The Longest August (27 page)

His successor, Khwaja Shamsuddin, had hardly settled in his job when the Kashmir Valley was rocked by massive antigovernment demonstrations that followed the disappearance of a hair of Prophet Muhammad's beard from Srinagar's Hazratbal shrine on December 26. The missing hair provided a trigger for popular disaffection, which had been building up since Shaikh Abdullah's arrest a decade earlier, to burst into the open like a volcanic eruption. Protestors took to the streets on a massive scale in the Vale of Kashmir. This shook a fast-aging, perpetually tired Nehru.

Until then, thanks to the complicit press's grossly biased reporting on Kashmir, Indians in general had been complacent about the situation there. Most of them associated their northernmost state with images of snow-capped mountains, gushing cold streams, and cypress and poplar trees, which provided an idyllic background to the duets sung by a heart-broken hero and the love of his life—stunningly shot in such Bollywood movies as
Kashmir Ki Kali
(Hindi: Kali of Kashmir) and
Mere Sanam
(Hindi: My Love). Cinema, which arrived in the subcontinent in 1913, when only one in sixteen Indians was literate, had become a vital tool to mold popular perceptions and culture. As for radio broadcasts, the popular medium for news, these were controlled by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. State-run television news would start in Bombay and Amritsar only a decade later.

Though the missing relic in Srinagar was recovered on January 4, 1964, popular agitation did not subside even after Shamsuddin stepped down in favor of the older, more experienced Ghulam Muhammad Sadiq almost two months later. He and Nehru decided to withdraw the “Kashmir Conspiracy” case against Abdullah in April and released him and the others.

Abdullah was invited to Delhi by Nehru as a personal guest and lodged in his official residence. The two discussed the Kashmir problem. During a cabinet session, attended by Abdullah, Nehru told fellow ministers that he wanted to resolve the Kashmir issue during his lifetime. In the course of his meeting with Pakistan's high commissioner in Delhi, Abdullah received an invitation from Bhutto to visit Pakistan's capital. Nehru recommended acceptance. After consulting several other Indian leaders outside of Delhi, Abdullah returned to Nehru's residence on May 20.

Abdullah and his party boarded the special plane sent by Ayub Khan on May 23. Eleven years of incarceration by the Indian government had transformed Abdullah from a traitor to Islam and Kashmiri Muslims in the eyes of Pakistanis into a fearless champion of Kashmiris. He received a hero's reception in Rawalpindi.

On May 25, a Friday, he addressed a rally of almost two hundred thousand people, presided over by his lifelong rival, Chowdhury Muhammad Abbas of the Muslim Conference.
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The next day, during his long session with the Pakistani president, Abdullah broached the idea of a quadrangular confederation of the subcontinent, India–West Pakistan–Kashmir–East Pakistan, which had earlier interested Nehru. After this meeting, he announced that Ayub Khan would hold talks with Nehru in Delhi in mid-June to resolve the Kashmir dispute.

On May 27, as Abdullah was on his way in an official convoy to Muzaffarbad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, news came that following a stroke, Nehru had died in the early afternoon of a heart attack. When Abdullah heard the news, he broke down and sobbed. Nehru's death killed any chance of India's amicable settlement with Pakistan on Kashmir.

At the open-air cremation of Nehru's corpse on the banks of the Jamuna (aka Yamuna) in Delhi, Abdullah leapt on the platform and, crying unashamedly, threw flowers onto the funeral pyre. Later, in his autobiography
Aatish-e Chinar
(Urdu: Flames of the Chinar), Abdullah would sum up his rocky relationship with Nehru: “Pandit Nehru's love for Kashmir was more like love for a beautiful woman whom he wanted to possess and that he had come to regard me as a rival in love—for the possession of this beautiful valley.”
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Nehru's Lackluster Successor

Lal Bahadur Shastri, who succeeded Nehru, had neither the charisma nor the popularity needed to win the approval of Parliament for an agreement
with Pakistan, which would have inevitably involved some territorial concessions to Pakistan and/or letting Kashmiris exercise their right of self-determination for the state as a whole or by region. In polar contrast to the aristocratic background of handsome Nehru, a child of the fabulously rich lawyer Motilal Nehru and his wife, Swaruprani Thussu, the diminutive, jug-eared Shastri, mild-mannered and soft-spoken, was born into the household of a schoolteacher who died when he was a year old. He grew up as a staunch member of the Congress Party and served in Nehru's cabinets from 1952 onward, his latest ministry being home affairs.

