A Hardgrave1998) Kashmir 1947

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Kashmir 1947: Burdens of

the past, options for the
future ‐ four perspectives
a
Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. , Peter John Brobst
b c
, Mstapha Kamal Pasha , Sumit Ganguly &
Prem shankar Jha
a
University of Texas , Austin
b
American University , Washington DC
c
Hunter College , City University of New
York ,
Published online: 25 Mar 2008.
To cite this article: Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. , Peter John Brobst , Mstapha
Kamal Pasha , Sumit Ganguly & Prem shankar Jha (1998) Kashmir 1947: Burdens
of the past, options for the future ‐ four perspectives, Commonwealth &
Comparative Politics, 36:1, 92-123, DOI: 10.1080/14662049808447762
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14662049808447762
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Kashmir 1947: Burdens of the Past, Options
for the Future - Four Perspectives
1. Introduction
2. Sir Olaf Caroe and the Question of British 'Grand Design', by
Peter John Brobst

3. The Paradoxes of History: Partition, Independence and Kashmir,
by Mustapha Kama! Pasha
4. Options for Resolving the Crisis in Kashmir, by Sumit Ganguly
5. Response, by Prem Shankar Jha
In Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions of History, Prem Shankar Jha, one of

India's most distinguished journalists, provides a close analysis of the
accession of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir to India in 1947. Over
the years, two versions of Kashmir's accession have come to represent
essentially the Indian and the Pakistani views. Against the backdrop of
Britian's geopolitical compulsions and strategies, Jha examines both
versions using recently declassified British Transfer of Power documents as
well as personal accounts by the main participants.
In April 1997 the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Texas at
Austin hosted a symposium, 'Kashmir 1947', that took Jha's book as the
catalyst for discussion of the events 50 years ago - the partition of India and,
in the first India-Pakistan war, the division of Kashmir - with reflections on
the implications of those events for the future of Kashmir. Peter John Brobst
(Department of History, University of Texas), Mustapha Kamal Pasha
(School of International Service, American University), and Sumit Ganguly
(Department of Political Science, Hunter College, City University of New
York) provided analyses of issues and problems raised in Kashmir 1947, and
Prem Shankar Jha responded. Roger Louis (Department of History,
University of Texas) provided an introduction to the historical context of the
symposium; Wajahat Habibullah (Embassy of India, Washington, DC) and
Gail Minault (Department of History, University of Texas) served as
discussants; Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. (Department of Government, University
of Texas) organised the symposium and moderated the proceedings.
ROBERT L. HARDGRAVE, JR.
Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Vol.36, No.l (March 1998), pp.92-123

PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
KASHMIR 1947 93
SIR OLAF CAROE AND THE QUESTION OF BRITISH
'GRAND DESIGN'
by Peter John Brobst
University of Texas at Austin
'It is convenient', Sir Olaf Caroe once wrote, 'to see all Central Asia in the
focus of Kashmir. It is the focal point at which China, the U.S.S.R., India,
Pakistan, and indeed Afghanistan in the Wakhan "pan-handle", meet. There

are few points in the world more strategically situated." Such was the view
of one of British India's archetypal strategists. But to what extent did the
accession of Kashmir to India rather than Pakistan square with imperial
strategy? One historian has recently suggested that Indian control of
Kashmir fitted into a British 'grand design' for continued influence in
Central Asia beyond the transfer of power on the subcontinent in 1947.2
Prem Shankar Jha is sceptical. In his recent study, Kashmir 1947: Rival
Versions of History, Jha argues that notions of British complicity in India's
bid for Kashmir - particularly on strategic grounds - make little sense.
Would not Kashmir's accession to Pakistan have served British interests
better? This essay reinforces Jha's contention, examining the question of
British 'grand design' from the perspective of Sir Olaf Caroe, a leading
imperial authority on Central Asia during the final phase of the Raj.3
Proconsul, strategist and pamphleteer, Caroe was the quintessential
master of the 'Great Game', Britain's long contest with Russia for mastery
in Central Asia. Caroe first went to India during the First World War as an
officer in Britain's Territorial Army, seeing service on the frontier with
Afghanistan. In 1919, he entered the Indian Civil Service. He soon
transferred to the Indian Political Service, the elite branch of British rule
charged with monitoring the great princely states as well as the Indian
borderlands. Caroe was Foreign Secretary to the Government of India
throughout the Second World War. Afterwards, he became Britain's last
governor of India's Northwest Frontier Province. In retirement, he gained
prominence as a conservative critic of imperial policy, Asian affairs and
Western strategy.
Caroe was arguably the foremost strategic thinker that British India
produced in the last years before independence. His thought certainly
embodies the official memory of the 'Great Game'. Caroe sought to discern
and to record the rules of the 'Great Game' in the hope that a transfer of
strategy might accompany a broader transfer of power in India. In his
wartime capacity as Foreign Secretary, Caroe organised a secret study group
to assess the strategic implications of post-war independence for India. The
group was originally set up in 1942 on the authority of Lord Linlithgow. It
94 COMMONWEALTH & COMPARATIVE POLITICS
remained active through 1945 under Lord Wavell's Viceroyalty. Caroe's

group was based in Delhi and drew its members from the senior ranks of the
Indian Army as well as the Indian Civil and Political Services. It met
informally and off the record in an effort to ensure candid discussion. Taken
together, Caroe's writings - both confidential and published - provide a
blueprint of what Prem Jha refers to as the 'grand design' of British strategy
in Central Asia.
Jha devotes much of his book to rebutting the work of Alastair Lamb,
including Lamb's portrayal of Caroe's thought as the model for India's

policy on Kashmir. Lamb does, however, make a useful point in suggesting
that, as an architect of the British 'grand design', Caroe can be understood
as a member of the Mackinderan school.4 Sir Halford Mackinder, the
Edwardian geographer and pioneer of geopolitical theory, held that Central
Asia represented the 'pivot of history'. He saw in Russia's consolidation of
a continental base of power the ultimate threat to the British Empire.
Mackinder imagined that from an insulated position in Turkestan, Russia
would eventually attempt to 'overset' the balance of world power by
conquering the Middle East and establishing supremacy in China. Caroe
explained that India formed the keystone on which to organise the Asian rim
- economically as well as militarily - against any Russian breakout from
Central Asia.
Where did Kashmir figure in Caroe's Mackinderan schematic? In
respect to a Russian advance in the Middle East, Kashmir formed a possible
area of diversion. The strategists of the Raj traditionally anticipated that a
general engagement between regular forces would occur in the
comparatively open if desolate terrain of Baluchistan. Caroe once described
Baluchistan as the subcontinent's 'front-door'. He understood, however,
that the northern sectors of India's western frontier formed an important
'side-door' - one that could hardly be left unlocked.5 Kashmir offered a
field for irregular warfare. The British feared that trouble in the mountains
of the north would mire the Indian Army in the bog of 'watch-and-ward'
operations - what today might be called 'counter-insurgency' or perhaps
'peace keeping'.
Kashmir occupied a central position in respect to imperial aims in
Chinese Central Asia.6 Serious British concern about Russian penetration of
Sinkiang and Tibet dated at least to the late 1860s, when Yakub Beg
managed to break from China and set up a Muslim state based on Kashgar.
A crisis developed in the 1890s as the Russians advanced into the Pamirs,
pushing the Tsar's frontier nearly to the borders of Kashmir itself. In the
1930s, China's continued inability to keep a firm grasp on Sinkiang gave
rise to worries among British authorities - including Caroe himself- that
Bolshevik influence would spread out through the Dzungarian Gate, along
KASHMIR 1947 95
the Silk Road, and into Tibet. The dawning of air power only heightened the
British sense of urgency about the creep of Russia in Central Asia.
The importance of the Indian frontier in British air strategy emerges as
a key issue in Jha's discussion of imperial policy on Kashmir. As Jha points
out, the development of aerial warfare led to a 'revival of the Palmerstonian
Forward Policy with a vigour that no one could have predicted'.7 Not only
did the British plan air bases along the Indian frontier, but in Caroe's circle
they speculated about developing landing grounds in Central Asia itself.8
Bases in Sinkiang or Tibet would place British air power in reach of Soviet
industrial targets behind the Urals that seemed otherwise untouchable.
Caroe and his wartime interlocutors conversely worried that Russia might
herself gain air access to Sinkiang and Tibet, putting the very heartland of
India at risk. 'Looked at from the enemy's point of view', a senior military
officer closely associated with Caroe wrote, 'the Tibetan plateaux are the
airfield areas from which to cover eastern India; the bombardment group
areas from which the further stepping forward of these groups can be
undertaken to clear the way for the airborne assault and occupation of the
U.P., Bihar, and Bengal.'9 Caroe argued that, if anything, modern
technology had increased the importance of buffer states.
As late as 1945 and 1946, there was still talk in British circles of using
direct force to maintain Tibet, if not Sinkiang, as a buffer state. Caroe
thought that imperial troops for trans-Himalayan operations might suitably
be based in Kashmir. 'Circumstances may well arise', he wrote, 'in which
Kashmir could become a training ground and point d'appui for the forces of
the future.'10 But although Whitehall took seriously Caroe's proposal for
such a base in Baluchistan (to cover the approaches to India through eastern
Persia and southern Afghanistan), there is no evidence to suggest that the
extension of the idea to Kashmir and Chinese Central Asia ever amounted
to anything more than fanciful speculation. In terms of potential combat,
British planners tended to look west rather than north from India. As Jha
observes, 'Britain's interest in Sinkiang was but a pale shadow of its
obsession with Afghanistan'."
Jha notes, however, that British strategists did at least maintain a lively
interest in keeping a 'close weather eye' on Chinese Central Asia.12 Indeed,
the primary interest that British strategists had in Kashmir was the state's
tremendous value as a listening post. In the nineteenth century, Lord
Salisbury had complained that if the Himalayas and Karakoram formed a
great rampart for India's protection, they also represented a 'thick covert,
behind which any amount of hostile intrigue and conspiracy may be
masked'.13 A forward policy was necessary if only for purposes of
observation and early warning. In the bazaars of Gilgit and Leh, for
example, the British could keep their ears attuned to Chinese Central Asia.
Here was the fabled 'Great Game' of Kipling's Kim. It was also through
Kashmir that the British maintained a consulate in Kashgar, which Caroe
believed was essential to the flow of intelligence on innermost Asia.
Looking to Indian independence, Caroe took various steps as Foreign
Secretary to secure British interests in Kashmir and Chinese Central Asia
after a post-war transfer of power. He worked to perpetuate a coalescence
of strategic thinking between Britain and the hypothetical Indian Dominion.
In 1944, Caroe encouraged K.P.S. Menon to make a grand tour of Chinese

