While studying India Office documents, I came across some interesting files (IOR/L/PS/13/1259-1273, IOR/R/2/Kashmir 5, IOR/L/I/1/178) about Jammu and Kashmir during the fevered days of 1947, when the British were planning to leave India, and the princely states had been given the choice to remain independent or join India or Pakistan. This series of secret political correspondence refers specifically to the Gilgit Wazarat and the surrounding areas, which are now part of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
Jammu and Kashmir was at the time ruled by Maharaja Hari Singh, a Hindu Dogra, under a Treaty of Paramountcy with the British government of India, which would lapse as soon as the British withdrew from the country. The Maharaja was being courted by leaders of both India and Pakistan to accede to their respective dominions.
Although the Maharaja was a Hindu and was aware that the Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist populations of his state would find greater safety in the non-denominational state of India rather than in Islamic Pakistan, he showed great reluctance to side with India. The reason for this reluctance may be traced to his distrust of Nehru, who had strategically alienated himself from the Maharaja by his overt support of Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference’s agitations against the Maharaja’s government.
For all his supposed flaws, the Maharaja ran a solvent government (probably the last such government of the state) and had kept the communal clashes from the Punjab and NWFP out of Kashmir through strategic deployment of State Forces and the arrest of troublemakers.
In a tinderbox environment where Pakistani propaganda, provocateurs, and freshly printed Pakistani cash were flooding the state, the able administration of the Prime Minister, R.C. Kak had managed to retain peace in Jammu and Kashmir. This was despite rising food and fuel prices from a severe winter, closed borders cutting off land transport, and an influx of Hindu and Sikh refugees from Punjab and the Hazara district.
This skilful handling of a troubled situation earned the Maharaja’s government plaudits in the British administration, with a Political Department official noting in internal communications that “it is very creditable indeed to the State that things remained so quiet during the Punjab and NWFP troubles.”
At this time, Jammu and Kashmir had three major political parties: the National Conference led by Sheikh Abdullah, the Muslim Conference, and the All Jammu and Kashmir People Conference. Since 1936, the state had been a constitutional monarchy with a 75-member Praja Sabha, part elected, part nominated, supporting the Maharaja’s rule. In the election concluded in 1947, boycotted by the National Conference, the Muslim Conference won 13 of the 21 elected Muslim seats, while many Muslim candidates won as independents, whom the National Conference disavowed, with the Maharaja’s government receiving support of 65–70 members of the Sabha. (The Hindu candidate from Srinagar, backed by the National Conference, had to forfeit his deposit.)
The National Conference was the supposed “secular” political party in Jammu and Kashmir at the time, as opposed to the religiously aligned Muslim Conference. However, headquartered in a building named Mujahid Manzil, the party had become increasingly Islamicised, so much so that the British internal communications from the time noted that “…the Kashmir government had nowadays more reason to fear the National Conference than the Muslim Conference, although the former included some Hindus.”
However, Nehru had allied himself irrevocably and publicly with the National Conference via the Quit Kashmir movement in 1946 with which the Sheikh Abdullah-led party had publicly agitated to oust the Maharaja. As a consequence, he had been arrested in Kashmir and deported back to British India in ignominy and was strongly discouraged from visiting Kashmir or taking part in direct negotiations with the Maharaja’s government. Nehru’s focus during this time remained on securing the early release of “my good friend” Sheikh Abdullah, ignoring all other strategic considerations.
Another tactical misstep by Nehru regarding Kashmir was his attitude towards the status of the Lease Agreement of the Gilgit Wazarat and surrounding areas. This Agreement, in effect since 1935, allowed the British government to administer and secure this key frontier region directly. The British Resident for Kashmir and other officials had suggested that the Lease Agreement should be voided and the territory returned to the Maharaja well before the British departure from India.
Until April 1947, even the highest echelons of the British government in India thought that their withdrawal from the country would not take place before June 1948. This would have left a good ten months to execute a secure change of administration in Gilgit. This meant the withdrawal of Political Officers and the Gilgit Scouts, the British army troops used to garrison the area, and their replacement with State officials and troops.
Nehru, the Vice President of the Viceroy’s Executive Council and a primary consultant on all decisions by the British Indian government, wanted to defer the termination of the agreement to 1948, once Jammu and Kashmir’s status was clearer vis-à-vis India.
The India Office file states: “The Crown Representative’s telegram No. 941-P of 29th April indicates a difference of opinion exists between Lord Mountbatten and Mr. Nehru regarding the stage at which British administration of the Gilgit Wazarat of Kashmir should be terminated. Subject to the Secretary of State’s approval, Lord Mountbatten is not disposed to accept Mr. Nehru’s counter proposal [to delay the withdrawal to the Spring of 1948] for it is clearly designed to make the maximum tactical use politically of a situation in which any delay on the part of the Paramount Power would be regarded as a breach of faith by the State concerned. The Crown Representative, therefore, proposes to intimate forthwith to the Resident that British control of administration over the area, deriving from an Agreement made in 1935, will terminate this year.”
The internal correspondence between British officials recognises that Nehru’s position was a political move, and the early termination would not harm India’s interests at all. “That the real point at issue is a political one is I think clear from the Crown Representative’s statement that no objection is seen from a diplomatic or strategic point of view by either the External Affairs or Defence Departments of the Government of India. No All-India interest will be prejudiced if the Crown Representative’s proposal is supported. … As the Crown Representative states, a postponement of a decision in this case would be strongly resented and regarded by Kashmir as a breach of faith while conversely it would increase Congress prestige.”
Following stern pushback by Mountbatten, Nehru finally agreed for the treaty to be terminated, but did not push for a quicker execution of this transfer of power. As communal violence and political instability caused the British withdrawal from India to be expedited and intensely chaotic, the treaty was officially terminated in August 1947, concurrent with the lapse of Paramountcy. This left no time for the Kashmir government to take over the administration in Gilgit.
By September, the Maharaja’s government had concluded Standstill Agreements with both India and Pakistan and was considering holding a referendum to determine the future of the state. British despatches at the time note that the local press was reporting radicals like the Pir of Manki sending agents to “prepare people for a holy crusade by the local tribes after the British left,” and “Muslim National Guards are parading and Muslim League Flags are being hoisted in certain areas of the State.”
In this febrile environment, State troops under Major Ghansara Singh were only able to reach Gilgit in early October 1947, while the Gilgit Scouts, under the command of a seconded British officer, Major William Brown, were still posted there and had not been withdrawn as had been the explicit proposition in the Lease termination plan. Perhaps Nehru had thought that the presence of British troops would secure the area under the terms of the Standstill Agreement, or, in more likelihood, no thought had been given to this area at all by the newly formed Indian government. This was to prove a dangerous and cursed oversight, one which haunts India to this day.
In October 1947, Major Brown led a rebellion of the Gilgit Scouts against the Maharaja’s troops and claimed Gilgit for Pakistan, a nearly bloodless conquest of a strategic frontier area. The timing meant that the passes were closed for the winter and very little support from either Kashmir or India could reach the remote area. Gilgit’s loss not only weakened India’s northern defences but also entrenched Pakistan’s hold over what is now Gilgit-Baltistan, fuelling decades of territorial disputes that remain unresolved to date.
It can be reasonably speculated that India could have avoided this loss or at least defended the territory more rigorously had the original time frame and terms of the lapse of the Lease Agreement been enforced in a timely and forceful manner. Unfortunately, Nehru used his say in the transition government to stall and delay this essential bureaucratic process, contributing to India’s loss of a key strategic territory.
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