| Author |
Message |
    
Ibmast
Pilla Bewarse
Username: Ibmast
Post Number: 30
Registered: 03-2004
Posted From: 80.3.128.6
| | Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 1:33 am: |    |
thanks chalam bhai..I will buy this book |
Ibmast
Pilla Bewarse
Username: Ibmast
Post Number: 29
Registered: 03-2004
Posted From: 80.3.128.6
| | Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 1:32 am: | |
.havent read till the end..shall read tonight...but is interesting...suggesting that plebiscite was initially indias brainchild is something that india can leverage to its advantage in the matter.
|
Chalam
Bewarse
Username: Chalam
Post Number: 719
Registered: 04-2004
Posted From: 148.87.1.170
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 06, 2004 - 1:40 pm: | |
An excerpt from MJ Akbar's book 'Kashmir - Behind The Vale' would give another perspective to those interested in this subject. These are taken from the March 9, 1991 issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India.
***************************
"You can't build a nation on tricks." It was one of those remarks which illuminate the future. Lord Mountbatten was speaking to Ian Stephens, editor of The Statesman at the Government House on Tuesday, 28 October 1947, a meeting provoked by the paper's editorial criticism of the decision to send troops into Kashmir. Still livid over Jinnah's underhand tactics in Kashmir, Mountbatten continued:
Jinnah at Abbotabad...had been expecting to ride in triumph into Kashmir. He had been frustrated...India's move on Kashmir was an event of a different order. Her readiness to accept a plebiscite had been declared from the outset. A large-scale massacre, including a couple of hundred British residents in Srinagar, by tribesmen would have been inevitable if no military move had been made. The Maharaja's accession gave complete legality to the action so far taken.
The quotation is from Mission With Mountbatten, the much-mined diary of Alan Campbell-Johnson, CIE, OBE, Legion of Merit (USA), press attaché and head of the personal staff of Lord Mountbatten from January 1947 to June 1948, when Mountbatten said an emotional farewell to India. Forty years after the diary was first published in 1951, the sentence that strikes the eye most sharply is not the one about Pakistan's intentions, but India's. It is both perfectly true and perfectly logical: Plebiscite began as an Indian demand, formally articulated in the first Indo-Pak talks on Kashmir, on 1 August 1947.
The invasion of the tribal suddenly lifted Kashmir out of the background and pushed it on to the front page. It also forced everyone to take a public position on a complicated problem made infinitely more complex by the first use of force in Indo-Pak relations. For the moment, however, the invasion served a very useful purpose in India: the instant and unanimous outrage melted all differences, strengthening Nehru immeasurably. Mahatma Gandhi, often taunted with the question in the war years as to how far his non-violence would succeed against a brutal invasion, now gave the answer: non-violence could wait. On 29 October he met Mountbatten for ninety minutes to display his complete support for the Indian response. What Gandhi said privately he said publicly. On the 27th itself, he had told his daily prayer meeting that he would not mind if the small Indian force which had reached Srinagar were wiped out, or if Sheikh Abdullah also publicly lashed out against Pakistan, telling The Times of India (the interview was published on 28 October) that Kashmir was in dire peril, and that the tribal incursions had to be opposed.
Pakistan had made one last attempt before the invasion to woo Abdullah. In mid-September, Jinnah's emissaries contacted National Conference leaders in Srinagar; in October, G M Sadiq went twice to meet the Pakistani Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan. But all that the National Conference leaders would say was that Pakistan should not force the issue, and they would not support accession to Pakistan. The invasion aborted the dialogue. On 31 October, Abdullah sent a signal of peace to Pakistan. The Hindustan Times quoted him on, 2 November, as saying:
I...request Mr Jinnah to accept the democratic principle of the sovereignty of the people of our State, including as it does 78 per cent Muslims, whose free and unhampered choice must count in the matter of final accession.
