To any schoolboy the Indian subcontinent
appeared to form a natural unity. But, even under
the glittering panoply of the viceroy, that unity
was never really achieved. India remained a patchwork;
some regions came under direct British rule
while more than 360 princely states, a few – such
as Hyderabad – large and others small, were
allowed a substantial measure of internal selfgovernment.
The princes occupied a special place.
When aristocracy still mattered, the Indian
maharajas – displaying their wealth ostentatiously
and sending their sons to Eton and Harrow –
became part of the British upper crust, or almost.
So did the opposition to the Raj. The best-known
Indian nationalists, Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali
Jinnah, were members of the English Bar. There
was not only opposition to British rule but also
Anglo-Indian cooperation. In the lower branches
of administration, Indians and Anglo-Indians
were providing efficient and loyal service. The
best example of Indian unity was the Indian army.
Racist yet loyal, it was for long exclusively officered
by the British; not until the 1930s were
Indians given commissions. Moreover, it incorporated
all the divisive religious cultures of the
Indian subcontinent: Nepalese Gurkhas, Sikhs,
Muslims and Hindus were all imbued with a fierce
loyalty to their regiments and to the Crown.
What would happen to the patchwork of
British India once the unifying Crown and the
institutions that supported it disappeared with
independence? That was the crucial question
facing the British and the Indians in the 1940s.
Gandhi’s vision was of an India where all its inhabitants
would be brothers. It seemed only natural
that British India should be replaced by the one
Commonwealth of India. But during the century
of British rule the deep divisions grew deeper.
Only by force and bloodshed was it possible to
create two states in 1947, and nationalism continued
to threaten the cohesion of these two successor
nations, India and Pakistan. In 1971, the
eastern region of Pakistan fought for and gained
independence as Bangladesh; now the subcontinent
had divided into three political units.
Religion has been a prime cause of division.
Hinduism is the religion of the majority of
Indians, but there are many different kinds.
Hinduism professes, but does not always practise,
broad tolerance, and it can embrace many different
religious practices; Hindus are opposed to the
assertions of exclusive truth made by many other
religions. But it is precisely these all-embracing
Hindu claims that are seen as a threat to those
religions that base their faith on providing a
specific path to salvation. Muslims are the largest
of these minorities, numbering 120 million, a
quarter of all the Indian population in 1947 of
some 480 million. The next largest minority were
12 million Christians. The Christians of Kerala in
southern India are poor and have supported the
Communist Party. The principal challenges to
Indian unity in the 1990s, however, came from
the militant Sikhs of northern India and the
peoples of Kashmir. In 1947 the main enemy of
the Sikhs was the Muslims, from whom they
derive some of their religious practices. But since
independence the 7.5 million Sikhs have asserted
rights of independence from India’s Hindus as
well. The home of the Sikhs is the Punjab in
northern India, while the majority of Muslims live
in north-western India and in the east. They are
divided by the large central Indian land mass,
which is predominantly Hindu. But minority
communities of Hindus and Muslims are to be
found throughout India and Pakistan. Bengal in
the east had mixed Muslim and Hindu communities;
the Punjab in the north is also mixed religiously
between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.
Some twenty major languages divide India, as
well as the 3,000 castes and sub-castes of
Hinduism; the landlord is divided from the
peasant; the wealthy merchant and factory owner
from the worker, and the bureaucracy and government
have their own grades of influence. The
hundreds of princes great and small contributed
further to this fragmentation. It was Britain’s
imperial power that provided whatever unity
India enjoyed before independence.
Racial prejudice marred British India before
independence as it marred South Africa. It was
condemned by the more enlightened Englishmen,
among whom was Lord Salisbury, prime minister
in 1900. Replying to the governor of Bombay, he
wrote:
it interests me to find that you are struck with
the damned nigger element in the British
society at Bombay. It is bad enough in official
and military circles here. I look upon it as not
only offensive and unworthy but as representing
what is now and will be . . . a serious political
danger!
A generation later, Nehru in his Discovery of
India, which he wrote in 1943, expressed his own
anger at the racial discrimination of notices placed
in railway carriages, on the walls of waiting rooms
and even attached to park benches, with the
insulting message ‘For Europeans only’. Nehru
comments:
the idea of a master race is inherent in imperialism.
There was no subterfuge about it; it
was proclaimed in unambiguous language by
those in authority. . . . generation after generation,
and year after year, India as a nation and
Indians as individuals were subjected to insult,
humiliation, and contemptuous treatment. . . .
