right that for a time ranked among the most brutal conflicts in the world, and
would have a direct bearing on Jammu and Kashmir s fortunes.
His secret life in Jammu and Kashmir received no notice: few even knew of it. Twenty-eight years before his death, Nath, then a senior police official, had authored a classified history of India s counter-intelligence campaign against terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir from 1948 onwards. The still-secret Report on Pakistani Organized Subversion, Sabotage and Infiltration in Jammu and Kashmir is perhaps the sole history of the Informal War, and provides encyclopaedic account of its course. Writing two decades after Nehru proclaimed the existence of the Informal War, Nath affirmed many of its conclusions. The cease-fire which came into effect on the 1st of January, 1949 , Nath wrote was merely a prelude to the Pakistani efforts to grab Kashmir by other means .40 The object of Pakistani sub-conventional efforts, he argued, was to create conditions in which the Government established by law in this State could not function, to arouse communal passions, to assassinate important nationalist leaders and ultimately overthrow the Government and capture power either through their agents or by direct intervention. Pakistan was uniquely well poised to launch such a covert campaign, for reasons which are little understood. Despite its ostensible military superiority , India s intelligence apparatus was in ruins after Independence. Its Intelligence Bureau, staffed mainly by police officers, was charged with reporting on events in Jammu and Kashmir. At Independence, however, the Intelligence Bureau was in what one participant has described as a tragic-comic state of helplessness .41 Qurban Ali, the senior-most Indian in the organization s last months as an institu tion of British India, was to choose Pakistani citizenship and had used his offices to transfer every file of importance to that country. India s intelligence personnel were left with the office furniture, empty racks and cupboards, and a few innocuous files dealing with office routine .42 India s Military Intelligence Directorate had the capability to monitor events in Jammu and Kashmir, but the chaos across much of northern India meant the Army had neither the time nor resources to do so.43 Put simply, Pakistan s covert warriors were the only team on the field. Low-level covert activity mirrored Pakistani conventional military responses to India s spring counter-offensive of 1948. That year, the Jammu and Kashmir Police recovered 643 crude bombs, 666 hand-grenades and 83 tins of fuses in raids, which led to 22 arrests. Authorities claimed that these explosives had be en brought from Pakistan by a Srinagar resident working for Pakistani intelligence, Salim Jehangir Khan. What little published material is available suggests that Pakistan s intelligence services, and powerful elements in its political establish ment, used such tactics fairly widely. One remarkably candid admission has come from Lieutenant-General Gul Hasan Khan, who served as the last commanderinchief of the Pakistani armed forces. General Khan s memoirs record that an