My Seventy Four Articles, Books (now in pdf 2021), Notes Etc on Kashmir, Pakistan, & of course, India (plus my undelivered Lahore lectures)

2) Law, Justice and Jammu & Kashmir (2006)

https://independentindian.com/2006/07/03/law-justice-and-jk/

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=152464726125

Monday, October 5, 2009

3) Solving Kashmir: On an Application of Reason (2005)
https://independentindian.com/2005/12/03/solving-kashmir-on-an-application-of-reason/

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=152462776125

Monday, October 5, 2009

4) My (armchair) experience of the 1999 Kargil war (Or, How the Kargil effort got a little help from a desktop)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=388161476125

Thursday, April 29, 2010

5) Understanding Pakistan (2006)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=152348161125

Monday, October 5, 2009

6) Pakistan’s Allies (2006)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=152345826125

Monday, October 5, 2009

7) History of Jammu & Kashmir

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=152343836125

Monday, October 5, 2009

8) from 30 years ago, now in pdf

Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s edited by Subroto Roy & William E James

indvol

Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s edited by William E James & Subroto Roy

pakvol

9) Talking to my student and friend Amir Malik about Pakistan and its problems

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150297082781126

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

10) My thanks to Mr Singh for seeing the optimality of my Kashmir solution

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150271489571126

Sunday, September 4, 2011

11) Zafrullah, my father, and the three frigates: there was no massacre of the Hindu Sindhi refugees in Karachi in 1947

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150265008366126

Saturday, August 27, 2011

12) Conversation with Mr Birinder R Singh about my Kashmir solution

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150259831611126

Saturday, August 20, 2011

13) On the Hurriyat’s falsification of history

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150258949946126

Friday, August 19, 2011

14) Letter from a young Pashtun whose grandfathers were in the 1947 invasion of Kashmir (which the Hurriyat says never happened)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150258851821126

Friday, August 19, 2011

15) More on my solution

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150258100876126

Thursday, August 18, 2011

16  ) A Hurriyat/Taliban Islamist emirate in the Valley subject to an Indian blockade would likely face famine.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150257700231126

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

17) There is no Kashmiri nationality and there never has been in the modern era of international law

https://www.facebook.com/notes/subroto-roy/there-is-no-kashmiri-nationality-and-there-never-has-been-in-the-modern-era-of-i/10150255815456126

Monday, August 15, 2011

18) Of the Flag of Pakistan, and the Union Jack, and the Flag of India — August 14-15 1947

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150255301456126

Sunday, August 14, 2011

19) Talking about Kashmir in 1947 to Ralph Coti

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150254871116126

Saturday, August 13, 2011

20) Conversation with Prof. Bhim Singh about 1947

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150254495896126

Saturday, August 13, 2011

21) The LOC represents the division of ownerless, sovereignless territory won by military conquest by either side…

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150245816611126

Monday, August 1, 2011

22) Talking to Mr Tauseef

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150245521131126

Monday, August 1, 2011

23) J&K had ceased to exist as an entity in international law by August 15 1947, at most by October 22 1947

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150244867021126

Sunday, July 31, 2011

24) Would someone be kind enough to tell me which freedoms Indian Kashmiris are being deprived of?

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150243323381126

Friday, July 29, 2011

25) Kunan Poshpora: I would say the evidence reported by the Verghese Committee itself was enough to indicate there had been rape 28 July 2011

https://www.facebook.com/notes/subroto-roy/kunan-poshpora-i-would-say-the-evidence-reported-by-the-verghese-committee-itsel/10150242580476126

26) Talking to Mr Rameez Makhdoomi about Kashmir

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150241973371126

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

27) And, as you well know, General Hasnain is both Muslim and Kashmiri, besides being the Commanding Officer of 15 Corps.

http://www.facebook.com/subyroy?sk=notes&s=40

Friday, July 22, 2011

28) Kashmir needs a Coroner’s Office!

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150238284741126

Friday, July 22, 2011

29) A slogan for Kashmir: No exaggerations, no hallucinations, no cover-ups please: Just the plain facts & accountability

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150238136556126

Friday, July 22, 2011

30) Towards a Spatial Model of Kashmir’s Political History

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150234599731126

Sunday, July 17, 2011

31) Why did Allama Iqbal say “India is the greatest Muslim country in the world…”?

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150233148866126

Friday, July 15, 2011

32) Conversation with Mr Arif

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150230793806126

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

33) Omar Qayoom Bhat: A Victim of State Repression in J&K

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150229389496126

Monday, July 11, 2011

34) Good and evil in Kashmir over more than a millennium…

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150217168656126

Sunday, June 26, 2011

35) Letter to Mr Zargar (Continued)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150212034496126

June 23, 2011

36) From the Official Indian Army website re Human Rights Violations

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150210741356126

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

37) A Facebook Discussion on Kashmir with the Lahore Oxford & Cambridge Society

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150208871201126

Sunday, June 19, 2011

38) Answering two central questions on the Kashmir Problem

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150202054326126

Friday, June 10, 2011

39) Some articles on Jammu & Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150201498846126

Friday, June 10, 2011

40) Lar ke lenge Pakistan? Khun se lenge Pakistan?

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150195065706126

Thursday, June 2, 2011

41) On Pakistan & Questions of the Nature & Jurisprudence of Polities

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150165301016126

Saturday, April 30, 2011

42) On “state involvement” (January 2009)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?

on Friday, April 22, 2011

43) My four main 2005-06 articles on the existence of a unique, stable solution to Kashmir

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150155305266126

Sunday, April 17, 2011

44) On the present state of the Pakistan-India dialogue

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150140448906126

Thursday, March 31, 2011

45) Mixed messages (from a Dec 2008 post on Pakistan just after the Mumbai massacres)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150117696731126

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

46) New Foreign Policy? “Kiss Up, Kick Down”? (October 2006)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150098854806126

Friday, March 4, 2011

47) Conversations with Kashmiris: An Ongoing Facebook Note

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=489267761125

Saturday, January 22, 2011

48) On Pakistan and the Theory & Practice of the Islamic State, 1949, 1954

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=486039761125

Saturday, January 15, 2011

49) A Modern Military (2006)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=483556931125

Monday, January 10, 2011

50) India’s Muslim Voices: Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan (1892-1942), Punjab Prime Minister 1941

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=476020171125

Monday, December 27, 2010

51) Pre-Partition Indian Secularism Case-Study: Fuzlul Huq and Manindranath Roy

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=445015731125

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

52) A Brief Note on Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and the Pashtuns 1971-2010

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=414500306125

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

53) On the Existence of a Unique and Stable Solution to the Jammu & Kashmir Problem that is Lawful, Just and Economically Efficient

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=407478886125

Monday, July 5, 2010

54) Seventy Years Today (Sep 4 2009) Since the British Govt Politically Empowered MA Jinnah

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=407310716125

Monday, July 5, 2010

55) Justice & Afzal (Oct 14 2006)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=393914236125

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

56) A Brief History of Gilgit

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=336081356125

Monday, March 1, 2010

57)  India-USA interests: Elements of a serious Indian foreign policy (2007)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=299902341125

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

58) Ambassador Holbrooke’s error of historical fact

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=259713446125

Sunday, January 17, 2010

59) Of a new New Delhi myth & the success of the Univ of Hawaii 1986-1992 Pakistan project (Nov 15 2008)

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=247284116125

Sunday, 10 January 2010

60) Was Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah (1905-1982), Lion of Kashmir, the greatest Muslim political leader of the 20th Century?

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=244956301125

Friday, January 8, 2010

61) On Indian Nationhood: From Tamils To Kashmiris & Assamese & Mizos To Sikhs & Goans (2007)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=222511821125

Friday, December 25, 2009

62) India has never, not once, initiated hostilities against Pakistan (2009)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=194400926125

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

63) RAND’s study of the Mumbai attacks (Jan 25 2009)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=189261716125

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

64) Memo to the Hon’ble Attorneys General of Pakistan & India (January 16 2009)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=189251816125

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

65) On Hindus and Muslims (2005)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=172649451125

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

66) Iqbal & Jinnah vs Rahmat Ali in Pakistan’s creation (2005)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=171039831125

Saturday, October 31, 2009

67) Have “mixed messages” caused a “double-bind” in the US-Pakistan relationship?

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=164051251125

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

68) Pakistan’s Kashmir obsession: Sheikh Abdullah Relied In Politics On The French Constitution, Not Islam (Feb 16 2008)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=154064436125

Thursday, October 8, 2009

69) Two cheers for Pakistan! (April 7 2008)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=154062896125

Thursday, October 8, 2009

70) What to tell Musharraf: Peace Is Impossible Without Non-Aggressive Pakistani Intentions (Dec 15 2006)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=153985256125

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

71) India’s Muslim Voices (Dec 4 2008)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=153977181125

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

72) Saving Pakistan: A Physicist/Political Philosopher May Represent Iqbal’s “Spirit of Modern Times” (2007)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=153971996125

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

73) The Greatest Pashtun: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988)

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=153812126125

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

74) KashNFL

India has never, not once, initiated hostilities against Pakistan: A Note to Mr Clemons

From Facebook:

Mr Clemons,

Apropos your statement:

“The U.S. has an awkward problem with Pakistan in that substantial parts of its government actually favor the Afghan Taliban achieving political primacy in Afghanistan *as a buffer against incursions by India*” (italics added):

the US makes a mistake by accepting at face-value the psychotic delusion of the Pakistan military that it has faced or faces now a threat from India.

As I have said before, the last place on earth that New Delhi’s nomenclatura would like to extend its misgovernance would be Pakistan.

And the historical record is clear that India has never initiated hostilities against Pakistan, not once.

In Oct 1947, the new Pakistan started with an armed attack against the old “princely” State of Jammu & Kashmir with whom it had signed a “Standstill Agreement”. That State came into existence in international law in 1846.

In Sep 1965, Ayub Khan’s Pakistan, armed with Patton tanks and F-104s and F-86s, started an inflitration and then a war hoping to drive tanks all the way to Delhi but did not succeed.

In 1971, East Pakistan seceded from West Pakistan, and though India made it militarily possible it was not something that India conspired to bring about but was something caused by West Pakistanis lording it over their own compatriots. The Richard Sisson-Leo Rose book “War and Secession” is quite a definitive history. 90,000 Pakistanis surrendered as POWs whom India protected from Bangladeshi revenge.

In 1999, Musharraf had his Kargil misadventure. Other than the ghastly mutilation and murder of Lieutenant Saurabh Kalia and his platoon as POWs by the Pakistan Army and its Taliban friends,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saurabh_Kalia
Musharraf achieved nothing. He then sought to stay on in power unlawfully for almost a decade despite his civillian boss trying to sack him.

And then there was the 2008 attack on Mumbai by ten youthful terrorists from Pakistan who were trained by elements of the Pakistan military.

Where has there ever been an Indian “incursion”?

To the contrary, India had proposed the name of Pakistan as a new member of the UNO back in 1947 — and Zahir Shah’s Afghanistan was the only country to oppose it, for precisely the same unresolved problem as continues today, namely, the destiny of the Pashtuns.

Cordially

Suby Roy

MK Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan “Frontier Gandhi”

Following my 2006  article “The Greatest Pashtun: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan”, I have today posted at Facebook this photograph from a book in my Library :

scan0057

How to solve Kashmir (2009)

see

https://independentindian.com/2015/03/03/pakistans-indias-illusions-of-power-psychosis-vs-vanity/

https://independentindian.com/2011/10/13/my-seventy-one-notes-at-facebook-etc-on-kashmir-pakistan-and-of-course-india-listed-thanks-to-jd/

Also

from Jan 2009
It is excellent news Omar Abdullah has become the constitutionally elected Head of Government of the great Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir after a historic vote.  I had the privilege of meeting his esteemed father briefly once on 23 March 1991 at the residence of the late Rajiv Gandhi though it would be understandable if he did not recall it.  Farooq Abdullah’s father Sheikh Abdullah was not merely a Lion of Kashmir but a genuine hero of Indian history, a true Bharat Ratna, someone whose commitment to constitutional principles of law and politics I admire more and more as I learn more of it…

The purpose of this open letter is to describe the broad path I believe to be the only just and lawful one available to the resolution of what has been known universally as the Kashmir problem.

Very briefly, it involves recognizing that the question of lawful territorial sovereignty in J&K is logically distinct from the question of the choice of nationality by individual inhabitants.  The solution requires

(a)    acknowledging that the original entity in the world system known as Jammu & Kashmir arising on March 16 1846 ceased to exist on or about October 22 1947, and that the military contest that commenced on the latter date has resulted in fact, given all particular circumstances of history, in the lawful and just outcome in international law;
(b)    offering all who may be Indian nationals or stateless and who presently live under Article 370, a formal choice of nationality between the Republics of India, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan: citizen-by-citizen, without fear or favour, under conditions of full information, individual privacy and security; any persons who voluntarily choose to renounce Indian nationality in such private individual decisions would be nevertheless granted lawful permanent residence in the Indian Republic and J&K in particular.

In other words, the dismemberment of the original J&K State and annexation of its territories by the entities known today as the Republic of Pakistan and Republic of India  that occurred since October 22 1947, as represented first by the 1949 Ceasefire Line and then by the 1972 Line of Control, is indeed the just and lawful outcome prevailing in respect of the question of territorial sovereignty and jurisdiction. The remaining democratic question has to do with free individual choice of nationality by inhabitants, under conditions of full information and privacy, citizen-by-citizen, with the grant of permanent residency rights by the Indian Republic to persons under its jurisdiction in J&K who might wish to choose, for deeply personal individual reasons, not to remain Indian nationals but become Afghan, Iranian or Pakistani nationals instead (or remain stateless).   Pakistan has said frequently its sole concern has been the freedom of Muslims of J&K under Indian rule, and any such genuine concern shall have been thereby fully met by India.  Indeed if Pakistan agreed to act similarly this entire complex mortal problem of decades shall have begun to be resolved most appropriately. Pakistan and India are both wracked by corruption, poverty and bad governance, and would be able to mutually draw down military forces pit against one another everywhere, so as to begin to repair the grave damage to their fiscal health caused over decades by the deleterious draining away of vast public resources.

The full reasoning underlying this solution, which I believe to be the only lawful, just, efficient and stable solution that exists, is thoroughly explained in the following five  articles. The first four, “Solving Kashmir”, “Law, Justice & J&K”, “History of J&K”, and “Pakistan’s Allies”, were published in The Statesman in 2005-2006 and are marked ONE, TWO, THREE, and FOUR below, and are also available elsewhere here.  The fifth “An Indian Reply to President Zardari”, marked FIVE, was published for the first time here following the Mumbai massacres.  I believe careful reflection upon this entire body of reasoning may lead all reasonable men and women to a practically unanimous consensus about this as the appropriate course of action; if such a consensus happened to arise, the implementation of the solution shall only be a matter of relatively uncomplicated procedural detail.

Subroto Roy
January 7 2009

“ONE
SOLVING KASHMIR: ON AN APPLICATION OF REASON by Subroto Roy First published in three parts in The Statesman, Editorial Page Special Article, December 1,2,3 2005, http://www.thestatesman.net

(This article has its origins in a paper “Towards an Economic Solution for Kashmir” which circulated in Washington DC in 1992-1995, including at the Indian and Pakistani embassies and the Carnegie Endowment, and was given as an invited lecture at the Heritage Foundation on June 23 1998. It should be read along with other articles also republished here, especially “History of J&K”, “Law, Justice and J&K” , “Understanding Pakistan”, “Pakistan’s Allies” and “What to Tell Musharraf”. The Washington paper and lecture itself originated from my ideas in the Introduction to Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy, edited by WE James and myself in the University of Hawaii project on Pakistan 1986-1992.)

I. Give Indian `Green Cards’ to the Hurriyat et al
India, being a liberal democracy in its constitutional law, cannot do in Jammu & Kashmir what Czechoslovakia did to the “Sudeten Germans” after World War II. On June 18 1945 the new Czechoslovakia announced those Germans and Magyars within their borders who could not prove they had been actively anti-fascist before or during the War would be expelled — the burden of proof was placed on the individual, not the State. Czechoslovakia “transferring” this population was approved by the Heads of the USA, UK and USSR Governments at Potsdam on August 2 1945. By the end of 1946, upto two million Sudeten Germans were forced to flee their homes; thousands may have died by massacre or otherwise; 165,000 remained who were absorbed as Czechoslovak citizens. Among those expelled were doubtless many who had supported Germany and many others who had not — the latter to this day seek justice or even an apology in vain. Czechoslovakia punished none of its nationals for atrocities, saying it had been revenge for Hitler’s evil (”badla” in Bollywood terms) and the post Cold War Czech Government too has declined to render an apology. Revenge is a wild kind of justice (while justice may be a civilised kind of revenge).

India cannot follow this savage precedent in international law. Yet we must recognise there are several hundred and up to several hundred thousand persons on our side of the boundary in the State of Jammu & Kashmir who do not wish to be Indian nationals. These people are presently our nationals ius soli, having been born in territory of the Indian Republic, and/or ius sanguinis, having been born of parents who are Indian nationals; or they may be “stateless” whom we must treat in accordance with the 1954 Convention on Stateless Persons. The fact is they may not wish to carry Indian passports or be Indian nationals.

In this respect their juridical persons resemble the few million “elite” Indians who have in the last few decades freely placed their hands on their hearts and solemnly renounced their Indian nationality, declaring instead their individual fidelity to other nation-states — becoming American, Canadian or Australian citizens, or British subjects or nationals of other countries. Such people include tens of thousands of the adult children of India’s metropolitan “elite”, who are annually visited abroad in the hot summer months by their Indian parents and relatives. They are daughters and sons of New Delhi’s Government and Opposition, of retired generals, air marshals, admirals, ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, public sector bureaucrats, private sector businessmen, university professors, journalists, doctors and many others. India’s most popular film-actress exemplified this “elite” capital-flight when, after a tireless search, she chose a foreign husband and moved to California.

The difference in Jammu & Kashmir would be that those wishing to renounce Indian nationality do not wish to move to any other place but to stay as and where they are, which is in Kashmir Valley or Jammu. Furthermore, they may wish, for whatever reason, to adopt, if they are eligible to do so, the nationality of e.g. the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan or the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

They may believe themselves descended from Ahmad Shah Abdali whose Afghans ruled or mis-ruled Kashmir Valley before being defeated by Ranjit Singh’s Sikhs in 1819. Or they may believe themselves of Iranian descent as, for example, are the Kashmiri cousins of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Or they may simply have wished to be, or are descended from persons who had wished to be on October 26 1947, citizens of the then-new British Dominion of Pakistan — but who came to be prevented from properly expressing such a desire because of the war-like conditions that have prevailed ever since between India and Pakistan. There may be even a few persons in Laddakh who are today Indian nationals but who wish to be considered Tibetans instead; there is, however, no Tibetan Republic and it does not appear there is going to be one.

India, being a free and self-confident country, should allow, in a systematic lawful manner, all such persons to fulfil their desires, and furthermore, should ensure they are not penalised for having expressed such “anti-national” desires or for having acted upon them. Sir Mark Tully, the British journalist, is an example of someone who has been a foreign national who has chosen to reside permanently in the Republic of India — indeed he has been an exemplary permanent resident of our country. There are many others like him. There is no logical reason why all those persons in Jammu & Kashmir who do wish not to be Indians by nationality cannot receive the same legal status from the Indian Republic as has been granted to Sir Mark Tully. There are already thousands of Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Nepalese nationals who are lawful permanent residents in the Indian Republic, and who travel back and forth between India and their home countries. There is no logical reason why the same could not be extended to several hundred or numerous thousand people in Jammu & Kashmir who may wish to not accept or to renounce their Indian nationality (for whatever personal reason) and instead become nationals, if they are so eligible, of the Islamic Republics of Afghanistan, Iran or Pakistan, or, for that matter, to remain stateless. On the one hand, their renunciation of Indian nationality is logically equivalent to the renunciation of Indian nationality by the adult children of India’s “elite” settled in North America and Western Europe. On the other hand, their wish to adopt, if they are eligible, a foreign nationality, such as that of Afghanistan, Iran or Pakistan, and yet remain domiciled in Indian territory is logically equivalent to that of many foreign nationals domiciled in India already like Sir Mark Tully.

Now if you are a permanent resident of some country, you may legally have many, perhaps most, but certainly not all the rights and duties of nationals of that country. e.g., though you will have to pay all the same taxes, you may not be allowed to (or be required to) vote in national or provincial elections but you may in local municipal elections. At the same time, permanently residing foreign nationals are supposed to be equal under the law and have equal access to all processes of civil and criminal justice. (As may be expected though from human frailty, even the federal courts of the USA can be notorious in their injustice and racism towards “Green Card” holders relative to “full” American citizens.) Then again, as a permanently resident foreigner, while you will be free to work in any lawful trade or profession, you may not be allowed to work in some or perhaps any Government agencies, certainly not the armed forces or the police. Many Indians in the USA were engineering graduates, and because many engineering jobs or contracts in the USA are related to the US armed forces and require US citizens only, it is commonplace for Indian engineers to renounce their Indian nationality and become Americans because of this. Many Indian-American families have one member who is American, another Indian, a third maybe Canadian, a fourth Fijian or British etc.

The same can happen in the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir if it evolves peacefully and correctly in the future. It is quite possible to imagine a productive family in a peaceful Kashmir Valley of the future where one brother is an officer in the Indian Armed Forces, another brother a civil servant and a sister a police officer of the J&K State Government, another sister being a Pakistani doctor, while cousins are Afghan or Iranian or “stateless” businessmen. Each family-member would have made his/her choice of nationality as an individual given the circumstances of his/her life, his/her personal comprehension of the facts of history, his/her personal political and/or religious persuasions, and similar deeply private considerations. All would have their children going to Indian schools and being Indian citizens ius soli and/or ius sanguinis. When the children grow up, they would be free to join, if they wished, the existing capital flight of other Indian adult children abroad and there renounce their Indian nationality as many have come to do.

II Revealing Choices Privately with Full Information
For India to implement such a proposal would be to provide an opportunity for all those domiciled in Kashmir Valley, Jammu and Laddakh to express freely and privately as individuals their deepest wishes about their own identities, in a confidential manner, citizen by citizen, case by case. This would thereby solve the fundamental democratic problem that has been faced ever since the Pakistani attack on the original State of Jammu & Kashmir commenced on October 22 1947, which came to be followed by the Rape of Baramulla — causing the formal accession of the State to the then-new Dominion of India on October 26 1947.

A period of, say, 30 months may be announced by the Government of India during which full information would be provided to all citizens affected by this change, i.e. all those presently governed by Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The condition of full information may include, for example, easy access to Afghan, Iranian and Pakistani newspapers in addition to access to Indian media. Each such person wishing to either remain with Indian nationality (by explicitly requesting an Indian passport if he/she does not have one already — and such passports can be printed in Kashmiri and Urdu too), or to renounce Indian nationality and either remain stateless or adopt, if he/she is so eligible, the nationality of e.g. Afghanistan, Iran, or Pakistan, should be administratively assisted by the Government of India to make that choice.

In particular, he/she should be individually, confidentially, and without fear or favour assured and informed of his/her new rights and responsibilities. For example, a resident of Kashmir Valley who chooses to become a Pakistani citizen, such as Mr Geelani, would now enjoy the same rights and responsibilities in the Indian Republic that Mr Tully enjoys, and at the same time no longer require a visa to visit Pakistan just as Mr Tully needs no visa to enter Britain. In case individual participants in the Hurriyat choose to renounce Indian nationality and adopt some other, they would no longer be able to legally participate in Indian national elections or J&K’s State elections. That is something which they say they do not wish to do in any case. Those members of the Hurriyat who chose e.g. Pakistani nationality while still residing in Jammu & Kashmir, would be free to send postal ballots or cross the border and vote in Pakistan’s elections if and when these occur. There are many Canadians who live permanently in the USA who cross home to Canada in order to cast a ballot.

After the period of 30 months, every person presently under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution would have received a full and fair opportunity to privately and confidentially reveal his/her preference or choice under conditions of full information. “Partition”, “Plebiscite”, and “Military Decision” have been the three alternatives under discussion ever since the National Conference of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and his then-loyal Deputy, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, helped the Indian Army and Air Force in 1947-1948 fight off the savage attack against Jammu & Kashmir State that had commenced from Pakistan on October 22 1947. When, during the Pakistani attack, the Sheikh and Bakshi agreed to the Muslim Conference’s demand for a plebiscite among the people, the Pakistanis balked — the Sheikh and Bakshi then withdrew their offer and decisively and irrevocably chose to accede to the Indian Union. The people of Jammu & Kashmir, like any other, are now bound by the sovereign political commitments made by their forebears. Even so, given the painful mortal facts of the several decades since, the solution here proposed if properly implemented would be an incomparably more thorough democratic exercise than any conceivable plebiscite could ever have been.

