by Dr. M. K. Teng, C. L. Gadoo 
 (Joint Human Rights Committee WA-88, Shakarpur, Delhi - 110092)

 Terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir has almost broken up the national consensus on major functional attributes of Parliamentary government in Jammu and Kashmir. There is a deep difference of opinion about the feasibility of a political package on 'greater autonomy' to the State; Hindus and the other minorities, about 46 percent of the population of the State, opposed to any restructurisation of the existing constitutional relations between the Union and the State, and the Muslims uncertain of whether the so-called package of autonomy would be acceptable to militant regimes as a basis for settlement with the Indian Govemment. Perhaps, the Govemment of India believes that it can substitute 'greater autonomy' for the 'right of self-determination', that the Muslim secessionist forces, militarised by Pakistan in 1989-90, have been demanding for the last five decades. The former Prime Minister, Narsimha Rao, went so far as to suggest, that the Congress Government would concede "Azadi, short of Independence" to meet Muslim separatism, at least half-way, exactly in the same manner as the Congress had offered to concede a Muslim State within India, when it accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946.

    The acceptance of the separate identity of the Muslim majority provinces proposed by the Cabinet Mission Plan led to the partition of India in 1947. The acceptance of the 'autonomy of the State', which, evidently, is presumed to be based on exclusion of Jammu and Kashmir State from the Indian constitutional organisation, may lead to the second partition of India.

    The Government of India appears to have overlooked the dangerous portent of forcing a restructurisation of the existing constitutional relations between the State and the Indian Union and exclude the State from the constitutional organisation of India, to push it back into the position of isolation in which it was placed from 1947 to 1954. In the new setting created by fundamentalisation of secessionist movements in the State and their militarisation by Pakistan, the exclusion of the State from the Indian constitutional organisation, which the demand for autonomy actually aims to achieve, will be a prelude to the disengagement of the State from India. The recognition of Jammu and Kashmir, as a separate Muslim identity, based upon the Muslim majority character of its population, repudiates the Indian commitment to secularism and integration of the Indian people on the basis of the fundamental right to equality. Perhaps, it is not fully realised that Muslimisation of Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim majority State in India, would eventually disrupt the foundations of the Indian political culture and threaten not only the secular values of the Indian nation but its unity as well.

DISTORTION OF HISTORY

    Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir State, signed the same standard form of the Instrument of Accession in October 1947, which the other Indian rulers signed to accede to the then Indian Dominion. The Instrument of Accession was evolved by the States Department, headed by Vallabh Bhai Patel, and was based upon the principles the Cabinet Mission had stipulated for the accession of the Indian States to the All India federation. All the rulers of the acceding States retained all the residuary powers of government and the Instrument of Accession they signed underlined the delegation of powers to the Dominion Govemment in respect of foreign affairs, defence and communications only. Among the other rulers, Hari Singh too retained the residuary powers of the government, and the Instrument of Accession he signed envisaged the delegation of powers to the Dominion Government of India in respect of foreign affairs, defence and communications. The Instrument of Accession did not bind any acceding State, including Jammu and Kashmir, to accept the future constitution of India.

    No separate or special provisions were incorporated in the Instrument of Accession signed by Hari Singh and there was no precondition or agreement, specially accepted by the Government of India to any separate and special constitutional arrangement, to the exclusion of the other acceding States.

    That the State Department of the Dominion Government, or the ruler of the State or the Congress leadership accepted any condition that Jammu and Kashmir would be provided a special constitutional position or any particular brand of autonomy or would be recognised as a separate Muslim identity, is a travesty of history. Neither Nehru, nor Patel gave any assurance to the Conference leaders that the Jammu and Kashmir State would be recognised as a separate constitutional entity because of the Muslim majority in its population.

    When the invading armies of Pakistan were fast approaching Srinagar, the Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehar Chand Mahajan, arrived in Delhi, with a request from Hari Singh for help against the invaders. Mahajan was instruced to inform the Government of India that the Maharaja had decided to accede to the Indian Dominion and accepted to transfer whatever authority he would be required to make in favour of the National Conference. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was in Delhi and neither he nor Nehru laid any conditions on Mahajan in respect of the future constitution of the State. Mahajan too did not make any commitment on the separate Muslim identity of Jammu and Kashmir or its autonomy. Nehru sought a substantial transfer of authority to the National Conference which was in consonance with the pledges that the Congress had given to the people of all Princely States. The Congress was committed to replace personal rule, which characterised the political organisation of the States, by representative institutions on the basis of administrative responsibility which was accepted for the reorganisation of the governments in the Indian Provinces. Jammu and Kashmir was not recognised as an exception here also.

    After accession of the State to India, an Emergency Administration, headed by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, was constituted by Hari Singh on 30 October 1947, to deal with the situation of crisis the invasion had created. In June 1948, The Emergency Administration was dissolved and replaced by an Interim Government, formed by the National Conference and headed by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah.

    Unfortunately lies have been multiplied during the last four decades to distort the history of those crucial years and lies are being retold to justify the treachery and blackmail, which characterised the atrocious process of forcing the exclusion of the State from the Indian constitutional organisation in 1950, when the Indian Constitution was adopted.

INSTRUMENT OF ACCESSION

    The Instrument of Accession, which the rulers of the Princely States executed to join the Indian Dominion, reserved them the right to convene Constituent Assemblies to frame constitutions for their respective governments. The ruler of the Jammu and Kashmir also reserved the right to convene a Constituent Assembly to frame a constitution for his government. The Constituent Assembly of India, was by mutual consensus of the Premiers of the States and the representatives of the Constituent Assembly, entrusted with the task of evolving a model constitution, which the Constituent Assemblies of the States would follow in order to avoid any conflict between the Constitution of India and the constitutions of the States. Constituent Assemblies were convened in the Mysore State, the States Union of Saurashtra and the States Union of Travancore-Cochin.

    In 1949, an extraordinary decision was taken by the Premiers of the States in a Conference held in Delhi. They decided to entrust to the Constituent Assembly of India the task of framing a uniform set of constitutional provisions for all the States. The constitutional provisions for the States, the Conference decided, would be incorporated in the Constitution of India.

    The National Conference leaders did not accept the decision of the Premiers' Conference and insisted upon convocation of a separate Constituent Assembly for Jammu and Kashmir. Consequently, a Conference of the Conference leaders and representatives of the Dominion Government, in which Nehru and Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah participated, was convened in Delhi, shortly after the Premiers' Conference. A number of issues pertaining to the territorial jurisdiction of the Union, citizenship, fundamental rights and related safeguards, freedom of faith, emergencies arising out of war, rebellion and constitutional breakdown in the States, jurisdiction of the Courts, division of powers between the Union and the federating States, residuary powers between the Union and the federating States, the residuary powers and the institution of the Constituent Assembly in the State, came up for deliberation in the Conference. The Constituent Assembly of India had evolved provisions in respect of the territories of the Union, citizenship, fundamental rights, principles of State policy, jurisdiction of the courts and emergencies. The Constituent Assembly of India had also evolved a scheme of the division of powers between the Union and the States, which it proposed would replace the delegation of powers stipulated by the Instrument of Accession the acceding States had signed.

    The Conference leaders stunned Nehru and the other Congress leaders when they refused to accept the application of any provisions of the Constitution of India to the State and instead insisted upon the continuation of federal relations between the proposed Union of India and Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Instrument of Accession. In other words they demanded the exclusion of the State from the consitutional organisation of India and its reorganisation into a separate political entity which would be aligned with the Union of India in respect of external relations, defence and communications. In fact, the National Conference demanded the restoration of control over the State army to the Interim Government, which they claimed, would undertake the defence of the State, after the Indian army was withdrawn. The Conference leaders proposed that

        (i) the rule of the Dogra dynasty be abolished;

        (ii) the State be excluded from the constitutional organisation of India:

        (iii) the relations between the Union and the State be governed by the stipulations of the Instrument of Accession;

        (iv) the control over the State army be transferred to the Interim Government of the State;

        (v) the Interim Government would institute a separate Constituent Assembly to draw up a Constitution for the State.

    The Indian leaders agreed to leave a wider orbit of authority to the State Government and accepted to vest the residuary powers with it. They agreed to the demand for the abolition of the Dogra rule, and the institution of a separate Constituent Assembly for the State. However, they refused to countenance the exclusion of the State from the Indian Union and its constitutional organisation. Nehru, evidently disconcerted with the proposals the Conference leaders made, told them that he could not accept to deprive the people of the State of the Indian citizenship, fundamental rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy which reflected the pride of the Indian people in the ideological commitments of their liberation struggle.

    The National Conference harboured completely different views about the constitutional relations between the State and India. They visualised the State as a separate political entity with its own constitutional organisation, independent of the political organisation of India in respect of which the Union of India assumed the responsibility of defence, communications and external relations within the stipulations of the Instrument of Accession. The Conference leaders were motivated by a subtle consideration that since the execution of the Instrument of Accession by Maharaja Hafi Singh, which the Conference leaders derisively described as "Paper Accession", was subject to a plebiscite, the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir, had assumed a veto over the accession of the State to India. To retain the Muslim right to veto on the accession of the State, the Conference leaders evaded any fresh Constitutional postulates and agreements with the Indian Union, which would replace the Instrument of Accession or would alter its consequences.

    The atmosphere in which Delhi Conference was convened, was pervaded by a deep feeling of uncertainty. A month before the Delhi Conference was held, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah had thrown a bombshell in the Indian camp when he had told the correspondent of 'Scotsman', that the independence of Jammu and Kashmir would be the most suitable course to end the dispute over Kashmir. In case, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah maintained, Kashmir was able to establish good neighbourly relations with India and Pakistan, the two countries would settle down to peace and live as good neighbours.

    The National Conference leaders made a tactical retreat mainly to bide time and an agreement was finally reached between them and the Congress leaders. The agreement stipulated:

        (i) that Jammu and Kashmir would be included in the territories of Indian Union;

        (ii)  provisions of the Constitution of India in respect of citizenship, fundamental rights and related legal guarantees, Directive Principles of State Policy and the Federal Judiciary would be extended to the State;

        (iii) the division of powers between the State and the Union of India would be governed by the stipulation of the Instrument of Accession and not the Seventh Schedule of the Indian Constitution;

        (iv) the administrative and the operational control of the State army would remain with the Government of India;

        (v) a separate Constituent Assembly of the State would be convened to draw up the Constitution for the State; and

        (vi) the Constituent Assembly, after it was convened, would determine the future of Dogra rule.

    The agreement was shortlived. Not long after the Conference leaders returned to Srinagar, they made public pronouncements that the Jammu and Kashmir State would not compromise on the issue of autonomy and the Constituent Assembly of the State would evolve a set of separate principles in regard to citizenship, fundamental rights, Principles of State Policy and elections. The Conference leaders gave ample expression to their reluctance to accept the inclusion of the State in the Indian Union and the application of any provisions of the Constitution of India to the State.

    The issues came to a head when Gopalaswamy Ayyangar sent the draft constitutional provisions, he had drawn up for the State, to the Conference leaders for their approval. The draft provisions were based upon the agreement reached in Delhi in May 1949, between the representatives of the Government of India and the Conference leaders. After closed door deliberations, the Conference leaders placed the draft proposals before the Working Committee of the Conference. The Working Committee turned down the proposals promptly.

    Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah sent an alternate draft to Ayyangar which envisaged exclusion of the State from the Indian Union and its constitutional organisation. The draft stipulated the abolition of the Dogra rule and the reorganisation of the State into an independent political entity which would be federated with the Indian Union on the basis of the Instrument of accession. The draft proposed that the separate political identity of the State would be based upon the Muslim majority character of its population, its separate culture and history and the aspirations of its people for economic equality and political freedom which the Constitution of India did not enshrine.

    The Conference leaders were particularly opposed to application of the provisions of the Constitution of India with regard to citizenship and fundamental rights to the State. They disapproved of all forms of safeguards which the provisions of the Constitution of India in respect of fundamental rights embodied, on the pretext that such safeguards would frustrate the resolve of the Interim Government to undertake economic, political and social reforms in the State. The real reasons for the Conference leaders to resist the application of the fundamental rights to the State were, however, different. The right to equality and the right to protection against discrimination on the basis of religion, the right to freedom of faith and the right to property enshrined by the Constitution of India, conflicted with the Muslimisation of the State, the Interim Government had embarked upon, right from the time it was installed in power. The Interim Government enforced the communal precedence of the Muslim majority in the government, the economic organisation and the society of the State with religious zeal. The discriminatory legislation, which devastated the non- Muslim minorities in the State, worst hit among them being the Hindus in the Kashmir Province, controverted the safeguards the Constitution of India envisaged against discrimination on the basis of religion.

    Ayyangar received a jolt when the communication of the Conference leaders, along with the draft proposals drawn by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, was delivered to him. On 14 October 1949, he had a long meeting with Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and Mirza Afzal Beg in Delhi and tried to persuade them to adhere to the agreement they had accepted in the conference at Delhi, earlier in May. The Conference leaders did not relent and told Ayyangar bluntly that they would not accept the application of the Constitution of India to the State.

    Ayyangar failed to face the Conference leaders with firmness. He made a vain bid to placate the Conference leaders by offering to exclude fundamental rights and related legal safeguards, from the provisions of the Constitution of India, which were proposed to be extended to the State in his draft. To his consternation, the Conference leaders rejected the modified draft as well. They informed Ayyangar that the National Conference would not accept the application of any provision of the Constitution of India, including the provisions with regard to the territories of the Union and citizenship and that it accepted only the Instrument of Accession as the basis of any relationship between the State and the future Union of India. When Nehru and other Indian leaders insisted upon the inclusion of the State, at least, in the basic structure of the Constitution of India, the Conference leaders broke off the negotiations and threatened to withdraw from the Constituent Assembly.

    Fearful of a crisis the resignation of Conference leaders from the Constituent Assembly of India would create in Jammu and Kashmir and its repercussions outside India, Ayyangar beseeched them not to take any precipitate action which would adversely affect Indian interests in the Security Council. A breach with the Conference leaders, he believed, would undercut the support India had among the Kashmiri speaking Muslims who Nehru, still believed, would win the plebiscite for India. The Conference leaders, foxy and sly, used the United Nations intervention, ironically enough, invoked by India to secure the withdrawal of the armies of Pakistan from the occupied territories, to foist on the Indian leaders, a settlement which placed the State in a position outside the political organisation of India.

    Nehru was abroad in the United States of America. Ayyangar met the Conference leaders and assured them that the Government of India would accept a constitutional position for Jammu and Kashmir outside the Indian constitutional organisation. He further assured them the Government of India respected the aspirations of the Muslims of the State, and therefore, would accept the institution of a separate Constituent Assembly of the State which would frame the Constitution of the State and also determine the future of the Dogra dynasty. The provisions of the Instrument of Accession, Ayyangar assured them further, would determine the Constitutional relationship between the State and the Union of India.

    Ayyangar drew up a fresh draft in consultation with Mirza Afzal Beg. Abdullah pulled the strings from behind the scene. The revised draft, prepared by Ayyangar and moved in the Constituent Assembly of India, envisaged:

        (i) no provisions of the Constitution of India, except Article 1, would be extended to the State;

        (ii) the division of powers between the Union and the Jammu and Kashmir State would be limited to the stipulations of the Instrument of Accession;

        (iii) a separate Constituent Assembly would be convened in Jammu and Kashmir to frame its Constitution;

        (iv) the President of India would be empowered to vest more powers in the Union Government in respect of Jammu and Kashmir in concurrence with the State Government;

        (v) the President would be empowered to modify the operation of the special constitutional provisions for the State on the recommendations of the Constituent Assembly of the State;

        (vi) the State Government would be construed to mean, the Maharaja acting on the advice of the Council of Ministers appointed under his proclamation dated 5 March 1948."

    The draft provisions were incorporated in Article 306-A of the draft Constitution of India. The draft Article 306-A was renumbered Article 370 at the revision stage.

    Article 306-A was circulated in the Constituent Assembly on 16 October 1949. It came up for consideration of the Assembly the next day. Several members of the Constituent Assembly detected an error in the draft provisions, which Ayyangar had overlooked. The draft Article defined the State Government as the "Council of Ministers appointed under the Maharaja's Proclamation dated 5 March 1948." The members of the Constituent Assembly pointed out to Ayyangar that the definition of the State Government envisaged a perpetual Interim Government which would lead to the creation of an anomalous situation of excluding all successor governments from the provisions of the Constitution of India. Ayyangar modified the draft to remove the anomaly and redefined the State Government as the "person for the time being recognised by the President as the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir acting on the advice of the Council of Ministers for the time being in office under the Maharaja's proclamation dated the fifth day of March 1948."

    The Conference leaders took strong exception to the change in the definition of the State Government. Mirza Afzal Beg threatened to move an amendment to the draft provisions of Article 306-A, seeking to alter the definition of the State Government.

    Beg had actually sought to include provisions in the draft Article 306-A which envisaged a perpetual Interim Government in the State and which could be used as a lever against India in future. He and the other Conference leaders, were disconcerted with the inclusion of the State in the First Schedule of the Constitution of India and wanted some pretext to block the passage of the special provisions in the Constituent Assembly.

    Ayyangar could not remodify the definition of the State Government, in view of strong reaction against it in the Constituent Assembly. He failed to persuade the Conference leaders to condescend to the modifications he had brought about in the draft. When Article 306-A came up for the consideration of the Constituent Assembly, the Conference leaders sulked away and did not join the deliberations on the draft provision till Ayyangar completed his speech. They sat glum when the draft provisions were put to vote and passed unanimously.

    Immediately after the draft provisions were adopted by the Constituent Assembly, they sent a sharp rejoinder to Ayyangar demanding the rescission of Article 306-A as adopted by the Constituent Assembly, failing which they threatened to resign from its membership. Ayyangar was stunned. He sent a plaintive note to the Conference leaders entreating them not to take any action which would prejudice the Indian interests, and wait for Nehru's return. The Conference leaders did not resign from the Constituent Assembly, but as the days went by, they launched a surreptitious and widespread campaign to subvert the special provisions of Article 370. 
 

Article 370

Article 370, in its original form, envisaged exclusion of Jammu and Kashmir State from the secular Constitutional organisation of India, and its reorganisation into a separate political identity based upon the Muslim majority character of its population. It imposed a limitation on the application of the provisions of Constitution of India to the State. The division of powers between the State and the Union was also limited to the stipulations of the Instrument of Accession. Article 370, was therefore, not an enabling act. It was, in fact, an act of limitation imposed on the application of the Constitution of India to the State, after the State was included in the First Schedule of the Constitution. The State was included in the First Schedule independent of Article 370.

CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR

    The Conference leaders sought to use the Constituent Assembly of the State to undermine the special provisions of Article 370 as well as the Instrument of Accession. The elections to the Constituent Assembly of the State were held in 1951. Seventy three of the Conference nominees were returned to the Assembly unopposed. Two of the remaining seats in the 75 member Assembly were also annexed by the National Conference.

    In his inaugural address, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah claimed plenary powers for the Constituent Assembly to determine the final form of the Constitutional relations between the State and the Indian Union, which virtually sought to subject the special provisions envisaged by Article 370 to the verdict of the Assembly. He went further and asserted that the Constituent Assembly, its powers drawn from the people of the State, would determine future affiliations of the State in respect of its accession, in accordance with the options the Cabinet Mission Plan had reserved for the States. In categorical terms, he spelt out that the Constituent Assembly would determine whether the State would remain in India, accede to Pakistan or assume independence. The implications of his statement were clear. Article 370 would be rendered redundant after the Constituent Assembly had taken a final decision on the accession of the State and its constitutional relations with India.

    The exclusion of the State from the Constitutional organisation of India and the insistence of the Conference leadership on the right to plenary powers for the Constituent Assembly, caused concern among the Hindus and the other minorities. The Hindus of Jammu reacted sharply against the exclusion of the State from the Indian Constitutional organisation, which they feared was a ploy to undo the accession of the State to India. They also opposed the abolition of Dogra rule, which they alleged would be used by the Interim Government to break the last link between India and the Jammu and Kashmir State.

    The Hindus of the Kashmir Province, who bore the rigours of the Muslimisation of the State, also expressed strong disapproval of the Conference demand for a separate political organisation of the State. They had been devastated by the enforcement of Muslim precedence, and virtually reduced to a state of servitude. Their voice was stifled by the Conference gendarmes, who had taken over magistracies in the Valley in the aftermath of the invasion and dispensed justice in the name of Islam. The Conference leaders branded the Hindus as the traitors to the freedom of Jammu and Kashmir and accused them of having supported the Dogra rule in its depredations against the Muslims.

    The Hindus made frantic appeals to the Indian Prime Minister and entreated Ayyangar not to accept the exclusion of the State from the Indian political organisation. They pleaded with the Indian leaders that the consequences of the isolation of the State and its reorganisation into a separate political organisation, governed by the commitment of the National Conference to the Muslimisation of the State, would have disastrous consequences in the long run.

    History proved them right. Four decades after Article 370 was enacted, the rickety structure of the political instruments envisaged by it, crumbled under the onslaught of the Muslim secessionist forces, militarised by Pakistan. With that were wiped out the Hindus and the other minorities, along with the hollow slogans of secularism with which the successive governments of India had concealed the ugly face of Muslim communalism in the State.

    The demonstrations made by the Hindus in Kashmir evoked little response from the Congress leadership. Blinded by the partition of India, which had been brought about by the Indian Muslims, rather than the British, they looked to the Muslims of Kashmir as the sole guarantors of secularism in India. They denounced the Hindus and other minorities for allegedly seeking to communalise the traditionally tolerant community of the Muslims and applauded the National Conference for its demand to secure the exclusion of the State from the secular political organisation of India on the basis of the Muslim majority character of its population

    The National Conference used the Indian State to defend Jammu and Kashmir from the invading armies of Pakistan in 1947. After that was accomplished, they sought to use the United Nations intervention to pull out the State from India. In August 1953, the Interim Government was dismissed and a second Interim Government headed by Bakhshi Gulam Mohammad installed in its place. In 1954, the limitations imposed upon the application of the Constitution of India to the State were partially lifted by a Presidential proclamation, in respect of citizenship, fundamental rights, Government of India, division of powers, federal judiciary and elections to the Parliament. Subsequent proclamations extended more provisions of the Constitution of India to the State. The application of the provisions of the Constitution of India, however, were subject to reservations and exceptions, which mutilated their real content.

TERRORISM AND AUTONOMY

In the broad background of terrorist violence which has ravaged the State for the last six years, the demand for greater autonomy and the wild assurances of the successive Indian Governments to support it, has an ominous portent. The restoration of the 1953 status, which is presumed to be the bottom line the autonomy of the State will necessitate restructurisation of the existing Constitutional relations between the State and the Union of India and the withdrawal of the provisions of the Constitution of India, extended to the State, following the Presidential proclamation of 1954. The restoration of the separate political identity of the State on the basis of the Muslim majority character of its population will reinforce the Muslim claim to a veto on the accession of the State to India.

    The insistence on (i) a safer zone to protect the Muslim minority from the dominance of the Hindu majority in India, and (ii) the right of the Muslims to reconstitute the Muslim majority provinces to form a Muslim State, were the two basic planks on which the Muslim League secured the partition of India. The creation of an autonomous state of Jammu and Kashmir placed outside the political organisation of India, will go half-way to substantiate Pakistan's claim on Kashmir. With militant guns booming in the background, India will, sooner or later, be forced to accept a settlement which is acceptable to Pakistan.

    The militarisation of Muslim secessionist forces and their reorientation to Pan-Islamic fundamentalism has added a new dimension to the Muslim separatism in Jammu and Kashmir. The consolidation of Pan-Islamic fundamentalism as a basis for a global strategy to unify the Muslim nations into an independent power in the world, with Pakistan as one of its focal centres, threatens the whole northern frontier of India.

    The demand for autonomy reflects the unconcealed satisfaction with which its proponents are using the ground earned by militants, to pull out the State from the Indian political organisation. With the Hindus in exile, there is no one left in Kashmir to weep for India. On a midnight hour, sometime in future, India might once again awaken to the reality of a second partition.

by Dr. M. K. Teng, C. L. Gadoo 
 (Joint Human Rights Committee WA-88, Shakarpur, Delhi - 110092)

  India That the Princely States of India, including Jammu and Kashmir State, were on the agenda of the partition of India in 1947, is a travesty of history and a part of the diplomatic offensive, Pakistan has launched to mislead the international opinion about its claim to Jammu and Kashmir. The matter of the fact is that the lapse of Paramountcy was a consequence of the dissolution of the British empire in India and the political imperatives of the authority, the British Crown exercised over the princely States. The withdrawal of the Paramountcy was not a concomitant or a consequence of the Indian partition, and neither the June 3 Declaration of 1947, nor the independence of India Act, embodied any provision by virtue of which the partition of India affected the Princely States or the British Paramountcy.

    The British colonial empire in India was divided into two separate and different political organisations, the British India constituted of the British Indian Provinces and the India of Princes. The British India was directly governed by the British Government through the Governer-General of India, with each of the Provinces in charge of a Provincial Governor, who in the old British tradition, administered the Provinces, with the help of the Indian Civil Service.

    The Princely States were ruled by local potentates, who had carved their independent fiefs and kingdoms in the long and atrocious process of the British expansion in India. Five hundred and sixty two in number, the Indian States formed a conglomerate of widely disparate identities in their territories, population and government. The Princes were British feudatories, who accepted the supremacy of the British Crown, which was symbolized in the person of the Crown Prince, or the Viceroy of India. The relations between the British Crown and the States were governed by what the British called, the "Paramountcy'. Paramountcy in real terms, described the extent of the authority the British exercised over the States.

    Apparently, the rulers of the States were vested with the powers to rule their States, but in actual practice, the States were administered by the British officers, whose functions were determined by the Viceroy, the Political Department of the Government of India and the British Residents posted in the States. The Princes represented the best of the oriental splendour, with their treasuries held by the British, and their privy purses plentifully provided.

    The Partition of India, which loomed larger on the horizons after the failure of the Cabinet Mission and the campaign of "Direct Action" launched by the Muslim League, suddenly pushed the States into the fore-front. Interspersed in the British Indian Provinces, the States were spread over more than one third of the territory of India and constituted about a hundred million people, almost a quarter of the population of India.

    The British, the Muslim League as well as the Indian National Congress, for their own interests, did not favour the inclusion of the Princely States, in the constitutional reforms, the Indian liberation movement idealised. The British held the States as a personal preserve, protected the Princes against their people and harnessed the resources of the States to promote the interests of their empire. The Princes, of their privileges and unrestricted power over their subjects, supported the British, to isolate themselves from any constitutional change which prejudiced their position.

    The Indian renaissance evoked a widespread response in the Princely States, and the liberation movement in India received as much support from the people of the States as it did in the British Indian Provinces. In fact, the revolutionary struggle, which followed the Swadeshi Movement in the aftermath of the stormy session of the Indian National Congress at Calcutta in 1906, grew in the States, where numerous revolutionaries received quarter.

    The Congress leaders, however, on the insistence of the Princes and the Muslim League, withdrew its movement from the States, and till almost the end of the British rule, refused to integrate the people's movements in the States avowedly inspired by the liberation of India, with the national struggle against the British in the Provinces. The Congress leaders were neither prepared to displease the Princes, who were the mantle of Indian nativity, nor did they dare to disregard the Muslim League leaders, who made the exclusion of the hundred million people of the Princely States, a precedent condition to any compromise on the constitutional reforms in lndia. The League leaders knew that the inclusion of the people of the States, predominantly Hindu, would reduce the weightage of the Muslim population in the British India in any future scheme of constitutional change.

    Throughout the long decades, the Indian national movement evolved, the Congress leadership remained divided on the anti- imperialist struggle in the States and the All-lndia Congress Committee did not formalise its opinion on the States till the Udaipur session of the All-India States People's Conference held in 1946. By that time, however, much precious time had been lost. The States had almost been isolated from the mainstream of the national movement and stood vulnerably exposed to the machinations of the British, the Muslim League and the Princes to balkanise India.

    The Muslim League policy on the States was more involved and shifting, which concealed the designs of the League to grab the Muslim ruled Hindu majority States as well as the Muslim majority States for the separate Muslim State of Pakistan, the League demanded for the Muslims in India. The All-India States Muslim League, an appendage of the Muslim League, constituted to co-ordinate the Muslim movements for Pakistan in the States, demanded in 1940, the integration of all such Indian States in the Muslim homeland of Pakistan as were ruled by the Muslim rulers as well as all such States .as were inhabited by Muslim majorities. The Lahore Resolution of the League, claimed a separate homeland for the Muslims in India, which was constituted of the Muslim majority Provinces of Sindh, the Punjab, Bengal, North-west Frontier, the Chief-Commissioner's Province of Baluchistan and the Hindu majority Province of Assam for its geographical contiguity to Bengal, besides the Princely States which were either ruled by the Muslim rulers or populated hy Muslim majorities.

    The Congress awoke to the dangerous consequences of the isolation of the States almost after it had virtually accepted the partition, when it realised that the British, in collaboration with the Muslim League, were conspiring to break up India into several imbecile political entities with the Muslim State of Pakistan strategically placed at their epicentre. That was precisely what Jinnah, Conrad Corfield, and the Political Department of the Government of India visualised as the future constitutional composition of India. The Cabinet Mission Plan also, by and large, envisaged the division of India into several political identities which were confined within the territorial jurisdiction of a united Indian Dominion. The Cabinet Mission precisely accepted the separate identity of the Princely States and rejected any proposition to transfer the Paramountcy to the federal government. The Mission insisted upon the agreements between the federal authority and the Princely States, as a basis for any future relations between the States and the Indian Union which would follow their accession and withdrawal of the Paramountcy.

    At the time, when the British and the Muslim League settled down to decide the fate of India, the Congress turned to the people in the States, whom they had neglected throughout the long history of Indian struggle against the British. Once again the Congress leaders fell prey to their own indecision and made a half-hearted plea for the right of the people of the States to determine their future. Not backed by conviction, the Congress demand made little impression upon the British and the League. The Princes were disparaged and opposed the right of the people in the States to determine their future. The League leaders turned the bend at the most appropriate time and in an astute move, pledged their support to the British designs to exclude the States from the constitutional arrangements envisaged by the partition and the withdrawal of the Paramountcy, to restore to the Princes, the powers which the British Crown exercised over them. The Muslim League realised that most of the States were populated by Hindu majorities and any arrangements to transfer Paramountcy to the two Dominions, would definitely place them in India. After the lapse of the Paramountcy, the Muslim League shared the optimism of British about independence of the States and their eventual alignment with the Muslim State of Pakistan, as a counterweight against India.

    The Congress resolve, having been broken by the partition and the Congress leaders, still groping for a new rationale of the Indian freedom, after their basic commitment to the unity of India was abandoned, did not stick to their demand for the right of the State's people to determine the future disposition of the States. Instead they acquiesced, without demur, with the British proposals to terminate the Paramountcy and restore the Princes the powers to decide their future affiliations with the two successor Dominions of India and Pakistan. The States were thus removed from the agenda of the Indian partition on the insistence of the British, the machinations of the Muslim League as well as the unconditional acceptance of the lapse of Paramountcy by the Congress.

    The conspiracy proved to be deeper and though the British Government refused to accord the status of British Dominions to the Princely States, it left the door open for separate negotiations with their rulers. Mountbatten informed the Princes, that he would forward to the British Government any requests from anyone of them to establish direct relations with Great Britain.

    When Jinnah met Mountbatten, a day before the acceptance of the partition plan was announced, he was triumphant. He had after all, carved out a Muslim State and also destroyed the bond of unity between British India and the Princely States. Jinnah did not conceal his satisfaction on the vivisection of India, which the Partition Plan, in fact envisaged." His delight was unconcealed", Mountbatten reported to London. "The Long campaign" the Viceroy mentioned in his report, "was virtually over There would be no Hindu government of an undivided India."

