Some new insights into Kashmir

Book review
By Navnita Chadha Behera;Brookings Institution Press 2006; Pp359
Author Behera is ‘impartial’ on a subject on which Indians and Pakistanis can’t shake off their nationalist positions. Pakistanis have lost the international community on their cause and nothing they say is considered right; the Indians used to present a closed mind to what they thought was a world convinced of the Pakistani case, but now they can feel easy looking closely at the Indian warts. The logic of losing and winning has emphasised realism and the Pakistanis are lost when their nose is rubbed into it. The book still looks anti-Pakistan but what can one do if Pakistan has been mostly wrong?

The book begins by taking account of India’s aim to gobble up the hundreds of states left unrealistically behind by the British in 1947. Pakistanis worked on the principle of ‘Muslim majority’ contiguous areas that could be roped in to swell up the territory inside Pakistan. India threatened the states with the label of hostile states till 551 of them acceded in three weeks. VP Menon and Sardar Patel pulled off the coup, but Kashmir remained on the brink, with a Hindu maharaja ruling uneasily over a majority Muslim population. Nehru was personally involved there because of the great Kashmiri Sheikh Abdullah who was close to the Nehruvian ideal of secularism.

Jinnah was not really confused by the phenomenon of Sheikh Abdullah; he had been faced with a similar kind of situation in Punjab where a majority Muslim population was ruled over by secular Muslim leaders who wanted Punjab to be multi-religious and independent. Nehru could dump the Maharaja and lean on Abdullah; Jinnah could do neither of the two things, but he could wait for the religious feeling to come up on top, as happened in Punjab. As opposed to Nehru, his policy on the states was declaredly non-coercive, aimed at getting even Hindu rulers to opt for Pakistan. But after 1947, only Junagarh, Hyderabad and Kashmir were out there to be claimed. The three may have been attracted to Jinnah, but India invaded and annexed.

Pakistan has a strong case when it reports that Mountbatten helped by making Kashmir contiguous to India through a tweaking of the boundary and awarding a Hindu tehsil of a Muslim-majority district Gurdaspur to India. Alastair Lamb thinks that Nehru coerced the Maharaja into acceding before landing troops in Kashmir to counter the ‘tribals’ rushing in from Pakistan. The book says Nehru regretted listening to Mountbatten’s advice to go the UN against Pakistan’s interference. After getting negative resolutions from the Security Council he turned back on all promises made for a fair deal on inclusion of the state of Jammu & Kashmir into India. His pledge of plebiscite today haunts India as Kashmiris demand it as their right.

Later India blundered in Kashmir many times. Nehru lost Sheikh Abdullah and had to put him in jail because he now wanted independent Kashmir. Indira Gandhi signed a clever deal with him and began to manipulate Kashmir to bring about a social engineering that would ease annexation. Nothing worked. Pakistan tried war and lost. The 1971 one it lost in East Pakistan changed the minds of the Kashmiris decisively away from Pakistan. The book records the Indian blunders honestly till it was time again for Pakistan to put Kashmir on the boil. It was a long way away from that moment in November 1947 when Sardar Patel offered a swap between Hyderabad and Kashmir and got a refusal from Jinnah. Behera thinks Jinnah should have agreed, given the slim odds in the Valley, but Jinnah may have thought of the impossibility of maintaining a Hindu-majority province smack in the middle of an annexation-happy India.

The book contains two nuggets on the mind that produced Pakistan’s losing wars against India. The first one is critical, and it is Altaf Gauhar’s verdict on ‘cultural discounting’ in the 1965 war that he handled so well as a the PR man that most Pakistanis still think it was a victory: ‘Pakistan’s for wars were conceived and launched one assumption: that the Indians are too cowardly and ill-organised to offer any effective military response’ (p.75). The other comes from General Akbar Khan, the raider in Kashmir, who thought ‘our people possess a self-confidence and ready willingness to march forward into India — a spirit the equivalent of which cannot be found on the other side’. He believed like General Hamid Gul of Jalalabad fame that India was exposed to ‘disintegration and emergencies’.

This race-based theory of military superiority became religion-based when Pakistani generals thought of unleashing the mujahideen on Kashmir in 1990. This time the rout was terminal — terminal for Pakistan — because the jihadis created centres of power inside Pakistan’s civil society, and jihad finally destroyed the state of Pakistan by taking away from it its monopoly of violence. When General Musharraf as army chief was delivering the final blow to Pakistan’s status as the revisionist power at Kargil in 1999, his close associates were all Islamists who answered all questions of tactics and strategy with recitations in Arabic. The miracle didn’t happen and Pakistan felt the humiliation it had not felt after past defeats.

All the assumptions made at Kargil were wrong and had earlier been rejected by army chief Jehangir Karamat and prime minister Benazir Bhutto. The defeat was military and political, as Behera says that Pakistani soldiers found dead by Indians had grass in their stomachs. Soldiers made to perch on heights were not supplied food after the Indian counter-attack materialised. This is confirmed by Shuja Nawaz in his excellent definitive study of the Pakistan army Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army and the Wars within (2007). His book also tells us that General Musharraf had briefed prime minister Nawaz Sharif and got his approval for the foolhardy operation. Giving his go-ahead, Mr Sharif had said: ‘This is a military operation. All I can say is that there should be no withdrawal, no surrender of any post because that will greatly embarrass us’.

After Kargil, Mr Sharif is a greatly embarrassed man, disenchanted as far as the army is concerned. So is the rest of Pakistan. And Kashmir, the source of all intellectual dislocation in Pakistan, is no longer the jugular vein of Pakistan. We have discovered rather late in the day that it is Karachi that is our jugular vein and that we have been living upside-down all our lives. And that we’d rather protect Karachi from terrorism and provincial sub-nationalism than try and grab Kashmir.