India–Pakistan Wars and the Kashmir Crisis

Rathnam Indurthy

• Verlag: Routledge India
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429581762
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: Indian & South Asian History

This book examines the origins of the conflict between two nuclear powers – India and Pakistan – and the instability and violence in the disputed territory of Kashmir. It presents to its readers a chronology of events and political decisions that have led to an intractable situation of the present, many decades since the stand-off between India and Pakistan started.

Rathnam Indurthy traces the origins of the constant war-like situation between the two most powerful nuclear powers in South Asia through war and peace, agreements and talks, and political leaders and generals. From Indira Gandhi to Vajpayee, and from Zia-ul-Haq, Parvez Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, the volume lays bare the various machinations on the political chessboard. It also looks at the internal issues and politics of Kashmir and offers explanations as well as solutions for the resolution of the festering impasse the two nations have reached.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and readers of foreign policy, international relations, South Asian politics, and defence and strategic studies.

India–Pakistan wars and the Kashmir crisis

Since the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947, the Kashmir dispute between them has become an intractable conflict, defying solution. India and Pakistan have fought four wars over Kashmir, in 1947, 1965, 1971 (the Kashmir dispute was peripherally related) and 1999, and were engaged in a number of crises in the past. Currently, India and Pakistan are in another serious crisis with portents of another war. The Kashmir dispute has become an intractable problem, as both India and Pakistan claim the same territory as their own. So, the purpose of this book is first to briefly discuss the origins of the Kashmir dispute, the wars and crises, including the current crisis that has erupted between India and Pakistan; second, to discuss briefly the intermittent, unsuccessful initiatives taken by both India and Pakistan, as well as by others, to resolve the conflict; and finally, to offer explanations for the persistence of this festering conflict between India and Pakistan and suggest alternative solutions, including a viable one for consideration by the parties to resolve the conflict. We begin our discussion first with the origins of the Kashmir dispute, and the wars and the crises that have occurred between India and Pakistan.

The origins of the dispute and the First War (1947–49)

In 1947, when British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, Hari Singh, the Hindu autocratic and unpopular maharaja (king) of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), a predominantly Muslim state, resisted pressure to accede to either Pakistan or India, hoping to seek either independence or autonomy from both countries. To buy time and to accomplish this goal, Singh signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan on August 16. Meanwhile, communal rioting erupted in the neighboring state, Punjab, between Hindus/Sikhs and the Muslims, as this state was divided between India and Pakistan. In September, the communal rioting in Punjab spilled into J&K. Muslims in the western part of Kashmir rebelled against King Hari Singh and established their independent (Azad) Kashmir government. So, to force the other part of state under Singh to accede to Pakistan, on October 22, 1947, the Pathan-armed tribes of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP, which is now called Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) invaded Kashmir and pushed themselves fifteen miles from the state’s capital city, Srinagar. Alarmed by this invasion, King Singh sought India’s military assistance, but India refused to aid him unless he signed the instrument of accession to the country, a standard procedure under which princely states acceded to either India or Pakistan. Following Singh’s signing of the Instrument of Accession on October 27,¹ and after receiving the consent of Sheikh Abdullah, the most popular leader and founder of the secular party, the National Conference (NC), the Indian armed forces entered Kashmir to repel the raiders on the same day. The local Muslims, mostly members of the NC Party, provided the logistical support for the Indian troops. This intervention by India infuriated Pakistani Governor-General Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan. On the evening of October 27, Jinnah ordered Lt. General Sir Douglas Gracey, the chief of the Pakistan army, to dispatch Pakistan regular troops into Kashmir, but persuaded by Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck, the supreme commander during the transition period, Jinnah withdrew his orders. However, in November, Jinnah sanctioned the transfer of military supplies to the invaders while also sending Pakistan regular troops to join their effort in early 1948 as “volunteers,” though not admitting its direct involvement until July 1948. As the fighting continued, on January 1, 1948, on the advice of British Governor-General Lord Mountbatten, though opposed by his Deputy Prime Minister Sarder V. Patel, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru lodged a complaint with the UN Security Council (UNSC) by invoking Articles 34 and 35 of the UN Charter (that call for Pacific Settlement of Disputes) against Pakistan, suspecting that it was behind the invasion.² In the complaint, as it had already been pledged by Lord Mountbatten in his letter addressed to Hari Singh on October 26, India reiterated its pledge of its conditional commitment to a “plebiscite or referendum under international auspices” once the aggressor was evicted – a pledge that India later regretted, as Pakistan insists on its implementation until to this day.

