Jammu and Kashmir: In the Shadow of Imperialism Home
Maharaj K. Kaul
[Taken from Essays in Inequality and Social Justice (Essays in honor of Ved Prakash Vatuk), Edited by Kira Hall, Archana Publications, Meerut, India, 2009]
REVISITING 1947
The appointment of E. J. Colvin as the Prime Minister of the State in 1932 was welcomed by Abdullah since he saw it as an indication of continued support for his activities. But Abdullah failed to realize that he had only been a tool for British hands and that his utility was to end with Colvin’s appointment. When the British subsequently abandoned him, Abdullah found it difficult to compete with other communalist contenders who were vying for leadership of the state’s Muslims. His tactics of making inflammatory communalist speeches, which had earlier catapulted him into a leadership role, now evoked a strong punitive response from Colvin. For the next few years, he found himself in a kind of political wilderness. But in 1935, Abdullah met with Congress leaders and subsequently teamed up with Prem Nath Bazaz, a politically prominent Kashmiri Hindu. Abdullah began to experiment with secular politics, presenting his new ideas at the 1938 annual session of the Muslim Conference, a communal party he had founded in 1932. A year later, the Muslim Conference was renamed the National Conference and opened its membership to all, regardless of religious persuasion.2 
The National Conference became a genuine mass party after Kashmiri communists joined it in 1942. It announced a revolutionary New Kashmir Program, which the party formally adopted at its annual session in 1944. The program was highlighted by three charters: one for workers, one for peasants, and one for women. Abdullah, in his introduction to the New Kashmir Program, wrote:
The first step towards equality was to come from the revolutionary land reforms and cancellation of usurious rural debt that had become the hallmark of National Conference politics during its early years. The program found an admiring supporter in Jawaharlal Nehru and other progressive members of the Congress Party; Jinnah and his feudal and pro-imperialist Muslim League were openly opposed to it. It was this program that endeared the National Conference to the people of Jammu and Kashmir. For this simple reason, the two-nation theory found its graveyard in Kashmir Valley, despite the preponderance of Muslims there.
The Valley’s overwhelming support for the National Conference and its fraternal Indian National Congress was evident in their response to the 1947 Pakistan-sponsored invasion of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan had been making sporadic military forays into the state during the months of September and October. Finally, Pakistan-assisted raiders launched a large-scale invasion on October 22, 1947. The raiders proceeded with lightening speed towards Srinagar, after looting and pillaging Muzaffarabad, Rajouri, Poonch, and Baramulla. In a matter of days, they killed thousands of civilians, as well as raped and kidnapped hundreds of women. N. N. Raina, a Kashmiri Communist Party of India activist working with the National Conference and witness to the events of 1947, recounts the response of the Kashmiris to the raid in his book Kashmir Politics and Imperialist Manoeuvres:
The invasion did come as expected and was followed by fast-moving events. On October 22, the raiders entered Kashmir at Garhi on the border with Pakistan and quickly advanced to Uri, wiping out 4 Jammu and Kashmir Rifles at Domel and a Medium Machine Gun Dogra picket north of Muzaffarabad. The state forces, spread over the long border with Pakistan, were stretched thin. Brigadier Rajinder Singh, the Officiating Chief of Staff of state forces, assembled a group of 150 men who faced 4,000 raiders at Uri. He held the raiders at Uri until October 24. That night his depleted forces withdrew to Mahora but successfully held their positions for two more days. On the night of October 26, they withdrew towards Rampur then to Baramulla, fighting and stalling the raiders until all of them were killed.
The raiders sacked Baramulla on October 26. Robert Trumbell, the New York Times correspondent who visited the town after the raiders were driven out by the Indian Army, issued the following report on November 10, 1947:
Two days preceding the Baramulla raid, a desperate appeal had been received in New Delhi from state authorities. Abdullah fled to Delhi with his family on October 25 and appealed to Mahatma Gandhi to send Indian troops to Kashmir. The next day the Defense Committee of India met and considered the response to the Pakistan-sponsored invasion of Kashmir. V. P. Menon was dispatched that night to Srinagar to give his assessment of the situation. He flew back out of Srinagar Airport in the early morning hours of October 26, 1947, with no night facilities. The people who held pine torches to light the runway were the senior leaders of the National Conference: Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq, Syed Mir Qasim, and D. P. Dhar (Jha 1998:Appendix I).
