Ghosts of Empire (19 page)

No one really knows how the disturbance started. It was reported in May that a mosque in Jammu Province had been demolished by Hindus, with the full approval of the Maharaja's government. Rumours swirled of other outrages. At another place in Jammu, it was alleged, Muslims had been prevented from saying their prayers. It was even whispered that pages of the Holy Koran had been found discarded in a public latrine.
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There was outrage in Srinagar when news of this broke. On 25 June, Abdul Qadeer, a firebrand who had come from the North West Frontier Province, which is now in Pakistan, gave a fiery speech, advocating violence against the Maharaja's rule; he pointed to the Maharaja's palace in Srinagar, which was within view of the crowd, and urged the demonstrators to ‘destroy its every brick'. He was arrested, but, as is often the case in such instances, his trial became a showpiece, drawing attention to the defendant's cause. On 6 July, a great assembly of Muslims gathered outside the law court, forcing suspension of the trial. The court proceedings were then moved to the Srinagar Central Jail. The next week, on the 13th, Abdul Qadeer's trial reopened. There was again a huge crowd, and
the police were present in strength; stones were thrown and the police responded with gunfire. By the end of the demonstration, twenty-two demonstrators had been killed. This day is known as Martyrs Day and is still celebrated in Pakistan and Kashmir. To the so-called Kashmiri freedom fighters the day marks the beginning of their struggle against Dogra and then Indian rule. In the immediate aftermath of the trial, the Muslim mob regrouped in the Hindu quarter of Srinagar and proceeded to wreak vengeance on the local shopkeepers. Hindus, as could be expected, retaliated and riots between followers of the two faiths broke out. The principal Muslim grievance was well known. In the bureaucracy, Hindus and Sikhs held 78 per cent of appointments, while Muslims held the rest, a proportion that was the exact reverse of the numbers of Muslims and non-Muslims in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, where, according to the census of 1931, Muslims made up nearly 80 per cent of the state's population.

Muslims complained that their share of state scholarships and places in government schools was the lowest of any of the three communities, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim. The cow-killing prohibition was also a source of resentment. The British were shaken by the communal violence which erupted in Kashmir in the 1930s. ‘Communalism' is a quaint term that was widely used in the 1930s to describe the sectarian violence that plagued the Indian subcontinent in the years preceding the independence and partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. On 2 November 1931, the British Resident, Sir Courtney Latimer, warned his superiors that communal rioting in Jammu was likely to break out ‘at any moment'; he also forecast a ‘widespread rebellion in Kashmir' unless the government of India took immediate steps. His attempts to calm the situation didn't work, as the next day, 3 November, the Muslims of Jammu started looting Hindu-owned shops. They attacked the police and set fire to public buildings. Hari Singh responded by telegraphing Simla, the summer residence of the Viceroy, with a request for British troops.