Furthermore, regardless of the outcome, it would not entail any further “Partition” or population “transfer” which inevitably would degenerate into a savage balkanization, and has been ruled out as an unacceptable “deal-breaker” by the Indian Republic. Instead, every individual person would have been required, in a private and confidential decision-making process, to have chosen a nationality or to remain stateless — resulting in a multitude of cosmopolitan families in Jammu & Kashmir. But that is something commonplace in the modern world. Properly understood and properly implemented, we shall have resolved the great mortal problem we have faced for more than half a century, and Jammu & Kashmir can finally settle into a period of peace and prosperity. The boundary between India and Pakistan would have been settled by the third alternative mentioned at the time, namely, “Military Decision”.

III. Of Flags and Consulates in Srinagar and Gilgit
Pakistan has demanded its flag fly in Srinagar. This too can happen though not in the way Pakistan has been wishing to see it happen. A Pakistan flag might fly in the Valley just as might an Afghan and Iranian flag as well. Pakistan has wished its flag to fly as the sovereign over Jammu & Kashmir. That is not possible. The best and most just outcome is for the Pakistani flag to fly over a recognised Pakistani consular or visa office in Srinagar, Jammu and Leh. In diplomatic exchange, the Indian tricolour would have to fly over a recognised Indian consular or visa office in Muzaffarabad, Gilgit and Skardu.

Pakistan also may have to act equivalently with respect to the original inhabitants of the territory of Jammu & Kashmir that it has been controlling — allowing those people to become Indian nationals if they so chose to do in free private decisions under conditions of full information. In other words, the “Military Decision” that defines the present boundary between sovereign states must be recognised by Pakistan sincerely and permanently in a Treaty relationship with India — and all of Pakistan’s official and unofficial protégés like the Hurriyat and the “United Jehad Council” would have to do the same. Without such a sovereign commitment from the Government of Pakistan, as shown by decisive actions of lack of aggressive intent (e.g. as came to be implemented between the USA and USSR), the Government of India has no need to involve the Government of Pakistan in implementing the solution of enhancing free individual choice of nationality with regard to all persons on our side of the boundary.

The “Military Decision” regarding the sovereign boundary in Jammu & Kashmir will be so recognised by all only if it is the universally just outcome in international law. And that in fact is what it is.

The original Jammu & Kashmir State began its existence as an entity in international law long before the present Republics of India and Pakistan ever did. Pakistan commences as an entity on August 14 1947; India commences as an entity of international law with its signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 20 1918. Jammu & Kashmir began as an entity on March 16 1846 — when the Treaty of Amritsar was signed between Gulab Singh Dogra and the British, one week after the Treaty of Lahore between the British and the defeated Sikh regency of the child Daleep Singh.

Liaquat Ali Khan and Zafrullah Khan both formally challenged on Pakistan’s behalf the legitimacy of Dogra rule in Jammu & Kashmir since the Treaty of Amritsar. The Pakistani Mission to the UN does so even today. The Pakistanis were following Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru himself, who too had at one point challenged Dogra legitimacy in the past. But though the form of words of the Pakistan Government and the Nehru-Abdullah position were similar in their attacks on the Treaty of Amritsar, their underlying substantive reasons were as different as chalk from cheese. The Pakistanis attacked the Dogra dynasty for being Dogra — i.e. because they were Hindus and not Muslims governing a Muslim majority. Nehru and Abdullah denounced monarchic autocracy in favour of mass democracy, and so attacked the Dogra dynasty for being a dynasty. All were wrong to think the Treaty of Amritsar anything but a lawful treaty in international law.

Furthermore, in this sombre political game of great mortal consequence, there were also two other parties who were, or appeared to be, in favour of the dynasty: one because the dynasty was non-Muslim, the other, despite it being so. Non-Muslim minorities like many Hindus and Sikhs in the business and governmental classes, saw the Dogra dynasty as their protector against a feared communalist tyranny arising from the Sunni Muslim masses of Srinagar Valley, whom Abdullah’s rhetoric at Friday prayer-meetings had been inciting or at least awakening from slumber. At the same time, the communalists of the Muslim Conference who had broken away from Abdullah’s secular National Conference, sought political advantage over Abdullah by declaring themselves in favour of keeping the dynasty — even elevating it to become an international sovereign, thus flattering the already pretentious potentate that he would be called “His Majesty” instead of merely “His Highness”. The ancestry of today’s Hurriyat’s demands for an independent Jammu & Kashmir may be traced precisely to those May 21-22 1947 declarations of the Muslim Conference leader, Hamidullah Khan.

Into this game stumbled the British with all the mix of cunning, indifference, good will, impatience, arrogance and pomposity that marked their rule in India. At the behest of the so-called “Native Princes”, the 1929 Butler Commission had hinted that the relationship of “Indian India” to the British sovereign was conceptually different from that of “British India” to the British sovereign. This view was adopted in the Cabinet Mission’s 12 May 1946 Memorandum which in turn came to be applied by Attlee and Mountbatten in their unseemly rush to “Divide and Quit” India in the summer of 1947.

It created the pure legal illusion that there was such a thing as “Lapse of Paramountcy” at which Jammu & Kashmir or any other “Native State” of “Indian India” could conceivably, even for a moment, become a sovereign enjoying the comity of nations — contradicting Britain’s own position that only two Dominions, India and Pakistan, could ever be members of the British Commonwealth and hence members of the newly created UN. British pusillanimity towards Jammu & Kashmir’s Ruler had even extended to making him a nominal member of Churchill’s War Cabinet because he had sent troops to fight in Burma. But the legal illusion had come about because of a catastrophic misunderstanding on the part of the British of their own constitutional law.

The only legal scholar who saw this was B R Ambedkar in a lonely and brilliant technical analysis released to the press on June 17 1947. No “Lapse of Paramountcy” over the “Native Princes” of Indian India could occur in constitutional law. Paramountcy over Indian India would be automatically inherited by the successor state of British India at the Transfer of Power. That successor state was the new British Dominion of India as well as (when it came to be finalised by Partition from India) the new British Dominion of Pakistan (Postscript: the deleted words represent a mistake made in the original paper, corrected in “Law, Justice & J&K” in view of the fact the UN  in 1947 deemed  India alone the successor state of British India and Pakistan a new state in the world system).  A former “Native Prince” could only choose to which Dominion he would go. No other alternative existed even for a single logical moment. Because the British had catastrophically failed to comprehend this aspect of their own constitutional law, they created a legal vacuum whereby between August 15 and October 22-26 1947, Jammu & Kashmir became a local and temporary sovereign recognised only by the Dominion of Pakistan (until October 22) and the Dominion of India (until October 26). But it was not a globally recognised sovereign and was never going to be such in international law. This was further proved by Attlee refusing to answer the J&K Prime Minister’s October 18 1947 telegram.

All ambiguity came to end with the Pakistani attack of October 22 1947, the Rape of Baramulla, the secession of an “Azad Kashmir”declared by Sardar Ibrahim, and the Pakistani coup détat in Gilgit on October 31 1947 followed by the massacre of Sikh soldiers of the J&K Army at Bunji. With those Pakistani actions, Gulab Singh’s Jammu & Kashmir State, founded on March 16 1846 by the Treaty of Amritsar, ceased to logically exist as an entity in international law and fell into a state of ownerless anarchy. The conflict between Ibrahim’s Muslim communalists backed by the new Dominion of Pakistan and Abdullah’s secularists backed by the new Dominion of India had become a civil war within a larger intra-Commonwealth war that itself was almost a civil war between forces of the same military.

Jammu & Kashmir territory had become ownerless. The Roman Law which is at the root of all municipal and international law in the world today would declare that in the ownership of such an ownerless entity, a “Military Decision” was indeed the just outcome. Sovereignty over the land, waters, forests and other actual and potential resources of the erstwhile State of Jammu & Kashmir has become divided by “Military Decision” between the modern Republics of India and Pakistan. By the proposal made herein, the people and their descendants shall have chosen their nationality and their domicile freely across the sovereign boundary that has come to result.

TWO
LAW, JUSTICE AND J&K by Subroto Roy First published in two parts in The Sunday Statesman, July 2 2006 and The Statesman July 3 2006 http://www.thestatesman.net Editorial Page Special Article

I.
For a solution to J&K to be universally acceptable it must be seen by all as being lawful and just. Political opinion in Pakistan and India as well as all people and parties in J&K ~ those loyal to India, those loyal to Pakistan, and any others ~ will have to agree that, all things considered, such is the right course of action for everyone today in the 21st Century, which means too that the solution must be consistent with the facts of history as well as account reasonably for all moral considerations.

On August 14, 1947, the legal entity known as “British India”, as one of its final acts, and based on a sovereign British decision made only two months earlier, created out of some of its territory a new State defined in international law as the “Dominion of Pakistan”. British India extinguished itself the very next day, and the newly independent “Dominion of India” succeeded to all its rights and obligations in international law. As the legal successor of the “India” which had signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the San Francisco Declaration of 1945, the Dominion of India was already a member of the new UN as well as a signatory to many international treaties. By contrast, the Dominion of Pakistan had to apply afresh to sign treaties and become a member of international organisations. The theory put forward by Argentina that two new States, India and Pakistan, had been created ab initio, came to be rejected and was withdrawn by Argentina. Instead, Pakistan with the wholehearted backing of India was made a member of the UN, with all except Afghanistan voting in favour. (Afghanistan’s exceptional vote signalled presence of conflict over the Durand Line and idea of a Pashtunistan; Dr Khan Sahib and Abdul Ghaffar Khan were imprisoned by the Muslim League regime of NWFP which later supported the tribesmen who attacked J&K starting October 22, 1947; that conflict remains unresolved to this day, even after the American attack on the Taliban, the restart of a constitutional process in Afghanistan, and the purported mediation of US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.)

Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan’s distinguished first ambassador to the UN, claimed in September 1947: “Pakistan is not a new member of UNO but a successor to a member State which was one of the founders of the Organisation.” He noted that he himself had led India to the final session of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1939, and he wished to say that Pakistan had been present “as part of India… under the latter name” as a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles. This was, however, logically impossible. The Treaty of Versailles long predated (1) Mohammad Iqbal’s Allahabad Address which conceptualised for the first time in the 20th Century a Muslim State in Northwest India; (2) Rahmat Ali’s invention of the word “PAKSTAN” on the top floor of a London omnibus; (3) M. A. Jinnah and Fazlul Haq’s Lahore Resolution; and (4) the final British decision of June 3, 1947 to create by Partition out of “British India” a Dominion named Pakistan. Pakistan could not have acted in international law prior to having come into being or been created or even conceived itself. Zafrullah Khan would have been more accurate to say that the history of Pakistanis until August 14, 1947 had been one in common with that of their Indian cousins ~ or indeed their Indian brothers, since innumerable North Indian Muslim families came to be literally partitioned, with some brothers remaining Indians while other brothers became Pakistanis.

Pakistan was created at the behest of Jinnah’s Muslim League though with eventual agreement of the Indian National Congress (a distant ancestor of the political party going by the same name today). Pakistan arose not because Jinnah said Hindus and Muslims were “two nations” but because he and his League wished for a State where Muslims would find themselves ruled by fellow-Muslims and feel themselves part of a pan-Islamic culture. Yet Pakistan was intended to be a secular polity with Muslim-majority governance, not an Islamic theocracy. That Pakistan failed to become secular was exemplified most poignantly in the persecution Zafrullah himself later faced in his personal life as an Ahmadiya, even while he was Pakistan’s Foreign Minister. (The same happened later to Pakistan’s Nobel-winning physicist Abdus Salaam.) Pakistan was supposed to allow the genius of Indo-Muslim culture to flourish, transplanted from places like Lucknow and Aligarh which would never be part of it. In fact, the areas that are Pakistan today had in the 1937 provincial elections shown scant popular Muslim support for Jinnah’s League. The NWFP had a Congress Government in the 1946 elections, and its supporters boycotted the pro-Pakistan referendum in 1947. The imposition of Urdu culture as Pakistan’s dominant ethos might have come to be accepted later in West Punjab, Sindh and NWFP but it was not acceptable in East Bengal, and led inevitably to the Pakistani civil war and creation of Bangladesh by Sheikh Mujib in 1971.

In August 1947, the new Dominions of India and Pakistan were each supposed to protect their respective minority populations as their first political duty. Yet both palpably failed in this, and were reduced to making joint declarations pleading for peace and an end to communal killings and the abduction of women. The Karachi Government, lacking the wherewithal and administrative machinery of being a nation-state at all, and with only Liaquat and an ailing Jinnah as noted leaders, may have failed more conspicuously, and West Punjab, the Frontier and Sindh were soon emptied of almost all their many Sikhs and Hindus. Instead, the first act of the new Pakistan Government in the weeks after August 14, 1947 was to arrange for the speedy and safe transfer of the North Indian Muslim elite by air from Delhi using chartered British aeroplanes. The ordinary Muslim masses of UP, Delhi and East Punjab were left in danger from or were subjected to Sikh and Hindu mob attacks, especially as news and rumours spread of similar outrages against Pakistan’s departing minorities.

In this spiral of revenge attacks and counter-attacks, bloodshed inevitably spilled over from West and East Punjab into the northern Punjabi plains of Jammu, though Kashmir Valley remained conspicuously peaceful. Zafrullah and Liaquat would later claim it was this communal civil war which had caused thousands of newly decommissioned Mirpuri soldiers of the British Army, and thousands of Afridi and other Frontier tribesmen, to spontaneously act to “liberate” J&K’s Muslims from alleged tyranny under the Hindu Ruler or an allegedly illegal Indian occupation.

But the main attack on J&K State that began from Pakistan along the Manshera-Muzaffarabad road on October 22, 1947 was admittedly far too well-organised, well-armed, well-planned and well-executed to have been merely a spontaneous uprising of tribesmen and former soldiers. In all but name, it was an act of undeclared war of the new Dominion of Pakistan first upon the State of J&K and then upon the Indian Dominion. This became obvious to Field Marshall Auchinlek, who, as Supreme Commander of the armed forces of both India and Pakistan, promptly resigned and abolished the Supreme Command in face of the fact that two parts of his own forces were now at war with one another.

The invaders failed to take Srinagar solely because they lost their military purpose while indulging in the Rape of Baramula. Thousands of Kashmiri women of all communities ~ Muslim, Sikh and Hindu ~ were violated and transported back to be sold in markets in Peshawar and elsewhere. Such was standard practice in Central Asian tribal wars from long before the advent of Islam, and the invading tribesmen shared that culture. India’s Army and Air Force along with the militias of the secular democratic movement led by Sheikh Abdullah and those remaining loyal units of J&K forces, fought off the invasion, and liberated Baramula, Naushera, Uri, Poonch etc. Gilgit had a British-led coup détat against it bringing it under Pakistan’s control. Kargil was initially taken by the Pakistanis and then lost by them. Leh could have been but was not taken by Pakistani forces. But in seeking to protect Leh and to retake Kargil, the Indian Army lost the siege of Skardu ~ which ended reputedly with the infamous communication from the Pakistani commander to his HQ: “All Sikhs killed; all women raped.”

Legal theory
Now, in this grave mortal conflict, the legal theory to which both the Indian and Pakistani Governments have been wedded for sixty years is one that had been endorsed by the British Cabinet Mission in 1946 and originated with the Butler Commission of 1929. Namely, that “Lapse of Paramountcy” over the “Indian India” of the “Native States” could and did occur with the extinction of British India on August 15, 1947. By this theory, Hyderabad, J&K, Junagadh and the several other States which had not acceded to either Dominion were no longer subject to the Crown’s suzerainty as of that date. Both Dominions drew up “Instruments of Accession” for Rulers to sign upon the supposed “Lapse” of Paramountcy that was to occur with the end of British India.

Ever since, the Pakistan Government has argued that Junagadh’s Ruler acceded to Pakistan and Hyderabad’s had wished to do so but both were forcibly prevented by India. Pakistan has also argued the accession to India by J&K’s Ruler was “fraudulent” and unacceptable, and Sheikh Abdullah was a “Quisling” of India and it was not his National Conference but the Muslim Conference of Ibrahim, Abbas and the Mirwaiz (precursor of the Hurriyat) which represented J&K’s Muslims.

India argued that Junagadh’s accession to Pakistan or Hyderabad’s independence were legal and practical impossibilities contradicting the wills of their peoples, and that their integration into the Indian Dominion was carried out in an entirely legitimate manner in the circumstances prevailing.

On J&K, India has argued that not only had the Ruler requested Indian forces to fight off the Pakistani attack, and he acceded formally before Indian forces were sent, but also that democratic principles were fully adhered to in the unequivocal endorsement of the accession by Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference and further by a duly called and elected J&K Constituent Assembly, as well as generations of Kashmiris since. In the Indian view, it is Pakistan which has been in illegal occupation of Indian territory from Mirpur, Muzaffarabad and Gilgit to Skardu all the way to the Khunjerab Pass, Siachen Glacier and K2, some of which it illegally ceded to its Communist Chinese ally, and furthermore that it has denied the peoples of these areas any democratic voice.

Roman law
In June 1947, it was uniquely and brilliantly argued by BR Ambedkar in a statement to the Press that the British had made a catastrophic error in comprehending their own constitutional law, that no such thing as “Lapse” of Paramountcy existed, and that suzerainty over the “Native States” of “Indian India” would be automatically transferred in international law to the successor State of British India. It was a legal illusion to think any Native State could be sovereign even for a single logical moment. On this theory, if the Dominion of India was the sole successor State in international law while Pakistan was a new legal entity, then a Native State which acceded to Pakistan after August 15, 1947 would have had to do so with the consent of the suzerain power, namely, India, as may be said to have happened implicitly in case of Chitral and a few others. Equally, India’s behaviour in integrating (or annexing) Junagadh and Hyderabad, would become fully explicable ~ as would the statements of Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel before October 1947 that they would accept J&K going to Pakistan if that was what the Ruler and his people desired. Pakistan unilaterally and by surprise went to war against J&K on October 22, declared the accession to India “fraudulent”, and to this day has claimed the territory of the original State of J&K is “disputed”. Certainly, even if the Ambedkar doctrine is applied that no “Lapse” was possible under British law, Pakistan did not recognise India’s jurisdiction there as the suzerain power as of August 15, 1947. Altogether, Pakistan’s sovereign actions from October 22 onwards amounted to acting to annex J&K to itself by military force ~ acts which came to be militarily resisted (with partial success) by India allied with Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference and the remaining forces of J&K. By these military actions, Pakistan revealed that it considered J&K territory to have descended into a legal state of anarchy as of October 22, 1947, and hence open to resolution by “Military Decision” ~ as is indeed the just outcome under Roman Law, the root of all municipal and international law today, when there is a contest between claimants over an ownerless entity.

Choice of nationality
Hence, the present author concluded (“Solving Kashmir”, The Statesman December 1-3, 2005) that the dismemberment of the original J&K State and annexation of its territories by India and Pakistan that has occurred since 1947, as represented first by the 1949 Ceasefire Line and then by the 1972 Line of Control, is indeed the just and lawful outcome prevailing in respect of the question of territorial sovereignty and jurisdiction. The remaining “democratic” question described has to do with free individual choice of nationality by the inhabitants, under conditions of full information and privacy, citizen-by-citizen, with the grant of permanent residency rights by the Indian Republic to persons under its jurisdiction in J&K who may choose not to remain Indian nationals but become Afghan, Iranian or Pakistani nationals instead. Pakistan has said frequently its sole concern has been the freedom of the Muslims of J&K under Indian rule, and any such genuine concern shall have been thereby fully met by India. Indeed, if Pakistan agreed to act similarly, this entire complex mortal problem of decades shall have begun to be peacefully resolved. Both countries are wracked by corruption, poverty and bad governance, and would be able to mutually draw down military forces pit against one another everywhere, so as to begin to repair the grave damage to their fiscal health caused by the deleterious draining away of vast public resources.

THREE
HISTORY OF JAMMU & KASHMIR by Subroto Roy  First published in two parts in The Sunday Statesman, Oct 29 2006 and The Statesman Oct 30 2006, Editorial Page Special Article, http://www.thestatesman.net

At the advent of Islam in distant Arabia, India and Kashmir in particular were being visited by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims during Harsha’s reign. The great “Master of Law” Hiuen Tsiang visited between 629-645 and spent 631-633 in Kashmir (”Kia-chi-mi-lo”), describing it to include Punjab, Kabul and Kandahar. Over the next dozen centuries, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and again Hindu monarchs came to rule the 85 mile long 40 mile wide territory on the River Jhelum’s upper course known as Srinagar Valley, as well as its adjoining Jammu in the upper plains of the Punjab and “Little Tibet” consisting of Laddakh, Baltistan and Gilgit.

In 1344, a Persian adventurer from Swat or Khorasan by name of Amir or Mirza, who had “found his way into the Valley and in time gained great influence at the Raja’s court”, proclaimed himself Sultan Shamsuddin after the death of the last Hindu monarchs of medieval Kashmir. Twelve of his descendants formed the Shamiri dynasty including the notorious Sikander and the just and tolerant Zainulabidin. Sikander who ruled 1386-1410 “submitted himself” to the Uzbek Taimur the Lame when he approached Kashmir in 1398 “and thus saved the country from invasion”. Otherwise, “Sikander was a gloomy ferocious bigot, and his zeal in destroying temples and idols was so intense that he is remembered as the Idol-Breaker. He freely used the sword to propagate Islam and succeeded in forcing the bulk of the population to conform outwardly to the Muslim religion. Most of the Brahmins refused to apostatise, and many of them paid with their lives the penalty for their steadfastness. Many others were exiled, and only a few conformed.”

Zainulabidin who ruled 1417-1467 “was a man of very different type”. “He adopted the policy of universal toleration, recalled the exiled Brahmins, repealed the jizya or poll-tax on Hindus, and even permitted new temples to be built. He abstained from eating flesh, prohibited the slaughter of kine, and was justly venerated as a saint. He encouraged literature, painting and music, and caused many translations to be made of works composed in Sanskrit, Arabic and other languages.” During his “long and prosperous reign”, he “constructed canals and built many mosques; he was just and tolerant”.

The Shamiri dynasty ended in 1541 when “some fugitive chiefs of the two local factions of the Makri and the Chakk invited Mirza Haidar Dughlat, a relation of Babar, to invade Kashmir. The country was conquered and the Mirza held it (nominally in name of Humayan) till 1551, when he was killed in a skirmish. The line… was restored for a few years, until in 1559 a Chakk leader, Ghazi Shah, usurped the throne; and in the possession of his descendants it remained for nearly thirty years.” This dynasty marks the origins of Shia Islam in Srinagar though Shia influence in Gilgit, Baltistan and Laddakh was of longer standing. Constant dissensions weakened the Chakks, and in 1586, Akbar, then at Attock on the Indus, sent an army under Raja Bhagwan Das into Srinagar Valley and easily made it part of his Empire.

Shivaism and Islam both flourished, and Hindu ascetics and Sufi saints were revered by all. Far from Muslims and Hindus forming distinct nations, here they were genetically related kinsmen living in proximity in a small isolated area for centuries. Indeed Zainulabidin may have had a vast unspoken influence on the history of all India insofar as Akbar sought to attempt in his empire what Zainulabidin achieved in the Valley. Like Zainulabidin, Akbar’s governance of India had as its “constant aim” “to conciliate the Hindus and to repress Muslim bigotry” which in modern political parlance may be seen as the principle of secular governance ~ of conciliating the powerless (whether majority or minority) and repressing the bigotry of the powerful (whether minority or majority). Akbar had made the Valley the summer residence of the Mughals, and it was Jahangir, seeing the Valley for the first time, who apparently said the words agar behest baushad, hamee in hast, hamee in hast, hamee in hast: “if Heaven exists, it is here, it is here, it is here”. Yet like other isolated paradises (such as the idyllic islands of the Pacific Ocean) an accursed mental ether can accompany the magnificent beauty of people’s surroundings. As the historian put it: “The Kashmiris remained secure in their inaccessible Valley; but they were given up to internal weakness and discord, their political importance was gone…”

After the Mughals collapsed, Iran’s Turkish ruler Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739 but the Iranian court fell in disarray upon his death. In 1747 a jirga of Pashtun tribes at Kandahar “broke normal tradition” and asked an old Punjabi holy man and shrine-keeper to choose between two leaders; this man placed young wheat in the hand of the 25 year old Ahmed Shah Saddozai of the Abdali tribe, and titled him “Durrani”. Five years later, Durrani took Kashmir and for the next 67 years the Valley was under Pashtun rule, a time of “unmitigated brutality and widespread distress”. Durrani himself “was wise, prudent and simple”, never declared himself king and wore no crown, instead keeping a stick of young wheat in his turban. Leaving India, he famously recited: “The Delhi throne is beautiful indeed, but does it compare with the mountains of Kandahar?”