On October 26th, the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession to India, and India promptly dispatched its first contingent of troops under the command of Lt. Col. D. R. Rai to Srinagar. Considering the immediacy of the threat to Srinagar, the 200-mile road link from Jammu to Srinagar could not be relied upon for a timely response. The road passed through a tunnel at 9,000 feet elevation through the Banihal Pass in the Pir Panjal mountain range, which receives about thirty feet of snow in the winter and was at that time almost impassable. The troops had thus to be flown into Srinager on October 27th.
The National Conference took over the de facto administration of the state and organized a 10,000-person Kashmiri Peace Brigade in Srinagar to stall the invasion, prevent infiltration, and protect critical installations. Mohalla (neighborhood) committees were organized in Srinagar, night patrols were put into place, and all night one could hear their slogan:
“Hamla Awar Khabardar, Hum Kashmiri Hain Tayyar”
(Beware the invader, we Kashmiris are ready [to fight]).
In the meantime, in Baramulla, a thirty-five year old National Conference activist Mir Maqbool Sherwani
That was November 7th. The next day Baramullah was liberated. When the first squadron of armored cars reached Srinagar by the 200-mile perilous road through Banihal Pass on November 5, 1947, there was jubilation in Srinagar. The whole convoy route in Srinagar was lined with cheering crowds waving the Indian tricolor flag.
The brutality of the Pakistani hordes in Kashmir Valley was surpassed in the Jammu region. Rajauri, liberated by Indian troops in mid-April 1948, suffered much more than what Baramulla experienced in the Valley. A town of only 15,000 people, Rajauri had fallen to the raiders in November 1947 and experienced its first massacre then. Pakistan held the town for about six months, until Indian troops liberated it on April 12, 1948.
Indian troops rescued about 1200 to 1500 refugees, about 500 of whom had been lined up to be shot. The troops found three gaping pits full of corpses, each fifty square yards in area and fifteen feet deep. More mass graves were later discovered by patrols. Many women had been kidnapped, and some had even committed suicide rather than be captured. The town had been decimated.
The invasion had been planned at the highest levels of the Pakistan government. One of the participants in its planning and organization, Akbar Khan, details the conspiracy in his 1970 book Raiders in Kashmir:
The massacres, rapes, and kidnappings in which these Pakistani hordes engaged definitively earned Akbar Khan a place in this “distinguished galley of personalities,” along with the military he represented and his civilian superiors, all the way to up to Liaqat Ali Khan and Jinnah. The first two names alone in this gallery—Chingiz Khan and Timur Lang—account for the slaughter of “around 30,000,000 Persian, Arab, Hindu, Russian, Chinese, European, and other men women and children” (Rummel 1994).
Pakistan was to repeat what Khan identifies as its “highly developed branch of the art of war” later in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971, where according to some estimates as many as 3 million people were slaughtered and over 10 million terrorized into neighboring India. In the 1980s, it was Afghanistan’s turn. In a decade-long fundamentalist war in Afghanistan, 2 million were killed and 6 million turned into refugees. In the 1990s, it was again Kashmir, with a death toll of 40,000 and rising as the Pakistan-sponsored jehad continues there, claiming new victims every day.
In our times, Soviet Russia has demonstrated before our own eyes, not merely theoretically, but in her actual day to day life and development, that real freedom takes birth only from economic emancipation. The inspiring picture of the regeneration of the different nationalities and peoples of the U.S.S.R., and their welding together into the united mighty Soviet state that is throwing back its barbarous invaders with deathless heroism is an unanswerable argument for the building of democracy on the cornerstone of economic equality. (Abdullah 1944, cited in Saxena 1975:401)
The invasion did not come as a complete surprise to the National Conference leadership, nor did they fumble for ideas, or get shell-shocked by its suddenness. In fact the reactionary purpose of the Mountbatten Award, its disruptive consequences for the people’s movement, were nowhere grasped with greater clarity, even by the rank and file workers, than in Kashmir because of the political experience gained, almost as soon as the Partition Plan was announced, and also it being the central arena of imperialist conspiracy against the people’s liberation.
