The Longest August (62 page)

The moral is that if Pakistan and India were to follow the example of China and India, they would both gain materially. Thriving commerce may well bring about the end to the Longest August between the two neighbors by helping to create mutual prosperity underpinned by continued peaceful coexistence. This would require putting the Kashmir issue on the back burner the way Beijing and Delhi did with their border dispute and focusing on forging strong economic links.

20: Overview and Conclusions

India and Pakistan, born as twins in August 1947, are now respectively the second and the sixth most populous nations on the planet. They also belong to the exclusive nine-member nuclear arms club. In terms of GDP estimates based on purchasing power parity, India is number three after the United States and China. And it has the distinction of being the world's largest democracy. These facts underscore the importance of its relations with its neighbor, Pakistan, which also shares borders with China, Afghanistan, and Iran. Twice, between 1999 and 2002, India and Pakistan came close to a nuclear confrontation.

The partition of the Indian subcontinent was the culmination of a process that started when Afghanistan-based Muhammad Ghori, commanding an army of Afghans, Arabs, Persians, and Turks, gained control of the Indus Valley basin in 1188. Four years later he defeated Prithvi Raj in the Second Battle of Terrain, paving the way for his leading general, Qutbuddin Aibak, to annex Delhi. Out of this was born the Delhi Sultanate. It lasted until 1526, when it gave way to the Mughal Dynasty, which ended in 1807. What distinguished the Afghans and Mughals from the earlier invader-conquerors of the subcontinent was that they were the followers of Islam. Their beliefs and religious practices clashed with those of the indigenous Hindus.

The rise of the British Empire on the ashes of the Mughal Dynasty put both the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority under the common yoke of a foreign power with its home base in distant Britain, a Christian country. While the Muslim elite's loss of power left it sulking,
upper-caste Hindus adjusted readily, switching from learning Persian to English to help the new rulers administer the subcontinent.

Preeminent among those Muslim aristocrats who accepted the unpalatable reality was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who urged his coreligionists to learn English. He also understood the importance of nationalism, a nineteenth-century construct originating in Europe. According to him, Muslims in India were a nation, and so were Hindus.

Within a few years of the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, calling for an increased role in the government by Indians, Sir Syed foresaw its modest demand escalating to a campaign to expel the British from India. “Is it possible that under these circumstances [of British withdrawal] two nations—the Mohammedans and the Hindus—could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power?” he asked rhetorically in 1888.
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His argument was flawed. It failed to recognize that universal suffrage in an independent India would deprive the minority Muslims of being “equal in power.” This is the point Muhammad Ali Jinnah articulated four decades later. Alluding to the historical oppression of minorities by majorities, he demanded legal safeguards for the Muslim minority in his address to the Congress session in 1928. He pleaded that Muslims, forming a quarter of the population, should be allocated a third of political power. The overwhelmingly Hindu leadership of the Congress prepared to concede only 27 percent. This was the first of the landmark events that led to the division of the subcontinent.

The Congress Party's Blunders

The next such event occurred in 1937. After the Muslim League had won two-thirds of the Muslim seats in the Bombay legislature and two-fifths in United Provinces', Jinnah offered the League a partnership with the Congress. But Vallabhbhai Patel, who controlled the party machine, demanded the merger of League legislators with the Congress before any of them could be appointed minister. The haughty behavior of Congress officials made even neutral Muslim leaders suspicious of their real intentions toward Muslims.

Leaving aside the exceptional case of the small, Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province, the Congress won an average of one Muslim seat in each of the ten provinces. With practically no Muslim
lawmakers on its benches, the Congress ruled six provinces. This made non-League Muslim legislators realize that the Congress would exercise power on the basis of a majority in the general (Hindu) constituencies. Non–Muslim League leaders started collaborating with the League.

The performance of the Congress ministries provided examples of insensitivity toward Muslims' beliefs and feelings. Congregational singing of “Vande Mataram” (Sanskrit: I bow to Mother) as part of the official protocol in schools, colleges, and elsewhere was one. According to Rabindranath Tagore, a nationalist poet and philosopher, the core of “Vande Mataram” was a hymn to the goddess Durga. In Islam, deifying or worshiping anyone or anything other than the One and Only (unseen) God constitutes idolatry and is forbidden.