Kashmir’s modern history begins with Ranjit Singh of the Sikhs who became a soldier at 12, and in 1799 at age 19 was made Lahore’s Governor by Kabul’s Zaman Shah. Three years later “he made himself master of Amritsar”, and in 1806 crossed the River Sutlej and took Ludhiana. He created a fine Sikh infantry and cavalry under former officers of Napoleon, and with 80,000 trained men and 500 guns took Multan and Peshawar, defeated the Pashtuns and overran Kashmir in 1819. The “cruel rule” of the Pashtuns ended “to the great relief of Kashmir’s inhabitants”.

The British Governor-General Minto (ancestor of the later Viceroy), seeing advantage in the Sikhs staying north of the Sutlej, sent Charles Metcalfe, “a clever young civilian”, to persuade the Khalsa; in 1809, Ranjit Singh and the British in the first Treaty of Amritsar agreed to establish “perpetual amity”: the British would “have no concern” north of the Sutlej and Ranjit Singh would keep only minor personnel south of it. In 1834 and 1838 Ranjit Singh was struck by paralysis and died in 1839, leaving no competent heir. The Sikh polity collapsed, “their power exploded, disappearing in fierce but fast flames”. It was “a period of storm and anarchy in which assassination was the rule” and the legitimate line of his son and grandson, Kharak Singh and Nao Nihal Singh was quickly extinguished. In 1845 the Queen Regent, mother of the five-year old Dalip Singh, agreed to the Khalsa ending the 1809 Treaty. After bitter battles that might have gone either way, the Khalsa lost at Sobraon on 10 February 1846, and accepted terms of surrender in the 9 March 1846 Treaty of Lahore. The kingdom had not long survived its founder: “created by the military and administrative genius of one man, it crumbled into powder when the spirit which gave it life was withdrawn; and the inheritance of the Khalsa passed into the hands of the English.”

Ranjit Singh’s influence on modern J&K was even greater through his having mentored the Rajput Gulab Singh Dogra (1792-1857) and his brothers Dhyan Singh and Suchet Singh. Jammu had been ruled by Ranjit Deo until 1780 when the Sikhs made it tributary to the Lahore Court. Gulab Singh, a great grand nephew of Ranjit Deo, had left home at age 17 in search of a soldierly fortune, and ended up in 1809 in Ranjit Singh’s army, just when Ranjit Singh had acquired for himself a free hand to expand his domains north of the River Sutlej.

Gulab Singh, an intrepid soldier, by 1820 had Jammu conferred upon him by Ranjit Singh with the title of Raja, while Bhimber, Chibal, Poonch and Ramnagar went to his brothers. Gulab Singh, “often unscrupulous and cruel, was a man of considerable ability and efficiency”; he “found his small kingdom a troublesome charge but after ten years of constant struggles he and his two brothers became masters of most of the country between Kashmir and the Punjab”, though Srinagar Valley itself remained under a separate Governor appointed by the Lahore Court. Gulab Singh extended Jammu’s rule from Rawalpindi, Bhimber, Rajouri, Bhadarwah and Kishtwar, across Laddakh and into Tibet. His General Zorawar Singh led six expeditions into Laddakh between 1834 and 1841 through Kishtwar, Padar and Zanskar. In May 1841, Zorawar left Leh with an army of 5000 Dogras and Laddakhis and advanced on Tibet. Defeating the Tibetans at Rudok and Tashigong, he reached Minsar near Lake Mansarovar from where he advanced to Taklakot (Purang), 15 miles from the borders of Nepal and Kumaon, and built a fort stopping for the winter. Lhasa sent large re-inforcements to meet him. Zorawar, deciding to take the offensive, was killed in the Battle of Toyu, on 11-12 December 1841 at 16,000 feet.

A Laddakhi rebellion resulted against Jammu, aided now by the advancing Tibetans. A new army was sent under Hari Chand suppressing the rebellion and throwing back the Tibetans, leading to a peace treaty between Lhasa and Jammu signed on 17 September 1842: “We have agreed that we have no ill-feelings because of the past war. The two kings will henceforth remain friends forever. The relationship between Maharajah Gulab Singh of Kashmir and the Lama Guru of Lhasa (Dalai Lama) is now established. The Maharajah Sahib, with God (Kunchok) as his witness, promises to recognise ancient boundaries, which should be looked after by each side without resorting to warfare. When the descendants of the early kings, who fled from Laddakh to Tibet, now return they will not be stopped by Shri Maharajah. Trade between Laddakh and Tibet will continue as usual. Tibetan government traders coming into Laddakh will receive free transport and accommodations as before, and the Laddakhi envoy will, in turn, receive the same facilities in Lhasa. The Laddakhis take an oath before God (Kunchok) that they will not intrigue or create new troubles in Tibetan territory. We have agreed, with God as witness, that Shri Maharajah Sahib and the Lama Guru of Lhasa will live together as members of the same household.” The traditional boundary between Laddakh and Tibet “as recognised by both sides since olden times” was accepted by the envoys of Gulab Singh and the Dalai Lama.

An earlier 1684 treaty between Laddakh and Lhasa had said that while Laddakh would send tribute to Lhasa every three years, “the king of Laddakh reserves to himself the village of Minsar in Ngarees-khor-sum, that he may be independent there; and he sets aside its revenue for the purpose of meeting the expense involved in keeping up the sacrificial lights at Kangree (Kailas), and the Holy Lakes of Mansarovar and Rakas Tal”. The area around Minsar village near Lake Mansarovar, held by the rulers of Laddakh since 1583, was retained by Jammu in the 1842 peace-treaty, and its revenue was received by J&K State until 1948.

After Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839, Gulab Singh was alienated from the Lahore Court where the rise of his brothers and a nephew aroused enough Khalsa jealousy to see them assassinated in palace intrigues. While the Sikhs imploded, Gulab Singh had expanded his own dominion from Rawalpindi to Minsar ~ everywhere except Srinagar Valley itself. He had apparently advised the Sikhs not to attack the British in breach of the 1809 Treaty, and when they did so he had not joined them, though had he done so British power in North India might have been broken. The British were grateful for his neutrality and also his help in their first misbegotten adventure in Afghanistan. It was Gulab Singh who was now encouraged by both the British and the Sikhs to mediate between them, indeed “to take a leading part in arranging conditions of peace”, and he formally represented the Sikh regency in the negotiations. The 9 March 1846 Treaty of Lahore “set forth that the British Government having demanded in addition to a certain assignment of territory, a payment of a crore and a half of rupees, and the Sikh Government being unable to pay the whole”, Dalip Singh “should cede as equivalent to one crore the hill country belonging to the Punjab between the Beas and the Indus including Kashmir and the Hazara”.

For the British to occupy the whole of this mountainous territory was judged unwise on economic and military grounds; it was not feasible to occupy from a military standpoint and the area “with the exception of the small Valley of Kashmir” was “for the most part unproductive”. “On the other hand, the ceded tracts comprised the whole of the hereditary possessions of Gulab Singh, who, being eager to obtain an indefeasible title to them, came forward and offered to pay the war indemnity on condition that he was made the independent ruler of Jammu & Kashmir.

A separate treaty embodying this arrangement was thus concluded between the British and Gulab Singh at Amritsar on 16 March 1846.” Gulab Singh acknowledged the British Government’s supremacy, and in token of it agreed to present annually to the British Government “one horse, twelve shawl goats of approved breed and three pairs of Kashmir shawls. This arrangement was later altered; the annual presentation made by the Kashmir State was confined to two Kashmir shawls and three romals (handkerchiefs).” The Treaty of Amritsar “put Gulab Singh, as Maharaja, in possession of all the hill country between the Indus and the Ravi, including Kashmir, Jammu, Laddakh and Gilgit; but excluding Lahoul, Kulu and some areas including Chamba which for strategic purposes, it was considered advisable (by the British) to retain and for which a remission of Rs 25 lakhs was made from the crore demanded, leaving Rs 75 lakhs as the final amount to be paid by Gulab Singh.” The British retained Hazara which in 1918 was included into NWFP. Through an intrigue emanating from Prime Minister Lal Singh in Lahore, Imamuddin, the last Sikh-appointed Governor of Kashmir, sought to prevent Gulab Singh taking possession of the Valley in accordance with the Treaty’s terms. By December 1846 Gulab Singh had done so, though only with help of a British force which included 17,000 Sikh troops “who had been fighting in the campaign just concluded”. (Contemporary British opinion even predicted Sikhism like Buddhism “would become extinct in a short time if it were not kept alive by the esprit de corps of the Sikh regiments”.)

The British in 1846 may have been glad enough to allow Gulab Singh take independent charge of the new entity that came to be now known as the “State of Jammu & Kashmir”. Later, however. they and their American allies would grow keen to control or influence the region vis-à-vis their new interests against the Russian and Soviet Empires.

FOUR
PAKISTAN’S ALLIES  by Subroto Roy  First published in two parts in The Sunday Statesman, June 4 2006, The Statesman June 5 2006, Editorial Page Special Article, http://www.thestatesman.net

From the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar creating the State of Jammu & Kashmir until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Britain and later the USA became increasingly interested in the subcontinent’s Northwest. The British came to India by sea to trade. Barren, splendid, landlocked Afghanistan held no interest except as a home of fierce tribes; but it was the source of invasions into the Indian plains and prompted a British misadventure to install Shah Shuja in place of Dost Mohammad Khan leading to ignominious defeat. Later, Afghanistan was seen as the underbelly of the Russian and Soviet empires, and hence a location of interest to British and American strategic causes.

In November 1954, US President Dwight Eisenhower authorized 30 U-2 spy aircraft to be produced for deployment against America’s perceived enemies, especially to investigate Soviet nuclear missiles which could reach the USA. Reconnaissance balloons had been unsuccessful, and numerous Western pilots had been shot down taking photographs from ordinary military aircraft. By June 1956, U-2 were making clandestine flights over the USSR and China. But on May 1 1960, one was shot or forced down over Sverdlovsk, 1,000 miles within Soviet territory. The Americans prevaricated that it had taken off from Turkey on a weather-mission, and been lost due to oxygen problems. Nikita Kruschev then produced the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who was convicted of spying, though was exchanged later for a Soviet spy. Powers had been headed towards Norway, his task to photograph Soviet missiles from 70,000 ft, his point of origin had been an American base 20 miles from Peshawar.

America needed clandestine “forward bases” from which to fly U-2 aircraft, and Pakistan’s ingratiating military and diplomatic establishment was more than willing to offer such cooperation, fervently wishing to be seen as a “frontline state” against the USSR. “We will help you defeat the USSR and we are hopeful you will help us defeat India” became their constant refrain. By 1986, the Americans had been permitted to build air-bases in Balochistan and also use Mauripur air-base near Karachi.

Jammu & Kashmir and especially Gilgit-Baltistan adjoins the Pashtun regions whose capital has been Peshawar. In August-November 1947, a British coup d’etat against J&K State secured Gilgit-Baltistan for the new British Dominion of Pakistan.

The Treaty of Amritsar had nowhere required Gulab Singh’s dynasty to accept British political control in J&K as came to be exercised by British “Residents” in all other Indian “Native States”. Despite this, Delhi throughout the late 19th Century relentlessly pressed Gulab Singh’s successors Ranbir Singh and Partab Singh to accept political control. The Dogras acquiesced eventually. Delhi’s desire for control had less to do with the welfare of J&K’s people than with protection of increasing British interests in the area, like European migration to Srinagar Valley and guarding against Russian or German moves in Afghanistan. “Sargin” or “Sargin Gilit”, later corrupted by the Sikhs and Dogras into “Gilgit”, had an ancient people who spoke an archaic Dardic language “intermediate between the Iranian and the Sanskritic”. “The Dards were located by Ptolemy with surprising accuracy on the West of the Upper Indus, beyond the headwaters of the Swat River (Greek: Soastus) and north of the Gandarae (i.e. Kandahar), who occupied Peshawar and the country north of it. This region was traversed by two Chinese pilgrims, Fa-Hsien, coming from the north about AD 400 and Hsuan Tsiang, ascending from Swat in AD 629, and both left records of their journeys.”

Gilgit had been historically ruled by a Hindu dynasty called Trakane; when they became extinct, Gilgit Valley “was desolated by successive invasions of neighbouring rulers, and in the 20 or 30 years ending with 1842 there had been five dynastic revolutions. The Sikhs entered Gilgit about 1842 and kept a garrison there.” When J&K came under Gulab Singh, “the Gilgit claims were transferred with it, and a boundary commission was sent” by the British. In 1852 the Dogras were driven out with 2,000 dead. In 1860 under Ranbir Singh, the Dogras “returned to Gilgit and took Yasin twice, but did not hold it. They also in 1866 invaded Darel, one of the most secluded Dard states, to the south of the Gilgit basin but withdrew again.”

The British appointed a Political Agent in Gilgit in 1877 but he was withdrawn in 1881. “In 1889, in order to guard against the advance of Russia, the British Government, acting as the suzerain power of Kashmir, established the Gilgit Agency”. The Agency was re-established under control of the British Resident in Jammu & Kashmir. “It comprised the Gilgit Wazarat; the State of Hunza and Nagar; the Punial Jagir; the Governorships of Yasin, Kuh-Ghizr and Ishkoman, and Chilas”. In 1935, the British demanded J&K lease to them for 60 years Gilgit town plus most of the Gilgit Agency and the hill-states Hunza, Nagar, Yasin and Ishkuman. Hari Singh had no choice but to acquiesce. The leased region was then treated as part of British India, administered by a Political Agent at Gilgit responsible to Delhi, first through the Resident in J& K and later a British Agent in Peshawar. J& K State no longer kept troops in Gilgit and a mercenary force, the Gilgit Scouts, was recruited with British officers and paid for by Delhi. In April 1947, Delhi decided to formally retrocede the leased areas to Hari Singh’s J& K State as of 15 August 1947. The transfer was to formally take place on 1 August.

On 31 July, Hari Singh’s Governor arrived to find “all the officers of the British Government had opted for service in Pakistan”. The Gilgit Scouts’ commander, a Major William Brown aged 25, and his adjutant, a Captain Mathieson, planned openly to engineer a coup détat against Hari Singh’s Government. Between August and October, Gilgit was in uneasy calm. At midnight on 31 October 1947, the Governor was surrounded by the Scouts and the next day he was “arrested” and a provisional government declared.

Hari Singh’s nearest forces were at Bunji, 34 miles from Gilgit, a few miles downstream from where the Indus is joined by Gilgit River. The 6th J& K Infantry Battalion there was a mixed Sikh-Muslim unit, typical of the State’s Army, commanded by a Lt Col. Majid Khan. Bunji controlled the road to Srinagar. Further upstream was Skardu, capital of Baltistan, part of Laddakh District where there was a small garrison. Following Brown’s coup in Gilgit, Muslim soldiers of the 6th Infantry massacred their Sikh brothers-at-arms at Bunji. The few Sikhs who survived escaped to the hills and from there found their way to the garrison at Skardu.

On 4 November 1947, Brown raised the new Pakistani flag in the Scouts’ lines, and by the third week of November a Political Agent from Pakistan had established himself at Gilgit. Brown had engineered Gilgit and its adjoining states to first secede from J&K, and, after some talk of being independent, had promptly acceded to Pakistan. His commander in Peshawar, a Col. Bacon, as well as Col. Iskander Mirza, Defence Secretary in the new Pakistan and later to lead the first military coup détat and become President of Pakistan, were pleased enough. In July 1948, Brown was awarded an MBE (Military) and the British Governor of the NWFP got him a civilian job with ICI~ which however sent him to Calcutta, where he came to be attacked and left for dead on the streets by Sikhs avenging the Bunji massacre. Brown survived, returned to England, started a riding school, and died in 1984. In March 1994, Pakistan awarded his widow the Sitara-I-Pakistan in recognition of his coup détat.

Gilgit’s ordinary people had not participated in Brown’s coup which carried their fortunes into the new Pakistan, and to this day appear to remain without legislative representation. It was merely assumed that since they were mostly Muslim in number they would wish to be part of Pakistan ~ which also became Liaquat Ali Khan’s assumption about J&K State as a whole in his 1950 statements in North America. What the Gilgit case demonstrates is that J&K State’s descent into a legal condition of ownerless anarchy open to “Military Decision” had begun even before the Pakistani invasion of 22 October 1947 (viz. “Solving Kashmir”, The Statesman, 1-3 December 2005). Also, whatever else the British said or did with respect to J & K, they were closely allied to the new Pakistan on the matter of Gilgit.

The peak of Pakistan’s Anglo-American alliance came with the enormous support in the 1980s to guerrilla forces created and headquartered in Peshawar, to battle the USSR and Afghan communists directly across the Durand Line. It was this guerrilla war which became a proximate cause of the collapse of the USSR as a political entity in 1991. President Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief William J. Casey sent vast sums in 1985-1988 to supply and train these guerrillas. The Washington Post and New Yorker reported the CIA training guerrillas “in the use of mortars, rocket grenades, ground-to-air missiles”. 200 hand-held Stinger missiles were supplied for the first time in 1986 and the New Yorker reported Gulbudin Hikmatyar’s “Hizbe Islami” guerrillas being trained to bring down Soviet aircraft. “Mujahideen had been promised two Stingers for every Soviet aircraft brought down. Operators who failed to aim correctly were given additional training… By 1986, the United States was so deeply involved in the Afghan war that Soviet aircraft were being brought down under the supervision of American experts”. (Raja Anwar, The Tragedy of Afghanistan, 1988, p. 234).

The budding US-China détente brokered by Pakistan came into full bloom here. NBC News on 7 January 1980 said “for the first time in history (a senior State Department official) publicly admitted the possibility of concluding a military alliance between the United States and China”. London’s Daily Telegraph reported on 5 January 1980 “China is flying large supplies of arms and ammunition to the insurgents in Afghanistan. According to diplomatic reports, supplies have arrived in Pakistan from China via the Karakoram Highway…. A major build-up of Chinese involvement is underway ~ in the past few days. Scores of Chinese instructors have arrived at the Shola-e-Javed camps.”

Afghan reports in 1983-1985 said “there were eight training camps near the Afghan border operated by the Chinese in Sinkiang province” and that China had supplied the guerrillas “with a variety of weapons including 40,000 RPG-7 and 20,000 RPG-II anti tank rocket launchers.” Like Pakistan, “China did not publicly admit its involvement in the Afghan conflict: in 1985 the Chinese Mission at the UN distributed a letter denying that China was extending any kind of help to the Afghan rebels” (Anwar, ibid. p. 234). Support extended deep and wide across the Arab world. “The Saudi and Gulf rulers … became the financial patrons of the Afghan rebels from the very start of the conflict”. Anwar Sadat, having won the Nobel Peace Prize, was “keen to claim credit for his role in Afghanistan…. by joining the Afghanistan jihad, Sadat could re-establish his Islamic credentials, or so he believed. He could thus not only please the Muslim nations but also place the USA and Israel in his debt.” Sadat’s Defence Minister said in January 1980: “Army camps have been opened for the training of Afghan rebels; they are being supplied with weapons from Egypt” and Sadat told NBC News on 22 September 1981 “that for the last twenty-one months, the USA had been buying arms from Egypt for the Afghan rebels. He said he had been approached by the USA in December 1979 and he had decided to `open my stores’. He further disclosed that these arms were being flown to Pakistan from Egypt by American aircraft. Egypt had vast supplies of SAM-7 and RPG-7 anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons which Sadat agreed to supply to Afghanistan in exchange for new American arms. The Soviet weapons, being light, were ideally suited to guerrilla warfare. … the Mujahideen could easily claim to have captured them from Soviet and Afghan troops in battle.… Khomeini’s Iran got embroiled in war (against Iraq) otherwise Kabul would also have had to contend with the full might of the Islamic revolutionaries.” (Anwar ibid. p. 235).

Afghanistan had been occupied on 26-27 December 1979 by Soviet forces sent by the decrepit Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov to carry out a putsch replacing one communist, Hafizullah Amin, with a rival communist and Soviet protégé, Babrak Karmal. By 1985 Brezhnev and Andropov were dead and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev had begun his attempts to reform the Soviet system, usher in openness, end the Cold War and in particular withdraw from Afghanistan, which by 1986 he had termed “a bleeding wound”. Gorbachev replaced Karmal with a new protégé Najibullah Khan, who was assigned the impossible task of bringing about national reconciliation with the Pakistan-based guerrillas and form a national government. Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989 having lost 14,500 dead, while more than a million Afghans had been killed since the invasion a decade earlier.

Not long after Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, Gregory Zinoviev had said that international communism “turns today to the peoples of the East and says to them, `Brothers, we summon you to a Holy War first of all against British imperialism!’ At this there were cries of Jehad! Jehad! And much brandishing of picturesque Oriental weapons.” (Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia, 1990, p. 213). Now instead, the Afghan misadventure had contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Empire itself, the USSR ceasing to be a political entity by 1991, and even Gorbachev being displaced by Boris Yeltsin and later Vladimir Putin in a new Russia.

What resulted for the people of the USA and Britain and the West in general was that they no longer had to live under threat of hostile Soviet tanks and missiles, while the people of Russia, Ukraine and the other erstwhile Soviet republics as well as Eastern Europe were able to throw off the yoke of communism that had oppressed them since the Bolshevik Revolution and instead to breathe the air of freedom.

What happened to the people of Afghanistan, however, was that they were plunged into further ghastly civil war for more than ten years. And what happened to the people of Pakistan was that their country was left resembling a gigantic Islamist military camp, awash with airfields, arms, ammunition and trained guerrillas, as well as a military establishment enlivened as always by perpetual hope that these supplies, provisions and personnel of war might find alternative use in attacks against India over J& K. “We helped you when you wished to see the Soviet Union defeated and withdrawing in Afghanistan”, Pakistan’s generals and diplomats pleaded with the Americans and British, “now you must help us in our wish to see India defeated and withdrawing in Kashmir”. Pakistan’s leaders even believed that just as the Soviet Union had disintegrated afterwards, the Indian Union perhaps might be made to do the same. Not only were the two cases as different as chalk from cheese, Palmerstone’s dictum there are no permanent allies in the politics of nations could not have found more apt use than in what actually came to take place next.

Pakistan’s generals and diplomats felt betrayed by the loss of Anglo-American paternalism towards them after 1989.

Modern Pakistanis had never felt they subscribed to the Indian nationalist movement culminating in independence in August 1947. The Pakistani state now finally declared its independence in the world by exploding bombs in a nuclear arsenal secretly created with help purchased from China and North Korea. Pakistan’s leaders thus came to feel in some control of Pakistan’s destiny as a nation-state for the first time, more than fifty years after Pakistan’s formal creation in 1947. If nothing else, at least they had the Bomb.

Secondly, America and its allies would not be safe for long since the civil war they had left behind in Afghanistan while trying to defeat the USSR now became a brew from which arose a new threat of violent Islamism. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, whom Pakistan’s military and the USA had promoted, now encouraged unprecedented attacks on the American mainland on September 11 2001 ~ causing physical and psychological damage which no Soviet, Chinese or Cuban missiles ever had been allowed to do. In response, America attacked and removed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, once again receiving the cooperative use of Pakistani manpower and real estate ~ except now there was no longer any truck with the Pakistani establishment’s wish for a quid pro quo of Anglo-American support against India on J&K. Pakistan’s generals and diplomats soon realised their Anglo-American alliance of more than a half-century ended on September 11 2001. Their new cooperation was in killing or arresting and handing over fellow-Muslims and necessarily lacked their earlier feelings of subservience and ingratiation towards the Americans and British, and came to be done instead under at least some duress. No benefit could be reaped any more in the fight against India over Jammu & Kashmir. An era had ended in the subcontinent.

FIVE

“AN INDIAN REPLY TO PRESIDENT ZARDARI: REWARDING PAKISTAN FOR BAD BEHAVIOUR LEADS  TO SCHIZOPHRENIC RELATIONSHIPS”  by Subroto Roy, December 17 2008

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s recent argument in the New York Times resembles closely the well-known publications of his ambassador to the United States, Mr Husain Haqqani.  Unfortunately, this Zardari-Haqqani thesis about Pakistan’s current predicament in the world and the world’s predicament with Pakistan is shot through with clear factual and logical errors. These  need to be aired because true or useful conclusions cannot be reached from mistaken premises or faulty reasoning.

1.  Origins of Pakistan, India, J&K, and their mutual problems

Mr Zardari makes the following seemingly innocuous statement:

“…. the two great nations of Pakistan and India, born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947, must continue to move forward with the peace process.”