The memory of it hurts, and what hurts still
more is the fact that we submitted for so long
to this degradation.
Where did the balance lie between the harm
done and the benefits brought by imperial rule?
Economic arguments are finely balanced and what
might have developed without British rule
becomes a hypothetical judgement. Among the
benefits can be enumerated the creation of a common
language of government throughout India,
the establishment of law and order, the building of
a railway network spanning the continent, the
beginnings of industry and its protection after the
First World War, the development of higher education,
the training of a civil service and an army,
vast irrigation schemes, the better control of
famines when the vagaries of the weather decimated
agricultural production except on occasions
like 1943, better health care and control of the
killer diseases. But India was not a blank sheet that
Britain ‘modernised’. British rule was imposed on
an ancient civilisation whose intellectual elite had
produced philosophers, poets, historians, writers,
artists and scientists of world renown, men such as
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), poet, philosopher
and early advocate of international understanding
based on respect and knowledge of the
different cultures of the world, and the physicist
C. V. Raman, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930.
One failure of British rule, by way of contrast, was
the illiteracy of the masses.
That the resentment of British imperialism and
the manipulation of India’s economic development
to suit British interests should create a
nationalist reaction was inevitable given the
growth of an Indian elite and middle class in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless,
the British did not attempt to crush independent
Indian political activities.
With all their arrogance and prejudice there was
also a genuine desire for reform, for involving
Indians increasingly in the governing of the
country, while reserving to the British Crown, that
is the viceroy, only what were regarded as the
powers necessary to preserve British rule. Parliamentary-
type institutions and elections – at first
confined to a small electorate and later widened –
provided the basis for constitutional development
after independence. The full scope of constitutional
progress under British rule cannot be
detailed here, but the salient measures were incorporated
in the Indian Councils Act 1909, also
known as the Morley–Minto reforms, which permitted
Indians to be elected to the viceroy’s council
and to provincial councils. Eight years later the
growing demands of the Indian National Congress
(founded in 1885) led Edwin Montague, secretary
of state for India, to promise to increase the association
of Indians ‘in every branch of the administration,
(and to promote) the gradual development
of self-governing institutions, with a view to the
progressive realisation of responsible government
in India as an integral part of the Empire’. It was
not exactly independence, and self-government
was gradual indeed – it was to take another thirty
years before it became reality. Then came the
Montague–Chelmsford report in 1918 which
devolved more responsibilities upon the provincial
assemblies when the reforms began to be implemented
in 1921.
The 1920s and 1930s under British rule were
paved with good intentions. India would be led to
independence gradually by means designed to prevent
the radical Congress Party with its democratic
and socialist aspirations from gaining dominant
power. The princes, Britain’s loyal allies, would be
given a prominent place and Muslim and Sikh fears
of a Hindu majority would be appeased by the
grant of considerable autonomy and separate electoral
rolls. Long experience of imperial rule gave
the British self-confidence in the exercise of their
‘trusteeship’. But some of India’s leaders wanted
more rapid progress to independence than Britain
was disposed to grant, among them Gandhi. The
British vice-regal government in India and the
Cabinet at home found it increasingly puzzling
and difficult to know how best to deal with this
small, skinny man in a loincloth, half saint, half
shrewd politician, who moved the Indian masses as
no one had done before, who defied the power of
the Raj by encouraging civil disobedience to show
that Britain’s rule lacked legitimacy, and who met
the use of force by passive resistance.
Gandhi, once a dapper lawyer, had spent many
years in South Africa, where racial discrimination
had first aroused his anger and where he had
evolved the new methods of harnessing ‘people
power’ to overcome the apparently unassailable
might of imperial white rule. British rule in India
was met by this powerful non-violent defiance of
the masses, inspired by Gandhi’s example.
The viceroys, responsible for upholding the
imperial law, for security and order, tried to avoid
violence, preferring to govern through cooperation.
Gandhi was not satisfied with the promised
pace of British reforms, nor with the nationalism of
the elitist Congress Party, which had little contact
with the masses. He achieved the contact by
arranging a protest against British laws designed to
combat terrorism and to raise taxes (for it was the
Indians themselves who had to pay for the admin-
istration and the soldiers of the Raj). In April 1919
a large crowd gathered in Amritsar in the Punjab.
