Sixty-five years after the event, the impact of the Great Partition is still being felt – and not just in Bengal and the Punjab. In Karachi the influx of Muslim muhajirs from India was on a scale comparable with that of East Bengalis into Calcutta. Literate and industrious, the muhajirs would stay put and through their MQM party become a thorn in the flesh of successive regimes in Islamabad. Not without bloodshed, they still control much of Pakistan’s largest metropolis. Parts of Hyderabad, the south Indian city that was the scene of another Partition-related crisis, are periodically devastated by motorbike bombers keen to incite their large Muslim component. Markets in Delhi and suburban trains in Bombay have also been targeted.
But, sporadic and essentially domestic, these outrages pale into insignificance compared to the horrors witnessed in Kashmir. In this former princely state, Partition’s business has yet to be concluded. Compounded by the excesses of the military and paramilitaries, the same atrocities prevailed at the end of the century as in 1947. The same arguments over the state’s status were being replayed and the same colossal troop levels maintained. More than anywhere else in South Asia, Kashmir was set to ensure that the legacy of Partition would not be forgotten.
Who Has Not Heard of the Vale of Cashmere?
‘But Sahib, we are Kashmiris, see. We are not Indians.’
The year was 1967 but the sentiments were those of 1947. My question to Ghulam Mohamed, a houseboat proprietor, had been why was he refusing to take bookings from Indians? His answer came from twenty years back. To a young would-be correspondent with not much to report, Kashmir seemed trapped in a time warp. On the leaf-strewn terrace outside Ahdoo’s bakery in Srinagar the cups were chipped, the coffee came in electroplated pots and the conversation was thick with dogma. Two decades of what Ghulam Mohamed called ‘Indian occupation’ had changed very little. Removing his lambskin fez, from which most of the wool had long since been rubbed, Ghulam Mohamed would listen, scratch his head with long bony fingers, then puckering his eyes, grin mischievously.
‘See, Kashmir. Kashmir is not India. India begins at Jammu – over there, across the Bannihal Pass. Here, this is not India.’
His English was excellent, though marred by a delivery as monotonous as that of a bumblebee, and whatever the subject it invariably cued a litany of complaints. These ranged from the price of mutton to Hindu toilet habits, bad manners in general, the iniquities of the British Labour Party and the supposed plight of the tourist trade. In Ghulam Mohamed’s conversational repertoire, bemoaning the ways of the world served as the default setting. It was how many Kashmiris dealt with their unhappy situation as South Asia’s bloodiest bone of contention.
By 1967 most of the Kashmir Valley had been under New Delhi’s rule for nineteen summers. Another Pakistani attempt to wrest it from India had just failed, and the Bannihal Pass, beneath whose summit the only access road now burrowed through a dripping tunnel, had been reopened. The tourists were returning; the political mud-slinging had resumed. Ahead loomed a spell of what Kashmiris liked best: business as usual. An engineering college was under construction, new emporia were opening and the powder-blue berets of UNMOGIP (the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan) offered some assurance that Kashmir’s problems had not been forgotten by the world at large. Natives of the valley, like Ghulam Mohamed, might be loath to admit it, but there was much to be said for Indian rule.
And yet the place remained palpably un-Indian. Uniquely, here English and Urdu were the official languages, with Hindi not much heard or written. Islam was the prevailing faith, tweed the preferred textile, and shawls and carpets the main trade. Instead of the shady banyan and mango of the plains, sprightly willow and poplar lined the roadsides. The year had recognisable seasons; they came in the right order; and judging by the umbrellas and the galvanised roofing, rain could be expected in all of them. The tea was sometimes pink; the meat was cooked in milk. Kingfishers piped among the sedge; dahlias and marigolds bedecked the gardens; and timbered bridges cantilevered crazily over the waterways. In Srinagar, the capital, the puddled alleyways and the higgledy-piggledy houses with their latticed shutters reminded V.S. Naipaul, then writing his An Area of Darkness, of a dank medieval Europe. Instead of India’s heat and dust, here there was water everywhere, snow on the peaks and scarcely a sari to be seen. Of all the erstwhile princely states, Kashmir alone neither fitted the image of India nor felt like India.
Back in July 1947, when Mountbatten had undertaken to dragoon the princely states of British India into joining the new India, he had cavilled over their exact number. Likening the possibly 565 states to apples, he had enquired whether having, say, 560 ‘in the basket’ by the time of Independence would be good enough. Sardar Patel, the Congress leader who was Home Minister in the interim government with responsibility for the princely states, acquiesced. With less than a month in which to fill the basket, Patel and the ubiquitous V.P. Menon did the arm-twisting, Mountbatten turned on the charm, and the signed Instruments of Accession came rolling in.
Although historians, both South Asian and British, have found much to criticise in Mountbatten’s viceroyalty, his handling of the princely states, with the possible exception of Kashmir, has scarcely been faulted. The integration of the states has been called ‘a revolutionary, watershed event’, even ‘the world’s biggest bloodless revolution’.1 Mountbatten himself reckoned that by sweet-talking the princes into acceding to India he had ‘brought off a coup second only to the 3rd June plan [i.e. his masterplan for Independence-cum-Partition]’.2
Mountbatten’s talk to the Chamber of Princes [of 25 July 1947] was a tour de force [writes Ramachandra Guha]. In my opinion it ranks as the most significant of all his acts in India. It finally persuaded the princes that the British would no longer protect or patronise them and that independence for them was a mirage.3
Asked merely to relinquish responsibility for the defence, foreign relations and cross-border communications of their states, the princes were surrendering nothing they had not previously surrendered to the British; and in return they were being offered generous pensions, tax concessions, official postings and many lifetime privileges (like immunity from private prosecution, free electricity and medical care, exemption from customs duties, and a state funeral at the end). Mountbatten’s imprimatur merely added further reassurance by giving some imperial respectability to the horse-trading. His task was not onerous and he conducted it with his customary conviction.
Yet by 15 August considerably more than five of the pro-forma Instruments of Accession remained unsigned. Indore and Jodhpur were engaging in brinkmanship, Bhopal was prevaricating, some minor states in Saurashtra (Gujarat) were toying with accession to Pakistan, and on the distant border with Burma, Manipur was holding out for an independence that, if secured, would gouge a substantial chunk out of India’s already eccentric eastern profile.
Much more ominous, though, was the obduracy of Hyderabad state in peninsular India and of Jammu and Kashmir state in the extreme north. Together these two accounted for around half the total territory of princely India and about a third of its population. Additionally both were considered of enormous strategic and psychological value. Hyderabad had been negotiating for a lease of lands which would give it access to the west coast, so almost cutting off the extreme south of India from the rest of the country. And the composite state of Jammu and Kashmir not only adjoined both Pakistan and India but shared a long and mostly undemarcated frontier with Chinese-claimed Tibet and Soviet-friendly Afghanistan; the possibility of its making common cause with either of these formidable neighbours was viewed with alarm. Without Hyderabad, the new India would look nearly as ‘maimed and moth-eaten’ as Pakistan, and without the lake-strewn