Now as a matter of simple historical fact, the current entities in the world system known as India and Pakistan were not “born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947”.  It is palpably false to suppose they were and Pakistanis indulge in wishful thinking and self-deception about their own political history if they suppose this.

India’s Republic arose out of the British Dominion known as “India” which was the legal successor of the entity known previously in international law as “British India”.  British India had had secular governance and so has had the Indian Republic.

By contrast, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan arose out of a newly created state in international law known as the British Dominion of Pakistan, consisting of designated territory carved out of British India by a British decision and coming into existence one day before British India extinguished itself. (Another new state, Bangladesh, later seceded from Pakistan.)

The British decision to create territory designated “Pakistan” had nothing to do with any anti-British “revolution” or “mandate” supported by any Pakistani nationalism because there was none.  (Rahmat Ali’s anti-Hindu pamphleteering in London could be hardly considered Pakistani nationalism against British rule.  Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Pashtun patriots saw themselves as Indian, not Pakistani.)

To the contrary, the British decision had to do with a small number of elite Pakistanis — MA Jinnah foremost among them — demanding not to be part of the general Indian nationalist movement that had been demanding a British departure from power in the subcontinent.   Jinnah’s separatist party, the Muslim League, was trounced in the 1937 provincial elections in all the Muslim-majority areas of British India that would eventually become Pakistan.  Despite this, in September 1939, Britain, at war with Nazi Germany, chose to elevate the political power of Jinnah and his League to parity with the general Indian nationalist movement led by MK Gandhi.  (See, Francis Robinson, in William James and Subroto Roy (eds), Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s.)  Britain needed India’s mostly Muslim infantry-divisions — the progenitors of the present-day Pakistan Army — and if that meant tilting towards a risky political idea of “Pakistan” in due course, so it would be.  The thesis that Pakistan arose from any kind of “revolution” or “mandate” in 1947 is  fantasy — the Muslim super-elite that invented and endorsed the Pakistan idea flew from Delhi to Karachi in chartered BOAC Dakotas, caring not a hoot about the vulnerability of ordinary Muslim masses to Sikh and Hindu majority wrath and retaliation on the ground.

Modern India succeeded to the rights and obligations of British India in international law, and has had a recognized existence as a state since at least the signing of the Armistice and Treaty of Versailles in 1918-1919.  India was a founding member of the United Nations, being a signatory of the 1945 San Francisco Declaration, and an original member of the Bretton Woods institutions.  An idea put forward by Argentina that as of 1947 India and Pakistan were both successor states of British India was rejected by the UN (Argentina withdrew its own suggestion), and it was universally acknowledged India was already a member of the UN while Pakistan would have to (and did) apply afresh for membership as a newly created state in the UN.  Pakistan’s entry into the UN had the enthusiastic backing of India and was opposed by only one existing UN member, Afghanistan, due to a conflict that continues to this day over the legitimacy of the Durand Line that bifurcated the Pashtun areas.

Such a review of elementary historical facts and the position in law of Pakistan and India is far from being of merely pedantic interest today.  Rather, it goes directly to the logical roots of the conflict over the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) — a state that itself originated as an entity in the world system a full century before Pakistan was to do so and more than half a century before British India did, but which would collapse into anarchy and civil war in 1947-1949.

Britain (or England) had been a major nation-state in the world system recognized since Grotius first outlined modern international law. On March 16 1846, Britain entered into a treaty, the Treaty of Amritsar, with one Gulab Singh, and the “State of Jammu & Kashmir” came to arise as a recognizable entity in international law for the first time. (See my “History of Jammu and Kashmir” published in The Statesman, Oct 29-30 2006, available elsewhere here.)

Jammu & Kashmir continued in orderly existence as a state until it crashed into legal and political anarchy and civil war a century later.  The new Pakistan had entered into a “Standstill Agreement” with the State of Jammu & Kashmir as of August 15 1947. On or about October 22 1947, Pakistan unilaterally ended that Standstill Agreement and instead caused military forces from its territory to attack the State of Jammu & Kashmir along the Mansehra Road towards Baramula and Srinagar, coinciding too with an Anglo-Pakistani coup d’etat in Gilgit and Baltistan (see my “Solving Kashmir”; “Law, Justice & J&K”; “Pakistan’s Allies”, all published in The Statesman in 2005-2006 and available elsewhere here).

The new Pakistan had chosen, in all deliberation, to forswear law, politics and diplomacy and to resort to force of arms instead in trying to acquire J&K for itself via a military decision.  It succeeded only partially.  Its forces took and then lost both Baramula and Kargil; they may have threatened Leh but did not attempt to take it; they did take and retain Muzaffarabad and Skardu; they were never near taking the summer capital, Srinagar, though might have threatened the winter capital, Jammu.

All in all, a Ceasefire Line came to be demarcated on the military positions as of February 1 1949.  After a war in 1971 that accompanied the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, that Ceasefire Line came to be renamed the “Line of Control” between Pakistan and India. An ownerless entity may be acquired by force of arms — the erstwhile State of Jammu & Kashmir in 1947-1949 had become an ownerless entity that had been dismembered and divided according to military decision following an armed conflict between Pakistan and India.  The entity in the world system known as the “State of Jammu & Kashmir” created on March 16 1846 by Gulab Singh’s treaty with the British ceased to exist as of October 22 1947.  Pakistan had started the fight over J&K but there is a general rule of conflicts that he who starts  a fight does not get to finish it.

Such is the simplest and most practical statement of the history of the current problem.  The British, through their own compulsions and imperial pretensions, raised all the talk about a “Lapse of Paramountcy” of the British Crown over the “Native Princes” of “Indian India”, and of how, the “Native Princes” were required to “accede” to either India or Pakistan.  This ignored Britain’s own constitutional law.  BR Ambedkar pointed out with unsurpassed clarity that no “Lapse of Paramountcy” was possible even for a single logical moment since “Paramountcy” over any “Native Princes” who had not joined India or Pakistan as of August 15 1947, automatically passed from British India to its legal successor, namely, the Dominion of India.   It followed that India’s acquiescence was required for any subsequent accession to Pakistan – an acquiescence granted in case of Chitral and denied in case of Junagadh.

What the Republic of India means by saying today that boundaries cannot be redrawn nor any populations forcibly transferred is quite simply that the division of erstwhile J&K territory is permanent, and that sovereignty over it is indivisible. What Pakistan has claimed is that India has been an occupier and that there are many people inhabiting the Indian area who may not wish to be Indian nationals and who are being compelled against their will to remain so ~  forgetting to add that precisely the same could be said likewise of the Pakistani-held area. The lawful solution I proposed in “Solving Kashmir, “Law, Justice and J&K” and other works has been that the Republic of India invite every person covered under its Article 370, citizen-by-citizen, under a condition of full information, to privately and without fear decide, if he/she has not done so already, between possible Indian, Iranian, Afghan or Pakistani nationalities ~ granting rights and obligations of permanent residents to any of those persons who may choose for whatever private reason not to remain Indian nationals. If Pakistan acted likewise, the problem of J&K would indeed come to be resolved. The Americans, as self-appointed mediators, have said they wish “the people of the region to have a voice” in a solution: there can be no better expression of such voice than allowing individuals to privately choose their own nationalities and their rights and responsibilities accordingly. The issue of territorial sovereignty is logically distinct from that of the choice of nationality by individual inhabitants.

2.  Benazir’s assassination falsely compared to the Mumbai massacres
Secondly, President Zardari draws a mistaken comparison between the assassination last year of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and the Mumbai massacres a few weeks ago.  Ms Bhutto’s assassination may resemble more closely the assassinations in India of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Indira Gandhi died in “blowback” from the unrest she and her younger son and others in their party had opportunistically fomented among Sikh fundamentalists and sectarians since the late 1970s.  Rajiv Gandhi died in “blowback” from an erroneous imperialistic foreign policy that he, as Prime Minister, had been induced to make by jingoistic Indian diplomats, a move that got India’s military needlessly involved in the then-nascent Sri Lankan civil war.  Benazir Bhutto similarly may be seen to have died in “blowback” from her own political activity as prime minister and opposition leader since the late 1980s, including her own encouragement of Muslim fundamentalist forces.  Certainly in all three cases, as in all assassinations, there were lapses of security too and imprudent political judgments made that contributed to the tragic outcomes.

Ms Bhutto’s assassination has next to nothing to do with the Mumbai massacres, besides the fact the perpetrators in both cases were Pakistani terrorists.  President Zardari saying he himself has lost his wife to terrorism is true but not relevant to the proper diagnosis of the Mumbai massacres or to Pakistan-India relations in general.  Rather, it  serves to deflect criticism and condemnation of the Pakistani state’s pampered handing of Pakistan’s terrorist masterminds, as well as the gross irresponsibility of Pakistan’s military scientists (not AQ Khan) who have been recently advocating a nuclear first strike against India in the event of war.

3.  Can any religious nation-state be viable in the modern world?

President Zardari’s article says:

“The world worked to exploit religion against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by empowering the most fanatic extremists as an instrument of destruction of a superpower. The strategy worked, but its legacy was the creation of an extremist militia with its own dynamic.”

This may be overly simplistic.  As pointed out in my article “Pakistan’s Allies”,  Gregory Zinoviev himself  after the Bolshevik Revolution had declared that international communism “turns today to the peoples of the East and says to them, ‘Brothers, we summon you to a Holy War first of all against British imperialism!’ At this there were cries of Jehad! Jehad! And much brandishing of picturesque Oriental weapons.” (Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia, 1990, p. 213).   For more than half of the 20th century, orthodox Muslims had been used by Soviet communists against British imperialism, then by the British and Americans (through Pakistan) against Soviet communism.  Touché! Blowback and counter-blowback!  The real question that arises from this today may be why orthodox Muslims have allowed themselves to be used either way by outside forces and have failed in developing a modern nation-state and political culture of their own.  Europe and America only settled down politically after their religious wars were over.  Perhaps no religious nation-state is viable in the modern world.

4.  Pakistan’s behaviour leads to schizophrenia in international relations

President Zardari pleads for, or perhaps demands, resources from the world:

“the best response to the Mumbai carnage is to coordinate in counteracting the scourge of terrorism. The world must act to strengthen Pakistan’s economy and democracy, help us build civil society and provide us with the law enforcement and counterterrorism capacities that will enable us to fight the terrorists effectively.”

Six million pounds from Mr Gordon Brown, so much from here or there etc –  President Zardari has apparently demanded 100 billion dollars from America and that is the price being talked about for Pakistan to dismantle its nuclear weapons and be brought under an American “nuclear umbrella” instead.

I have pointed out elsewhere that what Pakistan seems to have been doing in international relations for decades is send out “mixed messages” – i.e. contradictory signals,  whether in thought, word or deed.  Clinical psychologists following the work of Gregory Bateson would say this leads to confusion among Pakistan’s interlocutors (a “double bind”) and the symptoms arise of what may be found in schizophrenic relationships.  (See my article “Do President-elect Obama’s Pakistan specialists believe…”; on the “double bind” theory,  an article I chanced to publish in the Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1986, may be of interest).

Here are a typical set of “mixed messages” emanating from Pakistan’s government and opinion-makers:

“We have nuclear weapons
“We keep our nuclear weapons safe from any misuse or unauthorized use
“We are willing to use nuclear weapons in a first strike against India
“We do not comprehend the lessons of Hiroshima-Nagasaki
“We do not comprehend the destruction India will visit upon us if we strike them
“We are dangerous so we must not be threatened in any way
“We are peace-loving and want to live in peace with India and Afghanistan
“We love to play cricket with India and watch Bollywood movies
“We love our Pakistan Army as it is one public institution that works
“We know the Pakistan Army has backed armed militias against India in the past
“We know these militias have caused terrorist attacks
“We are not responsible for any terrorist attacks
“We do not harbour any terrorists
“We believe the world should pay us to not use or sell our nuclear weapons
“We believe the world should pay us to not encourage the terrorists in our country
“We believe the world should pay us to prevent terrorists from using our nuclear weapons
“We hate India and do not want to become like India
“We love India and want to become like India
“We are India and we are not India…”

Etc.

A mature rational responsible and self-confident Pakistan would have said instead:

“We apologise to India and other countries for the outrageous murders our nationals have committed in Mumbai and elsewhere
“We ask the world to watch how our professional army is deployed to disarm civilian and all “non-state” actors of unauthorized firearms and explosives
“We do not need and will not demand or accept a dollar in any sort of foreign aid, military or civilian, to solve our problems
“We realize our economic and political institutions are a mess and we must clean them up
“We will strive to build a society imbued with what Iqbal described as the spirit of modern times..”

As someone who created at great personal cost at an American university twenty years ago the book Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, I have a special interest in hoping that Pakistan shall find the path of wisdom.”

 

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An Indian Reply to President Zardari: Rewarding Pakistan for bad behaviour leads to schizophrenic relationships

An Indian Reply to President Zardari:

 

Rewarding Pakistan for bad behaviour leads to schizophrenic relationships

 

by

Subroto Roy

 

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s recent argument in the New York Times resembles closely the well-known publications of his ambassador to the United States, Mr Husain Haqqani.  Unfortunately, this Zardari-Haqqani thesis about Pakistan’s current predicament in the world and the world’s predicament with Pakistan is shot through with clear factual and logical errors. These  need to be aired because true or useful conclusions cannot be reached from mistaken premises or faulty reasoning.

1.  Origins of Pakistan, India, J&K, and their mutual problems

Mr Zardari makes the following seemingly innocuous statement:

“…. the two great nations of Pakistan and India, born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947, must continue to move forward with the peace process.”

Now as a matter of simple historical fact, the current entities in the world system known as India and Pakistan were not “born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947”.  It is palpably false to suppose they were and Pakistanis indulge in wishful thinking and self-deception about their own political history if they suppose this.

India’s Republic arose out of the British Dominion known as “India” which was the legal successor of the entity known previously in international law as “British India”.  British India had had secular governance and so has had the Indian Republic.

By contrast, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan arose out of a newly created state in international law known as the British Dominion of Pakistan, consisting of designated territory carved out of British India by a British decision and coming into existence one day before British India extinguished itself. (Another new state, Bangladesh, later seceded from Pakistan.)

The British decision to create territory designated “Pakistan” had nothing to do with any anti-British “revolution” or “mandate” supported by any Pakistani nationalism because there was none.  (Rahmat Ali’s anti-Hindu pamphleteering in London could be hardly considered Pakistani nationalism against British rule.  Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Pashtun patriots saw themselves as Indian, not Pakistani.)

To the contrary, the British decision had to do with a small number of elite Pakistanis — MA Jinnah foremost among them — demanding not to be part of the general Indian nationalist movement that had been demanding a British departure from power in the subcontinent.   Jinnah’s separatist party, the Muslim League, was trounced in the 1937 provincial elections in all the Muslim-majority areas of British India that would eventually become Pakistan.  Despite this, in September 1939, Britain, at war with Nazi Germany, chose to elevate the political power of Jinnah and his League to parity with the general Indian nationalist movement led by MK Gandhi.  (See, Francis Robinson, in William James and Subroto Roy (eds), Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s.)  Britain needed India’s mostly Muslim infantry-divisions — the progenitors of the present-day Pakistan Army — and if that meant tilting towards a risky political idea of “Pakistan” in due course, so it would be.  The thesis that Pakistan arose from any kind of “revolution” or “mandate” in 1947 is  fantasy — the Muslim super-elite that invented and endorsed the Pakistan idea flew from Delhi to Karachi in chartered BOAC Dakotas, caring not a hoot about the vulnerability of ordinary Muslim masses to Sikh and Hindu majority wrath and retaliation on the ground.

Modern India succeeded to the rights and obligations of British India in international law, and has had a recognized existence as a state since at least the signing of the Armistice and Treaty of Versailles in 1918-1919.  India was a founding member of the United Nations, being a signatory of the 1945 San Francisco Declaration, and an original member of the Bretton Woods institutions.  An idea put forward by Argentina that as of 1947 India and Pakistan were both successor states of British India was rejected by the UN (Argentina withdrew its own suggestion), and it was universally acknowledged India was already a member of the UN while Pakistan would have to (and did) apply afresh for membership as a newly created state in the UN.  Pakistan’s entry into the UN had the enthusiastic backing of India and was opposed by only one existing UN member, Afghanistan, due to a conflict that continues to this day over the legitimacy of the Durand Line that bifurcated the Pashtun areas.

Such a review of elementary historical facts and the position in law of Pakistan and India is far from being of merely pedantic interest today.  Rather, it goes directly to the logical roots of the conflict over the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) — a state that itself originated as an entity in the world system a full century before Pakistan was to do so and more than half a century before British India did, but which would collapse into anarchy and civil war in 1947-1949.

Britain (or England) had been a major nation-state in the world system recognized since Grotius first outlined modern international law. On March 16 1846, Britain entered into a treaty, the Treaty of Amritsar, with one Gulab Singh, and the “State of Jammu & Kashmir” came to arise as a recognizable entity in international law for the first time. (See my “History of Jammu and Kashmir” published in The Statesman, Oct 29-30 2006, available elsewhere here.)

Jammu & Kashmir continued in orderly existence as a state until it crashed into legal and political anarchy and civil war a century later.  The new Pakistan had entered into a “Standstill Agreement” with the State of Jammu & Kashmir as of August 15 1947. On or about October 22 1947, Pakistan unilaterally ended that Standstill Agreement and instead caused military forces from its territory to attack the State of Jammu & Kashmir along the Mansehra Road towards Baramula and Srinagar, coinciding too with an Anglo-Pakistani coup d’etat in Gilgit and Baltistan (see my “Solving Kashmir”; “Law, Justice & J&K”; “Pakistan’s Allies”, all published in The Statesman in 2005-2006 and available elsewhere here).

The new Pakistan had chosen, in all deliberation, to forswear law, politics and diplomacy and to resort to force of arms instead in trying to acquire J&K for itself via a military decision.  It succeeded only partially.  Its forces took and then lost both Baramula and Kargil; they may have threatened Leh but did not attempt to take it; they did take and retain Muzaffarabad and Skardu; they were never near taking the summer capital, Srinagar, though might have threatened the winter capital, Jammu.

All in all, a Ceasefire Line came to be demarcated on the military positions as of February 1 1949.  After a war in 1971 that accompanied the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, that Ceasefire Line came to be renamed the “Line of Control” between Pakistan and India. An ownerless entity may be acquired by force of arms — the erstwhile State of Jammu & Kashmir in 1947-1949 had become an ownerless entity that had been dismembered and divided according to military decision following an armed conflict between Pakistan and India.  The entity in the world system known as the “State of Jammu & Kashmir” created on March 16 1846 by Gulab Singh’s treaty with the British ceased to exist as of October 22 1947.  Pakistan had started the fight over J&K but there is a general rule of conflicts that he who starts  a fight does not get to finish it.

 

Such is the simplest and most practical statement of the history of the current problem.  The British, through their own compulsions and imperial pretensions, raised all the talk about a “Lapse of Paramountcy” of the British Crown over the “Native Princes” of “Indian India”, and of how, the “Native Princes” were required to “accede” to either India or Pakistan.  This ignored Britain’s own constitutional law.  BR Ambedkar pointed out with unsurpassed clarity that no “Lapse of Paramountcy” was possible even for a single logical moment since “Paramountcy” over any “Native Princes” who had not joined India or Pakistan as of August 15 1947, automatically passed from British India to its legal successor, namely, the Dominion of India.   It followed that India’s acquiescence was required for any subsequent accession to Pakistan – an acquiescence granted in case of Chitral and denied in case of Junagadh.

 

What the Republic of India means by saying today that boundaries cannot be redrawn nor any populations forcibly transferred is quite simply that the division of erstwhile J&K territory is permanent, and that sovereignty over it is indivisible. What Pakistan has claimed is that India has been an occupier and that there are many people inhabiting the Indian area who may not wish to be Indian nationals and who are being compelled against their will to remain so ~  forgetting to add that precisely the same could be said likewise of the Pakistani-held area. The lawful solution I proposed in “Solving Kashmir, “Law, Justice and J&K” and other works has been that the Republic of India invite every person covered under its Article 370, citizen-by-citizen, under a condition of full information, to privately and without fear decide, if he/she has not done so already, between possible Indian, Iranian, Afghan or Pakistani nationalities ~ granting rights and obligations of permanent residents to any of those persons who may choose for whatever private reason not to remain Indian nationals. If Pakistan acted likewise, the problem of J&K would indeed come to be resolved. The Americans, as self-appointed mediators, have said they wish “the people of the region to have a voice” in a solution: there can be no better expression of such voice than allowing individuals to privately choose their own nationalities and their rights and responsibilities accordingly. The issue of territorial sovereignty is logically distinct from that of the choice of nationality by individual inhabitants.

 

 

2.  Benazir’s assassination falsely compared to the Mumbai massacres

Secondly, President Zardari draws a mistaken comparison between the assassination last year of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and the Mumbai massacres a few weeks ago.  Ms Bhutto’s assassination may resemble more closely the assassinations in India of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

 

Indira Gandhi died in “blowback” from the unrest she and her younger son and others in their party had opportunistically fomented among Sikh fundamentalists and sectarians since the late 1970s.  Rajiv Gandhi died in “blowback” from an erroneous imperialistic foreign policy that he, as Prime Minister, had been induced to make by jingoistic Indian diplomats, a move that got India’s military needlessly involved in the then-nascent Sri Lankan civil war.  Benazir Bhutto similarly may be seen to have died in “blowback” from her own political activity as prime minister and opposition leader since the late 1980s, including her own encouragement of Muslim fundamentalist forces.  Certainly in all three cases, as in all assassinations, there were lapses of security too and imprudent political judgments made that contributed to the tragic outcomes.

 

Ms Bhutto’s assassination has next to nothing to do with the Mumbai massacres, besides the fact the perpetrators in both cases were Pakistani terrorists.  President Zardari saying he himself has lost his wife to terrorism is true but not relevant to the proper diagnosis of the Mumbai massacres or to Pakistan-India relations in general.  Rather, it  serves to deflect criticism and condemnation of the Pakistani state’s pampered handing of Pakistan’s terrorist masterminds, as well as the gross irresponsibility of Pakistan’s military scientists (not AQ Khan) who have been recently advocating a nuclear first strike against India in the event of war.

 

 

3.  Can any religious nation-state be viable in the modern world?

President Zardari’s article says:

 

“The world worked to exploit religion against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by empowering the most fanatic extremists as an instrument of destruction of a superpower. The strategy worked, but its legacy was the creation of an extremist militia with its own dynamic.”

 

This may be overly simplistic.  As pointed out in my article “Pakistan’s Allies”,  Gregory Zinoviev himself  after the Bolshevik Revolution had declared that international communism “turns today to the peoples of the East and says to them, ‘Brothers, we summon you to a Holy War first of all against British imperialism!’ At this there were cries of Jehad! Jehad! And much brandishing of picturesque Oriental weapons.” (Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia, 1990, p. 213).   For more than half of the 20th century, orthodox Muslims had been used by Soviet communists against British imperialism, then by the British and Americans (through Pakistan) against Soviet communism.  Touché! Blowback and counter-blowback!  The real question that arises from this today may be why orthodox Muslims have allowed themselves to be used either way by outside forces and have failed in developing a modern nation-state and political culture of their own.  Europe and America only settled down politically after their religious wars were over.  Perhaps no religious nation-state is viable in the modern world.

 

 

4.  Pakistan’s behaviour leads to schizophrenia in international relations

 

President Zardari pleads for, or perhaps demands, resources from the world:

“the best response to the Mumbai carnage is to coordinate in counteracting the scourge of terrorism. The world must act to strengthen Pakistan’s economy and democracy, help us build civil society and provide us with the law enforcement and counterterrorism capacities that will enable us to fight the terrorists effectively.”

Six million pounds from Mr Gordon Brown, so much from here or there etc —  President Zardari has apparently demanded 100 billion dollars from America and that is the price being talked about for Pakistan to dismantle its nuclear weapons and be brought under an American “nuclear umbrella” instead.

I have pointed out elsewhere that what Pakistan seems to have been doing in international relations for decades is send out “mixed messages” – i.e. contradictory signals,  whether in thought, word or deed.  Clinical psychologists following the work of Gregory Bateson would say this leads to confusion among Pakistan’s interlocutors (a “double bind”) and the symptoms arise of what may be found in schizophrenic relationships.  (See my article “Do President-elect Obama’s Pakistan specialists believe…”; on the “double bind” theory,  an article I chanced to publish in the Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1986, may be of interest).