Realizing the dramatically altered political scene, Shaikh Abdullah openly called for a plebiscite, something he had not done before. This had an unsettling effect on Sadiq, who had simultaneously to cope with Muhammad's maneuvers in the State Assembly against his recently formed cabinet. He was therefore driven to rely even more heavily on Delhi than Muhammad to stay in power. He actively cooperated with the Shastri government to integrate Kashmir further into the Indian Union.

On December 21, the president of India acquired powers, hitherto denied him, to take over Kashmir's administration if he felt that the constitutional machinery had broken down. Three weeks later it was announced that the National Conference would be dissolved and that the Congress Party would establish a branch in Kashmir. The opposition declared January 15 Protest Day, when Shaikh Abdullah demanded a plebiscite to decide the state's future.

The next month, accompanied by his wife, Akbar Jahan, and a senior deputy, Abdullah went on a hajj—a pilgrimage to Mecca—with plans to visit a few other Arab countries as well as Britain and France. In Algiers he had an unscheduled meeting with Zhou Enlai. According to his memoir,
Flames of the Chinar
, they discussed China's agreement with Pakistan over the northern frontier of Gilgit. Zhou said, “At present, Gilgit is under the control of Pakistan, and therefore we entered into an agreement stipulating that the agreement shall remain valid only as long as Gilgit is under the control of Pakistan.” Abdullah revealed that he sent a summary of his conversation with Zhou to the Indian ambassador to China.
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But the news of Zhou's invitation to Abdullah to visit China disconcerted the Shastri government.

In March, while Abdullah was abroad, the legislature, guided by Sadiq, amended Kashmir's constitution to alter the title of head of state from
Sardar-i-riyasat
(Urdu: president of province) to governor, and
Wazire Azam
(Urdu: prime minister) to chief minister, thus removing
the constitutional distinction between Kashmir and other Indian states. In short, the leading features of the “special relationship” that had existed all along between Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian Union were annulled.
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In April Abdullah published an essay in the prestigious, New York–based
Foreign Affairs
journal in which he argued that India, Pakistan, and Kashmiris should devise a solution that would grant Kashmiris “the substance of their demand for self-determination but with honor and fairness to both Pakistan and India.”
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He thus put India and Pakistan on a par.

Operation Desert Hawk: A Dry Run

The moves by the Sadiq-Shastri duo whipped up anti-India sentiment in Pakistan, leading to armed clashes between the two neighbors in the Rann (Desert) of Kutch along the Arabian Sea. Measuring about 2,900 square miles of sparsely inhabited marshland, originally part of the princely state of Kutch, its upland islets were used as pasture plots. It was one of the few un-demarcated tracts between Pakistan and India, each of which maintained a few armed police posts on scattered islets.

On April 9, 1965, the Pakistani army captured an Indian police post near the Kanjarkot fort and claimed all of the Rann of Kutch. Delhi deployed its army in the area to recover the lost posts. In turn, on April 24, Pakistan mounted Operation Desert Hawk by deploying an infantry division and two armored regiments equipped with superior US-supplied Patton tanks and field guns. Four inches of steel armor plating on the forty-six-ton Patton made it immune to all fire except at a very close range.
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Pakistan captured four more posts and claimed the entire Kanjarkot tract. Given their poor logistics and inferior military hardware, the Indians had no option but to withdraw after offering token resistance. To contain the fighting between two Commonwealth members, British prime minister Harold Wilson intervened. A temporary truce followed at the end of April.

But the Kashmiri background to this crisis worsened in May, when Abdullah returned home. He was arrested and interned in the hill station of Ootacamund, two thousand miles from Kashmir. The anti-India feeling that had been bubbling in the Kashmir Valley during March and April boiled over. Streets filled with huge protest demonstrations. These were crushed with a heavy hand.

The truce in the Rann of Kutch broke down. Hostilities resumed on June 15 on the eve of the weeklong Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in London. Once again Wilson intervened. A formal cease-fire was signed on June 30. Later the border issue was referred to a three-member arbitration committee.
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The purpose of Pakistan's Operation Desert Hawk was threefold: to assess India's military preparedness, to draw its troops away from Punjab and Kashmir, and to determine the extent of Washington's seriousness about enforcing its ban on the use of its superior military hardware, including F4 jet fighters, in a war with India. Despite Delhi's repeated protests, no effective action was taken by the Lyndon Johnson administration to inhibit Pakistanis' use of US-made weaponry.