The movement had been under pressure since the communal riots of March 1946 in Punjab, and they did their best to hold the virus on the other side of the border, and successfully prevented its crossing the border. …
As the riots spread in mid-August, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh refugees from Sialkote, Rajauri, Mirpur, Muzzaffarabad, Rawalpindi and Hazara – all found haven in Kashmir. By the time the invasion came in October 1947, there were some 23,000 of them in this oasis of communal peace in a raging hell-fire all around it. …
Meanwhile some influential refugees from the NWFP with close personal contacts among the Pathan elite, reached Srinagar in the second week of October. They had personal knowledge that Khan Bahadur Kuli Khan had been recruiting tribes in the Swat Valley for invasion of Kashmir. The communist group in the National Conference issued a handbill on the 14th or 15th of October warning that an invasion was being planned to take place before the onset of winter. (Raina 1988:150-151)
The city had been stripped of its wealth and young women before the tribesmen fled in terror, at midnight Friday, before the advancing Indian army. Surviving residents estimate that 3,000 of their fellow townsmen including four Europeans and a retired British Army Officer, known only as Colonel Dykes, and his pregnant wife, were slain. … A former town official said: ‘the raiders forced 350 local Hindus into a house, with the intention of burning it down. The group of 100 raiders is said to be holding another five as hostages, on a high mountain, barely visible from the town. Today 24 hours after the Indian army entered Baramulla, only 1,000 were left of a normal population of about 14,000. (Trumbell 1947, cited in Brecher 1953:28)
Over a hundred civilian aircraft were immediately mobilized to fly troops, equipment and supplies to Srinagar. … The ferry service to Srinagar continued unabated up to November 17, during which time 704 sorties were flown from Delhi.
Seldom in the history of warfare has an operation been put through with no previous planning and with many handicaps, not the least of which were almost non-existent lines of communications and a complete lack of intelligence of enemy dispositions.
There was widespread jubilation among the citizens of Srinagar and the inhabitants of neighboring towns and villages. For five anxious days they had carried on the normal life, kept the essential services going, and maintained a strict discipline. Their morale was high, they did not give way to panic, and they organized bands of volunteers to maintain law and order and keep a strict watch on strategic points. For five days they faced manfully the alarming reports of the raiders’ advance and their eyes were constantly cast to the skies in the hope of seeing the first Indian plane coming with sorely needed help and relief. They had collected all motor-vehicles and kept them ready to carry the first troops to the front. Local drivers were at the wheels ready to risk their lives in defending their land. (Bamzai 1962:682)
began working behind the lines, keeping up the morale of the besieged villages, urging them to resist and to stick together regardless of whether they were Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, assuring them that the help from Indian Army and People’s Militia was on the way. Three times by skillfully planting rumours he decoyed bands of tribesmen and got them surrounded and captured by the Indian infantry. But the fourth time he was captured himself.
The tribesmen took Sherwani to the stoop of a little apple shop in the town square of Baramula, and the terrified townspeople were driven into the square in front of him with the butts of rifles. Knowing Sherwani’s popularity with the people, his captors ordered him to make a public announcement that joining Pakistan was the best solution for Muslims. When he refused, he was lashed to the porch posts with ropes, his arms spread out in the shape of a cross, and he was told he must shout, “Pakistan zindabad: Sher-i-Kashmir [Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah] murdabad.”
It was a curious thing that the tribesmen did next. I don’t know why these savage nomads should have thought of such a thing, unless their sight of the sacred figures in St. Joseph’s Chapel on the hill just above had suggested it to them. They drove nails through the palms of Sherwani’s hands. On his forehead they pressed a jagged piece of tin and wrote on it: “The punishment of a traitor is death.
Once more Sherwani cried out, “Victory to Hindu-Muslim unity,” and fourteen tribesmen shot bullets into his body. (Bourke-White 1949:210-211)
The atrocities committed by the hostiles in Rajauri put Baramula in the shade. Our troops expected a warm welcome from 5,000 refugees as well as local inhabitants. When they entered the town, they were appalled by an eerie silence. Rajauri was a city of the dead and dying.
Before the hostiles departed, they had carried out a general massacre of the non-Muslim population. Heaps of rubble, mass graves and decomposing corpses told the tale. So did the sword and the hatchet wounds and burns on the person of the survivors, who slowly trickled back to their destroyed homes.
Of the 600 houses in town, half had been destroyed, some by fire and others by picks and shovels. In the bazaar, all that was left were a few pots and pans and some cooked chappaties left behind by the raiders in their haste to get out. This was the second massacre that Rajouri had witnessed. The first was staged when the raiders entered the town in flush of victory. (Bamzai 1962:690)
Nehru called us raiders. He did so in a derogatory sense. But what he did not know that raiding is, nowadays, an accepted and very highly developed branch of the art of war. … So we can, I think, without indignity, retain the name raiders. …Besides, as raiders, we may perhaps also qualify for sitting in that distinguished gallery of personalities like Chingiz Khan, Timur Lang, Mahmud of Ghazni, and even Alexander, whom some historians called raiders. (Khan 1970:Preface)