    In fact, not only Jinnah, but the entire Muslim League accepted the creation of Pakistan on the terms the British offered. In the League Council, the Muslim League accepted by 400 votes to 8, the separation of the Muslim majority regions and the British provinces into an independent and separate Muslim State. The League Council did not include the Princely States in the settlement with the British which created Pakistan.

    So clear was the line drawn in the Partition Plan, between the division of the British India Provinces and the Princely States, that the Secretary of the State for India, refused to accept any interference with the lapse of the Paramountcy or its consequence on the States or the two Dominions. The Viceroy wrote to the Secretary of the State to insert a clause into the Indian Independence Bill, limiting the powers of the Princely States which would revert to them with the lapse of the Paramountcy. The Secretary of State, straightway rejected the suggestion to the satisfaction of both the Political Department of the Government of India as well as Muslim League. The British as well as the Muslim League, sought the reversion of Paramountcy to the Princes, as a part of the transfer of power, to leave any future alignments in India, in which the Princes would participate to be determined primarily by them, of course, with the Muslim State of Pakistan backing them up in what they decided to do.

    The partition plan, envisaged by the June 3 Declaration, did not apply to the Indian States, which were left out of its procedure as well as its consequences. States were never placed on the agenda of the Partition of India, and therefore, the claim made by Pakistan to complete the agenda of the partition, by forcing India to cede the Muslim majority State of Jammu and Kashmir to it, has no historical or political relevance. Neither Pakistan nor India, laid any claim, to any Princely State on account of the partition, which was strictly limited to the agreement between the British, the Congress and the Muslim League to divide the boundaries of the British India and create the State of Pakistan.

    The transfer of powers of India in 1947, involved the division of the British Indian Provinces, into two dominions, India and Pakistan and the liberation of the Indian States from the British Paramountcy. The two processes were distinctly separate and underlined political change, which led to different consequences. The Provinces were reorganised into two independent dominions; the States were released from the obligations of the Paramountcy and the rulers of the States were empowered to adhere to either of the two Dominions, irrespective of the communal division, the Indian partition underlined. The State Departments of India and Pakistan, headed by Sardar Vallabhai Patel and Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar respectively, opened negotiations with the Princes, for separate political settlement, with them. Neither Patel nor Nishtar demanded, at any time, the adherence of any State to either of the Dominions on the basis of the partition of the British India.

    Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar offered whole-hearted support to the independence of the States, including the State of Jammu and Kashmir and strongly opposed any political arrangements, which were sought to be reached with the Princes on the basis of the division.

The Hidden Hand

    It was again the invisible hand of the British, which sought to alter the balance and this time, it was no other person than Mountbatten himself, who, perhaps, having realised the force of the States People's movements for unity with lndia, sought to prepare the ground for a division of the Princely States between the two Dominions on the basis of the partition. Mountbatten realised that none ot the Princes, whose States were geographically situated within the territories of the Indian Dominion, would be able to hold out against the will of his subjects and the States would sooner or later join the Indian Dominion. He did not share the optimism of the British officers in India and at home and the leaders of the Muslim League, to save the Muslim rules States from India. Instead he feared that the tide of the events would wipe off the Princes and India would absorb the States, perhaps sooner than anticipated.

    He was more concerned about the Princely States, situated within the proposed boundaries of Pakistan, among which the ruler of the Kalat State, refused to accede to Pakistan. He was also apprehensive of the Jammu and Kashmir State, which would be left with contiguous borders with both the Indian Dominion and Pakistan and of which the ruler was not favourably disposed towards settlement with Pakistan. His fears about Jammu and Kashmir were confirmed by Hari Singh, the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, who refused to accept his advice to arrive at an agreement with Pakistan.

    Mountbatten went to the extent of ensuing India a viable border with Pakistan and played safe in the division of the Upper Bara Doab, and favoured the inclusion of the districts of Amritsar and Gurdaspur in India. On the States, Mounbatten had a different commitment, which was dictated by the interests of the British empire. By the close of the month of July 1947, while the partition had begun to assume effect, Mountbatten was convinced that the borders of India should be confined to the Punjab, leaving the northern frontier of Jammu and Kashmir in safer and more friendly hands of Pakistan.

    In his last address, he delivered to the Princes on 25 July 1947, in Delhi, Mountbatten spelt out certain broad guidelines for them to follow in the determination of the future disposition of their States. He advised the Princes to accede to either of the two Dominions on the basis of the geographical contiguity of their States and the composition of their population. In his endeavour to extend the partition to the States, he utilised V.P. Menon, who had a few months earlier prepared the blue-print for the partition of India, which formed basis of the transfer of power.

    The Muslim League leaders scoffed at the advice of the Viceroy to the Princes and secretly counselled the Muslim Princes to ignore his address. They communicated to the Princes their readiness to support them in their independence. The Indian leaders, with V. P. Menon pulling the strings from behind, walked into the trap and entrusted the task of the negotiation with the Princes to Menon and Mountbatten. Mountbatten, deliberately avoided to take a bold initiative on the Muslim-ruled States and Jammu and Kashmir to bring about their integration with India. Junagarh acceded to Pakistan; Hyderabad refused to join India and Jammu and Kashmir was pushed into the oblivion. Menon succeeded where the going was easy, with Mountbatten adding an element of diplomatic intrigue to an otherwise versatile comedy which the Princes enacted to accede to India. Mountbatten provided a long handle to Pakistan which that country is still using in Kashmir with devastating effect.

    The British were no votaries of the Indian Unity and in the negotiations with the Indian leaders, preceding the acceptance of the partition of India, they kept the door open, for the Princes, to form a third, fourth and even a fifth estate in India, which in the new balances of power, between the two Dominions. Conrad Corfield and the Political Department of the Government of India as well as the Secretary of the State, were determined to keep the States apart from the division of the British India and the transfer of power to the two Dominions.

    The record indeed is straight. The lapse of Paramountcy released the Prince from the British tutelage and they were ensured the right to determine the future of their States by the British which assumed effect with their withdrawal from India. Pakistan had no right to any claim the Princely States which did not form a part of the British India. The Indian leaders in fact should have decisively claimed the States as a part of the colonial empire liberated from the British tutelage. They knew that Princes were only the shadows of their British masters, and they would neither dare to join Pakistan nor remain out of India after the British had boarded their ships for home. The only factor, which the Dominion of India could not overlook in regard to the States was the geographical location of several Princely States, within the territories, of which Pakistan was proposed to be constituted. No Government of India could have consciously taken the responsibility of seeking islands of territory inside the boundaries of Pakistan with all the military responsibility any such possession would entail. The Indian leadership, understandably made no efforts to save the State of Kalat, where the ruler refused to accede to Pakistan and sought the help of the Indian leaders to save him from being swallowed by the League. Kalat was eventually smothered into submission by the continued pressure of the British, who backed Pakistan to acquire the States, contiguous to its territories which incidentally, included Bahawalpur as well.

    Jinnah and the other leaders of the Muslim League had greater stakes in the States ruled by the Muslim Princes than they had in the Muslim majority of the Jammu and Kashmir State. They sought to keep the option open for the Muslim rulers to join Pakistan. And they did not close the option for the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir either. In fact, they offered to support Maharaja Hari Singh, in case he decided to opt for the independence of the State. Hari Singh saw through the game and refused to be used as a pawn in the British-League plan to keep the Muslim ruled States out of India.

Accession to India

    The Jammu and Kashmir state was contiguous to both India and Pakistan and had hundreds of miles of contiguous border with East Punjab and the Punjab Hill States, which had already decided to join India. Pakistan's propaganda has considerably clouded the real facts of the division of the Punjab. The division of the East Punjab from the west Punjab was not subject to the whims and caprices of the League leaders. They could not be ceded all the territories in the Punjab on which they laid their hands. They perpetrated a myth that the inclusion of the district of Gurdaspur in the East Punjab, contrary to their claims, was aimed to open up Jammu and Kashmir to India.

    The division of the Punjab was entrusted to an independent Boundary Commission which the British constituted and which was headed by an Englishman, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer of considerable repute. Besides its Chairman, the Commission constituted of four other members, two of them Din Mohamad and Mohamad Munir who represented the Muslims, Mehar Chand Mahajan represented the Hindus and Teja Singh represented the Sikhs whose culture, history and religious heritage were inextricably linked with the Punjab.

    The Commission could not follow standards different in demarcating the Muslim majority regions in the west of the Punjab and the Hindu majority regions in the east of the Punjab. Pathankot, was a Hindu majority Tehsil and it could not have been included in West Punjab by any stretch of imagination. The district boundaries were not strictly adhered to by the Boundary Commission as the basis of the division of the Punjab and there was evidently no reason why a Hindu majority Tehsil, which was contiguous to the Punjab Hill States should have been excluded from the East Punjab.

    Pathankot apart, the whole of the district of Gurdaspur was strategically important not only from the view-point of a defensible Indian border, a major consideration, the Boundary Commission recognised in demarcating the boundaries of the East Punjab form the West Punjab but also in view of the future of the district of Amritsar which would be almost isolated into an island of Indian territory in the West Punjab. Amritsar was by no means a Muslim majority district and it could not be separated from the east Punjab for its significance to the Sikh Community. Amritsar symbolised the principal centre of the Sikh religion. Sikhs were by far the more important of the parties to the partition of the Punjab, because, a major part of their population was uprooted from the West Punjab where their main assets and lands were located and secondly the most sacred of their religious shrines were situated in the Muslim majority districts, which could not be retained in the East Punjab Gurdaspur formed the most strategic flank of the district of Amritsar.

    The ruler of the Jammu and Kashmir State, Maharaja Hari Singh, had his own interests in the final delimitation of the new boundaries of the east and the west Punjab. Several of the Hindu leaders in the Punjab, among them notably Sir Shadi Lal and Bakhshi Tek Chand, kept him intimately informed of the proceedings of the Boundary Commission. The British were apprehensive about him, but through many of his British contacts, he had managed to convince the Political Department that he would not take any precipitate action, which would bring him into conflict with Pakistan. Hari Singh, did not hide his interest in a balanced order with India and Pakistan and open access to the two Dominions. He conveyed to the British Resident and the Political Department a veiled threat that he would be forced to deal directly with the Indian Government, if any attempts were made to isolate his state in the boundary demarcation of the Punjab, irrespective of the consequences his actions would have.

    The Muslim Commissioners, Justice Din Mohamad and Justice Mohamad Munir insisted upon the division of the Upper Bari Doab, with a view to assume control over the Ravi Canal head-works at Madhopur and encircle the district of Amritsar and also cut off the fair weather track between Madhopur and Jammu.

    The Radcliffe award was announced three days after the transfer of power. Expectedly Gurdaspur was included in the east Punjab. Pakistan raised a hue and cry on the decision of the Boundary Commission, though the accredited Muslim members of the Commission had committed themselves to accept the award.

    The actual game plan of Pakistan to grab the Muslim ruled States with the support of the British and the Muslim majority States with the support of their Muslim subjects unfolded on 14 August, 1947, the day power was transferred in Pakistan and the Nawab of Junagarh, a Hindu majority State situated in the midst of the Kathiawar States, acceded to Pakistan. Pakistan had secured the accession of all the Princely States, situated within its territorial limits, including the State of Kalat, which had resolutely resisted accession to the new Muslim State. A secret understanding had also been reached with the Nawab of the Hyderabad, to support him against India till the Nawab was able to accede to assume independence and then align himself with Pakistan.

    The Indian leaders failed to respond to the threat Pakistan posed to the Kathiaward States and instead of trying immediate counter- action against the Nawab of Junagarh, they feebly complained to Pakistan against the decision of the Nawab and proposed that the final disposition of the Junagarh State be determined by a reference to the people of the State. The bogey of referendum was actually raised by Mountbatten to enable him to execute his design; to divide the States on the basis of the partition.

    The Congress leaders walked into the trap. Perhaps, unsure of the British reaction and unable to face Mountbatten, they did not dare take advantage of the people's wrath against the rulers of Junagarh and Hyderabad. In Hyderabad, feverish preparations were afoot to declare the independence of the State and a secret understanding had already been reached between the Nawab of Hyderabad and the League leaders, which assured the Nawab, the support of Pakistan for an independent Hyderabad. Contrary to the avowedly pro-Pakistan stand of the rulers of Junagarh and Hyderabad, Hari Singh maintained scrupulous silence on the issue of accession. Hari Singh told the Viceroy as well, and in plain terms, that he would take such a decision on the accession of the State as would be in the interests of his people. Indeed, Mountbatten denounced him for his indecision and accused him of stupidity in reacting to the situation in a way which the British did not approve. Hari Singh offered a standstill agreement to both the Dominions on 12 August 1947.

    India had a claim to all the three States, mainly because of their geographical contiguity to the Indian Dominion and their strategic importance to its security and territorial integrity. Neither the partition nor Pakistan was a factor in this determination of the future of Junagarh and Hyderabad which were embedded in the heart of the Indian Dominion and Jammu and Kashmir, which formed the traditional frontier of India in the north.

    The indecisiveness of the Congress leaders to act promptly in Junagarh had a far-reaching impact on the Kathiawad States. Some of the rulers warned the Government of India that its prestige in Kathiawad had been irreparably impaired by its inability to save Junagarh and the two smaller States of Babriawad and Mangrol. The warning administered a jolt to the Indian leaders. Mountbatten Laughed in his sleeves, for he realised that Pakistan had assumed the initiative in using Junagarh as a pawn for a bargain on Jammu and Kashmir as well as Hyderabad. Pakistan followed the course Mountbatten had visualised. Acceptance of a plebiscite would, in effect mean the deferment of the accession of Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir and the continuation of the status-quo in Junagarh indefinitely, for how would the proposed plebiscite be conducted and by whom, more specially in a situation when the Nawabs of Junagarh and Hyderabad, were under no obligation to accept an agreement between the two Dominions which impinged upon their rights.

    The Indian leadership was broken into factions which were led by decrepit and small men, who had lost the courage to face the problems, the partition had created. Nehru put himself at the mercy of the Viceroy, who exhibited determination to tackle the problems of the partition, which Nehru himself, was hardly prepared to face. Gandhi had obsolete views on the States and had lost contact with the stupendous developments, which rocked the Princely India.

    Inside the Congress, the debate on the viability or otherwise of non-violence and non-intervention, immobilised whatever initiative India still possessed to retrieve the situation in the States of Junagarh, Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir, which were still outside the fold of the Indian Dominion. For India, the question of the Princely States was crucial, after the Muslim majority provinces and regions of the British India had seceded to form a separate Muslim State.

    The further separation of the States into a third confederacy, Jinnah had visualised, was bound to balkanise India sooner or later. Junagarh with a long sea-coast, which provided it access to Pakistan, posed a grave threat to whole Kathiawad peninsula Hyderabad was in the heart of India, and was boiling in internal distrust, which had dangerous portent for the country in the south. Jammu and Kashmir formed a part of the warm Himalayan hinterland, and if it was lost to Pakistan, the whole of the Indian frontier in the north, would suddenly disintegrate. The Jammu and Kashmir State was crucial to the existence of India and not Pakistan, the one basic fact, the Indian leadership failed to emphasise.

    After the transfer of power in India, the Dominion Government of India extended the time for accession, to the two States of Jammu and Kashmir and Hyderabad, which had offered a standstill agreement, to continue the relationship already subsisting between the States and the British India. The standstill agreement was of the same standard pattern, which the State Department of India had evolved for all the States. The standstill agreements, it needs to be noted, had no political implications and were restricted to the continuation of arrangements, which had governed the relation between the Princely States and the British Government of India.

    While Pakistan kept the fire hanging in Jungarh, it prepared fast to deliver another stunning blow to India. On 21 October 1947, hardly fourteen days after Pakistan had sternly warned India against any intervention in Junagarh. It launched a massive invasion of the Jammu and Kashmir State. Thousands of armed tribesmen and irregulars, led by the crack Tochi Scouts, easily identified by their brown tunics, stormed into the State, with the twin objective of occupying the Kashmir Valley and attacking Jammu from across the Sialkot border to cut off the only communication line connecting the State with Madhopur in the Punjab, which the State Government had ordered to be repaired into a more serviceable highway for cornmunication with India. Even at that time, Pakistan claimed that the invading forces were the Muslim subjects of the State, who had risen in revolt against the Dogra rule and the Afridi and the other tribesmen had only joined their brethren in the war of their liberation.

    Junagarh was already in Pakistan. The Nawab of Hyderabad was eagerly waiting for the crucial movement to sneak into its protectorate. The Tochi troops and the Afridi tribesmen, who had delivered a blitzkrieg attack on Jammu and Kashmir, were close to their military objectives. After Jammu and Kashmir was reduced, Pakistan could negotiate a settlement on Junagarh and Hyderabad from a position of strength. M.A. Jinnah, had forestalled Mountbatten in his bid to divide the States on the basis of the partition. No one in Pakistan, not even the Governer-General of that Country had any intention to invoke partition as a basis for any settlement of the Princely States, including Jammu and Kashmir.

    Hari Singh upturned the whole gameplan of Pakistan. He offered accession to India, while the invading armies of Pakistan were fast converging on the capital city of Srinagar. The Government of India, which had received the reports of the invasion in the morning of 22 October 1947, took five long days to accept the accession of the state and send military help to Kashmir to save it from the invading forces poised to launch the final assault on the State capital. Mountbatten opposed on expeditious military decision, mainly to delay the deployment of the Indian troops in the state and allow Pakistan to complete the occupation of, at least, the Kashmir Valley and the frontier of Battistau and Ladakh. The Indian leaders allowed precious time to pass bye in squabbles among themselves and with Hari Singh on how the authority of the government would be transferred to the National Conference, which opposed the accession of the State to Pakistan and exercised powerful influence among the Kashmir-speaking Muslims in the State. Together with the Hindus and the other minorities, a million in number, the Kashmir-speaking Muslims in the state. Together with the Hindus and the other minorities a million number, the Kashmir-speaking Muslims constituted almost the two thirds of the population of the State.

    While V. P. Menon, The Secretary of the state in Department of the Government of India, ran back and forth from Srinagar to Delhi to finalise a settlement with Hari Singh, the real batter for the State was fought by the troops of the State army. Already depleted by the desertion of its Muslim ranks, the state army offered dogged resistance to the invading hordes at held them at bay till their last hour, earning moments of reprieve for Menon as well as the Maharaja Brigadier Rajinder Singh, the commander of the state army and his valiant men laid down their lives in the battle but cut off the advance of the enemy till 25 October 1947. The invaders entered Baramullah, the next day and settled down to regroup for their final assault on Srinagar. On the morning of 27 October 1947, airborne Indian troops arrived in Srinagar. Few men of the Indian soldiers of the First Sikh, who went into action that day, returned home.

    The Indian Government threw away the initiative, the accession of the State had earned it, when it offered to refer the accession of the state to its people, a principle which the Indian leaders had been forced to abandon by the British as well as the Muslim League.

    The lapse of the British Paramountcy and the right of the Princes to determine the disposition of their states was a precedent condition which the British and the Muslim League had recognised as a part of the transfer of power in the states. The Congress leaders, unnerved by Hyderabad and Junagarh sought to build a balance between Jammu and Kashmir on the one side and Hyderabad and Junagarh on the other, a policy inspired by Mountbatten, which ultimately proved disasterous for India.

    While the Indian armies were fighting back the invasion, the Government of India committed another, blunder and invoked united Nations intervention to end the aggression committed by Pakistan against Jammu and Kashmir, little realising that united Nations intervention would involve the internationalisation of not only Kashmir, but Hyderabad and Junagarh as well. The British pulled the strings from behind the curtain. Jammu and Kashmir was strategically importance for the defence of their interests and the interests of their western allies, because the steady advance of the communists in China confronted them with a new danger, which a combine of the communist, regimes in Asia posed.

    In the Security Council, India found itself fact to face with a world in which the sense of self-righteousness with which Gopalaswami Ayangar pleaded the Indian case, had little credibility. Pakistan triumphed and the Security Council foisted a resolution on India which envisaged a plebiscite to determine the final disposition of Jammu and Kashmir. In January 1949, a cease-fire agreement was concluded between India and Pakistan. Almost half of the State was left under the occupation of the enemy.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

Brij Premi was the product of the Indian renaissance and the philosophy of rebellion which characterised the time in which he lived the formative years of his life. The community of Hindus inKashmir was among the first of the Hindu communities in India, which sought its identity in the Indian renaissance and identified itself with the reemergence of the Indian nation and a new social and intellectual commitment to the Sanskrit roots of the Indian civilisation. The Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir like the Muslims inIndia, rejected the Indian renaissance, because they did not accept the continuity of the Indian history and the civilisational boundaries of unity of the Indian nation. The conflict of ideology was deeper and sharper in Kashmir than it was in the rest of India. Kashmir was a Muslim majority princely State of the British empire in India ruled by a Hindu Rajput prince of the Duggar people of Jammu. Brij Premi belonged to the intellectual tradition which bore the influence of this conflict.

I came in close contact with Brij Premi in 1963, when I returned to Kashmirafter the completion of long years of research at the University of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, the heart of Hindu India in 1963. Those were the years when the Indian academics were inspired by a new vision of freedom which was total and universal, and which transcended the half-way freedom the liberalist reformism of the Indian national movement espoused. In Kashmir, I found, though not to my surprise, that the new vision of total freedom had already become an inseparable part of the intellectual and academic discourse of the community of Hindus and the Hindu intellectual class had already joined the search for models of change, almost on the same lines, on which the search for models of change was under way in the other parts of India. Brij Premi was a part of the search of the Hindu intellectual class ofKashmir for models of social change?which encompassed economic, social and political change, and which underlined the recognition of total and universal freedom as its main goal. Brij Premi's literary work and research reflect the struggle of the mind of the Hindu community in Kashmir to grow out of its narrow local focus of freedom and identity, its aspirations with the wider aspirations of the nation of India growing out of slavery and foreign dominance.

Brij Premi symbolised the quest the Indian nation was involved in. His commitment to provide an insight into Sadat Hassan Manto was to unravel the temper of the rebellion Manto's work represented. Manto repudiated the identity of a narrowly dated sectarian identity of India. Rightly, perhaps, Brij Premi made the revelation that Sadat Hassan was of Kashmiri origin and a descendent of a Kashmiri Pandit family which had converted to Islam. He brought the rebellion which lay suppressed in the generations of Manto's past, out of its confines to coordinate Manto's outlook with the quest for a national identity which symbolised total and universal freedom. Sadat Hasan’s work was a severe reaction against the communalisation of the Indian society and the destruction it brought in its wake, which eventually unfolded in the tragedy of the partition. Brij Premi's research on Manto was primarily aimed to correlate his own search for a national identity which Sadat Hassan had sought to establish.

Brij Premi's short stories, his interest in the history of Kashmir, his work of a literary critic of Urdu literature, in which he excelled, reflected the same quest. Brij Premi, was throughout his life, a Kashmiri Pandit, whose dream of freedom had been shattered by the enforcement of the religious precedence of the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir and who sought to give expression to his intolerance to oppression.

Brij Premi was a traditional Marxist who did not metamorphose into a communist and a party cadre. He talked to me, though hesitantly, about the broad contours of the Marxist approach to social change. He did not doubt the validity of the principal concepts of Marxism: the exploitative character of all class-society; the historical necessity of progress of all society from more exploitative forms to less exploitative forms; the role of the exploited and oppressed peoples in the revolutionary moments for change and the functional attributes of the state and its instrumentalities of authority to sustain exploitative forms of class society. Often our discussion, which he always kept at an informal level, centered upon the principal focus of the character of the Indian state. Was the Indian state different from the instrumentality of power that Marx considered the state to be?

The reformist foundations of the Indian state, which during the early decades of freedom were given a more radical content by the leadership of the Indian National Congress, had imparted a new definition to state function in a class society. The emphasis on change in the Indian society aimed at the attraction of class roles Nehru's concept of "socialistic pattern of society" and "full socialism" envisaged and the techniques of social engineering incorporated in the Directives of State Policy—a commitment of the Congress Left, was an attempt to give a new content to state function. Brij Premi, like other Marxists was unsure of Nehru's doctrine of state function in a class-society, yet adhered to it tenaciously like his comrades did. I harboured no illusions about Nehru's claims to convert the Indian state into an instrumentality of reform. Like the other Marxists of the Hindu community of Kashmir, including those who were members of the Communist party and their comrades, Brij Premi did not agree with me, though  he did not give expression to his disagreement.

The cadres of the Communist Party of India and the Marxists, followed their own versions of the role of the state in a class-society. Perhaps, Nehru's outlook provided the cadres of the Communist Party and the Marxists, adequate ground to use the instrumentality of the state to radicalise the process of reform in India and adjust the foreign policy of India to the post-war  world, governed by a hitherto unknown phenomenon of bipolar contest of power of the Cold War.

The movement for decolonisation, which dominated Nehru's outlook and the anti-imperialist role of the socialist world, converged, at the ideological level, to an identity of national interest of the socialist powers and the colonial peoples of the world, which had emerged from colonial rule. India was the largest, the most powerful and prestigious of the colonial peoples that came to face the internationalisation of the class conflict which followed the onset of the bipolar power relations in the post war world. The Marxists and the cadres of the Communist Party in Kashmir were conscious of this conflict.Jammu and Kashmir was caught up in the Cold War. The northern frontiers of the State, with a part of it under the occupation of Pakistan rimmed the "soft belly" of the southern frontier of the Soviet Union. The progressive writers ofKashmir, Dina Nath Nadim, Pushkar Nath, Som Nath Zutshi, Bansi Nirdosh and Brij Premi, were all involved in this conflict. Bansi Nirdosh and Som Nath Zutshi, who represented the two extremes of the revolt against exploitative society and identified themselves with the down trodden, recognised the sociological necessity of supporting Nehru's reformism, perhaps, out of their intellectual commitment to social change and their strategic role in the conflict over Kashmir. During Brij Premi's time the intellectual culture ofKashmir was conditioned by the stake, the Hindus of Kashmir had in theKashmir conflict.

The context of this conflict changed in 1990, when the bipolar balance of power came to its end and the Muslims pushed the Hindus out of Kashmir. None of the progressive Hindu writers survived to assess the aftermath. Brij Premi died in April 1990, in the midst of the of disaster the Hindu Community of Kashmir faced. I was in Delhi, living the life of a fugitive.

The Hindus of Kashmir, who formed the main strength of the Marxist flanks and the Communist Party cadres, as noted above, were the product of the Indian renaissance. In contrast to the Marxists and the communists in the rest of the country, the Hindus of Kashmir did not break away from their roots. Most of them did not abandon their commitment to the unity of the Indian nation, its civilisational boundaries and the continuity of the Indiahistory. Brij Premi was no exception. His interest in the ancient symbols of the Hindu civilisation, his keen interest in research in the history of Hindu Kashmir and his rather inexplicable commitment to the Hindu cultural forms, including Hindu ritual structures, is a testimony to his commitment. He found no conflict between the cultural sub-structures of a society and the Marxist concept for change. In fact, he told his son, Premi Romani, without any inhibitions, that there was no conflict between religion and Marxist concept of revolutionary change. In this respect, he was not different from Dina Nath Nadim or Bansi Nirdosh, the two Kashmiri Pandits, who built the tradition of the Indian renaissance into an edifice of social ideology. Perhaps the commitment of the Hindu Marxists in Kashmir to the Indian renaissance formed the basis of their rebellion against all forms of exploitation, including class-exploitation. That is why, secularism, a basic tenet of the Indian renaissance, became an article of faith with them. They were not apologetic about their beliefs and unlike their Muslim comrades, did not seek to legitimise their commitment to Marxism and communism in the theological precedent of Islam and the history of the Muslim Ummah.

Brij Premi carried this struggle, deeper in his consciousness. He was a victim of severe oppression to which the Hindu community was subjected inKashmir. He was denied his due, inspite of his work and research in Urdu language, which the powers that ruled Kashmir those days had insisted upon to declare as the official language of the State. In the long last, Brij Premi was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Urdu in the University of Kashmir in 1977. For Brij Premi, his new assignment was a dream come true. In the University he was cast into a new context, intellectually more purposeful and creative, which provided a wider opportunity for his research and writing.

In the University, he widened the scope of his research. But he was worn down by the isolation to which the Hindus were exposed in the Jammu and Kashmir State. He could not earn any reprieve from the oppression the Hindu community in Kashmir laboured under due to the communalisation of the Muslim society in Kashmir. He met me often, in the department of Political Science in the University of Kashmir. He was not unaware of my unconventional views on the social and political conditions prevailing inKashmir. He complained of the sense of deprivation that had overtaken him and the difficulties he faced in continuing his literary work. The oppression, he faced, goaded him to work more closely on his research projects in history and culture because his presentation of the findings of his investigations in Urdu language, tantamounted to the expression of protest against the oppression, the Hindus faced. Inside him, his feelings about the deep spiritual significance of the Hindu religious belief-system, gradually stirred his conscience. The devotion with which he performed the Pooja at the Shrine of Khir Bhawani at Tula Mula in Kashmir, described by the famed Urdu scholar and novelist Kashmiri Lal Zakir, in his scholarly essay on Brij Premi gives a peep into his mind. Brij Premi confided in me that he was unable to accept that the march of history was determined by logic.That assured him the freedom and perhaps, the perspective of scholarship to recognise the intrinsic quality of the Hindu civilisation of India and the Sanskrit content of the history of Kashmir.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

The breakdown of the national consensus on a parliamentary majority in India, a phenomenon which is characteristic of the function of parliamentary governments in the developing countries, has led to a dangerous trend, to identify the federal division of powers with sub-national pluralism. In an attempt to seek legitimacy for the coalition governments, which largely depend upon the support of several regional parties, a phenomenon specified to the Indian political system, many of the political parties, which claimed to have demolished one-party dominance of the Congress, have called for the identification of the federal division of powers with sub-national identities representing the pluralist content of the Indian society. Indeed the proposals were aimed to evolve a centre of power in which the coalition constituents shared authority to sustain their power. The decentralisation of central authority on horizontal basis, it was contended would, end the quest for identity of the regionalised sub-national cultures in India, otherwise compartmentalised in artificial administrative divisions of the Indian federal organisation. The pluralisation of power at the federal centre in India and in the states, it came to be actively advocated, would dissolve the configuration of political power based upon the traditional one-party parliamentary majority which reflect the diversity of the Indian society.

Besides the theoretical proposition that all forms of federal organisation are based upon territorial division of political authority on administrative basis, not even remotely related to any social pluralities, the practical implications of seeking any identification of the federal division of powers with sub-national identities, would be disasterous for such a large country as India and would, sooner than anticipated, lead to the disintegration of the Indian federal structure.

Federalisation is a political process which underlines a division of powers on territorial basis. Whenever the territorial division of powers was sought to be identified with sub-nationalism, the federal structures disintegrated.

The Indian federal polity grew out of two diametrically divergent processes, which underlined the devolution of authority to erstwhile provinces of what was known as the British India, before the independence and the integration of the Indian Princely States, which acceded to India in accordance with the instruments of Accession. The Instruments of Accession envisaged, the procedure by virtue of which the Indian States acceded to India. The federal organisation of India, was, therefore, constituted of the erstwhile Indian provinces and the Indian Princely States, which were liberated from the British tutelage after the British colonial empire in India came to its end in 1947.

The federating process in India underlined a combination of the devolution of authority to the provincial governments on the one hand and the integration of the acceding states, on the other. The Constituent Assembly favoured a conditional devolution of the powers to the provinces. The rulers of the states, on their part too, approved of a conditional transfer of their authority to the federation. The Constituent Assembly of India, however, proved to be a great leveler and forged the provinces and the states into an irreversible union in which the Central government assumed paramount authority over the provinces as well as the States.

The political boundaries of the Indian Provinces and the Princely States, as they evolved with the consolidation of the British Power in India, overspread ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic diversities. The Indian social pluralism did not represent any political boundaries. The ethnic divisions, religious commitments, caste gradation and cultural diversities, cut across the political boundaries, the British described, creating many interlocking segments. None of the interlocking segments presented any political uniformity and territorial contiguity.