Central Asia on his way to Chungking as India's Agent-General in China.
Menon's circuitous route began in Kashmir at Srinagar. From there, Menon
travelled up through Hunza and over the Karakoram. Descending into
Sinkiang, he visited Yarkand and Kashgar before continuing on to the north-
east. He eventually reached Urumchi, from whence he flew the leg to
Chungking.14 Caroe also laboured to ensure that the Maharajah's Muslim
feudatories adhered to Kashmir. For example, Caroe opposed an attempt
during the war by the Mehtar of Chitral to assert his independence from
Kashmir. It was Caroe who urged on Whitehall the case that Chitral - a
narrow state along the Afghan frontier - remained a vassal of Kashmir even
if the Maharajah had allowed Chitral's annual payment of tribute to lapse."
Why was Caroe so concerned with Menon's strategic outlook and the
continued coherence of greater Kashmir? It is fair to say that Caroe's
activities do reflect something of a 'grand design' for retention of an
imperial foothold in Kashmir. In support of Jha's argument, however, they
do not suggest that British strategists sought the accession of Kashmir to
India over Pakistan. Caroe, in fact, presumed, at least until late 1946, that
the British would avoid partition. He further assumed that the great princely
states would not immediately federate with a national government. He
supposed that the states, including Kashmir, would remain in a direct
relationship with the British Crown for some time after India's
independence. This was why he and other British strategists contended that
Chitral and neighbouring Gilgit should remain attached to Kashmir. The
idea was to keep these two picket posts in the 'Great Game' out of the hands
of any self-governing ministry, whether Indian or Pakistani. The British
could better maintain control over these strategic positions through a
subsidiary maharajah attended by a British resident. As it became clear that
the princely states would have to federate with whatever national
government or governments succeeded the British, the 'grand design' for
maintaining British influence in Central Asia through Kashmir faded away.
. What about K.P.S. Menon? In his book, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy,
Alastair Lamb singles out Menon as a link between Sir Olaf Caroe and
independent India's frontier policy. Menon certainly held Caroe in very high
regard.16 But whether or not Menon was actually a disciple of Caroe, it
KASHMIR 1947 97
would, as Jha suggests in response to Lamb, be too much to conclude that

the connection evinces an imperial hold on Indian frontier policy in the
post-independence era. Menon, Jha points out, was one of only two senior
Indian officials to have served closely with Caroe. The other was G.S.
Bajpai.17 Geographical imperatives and the forward march of China in
Central Asia account better for the resemblance between imperial and
Indian strategy than some direct transmission of ideas from the former to the
latter. Moreover, one can just as easily (and just as questionably) detect the
hidden hand of British imperialism by tracing similar paths to Caroe on the

Pakistani side. An example is Colonel A.S.B. Shah, who worked under
Caroe as a deputy secretary in the Department of External Affairs during the
Second World War. He went on to become joint secretary in the Pakistani
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was directly involved in Pakistan's effort to
gain Kashmir's accession.
There is also irony in the notion that India's bid for Kashmir's accession
had something to do with the 'Great Gamesmanship' of Olaf Caroe, who is
more often portrayed as an apologist for Pakistan. As the governor of the
Northwest Frontier Province between January 1946 and July 1947, Caroe
increasingly appeared a villain in the eyes of the Indian National Congress.
They considered him to be a partisan of the Muslim League. They believed
that 'Sir Olaf Caroe, and his subordinates, were doing their best to topple
the [Congress] Government [of the Northwest Frontier Province]'.18
Feelings grew so heated that an 'Anti-Caroe Day' was proclaimed in May
1947. The charges were largely unfair, but Caroe nevertheless resigned to
cool tempers and allow for the pre-independence plebiscite that resulted in
the accession of the Northwest Frontier Province to Pakistan.
It is true that Caroe audibly disapproved of what he regarded as the
'steam-roller' agenda of the Congress for assimilation of frontier and tribal
areas into a national state. Caroe advocated continued autonomy for the
Pathan tribes against full incorporation into the Northwest Frontier
Province. Caroe felt a great admiration for things Islamic, but the concerns
that he voiced as governor of the Northwest Frontier Province reflected a
broader philosophy of how to advance the Indian borderlands towards self-
government - one that informed his thought throughout his career in India.
Caroe's thinking on how India should handle the Northwest Frontier was
totally consistent with his advice on how to deal with Nepal and the Naga
Hills. 'It was essential', he wrote as Foreign Secretary in 1943, 'to have a
policy keeping in view the importance of the development of these areas
away from paternal rule towards a system of Tribal Councils or bodies
based on indigenous customs.'" Caroe's basic idea actually dated from
1917, when a chance meeting in Lahore with Lionel Curtis, the doyen of
imperial reform, inspired Caroe to write a lengthy essay on the subject of
self-government in India.20 In retirement, Caroe extended his thinking to

areas outside South Asia, insisting that limited autonomy and measures such
as plebiscites designed to protect local interests against centralised
government held the key to stable transfers of power in Africa.21
The point, of course, is that Caroe believed some form of regional
autonomy was the key to stability in Kashmir. This was the opinion that he
repeatedly put forward in hindsight. Caroe told an American audience in
1952 that a pre-independence plebisicite in Kashmir might have averted war

in 1947.22 He always admitted, however, that such a measure would have
proved difficult. It would have been impossible, he thought, if the
referendum was based on the idea that Kashmir had to accede to either India
or Pakistan. 'Kashmir', Caroe noted, 'is by no means homogenous.' He
argued that it was 'by no means certain that even the Muslim population ...
wishes to adhere to Pakistan'. At the same time, he observed, 'it may not
even be certain how far the Dogras of Jammu are wedded to a future in
which they would become the members of a State like any other State in
India'. Caroe supposed that 'the political inspiration of Shaikh Abdullah ...
is similar to that of Abdul Ghaffar Khan in Pakistan, namely the vision of a
regional autonomy'. Caroe continued to hope throughout his retirement that
leaders in both New Delhi and Islamabad would embrace such a conception.
He suggested that 'wisely approached, perhaps through a joint guarantee of
defence given by both neighbours, it might even be the beginning of a real
detente in Indo-Pakistani relations'.23 Caroe's reasoning harked back to his
wartime notion that external pressures might weigh against internal division
in South Asia.24 Caroe contended that 'Communist Imperialism' threatened
the subcontinent as a whole. As a window on Central Asia, Kashmir might
help to bring the common danger and with it the mutual interest into clearer
view.25
However, Caroe tempered his vision with realism. Imperial strategists
• could not, he knew, plan on an ideal. Caroe understood that 'Communist
Imperialism' was not a monolithic force. Indeed, he believed that the
internecine antagonism of Russia and China had compounded the
predicament of South Asia. Russia and China each posed a threat to the
subcontinent, but the effect had not been to galvanise co-operation between
India and Pakistan. Rather, conflict between the two communist giants had
resulted in a four-way balance of power in Asia. 'Up to date', Caroe wrote
in 1964, 'it has seemed to the directors of defence policy in both countries
that the best place to take out an insurance against inimical moves by the
neighbour is for India in Moscow, for Pakistan in Peking, so reflecting in
the sub-continent the Sino-Soviet rift.' On one hand, Caroe was sympathetic
to India's imperatives in Kashmir. 'On the confines of Kashmir', he wrote,
'India has to maintain a front facing in two directions, one army looking at
KASHMIR 1947 99
the Chinese as they probe forward in Ladakh, and another on the cease-fire
line with Pakistan.'26 On the other hand, Kashmir's accession to Pakistan
would not have been inconsistent with Caroe's concept of post-war strategy.
As Prem Shankar Jha notes in his book, the post-war 'grand design' of
imperial strategists envisaged a 'military crescent' of Islamic states. Caroe
was a leading proponent of this idea. His thinking was certainly consistent
with Wavell's 'Break Down Plan' of 1945 (by which the Viceroy proposed
that in a crunch the British could abandon the Congress-dominated
provinces of India in favour of Muslim-dominated ones in the north-west

and north-east), but Caroe only made an explicit argument for military
support of Pakistan after the fact of Britain's withdrawal from India and in
the context of a British empire in the Middle East separated from an Indian
base. A grouping of Islamic states, he argued, might form a bulwark against
Soviet expansion that could 'be put in the place of British power as
exercised from India'.27 Caroe worried, however, that 'the universality of
Islam as a social force, transcending race and colour, is matched,
paradoxically, by its inability to combine for common ends in politics'.28
The Atlantic powers would therefore have to underwrite any Islamic
alliance. As a member of the Commonwealth, Pakistan emerged as the
linchpin in Caroe's scheme. Pakistan also occupied a position on the
frontlines of a possible Third World War. Pakistan's territory interposed
between the putative Soviet enemy and his supposed targets on the Arabian
Sea. Caroe hoped for rapprochement between Britain's successor states in
South Asia, 'but', he cautioned, 'we have to face the other side and to make
certain that we do not overlook the practical difficulties'.2' Caroe had his
doubts about an Islamic alliance, but, from the vantage of imperial strategy,
what alternative was there so long as the subcontinent remained, in Caroe's
phrase, a 'house divided?'
What of the legacy of Kashmir and the events of 1947? Caroe came to
believe that the Baghdad Pact and the subsequent Central Treaty
Organization never fully substituted for what he called the 'Indian fortress'.
Not long before he died in 1981, Caroe assessed the 'strategic after-effects
of India's partition'.30 He contended that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in December 1979 was ultimately a product of India's partition and the
ensuing conflict over Kashmir. Caroe explained that Afghanistan had
survived in an equilibrium maintained by setting land power based on a
unified India against Russia. He held that partition had wrecked the
precarious balance. With a potentially hostile power in the rear, Pakistan
lacked the depth to provide a secure position on which to station a
meaningful counterweight to the Red Army.
If Caroe were here today, one suspects that he would probably tell us that
the world continues to feel the 'strategic after-effect of partition' in the post-
Cold War era. Although his principal concern was Russia, Caroe also
contemplated, as Foreign Secretary during the Second World War, the
possibility of an awakened and revanchist China a quarter to a half century
down the road. He suspected that the Chinese would eventually seek outlets
to the Indian Ocean - possibly by contesting control of the South China Sea
but more likely by way of an overland approach through Burma.31 In light
of recent reports that the Chinese have secured some vague form of naval
access to Rangoon and put electronic intelligence stations on Burmese
islands in the Bay of Bengal, Caroe's speculations appear prescient. The

strategic situation in 1997 is the reverse of that in 1979. Today, the strategic
question that partition begs is how effective a counterweight India might
provide with 'a potentially hostile frontier running straight across the Indo-
Gangetic plain'.32 The implication of Jha's apt phrase is that the partition of
India mooted whatever British 'grand design' there was for Asian defence
based on India. Jha is no doubt right, but to some extent the 'Great Game'
endures. For better or worse, Kipling's admonition in Kim seems an
appropriate note on which to conclude: 'When everyone is dead the Great
Game is finished. Not before.'
THE PARADOXES OF HISTORY: PARTITION, INDEPENDENCE

