On a cool November evening in Delhi in 1947, the grounds of the US Embassy in newly independent India were buzzing with the sounds of a cocktail party thrown by the US Ambassador and Mrs. Grady. Lord Mountbatten, still India’s Governor-General despite overseeing a thoroughly botched job of the British withdrawal from India, was in attendance, as was the cream of Delhi’s political class.
Also present was the British High Commissioner to India, Terence Shone, and it is from his reports to his bosses at the Commonwealth Relations Office in London that we learn of the inner workings of this elite gathering. While glasses were being clinked in Delhi, military operations were taking place in Kashmir, which had acceded to India after a Pakistan invasion had breached the Standstill Agreement between the two polities.
At this party, Shone reported that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Home Minister of India,
…showed me … an army sterilisation kit (two little bottles of pills in a box) which we gathered had been found on a dead or captured raider by way of proof that the raiders in Kashmir were being equipped from official Pakistan sources.
Other British despatches from the time also reported that Indian officials, both civil and military, had presented proof of recovered uniforms, equipment, and personnel that showed full Pakistani military backing of the invasion in Kashmir.
In fact, that the ‘tribal raids’ in Kashmir were operations sanctioned at the highest level may be seen from the report filed on 28 November by the High Commissioner for the UK to Pakistan, Laurence Grafftey-Smith, citing his sources who had visited Abbottabad and Poonch:
Whatever Jinnah [Governor-General of Pakistan] and others may say, the fullest assistance is in fact being given to the tribesmen who are going through in a steady stream of lorries, timing their journeys now so as to avoid air attack. Assistance is being given in money, food, traffic facilities, and he described the idea of there being any opposition to their passage as laughable.
He [the source] could not speak definitely about arms, but the tribesmen were well armed. Officers were going up in mufti [civilian disguise] to the front and Abbottabad had all the appearance of base headquarters.
On the other hand the position of the district authorities and the local Pakistan Army detachments is very difficult, and in fact it might be difficult to resist them, not that Abdul Qayam [Jinnah appointed Muslim League minister of NWFP] looks as if he wants to do so.
Officially, Pakistan maintained a policy of denial of official backing as it does to date, with Liaqat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, telling Mountbatten’s staff in Lahore that:
…the only way in which he could have prevented the influx of tribesmen was to declare war on them, a course for which they had not the resources and which was politically impossible.
That the newly formed Pakistan government had already lost control over some elements in its own administration and its army was becoming increasingly clear to both the Indians and the British. In fact, Patel told Shone that “…the Pakistan Government was unable to control affairs and that in the West Punjab in particular the Ministry was impotent and at loggerheads.”
At this time, India had regained Kashmir from a seemingly impossible situation considering the difficult terrain, and that the entire campaign had to be supplied by aircraft to Srinagar, as all land routes to the valley had hitherto been through Pakistan.
The British attitude to the invasion remained wishy-washy in public, despite them knowing full well that it had official Pakistan backing. To Indian leaders, they repeated the excuse that the Pakistani authorities could have done little to control the tribes. As Ismay reported:
We got on to the question of the tribes and I told Nehru frankly that I doubted whether the Pakistan Government could have stopped them, even if they had wished, with the local feeling running so high; but I also said that Sir George Cunningham [British Governor of NWFP appointed by Jinnah] had done a lot to keep them in control.
In reality, the British concerns regarding Kashmir were twofold. One was to keep Pakistan within the fold and influence of ‘Empire’ as they were certain that India was, despite Nehru’s anglophilia, too big, too difficult, and too determined to leave. The Kashmir problem presented itself as a perfect opportunity to intervene and keep a political hold in the region, especially as Liaqat Ali Khan wanted British troops in Kashmir pending a plebiscite.
As Ismay reported:
I was not greatly impressed by Liaqat as a personality, but I confess that I felt profoundly sorry for the Government of Pakistan for whom since August 15th it has obviously been one damn thing after another. And I left Lahore feeling that we ought to try to combine with such neutrality as is necessary some encouragement to this infant member of the Commonwealth to feel that we have not disowned her now that she has left the parental nest.
The second cause was that constant bugbear of the British Empire: Russia. The British were aware that some of the tribesmen used in the war against India were Afghans from Khost, who “are reported to have Russian equipment, presumably because the Afghans of that area are so equipped.”
