The Longest August (18 page)

The situation changed abruptly when the maharaja replaced Prime Minister Janak Singh with Mehr Chand Mahajan, an Indian judge, on October 15. Mahajan immediately ordered A. K. Shah, Pakistan's joint secretary of foreign affairs and states, who had tried to persuade Janak Singh to opt for Pakistan, to leave Srinagar.

But this left intact the two-pronged scheme the Pakistani premier had devised earlier: to take charge of the Azad Army created by the local Muslim Conference and to forge an independent plan to secure Srinagar by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas.

Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Plotter

On September 21 Liaquat Ali Khan chaired a top-secret planning meeting on Kashmir in Lahore. It was attended by civilian and military officials, including the chief ministers of Punjab and the NWFP—Iftikhar Hussain Mamdot and Abdul Qayyum Khan respectively—as well as Mian Iftikharuddin, (Retired) Major Khurshid Anwar, and Brigadier Muhammad Akbar Khan, who was in charge of the weapons and equipment department at general headquarters in Rawalpindi. The agreed-on strategy involved intensifying the insurgency in the Poonch-Mirupr area and opening a new front in western Kashmir to be accomplished by the tribal irregulars led by Anwar. Akbar Khan was charged with arming these fighters without his British commander detecting the loss from the armory.

A native of a princely state in Punjab, Anwar became a high-ranking official in the civil supplies department in Delhi. Because of the close association of this department with the military during World War II, he gained the rank of major. After being discharged from the army for suspected bribe-taking while supplying scarce goods to civilians, he joined the Muslim League in Punjab. He was appointed commander of the
Muslim National Guards (MNG; aka Muslim League National Guard) for the “Pakistan” provinces. He set up the MNG headquarters in Lahore. During the League's civil disobedience campaign against the Unionist-led ministry, he went underground and kept the agitation going. After the fall of the Unionist government in March 1947, he turned his attention to the NWFP. There he worked with Qayyum Khan and other League officials to launch direct action against the Congress ministry. Operating incognito, he remained active while other leaders served prison sentences.

Though the voters opted for Pakistan in a referendum in mid-July, the cabinet of Abdul Jabbar Khan (aka Dr. Khan Sahib), a Congress ally, maintained its majority in the legislature. And yet Jinnah ordered NWFP governor Sir George Cunningham to dismiss the ministry of Dr. Khan Sahib on August 22. That dismissal led the Muslim League's Qayyum Khan, a Pashtun of Kashmiri origin, to form the next cabinet.

Anwar claimed to have gotten clearance from Ali Khan in late August to turn his attention to Kashmir. He and Qayyum Khan set about raising a force of tribal men from the Tirah region and North and South Waziristan Agencies. The number of volunteers rose quickly. By early October about five thousand armed men from the Afridi and Mahsud tribes, embedded with a few hundred Pakistan soldiers on leave, would be assembled in the NWFP city of Abbottabad.

Inside Kashmir, by mid to late October, the Azad Army controlled large parts of Poonch and Mirpur, while much of the Muzaffarabad subdistrict was being cleared of non-Muslims in reprisal for the continued violence against Muslims in eastern Jammu.

On the diplomatic front, Kashmir's prime minister Mahajan sidestepped Jinnah's offer of an impartial inquiry by a third party to investigate his government's allegation of armed infiltration into Poonch by Pakistan. Instead, on October 18 he sent Jinnah a telegram threatening to ask for “friendly” assistance by India if the Pakistanis continued their armed infiltration into Poonch while blockading the border for transport of goods and persisted in their anti-maharaja propaganda.
14

Jinnah responded by sending a telegram to the maharaja. “The real aim of your Government's policy is to seek an opportunity to join the Indian Dominion through a coup d'état by securing the intervention and assistance of that Dominion,” he said. Then he offered to invite his prime minister to visit Karachi “to smooth out the difficulties and adjust matters in a friendly way.”
15

On October 20 relations between Karachi and Srinagar deteriorated when the maharaja's soldiers assaulted four villages inside West Punjab with mortars, grenades, and automatic fire, causing heavy casualties.
16

That day, as previously planned, the tribal warriors began marching from Abbottabad toward Kashmir. So far Sir George, the governor of NWFP, had been in the dark about the preparations Anwar had made with the cooperation of his chief minister, Qayyum Khan. When he learned about the march the following day, he immediately informed Prime Minister Ali Khan.