The two-year-plus rule of the Congress gave Muslims a foretaste of what to expect in an independent India. Support for the Muslim League grew rapidly. In the 1945–1946 elections, it garnered all 30 Muslim places in the Central Legislative Assembly, securing 87 percent of the Muslim vote. In the provincial legislatures its size quadrupled to 425 out of 485 Muslim seats.
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By then the League's resolution asserting that Muslims were “a nation by any definition,” and that the Muslim-majority areas in the northwestern and eastern zones of India, “should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units will be autonomous and sovereign,”
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was six years old.

More significantly, the term “Pakistan” had become irresistibly attractive to Muslims of all classes and persuasions. Orthodox Muslims envisaged a Muslim state run according to the Sharia. Muslim landlords felt assured of the continuation of the
zamindari
(landlord) system, which the Congress had vowed to abolish. Muslim businessmen savored the prospect of fresh markets in Pakistan free from Hindu competition. Civil servants foresaw rapid promotion in the fledgling state. These perceptions among Muslims grew in an environment in which Hindus were much better off economically than Muslims.

Astonishingly, there was a singular lack of perception among Congress leaders of the economic factors bolstering the League's appeal. Jawaharlal Nehru made passing remarks about peasants, whether Muslim or Hindu, suffering at the hands of landlords. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi failed to grasp that it was that section of the Muslim population that felt it could not compete with Hindus in getting government jobs and in commerce and industry that backed the League.

On the political front, what made partition inevitable was Nehru's boastful declaration on July 8, 1947, about Britain's Constitutional Award of May 16. It envisaged united India with a constituent assembly, elected by existing provincial legislatures, convening briefly in Delhi, and then dividing into Sections A (Hindu majority), B (Muslim-majority, northwestern region), and C (Muslim-majority, Bengal-Assam) to frame a constitution for three subfederations into which federal, independent India was to be divided. Nehru announced that the Congress had agreed to participate in the Constituent Assembly and, once convened, the Assembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award's provisions, if it so wished, and that the grouping scheme would most likely not survive. This led Jinnah to withdraw the League's acceptance of the Constitutional Award.

The savage butchery that Muslims and non-Muslims—Hindus and Sikhs—perpetrated on one another in Punjab left five hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand people dead and caused the largest mass exodus in history. When communal frenzy gripped Delhi, with Muslims bearing the brunt, Nehru stuck firmly to his secular beliefs, while Patel and Rajendra Prasad disapproved of the Indian army protecting Muslim citizens.

Moreover Patel and his cohorts in Nehru's government were hell-bent on strangling Pakistan at birth. Jinnah complained about this to British prime minister Clement Attlee and vowed that the Dominion of Pakistan would “never surrender.” Despite his failing health, he helped the incipient Pakistan, composed of two wings separated by a thousand miles, to find its infant feet.

Jinnah Fails to Woo the Maharaja

While acting as the chief executive of Pakistan, Jinnah dealt directly with the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan and the princely states. He realized that failure to persuade the Hindu Maharaja Sir Hari Singh of the predominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir to accede to Pakistan would be a severe blow to his two-nation theory. An opponent of Jinnah's thesis, the maharaja rebuffed his friendly approaches.

Jinnah then assigned the Kashmir portfolio to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. He complemented his strategy of taking charge of the Azad Army formed independently by Kashmiri Muslims with a plan to
secure Srinagar by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas. He informed Jinnah of the first track but not the second.

When the invasion of the tribal irregulars led to the airlifting of Indian troops to Srinagar in October 1947, following the maharaja's accession to India, Jinnah was distraught. His unease increased when Pakistan's commander in chief General Sir Frank Messervy refused to obey his order to deploy Pakistani troops. Sir Frank argued that implementing Governor-General Jinnah's order would result in British officers commanding their respective Indian and Pakistani contingents in a fight against each other.

Jinnah's dream of incorporating all of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan withered, accelerating his physical decline. He died in harness only a year after the birth of Pakistan.