The demonstrators were not armed, but in an
atmosphere in which rebellion seemed possible the
British commanding officer in Amritsar overreacted,
committing an atrocity by ordering his
troops to fire on the crowd, killing more than 300
and wounding another thousand. For Gandhi this
act of bloody violence changed his outlook: there
could no longer be cooperation with the British
Raj. By a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience
India would be made ungovernable.
Gandhi was imprisoned for a time, the first of
several arrests. In 1930 he led the famous salt
march 240 miles to the coast in defiance of the
government’s salt tax. Picking up a handful of
sand on the seashore, he boiled it to extract the
salt. By this simple act he demonstrated that salt
could be obtained from nature with no need to
pay the British Raj for it. His defiance reverberated
throughout India. He was arrested again,
only to be released later and sympathetically
received by the viceroy. He created a sensation
when attending, in his loincloth, a conference on
reforms in London in 1931. A renewal of civil disobedience
in India led to another spell in prison.
The popular British press might derisively refer to
Gandhi as the Indian ‘fakir’, but in official
London and Delhi he was regarded with a
mixture of irritation and admiration for the power
he wielded by his simple example; the Indians
called him Mahatma, ‘great soul’.
In the 1930s Britain tried again to advance
Indian representation. The Government of India
Act was passed in 1935. The Raj, after the civil disobedience
campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, had
become convinced that preparation for Indian
independence had to be taken seriously. The Act
of 1935 set up eleven British Indian provinces
with their own elected parliaments and limited
control over their affairs. The religious communal
groups would be placed on different electoral registers.
A federal Indian state was the goal, with the
princely states free to join or not. Meanwhile the
viceroy reserved crucial powers to himself and, at
the centre, the nationalist Indian politicians would
have only limited influence. It looked like a workable
compromise from the British point of view,
but to the leaders of the Indian National Congress
the centre would be too weak, the viceroy’s powers
negated the demand for Indian independence
and the veto the conservative princes were to be
allowed would condemn India to a patchwork of
federated and independent states. Indian nationalists
suspected that the British, acting on the ageold
principle of ‘divide and rule’, were deliberately
encouraging religious and princely separation.
Only the provincial assemblies were elected in
1937 and only that part of the Act came into
force. This was nevertheless the start of the democratic
parliamentary process in India and the
restricted electorate of some 35 million voters
overwhelmingly returned Congress members to
the provincial assemblies; local administrations
were then formed. But how little genuine power
had been devolved soon became evident. When
the viceroy in 1939 simply declared India to be at
war after Britain’s own declaration of war on
Germany, Indian national leaders were not even
consulted. The provincial ministries resigned. But
Congress had meanwhile grown in power, with a
legitimate electoral base – and so had the Muslim
League, of which Jinnah was president.
After the outbreak of war in 1939 the viceroy of
India had to revert to direct rule, since Congress
led by Gandhi and Nehru had refused their cooperation
and had brought the constitutional
advances of the Government of India Act, which
they hated, to an end. India’s reaction to the outbreak
of war in Europe and the Middle East, a
fight for survival for the mother country, was
split. On the one hand, the nationalist politicians
were uncooperative; on the other, the Indian
army fought with bravery and distinction under
British and Indian officers far away from home,
in the Middle East, in North Africa and later in
Italy. Their loyalty was never in doubt.
With the sudden Japanese attack on Malaya in
December 1941, British, Commonwealth and
Indian troops fought together; tens of thousands
were inhumanely treated in Japanese prison
camps, beaten, starved and killed. For the Indian
soldiers the Japanese offered an escape, to join an
Indian liberation army sponsored by the Japanese.
Even when the only major Indian nationalist who
had thrown in his lot with Germany and Japan,
Subhas Chandra Bose, attempted to win recruits,
the majority of Indian prisoners preferred to share
the appalling hardships with their British comrades,
rather than gain their liberty and tolerable
living conditions by reneging. It is remarkable evidence
of the loyalty and pride that ordinary
Indians felt for their regiment and flag. The Indian
nationalist politicians reacted differently and saw
an opportunity to push forward independence at a
time when the British Empire was hard pressed.