“On October 21, Liaquat Ali Khan told me in a state of unusual excitement that a tribal
lashkar
[Urdu: army], some thousands strong, was on the way to Kashmir,” wrote Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, the chief secretary of Pakistan, in his book
The Emergence of Pakistan
. “I asked him if he had informed the Quaid-i-Azam and he said, ‘Not yet,' as he had just received the report.”
17

Did the prime minister mislead his topmost civil servant? The answer is to be found in Anwar's statement, as cited later by his friend M. Yusuf Buch, a Pakistani expert on Kashmir since 1947. “The old man never gave it the green light,” Anwar told Buch after he had retired and set up an ice factory in Rawalpindi. “The old man” was Jinnah, who had not been kept fully briefed by Ali Khan.
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The Denouement

After crossing into western Kashmir along the Jhelum Valley road on October 22, (Retired) Major Anwar launched Operation Gulmarg by leading a convoy of two hundred trucks filled with sturdy Pashtuns armed with small weapons and mortars. His strategy was to advance along the axis of Muzaffarabad, Domel, Uri, and Baramula to capture the Srinagar airfield and the city, and then proceed to secure the Banihal Pass to block the road from Jammu and cut off the state from the rest of India. Following his capture of two outposts, the Muslim companies of the state's army started defecting to his side.

When the news of the tribal attack reached the maharaja on the afternoon of October 22, he ordered Brigadier Jamwal to fight the invaders to the last man and the last bullet. Jamwal's company of 150 men encountered the raiders at Garhi, forty-five miles west of Uri, in the early
hours of the next day. Heavily outnumbered and weakened by the earlier defection of the Muslim units, he withdrew to Uri after blowing up the bridge. That delayed the attackers by one day. His soldiers then fought them at Baramulla, straddling the Jhelum, thirty miles east, on October 24. They were all killed in action.

That day, the local insurgents in the Poonch-Mirpur region formed the independent government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir—shortened to Azad Kashmir—under the presidency of Muhammad Ibrahim Khan of the Muslim Conference in Palundari. Announcing the aim of his government as liberation of the rest of the state, he appealed to Pakistan for assistance.

The Indian government learned of the extent of the invasion on the evening of October 24, when Kashmir's deputy prime minister, R. L. Batra, arrived with letters addressed to Nehru and Patel and seeking military assistance. The next morning, October 25, the defense committee of the Indian cabinet met under Governor-General Lord Mountbatten. He argued that sending troops to a neutral state would be a great folly in the eyes of the world.

The committee then dispatched Vapal Pangunni Menon, along with civil and military officials, to Srinagar to assess the situation on the ground and find out whether or not the maharaja was prepared to accede to India.

After his meeting with Prime Minister Mahajan, Menon and Mahajan conferred with the maharaja, who was in a nervous state. Giving credence to the rumors that some invaders had infiltrated Srinagar, Menon advised the maharaja to drive to the winter capital of Jammu posthaste.

In retrospect, the precaution proved unnecessary. According to Operation Gulmarg, the tribal warriors should have reached Srinagar by October 25 to celebrate Eid al Adha in the city along with local Muslims. As a result of unexpected delays, on that day they found themselves in Baramulla. Home to fourteen thousand people, it was the commercial gateway to the Vale of Kashmir, with a high proportion of non-Muslims. The population included the staff and patients at Joseph's College, Convent, and Hospital, built on a hill, some of them being European.

Before being recruited, the tribal men had been told by Anwar that in the absence of any remuneration upfront, they were entitled to loot the properties of infidels in the conquered parts of Kashmir. Now, given the opportunity, the invaders went beyond pillaging non-Muslim possessions. They snatched jewelry from local women (irrespective of their religion), plundered the bazaar and homes, and vandalized Hindu and Sikh temples. They shipped their plunder back to Abbottabad in trucks. They
used the local cinema as a rape center. Among those they shot dead were Lieutenant Colonel D. O. Dykes and his English wife, ready to leave the hospital that day with their newborn baby, and two European nuns. They abducted hundreds of girls, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim alike. They ignored the pleas of Anwar to advance to Srinagar, only thirty miles away along a level road. In desperation, Anwar led a few bands of regular Pakistani soldiers in civilian clothes to the capital.