Here are a typical set of “mixed messages” emanating from Pakistan’s government and opinion-makers:

“We have nuclear weapons
“We keep our nuclear weapons safe from any misuse or unauthorized use
“We are willing to use nuclear weapons in a first strike against India
“We do not comprehend the lessons of Hiroshima-Nagasaki
“We do not comprehend the destruction India will visit upon us if we strike them
“We are dangerous so we must not be threatened in any way
“We are peace-loving and want to live in peace with India and Afghanistan
“We love to play cricket with India and watch Bollywood movies
“We love our Pakistan Army as it is one public institution that works
“We know the Pakistan Army has backed armed militias against India in the past
“We know these militias have caused terrorist attacks
“We are not responsible for any terrorist attacks
“We do not harbour any terrorists
“We believe the world should pay us to not use or sell our nuclear weapons
“We believe the world should pay us to not encourage the terrorists in our country
“We believe the world should pay us to prevent terrorists from using our nuclear weapons
“We hate India and do not want to become like India
“We love India and want to become like India
“We are India and we are not India…”

Etc.

A mature rational responsible and self-confident Pakistan would have said instead:

“We apologise to India and other countries for the outrageous murders our nationals have committed in Mumbai and elsewhere
“We ask the world to watch how our professional army is deployed to disarm civilian and all “non-state” actors of unauthorized firearms and explosives
“We do not need and will not demand or accept a dollar in any sort of foreign aid, military or civilian, to solve our problems
“We realize our economic and political institutions are a mess and we must clean them up
“We will strive to build a society imbued with what Iqbal described as the spirit of modern times..”

As someone who created at great personal cost at an American university twenty years ago the book Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, I have a special interest in hoping that Pakistan shall find the path of wisdom.

India’s Muslim Voices (Or, Let us be clear the Pakistan-India or Kashmir conflicts have not been Muslim-Hindu conflicts so much as intra-Muslim conflicts about Muslim identity and self-knowledge on the Indian subcontinent)

India’s Muslim Voices

 

 

(Or, Let us be clear the Pakistan-India or Kashmir conflicts have not been Muslim-Hindu conflicts so much as intra-Muslim conflicts about Muslim identity and self-knowledge on the Indian subcontinent)

 

 

by

 

 

Subroto Roy

 

 

Ill-informed Western observers, especially at purported “think tanks” and news-portals, frequently proclaim the Pakistan-India confrontation and Jammu & Kashmir conflict to represent some kind of savage irreconcilable division between Islamic and Hindu cultures.

For example, the BBC, among its many prevarications on the matter (like lopping off J&K entirely from its recently broadcasted maps of India, perhaps under influence of its Pakistani staffers), frequently speaks of “Hindu-majority India” and “Indian-administered Kashmir” being confronted by Muslim Pakistan.

And two days ago from California’s Bay Area arose into the Internet Cloud the following profundity: What we’re dealing with now, in the Pakistani-Indian rivalry, is a true war of civilizations, pitting Muslims against Hindus…. the unfathomable depths of the Muslim-Hindu divide….”.

Even President-elect Obama’s top Pakistan-specialists have fallen for the line of Washington’s extremely strong Pakistan lobby: “Pakistan… sees itself as the political home for the subcontinent’s Muslim population and believes India’s continued control over the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley and denial of a plebiscite for its inhabitants represent a lingering desire on India’s part to undo the legacy of partition, which divided the British Indian Empire into India and Pakistan.”

 

The truth on record is completely different and really rather simple: for more than a century and a half, Muslims qua Muslims on the Indian subcontinent have struggled with the question of their most appropriate cultural and political identity.

 

The starkest contrast may be found in their trying to come to terms with their partly Arabic and partly Hindu or Indian parentage (the words Hindu, Sindhu, Indus, Indian, Sindhi, Hindi etc all clearly have the same Hellenistic root).

For example, there was Wali Allah (1703-1762) declaringWe are an Arab people whose fathers have fallen in exile in the country of Hindustan, and Arabic genealogy and Arabic language are our pride”.

But here has been Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938), in his 1930 Allahabad speech to the Muslim League, conceiving today’s Pakistan as a wish to become free of precisely that Arab influence: “I would like to see the Punjab, NWFP, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state… The life of Islam as a cultural force in this living country very largely depends on its centralisation in a specified territory… For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power, for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilise its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and the spirit of modern times.”

In an article “Saving Pakistan” published last year in The Statesman and available elsewhere here, it was suggested Iqbal’s “spirit of modern times” may be represented most prominently today by the physicist/political philosopher Pervez Hoodbhoy: in a December 2006 speech Hoodbhoy suggested a new alternative to MA Jinnah’s “Faith, Unity, Discipline” slogan: “First, I wish for minds that can deal with the complex nature of truth…. My second wish is for many more Pakistanis who accept diversity as a virtue… My third, and last, wish is that Pakistanis learn to value and nurture creativity.” He has spoken too of bringing “economic justice to Pakistan”, of the “fight to give Pakistan’s women the freedom which is their birthright”, and of people to “wake up” and engage politically. But Pakistan’s Iqbalian liberals like Hoodbhoy still have to square off with those of their compatriots who sent the youthful squad into Mumbai last week with assault rifles, grenades and heroic Arabic code-names, as well as orders to attack civilians with the ferocity of the original Muslims attacking caravans and settlements in ancient Arabia.

 

What the extremely strong Pakistan lobbies within the British and American political systems have suppressed in order to paint a picture of eternal Muslim-Hindu conflict is the voice of India’s nationalist Muslims, who historically have had no wish to have any truck with any idea of a “Pakistan” at all.

 

Most eminent among them was undoubtedly Jinnah’s fiercest critic: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad whose classic 1946 statement on Pakistan is available in his India Wins Freedom, the final version published only in 1988.

 

“I have considered from every possible point of view the scheme of Pakistan as formulated by the Muslim League. As an Indian, I have examined its implications for the future of India as a whole. As a Muslim, I have examined its likely effects upon the fortunes of Muslims of India. Considering the scheme in all its aspects, I have come to the conclusion that it is harmful not only for India as a whole but for Muslims in particular. And in fact it creates more problems than it solves. I must confess that the very term Pakistan goes against my grain. It suggests that some portions of the world are pure while others are impure. Such a division of territories into pure and impure is un-Islamic and is more in keeping with orthodox Brahmanism which divides men and countries into holy and unholy — a division which is a repudiation of the very spirit of Islam. Islam recognizes no such division and the prophet says “God made the whole world a mosque for me”.

 

Further, it seems that the scheme of Pakistan is a symbol of defeatism, and has been built on the analogy of the Jewish demand for a national home. It is a confession that Indian Muslims cannot hold their own in India as a whole, and would be content to withdraw to a corner specially reserved for them.

 

One can sympathise with the aspiration of the Jews for such a national home, as they are scattered all over the world and cannot in any region have any effective voice in the administration.. The conditions of Indian Muslims is quite otherwise. Over 90 million in number, they are in quantity and quality a sufficiently important element in Indian life to influence decisively all questions of administration and policy. Nature has further helped them by concentrating them in certain areas.

 

In such a context, the demand for Pakistan loses all force. As a Muslim, I for one am not prepared for a moment to give up my right to treat the whole of India as my domain and to shape in the shaping of its political and economic life. To me it seems a sure sign of cowardice to give up what is my patrimony and content myself with a mere fragment of it.

 

As is well known, Mr. Jinnah’s Pakistan scheme is based on his two nation theory. His thesis is that India contains many nationalities based on religious differences, Of them the two major nations, the Hindus and Muslims, must as separate nations have separate States, When Dr Edward Thompson once pointed out to Mr. Jinnah that Hindus and Muslims live side by side in thousands of Indian towns, villages and hamlets, Mr. Jinnah replied that this is no way affected their separate nationality. Two nations, according to M Jinnah, confront one another in every hamlet, village and town, and he, therefore, desires that they should be separated into two States.

 

I am prepared to overlook all other aspects of the problem and judge it from the point of view of Muslim interest alone. I shall go still further and say that if it can be shown that the scheme of Pakistan can in any way benefit Muslims I would be prepared to accept it myself and also to work for its acceptance by others. But the truth is that even if I examine the scheme from the point of view of the communal interests of the Muslims themselves, I am forced to the conclusion that it can in no way benefit them or allay their legitimate fears.

Let us consider dispassionately the consequences which will follow if we give effect to the Pakistan scheme. India will be divided into two States, one with a majority of Muslims and the other of Hindus. In the Hindustan State there will remain 35 million Muslims scattered in small minorities all over the land. With 17 per cent in UP, 12 percent in Bihar and 9 percent in Madras, they will be weaker than they are today in the Hindu majority provinces. They have had their homelands in these regions for almost a thousand years and built up well known centres of Muslim culture and civilization there.

They will awaken overnight and discover that they have become alien and foreigners. Backward industrially, educationally and economically, they will be left to the mercies to what would become an unadulterated Hindu raj.

On the other hand, their position within the Pakistan State will be vulnerable and weak. Nowhere in Pakistan will their majority be comparable to the Hindu majority in the Hindustan States. ( NB Azad could hardly imagine even at this point the actual British Partition of Punjab and Bengal, let aside the later separation of Bangladesh from West Pakistan, SR. )

In fact, their majority will be so slight that will be offset by the economical, educational and political lead enjoyed by non-Muslims in these areas. Even if this were not so and Pakistan were overwhelmingly Muslim in population, it still could hardly solve the problem of Muslims in Hindustan. Two States confronting one another, offer no solution of the problem of one another’s minorities, but only lead to retribution and reprisals by introducing a system of mutual hostages. The scheme of Pakistan therefore solves no problems for the Muslims. It cannot safeguard their rights where they are in minority nor as citizens of Pakistan secure them a position in Indian or world affairs which they would enjoy as citizens of a major State like the Indian Union.

It may be argued that if Pakistan is so much against the interest if the Muslims themselves, then why should such a large section of Muslims be swept away by its lure? The answer is to be found in the attitude of certain communal extremists among the Hindus. When the Muslim League began to speak of Pakistan, they read into the scheme a sinister pan-Islamic conspiracy and began to oppose it out of fear that it foreshadowed a combination of Indian Muslim and trans-Indian Muslim States. The opposition acted as an incentive to the adherents of the League. With simple though untenable logic they argued that if Hindus were so opposed to Pakistan, surely it must be of benefit to Muslims. An atmosphere of emotional frenzy was created which made reasonable appraisement impossible and swept away especially the younger and more impressionable among the Muslims. I have, however, no doubt that when the present frenzy has died down and the question can be considered dispassionately, those who now support Pakistan will themselves repudiate it as harmful for Muslim interests.

The formula which I have succeeded in making the Congress accept secures whatever merits the Pakistan scheme contains while all its defects and drawbacks are avoided. The basis of Pakistan is the fear of interference by the Centre in Muslim majority areas as the Hindus will be in a majority in the Centre. The Congress meets this fear by granting full autonomy to the provincial units and vesting all residuary power in the provinces. It also has provided for two lists of Central subjects, one compulsory and one optional, so that if any provincial unit so wants, it can administer all subjects itself except a minimum delegated to the Centre. The Congress scheme threescore ensures that Muslim majority provinces are internally free to develop as they will, but can at the same time influence the Centre on all issues which affect India as a whole.

The situation in India is such that all attempts to establish a centralized and unitary government are bound to fail. Equally, doomed to failure is the attempt to divide India into two States. After considering all aspects of the question, I have come to the conclusion that the only solution can be on the lines embodied in the Congress formula which allows room for development both to the provinces and to India as a whole. The Congress formula meets the fear of the Muslim majority areas to allay which the scheme of Pakistan was formed. On the other hand, it avoids the defects of the Pakistan scheme which would bring the Muslims where they are in a minority under a purely Hindu government.

I am one of those who considers the present chapter of communal bitterness and differences as a transient phase in Indian life. I firmly hold that they will disappear when India assumes the responsibility of her own destiny. I am reminded of a saying of Mr. Gladstone that the best cure for a man’s fear of the water was to throw him into it. Similarly, India must assume responsibilities and administer her own affairs before fears and suspicious can be fully allayed.

When India attains her destiny, she will forget the chapter of communal suspicion and conflict and face the problems of modern life from a modern point of view. Differences will no doubt persist, but they will be economic, not communal. Opposition among political parties will continue, but it will based, not on religion, but on economic and political issues. Class and not community will be the basis oaf future alignments, and policies will be shaped accordingly. If it be argued that this is only a faith which events may not justify, I would say that in any case the 90 million Muslims constitute a factor which nobody can ignore and whatever the circumstances, they are strong enough to safeguard their own destiny.”

 

 

 

Next must be Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s classic February 1948 Speech to the UN Security  Council,  four months into the initial Pakistani attack on Kashmir:

 

 

“Aggression, not accession, is the issue: I have heard with patience, attention and respect the statements made by the representative of Pakistan and members of the Security Council, as well as the statements made on various occasions by the members of my own delegation. The Security Council will concede that I am probably the one man most concerned in the dispute because I happen to come from that land which has become the bone of contention between the two Dominions of India and Pakistan.

I have been quoted profusely on either side, and rightly so, because I have had the fortune-or, should I say, misfortune of leading my countrymen to freedom from 1931 onwards. In this task, I have suffered a great deal. I have been imprisoned not once or twice, but seven times, and the last imprisonment carried with it an aggregate sentence of nine years.

There are many troubles in Kashmir. I have heard patiently the debate in the Security Council, but I feel that I am rather confused. After all, what is the point in dispute? The point in dispute is not that the sovereignty of the Prince is in question, as the representative of Pakistan stated yesterday. After all, I have suffered the punishment of being sentenced to nine years imprisonment for saying what the representative of Pakistan said with regard to the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846. I am glad that he said in the Security Council, where he is immune from any punishment. Therefore, I am not disputing that point and that it is not the subject of the dispute before the Security Council.

The subject of the dispute before the Security Council is not the mal-administration of the Princely State of Kashmir. In order to set right that mal-administration, I think I have suffered the most, and today, when for the first time, I heard the representative of Pakistan supporting my case, it gave me great pleasure.

After all, what is the dispute between India and Pakistan? From what I have learned from the complaint brought before the Security Council by my own delegation, the dispute revolves around the fact that Kashmir acceded legally and constitutionally to the Dominion of India. There was some trouble about the demarcation of the Kashmir administration within the State, and the tribesmen from across the border have poured into my country. They have been helped and are being helped by the Pakistan Government, with the result that there is the possibility of a greater conflagration between India and Pakistan. India sought the help of Security Council so that Pakistan might be requested to desist from helping the tribesmen, and to desist from supporting the inside revolt, should I say, against the lawful authority.

I should have understood the position of the representative of Pakistan if he had come boldly before the Security Council and maintained: “Yes, we do support the tribesmen; we do support the rebels inside the State because we feel that Kashmir belongs to Pakistan and not to India, and because we feel that the accession of Kashmir to India was fraudulent.” Then we might have discussed the validity of the accession of the State of Kashmir to India. But that was not the position taken by the representative of Pakistan. He completely denied that any support was being given by the Government of Pakistan to either the tribesmen or those who are in revolt within the State against the constituted authority.

How am I to convince the Security Council that the denial is absolutely untrue? I am sitting before the Security Council at a distance of thousands of miles from my country. I have fought many battles, along with my own men, on the borders of Jammu and Kashmir. I have seen with my own eyes the support given by the Pakistan Government, not only in supplying buses but in providing arms, ammunition, direction and control of the tribesmen and I have even seen the Pakistan Army forces from across the border.

The denial has come so flatly that it becomes very difficult for me to disprove it here before the Security Council, unless the Security Council accedes to our request to send a commission to the spot and to find out first whether the allegations brought before the Security Council with regard to the aid given by the Government of Pakistan are correct or incorrect. If they are incorrect, the case falls; if they are correct, then the Security Council should take the necessary steps to advise the Government of Pakistan to desist from such support.

But then, this simple issue has been confused. On the one hand, the Pakistan Government says, “We are not a party to the trouble within the State. The trouble within the State exists because the people are fighting against the mal-administration of the Jammu and Kashmir Government.” Yes, we are fighting, we have been fighting against the mal-administration of that State since 1931. We have been demanding democratisation of the Government there. But how is it that today Pakistan has become the champion of our liberty? I know very well that in 1946, when I raised the cry “Quit Kashmir,” the leader of the Pakistan Government, who is the Governor-General now, Mr.Mohammed Ali Jinnah, opposed my Government, declaring that this movement was a movement of a few renegades and that Muslims as such had nothing to do with the movement.

The Muslim Conference, which has been talked about so much, opposed my movement and declared its loyalty to the Prince. The representative of Pakistan now says that Sheikh Abdullah, once the supporter of “Quit Kashmir”, has joined hands with the Maharaja of Kashmir, and that in one of my public speeches I declared that I wanted the Maharaja to be the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir-not the Maharaja of Jammu only, but the Maharaja of entire State.

I should like to correct the misreporting of my speech. I did deliver that speech in Jammu, which is the winter capital of our country, but it was in a different context. As the members of the Security Council have already heard from the head of my delegation, some massacres did occur in the Jammu Province. After the Kashmir Province was raided by the tribesmen, and after thousands of Hindus and Sikhs were uprooted from the villages and towns in the Kashmir Province and found their way into the Jammu Province, there was some very bad retaliation. I could not go to Jammu Province to control that situation because I was busy with the raiders in Kashmir Province. However, as soon as I had some time, I flew down to Jammu Province, addressed a gathering of 60,000 Hindus and Sikhs in Jammu city, and gave them some plain advice.

I told them clearly that this policy of retaliation would bring no good to them as Hindus and Sikhs and would bring no good to their leader, because while they could retaliate in one or two districts where they formed the majority, and could even wipe out the Muslim population in these one or two districts, the State happens to have a population which is 80 per cent Muslim, and it would be impossible for them to wipe out the entire Muslim population. The result would be that the Prince, whom they wanted to support, would remain the Prince of only two districts, and not of the entire State of Jammu and Kashmir. I told them that if they wanted him to be the Prince of Jammu and Kashmir, they would have to change their behaviour. That was the speech I delivered, and that was the context in which it was made.

However, I have already stated how this trouble started. It is probable that the representative of Pakistan would admit that when India was divided into two parts, my colleagues and I were all behind prison bars. The result of this division of India was to start massacre on either side. Where Muslims in the West Punjab formed the majority, the killing of Hindus and Sikhs started and this was retaliated in East Punjab. All along our border, massacres of Hindus and Sikhs, on the one hand, and Muslims on the other hand were a daily occurrence. But the State of Jammu and Kashmir, and its people, kept calm. The result was that thousands of refugees, both Muslims and Hindus, sought refuge in our State and we rendered every possible help to all of them.

Why was that so? It was because I and my organisation never believed in the formula that Muslims and Hindus form separate nations. We do not believe in the two-nation theory, nor in communal hatred or communalism itself. We believed that religion had no place in politics. Therefore, when we launched our movement of “Quit Kashmir”, it was not only Muslims who suffered, but our Hindu and Sikh comrades as well. That created a strong bond of unity between all the communities, and the result was that while Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were fighting each other all along the border, the people of Jammu and Kashmir State — Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs alike-remained calm.

The situation was worsening day by day and the minority in our State was feeling very nervous. As a result, tremendous pressure was brought to bear upon the State administration to release me and my colleagues. The situation outside demanded the release of workers of the National Conference, along with its leader, and we were accordingly set free.

Immediately we were liberated from prison we were faced with the important question of whether Kashmir should accede to Pakistan, accede to India, or remain independent, because under the partition scheme these three choices were open us as, indeed, they were open to every Indian State. The problem was a very difficult one, but I advised the people of my country that although the question was very important to us, it was a secondary consideration. The all important matter for us was our own liberation from the autocratic rule of the Prince for which we were fighting and had been fighting for the past seventeen years. We had not achieved that goal, and therefore I told my people that we must do so first. Then, as free men we should have to decide where our interest lay. Being a frontier State, Kashmir has borders with both Pakistan and India, and there are advantages and disadvantages for the people of Kashmir attached to each of the three alternatives to which I have referred.

Naturally, as I have indicated, we could not decide this all important issue before achieving our own liberation, and our slogan became “Freedom before accession”. Some friends from Pakistan met mein Srinagar. I had a heart- to- heart discussion with them and explained my point of view. I told them in plain words that, whatever had been the attitude of Pakistan towards our freedom movement in the past, it would not influence us in our judgement. Neither the friendship of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru and of Congress, nor their support of our freedom movement, would have any influence upon our decision if we felt that the interests of four million Kashmiris lay in our accession to Pakistan.

I requested them not to precipitate this decision upon us but to allow us time, supporting our movement for the while. I added that once we were free they should allow us an interval to consider this all important issue. I pointed out that India had accepted this point of view and was not forcing us to decide. We had, in fact, entered into a standstill agreement with both Pakistan and India, but the leader of the Indian delegation has already explained to the Security Council what Pakistan did to us.

While I was engaged in these conversations and negotiations with friends from Pakistan, I sent one of my colleagues to Lahore, where he met the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr. Liaqat Ali Khan, and other high dignitaries of the West Punjab Government. He placed the same point of view before them and requested that they should allow us time to consider this vital question, first helping us to achieve our liberation instead of forcing us to declare our decision one way or the other. Then, one fine morning while these negotiations were proceeding, I received news that a full-fledged attack had been carried out by the raiders on Muzaffarabad, frontier town in the Kashmir Province.

The representative of Pakistan has stated that immediately upon my release I went down to Delhi to negotiate the accession of Kashmir to India. That is not a fact. He probably does not know that while in jail I was elected President of the All India States People’s Conference, and that immediately upon my release I had to take up my duties. Accordingly, I had called a meeting of the executive of that Conference in Delhi, a fact which I had conveyed to the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Indeed, I had told the Prime Minister of Pakistan that immediately upon my return from Delhi I should take the opportunity of meeting him personally to discuss my point of view with him. I did not go to Delhi to conclude any agreement on behalf of Kashmir because, although released, I was still considered a rebel.

I might inform the representative of Pakistan that although I am beyond doubt the head of the Administration of Kashmir State, I am not the Prime Minister. I am head of the Emergency Administration, and that not because the Maharaja of Kashmir wished it. In fact, I do not know whether the Maharaja wishes it even now. I hold the position because the people of my country wish me to be at the helm of affairs in Jammu and Kashmir State.

When the raiders came to our land, massacred thousands of people—mostly Hindus and Sikhs, but Muslims, too—abducted thousands of girls, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike, looted our property and almost reached the gates of our summer capital, Srinagar, the result was that the civil, military and police administrations failed. The Maharaja, in the dead of night, left the capital along with his courtiers, and the result was absolute panic. There was no one to take over control. In that hour of crisis, the National Conference came forward with its 10,000 volunteers and took over the administration of the country. They started guarding the banks, the offices and houses of every person in the capital. This is the manner in which the administration changed hands. We were de facto in charge of the administration. The Maharaja, later on, gave it a legal form.

It is said that Sheikh Abdullah is a friend of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru. Yes, I admit that. I feel honoured that such a great man claims me as his friend. And he happens to belong to my own country;he is also a Kashmiri, and blood is thicker than water. If JawaharLal Nehru gives me that honour, I cannot help it. He is my friend. But that does not mean that, because of his friendship, I am going to betray the millions of my people who have suffered along with me for the last seventeen years and sacrifice the interests of my country. I am not a man of that calibre.

I was explaining how the dispute arose—how Pakistan wanted to force this position of slavery upon us. Pakistan had no interest in our liberation or it would not also have opposed our freedom movement. Pakistan would have supported us when thousands of my countrymen were behind bars and hundreds were shot to death. The Pakistani leaders and Pakistani papers were heaping abuse upon the people of Kashmir who were suffering these tortures.

Then suddenly, Pakistan comes before the bar of the world as the champion of the liberty of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The world may believe this, but it is very difficult for me to believe. When we refused the coercive tactics of Pakistan, it started full fledged aggression and encouraged the tribesmen in this activity. It is absolutely impossible for the tribesmen to enter our territory without encouragement from Pakistan, because it is necessary to pass through Pakistan territory to reach Jammu and Kashmir. Hundreds of trucks, thousands of gallons of petrol, thousands of rifles, ammunition, and all forms of help that an army requires, were supplied to them. We know this. After all, we belong to that country. What Pakistan could not achieve by the use of economic blockade it wanted to achieve by full-fledged aggression.

What do we request? We request nothing more than that the Security Council should send some members to this area to see for themselves what is happening there. If Pakistan comes forward and says, “We question the legality of accession”, I am prepared to discuss whether or not the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India was legal. However, now they say, “We want a plebiscite, we want to obtain the free and unfettered opinion of the people of Kashmir. There should be no pressure exerted on the people and they should make the free choice as to the State to which they wish to accede.”