Congress leaders had come to the conclusion
that the moment was ripe to force the British Raj
to give up its control of India, but they had no
intention of exchanging their British overlords for
Japanese conquerors. If Japan attacked from
Burma, Congress leaders would organise the
resistance of free India with its allies in the United
Nations military coalition, including of course the
Commonwealth. The Japanese in Burma were
checked and remained on the defensive until
1944. Gandhi and Nehru and Congress were
anxious to prevent a British transfer of power
which would allow the conservative princes and
the Muslim League separate powers. This would,
they believed, only lead to a feudal, federal India
in which religious fanaticism would open the way
to communal strife and violence. Jinnah had
already declared that the aim of the Muslim
League was an independent Pakistan. The princes
would attempt to hang on to their power and so
frustrate Nehru’s and Gandhi’s vision of an India
united, a progressive India socially reformed,
caste discrimination gone, a secular India striving
for religious harmony, a democratic India accepting
elected representative forms of government.
With Japan at the gates, the British were deeply
worried that Indian loyalty could not be counted
on. In the spring of 1942 Sir Stafford Cripps was
sent to offer India independence after the war was
over, but to appease Islamic aspirations the
Muslims would be given the option of secession if
they wished. This condition made certain the
rejection of the offer by the Congress leadership,
who would in turn have had to promise support
for the war. The Congress leaders were not to be
cajoled into a government powerless under the
viceroy, thus indicating that they accepted imperial
rule. For Congress another vital objection was
that acceptance would encourage the Muslims
after the war to divide India and set up their own
state. They suspected that Britain wished to divide
and rule. The British appeared to be more concerned
with retaining the loyalty of the Muslims
during the war. In August 1942 Congress launched
the ‘Quit India’ campaign. The viceroy then
put an end to all debate. He decided that the
only safe thing to do was to intern the political
leaders of the Congress Party, including Gandhi,
to prevent them from continuing to spread disaffection
throughout India. The silencing of the
Congress politicians enabled Jinnah’s Muslim
League greatly to strengthen its position. The
momentum for the partition of India and the creation
of Pakistan was henceforth not to be halted.
By August 1945 with the defeat of both
Germany and Japan, the curtain was about to fall
on the final act. Churchill, who was reluctant to
‘scuttle’ out of empire, had been replaced by
Attlee and a Labour government. Labour shared
none of Churchill’s historical sentimentality. The
viceroy, Viscount Wavell, was soon to discover
this. During 1943 and 1944 his hands had been
tied by London, who were afraid that talks with
Indian nationalists would sow disaffection. At this
very time, masked by government suppression of
news, the worst human disaster to befall India in
the twentieth century occurred. The Bengal
Famine claimed 3 million victims. There was
bureaucratic mismanagement, a failure to transport
food hoarded to feed the army; Burmese
supplies were cut. This disaster further fuelled
demands for independence.
In 1946, Field Marshal Lord Wavell told
London either to strengthen the army to keep
peace until all Indian parties had agreed to an
independent government of India in which they
would share power, or for Britain to withdraw
from India province by province, disclaiming
responsibility for the bloody consequences of
communal strife which was bound to follow its
departure. This was truly Hobson’s choice. What
had led the viceroy to such bleak conclusions?
Wavell’s attempts to arrive at compromises
among Indian political leaders promised no early
success, especially after the breakdown of talks
between them at the Simla Conference of June
1945; a British Cabinet mission to India in March
1946 came no nearer to success. But this time it
was not just a question of a conference of squabbling
politicians in India. To show the strength
of Muslim feelings and to protest at the tactics of
Congress, Jinnah called for a Direct Action Day
on 16 August. Fanatics stoked up communal violence
and in Calcutta alone there were 20,000
casualties of the riots.
So ended the last prospects of a ‘united India’;
it was the end too of the Wavell plan as far as the
Labour government was concerned. It was willing
neither to take the blame for leaving India in a
state of chaos nor to pour the resources into India
that were necessary if time for a solution was to
be won. If Britain could no longer guarantee life
and order from outbreaks of massive communal
violence, something drastic had become necessary.
In February 1947 Wavell was recalled. He
was replaced by a ‘royal’, a soldier of even greater
fame, Viscount Mountbatten, until then the
charismatic and successful supreme commander in
south-east Asia; in an attempt to make the Indians
accept responsibility for the consequences of their
disputes, a definite date, June 1948, was fixed for
the transfer of power.
The Mountbattens arrived in Delhi on 22 March
1947 with all the pomp due to a viceroy and consort.