The two days' delay by the main force in order to indulge in an orgy of plunder, rape, and murder made all the difference between success and failure of this armed venture.

After the maharaja along with his entourage and valuable possessions fled to Jammu in a convoy of cars around two
am
on October 26, Menon and his party, accompanied by Mahajan, boarded a Dakota to fly to Delhi. Once Menon had apprised the Defense Committee of the dire situation in Kashmir, a debate followed. Mountbatten pointed out that Indian soldiers could not be dispatched to the state until and unless the maharaja had signed the Instrument of Accession. He added that he would accept the accession subject to ascertaining the will of the people in a plebiscite after law and order had been restored. Nehru, Patel, and other members of the committee agreed.

Menon flew back to Jammu. At the royal palace he woke up the maharaja, slumbering after a night-long drive from Srinagar. Maharaja Sir Hari Singh signed the instrument of accession, which specified autonomy for the state. (Later, an article in the Indian Constitution would specify that the Indian parliament would need the state government's agreement to apply laws in other administrative areas to the state's territory.) In his forwarding letter to Governor-General Mountbatten, he said that, following the acceptance of the accession, he would ask Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, lodged in a Delhi hotel as an official guest for the previous week, to form an interim government.

That evening Defense Minister Baldev Singh sent a message to the military command in Delhi to airlift troops to Srinagar early the following morning. Overnight, supported by the swift acquisition of all civilian aircraft by Patel, about a hundred civilian and air force planes were mobilized to ferry men, weapons, and ammunition to Srinagar. The first airplane carrying Indian soldiers arrived at ten thirty
am
on October 27 at the unguarded Srinagar airport, eight miles from the city center.

While accepting the Instrument of Accession by the maharaja on October 27, Lord Mountbatten wrote in his cover letter:

In the circumstances mentioned by Your Highness, my government has decided to accept the accession of Kashmir State to the Dominion of India. In consistence with their policy that in the case of any State where the issue of accession has been subject to dispute, the question of accession should be decided in accordance with the wishes of the people of the state, it is my government's wish that, as soon as law and order have been restored in Kashmir and its soil is cleared of the invaders, the question of the state's accession should be settled by a reference to people.
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On October 28 Nehru sent a long telegram to his Pakistani counterpart. After summarizing the background to the signing of the Instrument of Accession by the maharaja, he added: “In regards to accession, it has been made clear that it is subject to reference to people of the State and their decision. The Government of India have no design to impose any decision and will abide by people's wishes. But those cannot be ascertained till peace and law and order prevail.” Two days later Ali Khan replied by telegram. He alluded to the killings of Muslims in Poonch and their massacres in Jammu, and how those atrocities and the earlier butchering of Muslims in East Punjab had inflamed feelings among the tribes. “When there was evidence that there was to be repetition of that in Kashmir as in East Punjab, it became impossible wholly to prevent the tribes from entering Kashmir without using troops which would have created a situation on the frontier that might well have got out of control,” he explained. “The Pathan [aka Pashtun] raid did not start until 22 October. It is clear therefore that Kashmir's plan of asking for Indian troops . . . was formed quite independently of this raid, and all evidence and action taken shows [that] it was pre-arranged.”
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The sharply divergent ways in which the two leaders presented their respective cases on Kashmir foreshadowed the severity of the challenge the neighboring nations would face in resolving this dispute over the next many decades.

Jinnah noted with growing anxiety the events in Kashmir. When Indian soldiers flew into Srinagar, he ordered his commander in chief General Sir Frank Messervy to dispatch troops to Kashmir. Messervy was a subordinate of the Delhi-based Field Marshal Sir Claude Achinleck, the supreme commander of the British forces remaining in India and Pakistan.
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His superior ruled out such a move because that would have resulted in British officers commanding their respective Indian and Pakistani contingents fighting one another. Messervy therefore refused to
implement Jinnah's order, arguing that the presence of the Indian forces in Kashmir was justified since the maharaja had acceded to India and that introducing Pakistani forces into Kashmir would compel him to withdraw all British officers from Pakistan's military. Thus Jinnah, a lawyer by training, found his hands tied. His subsequently tense relations with Messervy would lead the general to take an early retirement, in February 1948.