AND KASHMIR
by Mustapha Kamal Pasha
American University, Washington DC
Modern South Asian history, despite its generally porous and heterodox
character, continues to revolve around the axis of the Partition - its dramatic
events and principal actors, its heroes and villains. Fifty years after
independence, the boundaries of political imagination remain constricted by
rival versions of the Great Divide. Discussions of the Kashmir dispute are
interwoven into narratives of the Partition. Any allusion to Kashmir - the
issue that has given relations between India and Pakistan their raison d'etre
- prompts recitations of the entire historical script, a re-enactment of the
whole painful saga. Almost without exception, debates over the Kashmir
dispute rekindle old wounds, only to reproduce mutually contradictory
historical narratives.
Against the stubborn legacy of communalist historiography in South
Asia, and its dominant proclivity towards recycling familiar partisan
themes, the promise of an impartial account of the genesis of the Kashmir
conflict is bound to invite serious attention. Prem Shankar Jha's bold pledge
to seek fresh avenues of inquiry and unearth new evidence of some details
of the origins of the Kashmir dispute, therefore, merits careful scrutiny.33
KASHMIR 1947 101
Regrettably, however, Jha's ambitious attempt to provide an 'unbiased'

account of events that culminated in Hari Singh's Act of Accession to India
in 1947, far from lending closure to the unsettled business of the partition,
only helps polarise the erstwhile debate.
A Quasi-Official Story
Set as a counterpoint to Alastair Lamb's indictment of the Indian claim over
Kashmir,34 Jha's unofficial account ends up echoing India's official version
of the Accession, a controversial defence of New Delhi's claim over the

disputed territory. Shaped by the national context in which he is writing, Jha
falls prey to popular Indian views of Pakistan as the principal instigator of
political troubles in the subcontinent.
Jha's reference to rival versions of history involves two competing
accounts of the circumstances and motives that led the Hindu Maharaja of
a predominantly Muslim majority area to sign an Act of Accession with
India in October 1947. The two accounts correspond to the respective
official positions of India and Pakistan, provide justification for their
actions in the State of Jammu and Kashmir at the time of Partition, and help
explain their subsequent conduct. Based on information culled from official
correspondence and interviews, Jha explicitly challenges Pakistan's claim to
the territory. Without directly addressing the question of the right of self-
determination of the people of the disputed territory, Jha seeks to provide a
subtle defence of the Indian position. The Act of Accession, we are told,
was a lawful act, but also explicable from the Maharaja's standpoint.
Pakistan, according to Jha, had every design to annex Kashmir in 1947.
The invasion that forced Indian troops into Kashmir at the behest of
Maharaja Hari Singh was inspired by Pakistan's political leadership. While
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding-father, took Kashmir to belong
rightfully to Pakistan, India was open to any options exercised by Kashmir's
ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh. In the final analysis, Jha proposes, Hari Singh's
decision to opt for India rather than contiguous Pakistan, was directed by his
deep regard for the welfare of his people. Jha summons his journalistic
talents to support these claims, with the central goal of exonerating the
Maharaja for signing the Act of Accession and rationalising Indian actions
throughout the fateful days of the Partition. In this vein, Nehru's personal
attachment to Kashmir and Mountbatten's gerrymandering of the Punjab
border play virtually no role in the Kashmir story. Instead, the responsibility
for the Kashmir problem is placed squarely at the feet of Pakistan.
Relying on official Indian government documents, British official
statements, correspondence and recent interviews with former British and
Indian military and political officials, Jha reconstructs the events leading up
to Kashmir's accession/Producing a 'week by week, day by day, and finally
hour by hour account of events and actions in 1946 and 1947',3i Jha seeks
to dispel any reservations about the dubious nature of the Accession. Jha
accords Mountbatten a pivotal role as a credible source of information in his
narrative. Mountbatten's close relationship to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and
his 'interventions', pose no problems of objectivity for Jha, yet Jinnah's
dealings with Sir Francis Mudie (the first governor of post-Partition Punjab
in Pakistan) provoke the charge of a pro-Pakistan bias. Jha's chief claim is
that if Kashmir's accession to India was hustled by Pakistan's invasion and
subsequent Indian troop deployment, then the accession is not 'justifiable'.

On the other hand, Hari Singh's decision to accede to India five or six weeks
before these developments, makes the accession lawful. Nevertheless, the
events Jha narrates to prove this point are largely based on conjecture. Jha's
reading of Hari Singh's inner thoughts without the benefit of corroboration
is purely speculative. Prem Shankar Jha contests the view that the
Maharaja's motives were superficial, irresponsible or self-motivated.
Besides any personal preferences, Hari Singh saw the Muslim League's
alleged strategies of communal polarisation (especially in the Northwest
Frontier Province in 1946) as unbecoming for his kingdom. The Maharaja's
strict leanings toward secularism may have been at the root of his decision
to opt 'for the dominion which promised to be secular, federal and multi-
ethnic'.36
While portraying Hari Singh as an unselfish and respected ruler, Jha also
recognises Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah's large following, based on his
anti-Dogra political platform. On the one hand, Jha characterises Hari Singh
as a ruler lacking in self-interest. In the same breath, however, he is shown
as a stubborn ruler bent upon retaining his power and opposed to a titular
status. Was the Maharaja acting solely in the interests of his people? Had
Hari Singh lost the moral authority, even if one concedes he had it in the
first place, to decide Kashmir's fate? Jha seems to reject any line of
reasoning which introduces a moral argument. Jha's principal concern is to
recognise Hari Singh as a free and upright individual and his actions as the
articulation of altruistic motives. Yet the manner in which the Act of
Accession was generated and the veil of secrecy that surrounds the entire
episode, continue to cast serious doubt over the Maharaja's disposition.
Notwithstanding Jha's portrayal of Hari Singh as a tortured soul, his
findings do not substantially alter the misgivings scholars (such as Lamb)
have expressed over the Act of Accession.
Jha also refutes Mountbatten's complicity in the Radcliffe
Commission's award of three Muslim majority tehsils in Gurdaspur. These
strategic tehsils secured India's geographic link with Kashmir, making
accession possible. In Jha's opinion, the territorial award was designed to
accommodate Sikh shrines within India. To the extent that the original
KASHMIR 1947 103
award would have made Kashmir's accession to Pakistan inevitable (a

distinct possibility according to official Indian thinking at the time), this
scenario can hardly be ignored. Jha plays down the strategic importance of
Gurdaspur to both India and Pakistan in favour of other considerations.
In virtual agreement with the official Indian story, Jha sees an extension
of Britain's favourable links with the Muslim League to Pakistan in the
aftermath of the Partition. Pakistan, he contends, was viewed as a 'friend',
and, therefore, Kashmir's accession to Pakistan as a desirable and natural

outcome. The British felt Hari Singh should have acceded to Pakistan on
moral grounds. Jha's argument that 'Pakistan, not India, was the new nation
of the subcontinent', and, therefore, Pakistan 'was more likely to serve as a
"reliable ally'",37 is wholly speculative. There is ample evidence to also
suggest a contrary hypothesis.38
In the final analysis, Jha fails to dislodge Lamb's analysis and undo
other accounts of the larger historical and political context of the Kashmir
story. He is unable to refute Lamb's complex analysis of the historical
evolution of the Kashmir saga, especially his analysis of the underlying
factors for the Poonch Rebellion, Mountbatten's critical part favouring
India, and Indian secretive actions throughout the tenuous climate of the
Partition. By limiting himself to a narrow range of sources, Jha gives
speculative writing a free rein.39 Besides Lamb, neither the Kashmiri
nationalist position nor 'unofficial' accounts of the origins of the Kashmir
story are considered.40 There are simply too many counterfactuals to reckon
with.41 Jha's undertaking, therefore, succeeds only in rekindling the old
controversy over Kashmir.
At the time of the golden jubilee of Midnight's Children, Pakistan and
India, Kashmir still casts its long shadow on the future of the region.
Ironically, Jha's conclusions only solidify competing versions his analysis
painstakingly seeks to dispel. Jha's quasi-official account simply
embellishes New Delhi's elaborate rationale for the Act of Accession.
The Partition Syndrome

