The Kashmir Conflict

From Empire to the Cold War, 1945-66

Rakesh Ankit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317225249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book presents a study of the international dimensions of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan from before its outbreak in October 1947 until the Tashkent Summit in January 1966. By focusing on Kashmir's under-researched transnational dimensions, it represents a different approach to this intractable territorial conflict. Concentrating on the global context(s) in which the dispute unfolded, it argues that the dispute's evolution was determined by international concerns that existed from before and went beyond the Indian subcontinent.

Based on new and diverse official and personal papers across four countries, the book foregrounds the Kashmir dispute in a twin setting of Decolonisation and the Cold War, and investigates the international understanding around it within the imperatives of these two processes. In doing so, it traces Kashmir's journey from being a residual irritant of the British Indian Empire, to becoming a Commonwealth embarrassment and its eventual metamorphosis into a security concern in the Cold War climate(s). A princely state of exceptional geo-strategic location, complex religious composition and unique significance in the context of Indian and Pakistani notions of nation and statehood, Kashmir also complicated their relations with Britain, the United States, Soviet Union, China, the Commonwealth countries and the Afro-Arab-Asian world.

This book is of interest to scholars in the field of Asian History, Cold War History, Decolonisation and South Asian Studies.

1
The international setting, 1945–47

‘Fighting the same struggle as our fathers and grandfathers’¹

Introduction

In October 1945, Viceroy Archibald Wavell visited Jammu and Kashmir. Upon his return to New Delhi, Wavell listed the ‘possibilities of political trouble’ there.² These arose from the character of the ruler, Hari Singh; the intentions of his premier, Ramchandra Kak (1945–47); the communal divide of the population; the politicking engaged therein by the Indian political parties, Congress and the Muslim League; and the vulnerable northern and western borders of the state, adjoining Punjab and the NWFP, in the near vicinity of Afghanistan, the Central Asian Soviet republics and the Chinese Sinkiang. Wavell’s trip had been prompted by a report from the Foreign Secretary, Olaf Caroe, that, after emphasising Kashmir’s ‘supreme strategic importance’, had noted a growing inclination on the part of Hari Singh and Kak ‘to obtain a status’ as near as possible to independence.³ Moreover, since 1943, successive British residents in Kashmir had been sending reports warning about the nature and scope of Communist agitations.⁴

These concerns about Kashmir merged with Wavell’s prime external worries at this time, which were the strong feelings of over ninety million Muslims in India towards the idea of Pakistan and events in Palestine, the need to keep India ‘in the empire’ and ‘the difficult and unfriendly attitude of Russia’.⁵ These, in turn, fed into the continuing imperial concerns that grew in the two-year period 1945–47 and solidified around three themes: the value of India’s membership of the British Commonwealth, questions accompanying India’s emerging attitude at the United Nations, and fears about India’s advances towards the Soviet Union. Taken together, these constituted what has been called the ‘crisis of India’s international identity in the 1940s’.⁶ This chapter situates British concerns about the future of Jammu and Kashmir within this crisis. It shows that the former were understood in the light of the latter. It represented a coming together of an old continuum of ideas about imperial security and the changes of what William Strang, Permanent Under-Secretary of the British Foreign Office from 1949 to 1953, called the ‘new and portentous’ post-1945 world.⁷ Against this confluence, an autonomous, let alone independent, Kashmir filled British policy-makers with apprehension. Neither London nor New Delhi, therefore, responded with any enthusiasm when Ramchandra Kak had pointed out to Wavell that Kashmir possessed a healthy fiscal surplus and a better law-and-order situation than the neighbouring British India provinces.⁸ As the leading South Asian historian Judith Brown has noted:

India’s own experience of the final years of Empire was not isolated…. Once India was independent, the logistics of the Empire were radically changed…. From the imperial order emerged two independent nations … whose damaging conflict with each other was to feed the fears and aspirations of the two great superpowers in the ensuing Cold War …⁹

The existing scholarship on this ‘damaging conflict’ focusses largely on a time period from August–October 1947, i.e. the time of the partition of British India and the outbreak of conflict in Kashmir in its immediate aftermath.¹⁰ This chapter, instead, is interested in the two-year period up to 1947 and the salient aspects of this immediate context of the dispute. It seeks to understand, more than has been hitherto attempted, the various concerns that later shaped the international evolution of the Kashmir dispute, and thus dovetails, in a new manner, into the older scholarship on this subject. Second, from the broader vantage of South Asia’s relations with the superpowers too, light has been thrown on the international dimensions that accompanied the evolution of the Kashmir dispute in the 1950s and beyond.¹¹ Here too, this chapter is concerned with the ‘pre-history’ of the Kashmir dispute and argues that Kashmir’s evolution as a ‘crisis of independent India’s international identity’ cannot be fully understood without studying the creation of that international identity in the two-year period 1945–47. It thus adumbrates this backdrop to the well-established British interests in the subcontinent post-1947 and locates Kashmir within it.