Not only this the offer that was made by the people of Kashmir to Pakistan long, long ago, but it is the offer made by the Prime Minister of India at a time, I think, he had not the slightest need for making it, as Kashmir was in distress.

We realised that Pakistan would not allow us any time, that we had either to suffer the fate of our kith and kin of Muzaffarabad, Baramulla, Srinagar and other towns and villages, or to seek help from some outside authority.

Under these circumstances, both the Maharaja and the people of Kashmir requested the Government of India to accept our accession. The Government of India could have easily accepted the accession and could have said, “All right we accept your accession and we shall render this help.” There was no necessity for the Prime Minister of India to add the proviso, when accepting the accession, that India does not want to take advantage of the difficult situation in Kashmir. We will accept this accession, without Kashmir’s acceding to the Indian Dominion, we are not in a position to render any military help. But once the country is free from the raiders, marauders and looters, this accession will be subject to ratification by the people. That was the offer made by the Prime Minister of India.

That was the same offer which was made by the people of Kashmir to the Government of Pakistan, but it was refused because at that time Pakistan felt that it could, within a week, conquer the entire Jammu and Kashmir State and then place the fait accompli before the world, just as happened some time ago in Europe. The same tactics were used.

But having failed in these tactics, Pakistan now comes before the bar of the world, pleading, “We want nothing, we only want our people to be given a free hand in deciding their own fate. And in deciding their own fate, they must have a plebiscite.”

They then continue and say, “No, a plebiscite cannot be fair and impartial unless and until there is a neutral administration in the State of Jammu and Kashmir.” I have failed to understand this terminology with reference to a “neutral administration”. After all what does “neutral administration” mean?

The representative of Pakistan has stated that Sheikh Abdullah, because he is a friend of Jawahar Lal Nehru, because he has had sympathy for the Indian National Congress, because he has declared his point of view in favour of accession to India, and because he is head of the Emergency Administration, cannot remain impartial. Therefore, Sheikh Abdullah must depart.

Let us suppose that Sheikh Abdullah goes, who is to replace Sheikh Abdullah ? It will be someone amongst the 4 million people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. But can we find anyone among these 4 million people whom we can call impartial? After all, we are not logs of wood, we are not dolls. We must have an opinion one way or the other. The people of Kashmir are either in favour of Pakistan or in favour of India.

Therefore, Pakistan’s position comes down to this that the 4 million people of that State should have no hand in running the administration of their own country. Someone else must come in for that purpose. Is that fair ? Is that just ? Do the members of the Security Council wish to oust the people of Kashmir from running their own administration and their own country ? Then, for argument’s sake, let us suppose that the 4 million people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir agree to have nothing to do with the administration of their country; some one else must be brought into the country for this purpose. From where do the members of the Security Council propose that such a neutral individual may be secured? From India? No, from Pakistan? No, from anywhere in the world? No, frankly speaking, even if the Security Council were to request Almighty God to administer the State of Jammu and Kashmir during this interim period, I do not feel that He could act impartially. After all, one must have sympathy either for this side or that side.

If elections were to be held in the United Kingdom sometime after tomorrow with the Labour Government in power, would anyone say to Mr Attlee: “The elections are now going on. Because you happen to belong to Labour Party, your sympathies will be in favour of the Labour vote. Therefore, you had better clear out. We must have a neutral man as Prime Minister until our elections are finished?

However, we have been told that Sheikh Abdullah must walk out because he has declared his point of view in favour of India. Therefore, he cannot be impartial. We must have some impartial man we must have some neutral man.

As I have submitted to the members of the Security Council, Sheikh Abdullah happens to be there because the people wish it. As long as the people wish it, I shall be there. There is no power on earth which can displace me from the position which I have there. As long as the people are behind me, I will remain there.

We have declared once for all, that there shall be freedom of voting and for that purpose we have said, “Let anyone come in, we have no objection. Let the Commission of the Security Council on India come into our State and advise us how we should take a vote, how we should organize it, and how it can be completely impartial. We have no objection.” My Government is ready to satisfy, to the last comma, the impartiality of the vote.

But to have an impartial vote is one thing; to have a say in the administration of the State is a different thing entirely. After all, with what are we concerned? We are concerned only with the fact that no influence shall be exercised over the voters, either in one way or in another. The people shall be free to vote according to their own interests. We are ready to accede to that.

It is then said: “You cannot have freedom of voting as long as the Indian Army remains in the State of Jammu and Kashmir.” It is probably very difficult for me to draw a full picture of what is going on in that country. There is absolute chaos in certain parts of the country, fighting is going on and thousands of tribesmen are there ready to take advantage of any weakness on the part of the State of Jammu and Kashmir.

Once we ask the Indian Army, which is the only protective force in Kashmir against these marauders, to clear out, we leave the country open to chaos. After all, one who has suffered for the last seventeen years, in attempting to secure the freedom and liberation of his own country, would not like an outside army to come in and to remain in the country.

However, what is the present situation? If I ask the Indian Army to clear out, how am I going to protect the people from the looting, arson, murder and abduction with which they have been faced all these long months? What is the alternative? here need be no fear since the Indian Army is there, that this army will interfere in the exercise of a free vote. After all, a Commission of the Security Council will be there in order to watch. The Indian Army does not have to go into every village. It will be stationed at certain strategic points, so that in the event of danger from any border, the Army will be there to protect that border. The army is there to curb disorders anywhere in the State; that is all. The army will not be in each and every village in order to watch each and every vote.

It is then said: “Can we not have a joint control ? Can we not have the armies of Pakistan and India inside the State in order to control the situation ?” This is an unusual idea. What Pakistan could not achieve through ordinary means, Pakistan wishes to achieve by entering through the back door, so that it may have its armies inside the State and then start the fight. That is not possible. After all, we have been discussing the situation in Kashmir. I should say that we have been playing the drama of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The people of Kashmir are vitally interested in this question. Four million people in Kashmir are keenly interested in this entire affair. I have sympathies with the people of Poonch and Mirpur. The representative of Pakistan will probably concede that I have suffered greatly for the people of Poonch as well as for the people of Mirpur. There is no difference on this part of international democratisation of the administration between me, my party and the people of Poonch. We are one, we want our own liberty, we want our own freedom, we do not want autocratic rule. We desire that the 4 million people in Jammu and Kashmir—Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims— shall have the right to change their destiny, to control their country, and to administer it as best as they can. On that point there is absolutely no difference.

However, it is not a question of internal liberation. The Security Council should not confine the issue. The question is not that we want internal freedom, the question is not how the Maharaja got his State, or whether or not he is sovereign. These points are not before the Security Council. Whether Kashmir has lawfully acceded to India—complaints on that score have been brought before the Security Council on behalf of Pakistan—is not the point at issue. If that were the point at issue, then we should discuss that subject. We should prove before the Security Council that Kashmir and the people of Kashmir have lawfully and constitutionally acceded to the Dominion of India and Pakistan has no right to question that accession. However, that is not the discussion before the Security Council.

Indian and Kashmiri forces are ready to deal with tribesmen, to come to an understanding with the people of Kashmir and to establish ademocratic form of government inside the State. We shall do all that. We do not want Pakistan to lend us support to suppress an internal revolt or to drive out the tribesmen. We do not seek any support from Pakistan in that connection. Since Pakistan is a neighbouring country, we desire to remain on the friendliest possible terms with this sister Dominion. But we do ask that Pakistan shall have no hand, directly or indirectly, in this turmoil in Kashmir. The Government of Pakistan has said: “We have no hand in this turmoil.” The only course left to the Security Council is to send out the commission and to see whether or not Pakistan has any hand in this turmoil. If Pakistan has had any hand in this turmoil, then the Government of Pakistan should be asked to desist from such activity. If Pakistan has had no hand in this turmoil, then that can be proved.

This issue has been clouded by very many other issues and interests. I suggested at informal talks that according to my understanding there are two points at issue, first, how to have this neutral impartial administration; second, whether or not the Indian Army shall remain. It is not at all disputed that we must have a plebiscite and that the accession must be ratified by the people of Kashmir, freely and without any pressure on this or that side. That much is conceded, there is no dispute about that. The dispute arises when it is suggested that in order to have the free vote, the administration must be changed. To that suggestion we say, “No.”

I do not know what course future events will take. However, I may assure the Security Council that, if I am asked to conduct the administration of this State, it will be my duty to make the administration absolutely impartial. It will be my duty to request my brothers, who are in a different camp at this time, to come to lend me support. After all, they are my own kith and kin. We suffered together, we have no quarrel with them. I shall tell them: “Come on; it is my country; it is your country. I have been asked to administer the State. Are you prepared to lend me support? It is for me to make the administration successful; it is for me to make the administration look impartial.” It is not for Pakistan to say “No, we must have an impartial administration.” I refuse to accept Pakistan as a party in the affairs of the Jammu and Kashmir State. I refuse this point blank. Pakistan has no right to say that we must do this and we must do that. We have seen enough of Pakistan. The people of Kashmir have seen enough. Muzaffarabad and Baramulla and hundred of villages in Jammu and Kashmir depict the story of Pakistan to the people of Jammu and Kashmir. We want to have no more of this.

In concluding, I again request that in order to settle this issue of Kashmir, the Security Council should not confuse the point in dispute. The Security Council should not allow various other extraneous matters to be introduced. Very many extraneous matters have been introduced. The representative of Pakistan gave us the history of the Jammu and Kashmir State. He read to us some letters from Viceroys of India, asking the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir to behave, giving the Maharaja good advice, et cetera. However, we cannot forget that these States are the creation of British imperialism in India who has supported these states and this misrule for these 150 years? It is not going to convince me or the world for the representative of Pakistan to say: “These events have happened and these letters were written.” We know how the Princes have acted, how the states were brought into existence, and how the Princes were supported. This was all a game in the British imperialist policy. But this legacy has now fallen upon us. We are not here to discuss whether or not the Maharaja lawfully became the ruler of the State, whether or not there is moral administration in this State, whether or not the Maharaja is sovereign and whether or not Kashmir has legally acceded to India. These issues are not before the Security Council. The only issue before the Security Council is that Pakistan must observe its international obligations and must not support any outside raiders.

Pakistan should not encourage inside revolt. Pakistan has denied that it has in order to verify the statements made by the representatives of India and Pakistan, the Security Council must send a commission to the spot to see whether the complaint brought before the Security Council is valid or invalid. If the Security Council finds that the complaint brought before it by India is valid, then Pakistan should be asked to desist or India should be permitted to use its means to carry out the decision of the Security Council.

As far as I can speak on behalf of India, India does not want the help of the armies of Pakistan. What it wants from Pakistan is that Pakistan should not supply bases to the raiders on Pakistan territory across the border from Jammu and Kashmir State. All along the border on Pakistan territory, there are huge concentrations of these tribesmen who are Pakistani nationals. We request Pakistan not to allow its territory to be used by these raiders.

Pakistan should not provide ammunition, arms, direction and control to these tribesmen. It should stop the passage of these tribesmen through its territory. Pakistan should not supply arms and ammunition to the people who are fighting within the State because all these matters fall under an international obligation. Therefore, Pakistan should desist from that practice. That is all. We do not want any armed help from Pakistan. If Pakistan does what we have requested, the Indian Army, I am quite sure, will be capable of driving out the raiders and tribesmen. If Pakistan does not meddle in our affairs, we will be capable of solving all our own internal disputes with the Maharaja of Kashmir. However, as long as this unofficial war continues, it is very difficult for us to do any thing. Our hands are tied.

What is happening? The raiders are concentrated just across the border. They enter our State in large number—four or five thousand strong. They raid four or five villages, burn them, abduct women and loot property. When our army tries to capture them, they go across the border, and can not fire a single shot across the border, because if it does, there is the immediate danger of a greater conflagration. So our hands are tied.

We do not want to create this difficult situation without informing the Security Council and we felt honour-bound to inform it of the actual position. The Indian Army could easily have followed the raiders across the border and could have attacked the bases, which were all in Pakistan territory, but it desisted. We thought it would be better to inform the Security Council of the situation.

However, I did not have the slightest idea that when the case came before the Security Council, the representative of Pakistan would so boldly deny that Pakistan supplied all this help. Everybody knows that Pakistan is aiding these raiders and tribesmen and the people who are fighting with the State. However, Pakistan chose boldly to deny all these charges.

What is left for me to do? After all, I do not have any magic lamp so that I might bring the entire picture of Jammu and Kashmir State, along with the borders of Pakistan, before the eyes of the members of the Security Council so that they might see who is fighting and who is not fighting. Therefore, somebody must go to the spot. Then at that time it would be for us to prove that the charges we have brought before the Security Council are correct to the last word. That is the only help we want and no other help.”

 

 

 

Thirdly, though by no means lastly, may be placed the 14 August 1951 Memorandum of  prominent Muslims led by Dr Zakir Hussain to the UN Representative Dr. Frank P. Graham:

“It is a remarkable fact that, while the Security Council and its various agencies have devoted so much time to the study of the Kashmir dispute and made various suggestions for its resolution, none of them has tried to ascertain the views of the Indian Muslims nor the possible effect of any hasty step in Kashmir, however well-intentioned, on the interests and well- being of the Indian Muslims. We are convinced that no lasting solution for the problem can be found unless the position of Muslims in Indian society is clearly understood.

Supporters of the idea of Pakistan, before this subcontinent was partitioned, discouraged any attempt to define Pakistan clearly and did little to anticipate the conflicting problems which were bound to arise as a result of the advocacy of the two-nation theory. The concept of Pakistan, therefore, became an emotional slogan with little rational content. It never occurred to the Muslim League or its leaders that if a minority was not prepared to live with a majority on the sub- continent, how could the majority be expected t o tolerate the minority.

It is, therefore, small wonder that the result of partition has been disastrous to Muslims. In undivided India, their strength lay about 100 million. Partition split up the Muslim people, confining them to the three isolated regions. Thus, Muslims number 25 million in Western Pakistan, 35 million to 40 million in India, and the rest in Eastern Pakistan. A single undivided community has been broken into three fragments, each faced with its own problems.

Pakistan was not created on a religious basis. If it had been, our fate as well as the fate of other minorities would have been settled at that time. Nor would the division of the sub- continent for reasons of religion have left large minorities in India or Pakistan.

This merely illustrates what we have said above, that the concept of Pakistan was vague, obscure, and never clearly defined, nor its likely consequences foreseen by the Muslim League, even when some of these should have been obvious.

When the partition took place, Muslims in India were left in the lurch by the Muslim League and its leaders. Most of them departed to Pakistan and a few who stayed behind stayed long enough to wind up their affairs and dispose of their property. Those who went over to Pakistan left a large number of relations and friends behind.

Having brought about a division of the country, Pakistan leaders proclaimed that they would convert Pakistan into a land where people would live a life according to the tenets of Islam. This created nervousness and alarm among the minorities living in Pakistan. Not satisfied with this, Pakistan went further and announced again and again their determination to protect and safeguard the interests of Muslims in India. This naturally aroused suspicion amongst the Hindus against us and our loyalty to India was questioned.

Pakistan had made our position weaker by driving out Hindus from Western Pakistan in utter disregard of the consequences of such a policy to us and our welfare. A similar process is in question in Eastern Pakistan from which Hindus are coming over to India in a large and large number.

If the Hindus are not welcome in Pakistan, how can we, in all fairness, expect Muslims to be welcomed in India ? Such a policy must inevitably, as the past has already shown, result in the uprooting of Muslims in this country and their migration to Pakistan where, as it became clear last year, they are no longer welcome, lest their influx should destroy Pakistan’s economy. Neither some of the Muslims who did migrate to Pakistan after partition, and following the widespread bloodshed and conflict on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border in the north- west, have been able to find a happy asylum in what they had been told would be their homeland. Consequently some of them have had to return to India, e.g. Meos who are now being rehabilitated in their former areas.

If we are living honourably in India today, it is certainly not due to Pakistan which, if anything, has by her policy and action weakened our position. The credit goes to the broadminded leadership of India, to Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, to the traditions of tolerance in this country and to the Constitution which ensures equal rights to all citizens of India, irrespective of their religion caste, creed, colour or sex.

We, therefore, feel that, tragically as Muslims were misled by the Muslim League and subsequently by Pakistan and the unnecessary suffering which we and our Hindu brethren have to go through in Pakistan and in India since partition, we must be given an opportunity to settle down to a life of tolerance and understanding to the mutual benefit of Hindus and Muslims in our country – if only Pakistan would let us do it. To us it is a matter of no small consequence.

Despite continuous provocations, first from the Muslim League and since then from Pakistan, the Hindu majority in India has not thrown us or members of other minorities out of Civil Services, Armed Forces, the judiciary, trade, commerce, business and industry. There are Muslim Ministers in the Union and State cabinets, Muslim Governors, Muslim Ambassadors, representing India in foreign countries, fully enjoying the confidence of the Indian nation, Muslim members in Parliament and state legislatures, Muslim judges serving on the Supreme Court and High Courts, high-ranking officers in the Armed Forces and the Civil services, including the police.

Muslims have large landed estates, run big business and commercial houses in various parts of the country, notably in Bombay and Calcutta, have their shares in industrial production and enterprise in export and import trade. Our famous sacred shrines and places of cultural interest are mostly in India.

Not that our lot is certainly happy. We wish some of the state Governments showed a little greater sympathy to us in the field of education and employment. Nevertheless, we feel we have an honourable place in India. Under the law of the land, our religious and cultural life is protected and we shall share in the opportunities open to all citizens to ensure progress for the people of this country.

It is, therefore, clear that our interest and welfare do not coincide with Pakistan’s conception of the welfare and interests of Muslims in Pakistan.

This is clear from Pakistan’s attitude towards Kashmir. Pakistan claims Kashmir, first, on the ground of the majority of the State’s people being Muslims and, secondly, on the ground, of the state being essential to its economy and defence. To achieve its objective it has been threatening to launch “Jihad” against Kashmir in India. It is a strange commentary on political beliefs that the same Muslims of Pakistan who like the Muslims of Kashmir to join them invaded the state, in October 1947, killing and plundering Muslims in the state and dishonouring Muslim women, all in the interest of what they described as the liberation of Muslims of the State. In its oft-proclaimed anxiety to rescue the 3 million Muslims from what it describes as the tyranny of a handful of Hindus in the State, Pakistan evidently is prepared to sacrifice the interests of 40 million Muslims in India – a strange exhibition of concern for the welfare of fellow- Muslims. Our misguided brothers in Pakistan do not realise that if Muslims in Pakistan can wage a war against Hindus in Kashmir why should not Hindus, sooner or later, retaliate against Muslims in India.

Does Pakistan seriously think that it could give us any help if such an emergency arose or that we would deserve any help thanks to its own follies ? It is incapable of providing room and livelihood to the 40 million Muslims of India, should they migrate to Pakistan. Yet its policy and action, if not changed soon, may well produce the result which it dreads.

We are convinced that India will never attack our interests. First of all, it would be contrary to the spirit animating the political movement in this country. Secondly, it would be opposed to the Constitution and to the sincere leadership of the Prime Minister. Thirdly, India by committing such a folly would be playing straight into the hands of Pakistan.

We wish we were equally convinced of the soundness of Pakistan’s policy. So completely oblivious is it of our present problems and of our future that it is willing to sell us into slavery – if only it can secure Kashmir.

It ignores the fact that Muslims in Kashmir may also have a point of view of their own, that there is a democratic movement with a democratic leadership in the State, both inspired by the progress of a broad minded, secular, democratic movement in India and both naturally being in sympathy with India. Otherwise, the Muslim raiders should have been welcomed with open arms by the Muslims of the State when the invasion took place in 1947.

Persistent propaganda about “Jihad” is intended, among other things, to inflame religious passions in this country. For it would, of course, be in Pakistan’s interests to promote communal rioting in India to show to Kashmiri Muslims how they can find security only in Pakistan. Such a policy, however, can only bring untold misery and suffering to India and Pakistan generally and to Indian Muslims particularly. Pakistan never tires of asserting that it is determined to protect the interests of Muslims in Kashmir and India. Why does not Pakistan express the same concern for Pathans who are fighting for Pakhtoonistan, an independent homeland of their own ? The freedom-loving Pathans under the leadership of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan and Dr. Khan Sahib, both nurtured in the traditions of democratic tolerance of the Indian National Congress, are being subjected to political repression of the worst possible kind by their Muslim brethren in power in Pakistan and in the NWFP. Contradictory as Pakistan’s policy generally is, it is no surprise to us that while it insists on a fair and impartial plebiscite in Kashmir, it denies a fair and impartial plebiscite to Pathans.

Pakistan’s policy in general and her attitude towards Kashmir is particular thus tend to create conditions in this country which in the long run can only bring to us Muslims widespread suffering and destruction. Its policy prevents us from settling down, from being honourable citizens of a State, free from suspicion of our fellow-countrymen and adapting ourselves to changing conditions to promote the interests and welfare of India. Its sabre-rattling interferes with its own economy and ours. It expects us to be loyal to it despite its impotence to give us any protection, believing at the same time that we can still claim all the rights of citizenship in a secular democracy.

In the event of a war, it is extremely doubtful whether it will be able to protect the Muslims of East Bengal who are completely cut off from Western Pakistan. Are the Muslims of India and Eastern Pakistan to sacrifice themselves completely to enable the 25 million Muslims in Western Pakistan to embark upon mad, self-destructive adventures?

We should, therefore, like to impress upon you with all the emphasis at our command that Pakistan’s policy towards Kashmir is fraught with the gravest peril to the 40 million Muslims of India. If the Security Council is really interested in peace, human brotherhood and international understanding, it should heed this warning while there is still time.

Dr. Zakir Hussain (Vice Chancellor Aligarh University); Sir Sultan Ahmed (Former Member of Governor General’s Executive Council); Sir Mohd. Ahmed Syed Khan(Nawab of Chhatari, former acting Governor of United Provinces and Prime Minister of Hyderabad); Sir Mohd. Usman (Former member of Governor General’s Executive council and acting Governor of Madras); Sir Iqbal Ahmed (Former Chief Justice of Allahabad High Court); Sir Fazal Rahimtoola (Former Sheriff of Bombay); Maulana Hafz-ur-Rehman M.P.; Col. B.H. Zaidi M.P.; Nawab Zain Yar Jung (Minister Gcvernment of Hyderabad); A.K. Kawaja (Former President of Muslim Majlis); T.M. Zarif (General Secretary West Bengal Bohra Community)”.

Such have been the most eminent voices of India’s Muslims in times past. Sadly, they have no equivalent today when India’s Muslims need them with greater urgency. (Bollywood or cricketing celebrities hardly substitute!) This fault in the intellectual history of the modern subcontinent has been a principal factor causing the misapprehensions and distortions of Pakistan’s and J&K’s political reality to continue worldwide.

Do President-elect Obama’s Pakistan specialists suppose Maulana Azad, Dr Zakir Hussain, Sheikh Abdullah were Pakistanis (or that Sheikh Mujib wanted to remain one)?

Once upon a time, half a century ago, the son of a Pakistani president married the daughter of an American ambassador to Pakistan and moved to Washington.  That might be as good a time as any from which to mark the start of the grip Pakistan’s military and political/bureaucratic elite have managed to have on the process of defining official American policy towards Pakistan and indeed the subcontinent as a whole.

Four young and   doubtless well-meaning Democratic Party “think tank” analysts have now produced a document Partnership for Progress: Advancing a New Strategy for Prosperity and Stability in Pakistan and the Region (Center for American Progress November 2008) that is the latest edition emerging out of that process.

It is hard to find the most simplistic of the statements contained in the document.  My runner-up candidate would be the recommendations that what should happen in Pakistan now is

“Dismantle militant groups and reduce regional tensions;
Bolster civilian governance;
Strengthen Pakistan’s economy and advance development”.

Bravo!  What else to say?

My winning candidate for naiveté though must be this on page 16:

“Pakistan… sees itself as the political home for the subcontinent’s Muslim population and believes India’s continued control over the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley and denial of a plebiscite for its inhabitants represent a lingering desire on India’s part to undo the legacy of partition, which divided the British Indian Empire into India and Pakistan.”

Now someone really ought to explain to these soon-to-be-Obama-Administration-Pakistan-specialists that, once upon a  time, there were men named Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Dr Zakir Hussain and Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and many others like them (let aside Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) who were all not merely devout Muslims but also leaders who had no wish to have any truck with any idea of a “Pakistan”. And furthermore, that some years later there came to be another man named Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and many others like him, who were Pakistanis but who no longer wished to remain so.