A catalyst for exploring the contested terrain of South Asian history, Jha's
book underscores the resilience of the partition syndrome, a liberal-
secularist interpretative framework inextricably attached to the historical
memory of the Great Divide. This syndrome has produced, with predictable
force, a straitjacket for the analysis of relations between India and Pakistan.
Working within this framework, Indian interlocutors are quite likely to
reproduce fixed assumptions underpinning the formation of Pakistan's
political identity. Jha's Kashmir story reinforces the durable legacy of the
partition syndrome. A familiarity with the basic elements of this lens gives
an evaluation of Jha's account both context and salience.
In its pristine innocence, the Partition Syndrome, popular mostly

amongst Indian liberals and secularists, rests on a specific formulation of
the making of Pakistan and the recognition of South Asia's Muslim
'problem' in communal terms. Before the emergence of the idea of
Pakistan, the story goes, the subcontinent was a territorial, cultural and
political unity.42 Combining millennial elements of Indian history, a
syncretic civilisation emerged in the region characterised by values of social
amity, tolerance and harmony. While the political orders may not clearly
reflect the true essence of this civilisation, a genuine recognition of diversity

and indigenous secularism has marked a timeless, but vibrant, Indian civil
society.43 Society, if not the state, cultivated a system of peaceful existence
between distinct religious communities. This trajectory was rudely
interrupted by the introduction of nationalism as the ideology of self-
representation and political identity. With the demand for Pakistan, usually
fomented by opportunistic colonialists in concert with ambitious politicians,
the essential unity of India was challenged, and later destroyed, by
acquiescence to establishing a separate Muslim homeland on South Asia's
sacred soil. The Partition, in sum, entailed the vivisection of the
Motherland;44 the Partition and the creation of Pakistan represent the
triumph of communalism, the realisation of an exclusivist religious
nationalism.45
Interpreting the evolution of Muslim political identity in communal
terms, proponents of the partition syndrome see the creation of Pakistan as
the repudiation of the principles of liberalism and secularism. Five decades
after political independence, Pakistan is still viewed by Indian liberals and
secularists as the embodiment of a communal idea.
Historically, liberal-secularists have conflated the recognition of Muslim
communal interests within unified India with the demand for an
autonomous territorial polity based on a distinct national identity.
Recognition of Muslim national self-expression or an appreciation of
Pakistan's transformation over time are usually missing in this perspective.
The forging of new cultural forces, both West and South Asian, and the
development of a distinct political identity for Pakistan are not accorded
their due share.
Liberal-secularists also fail to contextualise the role of religion.46 While
religious association may not be the only basis of nationhood perse, it often
provides the initial boundary marker that may subsequently allow the
construction of an alternative political identity. A dynamic view of the
formation of political identities allows an appreciation of the varied role of
religion. In the context of decolonisation, and the renewed threat of
assimilation, the demand for a separate homeland may have been the only
viable option available to Muslims. Indian secularists have generally been
KASHMIR 1947 105
unwilling to distinguish between the idea of an autonomous political space

for Muslims and the notion of an assimilated Muslim community. At best,
Muslim interests have been recognised, but not their political identity." The
Partition Syndrome rests on a denial of an autonomous Muslim political
expression. While cultural tolerance is often recognised, even encouraged,
it must conform to a public discourse that avoids disconcerting questions
about the relationship between identity and political autonomy. The latter
would inevitably lead to an appraisal of the strong nexus between
institutions of civil society, which may allow cultural and associational

expression, and the state, where political identity is ultimately shaped and
realised.
Refutations of the 'Two-Nation Theory' have usually taken a
communalist framing to process Muslim political demands.48 The potential
for a deepening and solidification of Muslim political identity in a sovereign
political context has not been acknowledged in these claims. The Partition
Syndrome, which Jha tends to share, places the impetus for communal
discord in the waning days of British rule on Indian Muslims, especially the
Muslim League leadership.49 Invariably, the interactive and mutually
reinforcing roles of rival communalisms gets left out in this story. Muslim
political self-expression during the struggle for freedom was neither sui
generis nor simply reactive.
Towards Civil Society?

Moving beyond the Partition Syndrome and the strictures it has placed on
recovering history, the Kashmir dispute is part of a larger complex,
entangled in questions of the evolution of political identity in both India and
Pakistan. The real question is whether public intellectuals, scholars and
journalists can escape the fetters of the nationalist historiography of their
official counterparts and overcome the painful legacy of the partition. How
autonomous is civil society in relation to the state with respect to providing
alternative images of the past?
There is a common belief that the conflict between India and Pakistan
over Kashmir is restricted to the respective political machines of the two
countries. Outside the state apparatuses, there are real possibilities for
rapprochement, driven by common memories, a shared ethos and cultural
similarities of habit and temperament. A variant of this view sees the
Partition Syndrome as a generational artifact subject to natural
obsolescence. Jha's perspective on Kashmir, however, leads to a different,
more sobering, conclusion. Specifically, the Kashmir dispute serves as the
memory lane for revisiting the Partition.
At a deeper level, the rival versions of official history find resonance in
the respective civil societies of the two nations. On both sides of the great
divide, civil society is imbricated in the statist interpretation of the past.50

The boundaries of political imagination are not confined to official
historiography but lie deeply embedded in structures and practices of civil
society. National identity originates from the mutual interactions between
state and civil society. From schools to newspapers to films, a certain image
of the 'enemy' has acquired a familiar presence, readily identifiable and
manipulable." Cultural processes are not removed from official imagery,
discourses of national security, and the ubiquitous interference of 'foreign'
agents from 'across the border' in domestic affairs. In short, civil society
has provided the arena for the state to cast its intransmutable imprint.
National identity is a co-construction of the state and civil society. This
alternative view suggests the difficulties of providing easy pathways to
rethink the future.
On the other hand, the emergence of new political identities in the region
also suggests a general erosion of liberal-secular modalities of discourse. In
this context, the Partition Syndrome of liberal-secularists is giving way to
an even more exelusivist and rigid perspective for recovering and rethinking
the past. The implications of the declining fortunes of secularism for the
resolution of the Kashmir issue are, indeed, far-reaching. Tied to a robust
religious nationalism, claims over the disputed territory can assume a totally
uncompromising sensibility. Yet such a determinist forecast must also be
resisted. One alternative for rethinking the future originates in the enduring
presence of anomalies within the dominant mode of thought. Another,
perhaps more plausible option lies with the people of Kashmir, a course of
action no one can fully anticipate. The recognition of the right of the
Kashmiri people even to surprise us may offer the only viable alternative to
release the two nations from the straitjacket of the past.
OPTIONS FOR RESOLVING THE CRISIS IN KASHMIR

By Sumit Ganguly
Hunter College, City University of New York
The Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir remains one of the most

intractable militarised international disputes. Since their emergence from
the collapse of the British Indian empire in 1947, India and Pakistan have
twice gone to war over the status of Kashmir.52 In 1990, the two states again
teetered on the brink of war.53 Today, despite the presence of an elected
government in the Indian-held portion of Jammu and Kashmir, the
insurgency that has racked the Kashmir valley since 1989 continues.
Sporadic outbursts of violence still pepper the valley and the Indo-Pakistani
border remains tense.
KASHMIR 1947 107
The legal premises and the historical circumstances of Kashmir's

accession to India have been ably discussed by Prem Shankar Jha.54 The
origins of the Kashmir insurgency, also, have been examined in considerable
detail elsewhere.55 This paper will provide a comprehensive discussion of
proposed solutions to the dispute, will assess their political viability, and will
offer the outlines of a possible solution. The solutions that have been
discussed in both journalistic and academic circles range from the granting of
outright independence to even tighter integration into India. Many of these

options, while superficially attractive, fall short on a vitally important
criterion - that of political feasibility. Others are hortatory, polemical and
downright partisan. An enduring settlement of the Kashmir dispute must take
into account certain structural features of the political landscape of South Asia
while addressing the underlying sources of conflict.56
Independence
One possible option involves granting Jammu and Kashmir independence.
This option would entail a consolidation of both Pakistani-occupied
Kashmir ('Azad Kashmir') and Indian-held Kashmir and allowing the one-
time princely state to obtain an international legal personality. It is the
preferred option of one of the principal (and oldest) insurgent groups, the
Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). At one level, granting
independence to Kashmir would satisfy a significant number of Kashmiris
who are disenchanted with both Indian and Pakistani rule. This option,
however, has a number of important drawbacks. At an international level,
the People's Republic of China (PRC) remains opposed to the creation of an
independent Kashmir." The regime in Beijing fears that the emergence of an
independent Kashmir would have a demonstration effect on its own restive
Tibetan minority. Worse still, the creation of a Muslim-majority state
abutting China could also encourage incipient discontent and even
separatist tendencies amongst Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province.58 It
is highly unlikely that any future Chinese regime will adopt a markedly
different position on this issue, given the long-term internal vulnerabilities
of the Chinese state.
At a regional level, no Indian government can countenance the
possibility of an independent Kashmir. India has fought two wars with
Pakistan over the Kashmir issue and has expended considerable blood and
treasure to hold on to its portion of Kashmir. More to the point, and contrary
to the views of many observers, the Indian state has already evinced an
extraordinary willingness to sustain both human and moral costs to quell the
insurgency. As the ham-handed tactics of the Indian state have successfully
contained the insurgency, it is even more unlikely that a future regime will
grant the state independence.
Even if a future Indian regime were willing to grant independence to

Kashmir, it would have to countenance two profound questions: what
obligation would India have toward its Hindu and Buddhist citizens in the
state? and how would they fare in a Muslim-majority state where communal
relations have already been strained to a breaking point? Finally, decision
makers in New Delhi also fear the likely 'internal domino' effects of
Kashmir's withdrawal from the Indian Union. Consequently, any
government in New Delhi will pay a high price to ensure that Kashmir does
not obtain independence.
A handful of lone voices in Pakistan have supported the independence
option. However, it is also quite clear that no Pakistani government
seriously entertains this 'third option'.5' Pakistan can ill afford to lose a
significant portion of its already truncated state.
Plebiscite
The United Nations resolutions on Kashmir sought to resolve the dispute by
means of a plebiscite. The formal Pakistani position still calls for a
plebiscite to determine the future of Kashmir. India, although it was the
original proponent of a plebiscite, has long since backed away from its
initial commitment.60 Moreover, Indian apologists contend that the Simla
Accord has superseded the earlier commitment to a plebiscite.
Would a plebiscite solve the Kashmir problem? The answer is far from
certain. If a plebiscite were held today a section of the Muslim population
of the Kashmir valley would, no doubt, opt for Pakistan. But a significant
number of others would not. Even if a majority of the population of Jammu
and Kashmir were to vote in favour of a merger with Pakistan, the important
issue of the rights of the Buddhists and the Hindus within the state would
remain unaddressed.
Shared Sovereignty
Another proposal, that of shared sovereignty, has generated considerable
discussion in some circles." This proposal, which has a number of variants,
suggests that India and Pakistan could exercise joint sovereignty over the
entire former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Although this is an
interesting intellectual exercise and is superficially attractive, the proposal
is deeply flawed. As has been argued elsewhere, this option in all its various
incarnations leaves a number of questions unanswered. For example, if
India and Pakistan were to exercise joint sovereignty over Kashmir, which
state would be responsible for revenue collection and distribution? What
social and cultural policies would be pursued within the state? Who would
guarantee minority rights? Who would be responsible for maintaining
internal order and securing external defence? Finally, what would be the
KASHMIR 1947 109
citizenship status that would be conferred on the residents of the state?"

