, and Delhi was more paranoid than ever about the ‘inroads of Pakistan’.
Equally hostile sentiments were being aired in Pakistan. While in East Bengal Hindus suffered discrimination and dispossession, in Karachi the hand of an irredentist India was discerned behind every outbreak of dissent from the Afghan frontier to the Chittagong Hill Tracts (near Burma). In Pakistan, as in India, the hostility was exacerbated by the ongoing Kashmir crisis; and in Pakistan, because of that catalogue of internal contradictions, it had a bearing on the protracted business of state-building. All these factors would combine to render the political process there highly vulnerable to intervention. In an age of global competition between the Soviet bloc and the Western powers, this combination of pressure points would propel Pakistan in a direction wildly at variance with that of India.
Initially both nations applied themselves to making good the most glaring deficiencies of colonial rule. Constitutions must be drafted and elections on a universal franchise held. The social needs of the poor must be addressed, caste and gender discrimination ended, land more equitably distributed and health and education facilities provided for all. To stem the haemorrhage of scarce foreign exchange and lay the foundations of a productive modern economy, development plans for industry, agriculture and infrastructure needed careful formulation. And to ensure the implementation of all these things, the authority of the central government vis-à-vis the provinces must be stressed and the leadership’s grip on power consolidated. In both countries the agenda was almost identical. But not the results. For, while Delhi delivered, Karachi dithered. It took Pakistan nine years to draft a constitution, which was then promptly suspended. And the first national election on a universal suffrage had to wait until 1970.
By then India was gearing up for its fifth election. Each of them had been comfortably the world’s largest exercise in democratic selection; and despite the mind-boggling logistics (2 million ballot boxes, a quarter of a million polling booths, several hundred parties etc), all had been conducted with efficiency and impartiality. Instances of voters being intimidated, booths captured and boxes lost or tampered with were widely reported; bloc-voting by village, caste, clan or sect was standard. But blatant malpractice did not go unpunished; in 1970-1, for using government facilities for electioneering purposes, even the prime minister would be disqualified. The results, overall, were accounted highly creditable. Those diehards, like Winston Churchill, who had scoffed at the idea of a largely illiterate electorate exercising its vote responsibly had got it wrong. Since each candidate’s political party was pictorially identified on the ballot paper by a symbol – such as cart, cow, plough, lamp – even the unlettered could position their mark with confidence. Fair elections and gender-free suffrage, far from being the exclusive prerogatives of ‘advanced’ nations, were shown to be practical in larger, less privileged societies and just as productive of representative governments. The world’s other elected governments took heart. With each Indian election, the conviction grew that what was loosely termed ‘democracy’ might be a universal panacea, a long-sought penicillin in the war against ideological infections, whether communist or confessional.
After three years of consultation and debate India’s new constitution, ‘probably the longest in the world’, was rolled out in 1949 and officially adopted on 26 January (henceforth ‘Republic Day’) 1950. Like most of the proposals and revisions still being endlessly entertained by the constitution-makers in Pakistan, it favoured a Westminster style of government with first-past-the-post elections, an upper and lower house (the latter directly elected), a council of ministers, an inner cabinet, an independent judiciary and so on. But these arrangements were cast within a federal framework, as in the USA, which acknowledged the independent authority of the constituent provinces. Now known in India as ‘states’, the erstwhile provinces were also to elect assemblies. Each state/province assembly would appoint a state government, to which were reserved local revenue-raising powers (sales and liquor taxes, for example), a share of central revenues and a range of responsibilities (‘states’ subjects’). They also had a say in the so-called ‘concurrent subjects’, responsibility for which was shared with the central government. But in laying down these rules the constitution borrowed from the Government of India Act of 1935, and most notably from that Act’s imperial – that is, authoritarian – safeguards. Thus there were various ways by which the central government could influence or overrule state governments, including their dismissal and temporary suspension through the imposition of ‘President’s Rule’ (when the governor of a state, an appointee of the central government, took over on behalf of the president as head of state).