The request was readily granted, but the dispatch of British troops to Kashmir was a significant departure from the traditional policy of the British in India. Since the first decade of the twentieth century, the Raj had followed a consistent policy of non-intervention when it came to the
internal affairs of the larger princely states. The policy was prudent, as the British government wanted to rally the princes against the growing forces of Indian nationalism. Giving the princes more power over their states, it was felt, would ensure their loyalty and establish the princely families as a counterpoise to the more radical elements, who wanted the British to leave India for good. The British were caught between two stools. They did not want to alienate the well-to-do Muslim community in the Punjab in general, but neither could they neglect the interests of the princes. Meanwhile, more disturbances took place. A rural revolt spread rapidly throughout southern and western Jammu. There was injury and destruction, shops were looted and dozens of people were killed; over a hundred ‘low-caste Hindus' were forcibly converted to Islam.
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By January 1932, the Viceroy in Simla had authorized the dispatch of an additional brigade, about 5,000 troops, to Kashmir. In addition, a commission was set up to investigate ‘the grievances of Muslim and other subjects of His Highness the Maharaja of Kashmir'. The report of the Glancy Commission was broadly favourable to the Muslim community and it provoked the inevitable backlash, as irate Hindus protested that ‘the manner in which the Glancy Commission are injuring the Hindu religion' showed that the British would do anything to ‘root out Hinduism from the country'.
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The Muslim All-India Kashmir Committee nonetheless complained to the Viceroy about the ‘harsh and discriminating laws' against Muslims, about the relatively few Muslim lawyers in the state, and about the ‘harsh and inhuman' treatment of Muslim political prisoners in Kashmir's jails.
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The British continued to hide behind the figleaf of ‘non-intervention' which was restated in the Viceroy's bland reply. The government of India, the Raj, was ‘averse to putting pressure on States to accelerate the process and pace of reforms'.
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During this period, Sheikh Abdullah emerged as the voice of Muslim opinion. He was a constant thorn in the Maharaja's side and would be a key figure in Kashmiri politics until his death in 1982. Born in 1905, Abdullah had left Aligarh University with a science degree in 1930 and had settled in Srinagar as a teacher. Once installed in the capital of Kashmir, he threw himself into politics and by the following year was already recognized as a political leader. The events of 1931 defined his career as well as
that of the Maharaja. Abdullah, with his scientific, rationalist background, was a committed nationalist even before he was a Muslim. Like many of the leaders of colonial independence struggles, he was attracted by the twin gods of socialism and secularism. In 1931, however, he used the latent power of religious enthusiasm to whip up an agitated crowd.
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It was then that he realized that ‘the Muslim masses appeared to respond to Islamic appeals and Islamic leaders to a far greater degree' than to secular causes.
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Religion, despite the best attempts of the Indian Congress, under Gandhi and Nehru, was a dominant, and potentially toxic, factor in the affairs of the subcontinent. The harsh fact was that India was in the process of being ‘divided on communal grounds'.
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As early as December 1930, Sir Muhammad Iqbal delivered a speech at the Allahabad Session of the All-India Muslim League, in which he had declared that ‘communalism' was ‘indispensable to the formation of a harmonious whole in a country like India'. India, he argued, was a ‘continent of human groups belonging to different races and speaking different languages and professing different religions'. This diversity meant that each group had to have its own jurisdiction; ‘European democracy' would not work in India without recognizing the fact of ‘communal groups'. The ‘Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within India' was, Iqbal believed, ‘perfectly justified'.
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Religious and ethnic tensions bedevilled British India during the 1930s, and in this febrile atmosphere Kashmir proved to be a focal point for strife. The theme of difference, of Muslim and Hindu incompatibility, was a rallying cry for any Muslims who yearned for their own homeland throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The extreme Muslim view was widely aired in the years immediately preceding the fateful year of independence in 1947. Between Hindu and Muslim, according to extreme Muslim opinion, there was a difference of ‘law and of culture', because the two faiths represented ‘two distinct and separate civilizations'.
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Even Sheikh Abdullah, who ended up throwing in his lot with India, mainly because of his secular nationalism and personal friendship with Nehru, had difficulty appreciating the strength of religious feeling among the Muslims of Kashmir. In the midst of these powerful forces, the Maharaja, Hari Singh, was lost, and incapable of providing the leadership that the crisis demanded.

According to his son, the Maharaja ‘was not able to grasp the historical dimensions of the changes that were around the corner'.
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Hari Singh had started his reign attempting to heal the divisions between Hindu and Muslim and, in January 1926, only four months after succeeding his uncle, he had proudly declared that, as a ruler, he had ‘no religion; all religions are mine and my religion is Justice'.
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It was unfortunate that, as his reign unfolded, he came to be more and more identified with the Hindu domination of his state. He was a Hindu monarch, and that was all people could see. The Muslim delegation from Kashmir which had petitioned the Viceroy at the beginning of 1932 had told him that it was ‘natural that the rulers of the state should be anxious to maintain its monopoly in the administration'. Those rulers were Hindu. The Maharaja was at the top of that state. Hari Singh, despite his claims to impartiality, when caught between the two extremes of Hindu chauvinism and Islamic fanaticism, sided with the Hindus. In 1931, he had to issue a staunch denial that he intended to revoke the prohibition on the killing of cows. On 9 July that year, shortly before the infamous shootings of the 13th, he declared in a proclamation that the ‘malicious rumour now being spread that cow killing is shortly going to be permitted' had ‘no foundation whatever'. There was ‘no question whatever of making any change in the matter'.
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While the Maharaja was being identified purely as a Hindu ruler by his Muslim subjects, the communal forces which eventually created Pakistan were becoming more insistent and powerful. The Muslim League, in its annual session at Lahore in 1940, established the principle that ‘geographically contiguous areas' of the subcontinent ‘in which the Muslims were numerically in a majority should be grouped to form “independent states”'. Seven years later, this demand was reluctantly conceded by both the British and the Indian Congress Party when the state of Pakistan was born.
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On this basis, Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan: no one could deny that it was ‘geographically contiguous' to other states in Pakistan; no one could claim that it did not have a Muslim majority; and yet none of this made any impression on the somewhat bewildered and frightened Maharaja.