That was the moral key: India was willing to stand by the option of a free and unhampered choice, Pakistan was not. Jinnah, in fact, was in a trap. He had laid claim to Junagadh, which had a Hindu majority, purely on the basis of the Nawab's right to join whichever nation he chose to. If the will of the majority of the people was not going to be a consideration in the positions Jinnah took on Junagadh or Hyderabad, he could hardly alter the rules for Kashmir. India was consistent: let the people rather than their rulers, decide their own fate, whether in Junagadh or Hyderabad or Kashmir. In fact, the first decision by Delhi was to install a popular government in Kashmir. On 30 October 1947 Hari Singh signed Order Number 176-H:
We are hereby pleased to command that pending the formation of an Interim Government as agreed upon and in view of the emergency that has arisen I charge Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah to function as the Head of the Administration with power to deal with the emergency.
The twenty-three-member Emergency Council included Bakshi Ghulam Mohamad, Mirza Mohammad Afzal Beg, G M Sadiq, Shah Lal Saraf, Girdhari Lal Dogra, D P Dhar and J N Zutshi. Plebiscite was also part of the formal commitment which Mountbatten made on behalf of the Government of India on 27 October, in reply to Hari Singh's nine-point acceptance of the Instruement of Accession. The relevant portion needs to be reproduced (the full text, only slightly longer, is available in 'Kashmir: Constitutional History and Documents', by Mohan Krishen Teng, Ram Krishen Kaul Bhatt and Santosh Kaul):
In the special circumstances mentioned by Your Highness, my Government has decided to accept the accession of Kashmir State to the Dominion of India. Consistently with their policy that, in the case of any State where the issue 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 her soil cleared of the invader, the question of the State's accession should be settled by a reference to the people.
The commitment was categorical. This was precisely what Mountbatten offered Jinnah on 1 November in Lahore. And it was Jinnah who objected!
This meeting had been proposed by Auchinleck as a sop after he refused to order the Pakistan Army officially into Kashmir on 27 October. He suggested a round-table conference including Mountbatten, Nehru, Jinnah, Liaqat, Hari Singh and Abdullah. Of course, after accession the last two had no locus standi, so they were not considered by Delhi. Mountbatten was keen on immediate talks, Nehru agreeable, but the Sardar was violently opposed, pointing out that talks at this stage would be akin to Munich-style appeasement:
For the Prime Minister to go crawling to Mr. Jinnah when we are the stronger side and in the right would never be forgiven by the people of India.
Patel was talking of moral strength; the military strength had not yet been proved. Nehru felt that a false sense of prestige should not sabotage a chance of peace. In any case, another factor intervened; Nehru came down with fever. (Campbell-Johnson on 28 October: "I was shocked to see how haggard and ill Nehru looked.") Liaqat would later maintain that this was only diplomatic illness. However, the meeting was finally fixed for 1 November, and the mechanism agreed upon was a conference of the Joint Defense Council (composed of representatives from both India and Pakistan) already scheduled for the first week of November. Nehru agreed to fly to Lahore with Mountbatten on the morning of the first.
But on the evening of 31 October Nehru reading official statement by Pakistan describing the accession as a triumph of "fraud and violence"; this phrase, still standard in Pakistani officials four decades later, in a broadcast to his country:
We do not recognise this accession. The accession of Kashmir to India is a fraud, perpetrated on the people of Kashmir by its cowardly Ruler with the aggressive help of the Indian Government.
The 31 October statement was too much for Nehru to take. He cancelled his visit, and Mountbatten went alone. Nehru's views on the Kashmir question are apparent in two statements, the first a coolly reasoned letter to the British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, on 25 October, while the problem was cascading into a crisis; the second a revealing speech in Parliament eleven months after. He wrote to Atlee:
Kashmir's northern frontiers, as you are aware, run in common with those of three countries, Afghanistan, the USSR and China. Security of Kashmir...is vital to security of India especially since part of the southern boundary of Kashmir and India are common. Helping Kashmir, therefore, is an obligation of national interest to India.
Nearly a year later he would recall these tense days in an emotional speech to the Lok Sabha on 7 September 1948:
May I take the House into my confidence? In the early stages...I was so exercised over Kashmir that if anything had happened or was likely to have happened in Kashmir, which according to me, might have been disastrous for Kashmir, I would have been heartbroken. I was intensely interested, apart from the larger reasons which the government has, for emotional and personal reasons; I do not want to hide this: I am interested in Kashmir.