In sum, a federal (or provincial) structure was retained, but it was one heavily weighted in favour of the centre. For progressives like Nehru and Patel this was essential. In the run-up to Independence nothing had alarmed them more than proposals that, in order to preserve the integrity of pre-Partition India, would have limited the role of the central government to such things as foreign affairs, defence and some umpiring responsibilities for communications and the currency. Indeed the risk of a weak centre being held to ransom by its semi-sovereign provinces/states had soon appeared worse than the dangers inherent in the two-nation theory; for in the long run it too would jeopardise the integrity of the nation and, more immediately, would frustrate all hopes of pushing through the radical reforms that Nehru believed essential. More than anything else it had been this consideration that had reconciled him to Partition. Better, in other words, to head a governable entity minus Pakistan than an ungovernable one that included Pakistan. Obligingly, Karachi’s excruciating contortions over its own constitution seemed to be proving Nehru’s point. The ground rules of the centre-state relationship in India still left ample room for disagreement; but so long as Nehru lived and so long as Congress enjoyed a handsome majority in most of the state capitals as well as in New Delhi, stresses could be largely contained within the party.
In the first two decades of independence the substance of the Indian constitution proved less divisive than the language in which it was written. This was English, a foreign tongue with imperialist connotations. National pride demanded the adoption, at least for official purposes, of an indigenous language; so did notions of transparency; and there was no shortage of contenders. The constitution recognised sixteen major languages and acknowledged several hundred others. But therein lay the problem: which to choose and on what basis? Nehru favoured Hindustani, an innocuous amalgam of Hindi, the language of north India’s Hindus, and Urdu, that of its Muslims. It was easily mastered, widely understood, confessionally neutral, though not much spoken. On the other hand Hindi-speakers, who outnumbered any other language group and included much of the Congress leadership, strongly urged the claims of their own tongue. Meanwhile speakers of the Dravidian languages in the south (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam) objected to both Hindi and Hindustani as Sanskrit-based and so more alien to them than English, whose retention they therefore favoured.
At issue was more than just the medium of government business. The adoption of an official language would empower all those who spoke it while disadvantaging those who did not. Easier access to educational places, government posts and public sector jobs, plus a sense of privileged identity, awaited the chosen language group; hard study, perpetual disparagement and a marginalised heritage would be the lot of the unchosen. Careers were at stake, vast communities affected. Here was a subject worth fighting for, even dying for.
In a still constitutionless Pakistan the debate was just as fierce, though the battle was joined slightly sooner. There Jinnah favoured Urdu with its Mughal pedigree, its Islamic script and its familairity to the largely mohajir elite of his Muslim League. Famous poets had embellished its appeal and, although little used for conversational purposes outside rarefied circles in the main cities, it was widely understood. In this respect it too could be regarded as neutral, like Nehru’s Hindustani. But Panjabi-speakers soon sought common ground with Sindi-speakers and Pushtu-speaking Pathans in opposing it as an academic irrelevance, while in east Pakistan it was positively tainted as the medium of a well-born and resented minority. The east being East Bengal, the language almost universally spoken there – and the rich culture associated with it – was Bengali. And since Bengalis outnumbered all other Pakistanis, their language even more than Hindi in India had the majoritarian argument on its side.