Field Marshal Ayub Khan was buoyed by his victory in the armed sparring he had with India in the Rann of Kutch. An inkling of his upbeat mood was provided by Lakshmi Kant Jha, the principal secretary to Shastri, who was present when the two South Asian leaders met on the sidelines of the Commonwealth conference in London. “You know, your chaps tried to commit aggression on our territory, our chaps gave them a few knocks and they began to flee,” Ayub Khan reportedly said. “Mr President, do you think if I had to attack Pakistan, I would choose a terrain where we have no logistic support and you have all the advantages?” asked Shastri. “Do you think I would make such a mistake or any of my generals would allow me to make that mistake?”
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Little did Shastri realize that in the previous month Ayub Khan had scrutinized a military presentation on Operation Gibraltar and that at his behest an assault on Akhnoor in India-held Kashmir was included in the subsequently code-named Operation Grand Slam. Following that, Ayub Khan approved Operation Gibraltar. Soon after, however, he had second thoughts about executing the grand plan. The hawks within his cabinet, led by Bhutto, pounced on this and put it about that the president did not want to disturb the status quo because that would jeopardize the freshly acquired riches of his family. That forced Ayub Khan's hand. At the end of July, he addressed the force commanders of Operation Gibraltar as a preamble to the actual launch.
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9: Shastri's Tallest Order

Pakistan's Nightmare Comes Alive

Operation Gibraltar
1
grew out of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's memorandum to President Muhammad Ayub Khan in early May 1965. In it he warned that as a consequence of the ramped-up Western military assistance to India, the balance of power in South Asia was tilting rapidly in Delhi's favor. He recommended “a bold and courageous” move in Kashmir to create “greater possibility for a negotiated settlement.”
2
The end purpose of the complex Operation Gibraltar was to enable the Pakistani military to capture territory in Kashmir while making it appear that it was the Kashmiri people who had finally mounted an armed rebellion to end the unbearably oppressive rule of India.

Operations Gibraltar and Grand Slam

Devised conceptually by the Kashmir Cell of the Ayub Khan regime, it was passed on to Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik, the Murree-based commander of the Twelfth Infantry Division. Along with the Azad Kashmir Armed Force, this division guarded the cease-fire line in Kashmir. The strategy was to have a sizable force of trained guerrillas and saboteurs infiltrate India-held Kashmir to carry out sabotage to destabilize the state government and spark an anti-India rebellion by Kashmiris.

If it failed to achieve the desired aim, then the complementary Operation Grand Slam was to be launched by the Pakistani military. It envisaged a rapid strike by armored and infantry units from the southern tip
of the cease-fire line to Akhnoor, a town along the Pathankot-Jammu-Srinagar highway. The capture of Akhnoor would sever the critical supply line for the bottled-up Indian forces in the Vale of Kashmir, providing Pakistan with several options, one or more of which could be exploited.

Major General Malik, a tall, hefty, mustached man with receding gray hair, worked with Brigadier General Riaz Hussain, director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, to recruit volunteers for a new force, Mujahid Companies. Armed and trained as guerrillas and saboteurs, it was to be led by Pakistani officers. Malik formed six task forces, each five hundred strong, and gave them names of outstanding Islamic generals of the past. Each contingent consisted of Azad Kashmir troops and Mujahedin irregular volunteers, all in civilian clothes. Their tasks were to blow up bridges, cut communication lines, raid supply dumps, and attack military units as a prelude to an armed uprising scheduled for August 9, 1965. That day would coincide with the twelfth anniversary of the first arrest of Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah and was chosen by Plebiscite Front leaders to protest his latest incarceration.

According to this plan, Mujahideen ranks were scheduled to cross the cease-fire line in small groups between August 1 and 5, and assemble at prearranged places to set up camps as a preamble to infiltrating the Kashmir Valley at many points during the following three days. This phase would be facilitated by Pakistani troops firing along the truce line to distract their Indian adversaries.

The envisaged capture of Srinagar airport and radio station by the Ghaznavi Task Force on August 9 would set the scene for the declaration of the establishment of a Revolutionary Council, which would proclaim the liberation of Jammu and Kashmir.