The Indian federal organisation envisaged by the Constitution of India does not represent the division of political authority on the basis of the division of powers between the federation and the sub-national identities. The founding fathers of the Indian Constitution, envisioned integration as well as autonomy in a concrete political system. The Indian federal organisation was embedded in an environment, which was plural and diverse, but its boundaries were clearly defined.

The federal division of powers evolved by the Constituent Assembly transcended the cultural, religious and linguistic pluralism of the Indian society. The autonomy, now claimed for sub-national identities as the basis of what is called ‘cooperative federalism’, is a prescription for the dissolution of the federal relationship evolved by the Constituency Assembly of India as a basis of the Indian Federal Organisation. Any attempt, made, consciously or unconsciously, to change the territorial division of powers in the Indian federation will lead to its disintegration.

There is an inherent conflict between subnational pluralism and political autonomy. Political autonomy is a residue of political authority and therefore, complementary to national integration. Subnational pluralism is basically a function of ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic separatism and consequently irreconcilable to national integration and nation-building.

Coalition politics is not an attribute of parliamentary government. It is a dysfunctional feature of the cabinet system of government, which is essentially founded on an ideological and political consensus on a national level. Regional aspirations, autonomy and plural sociology, are an antithesis of a parliamentary consensus.Federalisation of power in India, is reconcilable to the national census in a parliamentary government to the extent it underlines on a political division of powers, within the broad framework of a parliamentary order.

Coalitions, are destructive of the parliamentary majority. If the trend to replace, parliamentary majorities continues, the whole parliamentary systems in India will not survive for long. Nor will the federal division of powers endure for many years, because its basis in India is underlined by a consensus on a parliamentary majority.

Tribute to Nadim and his comrades

By Dr. M.K. Teng

The Communist outlook which pervaded the contemporary marxist ideology, cast its shadows on the evolution of the Communist movement in Jammu and Kashmir. In its earlier phases, the main inspiration for the movement was the revolutionary movement in Russia and the rise of the Soviets to power. In the Indian context, the Marxist movement spread out into an anti-imperialist struggle. Lenin did not conceive nationalism as the basis of an anti-imperialist struggle. Confronted by the anomoly of an anti-imperialist struggle in India, without recognising India as a nation, the Indian Communist Party adopted categories of change, which were not Indian in content and which rejected the continuity of Indian history.

The traditional leadership of the Communist Party in India, in utter disregard of the historical process which Karl Marx claimed, determined the evolution of the human society, committed the fateful error of ignoring the continuity of Indian history. The communist movement in India, did not recognise the civilisational ethos with its social linkages, the forms of intellectual experience which evolved in thousand of years of social change, and the value-structures which survived relativism of time. The Indian civilisation determined the categorical imperatives of the Indian society. The Indian society grew into social forms and heirarchical gradations, the substructures of the social culture and the forms and institutions of authority and political control.

The Indian renaissance which formed the foreground of the liberation movement from foreign dominance, marked the re-assertion of the historical continuity of India.  The Indian renaissance did not form an expression of the Indian reaction to the replacement of the Mughal rule by the British power. It represented the recognition of the continuity of the Indian history and sought to locate the basis of  the content and contours   of the Indian nation.

Dina Nath Nadim the poet of Kashmir and one of the founding fathers of left movement in Kashmir, born and brought in an Kashmiri Pandit family shared the processes of socialisation to which his generation was exposed. The liberalist English education had revolutionised the Kashmiri Pandit mind, leaving him alone  in a context which was dominated by the frigidity of a society which resisted change. The Kashmiri Pandits, isolated by their commitment to liberal reformism and also to the earlier moderate movement for the Indian freedom, romanticised their loneliness. Nadim actually, was the harbinger and the bard of the spiritual satisfaction the Kashmiri Pandit community found in its dreams of the nation of India and the Sanskrit content of its civilisation. This, incidentally formed the basis of the Indian national movement as well. Indian history was a universe of experience in which the Indian people had borne indescribable persecution. Nadim sang of the revolution, which was aimed to change the world in which he was born. He looked to the destruction of the historical forces, which sustained the British colonialism in India. He yearned for the demolition of the whole super-structure, which had caught him and his community in a strangle-hold. His poetry reflected a world of desire to breathe freedom, which his community had always been denied, and which he too was denied even after the British colonialism ended.

He talked to me for long hours at his home in Srinagar, where I went to meet him. I saw deep inside him, a sorrowful quest still unfulfilled of a world in which he would see himself rise into a Sphin. He did not rise. The sorrow of his helplessness expressed itself in poetic pathos, a deep sense of unfulfillment and impatience with the slowly moving process of history, which, he was, as a Marxist, trying to accelerate.

The imagery he used was very native to his race memory and basically reflected a deep link with the ethos of the Sanskrit civilisation of which Jammu and Kashmir was a part. His fundamental concept of good, was not a catagical imperative as the left movement in India held it to be. This concept of good was local, tinged by liberalist influences.

The Communist Party of India perhaps, due to the psychological reversion of its leaders, mainly men of the English-speaking intellectual class of India, were unable to overgrow their liberalist outlook. They simply did not visualise revolutionary movement in the context of the Indian modes of production and the super-structures of social gradations, institutions, values and instruments of authority which had grown over them. Their struggle against colonialism was not a natively organised war to end it. They attempted to Semitise Marxism and methodologically apply the conceptual framework of the conflict between Marxism and Semitic theology, to India. They tore the revolutionary movement in India from its civilisation moorings. Lenin had Semitised Marxism, for the national consciousness of Russia was dominantly Semitic. Mao Tse Tung Sinfied Marxism, perhaps, realising that any attempt at Semitising it in China, would isolate the Communist Party of China from the Chinese milieu.

The Indian Communist Party attempted to apply the conceptual Marxist framework of conflict between Semitic theological precept and revolutionary change to the Indian conditions. They were isolated. The Sanskrit theological precept did not conflict with change and even with revolutionary change. Marx had refused to recognise the history of India, for his oft quoted, "Asiatic mode of production", was based upon the assumption that during the incredibly long history of India the modes of production had remained unchanged.

The Indian communists also rejected the reality of Indian history. The Muslims in the Communist Party also insisted upon the rejection of the Indian civilisation as a reality. Their denial of the Indian history was inspired by different considerations. In the static economic order which the Communists in India underlined as the basis of the Indian history, they identified the Marxist categories of dialecties of history such as the classes, with castes in India and  caste-war with class-war. They identified the ethnic centricism, including Muslim separatism, with independent nationalities.

The self-determination for nationalities which the communist party of India adopted as the basis of the freedom of India, was a negation of both the unity of the working class as well as the unity of India. The Muslim intellectual class rejected the civilisational unity of India and the continuity of the Indian history out of commitment to the separate Muslim nation in India and its separate freedom. The Communist Party in the Punjab and in Bengal suffered dissolution in 1947, due to its commitment to the freedom of the nationalities in India.

Iftikar Ahmad, a senior communist party cadre of the Punjab, arrived in Kashmir after the partition to canvass for the support of the National Conference to the accession of the State to Pakistan. The left  flanks in the National Conference, then led by Niranjan Nath Saraf (Raina), a thoroughbred Marxist, rebuffed Iftikhar. When I asked Pran Nath Jalali about the resolution on the right of self-determination of the nationalities, the National Conference had adopted, he explained that the resolution for the self-determination of the nationalities was conceived within the broad framework of the Indian unity.

The Communist ranks in Kashmir, who formed an influential flank of the National Conference, did not reject the continuity of the Indian history, as the basis of the revolutionary struggle in India. The conflict between them and the Communist leadership in India, was far deeper than it appeared to be. Nadim’s political outlook and its expression in his poetry underlined a spiritual belonging to the history of the Indian civilisation. Vitasta he insisted symbolised the “five thousand years of history” and therefore, formed the vehicle of his famous Opera.

The Communist Party cadres in Kashmir began to disintegrate under the pressure of the Muslimisation of the State. N.N.  Saraf (Raina) ran away to England. The other senior  leaders wobbled in frustration. The outlook of the Communist Party of India, still under the shadows of Adhikari doctrine, which in effect sought to Semitise Marxism almost on the lines Lenin had done in Russia, identified the Muslimisation of the state with the class conflict in Kashmir. It reduced the communist cadres in Kashmiri to mercenaries performing the "historical role" of facilitating the Islamisation of the political culture of Kashmir.

During those fateful days in Kashmir, I was present in a meeting between Nadim and Late Moti Lal Misri. The two men talked in hyperboles of the abandonment of Marxist categories in the political process that had unfolded in the Kashmir. Misri was disconcerted and in agony, his head clean shaven, which gave him a stoic bearing. Misris were able people. Moti Lal's younger brother Mohan Lal Misri, was one of the few scholars in economics of growth in India and taught at the university of Kashmir. He too was a Marxist, more of a traditional stock. Moti Lal, had broken up under the dichotomy in the Indian Communist movement, its rootlessness, its commitment to Semitise Marxism and its attempt to relate Marxist catagories to the rise of the movement for the unity of the Muslim Umah. The unity of the Muslim Umah, was incidentally used by the Soviets as an instrument of cold war. Remorse was writ large on the face of Misri, Nadim wore the pathetic smile of the poet in him perhaps, expressive of greater sorrow, which gnawed at his conscience. While Misri was leaving, he looked back at Nadim as he reached the door way. Then suddenly Nadim told Misri "Moti Lal, read Bhagwat Geeta: it will give you a sense of detachment". Misri looked back, his sardonic smile frozen on his face. He said "alright" and left.

I did not ask Nadim any questions on what he had told Misri though he looked at me, with the expectation that I would. There was no need. I had suddenly realised that the Communist cadres in Kashmiri rejected the Semitisation of Marxism, the Indian Communist Party had attempted and met the disaster it did not expect. The Communist Party idealogues and men in Kashmir, mainly the Kashmiri Pandits did not forsake the civilisational basis of the revolutionary change in India nor did they reject the continuity of the Indian history.

Nadim's poetry in its major appeal transcends, the "incorrigible laws of history" and reach out to a new epoch, which unfolded with the rise of New Marxism or Euro-communism, during the last decades of the cold war. He visualised revolutionary change in continuity of the Indian history and though that brought him in conflict with Muslim establishment in Kashmir, he did not cut off from his historical moorings. His poetry gleans with pathos of the elemental tragedy of the history of Kashmir.

by M.K. Teng

We reproduce here the keynote address delivered by Prof MK Teng at the convention organised by Panun Kashmir and NS Kashmiri Research Institute to commemorate this years Kashmiri Pandit Balidan Divas (Martyr's Day) at Abhinav Theatre Jammu. The day was observed as the day of 'Asmita' to highlight the importance of preservation of Kashmiri Pandit cultural identity, image and voice.

Preface to the keynote address delivered by Dr. M.K. Teng:

Due to the liberalist moorings of the English speaking Indian intellectual class, which flourished with the consolidation of the British power in India, the Indian historiography followed a methodology, which in the ultimate analysis reflected an ideological commitment to liberalist reformism. The Indian renaissance performed the most vital task of the assertion of the Sanskrit identity of India which formed the foreground of the Indian nationalism . Starchey's definition of India as a "geographical expression" was basic to the claim of the legitimacy of the British rule for the 'geographical expression" negated the national identity of India and its right to unity. The Indian intellectual class which directed the Indian national movement followed Strachey's negativism for the British and the Muslims in India, from whom the British had inherited power. This class visualised India as a special plurality which could not claim a national unity as the basis of its independence. Liberal reformism could not visualise Indian unity as an expression of its civilisational content. The Muslims and the Christians, could not accept Sanskrit civilisation as the basis of their participation in an independent India. The Indian intellectual class, under the leadership of Congress set out in search of a unity in diversity, rejecting the Sanskrit substratum of the Indian civilisation as the basis of the Indian nationhood. The Indian emphasis on unity in diversity, deepened the ethno-centric conflict in the Indian political culture and when the British left, the Muslim also joined them to leave India. The time has arrived to re-emphasis the basic current of the Indian renaissance and redefine the basis of the Indian identity. India continues to be visualised as a geographical identity and not as a national unity based on its own civilisational content, because, the Indian intellectual class is still trapped in the reformism of the British liberal tradition. The only way, therefore, for India to unite into a nation, is to of find the roots of its identity.

Key Note Address

Ladies and Gentlemen I express my gratitude to the chairman N.S. Kashmir Research Institute and the Chairman Panun Kashmir for having invited me to deliver the keynote address of the procedings today. There is an urgency to rediscover the identity of the Hindus of Kashmir. In fact there is an urgency to rediscover the identity of the Hindus in India. In the liberation struggle of India the Muslim separatist movement rejected the identity and the unity of the Indian nation. The rootless English-speaking intellectual class of India, which led the Indian movement for liberation, disowned the Indian renaissance because the Muslims rejected it. The British recognised the Muslim claim to a separate nation. The Indian leaders claimed a national unity based upon the diversity of India. In the process both Gandhi and Nehru and the other leaders of the Indian independence movement diluted both the unity of the Indian nation as well as its Sanskrit content. Jammu and Kashmir is part of the national identity of India, which is Sanskrit in origin and Sanskrit in content. India is in the midst of a civilisational war. The expansion of the Muslim power to the east will ultimately depend upon the de-Sanskritisation of the northern frontier of India, more specifically the warm Himalayan hinterland, of which Jammu and Kashmir forms the central spur. Committed to the unity and the Sanskrit foundations of their heritage the Hindus in Kashmir have always formed the frontline of the resistance against the Muslim crusade. They fought against Muslim separatism in India before the independence of the country. They fought, with determined resolution, against Pakistan and the Muslim secessionist movement inside the State, after freedom came to India. The Hindus of Kashmir are an ancient people. They form an inseparable part of the history of the Sanskrit civilisation of India. The contours of their identity are determined heritage. Their social culture is proto-Vedic. Their language has origin in the proto-vedic. Their ritual culture is Sanskrit. The Hindus of Kashmir are a part of the Sanskrit people of India. The Hindus of Kashmir are of proto-Aryan origin and have lived in Kashmir from times, which began with the Bruzahom civilisation between 3500 to 4500 BC, far before the Aryans and presumed to have invaded India. The skeletons found at Burzahom in Srinagar are of the people, were the ancestors of the people who live in northern India today. I saw the skeletons with my own eyes. I had no doubt who they were. The anthropometric survey corroborated the fact that the people, who lived at Burzahom, were of proto-Aryan origin. Kashmir and Jammu including Ladakh, perhaps with the region extending to the Indo-Ganetic plains formed the part of the Aryan heartland. The truth must be told and it is better that it is told by us. The Hindus of Kashmir are no imposters. They never descended on the Karewas of the Kashmir valley from the oblivion of the north. They grew from the soil of Kashmir and had their birth in it. The posterity of the Burzahom Aryans, lived in Kashmir, through ages down to our own time. The Nagas and the Pisachas were no aborigines. They were also people of Sanskrit origin. They were no more ancient than the Burzahom people. They were their descendents and inheritors of the Burzahom culture. Their ritual forms were adopted from the Vedic Kalpa-Sutra and the Vedic Grah-Sutra. They followed Vedic Karma-Kanda which Laugaksh Muni evolved in the first millennium before Christ, which represented the zenith of the Neelmat era. The Hindus of Kashmir became an epicenter of the Sanskrit civilisation of India. To them goes the credit of evolving the tenents of Shiavite Monism. Shiavite Monism represented both a theological doctrine aimed to achieve recognition of a unified field of universal existence and a philosophical concept of logical positivism. The recognition of eternal consciousness, of which universal existence was an expression, was the greatest gift of the Hindus of Kashmir to the Sanskrit civilisation of India. Shiavite monism grew out of 'Advaita in which, time and space vanished with the end of human consciousness. Shiavite monism transcended the limitations of human consciousness and the relativism of time and space. The Hindus of Kashmir Sanskritised the Himalayas and a great part of Asia beyond. Sarvastavadin Budhism filled the Hinyan nihilism with the immortality of the Budhisatva and the foundation of its being by the mother goddess Tara. Sarvastin Budhsim was evolved in Kashmir and was spread by the Kashmiri Pandit masters of Budhism to Tibet, Central Asia, Mongolia and part of Western China. The Hindus of Kashmir founded a script for both the Tibetan as well as the Mongolian language on the basis of linguistic sociology of Sharda. The Budhist theocracy of Tibet was founded by Kashmiri Pandits, who reached Mongolia in the time of the great Chengis Khan. The Hindus of Kashmir are not a part of the so-called composite culture of Kashmir. Islamic Sufism did not represent with cultural and the spiritual ethos of Kashmir. It represented the liberal theology of Islam, which did not accept coexistence of a composite culture. Sufism did not grow in Kashmir. Kashmir was never an abode of Rishis of the Sufi order, as is claimed. Lallshari represented the last resistance to the persecution and the ethnic extermination which the Hindus were subjected to in her time. India is not a geographical expression. It is a unity of people with a universal civilisational ethos which has grown through the millennia of the Indian history. The unity of India is not synonymous with unity in diversity. As a matter fact, the emphasis laid on unity in diversity during the liberation movement in India led straight to the division of the country. The propagation of the sub-national diversity of India was a subtle design to undermine the Sanskrit foundations of the nation of India. The creation of Pakistan was the first phase of the conspiracy. Neither Gandhi nor Nehru resisted the conspiracy. They failed to realise the fundamental conflict inherent in the claim to unity in diversity and what they called the composite culture. Their acceptance of diversity as a basis of Indian unity drove them straight to the partition of India and the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. After the partition, the insistence of the Indian leaders on the unity in diversity confronted them with the first phase of the Muslim crusade in Jammu and Kashmir. Hidden under the cover of the composite culture of India is the civilisational conflict, which seeks the de-Sanskritisation of the northern India to open the way for the Muslim power to expand eastward. The attempts to recreate the identity of Jammu and Kashmir in Sufism, is a subtler plot to dilute the boundaries and the content of the Sanskrit civilisation of Kashmir. From Kashmir the Muslim crusade has spread to Jammu and Ladakh, which form the two major bulwarks of the Sanskrit civilisation of the Northern India. Sanskrit Himalayas are impregnable. If the warm Himalayan hinterland is de-Sanskritised the Muslim power will spread over the whole of the north of India. The Indian state will ignore the warning at its own perils. Committed to the Sanskrit foundations of their heritage, the Hindus of Kashmir have formed the frontline of resistances against the Muslim crusade. They fought with bare teeth against Muslim separatism in India before independence. They fought with determined resolution against Pakistan and the Muslim secessionist movements after freedom came to India. A new phase of struggle has begun for them now. They must apprise the people of India that the Indian state does not recognise the civilisational unity of India. The Indian people must be told that if the Indian state repudiates the Sanskrit basis of the Indian society, it will disintegrate. The state of India which is in conflict with its civilisation will not survive. The Indian state will not be able face the Muslim crusade without a civilisational face.

by M.K. Teng

We reproduce here the keynote address delivered by Prof MK Teng at the convention organised by Panun Kashmir and NS Kashmiri Research Institute to commemorate this years Kashmiri Pandit Balidan Divas (Martyr's Day) at Abhinav Theatre Jammu. The day was observed as the day of 'Asmita' to highlight the importance of preservation of Kashmiri Pandit cultural identity, image and voice.

Preface to the keynote address delivered by Dr. M.K. Teng:

Due to the liberalist moorings of the English speaking Indian intellectual class, which flourished with the consolidation of the British power in India, the Indian historiography followed a methodology, which in the ultimate analysis reflected an ideological commitment to liberalist reformism. The Indian renaissance performed the most vital task of the assertion of the Sanskrit identity of India which formed the foreground of the Indian nationalism . Starchey's definition of India as a "geographical expression" was basic to the claim of the legitimacy of the British rule for the 'geographical expression" negated the national identity of India and its right to unity. The Indian intellectual class which directed the Indian national movement followed Strachey's negativism for the British and the Muslims in India, from whom the British had inherited power. This class visualised India as a special plurality which could not claim a national unity as the basis of its independence. Liberal reformism could not visualise Indian unity as an expression of its civilisational content. The Muslims and the Christians, could not accept Sanskrit civilisation as the basis of their participation in an independent India. The Indian intellectual class, under the leadership of Congress set out in search of a unity in diversity, rejecting the Sanskrit substratum of the Indian civilisation as the basis of the Indian nationhood. The Indian emphasis on unity in diversity, deepened the ethno-centric conflict in the Indian political culture and when the British left, the Muslim also joined them to leave India. The time has arrived to re-emphasis the basic current of the Indian renaissance and redefine the basis of the Indian identity. India continues to be visualised as a geographical identity and not as a national unity based on its own civilisational content, because, the Indian intellectual class is still trapped in the reformism of the British liberal tradition. The only way, therefore, for India to unite into a nation, is to of find the roots of its identity.

Key Note Address

Ladies and Gentlemen I express my gratitude to the chairman N.S. Kashmir Research Institute and the Chairman Panun Kashmir for having invited me to deliver the keynote address of the procedings today. There is an urgency to rediscover the identity of the Hindus of Kashmir. In fact there is an urgency to rediscover the identity of the Hindus in India. In the liberation struggle of India the Muslim separatist movement rejected the identity and the unity of the Indian nation. The rootless English-speaking intellectual class of India, which led the Indian movement for liberation, disowned the Indian renaissance because the Muslims rejected it. The British recognised the Muslim claim to a separate nation. The Indian leaders claimed a national unity based upon the diversity of India. In the process both Gandhi and Nehru and the other leaders of the Indian independence movement diluted both the unity of the Indian nation as well as its Sanskrit content. Jammu and Kashmir is part of the national identity of India, which is Sanskrit in origin and Sanskrit in content. India is in the midst of a civilisational war. The expansion of the Muslim power to the east will ultimately depend upon the de-Sanskritisation of the northern frontier of India, more specifically the warm Himalayan hinterland, of which Jammu and Kashmir forms the central spur. Committed to the unity and the Sanskrit foundations of their heritage the Hindus in Kashmir have always formed the frontline of the resistance against the Muslim crusade. They fought against Muslim separatism in India before the independence of the country. They fought, with determined resolution, against Pakistan and the Muslim secessionist movement inside the State, after freedom came to India. The Hindus of Kashmir are an ancient people. They form an inseparable part of the history of the Sanskrit civilisation of India. The contours of their identity are determined heritage. Their social culture is proto-Vedic. Their language has origin in the proto-vedic. Their ritual culture is Sanskrit. The Hindus of Kashmir are a part of the Sanskrit people of India. The Hindus of Kashmir are of proto-Aryan origin and have lived in Kashmir from times, which began with the Bruzahom civilisation between 3500 to 4500 BC, far before the Aryans and presumed to have invaded India. The skeletons found at Burzahom in Srinagar are of the people, were the ancestors of the people who live in northern India today. I saw the skeletons with my own eyes. I had no doubt who they were. The anthropometric survey corroborated the fact that the people, who lived at Burzahom, were of proto-Aryan origin. Kashmir and Jammu including Ladakh, perhaps with the region extending to the Indo-Ganetic plains formed the part of the Aryan heartland. The truth must be told and it is better that it is told by us. The Hindus of Kashmir are no imposters. They never descended on the Karewas of the Kashmir valley from the oblivion of the north. They grew from the soil of Kashmir and had their birth in it. The posterity of the Burzahom Aryans, lived in Kashmir, through ages down to our own time. The Nagas and the Pisachas were no aborigines. They were also people of Sanskrit origin. They were no more ancient than the Burzahom people. They were their descendents and inheritors of the Burzahom culture. Their ritual forms were adopted from the Vedic Kalpa-Sutra and the Vedic Grah-Sutra. They followed Vedic Karma-Kanda which Laugaksh Muni evolved in the first millennium before Christ, which represented the zenith of the Neelmat era. The Hindus of Kashmir became an epicenter of the Sanskrit civilisation of India. To them goes the credit of evolving the tenents of Shiavite Monism. Shiavite Monism represented both a theological doctrine aimed to achieve recognition of a unified field of universal existence and a philosophical concept of logical positivism. The recognition of eternal consciousness, of which universal existence was an expression, was the greatest gift of the Hindus of Kashmir to the Sanskrit civilisation of India. Shiavite monism grew out of 'Advaita in which, time and space vanished with the end of human consciousness. Shiavite monism transcended the limitations of human consciousness and the relativism of time and space. The Hindus of Kashmir Sanskritised the Himalayas and a great part of Asia beyond. Sarvastavadin Budhism filled the Hinyan nihilism with the immortality of the Budhisatva and the foundation of its being by the mother goddess Tara. Sarvastin Budhsim was evolved in Kashmir and was spread by the Kashmiri Pandit masters of Budhism to Tibet, Central Asia, Mongolia and part of Western China. The Hindus of Kashmir founded a script for both the Tibetan as well as the Mongolian language on the basis of linguistic sociology of Sharda. The Budhist theocracy of Tibet was founded by Kashmiri Pandits, who reached Mongolia in the time of the great Chengis Khan. The Hindus of Kashmir are not a part of the so-called composite culture of Kashmir. Islamic Sufism did not represent with cultural and the spiritual ethos of Kashmir. It represented the liberal theology of Islam, which did not accept coexistence of a composite culture. Sufism did not grow in Kashmir. Kashmir was never an abode of Rishis of the Sufi order, as is claimed. Lallshari represented the last resistance to the persecution and the ethnic extermination which the Hindus were subjected to in her time. India is not a geographical expression. It is a unity of people with a universal civilisational ethos which has grown through the millennia of the Indian history. The unity of India is not synonymous with unity in diversity. As a matter fact, the emphasis laid on unity in diversity during the liberation movement in India led straight to the division of the country. The propagation of the sub-national diversity of India was a subtle design to undermine the Sanskrit foundations of the nation of India. The creation of Pakistan was the first phase of the conspiracy. Neither Gandhi nor Nehru resisted the conspiracy. They failed to realise the fundamental conflict inherent in the claim to unity in diversity and what they called the composite culture. Their acceptance of diversity as a basis of Indian unity drove them straight to the partition of India and the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. After the partition, the insistence of the Indian leaders on the unity in diversity confronted them with the first phase of the Muslim crusade in Jammu and Kashmir. Hidden under the cover of the composite culture of India is the civilisational conflict, which seeks the de-Sanskritisation of the northern India to open the way for the Muslim power to expand eastward. The attempts to recreate the identity of Jammu and Kashmir in Sufism, is a subtler plot to dilute the boundaries and the content of the Sanskrit civilisation of Kashmir. From Kashmir the Muslim crusade has spread to Jammu and Ladakh, which form the two major bulwarks of the Sanskrit civilisation of the Northern India. Sanskrit Himalayas are impregnable. If the warm Himalayan hinterland is de-Sanskritised the Muslim power will spread over the whole of the north of India. The Indian state will ignore the warning at its own perils. Committed to the Sanskrit foundations of their heritage, the Hindus of Kashmir have formed the frontline of resistances against the Muslim crusade. They fought with bare teeth against Muslim separatism in India before independence. They fought with determined resolution against Pakistan and the Muslim secessionist movements after freedom came to India. A new phase of struggle has begun for them now. They must apprise the people of India that the Indian state does not recognise the civilisational unity of India. The Indian people must be told that if the Indian state repudiates the Sanskrit basis of the Indian society, it will disintegrate. The state of India which is in conflict with its civilisation will not survive. The Indian state will not be able face the Muslim crusade without a civilisational face.

A Historical Perspective

By Dr. M.K. Teng

The English and the European historians of the British empire in India, nursed a vested interest in their resistance, to recognise the Sanskirit content of the Indian civilisation as a fact of the history of the sub-continent. To perpetuate the British rule in India, they sought to divide the Hindu society in order to dilute the Hindu majority character of the Indian population, which they knew was the only formidable force they had to contend with. The conflict between the British outlook and the Indian aspirations came to surface with the Indian renaissance which provided ideological content to the national movement in India and for civilisational frontiers of the Indian nation.

The Muslims in India had also a vested interest in refusing to recognise the Sanskritisation of India as a fact of history. They had ruled India for a thousand years and all through their rule they had followed their religious responsibility to de-Sanskritise as much of India as they were able. The Muslims spurned the Indian renaissance and Muslim India, in whatever way it was described by the British and the Muslims themselves or even the Hindus, did not share the national response the Indian renaissance evoked. They rejected the unification of India on the basis of the Sanskrit content of the Indian civilizationa, the continuity of the Indian history and the civilisation frontiers of the Indian nation, the Indian renaissance underlined. The ideological commitments of the Indian national movement were bound to reverse the de-Sanskritisation of India, the Muslims had followed. As the national movement spread out to the masses of the Indian people and assumed a more revolutionary course with the commencement of non-cooperation, the Muslim leadership stepped up the campaign of Tablig, propagation of Islam and Tahreek its operationalisation through an organisational movement the Tanzim to re-state their rejection of unity of India on the basis of its civilisational frontiers.

The Muslims leadership did not take long to recognise the identity of interests between the British and the Muslim in India and assigned themselves in support of the British empire. Mohammad Ali Jinnah who supported political reform in India on the basis of British liberal tradition, parted with the Indian Congress, no sooner, the Congress described parameters of the Indian struggle for freedom. Jinnah was a Muslim, who conceptualised secularism in terms of liberalist reform, which the British empire in India enshrined. Freedom of India from the British empire, envisaged the empowerment of the Hindu majority in India, which was bound to identify the Indian unity with the civilisational frontiers of India. The Muslim leaders, including Mohammad Ali Jinnah, supported the Indian national movement only so far it accepted de-Sanskritsation of India as a part of the Indian freedom movement.

The Indian renaissance evolved widespread response from the Indian states people and they assumed a revolutionary role in the Indian national struggle. The Muslim leadership expressed strong disapproval of the extension of the Congress activities to the states. The states people formed one-fourth of the population of India and the states spread over one third of the territories of India. For the Muslim leadership, the states, particularly the Muslim ruled states were independent of the Hindu India which claimed freedom fearful of further alienation of the Muslims, Gandhi and a part of the Congress leadership, forbade the extension of Congress activities to the States, a policy for which the country had to pay a heavy price in the long run.

The leadership of the Indian National Congress attempted to resolve the ideological conflict by offering to accept a political organisation of a United India, which did not recognise the civilisation content of the Indian history as the basis of the Indian unity and which did not recognise the civilisational frontiers of the Indian nation, the Indian renaissance had described. The Congress leadership offered to accept constitutional reorganisation of India, within the broad structure of the British empire, which was based upon a configuration of political power, representing the ethnic diversity of India and the interests of the various religious communities and ethnic groups which constituted the population of India. The Congress leadership went to the extent of accepting a division of power in India, on the basis of religious divisions of the Indian population when it accepted the cabinet Mission Plan for the transfer of power to the Indian hands.

It is a little known fact that the Cabinet Mission Plan was actually the handiwork of the Muslim leadership in the Congress and the whole plan was stealthy conveyed to the members of the Cabinet Mission, with the assurance that it would be accepted by the Muslim League. The plan appeared to be acceptable to the British, because, it virtually recognised the separate identity of the Muslim India, ensured a separate political identity of the princely states and retained the British the power to safeguard the political arrangement, it envisaged.

The Cabinet Mission envisaged the establishment of a  multi-national state of India constituted of a Muslim India, a Hindu India and an India of the princely states. The Muslim India was constituted of the Muslim majority provinces with the non-Muslim majority province of Assam and the Hindu India was constituted of the remaining Hindu majority provinces. The India of the princely states was constituted of five hundred and sixty two large and small Indian princely states. The three Indias were united in a loose federal union of which the federal centre was vested with powers in respect of foreign affairs, defence and communications. However, the federal centre was not vested with powers to raise finances to exercise its powers.

The Cabinet Mission Plan recognised the separate identity of the Indian princely states and offered them the option to accede to the federation or remain out of it. The princely states, many of them ruled by Muslim potentates stubbornly refused to join the federation. The Muslim rulers claimed the right of conquest and prescription to hold on to their kingships as well as the prerogative to govern their subjects in accordance with the principles of their faith.