The Mountbatten-Jinnah talks of 1 November opened with wrangling over who should have informed whom about tribal and troops. Mountbatten's account (Governor-General's Personal Report No 5,7 November 1947) records a suggestion that both sides should "withdraw at once and simultaneously". This was an interesting statement - since, by the Pakistan's version of events, only one side's forces had intervened in Kashmir. For the record, Pakistan insisted that it had nothing to do with the tribal. But Campbell-Johnson recalls:
When Mountbatten asked him (Jinnah) to explain how the tribesmen could be induced to remove themselves, his reply was, 'If you do this I will call the whole thing off,' which at least suggests that the public propaganda line that the tribal invasion was wholly beyond Pakistan's control will not be pursued too far in private discussion.
"I will call the whole thing off": at least Jinnah had the honesty to admit that he had set the whole thing on. Mountbatten now proposed a plebiscite. Hodson reports Jinnah's reaction:
Mr. Jinnah objected that with Indian troops present and Sheikh Abdullah in power the people would be frightened to vote for Pakistan.
How time has reversed the arguments! Since one man's invader is another man's liberator, the soil of Kashmir never became clear enough for an unambiguous plebiscite - when such a solution was still possible.
At the meeting Mountbatten introduced another dimension to the plebiscite idea; perhaps he was only offering options to a reluctant Jinnah, but he suggested a plebiscite under the auspices of the United Nations. It was the first time that the United Nations was mentioned, but then it was also the very first meeting on Kashmir. Mountbatten had no prior Cabinet sanction for this, but once again Jinnah made the suggestion irrelevant. In another massive irony, given Pakistan's persistent use of the UN later on, it was once again Jinnah who turned the idea down. He suggested instead a plebiscite under the joint control and supervision of the two Governor-Generals, Jinnah and Mountbatten. The latter saw the trap early, and slid away. He pointed out that, politically, they were hardly equals; Jinnah had real power, while Mountbatten at best held this position in trust for a few more months. But Jinnah lost a great opportunity that day, if not to go to the UN then at least to embarrass the Indian government into disowning what its own Governor-General had proposed. If only Jinnah had realised what he himself was going to say on the subject of plebiscite and the United Nations ten weeks later.
That was his irony. The Indian irony was that Mountbatten and Nehru now began to harp on a role for the United Nations. If Jinnah had reason to rue the first, then Jawaharlal had more than ample opportunity to deeply regret the second. Nehru made the involvement of the UN public in a broadcast on 2 November. Explaining why Indian troops had moved into Kashmir, he said: "Not to have taken these steps would have been betrayal of a trust and cowardly submission to the law of the sword with its accompaniment of arson, rape and slaughter". He added that once the rule of law had been reestablished India was willing to hold a referendum "under some auspices as that of the United Nations". V P Menon records this in 'Story of the Integration of the Indian States'. This was obviously acceptable to the other Indian leaders, including Patel, since no one objected to the idea then.
On 3 November Home Minister Patel and Defense Minister Baldev Singh visited Srinagar; their report led to the establishment of a new divisional headquarters, signaling that India was now ready to dig in and stay. Major-General Kalwant Singh reached on 5 November, and by the afternoon of 8 November Baramulla was retaken. The now completely frustrated Pakistani leaders gave vent to their anger in statements and broadcasts: India had been as immoral as the Dogras, Abdullah was a quisling etc, etc.
Mountbatten maintained his increasingly lonely peace initiative in an environment of escalating hostility. Another meeting of the Joint Defense Council had been scheduled for Saturday, 8 November, but despite his best efforts, Mountbatten could not persuade Jinnah and Liaqat to come to Delhi to attend it. Nothing more was possible for two weeks as the Mountbattens left for London to attend the wedding of their cousin Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, a nephew. But as soon as Mountbatten returned, the process was reactivated. Liaqat Ali Khan agreed to come to Delhi for a meeting on 26 November.
But once again Jawaharlal Nehru was not present. In the middle of the meeting, Mountbatten received a "Most Immediate" envelope from him, enclosing two telegrams he had received that very morning from the Pakistan Prime Minister, along with a cryptic note:
In view of what Mr. Liaqat Ali Khan has said in these telegrams, I see no particular advantage in my discussing the Kashmir situation or indeed any other matter with him.