Considering the vastly different approaches taken by the Pakistani and
Indian states in these areas, co-ordination in ruling the fractious Kashmiri
population would be nearly impossible.
Conceding the Valley

Another possible option involves India conceding the Kashmir valley to
Pakistan while retaining Leh, Kargil, Ladakh and Jammu. This option has a
certain appeal because the insurgency draws its support from the Muslim
majority of the state, most of which is centred in the Kashmir valley. After
conceding the valley, India could effectively seal off the routes of
infiltration into Jammu and Ladakh. Even today, apart from sporadic
incidents, neither Ladakh and Jammu have been deeply implicated in the
insurgency. Consequently, conceding the valley to Pakistan may well rid
India of a never-ending thorn.
Despite its seeming attractiveness, however, this option is also fraught
with problems. First, would conceding the valley satisfy Pakistan? A future
Pakistani regime may insist that legally the entire former princely state of
Jammu and Kashmir belongs to Pakistan. Most Indian analysts of the
Kashmir issue, in fact, explicitly assign such motivations to Pakistan."
Second, conceding the valley would make it exceedingly difficult for India
to maintain its road links to Ladakh. It would also leave Jammu strategically
vulnerable to a Pakistani attack." Third, it would entail sacrificing the
interests of the minority Hindu population of the valley.
Protectorate
Some commentators on Kashmir have suggested that a portion of the state
be turned into an Indian protectorate. Under these terms, the government of
India would turn the Kashmir valley, the locus of the insurgency, into an
Indian protectorate. (The districts of Leh, Kargil, Ladakh and Jammu would
be made into union territories.) The government in Srinagar, under the terms
of a new treaty with the government of India, would be responsible for all
domestic and foreign policy issues except defence. In return for this
dramatically expanded form of autonomy, the government in the valley
would agree to five critical terms: protection of minority rights, the
continued secular status of the region, the maintenance of democratic
representative institutions, the safe return of the Kashmiri Pandits to the
valley and a restoration of their property and a demobilisation of all militant
groups in the valley.65
This option may address, at least notionally, the misgivings and
grievances of many Kashmiris who have long chafed under the heavy hand
of the Indian state. Yet a number of political and administrative problems
dog this option. First, the question of Kashmir's external defence can hardly
be separated from issues of internal security. As long as India remains
responsible for Kashmir's external defence, unrequited outside powers,
particularly Pakistan, will be tempted to intervene in Kashmir's domestic
affairs. Under such circumstances, the Indian armed forces would inevitably
be called in to quell unrest. Second, granting Kashmir the status of a
protectorate may well engage a 'slippery slope'. Both domestic and foreign
proponents of Kashmir's independence would construe the granting of

protectorate status as a first step toward eventual independence. Third, how
would a quasi-independent Kashmir valley ensure its own economic
viability? Fourth and finally, what legal rights would Kashmiris have within
the rest of India and what would be the basis of their citizenship?
Ethnic Flooding
India could, of course, adopt harsher strategies than the ones already
discussed. A segment of the Indian political spectrum has suggested that
India alter the demographic composition of the valley in an effort to curb the
insurgency. This strategy can be referred to as 'ethnic flooding'.66 In pursuit
of this goal, as a first step India would abrogate Article 370 of the Indian
Constitution. Once this article were abrogated, no legal barriers would
remain to settling the valley with Hindu migrants from other parts of India.
After populating the valley with nationalist Hindus, and thereby altering its
demographic profile, the government could proceed with a referendum
about Kashmir's future within the Indian Union. There would be little doubt
about the likely outcome.
It is extremely doubtful whether such a strategy could be implemented
under the present conditions. Even if it could be carried out, the option
courts disaster. Abrogating Article 370 for this purpose would violate a
long-standing compact, however attenuated, between New Delhi and the
Kashmiris. Furthermore, the tactic of 'ethnic flooding' is corrosive to the
spirit of Indian democracy. Adopting such a strategy would show complete
institutional and legislative disregard for the rights of India's largest
minority.
The 'MailedFist'Strategy
The Indian state could also pursue what may be referred to as a 'mailed fist'
strategy. From economic as well as strategic standpoints, in the absence of
another conflict with the PRC, India could well afford to deploy indefinitely
close to 400,000 regular troops and paramilitary personnel in Kashmir.
Furthermore, the Indian state has demonstrated considerable staying power
when dealing with insurgencies in other parts of the country. However, other
important issues are at stake if India continues to view the problem in
KASHMIR 1947 111
Kashmir through the lens of counter-insurgency operations and the

maintenance of order.
First, using the army for extended periods of time in Kashmir (and
elsewhere) erodes the firm distinction between civilian and military
authority. Already more than one outgoing chief of staff of the Indian Army
has sounded the tocsin of excessive reliance on the army to quell domestic
disturbances. The Indian Army has a remarkable record of subservience to
civilian authority. This well-established tradition may be compromised if
the higher echelons of the army perceive the civilian authority to be

incapable of governance.
Second, placing the armed forces in situations where legal authority is
tenuous opens up the prospect and likelihood of rampant human rights
violations. Even though the bulk of the charges of human rights violations
have been levelled against the police and paramilitary forces, the army has
come under some criticism. Using the army over an extended period of time
in counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir leaves it open to further
charges of human rights violations. Over time, the army's inability to
control its troops could have serious repercussions for morale and
discipline.
Third, unlike in the north-east and the Punjab, where India's sovereignty
was not under question, Kashmir is the subject of an international dispute.
Consequently, unless the Indian state can bring about a degree of both law
and order in Kashmir, Pakistani governments will find occasion to intervene
in Kashmir's internal affairs. Relying on force to quell discontent in
Kashmir is a recipe for a continuing stalemate.
Toward a Viable Solution

The earlier discussion has attempted to assess the viability of a number of
proposed solutions. Despite their apparent attractiveness, none of these
suggested panaceas meet the tests of political and strategic viability. Since
the outbreak of the insurgency in 1989, despite sustained political,
economic and moral costs, various governments in New Delhi have shown
scant willingness to consider any arrangement that compromises India's
territorial integrity. It is extremely unlikely that any subsequent government
will alter this fundamental stance.67
What, then, are the outlines of a possible solution? To begin with, New
Delhi must make an unequivocal commitment to return Kashmir to its pre-
1952 status. This will entail granting the government of Jammu and
Kashmir an extraordinary degree of autonomy under the aegis of the Indian
Constitution. In effect, New Delhi would control only defence, foreign
affairs, currency and communications. Under the terms of this renewed
pledge of autonomy, Kashmir could be invited to rewrite its own
constitution (with appropriate guarantees for minority rights). New Delhi

will also have to undertake a series of steps that will prove unpopular with
the Indian military and paramilitary forces. Nevertheless, these steps are
essential for addressing the grievances and misgivings of the Kashmiris.
Specifically, the government in New Delhi must make a good-faith effort to
mete out condign punishment to members of the security forces known to
have committed human rights violations. The government may also have to
consider granting an unconditional amnesty to members of the various
insurgent groups. Already the Indian Army has successfully co-opted some
of the insurgents through the lure of arms and cash. The scope of this effort
needs to be simultaneously widened and constricted. It needs to be widened
to include insurgents of all political and ideological persuasions. But at the
same time, the practice of arming former insurgents needs to be curbed now
that an elected government has assumed office. Other measures, including
the provisions of relocation and employment, can be instituted to provide
security to former insurgents.
Apart from taking these steps to restore the fractured rule of law within
Kashmir, India will need to continue its negotiations with Pakistan. In these
negotiations, India can offer to turn the Line of Control (LoC) into a
permanent, international border with minor territorial concessions. Such a
division of Kashmir would be consistent with the logic of India's decision
to accept a cease-fire in 1948 which left a third of Kashmir in Pakistani
hands. As Prem Shankar Jha correctly argues, the Indian leadership chose
not to prosecute the war beyond a sociocultural and geographic divide. The
cultural ethos of the Kashmir valley, where Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah's
Kashmir National Conference held sway, differed markedly from that of
Poonch, Mirpur, Muzaffarabad and Gilgit.68
In this context, India can also offer to make unilateral concessions to
Pakistan on the issue of the Siachen Glacier. Furthermore, to assuage
Pakistan's insecurity, stemming from its conventional military weakness,
India can also offer to start mutually balanced force reductions and various
other confidence-building measures."
A Pakistani regime may consider these negotiating provisions rather
meagre. However, after having fought three wars with India and after
supporting an insurgency for the better part of a decade, Pakistan needs to
reassess its own options.70 Support for the insurgency will continue to bleed
India, but the wound will never be deep enough to paralyse the Indian
polity. Instead it will only drain Pakistan's scanty resources dry. Settling this
seemingly intractable dispute will enable both states to concentrate their
precious life-blood towards more productive ends.
KASHMIR 1947 113
RESPONSE
by Prem Shankar Jha
The papers presented at the symposium raised a number of important points

and have given me an opportunity to reconsider them in the light of my
research. Since there was a degree of convergence in the views presented
and the questions that were raised, I will take these up the main issues that
arose and elaborate on them further.