In practice, however, on August 5 a shepherd boy informed the police of the presence of strangers, wearing green
salwar kameez
in the border town of Tanmarg, twenty-four miles from Srinagar, who offered bribes for information. He led the police to the base camp of the Salahuddin Task Force. The same day a local man in Mendhar, sixty miles from Srinagar, informed the nearby army brigade headquarters of a few foreigners who sought intelligence from him. But it was not until August 8 that the army troops arrested two commanders of the infiltrators near Narain Nag, five miles from Srinagar, that they learned about Pakistan's plan.
3

By then, however, the Ghaznavi Task Force had managed to reach a suburb of Srinagar. Gunfights soon broke out in the capital. Taken by surprise, the Kashmiri authorities urged Delhi to declare martial law in
the valley. But the Lal Bahadur Shastri government refrained from doing so. The sabotage and shootings by the armed infiltrators in Srinagar continued until August 12–13. “The streets in Srinagar were deserted,” noted Lieutenant General Harbaksh Singh, the commanding officer of India's Western Command. “There were visible signs of anxiety and tension on the faces of the residents gaping through the windows.”
4

All India Radio broadcast the confessions of the two captured officers outlining Pakistan's extensive plan.
5
The Indian government protested through diplomatic channels. Pakistan replied that Kashmir was a disputed territory and violent disturbances there could not be attributed to it. On the other hand, as preplanned, Pakistan's state-run radio broadcast on August 9 that a rebellion had broken out in India-occupied Kashmir. It added that, according to the Voice of Kashmir radio station, a Revolutionary Council had assumed full power over the state.

In Delhi, the chief of army staff (COAS) General Joyanto Nath Chaudhuri informed the Emergency Committee of the Cabinet that though the infiltrators were being apprehended, further sabotage could still be carried out by those at large. Indeed shoot-outs and subversive activities in Indian Kashmir continued until August 13.

On that day, Shastri authorized the army to cross the cease-fire line to destroy the infiltrators' bases. If regular Pakistani troops intervened, then the army would be free to retaliate at any suitable place of its choice, he added. In his August 15 Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, he declared that the “resort to the sword will be met with the sword.”
6
His valiant words helped portray him as a resolute leader. That day the Indian soldiers crossed the cease-fire line in the eastern Kargil region.

India's far more ambitious objective was to cut off Pakistan's main infiltration route into the Kashmir Valley. It passed through the 8,652-foot-high Haji Pir Pass on the western Pir Panjal mountain range three miles inside Azad Kashmir. The operation required meticulous planning and execution over several days. On August 24 the Indians prepared to capture the Haji Pir Pass.

That day, Major General Malik sought permission of the Rawalpindi-based general headquarters to launch the preplanned Operation Grand Slam. The director of military operations, Brigadier Gul Hassan, passed on the request to the COAS, General Muhammad Musa Khan. When nothing happened, Hassan reminded the COAS the next day. The COAS needed to get the permission of President Field Marshall Muhammad
Ayub Khan, who was then vacationing in the picturesque Swat Valley two hundred miles away. So Musa Khan dispatched Foreign Minister Bhutto to Swat. Pakistan was on the verge of an all-out war, but the COAS, a Baluch by ethnicity, was unwilling to make decisions while the Pashtun executive president was on vacation. On August 29 Malik received the green light. By then the Indians had captured the Haji Pir Pass and bolstered their forces by adding three infantry units and an artillery regiment in that sector. Following a further thirty-six-hour delay at the headquarters, the launch of Operation Grand Slam started at five
am
on September 1.

Ayub Khan's Midstream Somersault

When Malik advanced the Twelfth Infantry Division, he had a six-to-one advantage over the Indians in armor, with his Patton tanks being hugely superior to the enemy's lesser (American) Shermans and (French) AMX-13s. He enjoyed a similar advantage in artillery. His infantry was twice the size of the Indians'.
7
It was no surprise, then, that before the day was over, the Pakistanis had captured all their targets. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Indians suffered heavy losses. They withdrew rapidly, while the strategic Akhnoor remained lightly defended by four infantry battalions and a squadron of tanks.

At this point an inexplicable change of command occurred in Pakistan. General Musa Khan arrived at the theater of operations in a helicopter and transferred the command of the Twelfth Division from Malik, a Punjabi, to Major General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, then commander of the Seventh Infantry Division. A burly, double-chinned, bushy-browed, slothful Yahya Khan was, like Ayub Khan, an ethnic Pashtun. Malik was asked to leave with Musa Khan in his helicopter.

Yahya Khan altered Malik's strategy and thus lost more time. Malik had planned on bypassing strongly defended Indian positions and subordinating everything to capturing the bridge over the Chenab River at Akhnoor with the least possible delay. But Yahya Khan opted for a different route. He crossed the Tawi River and went straight into Troti, thereby losing crucial hours.

Why did Ayub Khan change horses midstream? He was overconfident of the glorious victory that Operation Grand Slam would deliver and wanted the kudos to go to his fellow Pashtun, Yahya Kahn, rather than Malik, who had masterminded the interlinked operations Gibraltar and Grand Slam.