This did not stop a 1948 declaration in favour of Urdu by Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah himself, so making any subsequent backtracking heretical. Protests and strikes resulted; Bengali sentiment was outraged. Only the delay in giving constitutional effect to the decision left some grounds for hope. But when in 1952 Kwaja Nazimuddin, the then prime minister and scion of the Muslim League who was himself a Bengali, confirmed in Dhaka (Dacca) that Urdu must indeed be the national language, all hell broke loose. East Bengal’s students called a general strike and were supported by various progressive groups, among them the Awami League, a populist party lately formed by the province’s ex-Muslim League leader, H. S. Suhrawardy. The authorities then panicked. The police were ordered to open fire, four students were killed, many injured, the army was called out and thousands of influential sympathisers were rounded up. It was a taste of things to come. The 1952 ‘Dhaka killings sealed the [Muslim] League’s fate in east Bengal’; in doing so, they also signalled the beginning of that land’s second freedom struggle and provided the future Bangladesh with its first martyrs.3
No less ominous were the language protests in India. The 1950 constitution had eventually fudged the issue: Hindi was to be the sole official language, but not for fifteen years (during which English might still be used), not without careful preparation and an official inquiry, and not without assurances that the individual states might use regional languages in transacting their own business. The hope was that in the fifteen-year interim tempers would cool and Hindi would win more friends, especially if it could demonstrate a capacity to express the complex legal, financial and scientific concepts on which a modern political economy depended. But six years later the official inquiry again reported in favour of Hindi; preparations for the switchover were stepped up. The anti-Hindi lobby in the south, now hitched to the rising star of a radical Dravidian party, the Dravida Munetra Kazagham (DMK), redoubled its protests. Meanwhile in the north, Hindi’s need for new words and intellectual respectability had sent scholars running for their Sanskrit lexicons. As a result the Hindi news on All India Radio became so Sanskritised as to be barely comprehensible. Listeners switched off and Nehru complained that he couldn’t understand the verbatim reports of his own speeches.
As the 1965 deadline approached, anxiety increased. Hints that English might be reprieved led Hindi activists in the northern cities to torch cars bearing English numberplates and vandalise premises bearing English signage. Madras responded with student demonstrators who marched to the chant of ‘Hindi never, English ever’; anything written in Hindi’s Devanagri script – books, billboards, letterheads – was destroyed; and in what could have been scripted as a tragic nod to their 1952 counterparts in Dhaka, four students sacrificed their lives by igniting themselves ‘at the altar of Tamil’.4 State-wide strikes crippled the government. Police attempts to regain control resulted in the deaths of over sixty people. The DMK, like the Awami League, had earlier hinted that if Hindi was imposed and Tamils thereby reduced to second-class citizens, their state might be forced to secede. In East Bengal such threats had cut no ice with the quarrelsome leaders of the Muslim League; but in India, with elections ever pending, they had been taken seriously both by the Congress government in Madras and by the leadership of the Congress government in Delhi.
The Congress party had always been divided on the language issue; once the Hindustani option had been dropped, Nehru himself had acted more as umpire than as player. With compromise now imperative, it fell to his daughter Indira as education minister to signal a change of policy, then later as prime minister to formulate it.
In 1967, with another Indo-Pak war over and elections out of the way, the path was clear for legislation. The bill that was eventually passed, while confirming the status of Hindi as India’s official language, gave the non-Hindi states a veto over the phasing out of English, thus effectively guaranteeing its place as ‘an associate official language’ indefinitely. For central government purposes ‘a virtual[ly] indefinite policy of bilingualism was adopted’.5 But it was actually a trilingual policy, for there was also something in it for languages other than Hindi and English. In the states, some of which had already been split up and renamed to meet the aspirations of local language groups, government business would still be conducted in the preferred regional language – Tamil, for instance, in the case of the now renamed and redefined Madras state of Tamil Nadu. Additionally this ‘three-language formula’ was to prevail throughout the educational system. Indian schoolchildren would henceforth be expected to acquire some proficiency in a regional language, plus Hindi, plus another that was almost invariably English. Thus was calm restored at the cost of a policy that bore rather heavily on young minds. Yet almost fortuitously it afforded them access to a language and literature whose international currency would in time prove even more professionally rewarding than Hindi.