How is it possible for  four young scholars from places like the Fletcher School to not know this and yet pretend to expertise on Pakistan or the subcontinent?   Pakistanis and Indians and Bangladeshis who actually live in Pakistan and India and Bangladesh all know this from mother’s knee.  But the powerful Potomac/CFR/Houston etc Pakistan lobby which has heavily influenced if not controlled the discussion of America’s Pakistan-India policy-thinking has hidden away such inconvenient facts, and may have thus misled our young authors entering these woods for the first time. The inevitable result of such repression has been the set of neuroses and psychoses that have beset the US-Pakistan relationship for decades on end and seem likely to continue now under President Obama.

(As for official New Delhi, its own infirmities, like allowing organized business lobbies to define and control India’s relationship with the United States, as well as its delusions of grandeur, causes it too to fail History 101 miserably, which explains the shallow depths that Indian diplomatic discussion manages to reach on the subject.)

What the Center for American Progress has to say expectedly contains contradictions that have been long seen before.  For example, the authors are unable to reconcile their own explicit statements (A) and (B), revealing what a clinical psychologist might follow Gregory Bateson to identify as a classic “double-bind” leading to schizophrenia in the Pakistan-US relationship:

(A) “The United States should continue supporting and working with the Pakistani military despite strains in the relationship. The stakes are too high to walk away from Pakistan’s military establishment. Not only does most of the materiel for the US war effort in Afghanistan go through Pakistan, but the ISI is almost the exclusive source of information about international terrorist attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan.”

(B) “Pakistan’s powerful military establishment has launched four outright coups d’etat in the country’s 60-year history. And through its control of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, Pakistan’s premiere intelligence service, the military continues to carry out subtler manipulations of the political system during the periods when it has not held power directly…. The military establishment also has expanded far beyond its national security portfolio, entrenching itself in the Pakistani economy…. .The United States shares some of the blame for imbalance between military and civilian institutions in Pakistan. During the 1960s, 1980s, and since 9/11, the Pakistan military has been richly rewarded by the United States based on its status as a front-line state in the Cold War and then in the war against extremist terrorist networks. The United States has created perverse incentives by richly rewarding the Pakistani military in its promotion of unstable and insecure geopolitical situations on the other side of its borders, and then withdrawing our support if peace and stability return. The Pakistan military, meanwhile, uses the threat of India and the dispute over the Kashmir region to legitimize its leading role in Pakistan’s domestic politics and budget…. Ties between the Pakistani security establishment (or at a minimum individuals within it) and specific militant groups have not been severed. The militants that now form the core of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Army have long-standing connections and shared interests….”

What may be recommended by way of therapy?

For starters, a book created under immense adversity at an American university almost 20 years ago: Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, Edited and with an Introduction by one William E James and one Subroto Roy.  (Yes, I too once was as young as these authors are now but we   We may have produced a more substantial piece of work.)  A prominent Pakistani author in the book thanked me for creating it because, he said, it was the first time Pakistan had been treated seriously at a Western university, not merely seen as a source of real-estate or manpower for Anglo-American interests.

Besides the book, I would, most immodestly, recommend any fraction of my subsequent publications in the field, listed alphabetically as below and all most easily available at this site.

America’s Pakistan-India Policy
History of Jammu & Kashmir
India and Her Neighbours
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh Merchandise Exports
Iqbal & Jinnah vs Rehmat Ali in Pakistan’s Creation
Is Balochistan Doomed?
Justice & Afzal
Lal Masjid ≠ Golden Temple
Law, Justice and J&K
On Hindus and Muslims
Pakistan’s Allies
Pakistan’s Kashmir obsession
Racism New and Old
Saving Pakistan
Separation of Powers: India, the USA, Pakistan
Solving Kashmir: On an Application of Reason
The Greatest Pashtun: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
Two cheers for Pakistan
Understanding Pakistan
What To Tell Musharraf

Etc

https://independentindian.com/2011/10/13/my-seventy-one-notes-at-facebook-etc-on-kashmir-pakistan-and-of-course-india-listed-thanks-to-jd/

In such matters, naiveté is too expensive a luxury to indulge in.

Subroto Roy

Postscript:  I had erroneously (and patronisingly) brushed all four authors as “young”; that has now been corrected; I hope it will not distract from the substance of the critique.

Two cheers for Pakistan!

Two cheers for Pakistan!

by

Subroto Roy

First published in The Statesman

Editorial Page Special Article, April 7, 2008

A century has passed since British rulers in India like Curzon and Minto became self-styled interlocutors between Muslims and Hindus of the subcontinent. Up through the 19th century there had been no significant national political conversation between India’s main communities. The “Chief Translator” of the High Court in Calcutta was highly prized for his knowledge of Sanskrit, Persian and English because at least three different sets of laws governed different people in the country. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wrote of his experience in the Bankim-inspired revolutionary societies of Bengal who treated him with extreme suspicion because they could hardly believe a Muslim wanted to join them as an anti-British rebel.

Jinnah vs Azad

Then came MA Jinnah, Iqbal, Rahmat Ali and others, initial creators of Pakistan whether through greater or lesser motives. Azad, Zakir Hussain, Sheikh Abdullah and other Muslims were equally firm the Pakistan idea was not only bad for India in the world it was bad for Muslims in particular. The Azads condemned the Jinnahs as greedy megalomaniacs, the Jinnahs condemned the Azads as minions of the Hindus. Larke lenge Pakistan, marke lenge Pakistan, khoon se lenge Pakistan, dena hoga Pakistan was the mob-cry during the bloody Partition, while the British, weakened by war and economics and bereft of their imperial pretensions, made haste to leave “this beastly country” to its fate ~ rather hoping the bloodshed would be such someone might hire them to stay on.

Certainly, having used the Indian Army for imperial purposes in the War, Britain (represented locally by a series of smartly dressed blundering fools) behaved irresponsibly in not properly demobilizing that Army during a period of intense communal tension. There were no senior Indian officers ~ KM Cariappa became a Brigadier only in 1946, Ayub Khan was a Colonel under him. Then there were the fatuous “princes” the British had propped up in “Indian India”, few being more than cardboard creatures. Among them was J&K’s ruler who was a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet and had come to harbour illusions of international grandeur. Once J&K’s Muslim soldiers returned to their Mirpuri homes, Jammu and Punjab were in communal conflict, months before the decision that Pakistan would indeed be created out of designated areas of British India just before British India extinguished itself. Army-issued Bren guns came to be used by former soldiers in communal massacres of the convoys of refugees going in each direction.

Part of the problem over J&K since then has been that it seems a dialogue of the deaf. Pakistanis since Zafrullah Khan claimed it was communal violence against Muslims in Jammu and Punjab that prompted the Pashtun invasion of Srinagar Valley beginning 22 October 1947; Indians have always claimed the new (and partly British-officered) Pakistan Army organized and instigated the invasion, coinciding with the planned takeover of Gilgit.

As in all complex moral problems, there was truth on all sides though no one doubts the invasion was savage and that the Pashtuns carried off Kashmiri women, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. J&K descended into civil war, Abdullah’s secularists backed by the new India, Ibrahim’s communalists by the new Pakistan. Field Marshall Auchinlek, who commanded both Indian and Pakistani armies, had the decency to resign when he realized his forces were at war with one another. That J&K could not be independent in international law was sealed when the 15 October 1947 telegram sent by Hari Singh’s regime went unanswered by Attlee. The tribal invasion from Pakistan caused the old State of J&K to become an ownerless entity in international law, whose territories were then carved up by force by the two new British Dominions (later republics) and the result has been the “LOC”.

ZA Bhutto was perhaps Pakistan’s only politician after that time. The years between the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan and the rise of Bhutto saw Pakistan’s military begin its liaison with the Americans ~ from the US Ambassador’s daughter marrying the Pakistan President’s son to the leasing of Peshawar’s airfields for U-2 flights over the USSR. Yet Bhutto’s deep flaws also contributed to the loss of Bangladesh and to brutality, supported by the Shah of Iran’s American helicopters, against the Baloch.

Bhutto’s daughter now may have succeeded in death where she could not in life. Like Indira Gandhi, there seemed a shrill almost self-sacrificial air about Benazir in her last days, and, like Indira, her assassination caused all her countrymen including her enemies to undergo an existential experience. Perhaps the public death of a woman in public life touches some chivalrous chord in everyone.

Benazir’s husband was transformed from seeming a rather dubious self-seeker to becoming a national leader of some sobriety. Her old adversary Nawaz Sharif, brought to power by one Army Chief and removed by another, is now a constitutional democrat – seemingly adamant that there be the Rule of Law and not of generals. Most of all, Benazir’s death seemed to completely shut up that most loquacious of Pakistanis: Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf seemed stunned and promised free, fair and transparent elections; though no one believed he would deliver, he somehow did. He would like now to be a senior statesman though it seems as likely his countrymen will not forgive his misdeeds and instead exile him to America.

Afghanistan

Pakistan’s main international problem is not and has never been J&K. It has been and remains its unsettled western border and identity vis-à-vis Afghanistan (as India’s problem has been the eastern border with China). Dr Khan Sahib and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan knew this but they were not allowed to speak by Pakistan’s Kashmir-obsessed elite. Zaheer Shah’s Afghanistan was the only country that voted against Pakistan joining the UN sixty years ago.

The present author has said before that Osama bin Laden may well be safely and comfortably in the deserts of North Africa while NATO and the Americans raise hell in Afghanistan and Waziristan pretending to look for him. It is not in India’s interest as it is not in Pakistan’s interest that Western militaries, who seem to have nothing better to do, brutalize Afghans of all descriptions in the name of nation-building or fighting “terrorism”. Afghan nation-building can only ultimately come from the Afghans themselves, no matter how many loya jirgas it takes. What Pakistan dislikes emerging from New Delhi is the sometimes rather supercilious and ignorant condescension that our officialdom is infamous for. Instead, with a new, seemingly clear-headed and well-intentioned Government in Pakistan elected for the first time ever, it may be time for all good people in the subcontinent to raise a glass of fruit juice and say “Two cheers for Pakistan!”

Understanding Pakistan

UNDERSTANDING PAKISTAN

First published in The Sunday Statesman & The Statesman Editorial Page Special Article

30-31 July, 2006

by

Subroto Roy

 

 

 

 

Pakistan’s political institutions have failed to develop properly over sixty years. Yet in the last ten years or more, its Government has acquired weapons of mass destruction and in 1998-99 its Foreign Minister half-threatened to use these against India in a first strike. As a religious and cultural phenomenon and as a putative nation-state, Pakistan needs to be sought to be understood in as unbiased and objective a manner as possible, not least by Pakistanis themselves, as well as by Afghans, Bangladeshis, Chinese, Americans,Israelis, Arabs, Iranians etc. besides ourselves in India.

 

The slogan “Islam in danger” has always had some substance since orthodox Muslims constantly face temptations in the world existing around them from materialism, scepticism, syncretism, pantheism etc. Some responded defensively to the Westernisation/modernisation of India’s Hindus, Parsees and Christians by becoming insular and separatist in outlook, and anti-individualist or communal in behaviour.

 

“We are an Arab people whose fathers have fallen in exile in the country of Hindustan, and Arabic genealogy and Arabic language are our pride,” declared Wali Allah (1703-1762), a contemporary of Nejd’s founder of Wahhabism. “We must repudiate all those Indian, Persian and Roman customs which are contrary to the Prophet’s teaching”, declared Barelvi (1786-1831), who also initiated the idea of a religious mass migration of North Indian Muslims. His movement saw “jihad as one of the basic tenets of faith… it chose as the venue of jihad the NW Frontier of the subcontinent, where it was directed against the Sikhs. Barelvi temporarily succeeded in carving out a small theocratic principality which collapsed owing to the friction between his Pathan and North Indian followers…” (A. Ahmed, in Basham (ed) Cultural History of India).

 

Political and psychological tensions between Pakistan’s Pashtun/Baloch tribal people and Punjabi/ Urdu elite continue to this day, even when many of the former have integrated into industries and vocations controlled by the latter. The highlanders were never part of Hindu societies, while the plainsmen, whether they admit it or not, ethnically were converts for the most part from India’s native religions (though here again the religious syncretism of Sindhis, both Muslim and Hindu, may be contrasted with orthodoxy). Barelvi’s theocracy, named Tariqa-yi Muhammadiya, had remnants near Sittana until the First World War, and his followers are still a major component of Pakistan’s most orthodox today.

 

Muslim separatism in North India would have been futile without British political backing. As early as 1874, the British saw their advantage: “The existence side by side of these hostile creeds (Hindu and Muslim) is one of the strong points in our political position in India. The better classes of Mohammedans are a source of strength to us and not of weakness. They constitute a comparatively small but an energetic minority of the population whose political interests are identical with ours.” When the Agha Khan’s 1906 delegation first pleaded for communal representation, Minto agreed with them, and Minto’s wife wrote in her diary the effect was “nothing less than the pulling back of sixty two millions (of Muslims) from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition.” The slogan “If you are not with us you are against us” was always widely applied by the British in India in the form “If you dare to not be with us, we definitely will be with your adversaries”.

 

One obscure ideological current of today’s Pakistan came via the enigmatic personage of Inayatullah Mashriqi (1888-1963), who, from being a Cambridge Wrangler, became a friend of Adolf Hitler in 1926, received a Renault as a gift from Hitler (possibly housed in a Lahore museum today) and claimed to have affected Hitler’s ideology. Mashriqi created the Khaksars, modelled on the Nazi SA, and was often jailed for violence.

 

But the official ideology of today’s Pakistan came from Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938), an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, “Pakistan” would have been better named “Iqbalistan” and its nationals “Iqbalians”, just as countries like Colombia, the USA, Israel, Saudi Arabia etc. have been named after an individual person. Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Speech to the Muslim League in Allahabad conceptualised the country that exists today: “I would like to see the Punjab, NWFP, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state…the formation of a consolidated NW Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims at least of NW India… India is the greatest Muslim country in the world. The life of Islam as a cultural force in this living country very largely depends on its centralisation in a specified territory… “

 

Though Kashmiri himself, Iqbal was silent about J&K being any part of this new entity. Nor did he see this Muslim country being theocratic or filled with anti-Hindu bigotry: “A community which is inspired by feelings of ill-will towards other communities is low and ignoble. I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities…. Yet I love the communal group which is the source of my life and my behaviour; and which has formed me what I am by giving me its religion, its literature, its thought, its culture,and thereby recreating its whole past, as a living operating factor, in my present consciousness… Nor should the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim states will mean the introduction of a kind of religious rule in such states…. I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam. For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power, for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilise its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and the spirit of modern times.” Iqbal clearly wished to be rid of the same stamp of Arabian Imperialism that Wali Allah had extolled.

 

In 1937, Iqbal added an economic dimension referring to Shariat in order that “at least the right to subsistence is secured to everybody”. A “free Muslim state or states” was “the only way to solve the problem of bread for Muslims as well as to secure a peaceful India.”

 

Iqbal persuaded MA Jinnah (1876-1948), who had settled once again into his London law practice, to return to India in 1934. But when, following the 1935 Government of India Act, India experienced its first democratic elections in 1937, the Muslim League’s ideology promoted by Iqbal and Jinnah failed miserably in the very four provinces that Iqbal had named.

 

Three days after Hitler’s attack on Poland, the British chose to politically empower Jinnah. Until September 4 1939, the British “had had little time for Jinnah and his League. The Government’s declaration of war on Germany on 3 September, however, transformed the situation. A large part of the army was Muslim, much of the war effort was likely to rest on the two Muslim majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal. The following day, the Viceroy invited Jinnah for talks on an equal footing with Gandhi…. because the British found it convenient to take the League seriously, everyone had to as well” (F. Robinson, in James & Roy (eds) Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy). Jinnah himself was amazed: “suddenly there was a change in the attitude towards me. I was treated on the same basis as Mr Gandhi. I was wonderstruck why all of a sudden I was promoted and given a place side by side with Mr Gandhi.”

 

Britain at war was faced too with intransigence from the Congress — Gandhi, for example, rudely dismissing the 1942 Cripps offer as a “post-dated cheque on a failing bank”. It was unsurprising this would contribute to the British tilt towards Congress’s adversary. Suddenly, Rahmat Ali’s acronym “PAKSTAN” , supposedly invented on the top floor of a London bus, was becoming a credible possibility.

 

By 1946, Muslim electoral opinion had changed drastically in the League’s favour. By 1947, Iqbal’s lofty philosophical vision of a cultured Muslim state had degenerated into irrational street mobs shouting: “Larke lenge Pakistan; Marke lenge Pakistan; Khun se lenge Pakistan; Dena hoga Pakistan”.

 

Events remote from India’s history and geography, namely, Hitler’s rise and the Second World War, had contributed between 1937 and 1947 to the change of fortune of Jinnah’s League, and hence the fate of all the people of the subcontinent. Even so, thanks to AK Azad’s diplomacy, the May 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan denying Partition and Pakistan did come to be accepted by Jinnah’s Muslim League, and it was doubtless the obduracy and megalomania of Azad’s Congress colleagues which contributed equally to the failure to find a political solution ~ along with the vapid behaviour of a pompous, vacuous Mountbatten who caused infinite uncertainty until June 3 1947, as to what was going to happen to the lives of scores of millions of ordinary people within a few weeks.

 

In August 1947, the new Pakistani elite hardly felt or even wished to feel free of the British ~ they merely felt independent of what they saw as Congress domination, and had now acquired some power for themselves. Far from any nation-building taking place, Pakistan’s early years were marked by political, legal, constitutional and military chaos and trauma. Both Dominions made a grab for the Raj’s common assets, especially the armed forces.

 

Indeed, how did the Kashmir problem originate? As much as any other factor, it occurred because of the incompetent partitioning of military assets and hurried decommissioning of British Indian armies ~ causing thousands of Mirpuri soldiers to return to a communally inflamed Punjab/ Jammu region.

 

The first J&K war started within weeks of Partition and was in all but name a civil war ~ somewhat like the American Civil War. It was a civil war not merely between Kashmir’s National and Muslim Conferences but also between Army regiments who had been jointly fighting Britain’s enemies until very recently.

 

Pakistan’s leadership vacuum started at once. Jinnah was ill and died shortly. Liaquat Ali Khan was the only politician of any experience left. He faced on one side Pashtuns having no wish to be dominated by a new Karachi/ Rawalpindi elite, and on the other side, the Kashmir conflict. The most basic functions of governance never got started. Taking a Census has been one such function since Roman times, yet Pakistan has never had one. Writing a Constitution is another, but Maududi and others demanded “That the sovereignty in Pakistan belongs to God Almighty alone and that the Government of Pakistan shall administer the country as His agent”. As a result, Pakistan’s few constitutionalists have been battling impossibly ever since to overcome the ontological mistake made of assuming that any earthly government, no matter how pious, can be in communication with God Almighty as easily as it can be with foreign governments.

 

The Rule of Law is another basic function. But when Liaquat was himself assassinated in 1951, his assassin was killed on the spot yet the murder remained unsolved. Mashriqi was immediately arrested because of his hostility to the Muslim League, but later released. Because the assassin was Pashtun, Afghanistan was blamed but the Afghan Government proved otherwise. The investigating policeman was killed in an aircrash, and all documents went with him. Final suspicion pointed towards Akbar Khan, the renegade Army general who had led the attack on J&K and was in jail for the Rawalpindi conspiracy. Years later, Liaquat’s widow (the former Irene Pant of Naini Tal) rued the fact no one was ever prosecuted.

 

After Liaquat’s assassination, the period of Ghulam Mohammad, Nazimuddin, Mohammad Ali Bogra, Chaudhury Mohammad Ali, and most importantly, Iskander Mirza leading up to Ayub Khan’s Martial Law in 1958, was simply appalling in its display of the sheer irresponsibility of Pakistan’s new super-elite. Instead of domestic nation-building or fulfilling the basic functions of governance, close comprador relations came to be established with the US and British Governments ~ exemplified by Mirza’s elder son taking the American Ambassador’s daughter as his (first) wife and moving to a lifelong career with the World Bank in Washington. This comprador relationship between Washington, London and Pakistan’s super-elite flourishes and continues to this day. E.g., the current World Bank head and architect of the 2003 Bush invasion of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, remains in a mentoring relationship with Shaukat Aziz, a former American bank executive, who is General Musharraf’s Prime Minister. For better or worse, Pakistan’s Government will never veer from the side of Anglo-American policy while such comprador relationships remain intact.

 

Before the 1971 war, West Pakistan was in a frenzy from a propaganda campaign of “Crush India” and “Hang Mujib”. General Niazi’s surrender to General Arora in Dhaka Stadium ~ causing 90,000 PoWs whom India then protected from Bangladeshi revenge ~ shocked Pakistan and shattered the self-image of its Army. ZA Bhutto was the only populist politician of the country ever, and his few years held vanishing promise of a normal political agenda (no matter how economically misguided) finally arising. But Bhutto suppressed the new Baloch revolt with the Shah of Iran’s military help; at the same time he failed to protect his own back against Zia ul Haq’s coup, leading to his judicial murder in 1979. Zia tried to rebuild the Army’s shattered esprit de corps the only way he knew how, which was by indoctrinating the Punjabi officer corps with Sunni dogmatism. This coincided with the Afghan civil war, influx of refugees, and US-Saudi-Chinese plan to defeat the USSR. Pakistan’s super-elite in their comprador role were happy to allow themselves to be used again and be hung out to dry afterwards.

 

All normal branches of Pakistan’s polity, like the electorate,press, political parties, Legislature and Judiciary, have remained at best in ill-formed inchoate states of being. The economy remains, like India’s, one fed on endless deficit finance paid for by unlimited printing of inconvertible paper money, though Pakistan has had relatively more labour emigration and much less foreign investment and technological progress than India. Both are wracked by corruption, poverty, ignorance and superstition.

 

Over half a century, the military has acquired vast economic and political interests and agendas, on pretext of protecting Pakistan from India or gaining “Kashmeer” for it. With few and noble exceptions, academics, politicians and journalists have remained timid in face of fascistic State-power with its militarist/Islamist ideology ~ causing a transferance of the people’s anger and frustration onto an easier target, namely ourselves in India. Anti-Indianism (especially over J&K) remains the sole unifying factor of Pakistan’s super-elite, regardless of what history’s objective facts may have to say. Much political courage and understanding will be needed for that to be reversed.

 

All countries hunger for genuine national heroes who take upon themselves individual risks on behalf of ordinary people. Wali Khan stood up to his father’s jailors, and young Benazir of 1980s vintage to her father’s executioner. But Pakistan has had few such heroes,certainly none among its bemedalled generals. Why AQ Khan is seen as a hero is because he at least took some personal risks, and finally brought Pakistan a kind of respect and independence in the world with his Bomb.

The Greatest Pashtun: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

THE GREATEST PASHTUN

First published in The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page Special Article, July 16 2006

By

SUBROTO ROY

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988) was without a doubt the greatest political genius the Pashtun people have yet produced.

Understanding the political economy of the Pashto/Pakhto speaking peoples, as well as the Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen and other inhabitants of Afghanistan, remains a top intellectual challenge for everyone including themselves. Afghans have hardly lived a peaceful decade since Genghiz Khan destroyed them avenging his grandson in the 13th Century.  Ghazni, Ghor, Peshawar etc. were launch-pads for attacks against the settled people of India’s fertile plains (most recently, the October 1947 attack on Kashmir Valley) while Herat saw wars by and against Iran.

Lyall, one of the architects of 19th Century British policy, thought Afghans “wretched”, “treacherous barbarians with whom it was an unfortunate necessity to have any dealings at all”… “I can only sympathise with the Afghan’s love for his country and his hatred against those who disturb him, although he has no scruple in disturbing others to the best of his savage ability”. Yet the British idea of Russian armies marching into India through Afghanistan was always a wild exaggeration, especially after joint boundary commissions demarcated the imperial spheres of influence. When the Russians did finally enter and occupy Afghanistan in 1978-79, they lived to regret it; and they arrived in independent India on passenger aircraft, were greeted as fraternal socialists selling weapons, and remain so today. Pakistan’s generals exaggerated the prospect of Russia seeking warm water ports, first to Nixon (as Vice President) then to Carter and Reagan, causing the Americans to happily supply weapons which the generals promptly turned against India.

Ghaffar Khan was and remains the only thoughtful figure in Pashtun history who invented a new, living political philosophy as a constructive force for his people’s peace and progress. Even though his ideology failed to take permanent root or survive among them, he commanded universal respect among all Pashtuns and Afghans and became “Badshah Khan” or “Bacha Khan” to them. Afghanistan’s civil war, in which the USSR was pit against the USA, Pakistan etc, stopped with a ceasefire in 1988 for his burial to take place in Jalalabad, with a funeral procession that was miles long.

