Tuesday’s grim violation of the Line of Control in the Mendhar area of Poonch district of Jammu region, which resulted in the death of Lance Naik Hemraj and Lance Naik Sudhakar Singh of 13 Rajasthan Rifles, and decapitation of one of them 600 metres inside Indian territory, raises fundamental questions about New Delhi’s attitude to this luckless region since the creation of the Republic.
Despite Islamabad’s frequent recourse to military means to grab Jammu and Kashmir from India, successive Congress regimes have made questionable deals with Pakistani leaders and later claimed ‘betrayal’ to silence critics. Yet few have been so passionately committed to diplomacy and back channel dialogue to surrender Indian advantages (Siachen, Sir Creek, Musharraf formula) as the Congress-dominated UPA, which remains keen to remove the Armed Forces Special Powers Act from the State despite objections from the Army.
State-funded scholars have connived to keep reams of critical material suppressed from the historical record for decades, and much is still sealed in the Archives. Yet, enough evidence has seeped into the public domain in recent years to make a fresh appraisal of the independence era necessary and possible.
Briefly, the last ruler of the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir fell into disfavour with the British Raj when he expressed support for the freedom movement at the Round Table Conference in London in 1930: “As Indians and loyal to the land of our birth, we stand as solidly as the rest of our countrymen for our enjoyment of a position of honour and equality in the British Commonwealth”.
Strangely, this did not endear him to the Congress leadership, which paid scant regard to British machinations in this strategically vital state, supported Sheikh Abdullah’s vicious campaign against one of the most progressive monarchies in the country in 1946, and connived in its difficulties and subsequent partition.
The British began fomenting communal trouble in the state through the services of a mysterious Abdul Qadir in June 1931 itself, and in 1935 forced Maharaja Hari Singh to lease the Gilgit Agency to them for a period of 60 years on grounds of securing the frontier against Russian designs. The lease was abruptly terminated on August 1, 1947, leaving an ill-prepared kingdom to take responsibility for a vast frontier in an extremely turbulent period. Not surprisingly, the bulk of this territory was successfully grabbed by Pakistan in the war of 1947-48 (and designated as the Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir) with the active connivance of the British officers there and the manoeuvring of Louis Mountbatten in Delhi.
The original boundaries of the kingdom stretched up to Tibet, China, Tsarist Russia and Afghanistan; such is the extent of territory lost to India due to the stranglehold of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru on Congress, and Mountbatten’s influence on both. The Viceroy, it may be mentioned, actually hinted to the Maharaja that he should accede to Pakistan, explaining with maps and plans how the kingdom was physically integrated with the North West Frontier Province!
The kingdom’s Achilles heel was Mirpur, Poonch and Muzaffarabad, and the adjoining areas of Punjab where, around partition, communal passions were ignited and the Muslim population instigated to demand merger with Pakistan, triggering extreme anxiety amongst the Hindus and Sikhs of these regions, Hindus and Jammu, and Buddhists of Ladakh, who favoured India. This difficult situation caused the Maharaja to offer Standstill Agreements to India and Pakistan.
Indian academics have been scandalously remiss in not questioning the motives of the Congress leadership in Delhi for sitting pretty when Pakistan made its first moves by imposing an economic blockade on this critical region and starving it of essential commodities. Nehru promised to help on October 20, 1947, but made it clear that his priority was the release of Sheikh Abdullah from jail and his political empowerment at the height of the turbulence, even advising the king against acceding to India until the Sheikh was installed as popular ruler!
Nor did Delhi react when destitute refugees from Sialkot began entering Jammu. Pakistan armed Punjabi Muslims in Poonch and ex-servicemen from Mirpur, and turned the whole border with Punjab volatile. It then sent Major ASB Shah, joint secretary of its Foreign Ministry, to Srinagar with a blank Instrument of Accession for the Maharaja to sign, so confident was it of its ability to manoeuvre the kingdom into its lap!
The State forces had to be spread out as Hindu homes and villages were being looted and burned. But the commander, Brigadier Scot and Inspector General of Police Powell both abruptly resigned from office just before the real trouble broke, when they realised that the Maharaja was not for Pakistan. Clearly, the British design was to push him towards Pakistan, or create crisis and partition the State if he did not.
Pakistan fomented trouble in Poonch, Bhimbar, Kotli, Mirpur and Muzaffarabad, recruiting 60,000 retired and demobilized soldiers of the Indian Army. The besieged Maharaja appealed to Maharaja Yadvindra Singh of Patiala, who did his best to help.
The details of the battles fought by the State forces with little or no ammunition or food supplies, in adverse weather and with thousands of refugees from Punjab and the Kashmir border regions to escort to safety, cannot be detailed here. What India must remember with gratitude is that Maharaja Hari Singh had the vision to have the Pathankot Jammu road link completed on war footing to ensure physical integration with India. He urged Sardar Patel to send him guns and ammunition to blow up the Kohala Bridge from where he anticipated Pakistani ingress. Sadly, New Delhi was tardy and even Patel did not see the urgency of the situation and did not agree to immediate accession without transferring power to Sheikh Abdullah, whose legacy and that of his dynasty is there for all to see.
The actual war broke out on the night of October 21-22 at Muzaffarabad and Domel. Five days of murder, rape and mayhem of the civilian population was allowed before VP Menon flew to Srinagar with the Accession document on October 26, 1947. Mountbatten accepted it, with conditions not imposed on any other ruler, on October 27, 1947. Then he steered India into the quagmire of the Security Council and secured the de facto partition of the strategic frontier and its control by Pakistan, and leaving India with a ‘moth-eaten’ State of Jammu and Kashmir, returned to London in triumph.
It is time to question the ‘vision’ of the great men who presided over the nation’s destiny at that critical hour, and the wisdom of successors who keep trying to fool the nation so that strategic territory can be gifted to Pakistan.
NitiCentral.com, 9 January 2013
http://www.niticentral.com/2013/01/congress-was-never-serious-about-kashmir.html