Mountbatten reported to his King:
If Mr. Liaqat Khan's intention had been to ruin any chance of further negotiations, he could not have phrased or timed his telegrams better. He accused Sheikh Abdullah, who, he must have full well have known, was one of Pandit Nehru's closest friends, of being "a quisling and a paid agent to disrupt the Muslims of Kashmir"; and he accused the Government of India of trying to mislead the world, of evasion, of contradiction, of tyranny and of attempting to eliminate the whole Muslim population of Kashmir.
What Nehru had to say, he told Parliament on 25 November. His theme was:
We did not want a mere accession from the top but an association in accordance with the will of the people.
The invasion, he said, reading from a prepared statement:
was an act of hostility not only to Kashmir but to the Indian Union...If we had allowed this scheme to succeed, we would have been guilty of the betrayal of the people of Kashmir and of a grave dereliction of duty to India...We cannot treat with freebooters who have murdered large numbers of people and tried to ruin Kashmir. They are not a State, although a State may be behind them.
Then Nehru promised a UN-overseen plebiscite on the floor of the House:
In order to establish our bona fides, we have suggested that when the people are given the chance to decide their future, this should be done under the supervision of an impartial tribunal such as the United Nations Organisation. The issue in Kashmir is whether violence and naked force should decide the future or the will of the people.
It needs to be added that there was no objection from anyone as Nehru took this high moral ground; Patel was answering questions that day in the House, and the man who later launched a movement and a party against Nehru's "appeasement", Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, was a member of the front benches.
Despite the ill-will between Nehru and Liaqat, Mountbatten arranged a meeting between the two at four o'clock on the afternoon of 26 November. Proposals to disengage were followed up at lower levels in a series of meetings over the next two days. But within two hours of the Pakistan delegation's departure, Mountbatten attended a Defence Committee meeting of the Indian Cabinet which he called "one of the most disastrous and distressing meetings it has ever been my lot preside over". It was a completely different mood that he witnessed within the Cabinet now. All talk of conciliation was over.
There were three reasons for this fresh burst of anger. Liaqat, who had returned home ahead of the rest of his delegation, had - instead of trying to defuse the situation - made provocative speeches saying Pakistan would never give up Kashmir, and ordered fresh batches of raiders into the Valley from their camps along the Jammu border. The information was brought to the Cabinet by Patel and Baldev Singh, who had just made another trip to Kashmir. Mountbatten records:
Thirdly (and this affected India's Ministers perhaps more than anything else), there were the stories, which had by now become commonplace, of the raiders having indulged in the most ghastly atrocities, including the wholesale murder of non-Muslims and the selling of Kashmiri girls.
Jawaharlal Nehru was particularly livid. Mountbatten added:
Pandit Nehru declared that, in these circumstances, he would certainly not talk to Mr. Liaqat Ali Khan at Lahore about a plebiscite. All the Ministers were insistent on the most violent military action being taken.
They wanted not only to clear Kashmir of the raiders but also a cordon sanitaire, or a demilitarized zone, on the Pakistan side which could be monitored from the air to ensure that the camps could never be reactivated. If that mood had been truly converted into military action right then, at least there might have been nothing called "Azad Kashmir" now. But, unfortunately for India, Mountbatten now sabotaged his own Cabinet. Hodson, a bit cheekily, exposes what transpired:
...they (the Ministers) were so insistent that Lord Mountbatten had to temporise by getting the proposal referred to the Joint Planning Staff. He made sure meanwhile that the report be adverse, and so it was. The Ministers then gave up the idea without argument.
In other words, Mountbatten simply instructed the British officers to tell the Cabinet that their military aims were impossible to achieve, and they dutifully remained more loyal to Mountbatten than to the truth. Mountbatten's reluctance to see a decisive defeat of Pakistan aborted the attempt before it could even be undertaken.
He then managed to persuade the reluctant Nehru to go to Lahore for the 9 December Joint Defence Council meeting. The discussions on that day set the pattern for the next few decades: the two sides circled endlessly around their positions, occasionally stepped out to spar with each other, but there was no meeting point. The only drama was provided by unscheduled outbursts. Mountbatten recalls that at one point:
Pandit Nehru flared up and declared that the only solution was to clear Kashmir with the sword, and that he would "throw up his Prime Ministership, and take a rifle himself and lead the men of India against the invasion".
