Ghosts of Empire (22 page)

The position of the Maharaja, at the beginning of 1949, was still not clear. Thanks to his pomposity and tactlessness, he was antagonizing the Indians who were, after all, supporting his throne with their army. By the middle of 1948, Nehru could see that Hari Singh was hopelessly incompetent. ‘My study of the Kashmir situation has led me to believe that the Maharaja cannot play,' he wrote to Sardar Patel. The Maharaja was fixated on small things; he didn't get the big picture: ‘when there is an obvious possibility of his losing everything he still wants to hold on to relatively simple things'.
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To secular-minded modern Indian nationalists, the Maharaja had shown absolutely no leadership. He had not led ‘his people in the hour of crisis', but had ‘left in the night for Jammu', where his winter palace was situated. (His summer palace was in Srinagar.) He had left, moreover, ‘in a caravan of cars and trunks carrying his family, his jewels', as well as ‘costly furniture and carpets from his palaces'. This had been an ‘ignominious betrayal'.
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The Pakistanis were implacably hostile to the Maharaja, because he had signed his state over to India. The Indians had grown weary of his vanity, his grand airs and his greed, as he kept complaining and asking for money.

In May 1949, Patel proposed to the Maharaja that he should leave the state and appoint his son, the Yuvraj Karan, regent. This suggestion alarmed the Maharaja, who left the audience with Patel in a state of ‘shock and bewilderment'. He was, in his own words, ‘completely taken aback by
this proposal' which he hoped would ‘not be a prelude to any idea of abdication', though that is exactly what it turned out to be. In May 1949, Nehru was finalizing the details of a house in Bombay which would be put at the Maharaja's disposal. Throughout the rest of 1949, Hari Singh, Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, quibbled about which bits of which properties belonged to him and not to the state of Kashmir. As an Indian politician acidly remarked, ‘it would be difficult to find any sane person in India who would agree that fishing rights or fishing lodges . . . were essential to the dignity of a ruler'.
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Meanwhile, the Maharaja had planned the wedding of his eighteen-year-old son Karan to a Nepalese princess. Tara Devi begged for the Indian state to settle an allowance on the young couple, and to pay for her son's wedding. The letter may have been written by the Maharani, but no one doubted who had inspired the initiative.
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The Maharaja stopped being a factor in Kashmir's affairs at the end of 1949, when he departed to live in exile in Bombay. There he sank back into indolent irrelevance, as new political forces emerged to shape the destiny of the land he had once ruled. The Maharaja of Kashmir became a recluse and, in the long days of his exile, loved nothing better than to read ‘illustrated books on castles and mansions of England, Europe and America'. He also devoured books on architecture and engineering, on racing and polo. With this sedentary lifestyle, Hari Singh became even more obese, eventually developing diabetes. He died in Bombay on 26 April 1961, aged sixty-five. He had refused to take the insulin injections prescribed for him. A long bout of coughing brought on a heart attack and, when the doctor had arrived, his last words were simply ‘Doctor, I am going.'
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The death of the former Maharaja moved Kashmir no closer to a solution to its problems. Certainly, as already noted, no popular vote has ever ratified the accession to India, the most important decision the Maharaja ever made. By 1956, Kashmir had been integrated into India, and Nehru had abandoned his earlier commitment to a plebiscite.
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In addition to the war fought between India and Pakistan in 1948, two further wars, in 1965 and 1971, have been waged between the two countries, in both of which Kashmir was a crucial issue in dispute. Relatively minor incidents have had the potential to aggravate an already volatile situation. In December
1963, the most sacred Muslim relic in Kashmir, a strand of hair from the beard of the Prophet, was stolen from the mosque at Hazratbal. Soon thousands were marching through the streets of Srinagar, demanding that the thieves be caught and punished. Outraged Kashmiris even set up a Sacred Hair Action Committee. Nehru sent the Chief of the Intelligence Bureau to help recover the relic.