On January 20, 1948, the UNSC established a three-member UN Commission on India and Pakistan (UNCIP) to go to Kashmir, investigate the situation and exercise mediation. On April 21, the council expanded the commission to five and authorized it to restore peace and arrange for a plebiscite after the withdrawal of tribal troops from the part of J&K they occupied. But following Pakistani Foreign Minister Sir Mohammed Zafrullah Khan’s admission on July 7, 1948, that his country’s regular troops were in Kashmir, on August 13, the UNCIP passed a resolution calling on both India and Pakistan to conduct a plebiscite after they agreed to a ceasefire and after Pakistan’s regular troops and tribesmen were completely withdrawn.³ The ceasefire went into effect on January 1, 1949, while Pakistan was still in control of one-third of the J&K state, which was later called Azad (free) Kashmir or Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK), as India calls it. Again under the UNCIP resolution of August 13, 1948, the Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNOGIP), the first ever by the UN, was sent to the region on January 24 to monitor the Ceasefire Line (CFL), which was later renamed as the Line of Control (LOC). The presence of the UNOGIP was approved by India and Pakistan following their agreement reached in Karachi on July 27, 1949. On January 5, 1949, the UNCIP reaffirmed the plebiscite. After that, Admiral Chester Nimitz, an American, was appointed by UN Secretary General Trygve Lie as plebiscite administrator, but he could not assume his functions, as India and Pakistan objected to his implementation by offering differing interpretations to the UNCIP resolutions on the issue of demilitarization of the state. So, in December 1949, the UNSC entrusted its President General A.G.L. McNaughton of Canada to negotiate a demilitarization plan in consultation with India and Pakistan. But it fell through, as Pakistan agreed only to simultaneous demilitarization while India chose to ignore it by raising the moral and legal aspects of the plan. On March 14, 1950, the UNSC passed another resolution affirming McNaughton’s proposals and appointed the noted Australian judge, Sir Owen Dixon, as UN representative to replace the UNCIP. In September 1950, Dixon suggested a proposal limiting plebiscite only to the predominantly Muslim Kashmir Valley population, which both countries rejected. In April 1951, the UNSC appointed Dr. Frank Graham, the former US senator, as the UN representative. Between December 1951 and February 1953, Graham frantically tried to convince both India and Pakistan to accept the UNSC-supported demilitarization proposals with reduced military presence of both countries in Indian-administered Kashmir and Azad Kashmir (POK) preceding the conduct of a plebiscite, but to no avail, as both India and Pakistan rejected the proposal. Meanwhile, under temporary Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which came into effect in January 1950, the state of J&K was granted a special status of autonomy to have its own constitution, with no right for non-Kashmiris either to purchase land or settle in the state under Article 35A of 1954, which is, by the way, currently being challenged before India’s Supreme Court.

Against the backdrop of this stalemate, Nehru and Pakistan Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra met in June 1953 at the commonwealth conference in London and discussed the Kashmir issue. After that discussion, on August 20, 1953, both India and Pakistan temporarily agreed to take the issue out of the UN and resolve it directly. Subsequently, to the pleasant surprise of Pakistan, by the time Bogra visited New Delhi in 1953, as he had already notified Kashmir’s new prime minister, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, of his intention to conduct a plebiscite, Nehru told the same to the visiting Bogra in New Delhi, who returned to Pakistan triumphantly with Nehru’s pledge. But Nehru’s offer failed to take off due to Bogra’s procrastination, reportedly brought about by the conspiratorial politics of General Ayub Khan, who was plotting to seize power and who had needed hostility with India in order to realize goal-seizing power.