Mountbatten notes:
I realised that the deadlock was complete, and that the only way out now was to bring in some third party in some capacity or the other. For this purpose, I suggested that the United Nations Organisation should be called upon.
The Third Party came. It settled nothing, and it is still there as an irrelevant observer. But till at least 1972, it absorbed too much time, concern and energy, and the internationalization of the dispute converted Kashmir into another playground of powerful interests. Mountbatten's motives were doubtless honourable, but he was also exhibiting the imperialist syndrome: the natives need guidance. Interestingly, by December Nehru had begun to have some serious reservations about going to the UN. Hodson writes:
Lord Mountbatten now bent his efforts to getting the idea of reference to the United Nations accepted. Pandit Nehru was first adamantly opposed. Under what article of the Charter, he asked, could any reference to the United Nations be made? How did Pakistan come into the picture?
Good questions; but why did Nehru lose faith in his own doubts? Whatever he may have said before, when the suggestion to go to the UN became serious he hesitated. But Mountbatten managed to prevail over Nehru and Patel and the Indian Cabinet finally decided on 20 December that India should take its complaint against Pakistan's involvement in the tribal invasion to the UN, under Article 35 of its Charter. Another irony: Pakistan's first reaction was an objection.
On the ground the confrontation escalated in the last days of December. By Christmas eve, the Pakistani forces had counter-attacked: the garrison at Jhangar had suffered heavy casualties, while Uri was seriously threatened -thus exposing Srinagar again. Nehru made it clear that if India became vulnerable in Kashmir it would broaden the war into Punjab - much as it was to do in 1965. Mountbatten dashed off a 2,000-word letter to Nehru urging a policy of peace. Nehru replied on Christmas Day at even longer length:
While we ardently desire peace and the end of fighting, we must not be unrealistic. Our desire does not lead to peace unless something is done to that end...From the strictly legal and constitutional point of view of international law we can in self-defence take any military measures to resist it, including the sending of our armies across Pakistan territory to attack their bases near the Kashmir border. We have refrained from doing this because of our desire to avoid complications leading to open war. In our avoidance of this we have increased our own peril and not brought peace any nearer...
He could hardly have been more categorical.
But instead of full war, the UN alternative was pursued. Disillusionment came quickly. By February, Nehru was bitterly regretting the UN decision to Mountbatten. But the fault lay with India. The leader of the Indian delegation, Gopalaswami Aiyangar (former Prime Minister of Kashmir) bungled India's case badly. In his opening statement to the Security Council on 15 January 1948, he was unconvincingly brief, and failed to carry the argument on key issues. Perhaps the biggest mistake was Aiyangar's inexplicable failure to condemn Pakistan directly. Michael Brecher writes in 'The Struggle for Kashmir':
Although India's complaint to the UN was raised in the form of Pakistan's alleged complicity in the tribal invasion, India's delegate failed or was unwilling to condemn Pakistan as a de facto aggressor. Indeed, as noted earlier, he took great pains to differentiate sharply between Pakistan and the raiders, and by focussing the attention of the Council on the tribesmen as the culprits in the case, he lost considerable debating effectiveness in his efforts to secure the Council's condemnation of Pakistan per se.
Worse, Aiyangar sounded as if he was Pakistan's lawyer on the issue of plebiscite: time after time he returned to:
the high-principled statesmanship of the Government of India under its present leadership. In accepting the accession they refused to take advantage of the immediate peril in which the State found itself and informed the Ruler that the accession should finally be settled by plebiscite as soon as peace is restored.
In effect, Aiyangar seemed to question the very validity of the accession when its unquestioned legality was the very basis of the Indian intervention. Writes Brecher:
He made it appear, as if the Accession was absolutely conditional upon the results of a plebiscite.