TEETHING TROUBLES
In marked contrast to Karachi, where ineffectual ministries were being toppled like ninepins, the Delhi government of the 1950s enjoyed a comparatively free hand to press ahead with its reform programme. Unlike the Muslim League, the Congress party held together; regular election victories topped up its mandate; central authority as refracted through an already entrenched bureaucracy assumed the impervious swagger of the raj; and above all Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister brought a vision to the direction of public affairs that inspired regard and cowed opposition. Sectarian parties like the Hindu nationalist Jan Sangh (the political wing of the RSS) made little headway against Nehru’s bracing insistence on an even-handed secularism. Ideology-based parties like the communists similarly failed to make a national impact while Nehru’s socialist convictions stole their thunder and his Moscow connections trumped their own.
Only by lowering its sights to focus on state issues and cultivate local grievances was the Communist Party of India (CPI) able to make an impact in West Bengal and, more immediately, Kerala. There in the 1957 elections the party won nearly half the seats in the state assembly and duly formed what was hailed as the world’s first democratically elected communist government. It lasted only a couple of years. Congress-backed opponents of its reforms cynically fomented chaos, the state police waded in and the government in Delhi, citing a breakdown of law and order, then jumped at the chance to dismiss the ministry and impose President’s Rule. Congress won the subsequent election but lost the next. Despite splits in their own ranks, the communists would remain a potent force in the state.
Ironically Kerala’s first communist government, far from subverting the democratic process and overturning the social order, had acted strictly within the constitution. Even the reforms responsible for its downfall were not exactly controversial; they had been mandated by Delhi itself. Free schooling for all, limitations on the size of landholdings, redistribution of surplus land to the landless, guarantees for the rights of tenant cultivators, rural development schemes, collectivisation – all were dear to Nehru’s heart and were being trumpeted as key elements in the central government’s programme of social justice. But, except in leftist pockets like Kerala, they were not necessarily being enforced. Education and agriculture being states’ subjects, the responsibility for implementing the reforms lay with state-level ministers who, because of bloc-voting, were at the electoral mercy of those landholding interests that had most to lose by the reforms. By pleading local circumstances to delay action, dilute the terms, overlook the intent or condone the evasion of such measures, they could effectively frustrate them. Thus the ‘land ceiling’ – a statutory limitation of so many cultivable hectares per individual holding – was unevenly applied and, where enforced, often became something of a joke: many proprietors simply parcelled out their estates among their children and dependants without in fact relinquishing a single field. Agricultural output did rise during the Nehru years, but nowhere near as fast as the population and little thanks to land redistribution. As a result, by 1956 India was heavily dependent on food imports from the USA. It would remain so for more than a decade. For a country three-quarters of whose citizens were engaged in agriculture, and for a government proudly proclaiming self-reliance through a policy of ‘import substitution’, it was a major embarrassment.
Admittedly, for Nehru and his generation import substitution more often referred to manufactured goods than to foodstuffs. With a nod to the swadeshi movement of the 1930s, it meant developing a domestic productive capacity that would eliminate the need for foreign imports, so reinforcing political independence with the steel mesh of economic self-sufficiency. Following the then admired Soviet model of development, the prerequisite for creating such a modern economy was taken to be the establishment of heavy industries, machine-tool foundries, mammoth infrastructural projects and top-class technical and scientific institutions. In what amounted to Nehru’s equivalent of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, state planners would set the targets and the state itself would be a major player; but in India private sector enterprise was not to be excluded or nationalised. Conglomerates like those of the Tata and Birla families, long-time supporters of Congress, would continue to operate throughout the economy and were expected to meet the demand for consumer goods. It was to be a genuinely mixed economy, albeit with a Kafkaesque system of licensing (the so-called ‘permit raj’) that would discourage the import of all but essential raw materials and ensure for the government an effective regulating role – plus a rich source of patronage.
Meanwhile the state assumed direct responsibility for the leviathans of the economy as epitomised by vast new steel plants and hydro-electric projects. Employment in the state sector expanded exponentially, as did the bureaucrats who directed it. Like Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, Nehru’s India was awash with inspirational feats of construction and sensational production forecasts – even as the hydro-dams themselves filled with silt and the steel plants proved woefully inefficient. In retrospect the period would come to be remembered as one of scarcity and drab austerity, ‘the wasted years’ even. Nehru’s influential Planning Commission and its five-year blueprints would be seen as having crippled the economy, stunted the nation’s entrepreneurial genius and barely dented the poverty statistics.