But following Pakistan’s joining of the US-led Baghdad Pact in April 1954 and the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1956, Nehru reversed his position on the plebiscite, as he considered this decision by Pakistan as inimical to India’s interests as a non-aligned state in the Cold War between the US-led bloc and the Soviet-led bloc. Nehru argued that because of Pakistan’s alliance with the US, all agreements about the plebiscite in Kashmir became obsolete. Subsequently, in February 1954, the J&K state constituent assembly declared that Kashmir’s accession to India was final. This position taken by the J&K state assembly was deemed by India as equivalent to a plebiscite, although the POK was not a party to this decision. India then told the UNSC that the issue of Kashmir was finally settled, notwithstanding that Pakistan and the UNSC had rejected that assertion. The UNSC met in January 1957 and reaffirmed its earlier resolutions on the plebiscite. In February 1957, the council authorized its president, Gunnar Jarring, to mediate between India and Pakistan on the proposals of demilitarization and plebiscite, but like his predecessors, Jarring, on his visit to the region, made no progress other than proposing to the UNSC in April that the issue be referred to arbitration, which Pakistan accepted, but India rejected. In September, as Pakistani Prime Minister Sir Feroz Khan Noon declared that his country was willing to withdraw its troops from Kashmir to meet India’s preconditions, the UNSC once again sent Frank Graham to the area. He tried to secure an agreement between India and Pakistan but to no avail, as India again rejected his efforts. In March 1958, Graham submitted a report to the UNSC recommending that it arbitrate the dispute, but as usual, India rejected the proposal. From the mid-1950s onward, the Soviet Union rescued India with its frequent vetoes of the UNSC resolutions on Kashmir. Thereafter, the Kashmir issue practically died in the UNSC until it was raised again in 1963 and 1965.⁴ Meanwhile, General Ayub Khan seized power through a military coup d’état in October 1958, which further hampered Indo-Pakistan relations. Having had been greatly attached to his ancestral J&K, Nehru took shifting positions on the Kashmir situation and died on May 27, 1964, without finding a solution. Lal Bahadur Shastri succeeded him as prime minister.

Meanwhile, during this ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan, the state of J&K underwent dramatic domestic political changes. For instance, in March 1948, King Singh handed over power to Sheikh Abdullah, who became prime minister of an interim government of the state. In 1949, the king abdicated the throne and his son Karan Singh succeed him as a regent, and under the temporary Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which, as noted earlier, came into effect in January 1950, the state was granted a special status by limiting the central government’s powers over it to defense, communication and external affairs while disallowing non-Kashmiris to either settle in the state or buy property under Article 35A. But by 1953, Abdullah, who had supported the state’s accession to India earlier, began to change his tune by calling for its independence. This stance by Abdullah resulted in his removal from power and arrest by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, who by now had assumed the office of prime minister. In February 1954, the state constituent assembly, as noted earlier, affirmed the state’s accession to India. Subsequently, under the seventh amendment to the Indian constitution, approved in 1956, the state, including the POK, became an integral part of India. This constitutional provision was approved by the J&K state constituent assembly in March 1957, and in December 1964, India announced that Articles 356 and 357 would also be applicable to the state of J&K, stating that under these articles, the state of J&K was brought under presidential rule (center’s rule) as well as under Indian parliamentary legislation, thus whittling down the state’s special status granted under Article 370 to the chagrin of the Kashmiris.⁵

As Kashmir’s issue was deadlocked in the UN, persuaded by the Kennedy administration and the British government, India and Pakistan held five rounds of bilateral talks between December 1962 and April 1963 but failed to break the ice on the dispute. In October 1962, China inflicted a humiliating defeat on India to the glee of Pakistan. In March 1963, in the wake of India’s protestation, Pakistan signed a border agreement with China ceding it some 2,050 square miles of the POK territory unilaterally. This agreement enabled China to build a road linking its Xinjiang province to Tibet. Pakistan and China subsequently became all-weather friends. By 1964, India rebuilt its military after its calamitous defeat by China on the assumption that India was not strong enough to respond to a Chinese attack. Meanwhile in 1965 tensions erupted between India and Pakistan that led to another war.

As a prelude to the September 1965 war, beginning in January 1965, Pakistan initiated a probing provocative action in the Rann of Kutch, a largely trackless wasteland and poorly demarcated border area in the Western Indian state of Gujarat, that led to several months of skirmishes between Indian and Pakistani troops. The skirmishes finally ended in May 1965 when, under Britain’s mediation, the parties agreed to an international arbitration commission.⁶ On the belief that India’s tepid response during the skirmishes was a sign of its military weakness and that Pakistan was militarily strong vis-à-vis India, the country launched another war in September 1965.

The Second Kashmir War (September 1965)

Having been emboldened by a presumed victory against India in the Rann of Kutch, in May 1965, Pakistan made plans for “Operation Gibraltar” to recover Kashmir. As it did in 1947, it first sent Pakistani guerrillas into the Valley in August 1965, hoping that the Kashmiri Muslims would rise in rebellion against India. Instead, the Kashmiris apprehended the Pakistanis and handed them over to the Indian authorities. But when Indian troops...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• India–Pakistan wars and the Kashmir crisis