It was surprising that Aiyangar could not even present the political background of Kashmir properly. M. C. Setalvad, Attorney-General of India then, tried to repair matters but the damage was too great. And Pakistan's representative, the brilliant Sir Muhammad Zafarullah, Foreign Minister of his country, made mincemeat of the Indian position in an unprecedented five-hour exposition. He used the classic technique of changing the argument. He linked the tribal invasion to the violence elsewhere, pursuing the line that it was a natural corollary to the communal violence in Punjab and Jammu. This was completely illogical, since not a single Muslim had been touched by any Hindu in the valley - in fact could not be, given the overwhelming Muslim majority there - but Aiyangar, instead of challenging this fake justification, agreed with it! On 22 January 1948, Aiyangar became Sir Zafarullah's biggest ally when he said:
There is no doubt that the Security Council now has before it both the Jammu and Kashmir question and situations other than this question which have been brought to the attention of the Security Council by Pakistan.
It was on 22 January, the same day that Pakistan scored its decisive victory in the United Nations. The Security Council altered the title of the issue from "The Jammu-Kashmir Question" to "The India-Pakistan Question". From the Kashmir issue an emboldened and spirited Sir Zafarullah turned it into a Muslim issue, a "national" response to the "genocide" against Muslims.
Nehru made a familiar mistake; unwilling to blame Aiyangar for the collapse of the Indian case, he began to imagine larger conspiracies. Mountbatten records:
Pandit Nehru said that he was shocked to find that power politics and not ethics were ruling the United Nations Organisation and was convinced that the United Nations
Organisation was being completely run by the Americans, and that Senator Warren Austin, the American representative, had made no bones of his sympathies for the Pakistan case...
This may have been perfectly true, but it hardly absolved the Indian delegation of surrendering the initiative to Pakistan. K. S. Bajpai, who retired from the Indian Foreign Service as Ambassador in the United States, told the author that his father, Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai, appointed the first Secretary-General of the External Affairs Ministry, was initially selected by Nehru to lead the Indian delegation to the UN, but his name aroused too much violent opposition - Sir Girija had been one of the great favourites of the British - and had to be withdrawn. Nehru did send Bajpai to represent India later, but the damage had been done. Sir Girija would have been a far better match for Sir Zafarullah.
An angry Nehru wanted to withdraw the Indian delegation from Lake Success, but was persuaded once again by Mountbatten to stop short of such a drastic step. The Security Council resolution came on 21 April 1948. Jointly sponsored by Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, the UK and the USA, and passed by a vote of 9-0 (the USSR and Ukraine abstaining), it created a Commission of five members, charged with restoring peace and conducting a plebiscite with the cooperation of both governments. Before Mountbatten left India on 21 June 1948, he made one final attempt at a solution. Towards the end of May, he suggested a formal partition of Kashmir. Nehru was ready to consider the idea, but Pakistan simply ignored it and it disappeared into the archives.
Pakistan had raised its sights by now. On 5 July 1948, Sir Zafarullah calmly informed the UN Commission in Karachi that his country had formally entered the war, with three regular force battalions. While the fighting escalated, the Commission shifted its focus to arranging a ceasefire. One would have been possible in August if Pakistan's military ambitions had not interfered.
On 13 August 1948, the Security Council's three-part Basic Resolution called for a ceasefire; And asked Pakistan, as aggressor, to withdraw all her forces, regular or irregular, while accepting that India could retain part of her troops in Kashmir. Part Three of the resolution, which was not binding unless the first two Parts had been implemented, said that
the future status of Jammu and Kashmir shall be determined in accordance with the will of the people and to that end, upon acceptance of the Truce Agreement both Governments
agree to enter into consultation with the Commission to determine fair and equitable conditions whereby such free expression of will be assured.
Pakistan refused to implement the first two parts, thereby handing the argument back to India. By winter, a chastened Pakistani Army headquarters had obviously realised that it would not be able to pull off any military victory. Pakistan accepted the terms of a further Resolution on 25 December 1948, and a ceasefire came into effect on 1 January 1949. Ceasefire, but no peace. The battle for Kashmir between India and Pakistan has raged all over the world, but nothing has changed on the ground. That Ceasefire Line drawn on 1 January has held through war and peace, through the decimation of one country and the destabilisation of the other. The UN failed; direct negotiation, begun in August 1953, became equally pointless. |
|
|