The Indian attitude to Kashmir has accorded with the comment of the civil servant V. P. Menon, an ally of Sardar Patel, ‘now that we've got it, we'll never let it go'.
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Pakistani governments have adopted increasingly warlike measures in trying to get back what they feel is rightfully theirs. The current situation has barely changed in more than sixty years. Indian-controlled Kashmir, which includes the stunning Valley of Kashmir itself, has a population of 7.7 million, while Azad Kashmir, the Pakistani-controlled region, has a population of 2.8 million.
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The boundary between these two regions is a ceasefire line that was determined by the United Nations in 1949.

Today the situation in Kashmir is still tense. In 1989 an insurgency began in Kashmir. On 13 February that year there was a large anti-Indian demonstration, in which the Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was denounced for his book
The Satanic Verses
. Even though the government had banned the book, the whole of Srinagar went on strike.
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By the following January, the rebellion had grown into a mass resistance to Indian rule. There followed an exodus from the Valley of the Kashmiri Pandits, the people who, under the maharajas, had largely governed the state. According to the 1981 Indian government census, there were only 124,000 Pandits at that time. This represented just 4 per cent of the Valley's population of a little more than 3 million people. As the uprising broke out in February and March 1990, approximately 100,000 Pandits left the Valley for Jammu and Delhi. Since 1991 bands of Islamic guerrillas, partly funded and encouraged by Pakistan, have fought Indian troops. By the end of 2010, Kashmir was one of the most militarized regions in the world, although Kashmiri aspirations for greater independence remain largely unrealized. The frustration felt by Kashmiris has found expression in violence and in the popularity of the independence movement. The years 1992 and 1993 saw the rise of the pro-Pakistan Islamist guerrilla group
Hizb-ul Mujahideen, which means ‘party of the warriors', or ‘party of the jihadists' in Arabic. (The words ‘jihad' and ‘mujahideen' have the same roots.) The continuing war in Kashmir has cost tens of thousands of lives, though Indian and Pakistani figures differ. The circumstances today are very different from those of 1947. The conflict in many ways has, in the words of one commentator, ‘taken on a life of its own'.
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A rampant gun culture pervades what was once a favourite tourist destination, described as a ‘heaven on earth', with its ‘clear streams, snow-clad mountains and green valleys'.
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A story about two friends, both born in Srinagar in 1967, puts the tragedy of Kashmir in human terms. Both members of prosperous, middle-class professional families, Ashfaq Majid Wani and Nadeem Khatib were best friends during the 1970s and early 1980s. Together they attended the best grammar school in the city, where they were both bright students and fine athletes. While Ashfaq's ambition was to be a doctor, his friend Nadeem had ambitions to be an airline pilot. In his late teens, Ashfaq became interested in politics and, fired with this new enthusiasm, he joined the numerous demonstrations that took place in Srinagar at the end of the 1980s. On 23 March 1987, he was one of the hundreds of opposition activists arrested in police crackdowns across Indian-controlled Kashmir. He was released after nine months, but it is now apparent that his period in prison made him bitter. After his release, he was found to have cigarette burns all over his body, and he promptly left home and ‘disappeared'. He never came home again, but in 1989 he emerged as a household name in Kashmir. He was now a leading member of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. By early 1990, when government authority had collapsed in the Kashmir Valley, the insurrection had just started and Ashfaq Wani was one of the most wanted men in India. On 30 March, the Indian security forces tracked him down in the old city of Srinagar. There was a fierce exchange of fire, in which he was killed.
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He had lost his life at the age of twenty-three.

