Nehru and his machinations to keep the valley
An American Professor Christine Fair in the School of Foreign Service at the Georgetown University has recently co-authored an article entitled, “A new approach for Kashmir” in the ‘National Interest’ magazine with an Indian Professor Sumit Ganguly based at Indiana University, Bloomington, arguing that US should recognise the Line of Control (LoC) dividing the disputed territory of the state of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan as an “international border” so as to transform the bilateral nature of this dispute into a domestic Indian problem. Unfortunately, they have arrived at this “new solution” by an explanation of history which distorts the origins of this conflict.
Their first distortion of facts is that after partition of the subcontinent in 1947, Kashmir abutted both Pakistan and India. This statement is historically incorrect because without the award of the Muslim majority district of Gurdaspur to India, India could not have any direct link with Kashmir and hence no claim over it. So, conspiracy was hatched by Nehru, who exploited his “intimate relationship” with Vicereine Edwina Mountbatten to prevail upon Viceroy Mountbatten to secure Kashmir for India when the boundary lines were being drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, the Chairman of the Boundary Commissions in early August 1947. Now, we do know that every flight of Air India to London literally carried a ‘love letter’ from Nehru to Edwina but what we don’t know is that how many of them contained gratitude for the ‘gift’ of Kashmir as all of Edwina’s personal documents have not been made public for historical research as yet.
All this may have remained a ‘conspiracy theory’ or mere ‘Pakistani conjecturing’, had Radcliffe’s secretary, Christopher Beaumont, not spilled the beans in a startling statement in London in 1992 revealing the fact that under Mountbatten’s pressure Radcliffe did alter the boundary lines which included the award of the Muslim-majority district of Gurdaspur to India in order to provide her a direct land access to Kashmir.
If one digs deeper, one comes across historical evidence in the form of a note written for Viceroy Mountbatten by his Indian Constitutional Advisor V P Menon on 17 July, 1947, about three weeks before partition, which is included in Vol XII of ‘The Transfer of Power’ series of documents, maliciously stating, “It (Kashmir) does not lie in the bosom of Pakistan and it can claim an exit to India, especially if a portion of Gurdaspur district goes to (the Indian) East Punjab”. There you go. Kashmir did not abut India. Either the learned professors are ignorant of geography or have deliberately ignored this fact.
This duo of Indo-American professors then blames the tribesmen from north-western Pakistan for starting the militarisation of the Kashmir conflict stating that after the Maharaja of Kashmir had refused to accede to either Pakistan or India, the “Pakistani forces taking advantage of a tribal rebellion invaded the state”. What a fantastic fabrication of facts! To avoid a historical understanding of events as they actually unfolded, the authors have deliberately avoided the chronology of events as these happened i.e., who did what and when.
The Indian propaganda blaming the tribesmen from Pakistan for ‘invading’ Kashmir and thus starting the first Indo-Pak war in 1947 fooled the world for many years but truth never retires. Nehru’s tall claim that the Indian forces were airlifted to Kashmir on 27 October, 1947, after the tribal invasion was a blatant lie. Now, we know through two historical sources namely ‘Crisis in Kashmir’ by Alastair Lamb and ‘Heir Apparent’ by Karan Singh, the son of the last Maharaja of Kashmir that Nehru’s government under ‘Operation Rescue’ had dispatched four commando platoons of Indian army’s 50th Parachute Brigade and batteries of Patiala artillery camouflaged in civvies to Kashmir on 17 October, 1947, well before the tribal invasion. Thus, it was the ‘great’ Nehru who first sent armed forces into Kashmir even before the Maharaja was coerced to sign the accession. This vindicates Jinnah’s claim that the Indian accession of Kashmir was not bonafide as it rested on ‘fraud and violence’, and hence would never be accepted by Pakistan. At least, one doesn’t expect academicians to parrot the propagandist stance of the Indian governments.
Ms Fair and Mr Ganguly then make another outlandish claim by arguing that due to military incursion from Pakistan, the Kashmiri “Maharaja Hari Singh, now in a panic, sought India’s military assistance. India agreed to come to Kashmir’s defence only after he agreed to accede”. This is plain twisting of facts. The Indian version of Maharaja’s accession to India is that he wrote a letter on 26 October, 1947, to the first Indian Governor General Mountbatten seeking military help and in return agreed to sign the Instrument of Accession of Kashmir to India on the same date, thus India was justified in airlifting troops to Kashmir on the next day. Multiple historical sources prove this Indian claim to be untrue. For example, the British historian, Professor Lamb argues that the date of accession given by India is false because on 26 October, there was no contact between the Maharaja and the Indian government as he was travelling from Srinagar to Jammu for his safety. After analysing the archival material, the memoirs of the then Kashmiri Prime Minister Mehr Chand Mahajan and the correspondence of Jawaharlal Nehru, Professor Lamb has exposed the contradiction in the Indian claim by stating that on one hand V P Menon stated that he and Mahajan went to Jammu in the afternoon of the 26th October to obtain Maharaja’s signed Instrument of Accession whereas Mahajan has related that he and Menon flew to Jammu on 27th and not 26th October to obtain Maharaja’s signature. Even Sheikh Abdullah, who was staying at Nehru’s residence at that time, has admitted in his autobiography that the Maharaja had not signed the accession document on October 26.
The more one reads, the more one finds Nehru acting as the villain in the Kashmir tragedy. Kashmir being his ancestral home, he was quite sentimental in retaining it by hook or crook in independent India. The intensity of obsession can be imagined from a confidential remark he made to a British officer: “In the same way as Calais was written on Mary’s heart. Kashmir is written on mine.” What he felt privately, he could not express it publicly. The Indian soldiers could not be told to shed blood just because their premier was romancing with Kashmir. Instead, he preferred the garb of nationalism to justify the blatant Indian aggression in 1947. Mark his words to the warring soldiers in Srinagar: “The Kashmir operation is a fight for the freedom of India.”
The evidence of his desperation to capture Kashmir at all cost is actually strewn all over the pages of history provided one doesn’t shut eyes to the facts. As the first prime minister and despite being a barrister, quite well-versed in law, he was ready to dump all legalities and diplomatic niceties when the issue was Kashmir. Just imagine his fixation. About a month after partition and exactly a month before India sent her army to occupy Kashmir, he shot an anxious letter to his Home Minister Sardar Patel on September 27, 1947, stating that “Things must be done in a way so as to bring about the accession of Kashmir to the Indian Union as rapidly as possible with the cooperation of Sheikh Abdullah.”
So, much before the tribal invasion, Nehru had plans to gobble Kashmir. Now we know that deep down in his heart only he knew perfectly well that he would not hold any plebiscite while he made a pledge to the contrary before the world community. It was this passion for Kashmir that didn’t allow any rational thinking on his part. This unreasonable attitude was noted by several leaders who tried to talk sense to him. For example, US President Truman termed Nehru’s stance on Kashmir “silly” and “disagreeable” whereas President J F Kennedy found his sense of superiority “offensive”. Kennedy’s ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith lamented that he “had no luck” in convincing Nehru to hold the promised plebiscite. How weak was India’s stance from the very beginning can be understood from the advice given by their first High Commissioner to Pakistan, Sri Prakasha to Lord Mountbatten that “for the sake of peace all around”, the “wisest thing” India could do was to hand over Kashmir to Pakistan—an advice flatly rejected by Premier Nehru and never heeded by subsequent Indian prime ministers.
The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at qizilbash2000@yahoo.com