But at the time each ingot of home-produced steel glinted with promise and every kilowatt of home-generated power sparked a glimmer of hope. What with a Gandhian legacy comprised of homespuns and handicrafts and a colonial manufacturing base represented by cotton piecegoods, duff matches, gearless bicycles and a glut of brass elephants, there was much ground to make up. As in China, labour-intensive production in the state-run industries generated employment, while expanding the pool of expertise and acting as a form of wealth redistribution. In a heavily protected economy such things mattered more than the quality or competitiveness of the finished product. Industrialisation made sense psychologically and politically, and when in time import substitution gave way to export creation, it would make sense economically. The engineers and BSc graduates who spilled from the new technical institutes would prove a richer resource than the waters that sloshed through the dam-builders’ clogged turbines.
It was not domestic policy that discredited the Nehru period and brought on a national crisis of confidence but foreign policy. This was a field in which the internationally minded Nehru was uniquely qualified and for which he assumed sole responsibility throughout his prime ministership. As in matters of religion, language or economic development, he favoured a position of superior neutrality between the confrontational orthodoxies of the day. Standing aloof from the Muslim versus Hindu, Hindi versus English, Marxist versus capitalist rivalries, he would similarly position India outside the East versus West global confrontation. Europe’s ‘iron curtain’ and Asia’s ‘bamboo curtain’ were not destined to be drawn together along the length of the Himalayas. An even-handed India would keep them open, be a conduit between the ‘free world’ and the communist bloc, and offer a peace-loving alternative to both.
With a pride that was as much intellectual as national, Nehru rightly saw India’s emancipation from colonial rule as the first of many such liberations and as marking the dawn of a new era in international relations. In his Independence oration he had pointedly dedicated himself to the service of ‘the still larger cause of humanity’. The anti-colonial struggles of others (Indonesians, Vietnamese, Algerians, Palestinians etc) were assured of Indian support; and to safeguard their post-colonial futures Nehru championed the idea of a third bloc of nations, unaligned as between Moscow and Washington and pledged to the noble ideals of peaceful coexistence, mutual respect for one another’s borders and non-interference in one another’s affairs. This was the nub of the ‘five principles’, orpanchshila, to which New Delhi and Beijing signed up in 1954 and which were then incorporated into the charter of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Bandung conference of Afro-Asian states in 1955. Bandung (in Java) witnessed the first great gathering of leaders of the post-colonial world. Sukarno of Indonesia presided. Nasser (Egypt), Makarios (Cyprus), Sihanouk (Cambodia), Pham Van Dong (North Vietnam), U Nu (Burma) and Zhou Enlai (China) attended. Nehru (India) starred. With a smiling Indira by his side, the leader of the world’s largest democracy was fêted on a world stage of his own making.
But the heady days were short-lived. Nehru had accepted that both communist and anti-communist governments might be considered as non-aligned; ideology was a matter of individual choice, a bit like religion; the criterion for membership of the Movement should just be anti-imperialism, preferably as demonstrated by a cold-shouldering of the ‘security pacts’ being sponsored by Washington and Moscow. According to Nehru, such pacts brought only insecurity and increased the likelihood of a nuclear conflagration. As so often, he had his sights on Pakistan, already a member of the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and about to join the Baghdad Pact (later CENTO), both of them US backed. But this analysis also had implications for China. Linked to the Soviet Union through a treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance, China ought scarcely to have qualified either. Having overrun Tibet in 1950, it ought, arguably, to have been disqualified. Nehru thought otherwise. Despite inheriting British undertakings in respect of the autonomy of Tibet, he had registered no objection to that country’s occupation. Rather had he preferred vague Chinese promises about a favourable settlement of the disputed Indo-Tibetan frontier, plus the glorious prospect of Asia’s two mega-nations working hand in glove for a new world order.