Nehru, who was elected the President of the Indian National Congress in the meantime, reiterated the resolve of the Indian people to make the federal centre an effective instrument of governance and warned the rulers of the princely states against any attempt to remain out of united India. Nehru's rejoinder unhinged the Muslim League, which was reported to be sercretly encouraging demographic changes to consolidate its hold on Assam and supporting the Princes, particularly, the Muslim rulers to remain out of the Indian federation. The League leadership repudiated its acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan and in consequence gave a call  for Direct Action for the realisation of Pakistan. The Direct Action, launched in August 1946, plunged the country into a civil war. Gandhi's non-violence struggle for the unity and freedom of the country below in smoke. The Direct Action drove the wedge deep enough to break-up the country and concede the Muslim demand of Pakistan.

Maulana Azad's observation's that Nehru had ended the last effort the Congress had made to keep India united were published many years after India won freedom. Many of the British officers in India and Englishmen, who were involved in the negotiations for the transfer of power in India those days however, wrote that the implementation of the Cabinet Mission Plan would have driven India straight to its Balkanisation.

Pakistan, after it was founded in 1947, inherited the legacy of the Jehad the Muslim League had carried on to divide India. It assumed an extra-territorial right to protect the interests of the Muslims left behind in India, which it has reiterated time and again during the last five decades of the Indian freedom. It stated claim to interfere in the princely states, which were either populated by Muslim majorities such as Jammu and Kashmir or ruled by Muslim princes, such as Junagarh and Hyderabad. The insistence of the Muslim League on the exclusion of the states from the partition was in fact, motivated by the interests of the League leadership do use the states to divide India further and to provide the ground for the continuation of the Jehad to expand the Muslim power of Pakistan eastwards into the Indian mainland.

The invasion of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947, and the incessant struggle for the right of the self-determination of the Muslim majority of the population of the state, Pakistan has spearheaded during last six decades is a part of the Jehad, that country has waged against India. The militarisation of pan-Islamic fundamentalism, what Pakistan has used as an instrument of its policy against India and the war of subversion and international terrorism, which it has unleashed in India, during the last two decades, is also a part of the Jehad that country has waged against India.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

The regionalisation of the national consensus on a parliamentary majority, which has emerged as the dominant feature of the post-election political scene in India, may in the long run, break up the structure of the division of powers between the Central government and the States and undermine the Indian federal organization. The breakdown of the national consensus on a parliamentary majority is, in itself, a national calamity. Hung parliaments do not necessarily represent any conscious effort of the electorate to pluralise the authority of the government. For, there is hardly any initiative, that any of the political parties, which were in the fray for the elections, took to claim a mandate on the pluralisation of the authority of the Indian state. The Indian federal organization underlines, as do all other federal polities in the world, a division a powers, between the federal government and the governments of the federating units, which is defined and guaranteed by the federal constitution. Any regionalisation of the federal authority would, as a matter of course, dissolve all basis for a division of powers, in which the federal government is entrusted with authority, defined by the constitution as the states are, and which forms the basic groundwork of the Indian federal system.

 The Indian federation grew out of two diametrically divergent processes which underlined the devolution of authority to the provincial governments of the erstwhile British India on the one hand and the integration of the authority of the federating princely states on the other hand. The federal organization of India was, therefore, constituted of the provinces of the British India and the Indian States, which were liberated from the British tutelage after the British colonial empire in India came to its end in 1947. Neither the British Indian provinces nor the federating states represented any coherent regional identities, with ethnic, cultural and linguistic uniformity. The provinces as well as the states were also conglomerates of disparate sub-national diversities and neither of them could claim any regional authority on the basis of sub-national boundaries. The provinces were administrative divisions of a centralized power structure, the British had forged to govern India. The princely states were the peripheral salient of the British colonial organization in India, which had emerged with the expansion of the British power, from the crumbling kingdoms which the British smothered one after the other. They did not possess any coherent personality to claim a division of powers on any form of sub-national diversity. The Princes never possessed any powers, except the ceremonial and the splendor, the British allowed them to exhibit and the authority to collect revenues in order that the coffers of the British empire were amply filled, and they had plenty for themselves to squander.

 The farmers of the Indian constitution did not unite any national or sub-national identities into a federal form, which they named the Republic of India. If they had attempted to do that, the Indian federal organization would have never been envisaged. The Constituent Assembly of India accepted the territorial and political basis of the Indian unity, the British had assiduously fostered. At no stage did the Constituent Assembly seek to identify the Indian federal organization with any subnational diversity. It could not do so, because the subnational diversities in India did not have any social, territorial or political description.

 The Indian federal system was embedded in an environment, which was plural and diverse but its boundaries did not overlap cultural, linguistic or religious pluralities of the Indian society. The Jammu and Kashmir alone represented a variation of the federal principle, the Constitution of India envisaged. However, the recognition of Jammu and Kashmir as a sub-national identity on the basis of the Muslim majority character of its population, led to its exclusion from the federal organisation of India, for the sub-national identity it claimed, could not be reconciled to the basic structure of the political organization and federal division of powers, the Constitution of India embodied. The consequences proved to be disastrous.

 The Vajpayee government should put itself on guard lest the coalition politics, which the National Front has acclaimed as the beginning of the regionalisation of the federal authority in India, leads to the liquidation of the Indian federation. Regionalisation of power on the basis of sub-national pluralism is irreconcillable to federalism, which is an attribute of division of powers on the territorial and administrative basis. Vajpayee government cannot afford to overlook the difference between federal autonomy, to which it is committed and the pluralisation of the authority of the Indian state on the basis of ethnicity, caste, religion and language, which it is committed to resist.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

Methodologically, the analysis of linkages of between archeology and an ideology of history may appear to be serious work of research, but ultimately it is only, one of thos many attempts to distort Indian history by various techniques of logical reductionism. The pre-supposition of a Harappan-Aryan debate, hings on the British historiographic assumption of a civilisational conflict, which the Aryan race movement in India generated. Mortimer wheeler, dazed by this stanctural formats of the Sind Valley Civilisation and their historical antecedents, could not imagine the sequences of events which led to the growth of the Harappan civilization, except in the conceptual formats of the race movements across Asia, the liberalist reformism envisioned. The attempt made by scholars of Indian history to use the Indian media, for a projection of the Indian past, provides good reading but in essence it is a preposterous combination of archeologist evidence and paradigms of approach to the study of history, built around an irrational urge to deny the continuity in Indian history and its civilisational identity. A psychologist complex of fear, haunts the mind of the Indian historian that the acceptance of the continuity of the India history and its civilisational identity would necessitate the reconstruction of the Indian history in the context of its Sanskrit content. The Aryan myth was a part of the sociology of the race movement and the ideological and moral commitment to formulate premises that racial differences were fundamental to the growth of human civilisation. The sediments of a civilisational history bear evidence of the racial characteristics presumed to provide clues to the analysis of the levels of its culture. The myth that Aryans considered themselves to be superior to the Authroloid and proto-Austraoloid stock of the Indian population, is also a projection of the British liberalist reformism. That caste had its origin in the social differention between the Nordic invaders and the Austroloid and proto-Autroloid survivors on the India sub-continent has its roots in the presumption that race movements were ideologically oriented. An attempt is made with deliberate intent to ignore and leave out of reckoning the race-movement of the Western-Brachycephlic Alpinoid peoples, across the north of India, spreading down to Bengal. The Alpinoids disappeared and are now extinct as a separate raceist identity, but their acculturation in India had a deep impact on the social patterns into which the Indian civilisation grew. Possibly a study of such acculturation would explain the western Bracky-cephlitic presence in northern India. Ideological conflict dominates the study of Indian history for their are visible trends in historiography in India to prove that Indian culture was an extension of the civilisational process of the Occient, where divinity had ordained the reality of an ominipotent masculine God, who determined the legitimacy of human action. The claim to the closer proximity of the Sind civilisation to the civilizational, has an ideological thrust to Occidentalise the Harappan culture. Having grown along the river Saraswati or the Sind, is only important in so-far as it establishes the proximity of Sind Valley civilisation to the Middle East, to prove that the civilisational process of the Harappan culture was not Indian and it had a plural origin. Not far off from the remains of the Harapan culture in the upper reaches of the Shivaliks, across the Pir Panjal mountain range, the worship of the Mother Goddess, Bhawani had already achieved a systemic shape with a basic sub-stratism of Shakht, which the mesopotamian civilisation did not envision, and which later florished in the Shiavite monism of the Trika, in the Kashmri valley. In the Sind valley cilivisation, figures of Goddesses were found and a representation similar to the Pashupati was also found, with the types of ornaments, which were strictly native and which had a ritual texture close to the Vedic ritual system. The later Neolothic culture at Burzaham in the Kashmir valley, populated by people of the Aryan stock. The chalcolithic revolution in the Burzaham civilisation came about, in the begining of the period of the Nilmat Puran in Kashmir, undoubtedly by its contact with the Sind valley. The ritual culture which grew in Kashmir in the Nilmah era, was the negotiation of the masculine God of the Occident. The Harappan culture and the myth of its civilisational conflict with the Aryans requires to be analysed by new and more sophisticated tools and techniques of history Linguistic sociology and the analysis of ritual culture and social anthropology provide as vital data on history as archeology does. The neolithic culture, which flourished in Kashmir along the river Vitasta (Jehlum) and which formed the ground work of the Shahkt-Shiva ritual structure, must be studied more intensively, to understand the contours and content of the Sind valley civilisation and its alignments with, the Aryan people.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

The Sanskritisation of Himalayan hinterland extending from Afghanistan to the Mongolian deserts of Gobi, was brought about by the Hindus of Kashmir. The periodisation of the history of proto-Aryan culture in India, must be reviewed now and rescued from the colonial concepts of the race movements across India. The divide that has been, so far claimed to intervene between the proto-Aryan India and the Sanskrit culture of the Indo-Gangetic India, is imaginary and unfounded in sociological data. The civilisation of India, as conceived in colonial frames of reference, was confined to boundaries which never existed in the history of India. Indian civilisation was always a totality, with its Sanskrit substructure, of which the Hindus in Kashmir formed an inseparable part.

The Muslim expansion into India, was the first assault on the modes of the Sanskrit society. The civilisational conflict inherent in the Muslim expansion in India, characterised the entire course of history, which followed right up to the end of the British colonial empire in India.

The Hindus of Kashmir, so far, they were not exposed to the Muslim expansion, evolved the aspects of the Indian civilisation, which marked a rare intellectual brilliance, in integrating the Vedic spiritual culture into a single unity. The Semitic expansion into India suddenly put the Hindus in Kashmir on the frontline of a conflict, which later continued for a millennium, and which consumed them ruthlessly, till the Sikhs came to their rescue. When  Ranjit Singh wrested Kashmir from the Durani Afghans, he was stunned to learn from a census, he had ordered to be conducted that of the quarter a million of the population of Kashmir, who were Hindus at the time of the Muslim conquest of the Valley, hardly twenty eight thousand survived. The rest had been converted or killed.

The reductionist rationa-lisation of the cultural change, claimed more by the Indian scholars of the history of Northern India, than the British and the European scholars, forms part of the post-colonial expressions of Indian reaction to Muslim dominance. Few societies in the world have accepted change in their tradition and the mores of their ethics out of recognition of a symbiosis in cultural confrontation. Indeed the rise of semitic religions in the west, the supersession of Budhism over the  Bon, Confucianism and Taoism, in Far East, was a consequence of powerful military and violent struggle. Northern India, more specifically Kashmir, could not be an exception.. The Jengezide Mongols, who spread across Asia, into the Middle East and then South Europe, carried the nascent ingredients of the early Budhism with their vast expansion and destroyed everything that came in their way. Kublai Khan, the grandson of Changis, enforced the Buddhist faith in most of the Central Asia and far East. The phenomenon of the extinction of the Sanskrit Hindus and their cultural heritage in Kashmir, was a part of the same historical process, which determined the rise of Christianity and Islam. Inquisition was a principal feature of all semitic faiths and it continues to be so even now. Pakistan represents the same tradition.

Martyrdom in Kashmir must, therefore be visualized in the process of Indian history. Unfortunately for this country, inspite of the great renaissance, the exposure of its people to British liberalism, led to the leadership of the Indian liberation movement, to override the assertion of the Muslim India for a separate political wheitage fact, which led straight to the partition. The leadership of the Congress, sought a reconciliation with the Muslims with the help of the inertness of the Hindu civilisation suppressed into subordination over a millinium. It had a direct impact on the Northern India, which was ultimately broken up and ravaged.

The partition, the logical consequence of the attempt to seek a reconciliation of the national identity of India, with the quest for a Muslim power in India, did not end, the basic conflict, which had its roots, spread over the centuries of Muslims rule in India. Akbar the great Mughal, erroneously venerated for religious tolerance, was as committed to the Islamisation of India, as Babar was. He changed the strategies the earlier Mughals had followed. Not surprisingly therefore, the process of the destruction the Hindus undertaken in Kashmir was as rigorous during the Mughal rule as it was during the Muslim Saltanate. The Muslim struggle for ascendence in the north crystalised in seeking to integrate the Muslim majority provinces in India, into the Muslim State of Pakistan. In the princely. States, which were not even remotely linked with the partition of the British India and the creation of Pakistan, the Muslims demanded the Muslim majority for their Muslim commonwealth. They swallowed Kalat, against the will be of its ruler, flushed out Hindus from Bahawalpur, to annex it to Pakistan and then invaded Jammu and 
Kashmir a Muslim majority princely state.

In the invasion of Jammu and Kashmir, around thirty eight thousand Hindus and Sikhs were killed. Perhaps, the number would have been far larger, but for the heroic resistance the Hindu officers and men of the State army offered to the invaders. The Muslim officers and ranks deserted the State army, when the invaders rolled into the State. Perhaps, few of the hundred thousand Hindus, trapped in the Kashmir Valley would have survived, if Brigadier Rajinder Singh and the handful of his gallant men, would not have laid down their lives and delayed the entry of the invaders into the Uri bowl, for two and a half critical days, which earned moments of reprieve for Maharaja Hari Singh and his Hindu subjects.

Four decades after the partition, the civilisational conflict, manifested itself in a different form, and struck the Hindus in Kashmir and Jammu, with a ferocity, no less in its severety, than fascism, before the second world war. Beside the genocide the Hindus faced, their whole community was forced out of Kashmir. Later the hatchet fell on the Hindus in the Muslim majority regions of the Jammu province. Hindus are actually paying the forefiet, for a leadership in India, which has failed to realise the historical import of the civilisational conflict, in which the Hindus have been on the frontline. Where do we find the martyrs, in a struggle, which has a history of centuries. Martrydom for Hindus, has indeed, been the only way to their freedom.

The war of subversion being waged in Jammu and Kashmir must be visualised in its proper perspective as a part of the Muslim crusade to extend Muslim power into India. The terrorist violence in Kashmir commenced with the genocide of the Hindus and their exodus from Kashmir. The battle lines were not drawn inadvertently, but with a deliberate intent which had an ideological basis in the long civilisational struggle for which Northern India was the battle ground. The Hindus in Kashmir, who formed the northern most salient of the Sanskrit civilisation, remained for more than six centuries  on the frontline of the great civilisational conflict. Slowly they were consumed in the long struggle. Those left alive, continue resistance to the various forms of ideological precedence the Muslims claimed.

In his presidential address to the first All India States Peoples Conference, held in Kathiawar in 1929, Pandit Shankar Lal Koul, a Kashmiri-speaking Hindu, called for the recognition  of the in alienable unity of the States and the British India, which he proclaimed formed one and an indivisible nation. Lalla Muluk Raj Saraf joined the conference as a delegate from Jammu. The Indian leaders dragged their feet and refused to integrate the liberation movement in the states with the national movement in the British India. The Muslims in India had a deep interest in the segregation of the states from the British India, for the states spread over nearly half the territory of the British empire in India and were populated by a hundred million Hindus. Indeed the Muslim League insisted upon the exclusion of the states from the rest of India as a basis for any constitutional settlement of the Indian question.

The fundamental conflict between the assertion Shankar Lal Koul made in his presidential minute to the All India States People’s Conference and the Muslim League came to surface when the Muslims cut away a part of the Northern Indian to form the State of Pakistan. They insisted upon the dissolution of the Paramountancy to swallow not only the Muslim ruled States in India, which they claimed on the basis of prescription, but the Muslim majority states as well, which they claimed on the basis of the right to precedence of the Muslim majority in such states.  The inability of the Indian leadership to resist the lapse of the paramountancy again pushed the Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir to the frontline.

The subversive war being waged in the North of India, is the part of the same historical and elemental conflict. The Indian civilisation is in a state of siege. The Indian people must redeem their pledge to freedom. The siege must be broken.

The  Author is the internationally acclaimed Kashmir expert who has retired as the Head of the Deptt. of Political Sciences of Kashmir University.

by Dr. M.K. Teng

International terrorism has ravaged India for more than two decades. None, except the Indians themselves, have harboured any illusions about the objectives the terrorist violence, carried out almost everywhere in the country, is intended to achieve. To be fair to the Jehadi war groups they have spelt out the objectives they sought to achieve, in unambiguous terms.

Within the broad framework of the Islamic Revolution, the Jehadi wars have their objectives (a) the liberation of Jammu and Kashmir from the Indian occupation and the unification of the state with the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, (b) the  enforcement of their extra-territorial right to protect the interests of the Muslims in the Hindu India; and (c) integrate the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir and the Muslims of India into the Muslim movement for the unification of the Muslim Umah into a Muslim International.

Containment of India

Pakistan has been an epicentre of the struggle for the unification of the Muslim Umah and its consolidation into a Muslim International. It has sponsored the Islamic Revolution and supported the fundamentalisation of the Muslim Umah. In fact, Pakistan was conceived by its founders as Muslim commonwealth committed to Islamic order of the society. The foundations of Pakistan were ideological. Not only Sir Mohammed Iqbal but also Quad-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the ideologue of the Muslim League, Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan, consciously owned the “historic responsibility” of forging a state which was Muslim in composition and Muslim in outlook.

After its foundation, the first task Pakistani state undertook was to Balkanise the Indian princely states and establish a foothold in the heart of the Indian mainland, to divide it further. Pakistan secured the accession of the princely state of Junagarh on one hand and on the other hand prompted the Nawab of Hyderabad to remain out of India. It embarked upon an invasion for the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir barely two and a half months after its establishment to extend its territories eastwards into the north of India. Pakistan failed to swallow Junagarh and help the ruler of Hyderabad to remain out of India. In both the states, military action united them with India. In Jammu and Kashmir the invading army entreched itself in the Muslim majority districts of the state bordering Pakistan  and conspired  to break away the whole of Jammu and Kashmir state from India, but failed in its efforts.

Having failed to use the princely states to Balkanise India, Pakistan followed a three-pronged policy to contain it. First it assumed the role of leading the movement of the unification of the Muslim Umah into a Muslim International. Secondly, it adopted a policy of international alignments to encircle India. Thirdly it put itself on the course of military armament aimed to achieve a military parity with India.

The consolidation of the Muslim Umah into a Muslim International and the participation in the alliance systems achieved the objective of the containment of India to a considerable extent. The effect of the containment of India was visible in the India-China conflict of 1962. The Chinese pushed across the Mc Mabon Line a hundred miles to its south, virtually without any opposition from Indian army.

Pakistan, to  consolidate its ideological basis, proclaimed itself as an Islamic Republic and in the years that followed went through the Islamic Revolution. The Islamic Revolution underlined the fundamentalisation of the Muslim society to provide an ideological basis for the consolidation of the Muslim Umah into a Muslim International. The powers of the western alliance saw the consolidation of the Muslim Umah into a Muslim International as the most effective instrument in the ideological conflict of the Cold War, and the containment of Communism including India.

The Jehad

Pakistan put itself in the forefront of the Muslim Jehad in Afghanistan against the Soviet intervention. While the Jehad against the Soviet power continued, Pakistan embarked upon the militarisation of the pan-Islamic fundamentalism which it claimed was aimed at the liberation of the Muslims living under the subjection of the heathen all over the world. In 1989-90, Pakistan launched the Jehad in Jammu and Kashmir to liberate the state from India. After the disintegration of the Soviet power, Pakistan continued to Jehad in the Aghanistan and built the Taliban. While the Taliban established their hold on Afghanistan, the Jehadi war groups operating in Jammu and Kashmir extended their operations to the other parts of India.

Talibanisation of the Islamic Revolution is a revolutionary movement which provides a military thrust to the Muslim struggle for the unification of the Muslim Umah and its consolidation into a world power.

A logical continuity pervaded the various phases of the Jehad-the religious war waged. The spread of Jehadi war groups in India is an inseparable  part of the Islamic Revolution which Pakistan spearheads. Whereas the Jehadi war groups in Jammu and Kashmir are committed to the liberation of Kashmir and its unification with the Muslim homeland of Pakistan, the Jehadi war groups in India have committed themselves to the liberation of the Muslims from their subjection from the Hindus in India. Ideologically the Jehad claims an extra-territorial right, over and above all international obligations recognised by the international community, to protect the Muslims in India against the dominence of the Hindus.

The bipolar balance of power provided enough space for the Islamic Jehad to wage the religious war, it envisaged, for the consolidation of the Muslim Umah into a Muslim International. However, the end of the bipolar balance of power with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of a new unipolar world order, suddenly dissolved all the space, which the Islamic Jehad had occupied in the bipolar world. The Islamic Jehad drove straight to a head on collision with the unipolar world order. Al Qaeda struck the first blow  when it attacked the United States.

Dangers Ahead

The political and military campaign Pakistan has carried on in Jammu and Kashmir during the last six decades of the Indian freedom is aimed to open the way for the expansion of its power eastwards, into the warm Himalayan rugged countryside. This area stretching in between the river Sind and the river Ravi, formed the part of the Sikh State of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who had after a long military endeavour fortified it   into the northern frontier of India.

The expansion of Pakistan into Jammu and Kashmir will demolish the Northern Frontier of India and lead to (a) the de-Sanskritisation of the Himalayas strategically the most important factor in their security (b) exclusion of India from any balance of power in Asia and (c) expose the north-Indian States of the Himachal, the Punjab and Haryana to invasion and foreign intervention.

Pakistan is an integral part of the Anglo-Saxon-Muslim alliance. The western powers have built it, to protect their military and political interests in the Middle East, the Far East and South-East Asia and the security of their maritime interests, in the Indian ocean and the Malacca Straights, the water way opening into the Pacific. Perhaps, India is the only country in Asia, which has exhibited scant interests in the security of the Indian Ocean. Had it not been so, perhaps, the Indian Government would have guarded the Ram Settu more closely rather than have clamoured for its demolition.

India has, out of sheer inability to muster courage to stand up to the threat the Pakistan-China. Axis poses to its security and its interests. For India, the Indian ocean and the straight on Malacca, should have been the first concern of any strategic plans, as the Himalayas should have been. Any  foothold Pakistan gets in Jammu and Kashmir will open the way for the expansion of the Taliban in the north of India. The China-Pakistan Axis, is aimed to close India into a pincer hold in the north as well as the south. Intriguingly, India has never questioned the silence America has maintained on the implications of the  China-Pakistan Axis, for the security of South-Asia .

The Indian belief that Pakistan could be brought round to settle down to accept a state of peaceful coexistence with India if it was assured of its security and its ideological commitment to Islam was recognised, is highly misplaced. The Indian attempt to seek a compromise on Jammu and Kashmir, to satisfy the ideological commitments of Pakistan to the unification of the Muslim Umah will only strengthen the China-Pakistan Axis further.

India has to realise that Pakistan has in recent years, embarked on a war of subversion in India with the aim of bringing about the fundamentalisation of the Muslim social organisation in India. India continues to be a largely un-integrated political culture and more exposed to subversion. The spread of terrorism to rest of India which Bombay attack underlined can be ignored by India at its own peril.

by M.K. Teng

There is a risk of rep etition of what has been reported in the columns of the Sentinel about the nature of the Kashmir dispute, the state that Pakistan has claimed in it and the anomalous policy Indian has followed about the future of Jammu and Kashmir State.

However, the Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir cannot afford to be complacent about the developments in the state, the police action Pakistan has initiated against the Taliban and the increasing sense of self-abnegation which dominates the outlook of the Indian political class in respect of national unity.

The Indian interest in Kashmir is overwhelmingly deep and the future of the state is intimately connected with the unity of Indian the security of the Indian frontiers and the role of the Indian state in the changing balances of power in Asia.

Pakistan's Claims

Pakistan has incessantly claimed that the unification of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan is a condition for the completion of the process of the partition of India. Pakistan has claimed that the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir constituting a majority of the population of the state, formed a part of the Muslim nation of Pakistan.

The dispute over Kashmir, Pakistan claimed has its roots in the Indian denial of the right of self-determination the Muslims of the Jammu and Kashmir acquired in consequence of the lapse of the British Paramountcy-the authority the British Crown exercised over the princely state of India.

The contention of Pakistan is deceptively simple.

Pakistan insists upon the responsibility of India, to find a settlement of the Kashmir dispute, which is acceptable to Pakistan and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir.

However, the Kashmir dispute is not a legacy of the partition of India nor is the Kashmir dispute a creation of the Indian denial of the right of self-determination the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir acquired as a consequence of the lapse of the Paramountcy. The unification of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan, never formed a condition for the completion of the process of the partition of India. The partition of India did not apply to the princely states which were completely insulated from its operation on the insistence of the Muslim League and the British Government. There is no basis in the claim, Pakistan has persistently made, that the onus of responsibility to find a settlement of the Kashmir dispute, which is a accpetable to Pakistan and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir, rests on India. India has never accepted any responsibility to find a settlement of the Kashmir dispute which is acceptable to the Muslims in Pakistan and the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir.

Kashmir's accession to India dispute is an inseparable part of the Indian struggle for freedom from the British rule. It is a part of the commitment of the Indian people to preserve the unity of the Indian nation and its civilisational frontiers. It is a part of the Indian commitment to uphold the continuity of the history of India.

Kashmir dispute in fact, the last phase of the Indian resistance against the Muslims separatists movement, which culminated in the partition of India in 1947. The movement for secession in Jammu and Kashmir which Pakistan has been carrying on for the last six decades, is aimed to foist a second paritition on India, extend the Muslim power of Pakistan eastwards into the warm Himalayan uplands of Jammu and Kashmir and reopen the routes of invasion into the north India across the river Ravi.

The Indian princely states were a part of the Indian nation.

The people of the Indian states were always in the forefront of the Indian struggle for the unity of India and its liberation from the British rule. The insistence of the British Government and the Muslims League on the lapse of the Paramountcy was aimed to divide the princely states from the British Indian provinces and break up the states to bring about the vivisection of India. While the partition plan was on the anvil, Mountabatten and the British authorities secretly assured the Congress leaders that after the separation of the Muslims majority regions of the British India was accepted by the Congress leaders, the unity of the remaining provinces of the British Indian and the Indian princely states would not be allowed to be impaired.

Infact the Congress leaders among them mainly Nehru, expressed concern about the princely states, which they emphasised could not be left out of the future political organisation of an independent India. Mountabatten and the British authorities, quietly resiled from their commitments, after the Congress leaders endorsed the partition plan.

Self-Determination:

The princely states of India spread over one-third of the territory of the British Indian empire and constituted one-fourth of the population of India. The peoples' movements in the states were committed to the unity of the people in the British India and the Indian states and the freedom of India including the states from the British colonial rule. The creation of the Muslim homeland of Pakistan was confined to the partition of the British India and left the princely states out of its preview.

The Muslim League advocated the exclusion of the princely states from the constitutional organisation the British India, because it claimed the princely states which were populated by Muslim majorities as well as the princely states ruled by the Muslim rulers. Among the princely states very few states including Jammu and Kashmir were populated by Muslim majorities. The larger number of the princely states was populated by Hindu majorities and among them were the states ruled by Muslim princes, including Bhopal, Hyderabad and Junagarh, which had financially backed the Muslim struggle for Pakistan.

The Muslim League supported the lapse of the British Paramountcy to provide space for the Muslim ruled states to remain out of India and align themselves with the Muslim state of Pakistan.

Both the British and the Muslim League opposed the right of the peoples of the princely states to determine their future affiliations which the Congress leaders frantically pleaded for. The British and the Muslim League were aware of the commitment of the peoples' movement in the states to the freedom of India and the unity of the states with the British India.

The partition plan as well as the lapse of the Paramountcy the transfer of power in India, envisaged did not underline the right of selfdetermination of the Muslims  

 in the British Indian or the Muslims in the princely states, including the states where they formed a majority of the population. The Muslims League and the British persistently refused to recognise the right of selfdetermination in the British Indian provinces and the princely states. Both the British and the Muslim League sought to use the princely states, particularly the states ruled by Muslims Princes and the states populated by Muslim majorities, to Balkanise India.

Muslim League looked upto the Muslim rulers of the states to align themselves with the Muslim homeland of Paksitan. The British supported the League in its endeavour to bring about the fragmentation of the India.

Muslim League looked upto the Muslim rulers of the states to align themselves with the Muslims homeland of Pakistan. The British supported the League in its endeavour to bring about the fragmentation of the Indian States, for the British were keen to include a part of the northern frontier of India in the Muslim state of Pakistan which they believed would secure their interests in Asia. Jammu and Kashmir, formed the central spur of the northern frontier of India.

The northern areas of the North-West Frontier Province rimmed the Dardic dependencies of the Jammu and Kashmir state, and the Gilgit Agency which was fortified by the British grarrisons.

The Muslim rulers of Junagarh and Hyderabad played their part well. But the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir upset in British and the League plans. The ruler of Junagarh acceded to Pakistan and Hyderabad spared no efforts to align itself with that country.

Junagarh was located in the midst of the Kathiawad States, which formed a part of the Indian Dominion.

Hyderabad was situated deep inside south India. The subjects of both Junagarh and Hyderabad were predominantly Hindu. Hari Singh, right from the time he turned away the Viceroy, who flew into Srinagar, shortly after the June 3 Declaration to prevail upon him to come to terms with Pakistan, acted deftly to save his state from being used as a pawn. Mountabatten did not forgive the Maharaja, for how he had sent him back to Delhi.

The leaders and the cadres of the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference were in jail, when the British quit India on 15 August 1947. They had been closed up for a year before on account of the "Quit Kashmir" movement they had launched in the spring of 1946. The National Conference supported the Indian struggle for freedom and was affiliated to the All India States People's Conference, which spearheaded the national movement in the princely states. The National Conference leaders were released from their incarceration after 6 September 1947, when the Maharaja proclaimed a general amnesty for the National Conference political prisoners. The National Conference leaders, though they demanded the transfer of power to the people, did not show any impatience with the accession of the State. Infact, after the working Committee of the National Conference decided to support the accession of the state to India in a secret meeting, they sent emissaries to Pakistan to open negotiations with the League leaders on the future of the state.

Dangers Ahead:

During the last six decades of the Indian freedom, Pakistan has maintained a high degree of military pressure on India, which that country has deftly used to perpetuate a sense of insecurity in Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan has waged a religious war against India, commencing with the invasion of the state in 1947 with its latest phase unfolding in the Jehad in 1990. Inside the state Pakistan has used the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir as a frontline of the Jehad for the liberation of the State from the Indian occupation.

Outside Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan has alinged itself with the Anglo- American block of powers and joined China to form the China-Pakistan axis in the east, in order to confine. India into a pincer-hold along its northern frontier.

Pakistan is an ideological state committed to the Islamic order of society. The political class of Pakistan is committed to the unification of the Muslim Umah into a Muslim International. The civil society in Pakistan, inspite of the protestations on the contrary, is largely fundamentalised. Any compromise with Pakistan on Kashmir, contemplated by the Government of India, will drive India to a second partition.

Hussain Haqqani, now Ambassador of Pakistan in the United States, wrote in his book, which was published a few years ago. "Pakistan still has an unfinished agenda in Afghanistan and Kashmir." The Indian political class must take a note of the political agenda of Pakistan.

The Muslim struggle in India laid down the foundations of the Muslim power of Pakistan. Pakistan follows the agenda of extending the Muslim power eastwards into the north of India, to secure a hold on the Himalayas and eliminate India from any future balance of power in Asia and as an epicentre of the Islamic Revolution wage a Jehad against India.