No viceroy’s wife had ever made so deep an
impression on Indians as Edwina Mountbatten,
who threw herself into support for welfare and
health programmes at a time of turbulence and
misery for so many. Mountbatten began a weary
process of talks with Pandit Nehru and the other
leaders of Congress and with Mohammed Jinnah,
representing the Muslim League. Gandhi was little
involved. He used his remaining strength – he
was now an old and frail man in his mid-seventies
– to try to halt the mounting religious conflicts
between Hindu and Muslims. The last two years
of his life, devoted to humanity, were the most
genuinely saintly.
Mountbatten got on well with the urbane and
warm Nehru; Jinnah he found negative and forbidding.
The Muslim leader fought for the underdog,
the numerically weaker and dispersed 100
million Muslims outnumbered by Hindus three to
one; and his intransigence would finally convince
the British and the Congress leaders to abandon
their cherished hopes for a united India and compel
them to accept an independent Pakistan. Even
then they would seek to weaken and confine a
‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan to such frontiers as would
make its viability and continued independence
highly questionable after the transfer of power.
Jinnah reflected Muslim suspicions of the good
intentions of the Hindu majority, influenced by
bitter memories of discrimination culturally, politically
and economically; a unified, secular, centralised
India, he feared, would simply perpetuate
the tyranny of the majority over the minority.
But an India without strong central authority
accommodating autonomy for Muslim-dominant
regions was anathema to Nehru and the Congress
leaders, who believed it would be ungovernable.
Well aware of mounting tensions, Mountbatten
calculated that the best chance of a peaceful transfer
and agreement between the leaders lay in making
them face a short deadline. He announced that
the transfer would take place not in over a year, but
in just six months on 15 August 1947. Nehru and
Jinnah, Congress and the Muslim League would
have to reach a practical solution for partition or
they would be responsible for chaos on the date of
transfer. Brought to the edge of catastrophe the
Indian leaders were forced to accept the implications
of Mountbatten’s timetable and the plan he
now put on the table. This involved partition but
with the mixed Muslim–Hindu Punjab and Bengal
provinces being allowed to choose which way they
wished to go. They too voted for partition. A
British jurist headed a commission which was given
the task of demarcating the frontiers of India and
Pakistan. The princes of the 562 states in 1947
were left to make the best terms they could with
one or the other of the successor states to the
British Raj.
Even if Muslim and Congress leaders had
accepted the demarcation between the two states
arrived at by the commission, immense practical
problems would still have had to be overcome.
The unified administration, police force, army and
treasury would all need to be split up. Most of
industry was located within those parts of India
where Hindus were in a majority; the economy
and communications would be dislocated. Would
the break-up into two nations heighten tensions
between Hindus and Muslims and lead to
renewed violence and strife? It was clear from the
outset that the creation of Pakistan was bound to
entail the division of Bengal in the east and the
Punjab in the north with one predominantly
Muslim part being incorporated in Pakistan and
the Hindu-majority districts going to India. Yet
the Muslim and Hindu populations were mixed
throughout the subcontinent, with millions living
on the ‘wrong’ side of any partition line that
could be devised. The Punjab was a powder-keg
of conflict, for here another minority of militant
Sikhs saw an opportunity as a result of partition
of becoming a majority and even gaining their
own state of Khalistan. Communal suspicions,
resentments and hatreds would not need much
provocation to set the subcontinent alight.
Bengal, the Punjab, Delhi and Calcutta were particular
areas of danger at a time when the loyalty
of the army and the police would be gravely
weakened by the transfer of power. Gandhi could
not permanently put out the flames of religious
and ethnic hatred and himself fell victim to the
bullets of a Hindu extremist, who shot him at a
prayer meeting on 30 January 1948. Ethnic and
religious strife and bloodshed not only in India
and Pakistan but throughout the world has
proved the hardest to halt, the most resistant to
the supposed progress of civilisation.
Bloody communal violence had also erupted in
the Punjab. Jinnah, Nehru, Gandhi and the leaders
of Congress had been aware of the dangers
ahead and were determined to avoid them or at
least to contain violence. Reports from the Punjab
before partition clearly warned of the likelihood
of conflict, and preventive plans were drawn up.
A British officered force (which included Gurkhas)
of some 55,000 men was available to preserve law
and order in the Punjab. But the scale of the violence
that would follow on partition was not fully
anticipated in Delhi and was to stain the transfer
of power with the blood of many hundreds of
thousands of innocent victims.
