[Reader-list] Kashmir Dispute, The Myth - Part VII

[Pawan Durani]

Kashmir Dispute, The Myth-VII



by MK Teng



Gandhi’s press statement administered a jolt to Maharaja Hari Singh.
Maharani Tara Devi favoured reconciliation with the Congress
leadership. She cautioned Hari Singh against the isolation into which
the State was sinking fast. It is a lesser known fact that the
Maharani tried to bridge the gulf between Hari Singh and the Indian
leaders.

Shortly after Gandhi left Kashmir Hari Singh removed Ram Chandra Kak
from his office and appointed General Janak Singh, one of his close
kin the Prime Minister of the state. Ram Chandra Kak headed the State
Government during the last years of the British Raj in India. Kak
served the Maharaja with unflinching loyalty and devotion. Kak
belonged to the Kashmiri Pandit community in Kashmir, which played a
pioneering role in the growth of national consciousness in the State.
While in office, Kak acted as an interface for the Maharaja with the
British as well the Muslim League, at a time, when the Princes were
struggling to place the State in between the British Crown and an
independent Indian nation. The political Department of the British
Govt. of India, with conrad corfield, a diehard British Civil Service
officer, as its head, spared no efforts to assure the Princes that the
British would not abandon the Princely India and would ensure the
continuity of the treaties between the States and the Crown. Like the
other Princes, Hari Singh was suddenly brought on the crossroads, when
India was divided and the British Paramountcy was withdrawn.

The British refused to continue the protection, the Paramountcy had
provided the States and the Muslim League claimed Jammu and Kashmir
for the Muslim State of Pakistan on the basis of the Muslim majority
of its population.

During the days, the future of the constitutional organization of
India was taking shape, Ram Chandra Kak was at the Centrestage of the
negotiations between the Princes, the British and the Indian leaders.
The Princes were not left with the choice to seek a place outside the
constitutional organization of the two successor Dominions of India
and Pakistan. The undersecretary of the State for India in the British
Government, clarified in the British Parliament, during the debate on
the Indian Independence Bill, that the British Government would not
recognize the States as the Dominions of the Commonwealth nor would
extend it recognition to their independence. Kak was no longer
relevant in the political context in which Jammu and Kashmir was left
with no choice except to join India, the option to accede to Pakistan
was not acceptable to Hari Singh or Kak.

Hari Singh turned away from the British, when he refused to abide by
the advice of the Viceroy of India tendered to him to come to terms
with Pakistan.

He earned the displeasure of the leaders of the Muslim League, when he
refused to grant permission to Mohammad Ali Jinnah to visit Jammu and
Kashmir, during the days, the transfer of power in India was in
process of completion. Jinnah sent several of his emissaries to
persuade Hari Singh to accede to Pakistan on conditions which he
specified. A second world war veteran Major General Shaukat Hayat
Khan, arrived in Kashmir with a peculiar proposal from him.

Khan met Hari Singh in his palace. He told the Maharaja that he had
been commissioned by Jinnah to convey to the Maharaja that he could
lay down any conditions that he chose, to accede to Pakistan and that
Pakistan would deposit a huge amount of money in British currency
worth hundreds of millions of Sterling Pounds, in the Bank of England,
as guarantee against any breach of the conditions laid down by him.

Hari Singh was slighted, but he did not lose his poise. He told
Shaukat Hayat that he would take a decision on the accession of the
State only in consideration of the interests of his subjects.

Naseeb Singh, an Army officer, of the Signal Corps, who was in
attendance on the Maharaja those days, told the author in an
interview: "I heard him (Shaukat Hayat) tell his aides, how strange of
the Maharaja it was to have turned down the offer. As he saw me
standing bye, he recoiled and fell silent". Thakur Kartar Singh, a
close kin of the Maharaja and a former Revenue Minister of the State,
told the author in an interview in Jammu. "His Highness was severely
intolerant of any suggestion about his relations with Pakistan.

He felt hurt by what happened around him. He had given a long rope to
Ramchandra Kak. He waited patiently, though that was not in his habit,
for an opportunity to save the State from going to Pakistan. Pakistan
pressurized him to agree to accede to that country, offering to accept
any number of conditions that he would lay to safeguard his interests.
But he "withstood all pressures".

Hari Singh offered a Standstill Agreement to India as well as Pakistan
for which the Indian States Department and the State Department of
Pakistan had provided the option. The Indian Government did not take
any action on the Standstill Agreement, though it extended the period
of accession by two months for both the States - Jammu and Kashmir as
well as Hyderabad. Hyderabad was the other Princely State, which did
not accede to the Indian Dominion by 15 August 1947.

That Pakistan had adopted a policy of confrontation with the State
Government was signaled by the formation of the Provisional Government
of 'Azad' Kashmir, by pro-Pakistan Muslim flanks and the cadres of the
Muslim Conference, at Trad Khel on 30 August 1947. Sardar Ibrahim Khan
founder of the Provisional Government of 'Azad' Kashmir, took the
salute of a contingent of armed volunteers of the Provisional
Government which march passed before him in a military formation. The
volunteers were armed with the rifles supplied to them from Pakistan.