The outbreak of war with India in Kashmir within months of Pakistan's inception gave its military a primacy it has maintained since then, monopolizing the drafting and implementation of national security policies after the assassination of Ali Khan in October 1951. With his death the nation lost the remaining cofounder of Pakistan. The Muslim League started to unravel, while differences between the eastern and western wings sharpened on the status of Bengali, the mother tongue of the majority of Pakistani citizens. Urdu remained the sole official language. The ongoing squabbling between politicians led to the seizure of power by General Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1958.

This highlighted the contrasting development of Pakistan and India, where two general elections held under a republican constitution and universal suffrage returned the Congress to power, with Nehru as prime minister and foreign minister. His policy of nonalignment with the power blocs contrasted with Pakistan's alignment with the United States. Pakistan acquired the distinction of being a member of the anticommunist South-East Asia Treaty Organization as well as the Central Treaty Organization.

As head of a stable military administration in Pakistan, Ayub Khan was able to reach a deal on the distribution of Indus waters once the World Bank persuaded the United States and Britain, along with Australia and New Zealand, to finance the construction of canals and storage facilities in India to transfer water from the eastern Indian rivers to West Pakistan.

Arriving at an enthusiastic reception in the Pakistani capital of Karachi in September 1960, Nehru cosigned the Indus Waters Treaty with Ayub
Khan. The successful conclusion to a long-running economic dispute encouraged Ayub Khan to broach the subject of Kashmir. But when, in the Presidential Lodge in scenic Murree, he initiated a conversation on the subject, Nehru turned his eyes away, toward the stunning scenery. He concluded the session by stating that any change in the status quo would face serious domestic opposition, and referred to the violent public reaction to China's occupation of India's territory.

Nehru's Tussle with China

By then China had become an integral element in the Indo-Pakistan equation because of its occupation of a part of Kashmir, as alleged by Delhi. Nehru raised the issue with Ayub Khan of Pakistan's boundary with China. He told Nehru that they did not claim any area not covered by the actual Line of Control, as determined by their experts. On his return to Delhi, Nehru criticized Pakistan for having approached the Chinese to demarcate the border.

Nehru was suffused with self-righteousness. This attitude had its merits when it came to sticking to such progressive concepts as secularism and democracy in India, where he enjoyed unrivaled mass popularity. But it was ill suited to diplomacy, where give and take is the universally accepted currency. This became apparent in his dealings with Pakistan on Kashmir and then with China on the border issue. Some analysts attributed self-righteousness to Nehru's Brahminical lineage. Brahmins had claimed and exercised monopoly over knowledge in the caste-ridden Hindu society.

To resolve the border dispute through negotiations, China's premier Zhou Enlai suggested to Nehru that their troops should retreat for twelve miles from the border. Nehru rejected the proposal. Nonetheless, China unilaterally pulled back its soldiers for twelve miles. India interpreted this as China's weakness. It occupied 1,540 square miles of Chinese territory and set up sixty forward posts, forty-three of them north of the McMahon Line in the eastern sector. On September 11, 1962, Delhi permitted all forward posts and patrols to fire on any armed Chinese who entered India's claimed territory. This was tantamount to a declaration of war.

On October 18, Chairman Mao Zedong addressed the Politburo of the Communist Party of China on this subject. “Now that Nehru is determined to fight us, we have no way out but to keep him company,” he
said. “However, our counter-attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means.”
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The second part of Mao's statement proved to be the key to understand why at midnight on November 20, having established its superiority in weaponry, strategy, communications, logistics, and planning in the month-long war, China declared a unilateral cease-fire, and added that after their withdrawal, the Chinese frontier guards would be far behind their positions held prior to September 8, 1962.

As wars go, this was a minor affair in which neither side deployed its air force. But it opened a new chapter in India's foreign policy and relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. These superpowers set aside their rivalry and backed India, treating Communist China as their common foe. This radical realignment affected Indo-Pakistan relations. The pro-Washington Pakistan was alarmed and angered to see India being armed heavily by the United States as well as Britain—both of which had persuaded Ayub Khan not to open a battlefront against India in Kashmir or elsewhere on its western frontier during the Sino-Indian War.