Pashtun and other Afghan and Arab tribal people have become notorious today by their association with the dogmatism, intellectual insularity and retrograde ideology of Muslim extremism. Yet Osama bin Laden and his Taliban and other friends have been unable to make any moral argument for the cause of violence other than one built on revenge for perceived or misperceived injustices against Muslims. “Because you have done this and this to Muslim people, we are bound by the code of vengeance to do this to you” is just about the entire quantum of moral reasoning contained in Al-Qaida’s statements. “Revenge is a wild kind of justice” and circumstances can exist where injustice is so deep that only revenge suffices in rectification. The current case of the rape-murder of an Iraqi girl and her family by a group of renegade American soldiers may be one such, which explicitly led to the kidnap, torture and murder of some of the soldiers by Iraqis seeking vengeance. But justice too is a civilised kind of revenge, and the transition from a code of revenge to a code of justice is precisely the transition from tribal warfare to civilisation. In Western countries, it occurred recently enough when duelling with swords or pistols came to be banned, giving way to the law of torts.

Ghaffar Khan attempted to change the Pashtun code in this one fundamental and all-important direction by abolishing the right to revenge. In its place he brought the doctrine of non-violence. “I am going to give you such a weapon that the police and the army will not be able to stand against it. It is the weapon of the Prophet, but you are not aware of it. That weapon is patience and righteousness. No power on earth can stand against it.”Patience and righteousness are not political virtues that seem to find much mention in Islamic or Afghan folklore, and doubtless they arose in Ghaffar Khan’s thought and actions at least partly through his encounter with Christian altruism, first with Rev. Wigram his schoolmaster, and later in adult life with the Tolstoy-Thoreau doctrines applied along with Jain ahimsa by MK Gandhi in the movement for Indian independence.

“It is the weapon of the Prophet” was Ghaffar Khan making explicit he was and remained at all times the most devout of Muslims and none could say otherwise; “but you are not aware of it” was his new move to tell his people they had misled themselves by sacerdotalism and needed to read the Prophet’s life and message afresh. He once told M. K. Gandhi how he explained to amazed Punjabi Muslim Leaguers the precise evidence in favour of non-violence from the Prophet’s life in Mecca, leaving his audience speechless.

Today’s “Taliban” were named for their purported piety; Lashkar-e-Taiba even means “Army of the Pious”, the typical image being of pious studious youth seated memorising scriptures in a Pakistani madrassa, and later waving AK-47s in a moving truck. Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgar “Servants of God” were their polar opposite. Each of some 120,000 members of the order took a fierce oath to non-violence and renunciation: “I am a Servant of God, and as God needs no service, but serving his creation is serving him, I promise to serve humanity in the name of God; to refrain from violence and from taking revenge; to forgive those who oppress me or treat me with cruelty; to refrain from taking part in feuds and quarrels and from creating enmity; to treat every Pathan as my brother and friend; to refrain from antisocial customs and practices; to live a simple life, to practice virtue, and to refrain from evil; to practice good manners and good behaviour and not to lead a life of idleness… I will sacrifice my wealth, life, and comfort for the liberty of my nation and people… side with the oppressed against the oppressor… live in accordance with principles of nonviolence… serve all God’s creatures alike… my object shall be the attainment of the freedom of my country and my religion. … will never desire any reward whatever for my service. All my efforts shall be to please God, and not for any show or gain.”

In their founder’s words, the Khudai Khidmatgars were to be ready to lay down their own lives for their cause and never take any life doing so. They became far more forceful practitioners of non-violence than their Gandhian Indian counterparts in the struggle for political freedom from the British, and hundreds of them died in Peshawar under British brutality.

In 1893, Durand’s controversial boundary-line gave the British control over the three mountain passes between Afghanistan and India in exchange for raising the annual British subsidy to the Afghan Amir by 50% from Rs 8 lakhs to 12 lakhs. Today, the Durand Line roughly separates perhaps 10 million Pashtun comprising 40% of Afghanistan’s population from perhaps 8 million Pashtun who are Pakistani nationals (no one has exact figures as there has been no census). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Afghan Government backed by the USSR, on pretence that the Durand Line had not been freely accepted by Afghans, wished for a “Pakhtoonistan” under its sway.

Though jailed by the new and nervous Pakistanis, Ghaffar Khan was averse to any truck with the Afghan Government ~ he had not demanded erasing the Durand Line but had demanded a separate and distinct “Pashtunistan”. A mature self-confident federal Pakistan today would bifurcate itself vertically into one or two mountainous western provinces on one side, and two or three river valley eastern provinces on the other. The former could be named “East Pashtunistan” if the Baloch agreed, or East Pashtunistan and Baluchistan otherwise, and extend to the port of Gwadar, while the latter would remain Punjab, Sindh and “Northern Kashmir”.

Along with an Afghan “West Pashtunistan” and an Indian “Southern Kashmir”, a stable design of peaceful nation-states from Iran through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India would be then finally in place. Badshah Khan’s influence in death may yet become greater than his influence in life.

Law, Justice and J&K (2006)

LAW, JUSTICE AND J&K

by SUBROTO ROY

First published in two parts inThe Sunday Statesman, July 2 2006 and The Statesman July 3 2006 Editorial Page Special Article

 

I.

For a solution to J&K to be universally acceptable it must be seen by all as being lawful and just. Political opinion in Pakistan and India as well as all people and parties in J&K ~ those loyal to India, those loyal to Pakistan, and any others ~ will have to agree that, all things considered, such is the right course of action for everyone today in the 21st Century, which means too that the solution must be consistent with the facts of history as well as account reasonably for all moral considerations.

On August 14, 1947, the legal entity known as “British India”, as one of its final acts, and based on a sovereign British decision made only two months earlier, created out of some of its territory a new State defined in international law as the “Dominion of Pakistan”. British India extinguished itself the very next day, and the newly independent “Dominion of India” succeeded to all its rights and obligations in international law. As the legal successor of the “India” which had signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the San Francisco Declaration of 1945, the Dominion of India was already a member of the new UN as well as a signatory to many international treaties. By contrast, the Dominion of Pakistan had to apply afresh to sign treaties and become a member of international organisations. The theory put forward by Argentina that two new States, India and Pakistan, had been created ab initio, came to be rejected and was withdrawn by Argentina. Instead, Pakistan with the wholehearted backing of India was made a member of the UN, with all except Afghanistan voting in favour. (Afghanistan’s exceptional vote signalled presence of conflict over the Durand Line and idea of a Pashtunistan; Dr Khan Sahib and Abdul Ghaffar Khan were imprisoned by the Muslim League regime of NWFP which later supported the tribesmen who attacked J&K starting October 22, 1947; that conflict remains unresolved to this day, even after the American attack on the Taliban, the restart of a constitutional process in Afghanistan, and the purported mediation of US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.)

Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan’s distinguished first ambassador to the UN, claimed in September 1947: “Pakistan is not a new member of UNO but a successor to a member State which was one of the founders of the Organisation.” He noted that he himself had led India to the final session of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1939, and he wished to say that Pakistan had been present “as part of India… under the latter name” as a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles. This was, however, logically impossible. The Treaty of Versailles long predated (1) Mohammad Iqbal’s Allahabad Address which conceptualised for the first time in the 20th Century a Muslim State in Northwest India; (2) Rahmat Ali’s invention of the word “PAKSTAN” on the top floor of a London omnibus; (3) M. A. Jinnah and Fazlul Haq’s Lahore Resolution; and (4) the final British decision of June 3, 1947 to create by Partition out of “British India” a Dominion named Pakistan. Pakistan could not have acted in international law prior to having come into being or been created or even conceived itself. Zafrullah Khan would have been more accurate to say that the history of Pakistanis until August 14, 1947 had been one in common with that of their Indian cousins ~ or indeed their Indian brothers, since innumerable North Indian Muslim families came to be literally partitioned, with some brothers remaining Indians while other brothers became Pakistanis.

Pakistan was created at the behest of Jinnah’s Muslim League though with eventual agreement of the Indian National Congress (a distant ancestor of the political party going by the same name today). Pakistan arose not because Jinnah said Hindus and Muslims were “two nations” but because he and his League wished for a State where Muslims would find themselves ruled by fellow-Muslims and feel themselves part of a pan-Islamic culture. Yet Pakistan was intended to be a secular polity with Muslim-majority governance, not an Islamic theocracy. That Pakistan failed to become secular was exemplified most poignantly in the persecution Zafrullah himself later faced in his personal life as an Ahmadiya, even while he was Pakistan’s Foreign Minister. (The same happened later to Pakistan’s Nobel-winning physicist Abdus Salaam.) Pakistan was supposed to allow the genius of Indo-Muslim culture to flourish, transplanted from places like Lucknow and Aligarh which would never be part of it. In fact, the areas that are Pakistan today had in the 1937 provincial elections shown scant popular Muslim support for Jinnah’s League. The NWFP had a Congress Government in the 1946 elections, and its supporters boycotted the pro-Pakistan referendum in 1947. The imposition of Urdu culture as Pakistan’s dominant ethos might have come to be accepted later in West Punjab, Sindh and NWFP but it was not acceptable in East Bengal, and led inevitably to the Pakistani civil war and creation of Bangladesh by Sheikh Mujib in 1971.

In August 1947, the new Dominions of India and Pakistan were each supposed to protect their respective minority populations as their first political duty. Yet both palpably failed in this, and were reduced to making joint declarations pleading for peace and an end to communal killings and the abduction of women. The Karachi Government, lacking the wherewithal and administrative machinery of being a nation-state at all, and with only Liaquat and an ailing Jinnah as noted leaders, may have failed more conspicuously, and West Punjab, the Frontier and Sindh were soon emptied of almost all their many Sikhs and Hindus. Instead, the first act of the new Pakistan Government in the weeks after August 14, 1947 was to arrange for the speedy and safe transfer of the North Indian Muslim elite by air from Delhi using chartered British aeroplanes. The ordinary Muslim masses of UP, Delhi and East Punjab were left in danger from or were subjected to Sikh and Hindu mob attacks, especially as news and rumours spread of similar outrages against Pakistan’s departing minorities.

In this spiral of revenge attacks and counter-attacks, bloodshed inevitably spilled over from West and East Punjab into the northern Punjabi plains of Jammu, though Kashmir Valley remained conspicuously peaceful. Zafrullah and Liaquat would later claim it was this communal civil war which had caused thousands of newly decommissioned Mirpuri soldiers of the British Army, and thousands of Afridi and other Frontier tribesmen, to spontaneously act to “liberate” J&K’s Muslims from alleged tyranny under the Hindu Ruler or an allegedly illegal Indian occupation.

But the main attack on J&K State that began from Pakistan along the Manshera-Muzaffarabad road on October 22, 1947 was admittedly far too well-organised, well-armed, well-planned and well-executed to have been merely a spontaneous uprising of tribesmen and former soldiers. In all but name, it was an act of undeclared war of the new Dominion of Pakistan first upon the State of J&K and then upon the Indian Dominion. This became obvious to Field Marshall Auchinlek, who, as Supreme Commander of the armed forces of both India and Pakistan, promptly resigned and abolished the Supreme Command in face of the fact that two parts of his own forces were now at war with one another.

II.

The invaders failed to take Srinagar solely because they lost their military purpose while indulging in the Rape of Baramula. Thousands of Kashmiri women of all communities ~ Muslim, Sikh and Hindu ~ were violated and transported back to be sold in markets in Peshawar and elsewhere. Such was standard practice in Central Asian tribal wars from long before the advent of Islam, and the invading tribesmen shared that culture. India’s Army and Air Force along with the militias of the secular democratic movement led by Sheikh Abdullah and those remaining loyal units of J&K forces, fought off the invasion, and liberated Baramula, Naushera, Uri, Poonch etc. Gilgit had a British-led coup détat against it bringing it under Pakistan’s control. Kargil was initially taken by the Pakistanis and then lost by them. Leh could have been but was not taken by Pakistani forces. But in seeking to protect Leh and to retake Kargil, the Indian Army lost the siege of Skardu ~ which ended reputedly with the infamous communication from the Pakistani commander to his HQ: “All Sikhs killed; all women raped.”

Legal theory

Now, in this grave mortal conflict, the legal theory to which both the Indian and Pakistani Governments have been wedded for sixty years is one that had been endorsed by the British Cabinet Mission in 1946 and originated with the Butler Commission of 1929. Namely, that “Lapse of Paramountcy” over the “Indian India” of the “Native States” could and did occur with the extinction of British India on August 15, 1947. By this theory, Hyderabad, J&K, Junagadh and the several other States which had not acceded to either Dominion were no longer subject to the Crown’s suzerainty as of that date. Both Dominions drew up “Instruments of Accession” for Rulers to sign upon the supposed “Lapse” of Paramountcy that was to occur with the end of British India.

Ever since, the Pakistan Government has argued that Junagadh’s Ruler acceded to Pakistan and Hyderabad’s had wished to do so but both were forcibly prevented by India. Pakistan has also argued the accession to India by J&K’s Ruler was “fraudulent” and unacceptable, and Sheikh Abdullah was a “Quisling” of India and it was not his National Conference but the Muslim Conference of Ibrahim, Abbas and the Mirwaiz (precursor of the Hurriyat) which represented J&K’s Muslims.

India argued that Junagadh’s accession to Pakistan or Hyderabad’s independence were legal and practical impossibilities contradicting the wills of their peoples, and that their integration into the Indian Dominion was carried out in an entirely legitimate manner in the circumstances prevailing.

On J&K, India has argued that not only had the Ruler requested Indian forces to fight off the Pakistani attack, and he acceded formally before Indian forces were sent, but also that democratic principles were fully adhered to in the unequivocal endorsement of the accession by Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference and further by a duly called and elected J&K Constituent Assembly, as well as generations of Kashmiris since. In the Indian view, it is Pakistan which has been in illegal occupation of Indian territory from Mirpur, Muzaffarabad and Gilgit to Skardu all the way to the Khunjerab Pass, Siachen Glacier and K2, some of which it illegally ceded to its Communist Chinese ally, and furthermore that it has denied the peoples of these areas any democratic voice.

Roman law

In June 1947, it was uniquely and brilliantly argued by BR Ambedkar in a statement to the Press that the British had made a catastrophic error in comprehending their own constitutional law, that no such thing as “Lapse” of Paramountcy existed, and that suzerainty over the “Native States” of “Indian India” would be automatically transferred in international law to the successor State of British India. It was a legal illusion to think any Native State could be sovereign even for a single logical moment. On this theory, if the Dominion of India was the sole successor State in international law while Pakistan was a new legal entity, then a Native State which acceded to Pakistan after August 15, 1947 would have had to do so with the consent of the suzerain power, namely, India, as may be said to have happened implicitly in case of Chitral and a few others. Equally, India’s behaviour in integrating (or annexing) Junagadh and Hyderabad, would become fully explicable ~ as would the statements of Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel before October 1947 that they would accept J&K going to Pakistan if that was what the Ruler and his people desired. Pakistan unilaterally and by surprise went to war against J&K on October 22, declared the accession to India “fraudulent”, and to this day has claimed the territory of the original State of J&K is “disputed”. Certainly, even if the Ambedkar doctrine is applied that no “Lapse” was possible under British law, Pakistan did not recognise India’s jurisdiction there as the suzerain power as of August 15, 1947. Altogether, Pakistan’s sovereign actions from October 22 onwards amounted to acting to annex J&K to itself by military force ~ acts which came to be militarily resisted (with partial success) by India allied with Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference and the remaining forces of J&K. By these military actions, Pakistan revealed that it considered J&K territory to have descended into a legal state of anarchy as of October 22, 1947, and hence open to resolution by “Military Decision” ~ as is indeed the just outcome under Roman Law, the root of all municipal and international law today, when there is a contest between claimants over an ownerless entity.

Choice of nationality

Hence, the present author concluded (“Solving Kashmir”, The Statesman December 1-3, 2005) that the dismemberment of the original J&K State and annexation of its territories by India and Pakistan that has occurred since 1947, as represented first by the 1949 Ceasefire Line and then by the 1972 Line of Control, is indeed the just and lawful outcome prevailing in respect of the question of territorial sovereignty and jurisdiction. The remaining “democratic” question described has to do with free individual choice of nationality by the inhabitants, under conditions of full information and privacy, citizen-by-citizen, with the grant of permanent residency rights by the Indian Republic to persons under its jurisdiction in J&K who may choose not to remain Indian nationals but become Afghan, Iranian or Pakistani nationals instead. Pakistan has said frequently its sole concern has been the freedom of the Muslims of J&K under Indian rule, and any such genuine concern shall have been thereby fully met by India. Indeed, if Pakistan agreed to act similarly, this entire complex mortal problem of decades shall have begun to be peacefully resolved. Both countries are wracked by corruption, poverty and bad governance, and would be able to mutually draw down military forces pit against one another everywhere, so as to begin to repair the grave damage to their fiscal health caused by the deleterious draining away of vast public resources .

On Hindus and Muslims

On Hindus and Muslims

by

Subroto Roy

First published in The Statesman, Perspective Page, Nov 6 2005

The one practical contribution made to India’s polity by the Hindu Mahasabha was to thwart the Sarat Bose/Suhrawardy idea in 1946-1947 of a “United Bengal”, which inevitably would have led to Kolkata andWest Bengal becoming part of Pakistan. The one practical contribution made to India’s polity by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was to help defend against the Pakistani attack upon Jammu & Kashmir which commenced on 22 October 1947 and included the Rape of Baramulla a few days later. The RSS contribution may have been more than what Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference or Jawaharlal Nehru and the Government of India cared to admit because it had had an offensive aspect as well; RSS attacks on Muslim civilians in the Mirpur-Pooncharea later formed the basis of Pakistan’s justification for the October 1947 attack and the origins of the “Azad Kashmir” idea. Practical contributions were also made by individuals like Shyama Prosad Mookerjee, who, for example, as a member of Nehru’s Cabinet, responded immediately to information received from a young Government of India officer in Karachi in September 1947, sending ships and Navy frigates from Bombay to retrieve thousands of Hindu refugees in danger of being massacred. The one theoretical contribution made by the Hindutvadi organisations in India has been to establish that it is not a matter of shame and can be a matter of pride to be a Hindu, or, more generally, to be an Indian in the modern world. This is important, even though most RSS and BJP members today may have altogether failed themselves to understand its nature and significance. Indeed, the small handful of Muslims who have been part of their organisations may have understood it rather better.

To be Muslim, a person has only to believe that God is One and Muhammad is the last of the prophets, i.e. to pronounce the Kalma. Nothing else is either necessary or sufficient. Praying daily, facing Mecca (or Jerusalem before it), going on pilgrimage, fasting during Ramzan, giving to the poor, circumcising boys, polygamy, inducing the modesty of women though seclusion or the veil, have all been part of Muslim practice for ever because they were aspects of the Prophet’s life. But if a Muslim did not pronounce the Kalma, everything else he/she might do is rendered meaningless. The Kalma is necessary and sufficient for Islamic belief. All else is incidental and logically superfluous.

The first half of the Kalma is a commitment to an austere monotheistic ontology; the second half is an oath of fidelity to the Prophet because he was the original exponent of this ontology (in Arabic). Muhammad (572-632 AD) was without a doubt among the greatest of men, as may be measured by his vast impact on human history. His total self-effacement and abhorrence of adulation was signified when at his death it was famously said “If you are worshippers of Muhammad, know that he is dead. If you are worshippers of God, know that God is living and does not die”.

Abul Kalam Azad understood well that there was no contradiction between being Muslim by faith and Indian by nationality. “My ancestors came to India from Herat in Babar’s time…” is how he began his autobiography. No one could think Azad anything but a proud Indian nationalist. No one ~ certainly not MA Jinnah ~ could think of Azad as anything but a Muslim and a scholar of Islam. Yet Azad’s respect and admiration (like that of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) knew no bounds for the only reformer since Vivekananda that Hinduism has seen in the 20th century: a Congress politician by the name of MK Gandhi,who came to be murdered by Hindu fanatics. By contrast, Jinnah, the political founder of Pakistan, could see Congress only as a Hindu party and Gandhi the Hindu leader using Hindu symbols against whom he was juxtaposed in a struggle for power after the British left: “Congress leaders may shout as much as they like that the Congress is a national body. But …(the) Congress is nothing but a Hindu body,” he declared in 1938. Jinnah’s ambition, and that of the separatist Muslim elite, demanded that they rule themselves in isolation in corners of India.

Throughout the period of Hindu Westernisation in response to the opening to the world presented by the British Raj, the Muslim elite were instead chafing under the idea that an India free of British rule could possibly have Muslims living under governments composed of people who were not “People of the Book” mentioned in the Muslim scriptures. Even if British rule had been almost intolerable in Muslim eyes ~ rendering India’s territory dar-ul-harb at worst or dar-ul-aman at best ~ the British were at least “People of the Book”. After a British departure, rule over Muslims by a Hindu majority, supported by the much-feared Sikhs (“kaffirs with beards” in Muslim popular perception), was felt to be psychologically intolerable. Not only were Hindus, in Muslim eyes, polytheistic believers in idol-worship and practitioners of a caste-system, but everyone knew that the vast majority of India’s Muslims had been themselves converts from the same Hindu social and cultural origins, and there would be constant danger of relapse of Muslims into Hindu beliefs and practices if the country was governed by a Hindu majority. The slogan “Islam in danger” has always had substance in the sense that the faithful have constantly had to mind the dangers of yielding to temptations around them, including scepticism, syncretism and pantheism. Hence, insularity and communalism ~ a psychological circling of the wagons in terms of the American Wild West ~ was a natural political response of Muslims to the Hindu (and Parsee and Christian) modernisation of India in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Such were the implicit unspoken premises driving the Pakistan Movement which Iqbal and Jinnah came to lead in the 20th century. The origins lay in the thoughts and deeds of Shah Wali Allah (1703-1762) and his Arab contemporary in Nejd, Mohammad Ibn Abdal Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism. It continued with men like Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi(1786-1831), and Titu Mir (1782-1831), until we reach the Islamic “moderniser” Sayyid Ahmed Khan who, while being the founder of Muslim higher education at Aligarh, was also the fountainhead of the separatism that led to the Muslim League’s creation in 1906. “We are an Arab people whose fathers have fallen in exile in the country of Hindustan, and Arabic genealogy and Arabic language are our pride,” Wali Allah had said. Barelvi after him declared: “We must repudiate all those Indian, Persian and Roman customs which are contrary to the Prophet’s teaching.” “In the later 1820s, (Barelvi’s) movement became militant, regarding jihad as one of the basic tenets of faith. Possibly encouraged by the British, with whom the movement did not feel powerful enough to come to grips at the outset, it chose as the venue of jihad the NW frontier of the subcontinent, where it was directed against the Sikhs. Barelvi temporarily succeeded in carving out a small theocratic principality which collapsed owing to the friction between his Pathan and North Indian followers; and he was finally defeated and slain by the Sikhs (at the battle of Balakot) in 1831,” points out Aziz Ahmed, in AL Basham’s A Cultural History of India. Barelvi’s jihadi proto-Pakistan state near Peshawar was named Tariqa-yi Muhammadiya; it may have survived at Sittana until the First World War. Leaving to one side Rahmat Ali’s lonely scheming from England and invention on the top floor of a London bus of the name “PAKSTAN”, such was the genesis of Iqbal and Jinnah’s Muslim state.

Azad, on behalf of scores of millions of Muslim Indians including Sheikh Abdullah and Zakir Hussain and Ghaffar Khan among the most prominent, candidly raised objections to this entire exercise: “I must confess that the very term Pakistan goes against my grain. It suggests that some portions of the world are pure while others are impure. Such a division of territories into pure and impure is un-Islamic and is more in keeping with orthodox Brahmanism which divides men and countries into holy and unholy – a division which is a repudiation of the very spirit of Islam. Islam recognises no such division and the Prophet says `God made the whole world a mosque for me’.”

Azad had seen that India is or can be dar-ul-Islam or at least dar-ul-aman and not dar-ul-harb, because the Muslim in this land of ours –bounded by the mountains and the seas, with the rivers in between them, all of which the Hindu finds sacred and imagines to be the home of the Hindu pantheon – is in fact able to practise his/her faith freely despite the majority culture superficially being or seeming to be one which is polytheistic and pantheistic. The majority culture in India has had no theoretical or practical difficulty with the recitation of the Kalma anywhere or anytime in the country. The handful of Muslims in the RSS and BJP today may have understood something of the same. Visiting Pakistanis today are amazed by two things in India: the presence of women in public life and the fact that Muslims are free to practise Islam. Muslims may privately believe their Hindu compatriots or cousins to be hopelessly ignorant of the truth, and vice-versa, but nothing in public life needs to hinge on such mutual beliefs people have about one another. That is what was meant when the present author said in the Introduction to Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy that Jinnah’s address to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly was as secular as any that may be found.