Jamait-u-Dawa is ideologically committed to extend an invitation to the people of world to accept Islam. Its involvement in the terrorist attacks on Bombay, must open the eyes of the Indian policymakers.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh forged, to close the routes of invasion into India from the north. It was first breached, when the Indian government allowed the frontier regions of Jammu and Kashmir state, Baltistan and Gilgit, be integrated by Pakistan into its territories later known as a "Northern Region". Any changes in the configuration of power in the frontier regions of Kargil and Ladakh, will eventually lead to the demolition of the whole of the northern frontier of India.

The warm upcountry of Jammu and Kashmir, with the sprawling Shivalik plains between the river Chinab and river Ravi, are crucial to the security of the Himalayas.

Both Pakistan and China have their eyes on the Himalayas. Had India taken the warning, the Tibetan Delegate sounded, in the political committee of the United Nations General Assembly in 1950 when Britain and the United States let down Tibet on the issue of its appeal against the Chinese invasion, the Chinese army would not have swooped down across the Mc Mahan Line to occupy hundreds of miles of the Indian border and in 1962.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

The war in Kargil, contrary to the  view unexpectedly held by the Indian government and which found favour with those who claimed expertise on Indo-Pakistan relations, was not an isolated eruption of a border conflict or a military expedition of the Pakistan army across the Line of Control. In India, a prismatic sense of self-mortification prevails in the government, as well as in the minds of those who run it that there is always, a cause which has its origin outside the Muslim community for whatever, happens inside its folds. Perhaps, the right of self determination which Pakistan alleged, had been denied to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, was also an alibi, which had its origin in India, and which was perhaps, devised for the convenience of Pakistan. For the fact, that neither the transfer of power in the British India, nor the lapse of the Paramountcy in the States,  accepted self-determination for any of the peoples in India: those inhabiting the British India, which was divided and those inhabiting the India of the princely States. Indeed, the partition was a denial of the right of self-determination of the Indian people, who except the Muslims-a small minority in the Indian population, opposed the division of India.

For whatever, was accomplished after the partition to locate the blame for the communal divide, the censure fell, partly on the British and partly on the Hindus of India, who were erroneously believed to have determined the policies of the Government of India, providing a clean chit to the Muslim League and the Muslims of India: the real force which brought about the partition of India. Pakistan  cried hoarse and rightly that the Muslims in India and not the British had created the Muslim homeland for Pakistan, concieved as a major step in the direction of the freedom of the Muslim Umah. Indeed, the British acted as catalysts.

The objective of Pakistan was delineated by the Indian Muslims. Sir Mohammad Iqbal and Mohammad Ali Jinnah provided the ideological content to the Muslim movement for Pakistan, a fact, which is clearly revealed by the correspondence Iqbal had with Jinnah till his death. The major tactical manoeuvre the Direct Action, which overwhelmed the Congress leadership, and brought it down to its knees to accept the partition, was envisaged by the Muslims of India. The British did not divide India. The Muslim of India divided it.

Sooner than expected, however, a conscious effort was made, first, to put the blame for the partition of India on the British and after that was achieved, put a part of the blame on the Congress leadership. The Muslims in India could do no wrong, and therefore, they could not be accused of having done the wrong of dividing the country.

The Indian perspectives continued to be warbled and the separatist demand for a Muslim majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, to exclude it from the secular constitutional organisation of India on the basis of the Muslim majority character of its population looked for its rationale, not in Muslim communalism, which it blatantly reflected, but in the quest for a sub-national identity which was claimed to represent a secular ideal.

Much worse, the long secessionist struggle, spearheaded by the Plebiscite Front, in search for the self-determination of the Muslims, was insistently characterised as a movement which did not support Pakistan and the so-called two-nation theory of the Muslim League. The demand for a second Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir, which the Plebiscite Front and the other secessionists organisation made, was justified as a secular movement because it did not underline this demand for the accession of the Jammu and Kashmir State to Pakistan, but claimed a second partition of India to create another independent Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir. After the front leaders formally adorned the garb of secular patriotism in 1975 they were suddenly, hailed as the harbingers of a new age of secular history in India. However, they pursued their own agenda and as Afzal Beg, the President of the Front, had promised his cadres, that the Front would enter the government “to wreck India from within”, they followed their objectives with meticulous care and ruthless effect. The leadership of the militant flanks which launched the war of attrition in the state against India in 1989, came from the two generations of the Muslims, who were socialised to secessionism and Pakistan for two and half decades of the movement led by the Plebscite Front in the State.

The Muslim international underlined by the Islamic revolution provided the secessionist movement in the state, with a new basis for pan-Islamic unity and a new thrust for the achievement of the freedom of the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir. A self conscious Indian leadership, driven by compulsions beyond ordinary human comprehension, sought to camouflage the fundamentalist, communal and separatist content of the Muslim militancy by offering theoretical explanations, like the “alienation syndrome”, “poverty” “unemployment” and of  course”, the inducement of Pakistan to misguide the Muslim youth”.

The Janata government, which owed much to the most irridentist leadership of the Indian Muslims, for their support in the elections, blamed everyone, except  the Muslims, for the militant violence in Kashmir. They blamed the Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir as well as in India for having scuttled the aspirations of the Muslims to autonomy, political participation and economic prosperity. They blamed the successive Congress governments of having rigged the elections in the State to userp political power and oppress the Muslims. The Congress which returned to power  after the Janata broke up, gave its own version of the eruption of the Muslim militancy in Kashmir and with an abject sense of self-condemnation, blamed its own leadership of having deprived the Muslims in Kashmir of the autonomy which their illustrious predecssors had promised them. Some of the Congress leaders carried their argument to absurd extremes, claiming that the crusade carried on by the militants and their Muslim supporters in Jammu and Kashmir, did not support the two-nation theory, on which Pakistan was based and the version of the Islamic Revolution the militant regimes in Jammu and Kashmir advocated was basically secular in character, and upheld the “tradition of tolerance and amity”, of the Muslim society in Kashmir.

The Congress government indeed, had no qualms to inform the National Human Rights Commission that half a million of Hindus had migrated out of their homes of their own volition, visibly seeking to convince the Commission that the Muslims in Kashmir were in no way involved in the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus from Kashmir. The Congress leaders avoided to refer to the genocide of the Hindus and their ethnic cleansing from Kashmir, lest they be rightly understood or misunderstood for what they said. For a long time, the Indian government and the Indian leadership, reluctantly referred to the complicity of Pakistan in the war of attrition in the State, using vague and often misleading chiches, to evade an indictment of the Muslims whether in 
Jammu and Kashmir or in Pakistan.

The Indian Muslims, who had stakes in the secular integration of the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir in the constitutional organisation of India and who vigorously supported the secularisation of the state and society in the rest of India vigorously aplauded the demand for Islamisation of the State under the garb of its sub-national identity. They insisted upon guarantees to secure the Muslims in India against the religious precedence of the Hindu majority and demanded the enforcement of the right to equality and right to protection against discrimination on the basis of religion. But they opposed the secularisation of the Jammu and Kashmir State and its integration in the Indian political structure. While secularism was necessary to protect the Muslim minority in India, religious precedence of Islam was necessary to protect the Muslims majority in Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim majority State in India.

The violence, with which the Muslims backed up their demand for Pakistan in 1946, when the League launched the ‘Direct Action’ campaign, was characterised  by Jinnah himself as the Muslim struggle for freedom from India. The long war of subversion unleased by Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir, is not different in its objectives as well as its character from the ‘Direct Action’ campaign, which led to the partition of India. The Muslim struggle in Kashmir is relatively a wider phenomenon and involves the commitment of the Muslim international with Pakistan as one of its epicentries to force a second partition on India, and cut off its northern regions, Jammu and Kashmir, followed by the planes of the Punjab and hills of Himachal Pradesh and make way for the Muslims to expand eastwards. Expansion to the east which the Nazis in their time, claimed for Germany as the inevitable Drag Natch Osten’, has ominous forebodings for India. Pakistan is an ideological state, and not different from the ideological states, fascism, nazism and communism reared. India is on the frontline of  the Muslim expansionist movements towards the east.

The eruption of the military activity in Kargil, which Pakistan claimed was a part of the crusade in Kashmir, carried by the Muslim Mujahideen represented the Islamic international, should leave no one in doubt about its objectives. The Kargil war, is a part of the long war Pakistan is waging against India to grab the Jammu and Kashmir, with a measured purpose: the de-Sanskritisation of the Himalayan frontier to integrate the Himalayas in the Central Asian Complex, which is dominantly Muslim. The Islamisation of the warm Himalayan hinterland, would ensure the emergence of the Muslims as the main power in Central Asia. And once they establish their power over Central Asia, they will extend their sway over South Asia and South East Asia. Placed along the soft frontiers of Russia as well as the turbulent Muslim majority border states of Western China, including Sinkiang, they would be able to force a realignment of power in Asia. The de-Sanskritisation of the Himalayas is the most crucial achievement Pakistan seeks to accomplish. For if the Himalayas are lost, the entire northern India will lose its geo-strategic defences against the invasion from the north.

Kargil is not an isolated act of military activity of Pakistan. For the ideological state of Pakistan, the soldiers of its army, the Afghan Taliban, the Sudanese and the Arab Mujahideen, are all pioneers of the Muslim crusade, indistinguishable from the Mujahidin raised from among the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir. Kargil war is an integral part of the ideological war, which Pakistan has carried on against India for the last five decades. Crusade is the character of an ideological state and Muslim crusade in Jammu and Kashmir should be viewed as a real threat to the national security of India. Kargil is a warning of the growing danger, India is faced with in its north. Ideological crusades assume varied forms, and the liberation armies, which lead the crusades follow their own agenda. They are not subject to the civilisational values, which India claims to be the basis of its secularism. The genocide of Hindus and their ethnic cleansing from Kashmir has amply proved that.

History vindicated Maharaja Hari Singh's Stand

By Dr. M.K. Teng

Neither the composition of the population of the  Princely States nor the self-determination of their peoples was recognised by the British, the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress, as the determining factor of the future disposition for the states in respect of their accession.

After the 3 June Declaration, envisaging the partition of the British India, Nehru demanded the right of the people of the Princely States to determine their disposition in respect of their accession Mohammad Ali Jinnah rejected Nehru's demand as an attempt to thwart the process of the partition. Shortly, before the transfer of power, the Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten advised the Princess to keep in consideration the geography and the composition of the population of the States in reaching a decision on their accession. Mountbatten proposed to the Muslim League as well as the Congress to accept the principles of the partition–geographical contiguity and the composition of the population as the criteria of their accession. While the Congress leaders indicated their inclination to accept the proposals, the Muslim League leadership reacted sharply against the proposals and characterised them as an attempt to interfere with the rights of the Princes to determine the future of the States. At that time the Muslim League was deeply involved in shadowy maneuvers to support the Muslim rulers of several major States to remain out of India and align with Pakistan. It has been pointed out in an earlier part of this paper that Pakistan invoked the partition to legitimize its claim to Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Muslim majority character of its population after the last two Muslim ruled States of Junagarh and Hyderabad were integrated with India.

There is enough historical evidence available, which reveals that in persuading the Congress leaders to accept the partition the British assured the Congress leaders that after the Muslim majority provinces and regions were separated to form the Muslim homeland of Pakistan, the unity of the rest of India, including the states would be preserved and not impaired any further.

The Indian leaders rejected the claim Pakistan made to the Muslim majority States as well as the  Muslim ruled States, but they dithered when the time to act and unite the States with India arrived. Instead of taking active measures to bring about the unification of the States with India, they resorted to subterfuge..

The Indian leaders turned to Mountbatten and not the people of the States to bring about their  integration with India. Mountbatten steered the States Department to accept a balance between the Muslim ruled States and the Muslim majority States. The largest of the Muslim ruled States were deep inside the Indian mainland. Neither Gandhi nor Nehru objected to the course, the Indian States Department followed.

The Viceroy did not forgive Hari Snigh for having disregarded his advice to come to terms with Pakistan. He refused stubbornly to deal with Jammu and Kashmir independent of the Muslim States and in the long run did more harm to Jammu and Kashmir than anybody else in India did. He was the main proponent of the policy of isolation, the Indian leaders followed towards Jammu and Kashmir. The way Mountbatten acted as the Governor General of India till 15 August 1947, and the way he acted as the Governor General of the Indian Dominion after 15 August 1947, left wide space open for Pakistan to claim a separate freedom for the Muslim of Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Muslim majority character of its population. Not many months after the Security Council adopted its first resolution on Jammu and Kashmir in August 1948, the Muslims laid claim to a separate freedom for them on the basis of the Muslim majority character of the population.

The Government of India and the Indian political leadership failed to rebut the claim made by Pakistan and the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir that the state was on the agenda of the partition of India. Not only that, the Government of India and the Indian political leadership failed to refute the claim made by the Muslims of the state to a separate freedom, different from the freedom that the Indian people were ensured by the Constitution of India - a separate freedom which was determined by the theological imperatives of Islam. The Indian leaders overlooked the fact that the conflict which led to the partition of India was rooted in the claim the Indian Muslims made to a separate freedom which drew its sanction from the precept and precedent of religion.

The Muslim League followed a meticulously designed plan to use the Muslim rulers of several major Princely States, situated deep inside the Indian mainland to bring about the fragmentation of India. The Indian  leaders walked into the trap when they tried to balance the accession the Muslim majority state of Jammu and Kashmir with the accession of the Hindu majority States ruled by the Muslim Nawabs like Bhopal, Hyderabad and Junagarh. The strategy to refer the issue of the accession to the people of these States tantamounted to the acceptance of the Muslim claim to a separate freedom, the Two-Nation theory envisaged. The Indian proposals to Pakistan to refer the accession of Junagarh with that Dominion, accomplished by the ruler of the State on the eve of the transfer of power, was a tame recognition of the Muslim claim to a separate freedom. When Pakistan made a counter-proposal to hold a plebiscite in all the three States, the Government of India was suddenly faced with a catastrophic choice. It promptly rejected the proposals made by Pakistan.

The Indian Government, for unknown reasons, separated its offer to refer the accession of the State to its people i.e. the Muslims for their endorsement. Why did not the Indian Government propose to refer the accession of Bhopal and Trancore to the Dominion of India, to the people of the two States? The rulers of both the States were opposed to join India and their people took to the streets and forced them to accede to India. Hardly ten months after the accession of the Jammu and Kashmir while the Indian armies were still fighting to drive out the invading forces, United Nations foisted a resolution on India which envisaged a plebiscite to determine its final disposition in respect of its accession. The resolution of the Security Council, virtually underlined the repudiation of the accession of the State to India and opened the option for the Muslims of the State to exercise their choice to join Pakistan. The Security Council Resolution was the first step in the process of the internationalization of the claim of the Muslims of the State to a separate freedom.  The Government of India cried hoarse that it had rejected the Two-Nation Theory inspite of having accepted the partition of India. But its commitment to refer the accession of the State, accomplished by Hari Singh to its people was a tacit recognition of the right to a separate freedom, which underlined the demand for Pakistan.

Another ten months after the August resolution of the Security Council was adopted the Indian Government took a fateful step and formally recognised the right the Muslims for Jammu and Kashmir to a separate freedom, when in May 1949, it agreed to exclude Jammu and Kashmir from the constitutional organisation of India. In November 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India incorporated provisions in the Constitution of India which left out the State from the constitutional structure which it had evolved for the Dominion as well as the Princely States which had acceded to India  and after years of labour. The special provisions for the State, embodied in the Constitution of India, stipulated the application of only Article if the Constitution of India to the State. A blanket limitation was imposed upon the application of the rest of the provisions of the Constitution of India to the State. The Union Government was empowered to exercise powers listed in the Central list of the Seventh Schedule of the India Constitution only in respect of defence, foreign affairs and communications which corresponded with the powers delegated by the State to the Dominion Government by virtue of the Instrument of Accession.

The Interim Government of the State, constituted by the National Conference insisted upon the right to frame a separate constitution for the State, which fulfilled the aspirations of the Muslims who constituted a majority of its population. The Interim Government arrogated to itself unrestricted powers and ruled the State by decree and ordinance. Within six years of its tenure, it completed the task of the Muslimisation of the State by enforcing the precedence of Islam and the Muslim majority in its social, economic and political organisation. In 1953, the Interim Government claimed a separate freedom for the Muslim ‘nation’ of Kashmir. The Indian leaders had conceded to the Muslims the right to constitute a Muslim State of Jammu and Kashmir on the territories of India. Confronted by the demand for a Muslim State outside the territories of India, the Indian leaders were flustered. They refused to countenance the Muslim demand for a separate Muslim State of Jammu and Kashmir, which did not form a part of India. The Interim Government was dismissed and the National Conference broke up.

Pakistan, the Muslim separatist and pro-Pakistan Muslim flanks joined by a large section of the leaders and cadres of the National Conference, called for a plebiscite in the State, which enabled the Muslims to exercise their right of self-determination. They claimed that they had acquired in consequence of the partition of India and which India, Pakistan as well as the United Nations had explicitly recognised.

The Muslim separatist movement led by the Plebiscite Front, committed itself to an ideological framework which was based upon the distortions of the history of the partition of India. The ideological commitments of the Plebiscite Front underlined : (a) that the right of the Muslims to a separate freedom enmated from the partition of India and the creation of the Muslim homeland of Pakistan; (b) that the right of the Muslims to a separate freedom transcended the accession of the State to India, brought about by the ruler of the State; and (c) that as a consequence of the partition of India, the Muslims, constituting the majority of the population of the State, had acquired an irreversible right to exercise their option to join the Muslim State of Pakistan.

In 1990, the Muslim Jehad initiated by Pakistan and the Muslim separatist forces in the State, claimed their aims to be the unification of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan on the basis of the Muslim majority character of its population to complete the agenda of the partition of India. The Jehad claimed that Muslims of the State, as the Muslims elsewhere in India, had acquired a right to a separate freedom which the  Muslim struggle for Pakistan had secured the Muslim nation of India.

The Indian Government and the Indian political class must realise that the Muslims of the State did not acquire any right to separate freedom from the partition of India, which brought Pakistan into being and any attempts to arrive at a compromise with the Muslim separatists forces will lead straight to a second partition of India. The Muslim claim to a separate freedom on the basis of religious is a negation of the unity of India.

Of the many distortions of the history of the transfer of power in India, which form a part of the Kashmir dispute, the most conspicuous is the distortion of the historical facts of the boundary demarcation between the Dominion of India and Pakistan in the province of the Punjab. After the announcement of the partition plan on 3 June, 1947, a Boundary Commission was constituted by the British to demarcate the boundary between the Muslim majority zones and the Hindu-Sikh majority zones in the two provinces of Bengal and the Punjab. The Boundary Commission for the demarcation of the Muslim majority zone in the Punjab was constituted of four Boundary Commissioners, two of them representing the Muslims and two representing Hindus and the Sikhs. Justice Din Mohammad and Justice Mohammad Munir represented the Muslims and Justice Mehar Chand Mahajan and Justice Teja Singh represented the Hindus and the Sikhs respectively. A British lawyer of great repute, Sir Cyril Radcliff was appointed the Chairman of the Commission. Sir Radcliff presided over the Boundary Commission appointed for the demarcation of the boundary in the province of Bengal as well.

The Boundary Commission was charged with the responsibility of demarcating the Muslim majority region of the Punjab from the Hindu-Sikh majority region of the province on the basis of the population and other factors, which were considered to be relevant to the division of the province. Justice Mohammad Munir and Justice Din Mohammad refused to agree upon the criteria to specifically identify the factors other than population ratios. The Muslim Commissioners insisted upon strict adherence to the population proportions as the basis of the division of the province.

Mehar Chand Mahajan and Teja Singh pleaded for a balanced interpretation of the terms of reference of the Boundary Commission and emphasised the need to bring about harmonization between population proportions and the "other factors", specified in the terms of reference. They felt that the division of the province of the Punjab was bound to affect the lives of millions of people, belonging to various communities living in the province as well as the future of the two Dominions, India and Pakistan. The Commissioners pointed out to the Commission that the population of the Hindus and Sikhs was unevenly distributed over the province of the Punjab. They pointed out that larger sections of the Hindu and Sikh population were concentrated in relatively smaller region of the East Punjab  and the imbalance would be reflected in demarcation of Hindu and Sikh majority regions from the Muslim majority regions of the West Punjab. They expressed the fears that the territorial division of the Punjab on the basis of population would earmark a smaller part of the East Punjab, to the Hindu and Sikh Community which would not commenserate with their population in the province. The Hindus and the Sikhs, Mahajan and Teja Singh pointed out to the Commission formed 45 percent of the population of the province and the territorial division of the province on the basis of the population ratios would leave them with less than 30 percent of the territory of the Punjab.

Mahajan and Teja Singh pointed out to the commission that fair distribution of river waters, irrigation headworks and canal system and cultural and religious centres could not be left out of its consideration in the delimitation of the Muslim majority and the Hindu and Sikh majority regions of the province. They emphasized the necessity of keeping in view the geographical contiguity of the demarcated regions, the communications and the viability of the borders  of the two Dominions of India and Pakistan. They told the Commission that in the demarcation of the borders between the West Punjab and the East Punjab balance would have to be achieved to ensure a fair and equitable division of the territories of the province between the Muslim community and the Hindu and the Sikh communities.

The most controversial and bitterly contested part of the demarcation for the borders was the division of the Doab, comprising the districts of the Lahore Division. Of the four districts of Lahore Division, the District of Amritsar was a Hindu-Sikh majority district and the district of Gurdaspur was a Muslim majority district with the Muslims having a nominal majority of 0.8 percent. Both Din Mohammad and Mohammad Munir insisted upon the inclusion of the entire Lahore Division in the West Punjab. The Muslim Commissioners were men of great ability and legal acumen and had the advantage of representing the majority community of the Punjab. They knew that the inclusion of the Lahore Division in the West Punjab would be of crucial importance to the future of Pakistan. The inclusion of the Lahore Division in the West Pakistan would ensure the Muslim homeland a larger share of water resources, irrigation headworks and the canal system of the Punjab. It would also close the only communication line; the Jammu-Madhopur fair weather road, which ran between the Jammu and Kashmir State and the Dominion of India. The Muslim League leaders were keen to isolate Jammu and Kashmir and build pressure on the ruler of the State to compel him to come to terms with Pakistan. Jammu and Kashmir was not wholly isolated from India and had a contiguous frontier with Kangra and the Punjab Hill States, which had acceded to India. The State Government could construct an alternative communication route to connect the State with India. The construction of an alternative road between the State and the Dominion of India would, however, be an arduous task and take a long time, thus exposing the State to more hardship. Logistically also the construction of an alternative road would pose many problems. The borders between the State and the Indian Union running east of the Pathankot tehsil in Gurdaspur district, through which the Jammu-Madhopur road run, were mountainous and rugged and largely snowbound. The closure of the Jammu-Sialkot road and railway line and the Jhelum Valley road, which linked Srinagar with Rawalpindi had been closed by Pakistan and there was little prospect of their being thrown open for transport after the State joined India. By the time, the Boundary Commission begun its work, Pakistan was left with little doubt about the disinclination for the ruler of the State Maharaja Hari Singh to accede to that country.

Mahajan and Teja Singh pleaded for the inclusion of the Division of Lahore in the East Punjab. The two Commissioners raised fundamental issues with unparalleled eloquence in respect of their claim, which Sir Cyril Radcliffe could not overlook altogether. The issues they raised, included:

i) the distribution of water resources between the East and West Punjab, the location of the irrigation headworks and the canal system;

ii) the continuation of the communication lines in the East Punjab of which the Lahore Division formed Centre;

iii) the demarcation of a viable and defensible border of the India in the Punjab;

iv) the interests of the Sikh Community which had its largest assets in the West Punjab and its main religious and cultural centres in the Division of Lahore;

v) the Indian interest in the road-link between Jammu and Madhopur, arising out of its proximity to Jammu and Kashmir State for the security of that state as well as its future relations with the Indian Dominion.

Both Mahajan and Teja Singh avoided the heavily value-laden discourse of the Congress leaders, in their presentation to the Commission. They marshalled up concrete facts relevant to the demarcation of boundary in the Punjab and elucidated in detail the consequences - geographic, economic, political and strategic, the division of the province was bound to lead to and their impact on the future of the Hindus and Sikhs in the Punjab. Sir Radcliffe was a man of independent outlook, sent down from his country to draw the boundaries of the new Muslim State of Pakistan, which the British had actively connvived in creating. Sir Radcliffe knew little of the cultural configuration of the Punjab, its economic organisation and its history. Not only the Punjab, Sir Radcliffe knew much less of the history and culture and economic and political organisation of Bengal, the other Indian province he was commissioned to divide between the two communities, Hindus and Muslims, on the basis of population proportions.

Mahajan and Teja Singh were genuinely fearful of the future of their communities in the Punjab. The history of the Punjab had been shaped by Hindus and the Sikhs. The Sikhs established a powerful Kingdom in the Punjab, the borders of which extended from Afghanistan to the eastern fringes of Tibet. The Sikh state integrated the Himalayas into the northern frontier of India. The Himalayas, Sanskritised by the Hindus of Kashmir, formed the civilisational frontier of India. The establishment of the Sikh power put an end to the long history of the invasion of India from the north. The division of Punjab was bound to have serious effect on the future of the Sikh community. The Punjab was considered by the Sikhs to be their homeland. The Sikh places of pilgrimage were located in the eastern part of the Punjab, mainly the Division of Lahore. The responsibility of apprising the Boundary Commission of the sociology of the Sikh religion and its moorings in the Hindu civilisation of India, fell upon the Hindu and Sikh Commissioners. Teja Singh, ravaged by the anti-Hindu riots in the Punjab, exhibited great courage and forbearance, in defending the cause of his community.

The Muslim League carried on a strident campaign to build pressure on the Commission to demarcate the boundary between the east and the West Punjab on the basis of the population proportions. The British Governors of the Punjab and the North-East Frontier province along with the British officials posted in the two provinces acted in tandem to influence the Commission.

The Boundary Commission was entrusted with the historic task, of the demarcation of the Indian frontier in the north. Jammu and Kashmir formed the central spur of the warm Himalayan uplands and the new configuration of power created by the emergence of the Muslim state of Pakistan, was bound to effect the security of the Himalayas. There is no evidence to show that the Indian leaders realised the importance of the crucial changes, the emergence of Pakistan, would bring about in the structure of power-relations along northern frontier of India.

The Hindu and Sikh leaders of the Punjab evinced serious interest in the boundary demarcation. Both Mahajan and Teja Singh kept themselves in close touch with the Hindu and Sikh leaders of the Punjab. Among them were Sir Shadi Lal and Bakshi Tek Chand. Both Sir Shadi Lal and Tek Chand were in the confidence of Maharaja Hari Singh. The Indian leaders had warbled notions about the northern frontier of India. They were carried away by the fraternal regard, the Asian conference held in Delhi in 1946, symbolised. The Indian leaders viewed the solidarity of the Asian people and the emergence of the Asian nation from colonial dominance as basis for coexistence and cooperation among the Asian people. Gandhi disclaimed national frontiers. He claimed commitment to vaguely conceived concept of anarchism which formed a part of the intellectual tradition of the early twentieth century.

They had accepted partition of India, but they refused to recognise its political implications. They were unable to comprehend the significance of the demarcation of the boundary between India and Pakistan in the Punjab. Their inability to link the boundary demarcation in the Punjab with the security of the Northern Frontier of India exposed Jammu and Kashmir and the entire Indian frontier, stretching to its east, to foreign aggression.

Another man, whose future  was linked with the de marcation of the boundary in the Punjab, was Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir. The Jammu-Madhopur fair weather cart-road was the only communication link between the State and India. The two major all weather motorable roads, the Jehlum-Valley Road linking Srinagar with Rawalpindi and the Jammu-Sialkot road ran into the West Punjab. The railway line connecting Jammu with Sialkot also ran into the West Punjab. The border between the State and Kangra and the Punjab Hill States, which had decided to accede to India, was broken by rugged mountainous terrain. An alternate road could be built via Mukerian to connect Jammu with Kangra and via Doda with the Punjab Hill States. Indeed, when Mahajan and Teja Singh pointed out to the Commission the necessity of securing access to Jammu and Kashmir through East Punjab, Mohammad Munir and Din Mohammad suggested the construction of an alternate land route via Mukerian connecting Jammu with Kangra. The Hindu and the Sikh Commissioners  realised, as did Hari Singh, the importance of the tehsil of Pathankot to the viability and the defensibility of the borders of India as well the Jammu and Kashmir State.

Sir Shadi Lal and Bakshi Tek Chand kept Hari Singh informed of the boundary demarcation in the Punjab. They were close to Mehar Chand Mahajan and had apprised him of the interest Hari Singh had in the demarcation of the boundary in the Punjab.

Hari Singh was suspicious of Mountbatten, whose mind he knew. He did not trust the Congress leaders. He had received a communication from States Minister, in which the latter had advised him to release the National Conference leaders and come to terms with them. Unsure of the course Sir Radcliffe would follow in respect of his State, he reportedly, conveyed to the British officials, through some of his trusted British friends, his interests in a balance border with the two Dominions of India and Pakistan and the importance of the Jammu-Pathankot road for the security of his State. Reportedly, he conveyed to the British authorities that in case he was not secured the land route between Jammu and Pathankot he would have no other alternative except to depend upon the Dominion of India for the construction of a new transit route, across the eastern borders of the State with Kangra or with any of the Punjab Hill States, which had already acceded to India.

The British were not averse to a balanced border of the State with India and Pakistan, for they were keen to avoid any diplomatic or political lapse which would push the Maharaja into the lap of India. Some of the British officials sincerely believed that Hari Singh would opt for an arrangement in which he was not required to accede to any of the Dominions, if he was guaranteed peace on his frontiers. Ram Chander Kak, out of stratagem or straight devotion to his master, had spared no efforts to assure the British, that Hari Singh pursued a policy, which enabled him to retain his independence, rather than join India which was beset with serious difficulties.

In view of the extremely divergent views and deep disagreement among the Hindu and Sikh Commissioners and the Muslim Commissioners, the Boundary Commission was unable to reach a mutually acceptable agreement on the demarcation of the boundary across the Lahore Division. In accordance with the procedure laid down for the Boundary Commission, in case of disagreement among the Hindu, Sikh and the Muslim representation in the Commission, it was decided by mutual agreement to entrust the task of the demaracation to Sir Radcliffe, the Chairman of the Boundary Commission. The Commissioners, representing the Hindus and the Sikh as well as the Muslims agreed that the arbitral award made by Sir Radcliffe would be binding on them.

History had cast a unique responsibility on Sir Radcliffe, to lay down the future boundaries of the nation of India, which was on the threshold of freedom from centuries of slavery as well as describe the future boundaries of an independent Muslim state in India. The Congress leaders, were perhaps, oblivious of the elemental  change the creation of Pakistan would bring into the civilisational boundaries of India and the far-reaching effect the establishment of a Muslim power in India, would have on its northern frontiers. Jammu and Kashmir formed the central spur of the great Himalayan uplands poised as the State was, it stood as a sentinel for any eastward expansion of any power from the west as well as the north.

Pakistan was, however, keenly conscious of the strategic importance of Jammu and Kashmir. But the Government of Pakistan was unable to judge the ability of Maharaja Hari Singh to defeat their designs. Hari Singh played a historic role in persuading Sir Radcliffe to accept  that his State could not be completely isolated from the Indian Dominion.

The Muslim League leaders did not trust Hari Singh. They spared no efforts to convince the British officials in the Government of India about the necessity to ensure that the Boundary Commission did not deviate from the principle of the population proportions. The Muslim League leaders were keen to acquire the Ravi Headworks at Madhopur isolate the district of Amritsar and seal the existing road-link connecting Jammu and Kashmir with India. The League leaders sent Chowdhary Mohammad Ali to convey to the British officials in the Indian Government their concern about the future of the Lahore Division. Mohammad Ali met, Lord Ismay, the Political Advisor to the Viceroy to convey to Mountbatten the anxiety of the Muslim League leaders about any deviation from the principle of population-proportions the Boundary Commission may resort to in the demarcation of the boundary in the Punjab. Ismay told Mohammad Ali that the Boundary Commission was an independent body of which the functions were determined by its terms of reference, and the Government of India had no role in its function. Many years later, research in Pakistan revealed that during his meeting with Lord Ismay, Mohammad Ali showed the Political Advisor a sketch map of the demarcation of the boundary between east and west Punjab which was not strictly based upon the principle of population-proportions. Ismay, reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with it.