Ayub Khan's egregiously unprofessional decision allowed India to shore up its defenses of Akhnoor. Its military high command deployed warplanes to blunt the attack at a time when the enemy was about ten miles from Akhnoor. The air strikes destroyed a number of Pakistani Pattons and slowed the advance of the rest. In response, the Pakistani planes targeted India's air bases not only in Kashmir but also in Punjab.

On September 3 the UN secretary-general U Thant conveyed to the Security Council the gist of the report he had received from the head of the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP). There had been a series of cease-fire line violations in Kashmir from the Pakistani side by armed men in civilian clothes for “the purpose of armed action on the Indian side.”
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Three days later the Council passed a resolution authorizing the secretary-general to strengthen the UNMOGIP and inform it on the situation in the area. U Thant dashed to the capitals of the warring nations.

On the battlefield, the Indian generals concluded that the Pakistani tank advance could not be halted by air strikes alone. So the Emergency Committee of the Cabinet pondered the question: Should we attack Pakistani soil across the international border to compel its military high command to redeploy its forces away from the Kashmir front? The ultimate decision lay with Shastri. He said, “Go!”

The Shortest Leader's Tallest Order

On September 6, when the Pakistan Army was only three miles from Akhnoor, the Indians opened a new front by attacking the Lahore and Sialkot sectors inside Pakistan. This compelled headquarters in Rawalpindi to rush its men and weaponry from the Kashmir front to blunt the Indian incursion toward Lahore, only fifteen miles from the border. For all practical purposes that move marked the end of Operation Grand Slam. “The [Indian] Army could never forget the tallest order from the shortest man,” remarked Lieutenant General Harbaksh Singh later.
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Actually, Shastri had made a more critical, but super-secret, decision in November 1964 by giving the go-ahead to India's nuclear weapons program—a fact that became known only a decade later. This was Shastri's response to the successful testing of an atomic bomb by China near Lop Nor, Kansu, in the previous month. That groundbreaking event in China had been the result of Mao Zedong's order to accelerate his country's
nuclear arms program in light of the military and diplomatic backing that both Washington and Moscow accorded Delhi during the Sino-Indian War.

On the Pakistani side, addressing his compatriots on September 7, Ayub Khan said, “[The earlier] Indian aggression in Kashmir was only a preparation for an attack on Pakistan. Indian rulers were never reconciled to the establishment of an independent Pakistan where the Muslims could build a homeland of their own. . . . But their defeat was imminent because the 100 million people of Pakistan whose hearts beat with the sound of ‘
La ilaha illallah, Muhammad ur rasul Allah
' [‘There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is messenger of Allah'] will not rest till India's guns are silenced.”
10

In the diplomatic arena, as soon as the Indians penetrated the Indo-Pakistan frontier, Ayub Khan and Bhutto appealed to Washington to honor the 1959 Pakistan-US Cooperation Agreement to assist their country in resisting Indian aggression. President Lyndon Johnson's administration pointed out that the concord referred to armed aggression from any country “controlled by international communism” and that India did not belong to that category.
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Johnson suspended military aid to both Delhi and Rawalpindi. That hurt Pakistan, solely dependent on Washington, more than India. (Britain followed suit.) Pakistan's appeal to the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) headquarters in Bangkok also failed because it was not a victim of communist aggression.

Patriotic Surge in Warring Nations

In Pakistan, patriotic emotion gripped the nation—from Karachi to Lahore to Dacca, with people attending huge rallies in support of the army. “Every Pakistani wanted to contribute,” recalled Mahmood Shaam, then a reporter with the Lahore-based daily
Nawa-e-Waqt
(Urdu: New Times).

Poets wrote nationalist poetry. The radio became the medium of the masses. Television was accessible only in Lahore. Popular singer Malika-e-Tarnoom (Queen of Melody) Nur Jahan went to the Lahore television station, requesting them to allow her to sing for Pakistan. . . . Outside the Lahore radio station a post box was kept in which people would submit patriotic poetry. . . . A poem I wrote for the Pakistan Air Force became very popular:
Yeh hawa ke rahion / Yeh badalon ke sathion / Harfan shan Mujahideen / Apni
jaan pe khel kar / Tum bane salamati
(Oh guides of the air / Oh companions of clouds / You glorious Mujahedin/Playing with your own life / You become robust). Rulers and opposition were united. . . . It was the first time we gave blood for our borders. From 1947 to 1965 . . . we were struggling to become a nation. But during the 1965 war all of us were one: Pakistanis. Hostility and enmity against India solidified.
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