India: ‘the expedient dominion’¹²

The ‘final years of Empire’ are, therefore, an important prelude to the ‘damaging conflict’, and the place of an independent India in a remodelled Commonwealth was the subject of the first set of questions regarding India’s international identity in those years that later had an impact on the evolution of the Kashmir dispute.¹³ On the nature of the British connection,¹⁴ imperial ideologues had well-demonstrated doubts about India.¹⁵ Nehru, especially, appeared to them ‘to be the Indian Washington, not Walpole’.¹⁶ Within this broad band of uncertainty, there was also a stratum of apprehension about the future of Kashmir and other princely states. Indeed, the chronological overlap between the first Kashmir conflict and the negotiations leading to the making of the New Commonwealth is striking.¹⁷ In London, the end of the Second World War had brought about a change of the political guard and, consequently, a new look at ‘Britain’s India Problem’.¹⁸ Clement Attlee, the socialist Prime Minister but ‘a dedicated enthusiast for King and Country’, was an old India hand who had been a member of the Simon Commission in 1928 and who, along with his party man Stafford Cripps, had a long and sympathetic association with the Congress-led mainstream of the Indian national movement.¹⁹ He saw British interests as being best safeguarded by a strong and unitary British and princely India within the Commonwealth.²⁰ Ernest Bevin, his Foreign Minister, also was ‘deeply attached’ to Empire,²¹ ‘hated the idea of leaving India’ and wanted to reorganise British dominance around it in ‘the East’.²²

They sent a three-member Cabinet Mission to India in the summer of 1946.²³ The disputes over its dealings with the Congress and the Muslim League have obscured its simultaneous pursuit of strategic concerns.²⁴ The possibility of Pakistan – with its volatile north-west frontier and consequent vulnerability vis-à-vis Afghanistan and Russia – in the neighbourhood of Kashmir served to complicate these.²⁵ While Cripps and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, have dominated the historical attention on the Cabinet Mission, it was Albert Alexander, the Defence Minister and the self-proclaimed ‘silent man’,²⁶ who, having monitored aspects of imperial defence, advocated ‘retaining imperial positions in India’.²⁷ On this, he clashed with Indians and Britons alike and threatened to return home.²⁸ He received support from Bevin’s ‘analysis of the possible effect upon foreign relations of developments in India’.²⁹ The Cabinet Mission also visited Kashmir. It met Hari Singh and Kak as well as the two leading politicians of the state, Sheikh Abdullah and Ghulam Abbas of the Muslim Conference.³⁰ Its visit coincided with Abdullah’s ‘Quit Kashmir’ agitation against Hari Singh, which was inspired by the Congress’ 1942 ‘Quit India’ campaign against the British and was supported enthusiastically by Nehru, to the discomfort of both the British and some of his own party colleagues.³¹ Alexander also noted ‘increasing communist activity in Srinagar’; the feeling about this would be strengthened when the British communist Rajni Palme Dutt visited Kashmir in July 1946.³² New Delhi was already suspicious of Abdullah’s associates, especially BPL Bedi and GM Sadiq.³³

The unsatisfactory end to the Cabinet Mission was followed by Wavell’s so-called Breakdown Plan of September 1946, of which Kashmir was an integral part. The plan envisioned a British sphere of influence in the Punjab, Baluchistan, Kashmir and the NWFP.³⁴ Remembering the summer of 1946, Alexander thought that while ‘Wavell had no conscious feeling of being partisan in favour of the Muslim League’, having been the Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) in India in 1942 he was bound to remember Congress’ ‘Quit India’ campaign ‘whilst he was trying to keep the Japanese out of India’. Five years on, the Soviets had replaced the Japanese as Wavell’s and Alexander’s key external concern towards which the Congress appeared, if anything, more impervious.³⁵

One individual who was alive to these concerns, and regularly sought to apprise Nehru accordingly, was his London-based friend VK Krishna Menon. Throughout 1946, Menon warned him that the ‘essentially imperialist’ Britain desired India as a ‘satellite’ and its policy towards India was a part of its international effort against Russia: ‘The conflict with Russia was and is serious. This time the USA plays the bigger part. Bevin wants the Moslem States and India to assist Britain against Russia. We should not be drawn into this business.’³⁶ Eighteen months later, in December 1947, Menon would firmly believe that the Anglo-American interest in Kashmir was ‘primarily and basically ti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a ‘ghost’ of Empire, a ‘game’ of the Cold War
• 1 The international setting, 1945–47: ‘fighting the same struggle as our fathers and grandfathers’
• 2 Britain and Kashmir, 1947–49: ‘whose was Kashmir to be? The Raja, Sheikh Abdullah, the tribes or Russia?’
• 3 America, India and Kashmir, 1945–49: ‘if ignorance about India in this country is deep, ignorance about the states is abysmal’
• 4 Kashmir, 1949–53: ‘when the US blew hot, the British blew cold and when the British blew hot, the US blew cold’
• 5 Kashmir, 1953–61: from ‘pact politics’ to ‘package proposal’
• 6 Kashmir, 1962–63: the last interventions
• 7 Kashmir, 1964–66: ‘the Soviets, CHICOMS, neutralists and the West are kibitzers and, to some extent, actors in … Kashmir’
• Conclusion: ‘a footnote to history’
• Bibliography
• Index