Kashmir: the only unfinished business of partition

By Kaleem Omar

Pakistan has urged the new Congress-led coalition government in New Delhi to stick to the January 6, 2004, joint statement of President Pervez Musharraf and then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee about the “resolution of all issues between them, including Jammuu and Kashmir, to the satisfaction of both sides” and the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
India, meanwhile, has urged Pakistan to “avoid controversy” ahead of a meeting of their foreign secretaries later this month. It has also denied that its new government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was stressing the Simla Agreement of 1972 as the basis of future talks between the two sides, to the exclusion of other subsequent agreements with Islamabad.
Meanwhile, the very low voter turnout in Indian-occupied Kashmir in India’s April/May national election has once again given the lie to New Delhi’s oft-repeated claim that the Muslims of occupied Kashmir – who comprise the overwhelming majority of the state’s population – want to be “a part of India.” Nothing could be further from the truth, as even New Delhi knows only too well. Hence, its persistent refusal to agree to hold a plebiscite in occupied Kashmir.
New Delhi knows that if a free and fair plebiscite were held under UN auspices, the majority of the Muslim population of the state would vote to join Pakistan. The so-called “third option” – an independent Jammu and Kashmir – is not really a practical option at all. It is more of a tactical device that the Indian government itself began secretly promoting in the 1970s in an effort to divert attention from New Delhi reneging on its solemn pledge to hold a plebiscite in the state.
Not that India has ever had any intention of actually giving occupied Kashmir its independence even if that turned out be the option Kashmiris voted for. From India’s standpoint, however, talk of a “third option” made for a useful red herring that could help sow doubts among Pakistanis about what the people of Kashmir really wanted, and that Islamabad might, as a result, be more amenable to letting the status quo in occupied Kashmir continue indefinitely.
Kashmir remains the only unfinished business of partition. The bottom line in the partition formula was that all the Hindu majority provinces of British India would become part of independent India and all the Muslim majority provinces would become part of the new state of Pakistan.
The only exceptions to this formula were the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, which had clearly defined Hindu and Muslim majority areas (and also a large Sikh population in Punjab’s case) and which, it was, therefore, agreed, would be partitioned, with East Punjab and West Bengal going to India, and West Punjab and East Pakistan becoming part of Pakistan.
The fact that the Radcliffe Boundary Commission Award gave some Muslim-majority areas of Punjab, in particular the key Gurdaspur District, to India instead of Pakistan, is another story. That story has less to do with the validity of India’s dubious claim to Gurdaspur and more to do with the fact that Lord Mounbatten, the last viceroy of British India, connived with Jawaharlal Nehru to influence Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the head of the Boundary Commission, to change the Boundary Award at the last minute in India’s favour by altering the Zera line and giving the Gurdaspur District to India, thus providing it with a land route to Kashmir.
This collusion was confirmed by no less a person than Christopher Beaumont, secretary to the Boundary Commission, who, in a lengthy interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph in 1992, said that Mountbatten had invited Radcliffe to lunch at the Viceroy’s Lodge two days before the Award was due to be announced and had persuaded him to change the Zera line in India’s favour. Beaumont said Radcliffe had come back to his residential quarters after the lunch looking “very disturbed” and that the same night the Zera line on the Boundary Award map had been changed.
Under the partition formula, the 550 or so princely states of British India, including Jammu and Kashmir, were theoretically free to join India or Pakistan or opt for independence. But the “independence option” wasn’t so much a practical alternative as it was a legalistic device conceived by the British to get around the fact that Britain had treaties with the princely states, and that, with the departure of the British, “sovereignty” would revert to these states, which would then be free to decide their own future.
This device notwithstanding, it was expected – including by the British themselves – that all the princely states would in fact chose to join either India or Pakistan, depending on whether they were Hindu-majority or Muslim-majority states.
Maharajah Hari Singh, the Hindu Dogra ruler of the overwhelmingly Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, however, had other ideas.
As Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah noted in a telegraphic message to the Maharajah on October 26, 1947: “The course which your government is pursuing in suppressing Musalmans in every way, the atrocities which are being committed by your troops and which are driving Muslims out of the state…and the threat to enlist outside assistance show clearly that the real aim of your Government’s policy is to seek an opportunity to join the Indian Dominion as a coup d’etat by securing the intervention and assistance of that Dominion.”
As subsequent events showed, Mr Jinnah was absolutely right in his assessment of the Maharaja’s intentions. Soon after that telegraphic message was sent, the Maharajah invoked India’s intervention to counter the uprising against his rule and Indian troops began landing at Srinagar airport.
The Indian government claimed that the Maharajah had signed an “instrument of accession” on October 26, 1947 ceding the state to India, and that India, therefore, had the “right” to send in troops. But as the well-known British historian Alistair Lamb has conclusively proved in his book “Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy 1846-1990”, the “instrument of accession” was a fake that was backdated to a date prior to the landing of Indian troops.
The Indians, however, claim that the instrument of accession was signed by Maharajah Hari Singh on October 26, 1947, in which the Maharajah agreed to accede to India in return for military assistance to put down the popular rebellion against him, seen at that time as “an invasion” by tribesmen from Pakistan.
The details of the accession were worked out between the Jammu and Kashmir prime minister, M. C. Mahajan, and an Indian official, V. P. Menon, in Delhi. However, there are serious doubts about the signing of the document. As Lamb points out, the instrument of accession could not have been signed by the Maharajah in Srinagar on October 26, 1947 as on that date he was travelling by road to Jammu (a distance of over 350 kms).
In fact, it was on October 27, 1947 that the Maharajah was informed by his prime minister, M. C. Mahajan, and V. P. Menon (who had flown into Srinagar), that the instrument of accession had already been negotiated in Delhi. Thus, the Maharajah could not have signed the instrument of accession, if at all, until October 27, 1947.
This casts serious doubts on the actions of the Indian government. Some Indian troops had already arrived and secured Srinagar airfield during the middle of October 1947, some two weeks BEFORE the so-called instrument of accession was signed. On October 26, 1947, a further massive airlift brought thousands of Indian troops to Kashmir – again BEFORE the signing of the instrument of accession. Therefore, this situation begs the question: would the Maharajah have signed the instrument of accession had the Indian troops not already been on Kashmiri soil? In other words, was the instrument of accession signed under coercion?
No satisfactory original of the instrument of accession has ever been produced in an international forum; a printed copy has always been shown. Further, the document was not presented to Pakistan or the UN. In the summer of 1995, the Indian authorities reported that the original document had been lost or stolen. This casts further doubt on whether the Maharajah actually signed the instrument of accession at all.