In his mind the ideal situation would have been independence. There is a body of evidence to suggest that the Maharaja had, by the 1940s, become
increasingly detached from reality. His uncle, Pratap, had assembled a motley collection of Hindu swamis, gurus, astrologers and assorted holy men round his court whom Hari Singh had for twenty years banished from his presence. Now, in 1944, he summoned back one of the most influential and charismatic of these men, Swami Sant Dev, a mystic who had enjoyed high prestige in the reign of the Maharaja's uncle. Hari Singh restored his allowance and, from May 1946 until October 1947, the Swami was always in residence in various houses within the palace compound in Srinagar. The Maharaja had turned, in the sunset of the Raj, to Hindu mysticism, under whose influence he believed he could build a new kingdom once the British had departed. Some called this fantastical kingdom ‘Dogistan', which would, Hari Singh hoped, rekindle the glory of his royal house. This absurd fantasy was nursed by the Swami. The Prime Minister, a Brahmin named Pandit Kak, told the Maharaja frankly that it was a ‘futile and impractical' idea, since the nationalism which was pushing out the British would not allow the princes of India to retain their former power. The Maharaja pressed on with his grandiose scheme, though he never forgave or forgot the impertinence of his prime minister. He had already ‘at great cost' prepared a new crown of diamonds and emeralds for his coronation as ruler of this new kingdom.
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He still cut a dashing figure. Though fat, he had a regal style about him. On a visit to Kashmir in 1945, he and his wife dazzled the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, who had been impressed by what he saw as the Maharaja's ‘liberal-minded' attitude. Wavell was especially taken with Tara Devi: ‘I quite fell for the Maharani who is attractive and has obviously a good deal of character. Her jewels must be seen to be believed; she wore a fresh set every day we were there.'
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Wavell stayed more than a week.

As independence drew nearer, the fate of Kashmir was still unclear. It had been decided that independence would be granted to India on 15 August 1947. Under the Government of India Act 1935, it was the maharajas and nawabs, the rulers of the princely states, who would decide which country they would accede to. Still the Maharaja of Kashmir had not decided, and it was at this point that Lord Mountbatten, who had replaced Wavell as viceroy in April 1947, made an interesting intervention. In the Pakistani demonology of the tragedy of Partition and the
communal violence which followed, Mountbatten plays a special role. Several historians have detected in him a pro-Indian bias, from which the subsequent tragedy of Kashmir is believed to flow. It is true that Mountbatten got on well with Nehru, whom ‘he both admired and trusted'.
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It is also true that Nehru had a very close relationship with Mountbatten's wife, Edwina, to whom Nehru later wrote that ‘some uncontrollable force, of which I was only dimly aware, drew us to one another'. A Mountbatten biographer has even opined on the precise nature of the relationship, airily declaring that if ‘there was any physical element it can only have been of minor importance to either party'.
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Whatever the nature of that relationship, the closeness of the Mountbattens to Nehru is well known. Historians have therefore assumed that Mountbatten was on India's side during the Kashmir conflict from the outset. ‘The key to understanding Mountbatten's stance over Kashmir . . . was his anti-Pakistan bias,' wrote Andrew Roberts in his acclaimed book,
Eminent Churchillians
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The documentary evidence presents a less clear picture. When Mountbatten visited Kashmir at the end of June 1947, it was to urge the kingdom's accession to Pakistan. He advised Pandit Kak, the Maharaja's beleaguered Prime Minister and, like Nehru, a Kashmiri Brahmin, to ‘consider your geographical position, political situation and composition of your population and then decide'. ‘That means that you advise us to accede to Pakistan. It is not possible for us to do that,' the Kashmiri replied.
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