Hari Singh proclaimed a general amnesty for all political prisoners
who were involved in the Quit Kashmir Movement and against whom
proceedings were in process in the courts of the state. Bakshi Ghulam
Mohammad, the Acting President of the National Conference, who had
taken refuge in the British India, during the Quit Kashmir Movement,
alongwith other leaders of the National Conference, arrived in
Srinagar on 12 September 1947. He received a tumultuous welcome, from
the people in Srinagar.

The leaders and cadres of the Conference who had gone underground, had
already begun to emerge from their underground quarters. Mohi-ud-Din
Qara the Head of the War Council, which had been constituted to direct
the Quit Kashmir Movement, came out of his underground quarters,
alongwith a number of his senior cadres. Among them was Onkar Nath
Trisal, a senior communist party activist, who later played a
memorable role in the defence of Srinagar, when the invading armies of
Pakistan were pouring into its outskirts. Mohi-ud-Din Qara addressed a
number of public meetings, where he impressed upon the people of the
necessity to maintain intercommunity peace and combat communalism and
subversion.

While the National Conference leaders and cadres set out to
reconstruct the organizational units of the National Conference, which
had been battered by the Quit Kashmir Movement, Pakistan launched a
surreptitious campaign in the State to unite the Muslims in support of
its accession to that country. The leaders and cadres of the Muslim
Conference and the sections of the Muslim community which were
ideologically committed to the Muslim struggle for Pakistan, though
they did not support the Muslim Conference, carried on the campaign
with the support of the widespread network of Pakistani agents, spies
and intelligence sleuths of the Government of Pakistan which operated
underground and in vast numbers, Muslim League cadres and other
political activists who had slipped into the state unnoticed.

The creation of Pakistan symbolized the realization of the desperation
of the Muslim Ummah in India and (a) religious obligation devolved on
the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir to support its accession to Pakistan
to consolidate the Muslim power (b) the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir
were part of the Muslim Umah and therefore were bound to Pakistan by
the bond of Islam; (c) any deviation from a commitment to the unity of
the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir would be an un-Islamic act. The
National Conference had spearheaded the Muslim struggle for liberation
from the Dogra Rule and now the only option for the leaders and
National Conference was to join the struggle for the unification of
the State with Pakistan (d) India and the Hindus who formed the main
resistance to the struggle for Pakistan, were trying their utmost to
scuttle the freedom of the Muslims in the Princely States, where the
Muslims were subject to severe repression and the ruler of the State
was waiting for an opportunity to join India, scuttle the freedom of
the Muslims and perpetuate his power (e) the Muslim struggle for
Pakistan was not against the Maharaja and the Muslims of the State had
assured him that they would recognize him as the constitutional head
of the State if he opted for Pakistan; (f) the National Conference and
its cadres and supporters would be accommodated in the Muslim
commonwealth of Pakistan on the basis of equality and brotherhood
enjoined by Islam upon all the Muslims irrespective of their language
and the region which they inhabited (g) any differences between the
National Conference leadership and the Muslim leadership of the people
of Pakistan could be settled mutually and (h) the Muslims of Jammu and
Kashmir had to stand united in the struggle for Pakistan in view of
the efforts the enemies of Islam were making in India to impair the
unity of the Muslims.

The police intelligence of the State reported that it had received
information about an underground cell, involved in the raising of a
militia, the Muslim Guard, to defend the struggle for Pakistan against
any police or military action the State Government resorted to. A
woman volunteer of Pakistan was charged with the tasks of recruitment
of local Muslim volunteers to the ranks of the Muslims guard. The
intelligence report about the Muslim Guard reached the State
Government and a summary of the report was sent to Hari Singh as well.
As usual, Hari Singh sent it to the State archives. But no action was
taken against the sabotage planned by the enemy agents to foment a
rebellion in the State, probably to coincide with the invasion of
State Pakistan was secretly planning.

The Indian leaders took little notice of the developments in the
State. The States’ Minister wrote a cryptic letter to Hari Singh,
imploring the Maharaja to bring all punitive measures against the
National Conference to an end, release the Conference leaders and
cadres from imprisonment and seek their cooperation to meet the
challenge the State was faced with.

On September 3, 1947, an intelligence signal was received in the Army
headquarters at Delhi, that armed infiltrators of Pakistan had raided
a border outpost, three miles inside the state territory. The signal
with the staggering import evoked response from the Indian Government.
The Indian leaders received information about the border raids and the
heavy damage to life and property the Hindus and the Sikhs suffered in
the border districts of the State. No voice was raised in India
against the depredation, the armed infiltrators spread in the border
districts of the State.



 - (To be continued)



Note: The Article, in this series are based upon documentary sources
in the Indian Archives, Archives of the Jammu and Kashmir State,
Sardar Patel Papers; documents and Papers in Sapru House Library,
Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, Contemporary Newspaper
Files and Interview.



Source: Kashmir Sentinel, a Panun Kashmir publication