The award of the Boundary Commission was announced on 18 of August 1947, three days after the transfer of power in India. Sir Radcliffe left India the same day. The districts of Amritsar and Gurdaspur were included in the East Punjab, whereas the districts of Lahore and Sheikhopora were included in the West Punjab. The entire Muslim League leadership flared upon in anger against the inclusion of Gurdaspur in the East Punjab and blamed Sir Radcliffe of connivance in a craftily devised plan to give India access to Jammu and Kashmir and provide the Indian state the strategic ground to grab the State. Communal riots flared up in Lahore and spread to the whole of the Punjab.

Sir Radcliffe followed uniform standards in the delimitation of the boundary between India and Pakistan in Bengal as well as the Punjab. Evidently, he did not overlook the consideration of other factors, specifically mentioned in the terms of reference of the Boundary Commission in the delimitation of the boundary between the East and the West Punjab. He did take into consideration the nominal majority, the Muslims enjoyed over the Hindus and the Sikhs in Gurdaspur. The Tehsil of Pathankote in the Gurdaspur district had a distinct Hindu majority and it could not have been included in the West Punjab by any stretch of imagination. Sir Radcliffe had not followed the district boundaries as the basis of delimitation of the boundaries elsewhere in the Punjab. Besides, the Ravi irrigation headworks were located in Pathankot and they could not have been excluded from the East Punjab, to ensure a just and equitable distribution of water resources in the Punjab between India and Pakistan. undoubtedly, Sir Radcliffe did not overlook the necessity of providing a balanced border to the Jammu and Kashmir State, for which Mahajan and Teja Singh had spiritedly  pleaded. The security of the Jammu and Kashmir State, which constituted the central spur of the northern frontier of India and which was crucial to the security of the Himalays, could not be left out the consideration of the Boundary Commission. The division of the Punjab was a part of the partition  of India and the demarcation of the boundary between India and Pakistan could not be undertaken in isolation from its effects on the Indian States. The delimitation of the boundary in the Punjab around the Bahawalpur State, was undertaken with due consideration of its future affiliations. Bahawalpur joined Pakistan,.

Sir Radcliffe recognised the inclusion of the district of Gurdaspur in the East Punjab as a strategic requirement of the security of the northern frontier of India, including the frontier of India in the Punjab. He accepted in his report that the inclusion of Gurdaspur in the East Punjab was necessary for the security of the district of Amritsar, which would otherwise he surrounded by Pakistan. Perhaps, Radcliffe was aware of the security of the northern Frontier of India, in which the British were more interested than the Congress leaders, who had warbled notions about the security of the Himalayas. Unlike the other officials of the Government of India, Radcliffe was free of the trappings, the British officials of the Indian Civil Service were strapped to. He did not visualise the partition of India as the British officials of the Indian Government did, and he was guided by his own judgement. He refused to recognise the claim to the geographical expression of the Muslim nation ofPakistan, the way the British officials of the Indian Government did. He had little regard for their colonial concerns or Jinnah's notions of the ascendance of the Muslims power in India.

An important consideration which Sir Radcliffe had in mind in dividing the Lahore Division was the future of the Sikh Community, which was bound to be adversely affected by the partition of the Punjab. The land and the assets owned by the Sikhs were largely situated in the west Punjab but a larger section of their population lived in the East Punjab. Besides, their main religious centres and most sacred shrines, including the Durbar Saheb, were located in the Lahore Division. The division of the Punjab was bound to uproot them from the West Pakistan and deprive them of their land and assets. The claim laid by the Muslims to the whole of Lahore Division, would divest them of their sacred places and shrines. Lahore was the seat of the Sikh empire of the Punjab, which had changed the course of the history of India. The demarcation of the boundary of the East Punjab was therefore, crucial to the survival and future of the Sikh community. Both Mahajan and Teja Singh emphasised upon the need to consider the interests of the Sikh community in the demarcation of the boundary in the Punjab.

The inclusion of Gurdaspur in the East Punjab mitigated, though only partially, the rigours of the division of the Punjab. The delimitation of the boundary in the Punjab, Sir Radcliffe undertook, gave the Muslims, who constituted 55 percent of the population of the Province, 65 percent of its territory. The Hindus and the Sikhs who constituted 45 percent of the population got only 35 percent of the territory of the Punjab. The Muslim League leaders had no reason to grumble. Their reconstruction were politically motivated and aimed to prepare ground to launch a new form of Direct Action to reduce the Jammu and Kashmri State.

Pakistan resorted to the distortion of the history of the transfer of power in India, to justify its claim on Jammu and Kashmir. Inside Jammu and Kashmir the National Conference leaders who ruled the State for decades after its accession to India, resorted to the distortion of the history of the accession of the State to India, to legitimize their claim to a Muslim State of Jammu and Kashmir inside India but independent of the Indian Union and its political organisation. Not only that. The Muslim separatists forces, which dominated the political scene in the State after the disintegration of the National Conference in 1953, also resorted to the fossilization of the facts of the accession of the State to India. Interestingly, the entire process of the distortion of the history of the accession of the State, spread over decades of Indian freedom assumed varied expressives from time to time.

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah who headed the Interim Government instituted in March 1948, disclaimed the Instrument of Accession executed by Hari Singh, as merely the Kagzi Ilhaq' or "paper Accession" and claimed that the "real accession of the state to India" would be accomplished by the people of the State, more precisely the Muslim majority of the people of the State. While the Constitution of India was on the anvil and the issue of the constitutional provisions for the States came up for the consideration for the Constituent Assembly of India, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah claimed that the National Conference had endorsed the accession of the State to India on the condition that the claim the people of the state had to a separate freedom was recognised by India and the leadership of the National Conference had been assured by the Indian leaders that the people of Jammu and Kashmir would be reserved the right to constitute Jammu and Kashmir into an autonomous political organisation, independent of the Indian constitutional organisation.

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and other National Conference leaders, claimed that they had been assured that Jammu and Kashmir would not be integrated in the constitutional organisaion of India and the assurances were incorporated in the Instrument of Accession. They stressed that they had agreed to the accede to India on the specific condition that the Muslim identity of the State would form the basis of its political organisation.

In his inaugural address to the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir convened in 1951, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah who was the Prime Minister of the Interim Government of the State, claimed that the Constituent Assembly was vested with the plenary powers, drawn from the people of the State and independent of the Constitution of India. He claimed that the Constituent Assembly was vested with the powers to opt out of India and assume independence or join the Muslim state of Pakistan.

Fifty years later the claims Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah made in the Constituent Assembly were echoed in the first Round Table Conference, convened by the Government of India in 2006, to reach a consensus on a future settlement of the Kashmir dispute.

Mr Muzaffar Hussain Beg, represented the People Democratic Party in the Round Table Conference which was a constituent of the coalition government in the State, headed by the Congress Party. Beg claimed, that the Instrument of Accession was a treaty between two independent states, the Dominion of India and the Jammu and Kashmir State and the Constituent Assembly was a sovereign authority, independent powers inherent in its sovereignty.

The Government of India made no efforts to put the record straight. Frightened at the prospect of losing the support of the National Conference the Indian leaders did not question the veracity of the claims the Conference leaders made. Indeed, they depended upon the support of the National Conference to win the plebiscite which the United Nations Organisation was hectically preparing to hold in the State. The Indian leaders, overwhelmed by their own sense of self-righteousness, helped overtly and covertly in the falsification of the history of the integration of the Princely States with India and the accession of Jammu and Kashmir with the Indian Dominion in 1947. Many of them went as far as to link the unity of India with the reassertion of the subnational identity of Jammu and Kashmir, which the Muslim demand for separate freedom for the Muslim symbolised.

The Indian Independence Act of 1947, laid down separate procedures for the transfers of power in the British India and the Indian Princely States. The Princely States were left out of the partition plan, which divided the British Indian provinces and envisaged the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. In respect of the Princely States, the Indian Independence Act, envisaged the lapse of the paramountcy - the power which the British Crown exercised over the Indian States. The British Government clarified its stand on the future disposition of the States in the British Parliament during the debate on the Indian Independence Bill. It categorically stated that the lapse of the Paramountcy would not enable the Princes to acquire Dominion status or assume independence.

The British Government made it clear that the reversion of the Paramountcy to the rulers of the States would inevitably lead to mutually accepted agreements between the Dominions and the Princely States which would involve their accession. The Indian Independence Act did not envisage in the procedure the accession of States. The Nawab of Bhopal approached the Diplomatic Mission of the United States of America in India to seek the recognition of the Independence of his state. The American Government snubbed the Nawab and refused to countenance any proposals for the independence of the Princely States in India. It was left to be formulated by the two Dominions of India and Pakistan.

The Political Department of the British Government of India was divided into two separate Political Departments – the Political Department of Pakistan to deal with the Indian Princely States. The Political Department of India was put in charge of Sardar Vallabhai Patel and the Political Department of Pakistan was put in charge of Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar. The procedure for the accession of the States to the two Dominions was evolved separately by their respective Political Departments.

The Muslim League however, insisted upon the independence of the Princely States in order to enable the Muslim ruled states to remain out of India. The Muslim League aimed to Balkanise the Princely States and place the state of Pakistan in a position which provided it a way to forge an alliance with them. The Indian States spread over more than one-third of the territory of India constituted more than one fourth of the Indian population. Some of the Muslim ruled Princely States were largest among the Princely States of India and several of them were fabulously rich.

The claim Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah made in his inaugural speech to the Constituent Assembly of the State that the States had the option to assume independence was a reiteration of the stand the Muslim League had taken on the future disposition of the states following the lapse of the Paramountcy. The lapse of the Paramountcy did not underline the independence of the States. It did not envisage the reversion of any plenary powers to the Princes or the people of the states as a consequence of the dissolution of the Paramountcy. The states were not independent when they were integrated in the British Empire in India. They did not acquire independence when they were liberated from the British Empire 1947. They were not vested with any inherent powers to claim independence to which Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah referred to in his inaugural address to the Constituent Assembly.

The convocation of the Constituent Assemblies in the States was provided for in the stipulations of the Instrument of Accession that the Princely States acceding to India, executed. The Instrument of Accession devised by the States Department of Pakistan for the accession of the States to that country did not envisage provisions pertaining to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The power to convene separate Constituent Assemblies was reserved for all the major states the Union of the States, which acceded to India.

The Jammu and Kashmir State was no exception. In fact, Constituent Assemblies were convened, in the states of Cochin and Mysore and the State Union of Saurashtra, shortly after their accession to the Indian Dominion.

The Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir was a creature of the Instrument of Accession. It exercised powers which were drawn from the state of India and its sovereign authority. It did not assess any powers to revoke the accession of the State to India to bring about the accession of the State to Pakistan or opt for its independence, as Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah in his inaugural address to the Constituent Assembly claimed or as Mr Muzaffar Hussain Beg claimed in the Round Table Conference.

The truth of what happened during those fateful days of October 1947, when the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India was accomplished was concealed by a irredentist campaign of disinformation which was launched to cover the acts of cowardice and betrayal, subterfuge and surrender which went into the making of the Kashmir dispute.

The National Conference leaders, were at no stage, brought in to endorse the accession of the State to India. No one among them was required to sign or countersign the accession and none of them signed or countesigned the Instrument of Accession, executed by Maharaja Hari Singh. The Indian Independence Act, an Act of the British Parliament, which laid down the procedure for the transfer of power in India, did not recognize the right of self-determination of either the people of the British India or the people of the States.

The transfer of power was based on an agreement among the Congress, the Muslim League and the British. The British and the Muslim League stubbornly refused to recognise the right of the people of the British India and right of the people of the Princely State to determine the future of the British India or the Indian states. The Muslim League and the British insisted upon the lapse of the Paramountcy and its reversion to the rulers of the States. Accession of the States was not subject to any conditions and the Instrument of Accession underlined an irreversible process the British provided for the dissolution of the empire in India.

No assurance was given to the National Conference leaders that the Constituent Assembly of the State would be vested with plenary powers or powers to ratify the accession of the State to India, revoke it opt for its independence or its accession to Pakistan. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and the other National Conference leaders did not seek the exclusion of the State from the Indian political organization as a condition for the accession of the state to India. Nor did the Indian leaders give any assurance to them that the Jammu and Kashmir would be reconstituted into an independent political organisation, which would represent its Muslim identity.

At the time of the transfer of power in India, the National Conference leaders and cadres were in jail. They were released from their incarceration after the proclamation of General Amnesty was made on 6 September 1947. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the Acting President of the National Conference who had evaded arrest and taken refugee in the British India in May 1946, arrived in Srinagar with several other senior leaders of the National Conference on 12 September 1947. Meanwhile, Mohi-ud-Din Qara the Director General of the War Council, which had been constituted by the National Conference to direct the Quit Kashmir Movement, surfaced from his underground quarters alongwith some of his close aides. Onkar Nath Trisal, who played a historic role in the defence of Srinagar, when the invading armies of Pakistan surrounded the city, was with him. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was released from jail on 29 September 1947.

Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad used the good offices of Pandit Sham Sundar Lal Dhar, a personal aide of the Maharaja to arrange a reconciliatory meeting between Hari Singh and Sheikh Mohammd Abdullah. The meeting did not go beyond usual formalities as the two men who shaped the future of the State looked at each other with cold distrust. Shiban Madan, a close kin of Sham Sundar Lal Dhar, then a man of younger years acted as a help. Shiban Madan told the author in a interview held in Srinagar in 1978, that Hari Singh sat through the meeting glumly. His Highness looked straight when the usual presentation ceremony of the Nazarana was completed. He sat glum and expressionless, his haughty demeanour more than awkwardly visible. The rest of the meeting was strictly formal."

Hari Singh was unable to judge the far-reaching consequences of the end of the British empire in India. Not only him, the other Princes too refused to realise that their power, which had its sanction in the British Paramountcy had virtually suffered dissolution with its withdrawal. The Princely rulers genuinely believed that the States were their fiefs and the British had usurped their right to rule them. They visualised the end of the British Empire as an act of deliverance for them, which they believed would enable them to regain the unquestioned authority they had as the sovereigns of the states.

They considered accession of their States to India as a new arrangement with the Dominion of India, by virtue of which they would part with the specific powers of the defence, foreign affairs and communications of the states and retain the rest of the powers of the governance without the encumbrances the Paramountcy entailed.

Hari Singh had been shaken by Mountabatten's advice to come to terms with Pakistan when the Viceroy visited Srinagar. Accession to Pakistan was the last act, Hari Singh was prepared to perform. However, when he turned to India and conveyed to the Indian leaders his desire to accede to India the Indian leaders advised him not to take any perceptible action in respect of the accession, till the transfer of power had been accomplished. The Indian leaders advised Hari Singh to end the distrust with the National Conference,  release the leaders and cadres of the Conference and take them into confidence and commence preparations to associate them with the government of the State.

After the transfer of power in August 1947 Hari Singh promptly ordered fresh recruitment to his armed forces and reportedly sought to secure field guns from Patiala and Hyderabad. Reports appeared in the newspapers in Pakistan that he tried to seek military assistance from India and wanted the Indian Government to take up the conversion of the fair weather road from Jammu to Madhopur, into a national roadway.

He was alarmed by the establishment of the Provisional Government of Pak-occupied-Kashmir at Tran Khel in the district of Mirpur by Sardar Ibrahim Khan on 30 August 1947. Hari Singh knew that the proclamation of the Provisional Government of Azad Kashmir had been made in connivance with the intelligence agencies of the Government of Pakistan and the leaders of the Muslim League to build pressure on him to accede to Pakistan.

Meanwhile Sham Sunder Lal Dhar helped to bridge the differences between Hari Singh and the National Conference leaders. Hari Singh agreed to revive the Dyarchy he had introduced in the State Government in 1944, and provide a wider share of power for the National Conference and accept to entrust a fairly large measure of responsibility in the State Government to National Conference leaders as members of his Council of Ministers. The National Conference leaders had shown their readiness to join the State Government.

For Hari Singh however, the difficulties he faced in regard to the accession were not eased. Several developments in the process of the integration of the States complicated his situation further. Junagarh, situated in the midst of the Kathiawad States, which had acceded to India, acceded to Pakistan on the eve of the transfer of power. The Nawab of Hyderabad refused to join India and secretly plotted with the leadership of the Muslim League to align himself with Pakistan.

Not only that. Mountbatten was at the helm of affairs in India, where he had been placed by the Congress leaders probably, to earn them a favourable disposition of the British. Hari Singh knew that Mountbatten had not forgiven him for his audacity to send him back to the Indian capital, without having agreed to abide by his advice to come to terms with Pakistan. It is hardly possible that the Congress leaders must not report have received the intelligence of what transpired between the Viceroy and the Maharaja in Srinagar. But how did they install him the first Governor-General of the Dominion of India is an enigma, which continues to remain unexplained.

Hari Singh was unsure of the Congress leaders as well, who had, in unabashed self-conceit, indicated their willingness to accept a settlement on the Princely States on the basis of their population and geographical location. Perhaps, they sought to use the influence of the Viceroy to ensure the accession of the Muslim ruled States, inhabited by Hindu majorities and situated within the territorial limits earmarked for the Indian Dominion to India. It is hardly possible that they did not know the mind of the Viceroy and perhaps the strategic implications of the future disposition of Jammu and Kashmir to the British interests in Asia. A section of the Congress leadership was not averse to the division of the States on the basis of their population even after the transfer of power. Some of them believed that Mountbatten would be able extricate Junagarh from Pakistan and bring about the integration of Hyderabad with India. Their prestige in the whole of the Kathiawad peninsula had plummeted down as they had reacted to the accession of Junagarh to Pakistan  pussiliminously. The rulers of the Kathiawad States had to send Jam Sahib of Nawanagar to convince the Congress leaders that Junagarh posed a serious threat to them and to demand immediate and effective action to liberate Junagarh, which was fast slipping into a civil wear.

The Congress leaders looked up to Mountbatten, who advised them restraint. Later admissions made by him in his interviews and memoirs, prove that he was keen to secure the interests of Pakistan and his country, Britain, in Jammu and Kashmir, but he had no mandate from the British Government to secure the Indian interests in the Muslim ruled States of Junagarh and Hyderabad. He disapproved of any perceptible action for the reclamation Junagarh and Hyderabad.

Hari Singh did not lose sight of the problems, arising out of his enemity with Mountabatten and the duplicity of the Congress leaders. Jinnah scuttled the proposals to divide the States on the basis of their population and scoffed at the suggestions made by Mountbatten. Hari Singh knew that if he took a false step, Mountbatten as well as the Congress leaders would nor hesitate to abandon him in a bargain with Pakistan.

This was the greatest act of betrayal committed by the men in power in India. The Indian Government crumbled in its resolve to set right the wrong in Junagarh and rein in the Nawab of Hyderabad. The Indian leaders  looked upto Mountbatten to deliver them from their predicament though experience had shown to them that the major role in the integration of the States had been played by the States people who had struggled for the unity of the States with India and the Hindu rulers of the States who had acceded to India.

The Government of India should have made a bold move to take Hari Singh into confidence, thrash out the issues pertaining to the transfer of power to the peoples representatives with him and helped in removing the prevailing distrust between him and the National Conference leaders. Instead the Indian leaders sulked away. Gandhi had advised Hari Singh to handover the State Government to the National Conference leaders and entrust them the responsibility to conduct elections to the Praja Sabha, the State Legislative Assembly and empower the elected representatives of the people to take a decision on the accession of the State. Hari Singh had refused to abide by Gandhi’s advice and told him that such a course would enable Pakistan to grab the State with the support of the Muslim Conference and the other pro-Pakistan flanks in the state. Later events proved that Hari Singh had chosen the right course. Jammu and Kashmir would have gone the way, North West Frontier Province did if he had opted for elections to the Praja Sabha.

The Indian Princely States were a part of the Indian nation. Partition did not divide the States, nor did the partition empower Pakistan to grab Junagarh or claim Hyderabad on the basis of being Muslim ruled States and annex Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of its population. The Muslim League as well as the British treated the States as their personal preserve and sought to use them to Balkanise India. The Princes as well as the people of the States defeated their designs.

The role played by Mountbatten and VP Menon, in the integration of the Indian States was only marginal. The States’ Ministry did not draw up any plans for the consolidation of the northern frontier of India of which Jammu and Kashmir was the central spur. Nor did the States Ministry formulate any plans for the security of the Himalayas against the threat of their de-Sanskritsation which the creation of Pakistan posed.

Few in-depth investigations and inquiries have been undertaken so far to unravel the forces and factors, which shaped the events in Jammu and Kashmir, during the fateful days following the transfer of power in India. No investigations were ever carried out in the actions of men, who were at the helm of affairs in India, Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir, their motivations and their personal prejudices. Much of what happened those days, has been covered under false propaganda by the Government of India as well as the  Government of Pakistan and the  Interim Government which was instituted in Jammu and Kashmir after the accession of the State to India. A widespread disinformation campaign was launched by the Interim Government in collusion with the Government to find scapegoats for their failures and to apportion blame, where it did not belong. The sordid story of what happened in the state, those days, is yet to be told.

Pakistan sought to bend the procedure laid down by the Indian Independence Act for the transfer of power in India, to grab the Muslim majority states as well as the states ruled by Muslim Princes.

The Indian Government failed signally to counteract the stratagem, subversion and military intervention, Pakistan employed to achieve its objectives. Perhaps the British, who had quit India, still cast a shadow on the Indian outlook. The Congress leadership with its liberalist tradition which denied the civilisational boundaries of the Indian nation, continued to play the Muslim card, to prove that Jammu and Kashmir would be more Islamic than the Muslim State of Pakistan after its inclusion in the Indian Dominion.

The Congress leaders wanted Maharaja Hari Singh to follow what they did in collusion with Mountabatten to retrieve Junagarh and bring round the Nawab of Hyderabad to come to terms, with India. Gandhi advised Hari Singh, during his visit to Kashmir, towards the close of July 1947, to (a) transfer the powers of the State Government to the representatives of his Muslim subjects, who formed a majority of the population of the state; (b) hold fresh elections to the Praja Sabha, the State Legislative Assembly, on the basis of universal adult franchise and (c) entrust the Praja Sabha with the task of taking a decision on the accession of the state. The meeting between Hari Singh and Mahatma Gandhi was held on the lawns of the Gupkar Palace, situated on the eastern bank of the Dal Lake in Srinagar. Maharani Tara Devi and the Heir-Apparent Karan Singh were present in the meeting. The only other man present in the meeting was a senior officer of the state army, who acted as an aide to the Maharaja and prepared the situation report of the meeting for the military archives of the state.

Gandhi had lost touch with the developments in the princely states. He was not aware of the dangerous  situation in Jammu and Kashmir. He did not know that an armed rebellion was brewing in the Muslim majority districts of the Jammu province, where arms and ammunition were being dumped by the elements of the Muslim League from a  cross the border of the state with the Punjab. He was hardly aware of the sharp divide between the Kashmiri speaking Muslims and non-Kashmiri speaking Muslims. He did not know that the non-Kashmiri speaking Muslims, who constituted nearly half the Muslim population of state along with a small section of the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims owing loyality to the Mirwaiz, the chief Muslim divine of Kashmir, supported the Muslim Conference, which spearheaded the struggle for Pakistan. He was completely unaware of the fact that the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims constituted about half the population of the Muslims of the State and together with the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Buddhists they formed more than sixty percent of the population of the State. The Hindus, the Sikhs and the Buddhists, a million people, constituted more than a quarter of the population of the State. Gandhi was completely unaware of the impact of the partition on the leaders and cadres of the National Conference, which had its main support bases in the community of the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims, largely concentrated in the Kashmir province. He did not know that an influential section of the leaders and cadres of the National Conference favoured a reconsideration of the commitment of the National Conference to the unity of India.

Gandhi believed that by seeking to divest Hari Singh of his powers to determine the future affiliation of the State in respect of its accession and empowering his Muslim subjects to take a decision on the accession of the state, he would be able to create a precedent for the rulers of the Muslim ruled states, to entrust their powers to determine the future affiliations of their states their Hindu subjects, who formed a majority of their population. Nearly all the Muslim ruled states, barring a few of them situated within the territories delimited for the Muslim State of Pakistan, nearly all the Muslim ruled States in India, including the major states of Hyderabad, Junagarh, Bhopal, were populated by preponderant Hindu majorities.

Perhaps, Gandhi believed that the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir committed to support the accession of the state to India, would opt to join India after power was transferred to them and they were empowered to  determine the future affiliations of the state. He was convinced that the transfer of power in Jammu and Kashmir would provide him a moral ground to bring round Pakistan as well as Mountbatten to persuade the Muslim rulers to abnegate from their power to determine the future affiliations of their states and entrust their subjects and of whom the Hindus formed a majority, to opt for India.

Gandhi and the other Indian leaders did not even get the wind of the secret preparations in Pakistan for military intervention in the Jammu and Kashmir State in the name of the Jehad for the liberation of the Muslims from their subjection to the Dogra Rule, while Gandhi went on a indefinite fast to prevent communal violence in India which threatened the Muslims, Pakistan prepared feverishly for the invasion of the state. Pakistan planned to reduce the state by military force and then deal with India from a position of strength in respect of Junagarh and Hyderabad. Junagarh had acceded to Pakistan and Hyderabad was plotting the align itself with Pakistan to remain out of India.

Had Hari Singh accepted Gandhi's advice he would have provided open ground for Pakistan and the Muslim League to grab the state by stratagem and force. Gandhi's suggestion to hold the elections to the Praja Sabha would have enabled the Muslim Conference and the flanks of pro-Pakistan Muslim activists, operating underground, to sabotage the National Conference and use religious appeal for Jehad to pack the Praja Sabha with the Muslim Conference. Any stringent measures adopted by him to prohibit religious propaganda in the elections would have brought him the blame of having settled the expression for the will of the Muslims. In case he did not take effective measures to prohibit the use of religious propaganda in the elections he would virtually leave the field open for the Muslim Jehad to take over.

Hari Singh had borne the ravages of Muslim communalism. He had also faced the scourage of the Paramountcy. The Congress leaders had installed Mountbatten as the first Governor General of the Dominion of India. Hari Singh had rebuffed Mountbatten and refused to abide by his advice to join Pakistan. Mountbatten, later events proved, had not forgotten the slight Hari Singh had caused to him. The Maharaja did not allow himself to be arranged before the man, who had spared no efforts to push his state into Pakistan for his management. He refused to accept Gandhi's advice.

Hari Singh contested Gandhi's views on the accession of the state and refused to abnegate from his rightful obligation to determine the future of his state. He told Gandhi, in measured words in the presence of Maharani Tara Devi, who regarded the Mahatma in awe, that the safety and the security of the Hindus and the other minorities in the state was uppermost in his mind, and he would not abandon them at any cost. He insisted upon the recognition of his rights as the ruler of the state to determine the basis of his future relations with India. He reminded Gandhi that nor only had the lapse of the Paramountcy vested in him the right to determine the future of the State, the Indian States Ministry had recognised the rights of the rulers of the States as the basis of their accession to India and he could not be treated in a manner different from the way, the rulers of all other acceding states had been treated.

Gandhi gave expression to his feelings in a statement he gave to the press in Punjab, on his way back to Delhi. He said that Jammu and Kashmir was a Muslim state and therefore, its future must be determined by Muslims who formed a majority of its population. He denounced the treaties between the Princes and the British as "parchments of paper" and decried the claims made by the Princes to any rights arising out of such treaties.

Hari Singh did not accept the surrender to a Muslim majority identity as the basis of a settlement of the accession of the state. He refused to become part of the process to consolidate the borders of the Muslim state of Pakistan, which Mountbatten and the Congress leaders visualised as the guarantee of the unity of India.

Later events proved Hari Singh right. Pakistan strove hard to hold Junagarh and openly supported Hyderabad in its endeavour to remain out of India. Pakistan invaded the State, irrespective of the procedure laid down by the Indian Independence Act, for the lapse of the Paramountcy, showing little regard for the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir and the people of Junagarh and Hyderabad.

Gandhi’s press statement administered a jolt to Maharaja Hari Singh. Maharani Tara Devi favoured reconciliation with the Congress leadership. She cautioned Hari Singh against the isolation into which the State was sinking fast. It is a lesser known fact that the Maharani tried to bridge the gulf between Hari Singh and the Indian leaders.

Shortly after Gandhi left Kashmir Hari Singh removed Ram Chandra Kak from his office and appointed General Janak Singh, one of his close kin the Prime Minister of the state. Ram Chandra Kak headed the State Government during the last years of the British Raj in India. Kak served the Maharaja with unflinching loyalty and devotion. Kak belonged to the Kashmiri Pandit community in Kashmir, which played a pioneering role in the growth of national consciousness in the State. While in office, Kak acted as an interface for the Maharaja with the British as well the Muslim League, at a time, when the Princes were struggling to place the State in between the British Crown and an independent Indian nation. The political Department of the British Govt. of India, with conrad corfield, a diehard British Civil Service officer, as its head, spared no efforts to assure the Princes that the British would not abandon the Princely India and would ensure the continuity of the treaties between the States and the Crown. Like the other Princes, Hari Singh was suddenly brought on the crossroads, when India was divided and the British Paramountcy was withdrawn.

The British refused to continue the protection, the Paramountcy had provided the States and the Muslim League claimed Jammu and Kashmir for the Muslim State of Pakistan on the basis of the Muslim majority of its population.

During the days, the future of the constitutional organization of India was taking shape, Ram Chandra Kak was at the Centrestage of the negotiations between the Princes, the British and the Indian leaders. The Princes were not left with the choice to seek a place outside the constitutional organization of the two successor Dominions of India and Pakistan. The undersecretary of the State for India in the British Government, clarified in the British Parliament, during the debate on the Indian Independence Bill, that the British Government would not recognize the States as the Dominions of the Commonwealth nor would extend it recognition to their independence. Kak was no longer relevant in the political context in which Jammu and Kashmir was left with no choice except to join India, the option to accede to Pakistan was not acceptable to Hari Singh or Kak.

Hari Singh turned away from the British, when he refused to abide by the advice of the Viceroy of India tendered to him to come to terms with Pakistan.

He earned the displeasure of the leaders of the Muslim League, when he refused to grant permission to Mohammad Ali Jinnah to visit Jammu and Kashmir, during the days, the transfer of power in India was in process of completion. Jinnah sent several of his emissaries to persuade Hari Singh to accede to Pakistan on conditions which he specified. A second world war veteran Major General Shaukat Hayat Khan, arrived in Kashmir with a peculiar proposal from him.

Khan met Hari Singh in his palace. He told the Maharaja that he had been commissioned by Jinnah to convey to the Maharaja that he could lay down any conditions that he chose, to accede to Pakistan and that Pakistan would deposit a huge amount of money in British currency worth hundreds of millions of Sterling Pounds, in the Bank of England, as guarantee against any breach of the conditions laid down by him.

Hari Singh was slighted, but he did not lose his poise. He told Shaukat Hayat that he would take a decision on the accession of the State only in consideration of the interests of his subjects.

Naseeb Singh, an Army officer, of the Signal Corps, who was in attendance on the Maharaja those days, told the author in an interview: "I heard him (Shaukat Hayat) tell his aides, how strange of the Maharaja it was to have turned down the offer. As he saw me standing bye, he recoiled and fell silent". Thakur Kartar Singh, a close kin of the Maharaja and a former Revenue Minister of the State, told the author in an interview in Jammu. "His Highness was severely intolerant of any suggestion about his relations with Pakistan.