Four broad questions emerged from the papers and discussion:
1. What was the role of Mountbatten in Kashmir's accession to India?
2. What role did Caroe play in ensuring that Kashmir had the
opportunity to accede to India and was not compelled to go to
Pakistan?
3. What constructive purpose does any discussion of Kashmir's
accession to India in 1947 serve today?
4. What are the options for settling the dispute today, and how, if at
all, are they affected by my research?
Mountbatten
I was aware of the gathering criticism among historians of Mountbatten's
role in the dismantling of the Raj. The earlier impression that he
accomplished an extremely distasteful and difficult job with speed and
dispatch, in a manner that preserved for Britain its good relations with both
the new dominions, has given place to an image of him as a playboy, a poor
naval commander during the war - and a naive Viceroy of India, who, by
his hasty and ill considered decision to advance the date of partition,
plunged the subcontinent into a bloodbath, and, by his ill-considered
intervention in the Kashmir issue, laid the foundation for the bitter
animosity that has plagued relations between India and Pakistan for half a
century. What I had not realised is the extent to which this view seems to
have gained a general acceptance. This is not the occasion, nor am I
qualified to discuss, Mountbatten's performance as a fleet commander in the
Second World War. My concern is with his actions as Viceroy, and later
Governor-General of India. Here I firmly believe that none of the criticisms
that have been heaped on him are justified.
Was Mountbatten wrong in advancing the date of partition and
independence? In his own final report to London, written on 16 August
1947, he says that it was the best of a series of bad alternatives, because
India was rapidly becoming ungovernable and another year's delay could
have had incalculable consequences. I believe that this was a correct

assessment of the situation and that all the criticism of it is based on
hindsight. We know what happened because the date of partition and
independence was advanced. We do not and cannot know what might have
happened if it had not been advanced. Most important of all, Mountbatten
and all his very able advisers did not know what would be the outcome of
either decision. They had to make an assessment and decide. Mountbatten's
assessment was one that is hard to disagree with.
When Mountbatten arrived in India in March 1947, communal riots

were erupting all over the country. They had swept Bengal from August
1946 through the winter of 1946-47, and had spread to Bihar and the United
Provinces. Since the previous autumn, the NWFP was in the grip of an
organised movement to destroy the secular Khan Sahib- government by
deliberately creating polarisation on communal grounds. Hindus and Sikhs
had been killed with premeditation, and demonstrations against the
government were being organised almost daily by leaders of the Muslim
League, such as Abdur Rab Nishtar and the Pir of Manki Sharif. Hazara, a
Muslim League stronghold, where the party had won eight out of nine seats
in the February 1946 elections, had seen some of the worst pogroms. From
January to March 1947, Punjab had been rocked by communal violence that
had led to the resignation of the Unionist government of Sikandar Hayat
Khan on 2 March. For the Congress, the fall of the Unionist government had
been the last straw. On 8 March, the Congress Working Committee had met
and decided to accept the partition plan. The CWC made it clear that it was
doing so only to prevent the spread of the communal poison that was tearing
society apart.
Once partition had been accepted, delaying it might have made it easier
for the administration to make the arrangements needed for an orderly
transfer of power and sharing of assets. But it would have created greater
uncertainty among the people. Since the division of the country would have
been made on the basis of Muslim and non-Muslim majority areas, there
would have been a strong temptation for the Muslim League in particular to
use the time left for changing the population composition of marginal areas
by using the technique perfected in the NWFP. On balance, therefore,
Mountbatten was right in deciding to minimise the period of uncertainty
after the decision was taken.
Coming to Kashmir, the belief that Mountbatten was influenced by
Nehru and leaned on Maharaja Hari Singh to accede to India, while
simultaneously leaning on Radcliffe to give Pathankot, and one other tehsil
of Gurdaspur to India, is also not supported by my research. To take
Maharaja Hari Singh first, Mustapha Kemal Pasha suggested that my
analysis of his motives and behaviour was an exercise in psychohistory.
KASHMIR 1947 115
What I thought I had done was to dispense once more with the benefit of
hindsight and look at the decisions he faced alongside the information he
had at the time. Hari Singh has been depicted as a self-indulgent, weak fool,
sufficiently out of touch with the real world to imagine that he could remain
independent with British support. In fact, his personality hardly enters into
the decision he took, for almost anyone else in his place would have tried to
do the same thing. He knew, as well as Sheikh Abdullah, the heterogeneity
of the Muslims of Kashmir, not to mention its non-Muslim population. He
believed that this was an excellent reason for his state to stay out of the
turmoil of an India that was being divided on the basis of religion. As
subsequent history has shown, this might well have been the best solution
to the problem if India and Pakistan - especially Pakistan - could have been
persuaded to leave Kashmir in peace.
When independence was ruled out and partition became inevitable, Hari
Singh prepared a fall-back plan as early as the beginning of April 1947, and
this was to accede to India. One of the reasons may well have been that he
was a Hindu, but, once again, there were good reasons why even a Christian
might have taken the same decision. These have been dwelt on at length in
my book, so I will not tarry on them here. Suffice it to say that what he and
the Maharani saw of the pogroms in neighbouring NWFP and what they
heard from the survivors from Hazara who streamed into Muzaffarabad in
December 1946 could well have made them fear that the far larger Kashmiri
minorities could become pawns to be sacrificed in a similar struggle
between the Kashmir Muslim Conference, which was trying to merge with
the Muslim League, and Sheikh Abdullah's National Conference.
Given his April attempt to replace Ram Chandra Kak with Mehar Chand
Mahajan as the Dewan of Kashmir, the Maharaja's refusal to meet
Mountbatten formally for talks on the future of Kashmir when the latter
visited Kashmir in June takes on an entirely different meaning. The most
plausible explanation is that he knew that Mountbatten was going to urge
him to join Pakistan, not India, and he did not wish to be pushed so when
he had already made up his mind to join India if he could not remain
independent. Mountbatten's note of his talks with Kak, in which he asks the
Maharaja (through Kak) to bear the composition of his population and the
geographical location in mind, assumes a different meaning. Far from
leaning on him to join India, he was gently urging him to accede to Pakistan.
The assurance he carried up from Patel that the future government of India
would not take it as an unfriendly act if he joined Pakistan, which has been
made to look like either naive altruism or a piece of theatre designed to
conceal India's Machiavellian designs, gains a more prosaic meaning.
Mountbatten's desire to see Kashmir go to Pakistan is also the only
explanation of Krishna Menon's 'strange' (according to Alastair Lamb)
letter warning Mountbatten against urging such a course of action on the

Maharaja. Menon was not unbalanced or unhinged. He had spent two
decades in London building close ties with the left wing of the Labour Party
and, as he was to show more than once, had sources of information within
the Labour Party and government that made him exceptionally well
informed.
That brings us back to Mountbatten. Mountbatten was under a strong
injunction from Attlee that if he had to go through with the partition of
India, he must attempt at almost any cost to keep the armed forces unified
and manned by a large number of British officers, so that it could continue
to serve Britain's strategic interests in the region. This was, of course, the
best alternative, and one that was discussed repeatedly by Attlee with the
service chiefs in London. But, if this proved impossible, it was understood
in Whitehall that West Pakistan would have to be the sheet anchor of British
interests to the west, while Chittagong in East Pakistan would be pivotal in
guarding British interest in the east.
In short, Pakistan would have to have priority over India. Mountbatten
served both strategies faithfully. What is more, he continued to do so even
after he became Governor-General of independent India and should have
owed his first loyalty to India. His advice to the Maharaja to accede to
Pakistan was intended to make Pakistan viable - a point driven home by the
UK High Commissioner in Karachi, Graftey Smith, on 28 October 1947,
when he telegraphed London that Kashmir's accession to India would make
Pakistan unviable as it would make the NWFP contiguous to India. His
insistence that India first accept Kashmir's accession before sending troops,
but that the accession itself should be conditional, and his subsequent
encouragement of Nehru to take the matter to the UN, were intended to find
an agreed basis for resolving the dispute amicably and thus preserve the
joint command of the armed forces on the subcontinent.
The above analysis explains so many events and so much behaviour that
had previously appeared anomalous that it makes it virtually unnecessary to
defend Mountbatten on the Gurdaspur issue, the charge that he somehow
gerrymandered the award. Christopher Beaumont, in a testimonial
deposited at All Souls College, expressly states that while he believes (for
reasons that I have shown in my book to be entirely wrong) that the award
of Ferozepur and Zira tehsils in Ferozepur district to India was influenced
by Mountbatten (who acted on the urging of Nehru, who was being fed
information from inside the Radcliffe boundary commission by a 'Hindu'
secretary, one Iyer), at no point did Mountbatten try to influence Radcliffe
on Gurdaspur. Mountbatten himself singled Pathankot out as an example of
where the final boundary might not follow the interim boundary established
for administrative convenience till the boundary commission had done its
KASHMIR 1947 117
work. The reason was fairly straightforward: the administrative unit in India
was the district. Thus the interim boundary had to follow the demarcation
of districts. It therefore drew its authority from nothing more than
administrative convenience. There was no such requirement for the final
boundary. As a result, the final boundary in both the east and the west
departed from the interim on any number of occasions, sometimes to the
benefit of Pakistan and at others to that of India. There was no question of
'gerrymandering' the border because the border did not exist.
But what about the Ferozepur award? Did Mountbatten not disgrace
himself by interfering to have that changed? My assessment is that,
whatever Radcliffe did, he did on his own. However, I cannot agree with
those who believe that Mountbatten should not have attempted to talk to or
influence Radcliffe. The award was changed at the last minute to avert a
Sikh uprising. Like Sheikh Abdullah in Kashmir, the importance of the Sikh
factor in partition remains the least acknowledged. Yet the Sikhs' loss of a
homeland was undoubtedly the single greatest tragedy of partition. The
Sikhs may have been only 18 per cent of undivided Punjab, but they had
ruled the state till barely a century earlier. The imprint of their dominance
was to be found in the fact that they owned fully 50 per cent of the land and
paid 70 per cent of the land revenues in Punjab. As an appalled Evan
Jenkins, Governor of Punjab, was to write to Mountbatten on receiving the
interim boundary, the decision to partition Punjab on the Ravi river would
split the Sikhs in half and destroy their identity as a nation. This would lead
to terrible turmoil. Were Punjab to be partitioned along the Chenab, Jenkins
had pointed out, 95 per cent of the Sikhs would have fallen within India. But
the principle adopted by the British, a bare head count, denied the Sikhs
both their identity and their history. If the original boundary intimated to
Jenkins on 8 August had been adhered to, the Sikhs would also have been
virtually denied their religion as well. A general uprising by the largest,
most highly trained, ex-soldiers' cadre in the entire country would very
likely have followed. If Mountbatten did press Radcliffe to change the
award so as not to encircle Amritsar with Pakistan, he did what any
responsible head of government should have done. There are times when
the spirit of the law must prevail over its letter, and this was one of them.
Caroe
I greatly enjoyed John Brobst's analysis, and rehabilitation, of Sir Olaf
Caroe. To say that Caroe is viewed with mixed feelings in India by those
who have taken an interest in the origins of the Kashmir dispute would be
an understatement. Caroe must thus enjoy the unique distinction of being
disliked on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border. Let me agree straight
away with Brobst that no one understood the nuances of the Great Game
and the strategic importance of Kashmir better than Caroe. But, precisely
for that reason, no one had a stronger reason for wanting to avoid the
partition of India. Caroe, for his part, never made a particular secret of his
belief in the essential unity of India and the artificiality of the partition. He
made this point in almost poetic terms two decades later, in 1968, in a
review of Hodson's The Great Divide. Yet Caroe, too, understood only too
well that, if partition did take place, there was a very good chance that the
two dominions would fall out with each other and that Britain would have
to choose between India and Pakistan to form a strategic relationship. Caroe

