Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day. John Keay
and it is not India. We are neither, see.’
Twenty years later, a self-appointed spokesman like Ghulam Mohamed could still be decidedly ambivalent about whether the state should have joined Pakistan in 1947 – or whether, then or since, it would have so voted. By 1967 Pakistan had been exposed as a poor advertisement for democratic sovereignty, while Kashmir’s predicament never lent itself to simple solutions. There had, too, been other considerations back in 1947. For one thing, the situation had already deteriorated into the first Indo–Pakistan war; and for another, there was Hyderabad. The war betrayed the depth of feeling over Kashmir in both India and Pakistan, while Hyderabad was relevant because it hinted at the possibility of Kashmir scorning both suitors and going it alone.
As Pakistani eyes were being lifted unto the hills, India had kept one eye fixed firmly on the peninsula. There Hyderabad’s situation was directly analogous to that of Junagadh: a Muslim ruler, the immensely rich Nizam Mir Usman Ali, lorded it over a vast population, four-fifths of which was non-Muslim. His sprawling state was around fifty times the size of Junagadh, and about as far from Pakistan as could be. It was contiguous only with India, indeed surrounded by it. But to the Nizam this was neither here nor there. A miserly skinflint where most princes were conspicuous spendthrifts, he was no keener on conferring his state on Pakistan than he was on India. His preference was for playing off one nation against the other while cultivating his British and European contacts and hoarding his sovereignty as jealously as he did his diamonds. In effect he would prefer to sign, if he had to, not an Instrument of Accession to either state but sovereign treaties with both.
An autonomous ‘Usmanistan’ (a more nation-like name for Hyderabad) had been touted in some of the Muslim League’s pre-Partition propaganda. With a population of sixteen million – so about the same as that of Sri Lanka and Nepal combined – with a division-sized army and an illustrious history dating back to Mughal times, Hyderabad had as good a claim to independence as anywhere. To realise it, the Nizam was prepared to defy New Delhi and even dip into his bottomless coffers. At great expense he enlisted the legal services of a King’s Counsel from the English Bar, plus that Bar’s favourite tactic of aggressive procrastination.
In Hyderabad, however, as in Kashmir, the ruler’s authority was already being challenged. Hyderabad was no peripheral backwater like Junagadh. A local Congress-affiliated party was demanding full democratic representation plus an end to hereditary rule; a socialist party chimed in by urging outright accession to India; Communist cadres were dismantling the larger landholdings in the turbulent Telengana region of the state; and in the main cities Islamist paramilitaries (Razakars), with or without the tacit support of the Nizam’s government, were terrorising pro-India communities, most of them Hindu. Thus while, in the aftermath of Partition, Muslim refugees poured into the state from central India, Hindu refugees poured out into the neighbouring Madras and Bombay provinces. As in the Punjab and Bengal, though on a smaller scale, powerful constituencies were being created by the crude expedient of repositioning people.
In this exercise, time might be thought to favour the Nizam. Accordingly, in October 1947 the Nizam’s legal counsel, backed by Mountbatten, began to lobby Nehru and Patel for a one-year extension of Hyderabad’s standstill agreement. The Congress leaders reluctantly concurred, and Mountbatten chalked up another triumph. No longer Viceroy but a decidedly hands-on Governor-General, in the same month Mountbatten enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing his nephew and protégé, Philip of Greece, preparing to wed Princess Elizabeth, the heir presumptive to the British throne. As one who was about to be even more closely related to the House of Windsor, Mountbatten was confident that by playing on the Nizam’s regard for the British monarchy he could get him to sign a document which, though neither an Instrument of Accession nor a treaty, yet combined enough of both to satisfy all parties.
There matters stood – with the Indian and Hyderabadi governments supposedly sworn to avoid provoking one another, the Nizam and his supporters still nursing hopes of independence, and Mountbatten as buoyant as ever – when, in late October, reports came from the other end of India that up through the apple-laden orchards on the hillsides of the outer Himalayas lorryloads of ragtag soldiery were advancing with the intention of taking a large bite out of the juiciest fruit of all. Kashmir, it seemed, was being invaded. Homesteads were aflame, villages were being pillaged and bridges captured. In less than a week, with his outposts fallen, his army on the run and his state in peril, the Maharajah of Kashmir would be propelled into India’s arms. And so, as if from nowhere, there began a conflict that would rumble on into the next century and comfortably outlast even Ghulam Mohamed’s drone of woe.
‘It was a case of retaliation,’ Ghulam Mohamed always claimed. ‘See, Kashmiris had nothing to do with it. These people with guns, they were Pathans from Yaghistan. We were the victims.’
Launched on 22 October 1947, what Indians regard as an unprovoked Pakistani-backed invasion of the Kashmir Valley and what Pakistanis regard as a spontaneous expression of Muslim solidarity in the face of the Maharajah’s oppression, rapidly escalated into open warfare. The invaders would overrun about a third of the entire state, threaten Srinagar itself and bring India’s army and air force rushing to the rescue. Thousands died, tens of thousands were displaced, and for generations to come millions would pay the price. Because of Kashmir, Indo–Pakistan hostility would become the defining motif in South Asian relations. A new generation, ‘Midnight’s Children’, and then another, ‘Midnight’s Grandchildren’, would imbibe the mythologies constructed around the Kashmir crisis and grow up in its atmosphere of irreconcilable claims and counter-claims. This near-existential enmity would spawn its own national heroes in succession to the freedom fighters of old and induce a myopia that is as puzzling to foreigners as it is troubling to neighbours. The policies subsequently pursued by India and Pakistan in respect of Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and especially Afghanistan were, and still are, heavily influenced by the unfinished business over Kashmir.
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