He felt hurt by what happened around him. He had given a long rope to Ramchandra Kak. He waited patiently, though that was not in his habit, for an opportunity to save the State from going to Pakistan. Pakistan pressurized him to agree to accede to that country, offering to accept any number of conditions that he would lay to safeguard his interests. But he "withstood all pressures".

Hari Singh offered a Standstill Agreement to India as well as Pakistan for which the Indian States Department and the State Department of Pakistan had provided the option. The Indian Government did not take any action on the Standstill Agreement, though it extended the period of accession by two months for both the States - Jammu and Kashmir as well as Hyderabad. Hyderabad was the other Princely State, which did not accede to the Indian Dominion by 15 August 1947.

That Pakistan had adopted a policy of confrontation with the State Government was signaled by the formation of the Provisional Government of 'Azad' Kashmir, by pro-Pakistan Muslim flanks and the cadres of the Muslim Conference, at Trad Khel on 30 August 1947. Sardar Ibrahim Khan founder of the Provisional Government of 'Azad' Kashmir, took the salute of a contingent of armed volunteers of the Provisional Government which march passed before him in a military formation. The volunteers were armed with the rifles supplied to them from Pakistan.

Hari Singh proclaimed a general amnesty for all political prisoners who were involved in the Quit Kashmir Movement and against whom proceedings were in process in the courts of the state. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the Acting President of the National Conference, who had taken refuge in the British India, during the Quit Kashmir Movement, alongwith other leaders of the National Conference, arrived in Srinagar on 12 September 1947. He received a tumultuous welcome, from the people in Srinagar.

The leaders and cadres of the Conference who had gone underground, had already begun to emerge from their underground quarters. Mohi-ud-Din Qara the Head of the War Council, which had been constituted to direct the Quit Kashmir Movement, came out of his underground quarters, alongwith a number of his senior cadres. Among them was Onkar Nath Trisal, a senior communist party activist, who later played a memorable role in the defence of Srinagar, when the invading armies of Pakistan were pouring into its outskirts. Mohi-ud-Din Qara addressed a number of public meetings, where he impressed upon the people of the necessity to maintain intercommunity peace and combat communalism and subversion.

While the National Conference leaders and cadres set out to reconstruct the organizational units of the National Conference, which had been battered by the Quit Kashmir Movement, Pakistan launched a surreptitious campaign in the State to unite the Muslims in support of its accession to that country. The leaders and cadres of the Muslim Conference and the sections of the Muslim community which were ideologically committed to the Muslim struggle for Pakistan, though they did not support the Muslim Conference, carried on the campaign with the support of the widespread network of Pakistani agents, spies and intelligence sleuths of the Government of Pakistan which operated underground and in vast numbers, Muslim League cadres and other political activists who had slipped into the state unnoticed.

The creation of Pakistan symbolized the realization of the desperation of the Muslim Ummah in India and (a) religious obligation devolved on the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir to support its accession to Pakistan to consolidate the Muslim power (b) the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir were part of the Muslim Umah and therefore were bound to Pakistan by the bond of Islam; (c) any deviation from a commitment to the unity of the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir would be an un-Islamic act. The National Conference had spearheaded the Muslim struggle for liberation from the Dogra Rule and now the only option for the leaders and National Conference was to join the struggle for the unification of the State with Pakistan (d) India and the Hindus who formed the main resistance to the struggle for Pakistan, were trying their utmost to scuttle the freedom of the Muslims in the Princely States, where the Muslims were subject to severe repression and the ruler of the State was waiting for an opportunity to join India, scuttle the freedom of the Muslims and perpetuate his power (e) the Muslim struggle for Pakistan was not against the Maharaja and the Muslims of the State had assured him that they would recognize him as the constitutional head of the State if he opted for Pakistan; (f) the National Conference and its cadres and supporters would be accommodated in the Muslim commonwealth of Pakistan on the basis of equality and brotherhood enjoined by Islam upon all the Muslims irrespective of their language and the region which they inhabited (g) any differences between the National Conference leadership and the Muslim leadership of the people of Pakistan could be settled mutually and (h) the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir had to stand united in the struggle for Pakistan in view of the efforts the enemies of Islam were making in India to impair the unity of the Muslims.

The police intelligence of the State reported that it had received information about an underground cell, involved in the raising of a militia, the Muslim Guard, to defend the struggle for Pakistan against any police or military action the State Government resorted to. A woman volunteer of Pakistan was charged with the tasks of recruitment of local Muslim volunteers to the ranks of the Muslims guard. The intelligence report about the Muslim Guard reached the State Government and a summary of the report was sent to Hari Singh as well. As usual, Hari Singh sent it to the State archives. But no action was taken against the sabotage planned by the enemy agents to foment a rebellion in the State, probably to coincide with the invasion of State Pakistan was secretly planning.

The Indian leaders took little notice of the developments in the State. The States’ Minister wrote a cryptic letter to Hari Singh, imploring the Maharaja to bring all punitive measures against the National Conference to an end, release the Conference leaders and cadres from imprisonment and seek their cooperation to meet the challenge the State was faced with.

On September 3, 1947, an intelligence signal was received in the Army headquarters at Delhi, that armed infiltrators of Pakistan had raided a border outpost, three miles inside the state territory. The signal with the staggering import evoked response from the Indian Government. The Indian leaders received information about the border raids and the heavy damage to life and property the Hindus and the Sikhs suffered in the border districts of the State. No voice was raised in India against the depredation, the armed infiltrators spread in the border districts of the State.

Note: The Article, in this series are based upon documentary sources in the Indian Archives, Archives of the Jammu and Kashmir State, Sardar Patel Papers; documents and Papers in Sapru House Library, Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, Contemporary Newspaper Files and Interview.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

For most of the years of the last five decades, while the Congress ruled the country, the policy of the Indian government in respect of the defence of the Northern Frontiers of India, lacked foresight and perspective besides the determination to ensure the security of the country. The Congress leadership, knew much less of what was happening behind the scene, when the Radcliffe Commission divided the Punjab. Mehar Chand Mahajan and Sardar Teja Singh, the former representing the Hindus and the latter the Sikhs, on the Boundary Commission, fought a bitter battle with the Muslim representatives Justice Munir Ahmad and Justice Din Mohammad, who actually sought to grab the whole of the upper Bari Doah for Pakistan to ensure control over the Madhopur canal headworks and close the borders of the east Punjab to Jammu and Kashmir. Mahajan and Teja Singh did not concede any ground and Radcliffe, adopting a uniform set of principles for the demarcation of Muslim majority regions in the west Punjab and the demarcation of the Hindu majority regions in the east, provided a borderline with Pakistan which secured its reach to its traditional defence line over the Himalayas Radcliffe Award was mainly an arbitral award, which the chairman of the Boundary Commission pronounced, but the main ground on which it was based, was prepared by Mahajan and Teja Singh. Not the Congress leadersm but the Arya Samaj veteran Bakhshi Tek Chand, the noted legal luminare Sir Shadi Lal and Maharaja Hari Singh the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, stood by Mahajan and Teja Singh during those crucial days, when the fate of the Himalayan frontier hung in the balance.

 For India, the access to the Himalayas was as vital as the transfer of power from the British, for the attempt of the British and the Muslim League to cut away the whole of the warm Himalayan hinterland spreading over the upper Punjab, the Punjab Hill States, now reorganised in the Indian State of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. Gandhi and Nehru, however, were oblivious to the importance of the divide in the north. The Indian leaders never realised the startling truth, that the expansion of the Muslim power of Pakistan into the warm Himalayan hinterland , would dismanttle the traditional frontier of India in north and perhaps, push down the Indian borders to the least viable geography across the the planes of the Punjab in the north and the Himalayan foothills in these north east. Inside the Congress Working Committee the eternal debate of how the dogma of passive resistance could be used to bring about the unification of the states with India, continued unabated, while the Muslim ruled states of Hyderabad, Bhopal and Junagarh situated in the Indian heartland prepared to remain out of India and the Muslims in the border districts of Jammu and Kashmir plotted to force the unification of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan. Junagarh acceded to Pakistan to the consternation of Gandhi as well as Nehru, but they quietened down, for Mountbatten held the reins of power in India. The Congress leaders received the second jolt, when Pakistan invaded Jammu and Kashmir. Again the Indian government wobbled, with Mountbatten managing to provide the invading armies, six long days to cover the ground from Kohalla, the last border outpost of the state, to Srinagar, a distance usually covered in a days time. The wrangles between the Prime Minister office, the British officials commanding various formations of the Indian army, the Viceroy and the mercenaries of the British who had taken key positions in the states department, wasted precious time. Jammu and Kashmir was saved by the Hindu elements of the Dogra army, of which the Muslim ranks had deserted to join the invading hordes, and the over cautious army command of Pakistan, which sought to spread into the state without giving India a cause to react in concern. Pakistan perhaps, did not want India to take the offensive in Junagarh and Hyderabad, where they hoped to entrench deeper after they had reduced Jammu and Kashmir and dismantled the traditional frontier of India.

 The Indian government opted for a cease-fire in 1949, and accepted to handover more than one third of Jammu and Kashmir to Pakistan, along with the strategic outposts of Gilgit and Baltistan as well as the Dardic dependencies of the State, Hunza, Nagrar, Yasin, Ish Koman, Darel, Koh-Gizir and Pumal, streching along the main routes entering Kashmir from the north. In 1950, only one year after the cease-fire, the Indian leaders handed over the rest of the state to the Muslims of Kashmir in perpetual possession by virtue of Article 370. The Himalayan frontier to the east, was treated with greater abondon. The Indian leaders nursed a self-deception that they were visionaries. They were products of history, which had been distorted by the liberalist reformism of the British Empire in India. India had considerable military interest in Tibet and indeed an Indian army garrison was posted in Chumbi valley, enroute to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, besides the considerable political and religious influence India exercised in the Tibetan capital. Pannikar was also a product of the career civil service of the British empire. He was unable to judge the ramifications of the Chinese advance into Tibet.

 Frightened of the prospect of a conflict, in which Pannikar saw no stakes for the Indian state, he guided the Indian government out of Tibet. India abandoned its position in Tibet, withdrew its garrison from Chumbi valley and closed its agency in Lhasa. But once the Chinese consolidated their power in Tibet, they demolished the Indian frontier all along the McMahon Line, accepted as the rightful border between India and Tibet in a convention held at Simla in 1914. The Tibetan delegate Lochen Shatra and the Chinese Plenipotentiary Ivon Chen signed the Simla convention along with Sir Charles Bell, the British Indian delegate. The Chinese, as was expected, pushed down the Indian frontier nearly two hundred miles south of the McMohan Line. Gandhi was dead. Nehru, broken by the Chinese action was unable to meet the challenge the Chinese posed. Tibet the great Himalayan table-land was Sanskritised by the Hindus of Kashmir, shortly after the beginning of the Christian era. Indeed the Sanskritisation of the entire Himalayas in the north was accomplished by them. The Sanskritisation of central Asia, Mongolia, and Tibet formed one continuous process, which the Hindus of Kashmir completed. The foundations of the Tibetan theorcracy were laid down by the Kashmir Budhist Scholar, Sakya, Pandit, a nephew of the great Pandit Phagspa of Kashmir, the mentor of Godan Khagan the son and successor of Timuchim, the Changis Khan. The northern Himalayan were Indianised by the Sikhs, when the Sikhs extended the Sikh empire, over the entire warm Himalayan hinterland up to the western Tibet. The Himayalas remained Sanskrit and Indian after the British wrested them from the Sikhs. The British politicised the Himalayas, and actually consolidated their cultural unity and their Indian content into a frontier, which for over a century, stood as the last bastion of Indian defence in the north.

 The efforts of Pakistan and China, to impair the Himalayan frontier of India, has a strategic purpose. Both seek to demolish the Indian frontier which is Sanskrit and which is Indian. Once it is washed away, the northern borders of India, brought down to the planes in the Punjab and the Himalayan foothills in the east, will, pave the way for the expansion of the Muslim power of Pakistan south and east and the expansion of China, into the Valley of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. The war of attrition, which is at present being waged by Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir, is a pact of the Great Game, to grab the warm Himalayan hinterland across Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Upper Punjab. India must recover the part of Jammu and Kashmir, under the occupation of Pakistan, without which it will not be able to close Pakistan' intervention in Jammu and Kashmir. Peace between India and Pakistan is essential but in the new world, with no security in a unipolar international system, the defence of the northern frontier of India is more essential.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

During the last several years, the quest for a peaceful settlement of the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir has spread out into a long process of track two diplomatic interaction, commonly known in India as the peace-process. The peace-process spreads across a wide spectrum of responses at a less formal range of negotiations, involving governments, administrative agencies, non-governmental organisations and non-official institutions representing various sections of people and their interests. Both India and Pakistan profess their commitment to find a settlement which is acceptable to the people of the State. So do the non-government organisations and non-official agencies profess their commitment to find a settlement which is acceptable to the people of the State. However, Pakistan and the Muslims of the State identify the people of the State with its Muslim population.

Pakistan insists upon a settlement which is acceptable to the Muslims of the State. The Muslims of the State insist upon a settlement which is acceptable to them and the Muslims of Pakistan. The Indian political class appears to lend tacit support to the claims made by both the Muslims of the State and Pakistan that a settlement reached on Kashmir has to be acceptable to the Muslims of Kashmir and the Muslims of Pakistan. A.G. Noorani, a self-styled expert on Kashmir, notes with undisguised hypocracy: "The people of J&K must have a voice. It cannot be expressed at a round table. That will make it a tower of Babel". He prefixes his comment with an unambiguously crude expressions: "The Kashmir dispute is at the outskirts of a solution; the amnesty that will follow it will return Syed Salahuddin to state politics as a major player and alter the scene radically; deep divisions rule out the kind of the involvement in India-Pakistan that Kashmiris aspire".

The Round Table Conference does not provide a convenient platform for the Muslims to settle the dispute over Kashmir. It is a Tower of Babel because, Syed Salahuddin, the chairman of the United Jehad Council and the leaders of the Hurriyat, besides the leaders of other Jehadi regimes are not in it and it gives a wide representation to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who are not Muslims.

The impression that the people of the State are identifiable with the Muslims of the State and settlement on the Kashmir dispute is subject to their acceptability and the acceptability of the Muslims of Pakistan, has assumed the validity of a historical fact, a development unsparingly used by Pakistan and the Muslim separatist flanks in Jammu and Kashmir to legitimise the Muslim separatist movement as well as the Muslim Jehad.  The Government of India has made no attempt to remove the  erroneous impresssion that the people of the State are identifiable with its Muslim population. Nor has the Indian political class clarified that a settlement on Kashmir is also subject to the acceptability of India and the Hindus and the other minorities in the State. No effort has been made in India to give expression to the stark facts that the people who have led the resistance to the Muslim Jehad have a more crucial role to play in the settlement of the Kashmir dispute than the chief of the United Jehad Council and the Hurriyat leaders and that the people who have fought for the unity of the Jammu and Kashmir and India have a prior right to determine the basic structure of a settlement about its future.

It is not a well known fact that the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Buddhists, alongwith the Hindus and Sikhs uprooted from the occupied territories of Azad Kashmir and the West Punjab, who took refuge in the State in 1947; constitute around 42 percent of the population of the State. The Hindus constitute a majority of the population in the Jammu province and the Buddhists form a majority of the population of Ladakh. In the Kashmir province, where the Muslims constitute a majority, the Hindus constitute 8.6 percent of the population of the province. They constitute 4.4 percent of the population of the whole State. Relatively the strength of the Hindu minority in Kashmir, compares well with the population of the minorities in the other States of India, including the Muslims.

The Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists have always been in the forefront of the resistance against the Muslim Jehad and the Muslim separatist movements which have ravaged the State for the last five decades. They fought against the invasion of the State in 1947, shoulder to shoulder with the State troops and the Indian army. to defend the State. More than thirty eight thousand Hindus and Sikhs paid their lives for India as the invading armies of Pakistan spread in the State. An unknown number of Buddhists laid down their lives in the defence of Ladakh after the invading armies overran Baltistan. The Muslim officers and ranks of the State army deserted, killed their Hindu comrades in arms and joined the invading forces. After the disintegration of the National Conference and the dismissal of the Interim Government in 1953, the Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists formed the main flanks of resistance against the virulent secessionist movement led by the Plebiscite Front. In 1990, the Hindus bore the first assault of the Muslim Jehad. Ever since, they have been in the forefront of the resistance against the subversive war Pakistan and the Jehadi war groups have been waging in the state. Thousands of Hindus have been massacred during the last seventeen years. A million of them have been uprooted from their homes in the Kashmir province and the Muslim majority districts of the Jammu province.

The Jehadi war groups and terrorist regimes, waging Jehad against India for the liberation of the Jammu and Kashmir, which claim to represent the people of the state do not represent the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Buddhists. Nor do the militant flanks, which are fighting for an independent Muslim Kashmir, represent the Hindus of the State. The assortment of militant organisation and Muslim separatist groups combined in Hurriyat Conference, the moderate as well as extremist, the former seeking a "United States of Jammu and Kashmir" and the latter fighting for the unification of the State with Pakistan represent the Hindus. It must be mentioned that the proponents of "autonomy", "self-rule", "joint control" etc. also do not represent the Hindus and the other minorities.

The Indian state has an obligation to ascertain, who among the Muslims in the State are committed to support the Jehad for the unification of the State with Pakistan and who among them are committed to support independence, "autonomy", self-rule" and joint control under a condominium". But it cannot treat Jammu and Kashmir as a "no-man's land", which, it has a right to handover to Pakistan or the Jehadi war groups, under the cover of "self-rule" "joint control". The Hindus, the Buddhists and the Sikhs did not give a mandate to the Indian State when they paid with the lives of thousands of their brethren the price for the accession of the State to India, to convert it into a Muslim state on the territories of India. Any compromise by the Government of India, which consigns four million Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists to the slavery of a Muslim state, whatever its form, will be a betrayal with the people of India.

The Hindus and the other minorities—the Sikhs and the Buddhists, do not support any separatist, secessionist or Jehadi claim to a separate freedom for the Muslims of the State. No government of India can visualise the future of the Jammu and Kashmir state in the faultiness of the Indian struggle for freedom. Any attempt to do so will lead this country to a second partition and perhaps, open the way for the dismemberment of the Indian nation.

The ongoing peace-process will not succeed so long the interests and aspirations of the Hindus and the other minorities  in the State are not taken into account in reaching a fair and lasting settlement on the future of Jammu and Kashmir. So long the negotiations for a peaceful settlement on Kashmir, whether they are held at the level of the composite dialogue between Indian and Pakistan, or held between the people of the State and the Government of India, continue to be Muslim centric and their broad agenda is set by Pakistan and the Muslim Jehad, India will run the risk of sinking into an internecine conflict such as she faced in 1947. The Muslim movement for the de-Sanskritisation of India, which commenced in 1947, and has been going on ever since, must be brought to close before the civilisational conflict which it has given rise to flares up into a civilisation war.

A settlement on Jammu and Kashmir based upon the recognition of the precedence of the Muslim majority of its population, in any form it is given shape, will spell doom for the four million Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhist.

Autonomy envisaged by Article 370, and the exclusion of the State from the Indian political organisation, "self-rule" within an Indo-Pakistan condominium, or the reorganisation of the Muslim majority regions of the State into an independent or a semi-independent political organisation, are aimed to open fresh ground for the Muslim Jehad to achieve its political objectives. A Muslim State of Jammu and Kashmir with "soft" or "irrelevant" borders, is bound to shift the Line of Control eastwards, to the Chenab watershed, which will uproot millions of Hindus and Sikhs from their homes and hearths.

The Muslim Jehad has already uprooted more them half a million Hindus from the Kashmir province. It has uprooted a quarter a million of Hindus from the Muslim majority districts of the Jammu province. More than a million Hindus and Sikhs uprooted from the occupied territories of Pak-occupied Kashmir and West Punjab, live in the State as Sharnathis, still awaiting their resettlement.

The Islamic Jehad has its own dynamics. The Indian attempt to delink theological imperatives of Jehad, to seek a national expression for the Muslim struggle for a separate freedom in Jammu and Kashmir, is based upon the misreading of the history. The readiness of the Indian Government to buy peace with Pakistan on the condition that it accepts the legitimacy of the Muslim claim to a separate freedom  may well lead India to its distintegration. The belief that a Muslim State of Jammu and Kashmir forms a gradient of Indian secularism will damage social stability.

Any final settlement of the dispute our Kashmir is a national decision which is bound to have an effect on the future of the Hindus and other minorities of the State. No electoral majority has a right to subject any minority community in India to the servitude of the majority it represents. In Jammu and Kashmir as well, no electoral majority, national or regional, has a right to subject the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Sikhs to the servitude of a political and social order which draws its sanction from the sectarian, fundamentalists imperatives.

-To be continued

Dr. M.K. Teng

The Muslim separatist movement in Jammu and Kashmir in various forms it assumed from time to time, during the last five decades of the Indian freedom, has espoused the claim of the Muslim community to reconstitute the State into an Islamic pol­ity. Kashmir dispute has its roots in the struggle of the Muslims of India an Islamic state, which enshrined a separate freedom for them, on the basis of religion.                       

The Muslims in the British India and the Indian Princely States refused to accept that they formed a part of the Indian na­tion. They insisted upon their claim to a separate nation. The separate homeland of Pakistan was conceived by its founding fathers as an Islamic state, which would enable the Muslims in In­dia to realise their Islamic des­tiny.

The incessant efforts of the Indian political class, unable to break away from its liberal-reformist moorings, and still in search of the means to legitimise its rootlessness have caused much harm to the process of po­litical development in India as well as impeded the integration of the Muslims in the political culture of India. The Muslim League which spearheaded the Muslim movement for Pakistan in the British India and the All India States Muslim League, which led the Muslim movement for Pakistan in the Indian princely States visualised expres­sion of the consolidation of the Muslim power in India. The Muslim people of India formed part of the Muslim Ummah, and an expression of its unity. Muslim commitment to the unity of the Muslim Ummah was a negation of the national power of the Indian people. Muslims did not recognise any national power, which did not form a subsidiary part of the Muslim Ummah.

The Muslims in India sup­ported the struggle for Pakistan unequivocally and rejected the ideological commitment of the Indian people to the national identity of a United India, the In­dian struggle for freedom under­lined. The partition of India was not foisted on the Indian people by British, as the Indian political class continues to claim, even half a century after India was freed from the British colonial hold. The partition was wrought by the Muslims. The civil war and wanton violence, which the Direct Action campaign the Muslim League launched in August 1946, broke up the national consensus on the unity of India, that permeated the outlook of the Indian National Congress. Gan­dhi had not prepared the Indian people to face a civil war. His pre­scription of passive resistance, left the field open for the Muslim League to break up India.

The Muslim League leaders and the leaders of the States Muslim League, which coordi­nated the Muslim struggle for Pakistan in the princely states, committed themselves to the realisation of an Islamic State of Pakistan. Mohammad Ali Jinnah made no mistake about the ulti­mate objective of the struggle for Pakistan.

The Muslim League leaders made no mistake about the sepa­rate freedom they sought for the Muslim nation of India. The Muslim ‘nation’ of India, they averred was the con­tinuation of the history of the Muslim power in India, which formed a part of the history of the Muslim Ummah. The Mus­lims in India, the Muslims League leaders claimed, were not a part of the Indian nation, which spread over the civilisational frontiers of India. The Muslims in India were a separate ethnic identity of which the history, social culture, political outlook and religion, drew their content from Islam and its history in India. The gospel of redemption, which formed the basis of all Se­mitic religious ideologies, did not admit of coexistence of religions. The expression Jinnah gave to his outlook about the commit­ment of Pakistan to enable all people of Pakistan to live in free­dom, irrespective of their faith, in his inaugural address to the Constituent Assembly of Paki­stan, did not reflect his intention to repudiate the Muslim commit­ment to an Islamic state. Indeed, the Muslims believed as they do believe now, that the Islamic or­der of society does not conflict with the freedom of all people, irrespective of their faith. For Jinnah the Muslim state was not a theocracy. For him the Muslim state of Pakistan was the expres­sion of the Muslim political power in India. The very concept of Pakistan, which Jinnah was in­strumental in forging underlined the recognition of the geographi­cal boundaries of the Muslim In­dia as well as the continuity of its history. His claims to the Muslim majority provinces of the British India and the Muslim majority princely States as well as the Muslim ruled princely states for Pakistan, was based upon his acceptance of the con­tinuity of the history of the Mus­lim Ummah in India. Jinnah, ac­companied by Liaquat Ali Khan, met Mountbatten after the partition plan was given final shape. Mountbatten told Jinnah that partition had given the Muslims, a broken country far smaller than they had claimed. Jinnah looked straight at the Viceroy and then told him in resigned words that they would have accepted desert of Thar, if that was what their were given as their homeland.

From 1947 to 1953, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah insisted upon the exclusion of Jammu and Kashmir from the guarantees for rights of freedom, the Constitu­tion of India envisaged and claimed the right of the Muslims to redefine the rights and free­dom of the people of the State. He stated with the enthusiasm of a religious preacher that the theological imperatives of Islam pro­vided adequate guarantees for the protection of the rights and freedom of non-Muslim population of the State The exclusion of the State from the constitu­tional organisation of India by Article 370, was based upon his insistence on a separate struc­ture of rights which satisfied the aspirations of the Muslims. In fact, in the meetings of the National Conference leaders led by him with the Indian leaders and the members of the Negoti­ating Committee of the Constitu­ent Assembly of India, he claimed a separate freedom which the Muslims would demar­cate for the people of the State on the basis of the Muslim ma­jority character of its population. It is not fairly well known that when Nehru refused to deny the rights and freedom to the people of Jammu and Kashmir embod­ied by the Constitution of India, which he cried in pain, had been evolved by the Constituent As­sembly with pride, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah threat­ened to resign from the member­ship of the Constituent Assem­bly. The crisis which broke up the first Interim Government in the State in 1953, grew out of the conflict between the Muslimisation of the State and the rights and aspirations of the Hindus and the other minorities, the Buddhists and the Sikhs in the State. Forty-three years later, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, a former Pradesh Congress Presi­dent, besides being a former Home Minister of India and a former Chief Minister of the State, pleaded for “one country, two systems” in the first Round Ta­ble Conference on Kashmir held by the Indian Government in 2006. The Muslims of the State, followed the same ideological commitments-a separate freedom for Jammu and Kashmir, organ­ised on the basis of one country, two systems, pattern in India. The Indian Prime Minister has, of course, very apologeti­cally expressed the inability of the Indian Government to accept

any change in the existing bor­ders of the State and yet agreed to carry the peace-process for­ward. Would that lead to the conclusion that the Government of India is ready to recognise the right of the Muslims of the State to a separate freedom by politi­cal arrangements such as the “one country, two systems” en­visages or the exclusion of State from the Indian political organi­sation underlines or the modifi­cations in the existing provisions of Article 370, proposed by the Congress Party, embody. It is a moot point how the Govern­ment of India would adjust the demand for demilitarisation, and joint management that Pakistan has been pressing for and pro-Pakistan political flanks like the Hurriyat-Conference are insist­ing upon, to the re-location of power denominations in order to ensure the Muslims a separate freedom on the territories of In­dia. The peace process has reached a state, where the Gov­ernment of India has to decide whether it accepts the exclusion of Jammu and Kashmir State from the secular political organisation of India and Jehad as a compo­nent of the peace-settlement with Pakistan and recognises the precedence of religion and the Muslims in the state and society of Jammu and  Kashmir. It has also to decide whether it has the mandate from the Indian people to accept Jehad, as the legitimate right of the Muslims in Kashmir, to foster political change. So far, the terrorist groups, waging Jehad in the State, have not shown any inclination to accept a settlement with India, which does not un­derline the integration of the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir, with the struggle of the Muslims Ummah for its ascendence into a world power of polar strength, Pakistan envisions.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

When the Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh stated in the Indian Parliament that India could not change her neighbours, did he convey the message to the Indian people that India could not choose policies which its neighbours did not approve.

How come that the Indian Prime Minister did not know that in the community of nations there are no neighbours and neighbourhoods but there are independent and sovereign states and their national borders which are secure from invasion only so long they are defended? Evidently the Indian Foreign office must have briefed the Indian Prime Minister on what the core concerns of the Indian foreign policy are. Could it follow from what the Indian Prime Minister told the Parliament, that he was selling a monitored lie to the Americans and the people of Pakistan, that India could be persuaded to accept a settlement on Kashmir which was acceptable to the Muslims of Pakistan and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir? For, no one would believe that the Indian Prime Minister could ride roughshod over the Indian people and the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists in Jammu and Kashmir, who have always formed the main resistance to the Muslim separatist movements in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Indian Prime Minister should have known that the international relations are an intricate interplay of the national interests of the members of the community of nations irrespective and independent of the geographical distances among them. The Americans are fighting a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, both the countries located, nowhere near the American borders.

Infact Americans are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to defend their borders on the American continent. The Russians stuck out their neck in the Bay of Pigs to deploy its missile systems in Cuba in order to secure a foothold on the American cantonment. The Chinese fought a relentless war for a decade and a half against the allied forces in Vietnam to secure the Malacca Straits-the waterway between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

The Indian Prime Minister has to realise that the problem of India is not that created by her recalcitrant neighbours.

The stark Truth is that the Indian borders have for most of the history of the independent India, been left undefended.

Worst of it is that the successive Indian Governments have spared no efforts to neutralise the civilisational contours of the Indian frontiers.

Right after the annexation of Tibet, the Chinese have been insisting on the unity of the "five fingers" of China. But successive Indian Governments have insistently disclaimed the Sanskrit content of the Indian frontiers in the north of which the first citadels were built by Maharaja Ranjit Singh which closed the routes of the invasion of India in the north.

The consequences have been disasterous.

Jammu and Kashmir was invaded in 1947. The state was by no means a personal preserve of Pakistan, inspite of the Muslim majority of its population. It is a little known historical fact that when the partition of India was on the anvil, the British assured the Congress leaders, who harboured misgivings about the future of the princely states, that after the British Indian Princes were divided to form Pakistan, no impediment would be allowed to come in the way of uniting the rest of India, including the Indian Princely States.

Pakistan did not have any claim on Jammu and Kashmir.

Infact, Pakistan did not have any claim on any Princely State of India. The Princely States were never brought within the purview of the partition of India. In a ceasefire brokered by the Security Council, the invading armies retained their hold on nearly half the territories of the state including Pakistan and Gilgit and the Gilgit Agency along with the Dardic principalities recognised as the "Dependences" of the state.

Among the Dardic principalities, Hunza, Nagar, Pumial, Yasin, Ishkonan, Koh Gizir, which stretched along the northern fringes of the North- West Frontier Province of Pakistan and the southern flanks of the Wakhan Valley of Afghanistan were considered to be strategically the most important part of the northern frontier of India.

Gilgit frontier apart, India faced a debacle along the Mc Mahon Line, the Indian frontier with Tibet. When the Chinese commenced the invasion of Tibet the Indian Government agreed to withdraw its garrisons from the Clumbi Valley and end its military presence in Lhasa, unmindful of the consequences involved. In the political committee of the General Assembly, where the Tibetan complaint to the General Assembly against the Chinese invasion of Tibet was being considered, the Tibetan representative pleaded with the world powers to protect the freedom of his country. While Britain and the United States, virtually accepted the Chinese claim over Tibet, the Indian representative, Jam Shahib of Nawnagar, watched the proceedings in dismay. For more then a decade after the subjugation of Tibet, India left the McMahon Line undefended. In 1962, the Chinese troops swept across the McMohan Line, more than a hundred miles south, occupying the most strategic features of the Indian frontier and lay claim to Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim.

The Indian borders in the north have been vulnerable to attack because they were, for most of the history of the independent India, left undefended.

The long sea-coast of India, in the south, has been guarded by the waters of the Indian ocean. Indian problem with Pakistan, or China, or even Bangladesh has not been that of unfriendly neighbourhood.

The Indian problem with these countries has been that of the borders which India did not defend.