had no doubt that, for geo-political reasons, the partner would have to be
Pakistan. It is almost certain, therefore, that the entire British two-track
policy described above was Caroe's brainchild.
However, Caroe's own ambivalence towards this strategy, his hankering
for a united India and his distaste for a Pakistan first strategy comes through
his fortnightly reports to the Viceroy when he was governor of the NWFP.
On the one hand, he systematically refused to accede to Khan Sahib's
request to bring out the army to control the Muslim League hoodlums who
had gone on a killing and looting spree in the province. His explanation, that
to send the army out against a popular movement would have meant civil
war, simply did not ring true to Khan Sahib and does not ring true today.
History is replete with instances when a single decisive use of force at a
critical moment has nipped an incipient riot or insurrection in the bud. Khan
Sahib was not given the opportunity, because to do so would have gone
against Britain's fall-back plan. That plan required that NWFP should
become a part of Pakistan, something that Khan Sahib was utterly opposed
to. For this it was necessary not only that there should be a plebiscite in the
NWFP, but that the plebiscite should go in favour of Pakistan. This last was
not impossible or, as Caroe pointed out in one of his fortnightly reports, in
the February 1946 elections, while the Khudai Khidmatgars won two-thirds
of the seats, the Muslim League polled marginally more votes. Thus, a
referendum would take the province to Pakistan. What was needed was to
create the conditions that would justify a referendum. That is what the
Muslim League set out to do. All that Caroe had to do was adopt a policy
of masterly inaction.
Yet Caroe wanted the plebiscite itself to be fair. When Pandit Nehru
insisted on visiting the NWFP, Caroe urged Lord Wavell that he should be
dissuaded from doing so because he would suddenly give a concrete shape
to the fears that the Muslim League had been instilling in the Pathans, that
voting against Pakistan would mean making themselves servants of the
Hamsayas - literally helpers or servants, that is, Hindus. This is what
actually happened. It is not necessary to add that the person who in all
probability framed the two-track strategy could not have failed to
KASHMIR 1947 119
understand that if Britain was to fall back on Pakistan as its principal ally in
the subcontinent, then Kashmir had to go to Pakistan. To have it go to India,
and bring India next to the NWFP, would have invalidated the fall-back
strategy. The suggestion that Sir Olaf Caroe was somehow the mastermind
behind a conspiracy to hand Kashmir over to India is, therefore, quite
simply, absurd.
The Relevance of the Accession Debate to the Search for a Solution

Mustapha Kamal Pasha made a number of observations on my book, with

many of which I agree in spirit if not always in detail. India and Pakistan are
caught in a partition syndrome. Communalism has been turned into a
boundary marker in South Asian history. Before it was unleashed, South
Asia was a cultural and social unity. Communalism disrupted that unity. The
conflict that ensued was one between secularism and exclusivism - with
secularism the 'property' of India and the Congress, and exclusivism that of
Pakistan and the Muslim League. This emphasises political events rather
than cultural and sociological developments.
Pasha pointed out that such an approach ignores the changes that have
taken place in the past 50 years, for instance, that there is as much
exclusivism in the BJP in India now as there was in Pakistan. His main
contention, however, seems to be that in discussing the events of that past
we remain chained to them. Even while criticising the two-nation theory, I
remain chained to it. Such a discussion reopens old wounds and does not
promote their healing. This is a contention that I am unable to agree with.
Kashmir is not only the past, it is also the present. For seven years there has
been a militant struggle going on in parts of the state against the government
of India. Pakistan has been fully involved in the struggle in one way or
another from the outset. It is the struggle and not my book that has opened
old wounds or prevented them from healing. It is Pakistan's leaders who
keep repeating that Kashmir is part of the unfinished business of partition
and that the 'K' in Pakistan stands for Kashmir. An analysis of the roots of
the dispute, therefore, becomes not only relevant but necessary. The purpose
of the book is not, however, to apportion blame. It is an attempt to get as
close to the truth as is possible on the basis of the documents that are now
available. The quest needs no justification outside of itself, but it does have
one nevertheless. History is what people turn to when they seek a
justification for what they are trying to achieve. If history, as it is then
understood, does not yield one up readily enough it has to be reinterpreted
and rewritten. The Kashmir dispute has suffered too much already from this
process. It has been twisted out of shape to make it support claims that today
have become the main obstacles to the restoration of peace.
My purpose was to string together a narrative of not only what actually
happened, but why the main actors, individuals as well as countries, acted
as they did. From the unfolding narrative one irrefutable fact gradually
emerged: that in the Kashmir saga, contrary to what most others have
written, there are no heroes and no villains. Not Mountbatten, not Hari
Singh, not Jinnah, not Liaquat Ali Khan, not Nehru and not Sheikh
Abdullah. Not the Pakistan government, nor the Indian; not even the British
Commonwealth Relations Office. At each stage, all of the actors did what
they considered to be in the best interests of the people they were trying to
serve.
Had all of Kashmir really gone to India, Pakistan's continued existence
would genuinely have been jeopardised. Pakistan cannot, therefore, be
blamed for sending in the raiders on 22 October 1947. But if its reasons for
invading Kashmir then were understandable, then by the same yardstick it
has no rational reason left for coveting the Indian part of Kashmir now. For,
probably on the advice of Sheikh Abdullah, Pandit Nehru accepted the
cease-fire on 1 January 1949, when the Indian troops were poised to invade
Muzaffarabad. By doing so he not only stopped on an ethnic fault-line in
Kashmir, on the other side of which there were orthodox Sunni Muslims
who were overwhelmingly supporters of the Muslim Conference, but the
new de facto border left a large part of Kashmir adjoining the NWFP in
Pakistan's hands, and thereby ended the threat that had made Pakistan go to
war in the first place.
Pakistan's strident hunger for Kashmir over the last half-century has
obscured the fact, moreover, that it emerged from the 1948 war at least
partly if not wholly the winner, inasmuch as it added to its territory and
protected its political viability. For both reasons, the right place to end the
50-year-long dispute is precisely where it is today, on the present Line of
Control. What both India and Pakistan need to do is concentrate on meeting
the demands of the Kashmiris. They have been demanding freedom for the
past seven years with violence and longer by other means. Freedom does
not necessarily mean independence. North Korea is independent but it can
be argued that North Koreans are not free. A Tamil Eelam under the LITE
would similarly be independent but not free. Two Kashmirs, with
governments of their choice, free to build trans-border links, might not be
independent, but they would be free.
NOTES
1. O. Caroe, Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (London, 1967), xviii.
2. See A. Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 1846-1990 (Hertfordshire, 1991).
3. This essay relies largely on Peter John Brobst, 'The Official Mind of the Great Game: Sir
Olaf Caroe, Indian Independence, and World Power, 1939-1954', unpublished Ph.D.
KASHMIR 1947 121
dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, August 1997.