Additionally, had he contested Beijing’s declared ‘resumption’ of its sovereignty over Tibet he could have been accused of hypocrisy; for on not dissimilar grounds New Delhi had been pressing the French and the Portuguese to vacate their respective enclaves on the subcontinent’s coastline. After Indian provocation, then French prevarication, Paris had eventually complied, Pondicherry being handed over in 1954. But Lisbon had not. Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, turned a deaf ear to Congress-backed rallies thronging the normally somnolent purlieus of Panjim, the Goan capital, and reminded Delhi that Portugal’s 500-year rule predated not only that of the British, to which the new India had succeeded, but very nearly that of the Mughals. Passionate about history, Nehru might just conceivably have accepted this argument. The conservation of Portuguese rule over Goa’s church-ridden congregation could have been of antiquarian interest and was no more menacing to the Indian republic than was the Vatican to the Italian republic. But he was also passionate about ousting colonialism, demonstrating commitment to India’s territorial integrity (Pakistan would take note) and currying popular favour. In 1961 therefore, notwithstanding peaceful coexistence and non-interference, Indian troops rolled into Goa much as they had into Hyderabad and Kashmir, though without the figleaf of formal accession.
Fifteen years later, for doing exactly the same in respect of Portuguese East Timor, the Indonesian government of General Suharto would be universally condemned and its troops expelled by UN forces. The difference lay in the indulgence extended by the international community to a civilian aggressor with impeccably democratic credentials, plus the evident relief with which Indian intervention was greeted by Portugal’s ex-subjects. Nehru had judged the situation well. Critics, mostly in the West, were silenced by the minimal resistance and mass welcome extended to the invaders. Clearly the ‘conquest’ of Goa met with the approval of Goans themselves.
The same could not be said of Chinese intervention in Tibet. In 1955 Sino-Indian friendship had been popularly celebrated with the catchphrase Hindi Chini bhai bhai (something like ‘India, China, inseparable brothers’). But by early 1959, with a major Tibetan uprising having just been ruthlessly repressed, 100,000 refugees pouring over the Himalayas, the non-communist world up in arms, right-wing parties in India talking of Delhi’s Buddhist betrayal and the Dalai Lama himself fleeing his homeland, the fraternal sloganeering froze in the thin Himalayan air. Nehru, though deeply embarrassed by the attitude of his friend Zhou Enlai, rose to the occasion by providing the Dalai Lama with asylum and rebuffing Beijing’s protests.
It was the least he could do, though no less provocative for that. A year earlier reports had come from the remote Ladakh-Tibet border that Chinese engineers had constructed a military road across a bit of uninhabited trans-Himalayan tundra known as the Aksai Chin. Delhi protested that the region was a salient of Ladakh, therefore of Jammu and Kashmir state, and therefore of India; Beijing responded that the Aksai Chin had always been part of Tibet and therefore of China. The sensitive issue of the 3000-kilometreHimalayan frontier was thus thrown wide open. China did not recognise even sections that had actually been demarcated, like the McMahon Line north of Assam; as relics of British imperialism and products of ‘unequal treaties’, they were ‘invalid’. India’s reception of the Dalai Lama strained relations further. By late 1959 both sides were tinkering with their border posts; clashes were being reported and Indian lives lost.
There followed two years of recrimination masquerading as negotiation. Delhi spurned a possible settlement involving the cession of the Aksai Chin in the west in return for the recognition of the McMahon Line in the east. Indeed it is probable that the Goa invasion was launched in 1961 to deflect the domestic criticism that might result from such a swap. Yet in the Himalayas nothing much was done to reinforce the Indian position. Most of the Indian army remained ranged along the frontier with west Pakistan or ready to strike into Kashmir. Few if any units were equipped and trained for the high altitudes of Ladakh, while, like Pakistan, India had never accorded a top priority to its north-eastern defences. The Himalayas themselves were presumed a sufficient deterrent to an all-out invasion. Instead, therefore, of massively reinforcing existing positions, a strategy was adopted of discreetly establishing new ones. These were designed to counter Chinese claims and create a more advantageous situation if and when, as the Chinese repeatedly urged, terms for disengagement and withdrawal were agreed.