Independence Day in Pakistan on 14 August
and in India on 15 August passed off with celebrations
and praise for Mountbatten and the
British. Jinnah publicly acknowledged that ‘such
voluntary and absolute transfer of power and rule
by one nation over others is unknown in the
whole history of the world’. He wished to live in
amity with his neighbour. Yet the celebrations
were hardly over before the tragedy of the transfer
became manifest and relations between India
and Pakistan were deeply scarred and damaged for
decades to come. The demarcation of the frontier
had been announced on 16 August. The militant
section of the Sikhs then set upon the Muslims,
killing and raping and destroying their homes.
How great the loss of life was has never been even
roughly established; it was on a huge scale.
During August and September, between
200,000 and half a million Muslims fleeing the
Indian half of east Punjab lost their lives. No
mercy was shown to unarmed men, women and
children. Even trains overcrowded with refugees
were halted and the passengers murdered in cold
blood. The local authorities either looked on or
were powerless to stop the massacres. Pakistan
never forgave. It was evident that the onslaught
had been planned, the Pakistanis believed, with
the foreknowledge of Delhi. Gandhi and Nehru,
now India’s prime minister, were horrified. There
were killings too on the Pakistan side on a smaller
scale. Certainly the Muslim League was also anxious
to drive out the Sikhs and Hindus from what
became Pakistan by organising riots. Millions of
refugees crossed the frontier in opposite directions
to India and Pakistan with nothing but what they
stood up in. Communal riots spread to Delhi,
where more killings of the Muslim minority
occurred. Gandhi hastened to Calcutta to stop the
riots in Bengal. There he announced a fast to the
death, and so great was his moral stature that
large-scale killings did cease. But in the Punjab the
Sikhs were deliberately expelling their Muslim
neighbours so that they might at last gain power.
It is obvious that force and organised terror
were required to drive people despairingly from
their homes, their farms and their plots of land
where they had lived for generations. They did
not move willingly before the Independence
Days. In West Pakistan only a small minority of
Hindus remained. In East Pakistan (Bengal) a
substantial number of the 30 million Hindus
stayed. From India some 9 to 10 million Muslim
refugees had crossed over to West or East
Pakistan, yet millions of Muslims stayed, remaining
the largest minority among 340 million
Indians. Communal rioting and killings recurred
in later years, but never again on the horrific scale
of 1947. Nor did Sikhs and Hindus in the eastern
Punjab peacefully coexist. While Sikh hatred of
Pakistan secured the Indian frontier from any
danger of internal subversion in any conflict with
Pakistan, Sikh militants – because they constituted
only a minority of some 10 million – have
stridently and at times violently sought autonomy
and independence. This stems from their fears of
losing their identity, their way of life.
In an atmosphere of bitterness Pakistan and
India only a few weeks after independence became
embroiled in conflict over the future of a princely
state bordering on both northern India and
Pakistan – Kashmir and Jammu. The ruling
Maharaja vacillated, refusing to opt for either
Pakistan or India. He was a Hindu, though the
majority of the population was Muslim. The key
figure in Kashmir was not the Maharaja but Sheikh
Mohammed Abdullah, the leader of a party not
divided on religious lines and in agreement with
the Congress leaders in India. Pakistan attempted
to force the issue and encouraged Pathan tribesmen
to invade Kashmir, which they almost succeeded
in occupying. The Maharaja fled to India,
where in return for a promise of Indian military
assistance he agreed, without consulting his people
or the political leaders, that his state should accede
to India. Nehru sent in troops and promised to
allow the people to choose their own future in a
referendum. In Kashmir both Hindus and Muslims
looking to Sheikh Abdullah resisted the Pathans
and the idea of absorption by Pakistan, which
claimed Kashmir on the ground that it had a
Muslim majority. Abdullah was after all a close
friend and admirer of Nehru, sharing with him the
Indian ideal of a secular state in which Muslim and
Hindu could live peaceably together. The Indians
and Kashmiris now pushed the Pathans back, only
for Pakistan to intervene with its own regular
troops. Nehru, meanwhile, weakened his case by
not implementing his promise to hold a plebiscite.
With the two new states on the brink of war, the
United Nations intervened, and on 1 January 1949
a truce line was established which left two-thirds of
Kashmir in Indian hands and one-third with
Pakistan. Nehru was deeply disappointed by this
injustice. It was not the end of the Kashmir problem,
nor did it settle Indian–Pakistani hostilities.
Basic to these was the suspicion for decades of the
Islamic Pakistani leadership that secular India
would, one day, seek to reunite the subcontinent
and destroy Pakistan’s hard-won independence
and religious culture.
World History