4. Lamb, Kashmir, 82.
5. Olaf Caroe, 'The North-West Frontier', lecture, 6 April 1949, MSS Eur F.203/47 [Caroe
Papers, India Office Library].
6. For the nineteenth century background, see G. Alder, British India's Northern Frontier,
1865-1895: A Study in Imperial Policy (London, 1963).
7. P. Jha, Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions of History (Delhi, 1996), 85.
8. For South Asia in British air planning, see R. Aldrich and M. Coleman, 'Britain and the
Strategic Air Offensive Against the Soviet Union: The Question of South Asian Air Bases,
1945-49', History, 74 (1989).
9. 'India's Mongol Frontier', memorandum by Tuker, 1946, in F. Tuker, While Memory Serves
(London, 1950). At the time he wrote the memorandum, Lieutenant-General Sir Francis
Tuker was General Officer Commanding, Eastern India.
10. 'Some political and constitutional reflections on the landward security of the India of the
future', memorandum by Caroe, 18 Aug. 1944, IO L/P&S/12/727.
11. Jha, Kashmir 1947, 84.
12. Ibid., 83.
13. Salisbury quoted in G. Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (London, 1922), 72.
14. See K. Menon, Delhi-Chungking: A Travel Diary (Bombay, 1947).
15. Note by Rolfe, 10 May 1944, IO L/P&S/12/3295.
16. See K. Menon, Many Worlds: An Autobiography (London, 1965).
17. Jha, Kashmir 1947, 91, n. 12.
18. W. Khan, Facts are Facts: The Untold Story of India's Partition (New Delhi, 1987), 112.
19. Note by Caroe, 13 March 1945, IO L/P&S/12/3115A.
20. O. Caroe, 'First Steps to Responsible Government in India', unpublished manuscript,
December 1917, MSS Eur F.203/61 [Caroe Papers, India Office Library],
21. For Caroe's views on Africa see, Olaf Caroe, 'Land Tenure and the Franchise: A Basis for
Partnership in African Plural Societies', Journal of African Administration, 7, 4 (1954).
22. O. Caroe, 'Report on Lecture Tour [of the United States]', 10 June 1952, MSS Eur. F.203/64
[Caroe Papers, India Office Library].
23. [O. Caroe], 'India and Pakistan: Pressures External and Internal', The Round Table, 215
(1964), 236-7.
24. See 'Some political and constitutional reflections on the landward security of the India of the
future', memorandum by Caroe, 18 Aug. 1944, IO L/P&S/12/727.
25. See [O. Caroe], 'The Beam in the Eye: Communist Imperialism in Asia', The Round Table,
203 (1961).
26. [Caroe], 'India and Pakistan', 238.
27. O. Caroe, Wells of Power: The Oil Fields of South-Western Asia: A Regional and Global
Study (London, 1951), 185.
28. [O. Caroe], 'Pakistan and the Tribes', The Round Table, 156 (1949), 336.
29. O. Caroe, 'The North-West Frontier', lecture, 6 April 1949, MSS Eur. F.203/47 [Caroe
Papers, India Office Library].
30. See O. Caroe, 'The Strategic After-Effects of India's Partition', The Round Table, 280 (April
1980).
31. See Brobst, 'The Official Mind of the Great Game', ch. 5.
32. Prem Shankar Jha, Kashmir, 1947: Rival Versions of History (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 91.
33. Jha, Kashmir 1947.
34. Alastair Lamb, The Birth of a Tragedy: Kashmir 1947 (Hertfordshire: Roxford Books, 1994)
and Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 1946-1990 (Herfordshire: Roxford Books, 1991).
35. Ibid., vii.
36. Jha, Kashmir, 1947, 58
37. Ibid., 87.
38. See Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, especially Chapter VII.
39. Jha often makes statements such as 'all evidence points to', without specifically stating the
source of the evidence. For instance, see pages 12, lines 24 and 37 and page 37, line 18. Jha
also omits sources, such as a reference to a newspaper report that was published in Pakistan
but is not cited (see page 48). The author speculates that the source of information could have
been Jinnah's secretary, K.H. Khurshid. While discussing the British government's
disapproval towards Indian actions in Kashmir, Jha relies on two telegrams sent to the High
Commissions in both countries. However, no further details are given on these telegrams (see
page 111).
40. In this regard, Jha's reliance on Akbar Khan's testimony is particularly questionable.
41. For a collection of various viewpoints on the Kashmir dispute, see Raju G.C. Thomas (ed.),
Perspectives on Kashmir: The Roots of Conflict in South Asia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1992).
42. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's classic statement on this view is to be found in The
Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946).
43. Ashis Nandy, 'The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance',
Alternatives, 13, 3 (1988), 177-94.
44. This view is also shared by Hindu nationalists. For a compelling analysis of Hindu nationalism,
see Amrita Basu, 'Mass Movement or Elite Conspiracy? The Puzzle of Hindu Nationalism', in
David Ludden (ed.), Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of
Democracy in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 55-80.
45. On this view, the emergence of Bangladesh as a separate Muslim homeland in 1971 is
interpreted as the final blow to the communalist idea.
46. The failure to analyse the dynamic role of religion is not limited to an analysis of Pakistan.
By the same token, secularists have erred in understanding the rise of Hindu nationalism
within India. Space considerations do not permit elaboration of this point.
47. Jha states the question quite explicitly: 'Assuming that Muslim interests, and the position of
Muslims in Indian society did need safeguards, at least for psychological reasons, was
Partition the only way of providing them?' (Jha, Kashmir, 1947, ix).
48. Prem Shankar Jha shares this perspective (see Preface).
49. Jha, Kashmir, 1947, ix.
50. For an elaboration of this theme, see Mustapha Kamal Pasha, 'Security as Hegemony',
Alternatives, 21, 3 (July-Sept. 1996), 285-302.
51. See, for instance, the latest Indian movie, Border, which recycles the Partition syndrome.
52. For a comparative study of the three Indo-Pakistani wars, see S. Ganguly, The Origins of War
in South Asia: The Indo-Pakistani Conflicts Since 1947 (2nd edn. Boulder, CO, 1994).
53. D. Hagerty, 'Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia: The 1990 Indo-Pakistani Crisis',
International Security, 20, 3 (Winter 1995-96), 79-114.
54. The most compelling legal and historical argument in support of the Indian position is made
by Jha, Kashmir, 1947. For an account that is largely sympathetic to the Indian position, see
H. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan (Karachi, 1985). The two most pro-
Pakistani accounts are provided by Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy and Birth of
Tragedy.
55. For a discussion of the origins of the Kashmir insurgency, see S. Ganguly, The Crisis in
Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (Cambridge and Washington DC, 1997); also see
V. Hewitt, Reclaiming the Past: The Search for Political and Cultural Unity in
Contemporary Kashmir (London, 1995).
56. Obviously, I am not suggesting that all political structures are immutable. Nevertheless, in
the foreseeable future certain configurations of political geography, demography and military
power place distinct (if not insuperable) barriers to the adoption of particular strategies of
conflict resolution. There is a lively debate in the literature on international politics between
the persistence of certain enduring structures of the international system and the possibilities
of systemic transformation. On this subject see A. Wendt, 'Constructing International
Politics', and J. Mearshimer, 'A Realist Reply', International Security, 20, 1 (1995), 71-93.
57. A. Rashid, 'The China Factor', Far Eastern Economic Review, 13 Jan. 1994, 12-13.
58. For a discussion of unrest amongst China's Muslim minorities see J. Dreyer, 'Ethnic Politics
and Policies in the People's Republic of China', in M. Brown and S. Ganguly (eds.),
Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge, MA, 1997),
351-91.
KASHMIR 1947 123
59. On this point, see H. Rizvi, 'Peaceful Resolution of the Kashmir Dispute', Strategic Studies
(Islamabad), 17 (1994), 109-32.
60. The key United Nations resolutions are discussed in Jha, Kashmir 1947, 4-5.
61. See, for example, A. Jalal, 'Kashmir Scars', New Republic, 23 July 1993; H. McDonald,
'Forced into a Comer', Far Eastern Economic Review, 23 Dec. 1993, 18-20; B. Verghese,
'The Fourth Option', Hindustan Times, 25 March 1993, 4; and J. Schwartzberg, 'An
American Perspective IV, Asian Affairs, 22, 1 (1995), 71-87.
62. K. Bajpai and S. Ganguly, 'India and the Crisis in Kashmir', Asian Survey, 34, 5 (May 1994),
401-16.
63. See Jha, Kashmir 1947, 129.
64. Jha points out that this consideration played an important role in shaping India's military
strategy in the 1947-48 war. See Jha, Kashmir 1947, 126.
65. Personal communication with Professor Amitabh Mattoo of the School of International
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
66. See Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir, 131.
67. The depth of sentiment on this subject can be gauged from the largely hostile reception that
met Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah's public statement that the Line of Control should be
turned into an international border. See News Dispatches, 'State Government Eyes
Referendum on Border', India Abroad, 7 March 1997, 15; and B. Joshi, 'Lukewarm
Response to Border Proposal', India Abroad, 14 March 1997, 8.
68. Jha, Kashmir 1947, 16-17.
69. S. Ganguly and T. Greenwood (eds.), Mending Fences: Confidence-and Security-Building
Measures in South Asia (Boulder, CO, 1996).
70. For an early discussion of Pakistani involvement in the insurgency see E. Desmond,
'Pakistan's Hidden Hand', Time, 22 July 1991, 23.

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Kashmir 1947: Burdens of

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14662049808447762

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reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any

Peter John Brobst

In Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions of History, Prem Shankar Jha, one of

ROBERT L. HARDGRAVE, JR.

Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Vol.36, No.l (March 1998), pp.92-123

Pakistan, and indeed Afghanistan in the Wakhan "pan-handle", meet. There

remained active through 1945 under Lord Wavell's Viceroyalty. Caroe's

including Lamb's portrayal of Caroe's thought as the model for India's

In 1944, Caroe encouraged K.P.S. Menon to make a grand tour of Chinese

would, as Jha suggests in response to Lamb, be too much to conclude that

hidden hand of British imperialism by tracing similar paths to Caroe on the

self-government in India.20 In retirement, Caroe extended his thinking to

1952 that a pre-independence plebisicite in Kashmir might have averted war

provinces of India in favour of Muslim-dominated ones in the north-west

islands in the Bay of Bengal, Caroe's speculations appear prescient. The

THE PARADOXES OF HISTORY: PARTITION, INDEPENDENCE

Regrettably, however, Jha's ambitious attempt to provide an 'unbiased'

of the Accession, a controversial defence of New Delhi's claim over the

subsequent Indian troop deployment, then the accession is not 'justifiable'.

award would have made Kashmir's accession to Pakistan inevitable (a

and, therefore, Kashmir's accession to Pakistan as a desirable and natural

The Partition Syndrome

In its pristine innocence, the Partition Syndrome, popular mostly

reflect the true essence of this civilisation, a genuine recognition of diversity

unwilling to distinguish between the idea of an autonomous political space

institutions of civil society, which may allow cultural and associational

Towards Civil Society?

divide, civil society is imbricated in the statist interpretation of the past.50

OPTIONS FOR RESOLVING THE CRISIS IN KASHMIR

The Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir remains one of the most

The legal premises and the historical circumstances of Kashmir's

outright independence to even tighter integration into India. Many of these

Even if a future Indian regime were willing to grant independence to

citizenship status that would be conferred on the residents of the state?"

Conceding the Valley

proponents of Kashmir's independence would construe the granting of

Kashmir through the lens of counter-insurgency operations and the

the higher echelons of the army perceive the civilian authority to be

Toward a Viable Solution

constitution (with appropriate guarantees for minority rights). New Delhi

The papers presented at the symposium raised a number of important points

arose and elaborate on them further.

have had incalculable consequences. I believe that this was a correct

When Mountbatten arrived in India in March 1947, communal riots

letter warning Mountbatten against urging such a course of action on the

to choose between India and Pakistan to form a strategic relationship. Caroe

The Relevance of the Accession Debate to the Search for a Solution

Mustapha Kamal Pasha made a number of observations on my book, with

dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, August 1997.

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