Meanwhile Nadeem, Ashfaq's childhood friend, was pursuing his dream of becoming a pilot. In March 1992, he left Srinagar to join a flying school near Delhi. From there he went to a flying school in Georgia, in the United States. He returned to Srinagar in 1994, but left again in 1996, telling his
parents that he was going back to the United States, where he would find a job as a pilot for an American airline. His parents kept in touch. They received many calls back from their son, who they believed was living a prosperous and contented life in America. In 1999, there occurred one of the frequent fierce exchanges of fire between Indian troops and Kashmiri guerrillas in a remote mountainous area of the region. Nadeem Khatib was killed at the age of thirty-two. He had left America to go to Pakistan, where he learned how to be a guerrilla fighter. Ominously, it was his experience in America which had turned him into a radical Islamist. There, according to his mother, he ‘used to brood a lot on America's exploitation of Muslim countries'.
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Beyond the personal tragedies, there lies the dangerous political situation, which continues to have serious implications for international politics. One curious legacy of the British Empire has been a strong Kashmiri community in England, which has been described as the ‘real fountainhead of secessionism'.
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Even more dangerously, the region is one of the places where the threat of nuclear war is still very real. On 11 and 13 May 1998 India carried out a series of underground nuclear tests at Pokhran. On 28 and 30 May, Pakistan conducted its own series of nuclear tests. Some sort of confrontation seemed likely. The Japanese Prime Minister, Keizo Obuchi, spoke of the urgency of resolving the ‘root cause' of the Indo-Pakistan conflict–Kashmir.
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More recently, Kashmir has been host to all types of Islamic terror groups, who find in the state's lawlessness a convenient cover for their activities. Between 26 and 29 November 2008, Mumbai witnessed more than ten shooting and bombing attacks, in which 173 people were killed. The group responsible for the attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, had been active in Kashmir for more than a decade. One of the attackers mentioned Kashmir in a rambling interview with the India TV news channel during the siege of the Taj Mahal Hotel. ‘Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir?' This is an excuse which in itself proves nothing, except how politically sensitive the issue of Kashmir still remains.
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The Kashmir dispute from the very beginning has been a battle of different ideas of what constitutes a state. Pakistan was built as an avowedly Muslim state, whose basis is the religion which, it was believed, united
the country. India, under its Congress leaders, has always proudly maintained its secular status. According to one writer, the battle of Kashmir is an ‘uncompromising . . . struggle of two ways of life, two concepts of political organization, two scales of values, two spiritual attitudes'.
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It was exasperating for Indian leaders like Nehru to have to justify India's control of Kashmir, given that the religious argument in favour of Pakistan seemed so obvious. It is ironic that since 1947 religion, in the form of militant Islamism, has, if anything, become a stronger current in international politics. At the end of 1948, Nehru complained that ‘people cannot get rid of the idea that Kashmir is predominantly Muslim and therefore likely to side with Muslim Pakistan'.
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This has always been at the core of the Pakistan case. It was the same argument made by Lord Mountbatten to the Maharaja in the summer of 1947, before Hari Singh's fateful decision to accede to India. It is the same argument that is heard from the mouths of Pakistani politicians today. Secular India, however, sees no reason why a majority Muslim state should not remain as part of India. Recent history has not moved in India's way in this respect. International politics in today's world, especially after 11 September 2001, has been dominated by ethnic and religious conflict, by people identifying with religion to a greater degree than any enlightenment thinker could have imagined. As George Orwell wrote in 1941, the ‘energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions–racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war–which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms'.
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The dispute in Kashmir is highly representative of the ‘energy that actually shapes the world'.

The role of history, of the British Empire, in all this is clear to see. Accidents and decisions made on a personal, almost whimsical, level have had a massive impact on international politics. The empire in its belief in the individual action of its servants, with very little supervision and without any real central philosophy, created an environment in which a parcel of land was sold to a very rich man, with enormous repercussions. The family of that rich man ruled Kashmir for a hundred years because it was convenient for the British that that family should do so. It is ironic that revisionist historians have pointed to Indian democracy as the British Empire's greatest legacy. Democracy in Kashmir never existed; the system
of Indian princes, which is directly responsible for the Kashmir problem, was the absolute opposite of democracy. The personal rule of the Hindu maharajas of Kashmir accorded with the snobbery of Victorian England, the belief in natural aristocrats, the love of pageantry and pride in lineage. These are not modern ideas, but owe their origin more to a feudal, medieval past than to the secular, democratic liberalism of the modern West. In Kashmir, the Maharaja's decision was final. It was that decision which has shaped, and will continue to influence, the fate of this troubled region. As Hari Singh himself wrote, in his clumsy, pompous style, ‘to which Dominion the state should accede–strictly speaking–according to the Government of India Act, I alone am the authority to decide'.
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In many ways, Hari Singh was indeed a modern-day Louis XIV, echoing the famous remark attributed to the French King: ‘L'État, c'est moi.'