In addition, certain districts that had ceded from the state were supposedly telling the Pakistani government that if they could not accede officially to Pakistan, they would accede to Russia. In fact, much of Western policy with regard to Kashmir, India, and Pakistan may be traced to these two anxieties. A sorted Kashmir was and is of no use to them at all.
As a CRO official annotated on the despatch about the ceded districts of Kashmir:
Mr. Liaqat Ali Khan’s references to Gilgit, Hunza and Nagar are of some interest. If Pakistan accepts the accession of these States, she will be accepting the accession of States which have seceded from Kashmir after Kashmir’s accession to the Indian Union. It would be more prudent for Pakistan to hold her hand in this matter.
And, of course, as decreed by the UK, the fate of these ceded districts remains undecided to this day, perhaps because they represent an unsettled Kashmir, but also because accepting their accession officially would mean Pakistan also accepts Kashmir’s accession to India, which would settle the Kashmir matter once and and for all.
Nehru and Patel also marked two different sides of the ideological divide in the Congress. One side wanted India to be a Hindu nation and favoured partition and did not want Muslim majority Kashmir to accede to India, excepting the Hindu and Buddhist majority districts. But after Kashmir had acceded to India, Patel wanted full control of it, and for all matters between Pakistan and India to be settled by them alone. As Shone reported:
Patel was in very good heart about the general situation and said on at least two occasions that he had great hopes that the two Dominions would ultimately settle down. India had no desire to strangle Pakistan. Indeed, it was in their interests that Pakistan should be prosperous and peaceful.
Nehru, meanwhile, had barely reconciled himself with the idea of partition and therefore was less pragmatic in dealing with the situation with the decisiveness and firmness it needed. Paul Grey from Mountbatten’s office filed that “He [Nehru] argued of course that partition was the greatest mistake for India and that it was the prime cause of the troubles which had followed.”
There was also a marked difference between the relationships of Nehru and Patel with the British, especially regarding interference in Indian affairs and in Kashmir. Patel shot down immediately a suggestion by Mountbatten’s staff that the British Prime Minister should visit in order to ‘be a bridge’ between the two sides, saying that the two sides should settle their own affairs. On the other hand, Nehru continued to have a more inclusive attitude towards the British, clearly reporting every development to the British government, sometimes officially as in this telegram to British Prime Minister Clement Attlee from 13 December 1947, where after referencing a long-standing reporting of events, he reports the results of the recently concluded Joint Defence Council in Delhi:
…We have also had further discussions on Kashmir. Unfortunately, our differences on this vital issue have not been resolved so far. We hope to have further conversations about it when the Joint Defence Council meets in New Delhi on the 22nd of this month. My colleagues fully share my desire that this major cause of potential conflict between Pakistan and ourselves should be settled by peaceful and friendly negotiation.
More worrying than these official communications was the fact that Nehru ran a leaky Hill. For example, records show that full details of the agreement reached between Liaqat Ali Khan and Nehru in a closed-door meeting on 27 November regarding Kashmir and the division of assets and liabilities between India and Pakistan had already been communicated to London by the UK High Commissioner by 30 November despite the fact that the Parliament was only briefed on this matter in December.
There was considerable anxiety within and without the Congress about Nehru’s close personal ties with the British establishment, so much so that questions about how much he was communicating to them were asked officially in Parliament (and, quite amusingly, were duly reported to London by the High Commissioner).
Whether it was Patel’s insistence on bilateral resolution and firm control, or Nehru’s accommodations to foreign players, both men knew they were dealing with an already disintegrating adversary that had no single locus of leadership.
The policy of arming and facilitating a proxy war in Kashmir while maintaining plausible deniability at the highest level may have seemed a tactical masterstroke at the time, but it was, in fact, the start of a suicidal slow bleed that ended the possibility of Pakistan ever existing as a successful, independent democracy. The snake that Jinnah released in the form of un/sanctioned military operations by its army would never be captured again and would eventually become the monstrosity that swallowed its own masters, basket and all.
Note: This article has been compiled from now declassified secret despatches from the High Commissions for the UK to India and Pakistan to the Commonwealth Relations Office, Foreign Office, and Prime Minister’s Office in London. The author is a historian and museum curator, who specialises in the history of the princely states.
The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not reflect the views of BlueKraft Digital Foundation.