But in mid-1962 the Chinese tired of this game just as the Indians began to push their luck too far. After patrols had clashed in Ladakh, what had been a loudspeaker war between the heavily manned posts east of Bhutan erupted when an intended Indian assault provoked the Chinese into a preemptive strike. Surprised and overwhelmed the Indian troops suffered heavy casualties. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had chalked up its first Himalayan victory and in October began advancing in strength at both extremities of the range. Nehru now conceded that the nation faced ‘what is in effect a Chinese invasion of India’. The five principles of non-alignment had been flouted and ‘nothing in my long political career has hurt me more’.6 An Indian counter-thrust in November only triggered another Chinese advance. The upper Brahmaputra valley in Assam now lay at the invaders’ mercy. Whole towns were being evacuated; blood banks and recruitment centres throughout India were besieged.
In Delhi too, the unthinkable was happening. Communists, Hindu nationalists and Muslims stood shoulder to shoulder with Congress stalwarts in defence of the motherland. Meanwhile Nehru, gagging on a lifetime of anti-imperialist rhetoric, went Gandhi cap in hand to beseech the US and the UK for an airlift of arms, plus a diplomatic offensive. Both were forthcoming. Indian fatalities already stood at two to three thousand with twice as many taken prisoner. Any Western misgivings about Nehru’s sudden conversion to ‘free world’ values were stilled by genuine alarm; an Asian armageddon seemed possible.
Then quite suddenly, without warning or explanation, the PLA vanished, back into the Himalayan cloud cover. The actual ‘invasion’ had lasted little more than a month. By the end of the year the Chinese were ensconced in their original positions along the McMahon Line and in the Aksai Chin. All gains had been abandoned, presumably because the onset of winter would prevent their resupply. Yet no claims had been withdrawn. The border issue had still to be settled and the threat it posed could no longer be ignored by a horribly humiliated India.
Nehru never recovered from the shock. Personally ‘hurtful’ and politically devastating, the Chinese betrayal had dented his confidence and undermined his health. Just over a year later, in January 1964, he suffered a minor heart attack; and in May of that year he died.
Just under a year after that, in April 1965, India’s borders were again under attack. This time the invaders came from Pakistan. An India militarily disgraced by the Chinese, shattered by the loss of Nehru, further weakened by dissension within Congress and now under the stopgap leadership of the untried and electorally untested Lal Bahadur Shastri was proving a temptation too far for the military men in Rawalpindi. If ever there was a moment to embarrass India into conceding Pakistan’s interest in the Kashmir valley it was now. New Delhi itself had seemed to signal as much. In May 1964 a deathbed initiative from Nehru had brought the release of his old friend Sheikh Abdullah and the despatch of the latter to Pakistan with a set of new options for resolving the crisis. Though China had been Nehru’s biggest mistake, Kashmir was his greatest failure. A last-gasp settlement would have redeemed his damaged reputation and been a fitting legacy. The options on offer included a possible federation of India and Pakistan with an autonomous Kashmir. It was 1947 all over again. Maharaja Hari Singh’s contested accession was back on the table, so was the UN’s plebiscite. In Kashmir itself, as in Pakistan, hopes soared.
They were dashed within days. Nehru died, his colleagues got cold feet and the sheikh was returned to detention. The second India-Pakistan war, opportunistically launched but conceived in disgust at this failure, would prove inconclusive. It would solve nothing, least of all the status of Kashmir. Yet its political fall-out, by maiming the aggressor and rewarding the aggrieved, would reshape the subcontinent.