In a solemn statement after the second world the American President Harry Truman said that world had to be made safe for the United States. The Americans spared no efforts to make the world safe for their country and that is exactly how they survived the Cold War. Truman underlined the commission of diplomacy as the security of his country. The Indian leaders, never realised that world has to be made safe for India to live.

India cannot live in an unsafe world. Manmohan Singh's prescription to leave India to the care of its neighbours is a counsel of despair, a state of mind, which the Indian political class has inherited as a legacy of its colonial past.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is an ideological state. True to its commitment to the unification of the Muslim Umah into a Muslim International and the consolidation of its power into an alternate polar-structure, Pakistan has exported Islamic Revolution, aimed at the fundamentalisation of all Muslim society everywhere in the world including the Muslim society in India. As an Islamic State, Pakistan has used the Jehad as the main instrument of its foreign policy.

In waging religious wars, Pakistan has resorted to international terrorism, guerrilla warfare and subversive war. The military intervention of Pakistan in Afghanistan followed the course of Jehad. The Taliban, Pakistan helped to raise in Afghanistan, were as much committed to Islam, as were the soldiers of the Northern Alliance, who also fought against the Soviets. In Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan has been waging a religious war against India with the avowed objective of liberating the Muslims of the state, who it claims, form a part of the Muslim nation of Pakistan. For the last twenty years, Pakistan has been waging a Jehad in India.

Both Pakistan and China are seeking to demolish the northern frontiers of India, de- Sanskritise the Himalayas and exclude India from any future balance of power in Asia.

India is already caught in a pincer-hold of the Anglo-American- Pakistan Alliance and the Sino-Pakistan Axis. Both Pakistan and China are seeking to drive India out of Jammu and Kashmir, the central spur of the northern frontier of India. The Americans have an eye on Russia, the real contender they face in Asia, rather than China. For them, a balance of power in Asia, in which Pakistan and China are on their side would always be more favourable a proposition, than a balance of power, in which China is arraigned against them.

Manmohan Singh's exhortion that "India seeks cooperation with Pakistan and engagement is the way forward", is decptively simple.

Engagement with Pakistan is not the way forward to seek the cooperation of Pakistan. The present engagement with Pakistan is the way forward to seek the cooperation of Pakistan. By its content it is a way forward to the second partition of India.

By Prof. M.K. Teng

Engagement with Pakistan, which the  Indian Prime Minister, Dr Man Mohan Singh has commended to the Indian People as “a way forward” to establish a relationship of peace, is in real terms a prescription for the second partition of India. The composite dialogue between the two countries and the long Track Two negotiations held behind the scene for over a decade now, have been centered round the quest for a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir, which is acceptable to the Muslims of Pakistan and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir.

The claim made by the Indian Prime Minister to have formulated proposals, envisaging a non-territorial solution on Jammu and Kashmir, which does not involve any territorial adjustments and which would be acceptable to Pakistan and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir, is deceptively simple. In essence Man Mohan Singh’s approach underlines the recognition of Jammu and Kashmir as a separate sphere of Muslim interest in the Republic of India. The proposed non-territorial settlement seems to essentially envisage the inclusion of Jammu and Kashmir in the territories of India but at the same time exclude it from the secular political organization of India. The approach further envisages the exclusion the state of Jammu and Kashmir from the territories of Pakistan while at the same time including it in the political organization of the Islamic republic of Pakistan.

The methods and means of balancing the act of the inclusion of Jammu and Kashmir in the territories of India and its exclusion from the Indian political organization and the exclusion of the state from the territories of Pakistan with its inclusion into the political organization of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, are spelt out in the proposals made by General Musharraf , the then President of Pakistan. Musharraf by no means a friend of India, had the opportunity of a life time, perhaps the one he had never expected to come his way, to accept the formula of a non-territorial settlement on Jammu and Kashmir which virtually opens the way for the second partition of India.

Musharraf accepted the formula of a non-territorial solution on Jammu and Kashmir exactly the way the founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah had accepted the Cabinet Mission plan. The principles, underlying the non-territorial concept as envisaged by Man Mohan Singh, are identical with the principles which underlined the Cabinet Mission Plan. The Cabinet Mission Plan underlined the recognition of a separate sphere of influence with a separate political organization, constituted of the Muslim majority provinces of theBritish India, within a broad structure of a future confederation of India. Ironically enough, the British historians of the partition of India, later made the startling revelation that the Cabinet Mission Plan was originally conceived by the senior Muslim leadership of Indian National Congress. When the Muslim League accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan, Jinnah exclaimed that he had accepted the Plan because it recognized the principle of Pakistan. History proved Jinnah right. The Cabinet Mission Plan led straight to the partition of India in 1947.

Musharraf had no reason to be dissatisfied with the non-territorial solution ofJammu and Kashmir. Like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, he was wise enough to understand, where, the recognition of Jammu and Kashmir into a separate Muslim sphere of interest in India, would lead to. India, he must have felt, was the one country, where the history would repeat itself.

The Cabinet Mission Plan was a prescription for the complete balkanization ofIndia. The British officials and men, who were close witnesses of the events in India those days, wrote later that had the Cabinet Mission Plan been implemented India would have broken into several fragments. The Government of Pakistan must be fully aware that the de jure recognition of Jammu and Kashmir into a separate Muslim sphere of influence in India, would disrupt the Sanskrit content of the northern frontier of India and shift the battle front from the line of control in Jammu and Kashmir to the Shivalik plains situated to the east of river Ravi.

Neither the Prime Minister of India , nor the Indian Foreign Office, have provided the people of India a clear exposition on the content and contours of the non-territorial settlement on Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian Prime Minister has publicly only stressed the necessity to render the Line Of Control irrelevant as the basis of their perspective. But Indian Prime Minister has unambiguously stated that some sort of final settlement had already been arrived at between India and Pakistan during the rule of Pervez Mushrraf which could not be given a practical shape because of the internal instability in Pakistan.

However a clear exposition of the terms and conditionalities of the proposed settlement on Jammu and Kashmir was made by the former President of Pakistan Pervez Mushrraf. The broad structure of the proposals he made underlined:

1. Demarcation of the Muslim majority regions of the state including those situated to the west of river Chenab from the Hindu majority areas situated mainly to the east of river Chenab.

2. The dissolution of the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.

3. The demilitarization of the State.

4. Self-rule.

5. Joint management of the State by India and Pakistan.

Pervez Musharraf left no one in doubt about the fact that the proposals he made formed the broad framework of the negotiations which took place between the two countries almost up to the time Musharraf was forced to step down from his office. Whether or not, the new Government in Pakistanwhich replaced the military regime of General Mushrraf, accepted to continue the negotiations with the Indian Government on the basis of the Musharraf Plan, is not yet clear. It is, however, clear that the Indian Government did not abandon its commitment to implement the proposals Musharraf had made.

An overall assessment of Musharraf Plan leaves no one in doubt about its import. The plan is an ingenious road map to bring about the unification ofJammu and Kashmir with Pakistan within a period of ten Years. Musharraf plan has specified ten years after which the whole process would be subject to review. The demarcation of the Muslim majority regions of the state and their reorganization into five Muslim majority zones and the reorganization of the two and a half districts of Jammu, Kathua and Udhampur into a Hindu majority zone, is aimed to confine the Hindu and Sikh population of the State, nearly four million, towards the east of river Chenab. The dissolution of Line of Control through the stratagem of creating porous border and joint management is actually aimed to integrate the five Muslim majority zones of the State with the occupied territories of POK. These occupied territories have been used by Pakistan as a springboard of Jihad against India The demilitarization of the State, which forms the most prominent part of the Mushrraf Plan, is aimed at the withdrawal of the Indian security forces from the Muslim majority zones of the state and their replacement by the militarized separatist forces, which have been fighting against India for the last two decades.

The most deceptive of the conditionalities envisaged by the Mushrraf Plan, is the implementation of the self-rule in the State. Self-rule underlines the transfer of power in the state to the Muslim separatist regimes through the instrumentalities of multiple legislative bodies constituted to fortify Muslim demographic domains. The last, and in fact, the least conspicuous part of the Mushrraf Plan underlines the transfer of the de facto control over the State to the Government of Pakistan, which after the period of ten years, would be followed by the transfer of de jure control over the State.

When the army of the Sikh Monarch, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, chased the Durrani Afghans, across the river Attock in the north-west of India and fought its way up to Daulat Beg Ouldi in the north of Ladakh the Sikhs closed the routes of invasion into India from the north. The dissolution of the Line of Control will only shift the battlefront with Pakistan to the Shivalik plains of Jammu situated to the east of river Ravi.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

The nature of the failure of Indian Leadership:

The Indian leadership  did  not realize that the   partition of India had also brought about the territorial division of India. They were unable to comprehend the importance of princely States in the determination of the territorial borders of the two Dominions of India and Pakistan, the partition of India created. The Indian National Congress, which spearheaded the struggle for Indian freedom, had long before the British decided to quit India, abandoned their commitment to the continuity of the Indian history and the civilizational frontiers of the Indian nation. Congress did so in its abortive attempt to reconcile the Indian freedom with the separate freedom that the Indian Muslims lay claim to.

It was on the instance of the Muslim League leaders that the Indian National Congress refused to integrate the States peoples’ movements for the freedom of India. Had the Congress taken a bold stand and integrated the States peoples’ movements in the national movement, India would not have faced the disaster that partition led to.

Even after the Indian leaders drew close to the freedom of their country based on two nation principle, they failed to recognize the significance of their national frontiers and their civilizational content. An insight into the outlook of the Indian leaders about the national frontiers of India is provided by their pronouncements in the Asian Solidarity Conference which was held in New Delhi in 1946, a year before India won freedom. Both Gandhi and Nehru reflected a complete disregard of the crucial importance the national borders had assumed with the commencement of de-colonization and the emergence of new nations of the former colonial peoples. Except India, most of the newly independent nations of the former colonial peoples guarded their borders jealously.

It has been a historical reality that wherever, in Asia or Africa, the newly independent nations of the former colonial peoples lost their caution and ignored the security of their borders, foreign intervention disrupted their unity. India did not prove to be an exception. The lack of a systematic policy framework to integrate the Indian political culture and the identification of the national unity of India with pluri-cultural and multi-national composition of Indian social organization negated the process of the national integration. That led to the subversion of the national consensus on national unity in the north-eastern states, Jammu and Kashmir and finally Punjab.

The Indian leadership did not change its outlook about the territorial integrity of India and the consolidation of its civilizational frontiers even after it assumed the reins of power in 1947. The Indian leaders refused, rather stubbornly the necessity to protect the frontiers of India, which the partition had severely impaired and which the recalcitrance of the rulers of several major princely States threatened to erode. Indian leaders failed to evolve policy plans, which underlined the unity of India and the re-integration of the Indian political culture, the consolidation of the civilizational frontiers of the Indian nation with the national borders of the Indian state and the preservation of the Sanskrit content of the cultural configurations in the border regions of the country.

The Northern Frontiers

The Indian leaders were oblivious of the implications of the territorial divide, the partition of India had brought about, for the northern frontier of India. The Jammu and Kashmir formed the central spur of the northern frontier of India. There was none among the leaders of India who realized the importance of the Jammu and Kashmir state to the security of Himalayas, crucial for the security of whole of the north India and basic to any future balance of power in Asia.

Pakistan launched a surreptitious war of subversion in Jammu and Kashmir to undermine the stability of the State Government and its security organization, right from the day that country was brought into being on 14 August 1947. Within days Pakistan cut off rail and road communications with the State and stopped the transit of all essential supplies to the State. By the beginning of September 1947, Pakistan had begun to smuggle arms and ammunition into the Muslim majority border districts of the Jammu province to foment an armed uprising against the State Government. And by the end of September 1947, the border districts of Jammu province were embroiled in a civil war.

The Government of India was not unaware of the developments in the State. However, it did not act till Pakistan launched a full fledged invasion of the State on 22 October 1947. Led by Tochi Scouts, a part of the mechanized troops of the Pakistan army, the invading forces could reach Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir in a day. The dogged resistance of the state army kept the invading columns at bay till 26 October 1947. The airborne troops of the Indian army reached Srinagar on the morning of 27 October 1947, five long days after the invading hordes had swooped on the border township of Muzaffarabad. The advance columns of the First Sikh Regiment of the Indian army established contact with the invading forces while the latter were advancing to invest Srinagar. Not many of the soldiers of the First Sikh, who went into action that day, returned home.

The Indian leaders faltered once again. No measures were taken to ensure the defense of the frontier division of Ladakh, Baltistan, Gilgit, and the Gilgit Agency along with the Dardic dependencies of the State, including the strategically important Dardic principalities of Hunza, Nagar, Punial, Yasin, Ishkoman, Koh Gizir and Darel. Before the British quit India, the Gilgit Agency was fortified by the British and was garrisoned by the Gilgit Scouts, a military force raised by the British from the local Shiate Muslim population of Gilgit and commanded by British officers. The administrative and military control over Gilgit Agency was transferred to the government of Jammu and Kashmir when the British left. There was an air strip in Gilgit over which the Dakota planes, which carried troops to Srinagar, could have safely landed. Gilgit stood on the precipice for four days. Finally the Gilgit Scouts mutineed, took the Governor of Gilgit prisoner, and declared accession of the Gilgit Agency to Pakistan. On October 1, 1947, airborne troops of Pakistan army landed in Gilgit. The Muslim officers and ranks of the State army posted at Bunji in Baltistan also mutineed and killed their Hindu and Sikh officers and comrades in arms. As the invading armies began to spread across Baltistan, the remnants of the State army and civil police, Hindu and Sikh survivors and the elements of local Buddhist population regrouped to organize resistance against them, which eventually saved Kargil and Ladakh  for India, till the Indian army scrambled up the Zojilla Pass to join them.

After the cease-fire in 1949, Pakistan consolidated its hold on the territories of the State, which remained under its occupation and which included the Muslim majority district of Muzaffarabad, and a part of the Baramulla district in the province of Kashmir, the district of Mirpur and a part of Poonch in the Jammu province, the whole of Baltistan, Gilgit and Gilgit Agency along with the Dardic tribal dependencies of the State. Pakistan refused to implement its commitments on the withdrawal of the invading army from the occupied territories and instituted a local government, known as Azad Kashmir Government, to administer them. Pakistan raised a Muslim militia of more than thirty thousand men from among the “Muslim deserters of the Dogra army, Muslin ex-servicemen of Mirpur, Poonch and Sudhunti, who had been demobilized from the British Imperial Troops of India after the end of the second World War and recruits from the adjoining districts of Pakistan, who had brought up the rear of the invasion into the State and tasted blood and booty in their adventure”. In less than a year the occupied territories were turned into a springboard for a Jihad to liberate the part of the State on the Indian side of the Cease-Fire line from the Indian hold.

Pakistan followed a different strategy in respect of the frontier division of the State, which remained under its occupation. It integrated the Gilgit Agency, Gilgit and Baltistan along with the Dardic dependencies of the State into a separate administrative region, which was placed under the direct control of the Government of Pakistan. Right from 1954, when Pakistan joined the Anglo-American-Muslim alliance system for the containment of Communism, the Northern Regions were fortified into a most formidable military outpost of the Cold War in Asia. As the Cold War receded with the disintegration of the Soviet power, the Northern Regions formed an important centre of the struggle for the rise of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan.

Territorial Dispute

The invasion of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 had territorial objectives. The Jihad, Pakistan has been waging against India in Jammu and Kashmir ever since, is also aimed to achieve territorial objectives. After having swallowed more than one-third of the territories of the State, Pakistan seeks to grab the part of the State on the Indian side of the Cease-Fire Line. The annexation of whole of State of Jammu and Kashmir or the critical portions of it will open the way for the eastward expansion of the Muslim power of Pakistan into the north of India and the demolition of the northern frontier of India. This will enable Pakistan to extend its hold over the Himalayas, which it is frantically craving, to exclude India from any future balance of power in Asia.

Pakistan has already encircled northern India into a pincer-hold of its strategic alliances: the Anglo-American-Pakistan alliance and the Sino-Pakistan axis, both aimed at the reduction of the Sanskrit culture of the Himalayas. The pronouncements of the American President, Barrack Obama during his recent visit to China, indicate the extent of isolation, India has been pushed into.

The dispute over Jammu and Kashmir, between India and Pakistan, is a territorial dispute. Pakistan has succeeded in steering ‘peace process’ between the two countries to facilitate its territorial gains. Even the Musharaf proposals, which the Indian leaders claim to be a blue- print of a non-territorial settlement, have a territorial content. The most significant territorial stipulation of the Musharaf proposals is the separation of the Muslim majority regions from the Hindu majority regions of the state, situated to the east of river Chinab and the recognition of the Jammu and Kashmir State on the Indian Side as a ‘sphere of Muslim interests’ in India.

The Congress leaders accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan which envisaged a non-territorial settlement of the Muslim demand for the territorial division of India, in the hope of retaining the unity of India. The Cabinet Mission Plan in essence envisaged a Muslim State within a united India. The Cabinet Mission Plan was ingeniously designed by the British on the advice of the Muslim leaders of the Indian National Congress. The Plan lead straight to the division of India, when the Muslin League repudiated it on the issue of the princely states. However, had the Plan been  implemented, India would have been totally balkanized.

The acceptance of the territorial claims of Pakistan on Jammu and Kashmir under the cover of a non-territorial settlement is bound to impair the entire northern frontier of India from Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh. The pressures being built on India to recognize the territorial claims of China in Arunachal Pradesh, is a strategic maneuver to delink India from Himalayas as are the claims made on Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistan. The security of Himalayas is crucial to the unity and the territorial integrity of India. Non-territorial settlement is a sure recipe to compromise the security of the Himalayas. Indian People must put all the pressures on the Indian government to reclaim and retrieve Gilgit and Baltistan along with the Dardic dependencies of the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir. This reclamation will break the encirclement of India in the pincer-hold of the Anglo-American- Pakistan alliance and the Sino-Pakistan axis and give meaning to the ‘strategic partnership’ the Indian government claims to have established with the United States of America. The strategic partnership has no meaning so long the Americans act as a “laughing balancer’ in between Pakistan and China over the northern frontier of India.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

When the Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh expressed the decision of the Government of India to to take on board all the ‘stake holders’ of Jammu and Kashmir in order to reach a settlement , he was in real terms proposing a paradigm shift in the Indian stand on Jammu and Kashmir. The reference by the Prime Minister to the ‘stake holders’ is a dangerous interpolation in the vacillating positions taken by the Government of India on the very unity of India.

The partition and the upheaval which accompanied the founding of Pakistan, cost millions of lives of people who had fought for the freedom of their country and were consumed by the process which commenced with the Direct Action campaign the Muslim League launched in August 1946. The transfer of power led to the emergence of two countries, India and Pakistan , with their territories defined by the partition plan and the process of integration of the States, the lapse of British Paramountacyover the princely States, set into motion. The accession of Jammu and Kashmir State to India was accompalished by the ruler of the State, Maharaha Hari Singh, in accordance with the procedure laid down by the Indian Independence Act, enacted by the British Parliament and the Instrument of Accession drawn by the State Ministry of India.

It must be known that after the partition plan was announced on June 3 1947, the States’ Department of Government of India was divided into two parts: the States’ Ministry of India and the States’ Ministry of pakistan. Sardar Patel took over the charge of of the States’ Ministry of India while the Muslim League appointed Sardar Abdur-Rab-Nishtar to head the States’ Ministry of Pakistan. The Indian Independence Act and the partition plan did not incorporate any provisions in respect of the Instrument of Accession. Infact, the two divisions of the States’ Department, the States’ Ministry of India and the States’ Ministry of Pakistan drew up the form of the Instrument of Accession for the rulers of the princely States in order to enable them to join either of the two Dominions. The States’ Ministeries provided for such exigencies as well in which the princely States were unable to take a decision on the accession of the State till the transfer of power was completed and the ruler wanted more time to take a decision, but sought to continue the existing arrangement of trade, transport, communications, currency etc. that subsisted between the British India and the princely States during the British rule. For such exegencies the States’ Ministeries drew up separate instruments known as Standstill Agreements. The Standstill Agreements were strictly restricted in their content and application and provided for the continuation of the existing arrangements between the States and the British India.

It needs to be mentioned again here that the princely States were Kingships of the native Indian potentates, which formed an integral part of the British empire in India and were liberated from the british Paramountacy with the dissolution of the British Empire in India. The princely States did not become a part of the two Dominions with the lapse of Paramountacy, but they did not fall apart from the political arrangements, the transfer of power in India envisaged. The British Government made it clear that it would neither recognise the independence of the States nor admit them as independent Dominions of the British Commenwealth. Not only the British, the Americans too, refused to recognise the independence of the princely States, when some Muslim rulers approached the American Diplomatic Legation in New Delhi to solicit the recognition for the independence of their States.

Evidently the princely States were not land masses over which their rulers exercised proprietory rights. They were actually a part of the Indian nation, which the British divide into two separate constitutional organisations. Nor did the States form a no-man’s land in india, which any of the two Dominions or any other foreign power could claim on account of the religion of their rulers.The transfer of power in India did not divide the whole of india. Actually the partition was confined to the British Indian provinces, leaving the princely States out of its purview.

It also needs to be clarified here that the accession of the princely States underlined the irrevocable meger with the Dominions they acceded to . The accession made them a part of the Dominion and subjected them to its sovereignty. Accession of the States formed a part of the process which described the territorial jurisdiction of the two successor states of India and Pakistan.

The Jammu and Kashmir State, which had oferred a Standstill Agreement to the two Dominions was invaded by Pakistan. The accession of the State to India followed as a matter of course. Nehru was misled by Mountbatten, when the later advised the indian Prime Minister, to secure the accession of the State to India as an incumbent condition for the deployment of the indian troops in the State. India could not have left the State undefended. The British had not provided for any exigency in which a princely State needed to be defended from external threat and invasion. So long as the British were inIndia, the responsibility to defend the States fell upon them. But after the British left the Indian shores, the responsibility to defend the States fell upon India.

Inside the Security council as well as outside the Security Council the Indian Government insisted upon the finality of the accession of the State to india and its inviolability. The Indian Government refused to recognise the contention of Pakistan that the Muslim majority composition of the State of Jammu and Kashmir accord that country any right to claim it. India could not have allowed pakistan to jeopardise its freedom as well as its strategic interests in the Himalayas which formed the hinterland of the Indian frontier in the north.

The partition was foisted on Indian people against their will by the Muslims with the support of the British. The British were no longer the masters in India, and India was under no constraints, to allow Pakistan achieve its territorial ambitions in Jammu and Kashmir and Hyderabad where the Muslim ruler was invoved in intrigues to align with Pakistan in order to keep his State out of India. Jammu and Kashmir was vital to India because it formed the central spur of the northern frontier of India and crucial to the security of Himalayas. Hyderabad was situated deep inside India, south of the Vindhyas.

The lapse of Paramountacy was an unilateral process which underlined the withdrawal of British power from India. The Princes as well as the people of the States, the religious communities forming ethnic majorities in the States, were not a party to the lapse of Paramountacy. The two successor states ofIndia and Pakistan, formed by the division of the British India, as well, were not a part of lapse of Paramountacy. Who does the Manmohan Singh Government indentify as the ‘stake holders’in Jammu and Kashmir? There cannot be any stake holders to the unity of India, which is indivisible and inalienable.

The recognition of the right of any people in any part of India, to claim a veto on the unity of India is a negation of the nation of India. The Indian nation does not rest on the proportion of the population of the many communities which form the indian people. The Indian unity is an expression of the secular integration of the Indian people on the basis of the right to equality. The British divided India because they were a colonial power. No government of India, not even the government headed by Manmohan Singh, can preside over the vivisection of India on the ground that the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir claim a separate freedom.

The transfer of power in india in 1947, envisaged the liberation of the Indian nation from the colonial rule of the British, which the British refused to concede without recognising the corresponding claim made by the Muslims inIndia to a separate nation. The lapse of the Paramountacy, as explained here, underlined a parallel process for the liberation of the princely States and their integration with the successor States.

The partition of British India, the lapse of Paramountacy and the accession of the princely States were a part of the process of the transfer of power in India. Who, except India, is the ‘stake holder’in jammu and Kashmir. It is pertinent to note that when the National Conference leadership claimed separate charge in the Constituent Assembly of the State, independent of the accession of the State, the Indian Government refused to recognise any such claim.

*(The writer heads Panun Kashmir advisory).

By Dr. M.K. Teng

After the Foreign Secretary level talks between India and Pakistan, the meeting between the Prime Ministers of the two countries in Bhutan, has exposed the inconsistencies in the politics followed by India in dealing with what the Indian Government has called ‘ cross border terrorism’. For quite some time, the Indian Government repeatedly complained about the inability of Pakistan to act against the terrorist regimes, operating in that country, and accused it for the 26/11 attack on Mumbai.  There is enough ground to believe that the Indian Government has once again buckled under the American pressure and agreed to resume talks with Pakistan, ostensibly to smoothen relations with Pakistan, but in reality to find a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir, which Pakistan has insisted constitutes the core dispute responsible for destabilizing the relations between the two countries. However, Americans have not hidden their preference for a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir, which underlines a territorial adjustment altering very drastically, the geographical boundaries of India.

During the Cold War the Americans exhorted upon the Indians how important it was to settle the Kashmir dispute in the struggle to protect “open society and the free world” from totalitarianism. After the end of Cold War the Americans have spared no efforts to support the Muslim Jihad Pakistan waged in Afghanistan against the Soviet intervention though the Jihad spilt over into Jammu and Kashmir, ravaging the whole of the north of India. After 9/11 Al Qaeda attack, the Americans have been vociferously seeking to persuade the Indian leadership that a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir was vital for a purposeful prosecution of the “war against terror” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the recent past, many quarters in the United states have given expression to their dissatisfaction with the Indian Government, often in much less polite words, for its inability to recognize the American concern for a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir, which they claim could not be ignored in view of the urgency with which the Afghan campaign and the military operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban were being carried out.

Publicly the American concerns find expression in crude words, which are considered to be insolent in India, where a fairly large section of people speak English. Brian Trill of the Creator’s Syndicate, an American think tank, writes in a paper analyzing the military campaign in Afghanistan, “Thus Kashmir, the dispute at the centre of the bloody fissure between India and Pakistan, remains the most important region to the U.S. interests—and, ironically, it exists as one of the few conflicts over which we cannot wield significant influence. There has not been a call for U.S. mediation, the boisterous Indian population likely won’t stomach American pressure and there is a need to reiterate the loathing the Pakistanis feel towards the United States. Particularly the Pakistani military with whom power ultimately resides and which has the capacity to undermine any progress—is well steeped in distrust of the U.S.” Trill adds, “Indeed the defining struggle of our time- unlike those of previous generations that pitted competing imperial aggressions and ambitions and competing capitalist and communist ideologies against one another—our challenge and foe exists outside the State-system; it is the battle against lawlessness, backwardness and statelessness.” Another American Patrick Seale advocates, “an immediate and vigorous US-UN effort to broker a settlement over Kashmir—and if not a settlement then at least a reasonably amicable settlement which India, Pakistan, and the Kashmiris could live with.” Seale further  notes, “The US should use its full diplomatic clout to bring this about because Kashmir weighs heavily on the situation in Afghanistan, So long as the Kashmir conflict remains unresolved, the Pakistan military and intelligence services will think that they need Jihadi allies to put down the sizeable chunk of the Indian army in Kashmir and keep Indian influence at bay in Afghanistan, a country Pakistan considers its strategic depth.”

There is enough evidence to believe that the Americans are as committed to fortify Afghanistan as a forward post in their Asian policy as they were committed to protect it in the aftermath of the Soviet intervention. There is also enough reason to believe that the Americans seek to strengthen the Muslim power of Pakistan in a more effective way than they did during the Cold War, for their interest in the Himalayas is as deep as it was in the Cold War era. Gilgit-Baltistan horn of the northern frontier of Jammu and Kashmir, now under the occupation of Pakistan, reorganized into what is known as ‘Northern Region’ is vital to Anglo-American- Pakistan alliance structure in Asia, as it was during the Cold War era.

The American opinion is aware of the significance of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the future foreign policy formulations of the allied powers in Asia. The Commander of the allied troops in Afghanistan strongly pleads for a long military presence in Afghanistan committed to “winning or buying over dissidents, expanding the Afghan army and police and reforming and strengthening the Kabul government.” Former American Secretary of State for foreign affairs Henery Kissinger, the American Vice- President Joe Biden, Jhon Kerry, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, say the same thing in different words. An American journalist warns that the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan and Pakistan will have catastrophic consequences. “NATO will fold. So will Pakistan”.  That is exactly where the Indians are required to make good the forfeit to keep Pakistan and the Muslims on the American side while they fight the Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere in the world.

There is hardly any doubt about the existence of pressures on the Indian Government to resolve its differences with Pakistan and the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir. There is a visible uneasiness pervading the pronouncements of Indian leaders and an ominous sense of helplessness spread across the national discourse on the whole gamut of relations between India and the other countries of the world, particularly the neighboring countries. The solemn statement of the Indian Prime Minister that “India could not change her neighbors” and therefore, India was bound to buy peace with them, at the cost they demanded is a counsel of despair. Apparently the Indian Prime Minister is convinced that after all, the decades of the Indian commitment to “Panch-Sheel and Peaceful Coexistence”, “Non- Alignment”, “No first Use of Nuclear Weapons”, and “Non-Violence”, India is isolated in a world where the force is the ultimate arbiter of all inter-state relations. But why then does the Indian Prime Minister shirk from telling the truth to Indian People that, India needs a complete reappraisal of its foreign policy postulates and the Indian political class needs to come out of its intransigence, which has brought the country to such a pass? Indian Prime Minister must tell the nation about what is the “Strategic Partnership” between the Indians and Americans worth, if it underlines the demolition of the northern frontiers of India with the objective of excluding India from any future balance of power in Asia, which the Americans consider necessary for the stability of the “new world order”. For the people of India, these questions need to be answered.

The Americans are using the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir as a lever to smother India into submission. Pakistan is also using the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir, as a lever to secure submission of India. And China is also using Jammu and Kashmir as a lever to smother India into submission. The USA, China and Pakistan have common strategic objectives to follow. Pakistan seeks to (a) open the way for the eastward expansion of the Muslim power of Pakistan into Jammu and Kashmir; (b) demolish the northern frontier of India to establish its hold on the Himalayas and (c) assume a central role in the shaping a future balance of power in Asia. The Americans are eager to (a) consolidate their military presence in Gilgit-Baltistan region to extend the reach of the Anglo-American-Pakistani alliance over the Himalayas; (b) use the Muslim power of Pakistan- spread over the Afghanistan, Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir for penetration into Central Asia; and (c) to acquire a factorial role in determining the future balance of power in Asia. The Chinese are keen to consolidate their hold on the Indian territories south of McMohan Line under their occupation; (b) establish its reach over the eastern Himalayas and reach out to Central Asia; and (c) to join United States and Pakistan in the establishment of a triangular balance of power in Asia, in which the Muslim power of Pakistan acts as the balancer, or the laughing partner.

Government of India should realize that the British fortified the northern frontier of their empire in India, which was forged by the Sikhs. It should also know that the Sikhs laid down the northern frontier of India on the ground which had been cut centuries before the Sikh empire was founded, by the Hindus of Kashmir, who Sanskritised the Himalayas. The triangular balance of power in Asia, the Anglo- American- Muslim alliance and the Sino- Pakistan axis seek to realize, can only be achieved by the de- Sanskritisation of the Himalayas.

If the Americans fight for the safety of their borders in a country as far away as Afghanistan, how is it that the Indians do not deem it was necessary to secure their borders In Jammu and Kashmir? Do the Indians believe that after they got rid of Jammu and Kashmir, the Americans, the Pakistanis, and the Chinese would guarantee the neutrality of their borders?

*(The author heads Panun Kashmir Advisory)

Dr MK Teng

The study undertaken by Sandhya Jain , published by Rupa-co, New Delhi, in an attractively designed volume, titled “ Evangelical Intrusions- Tripura, a case study” is the first systematic and in-depth inquiry into the evangelical intervention in the religious cultures of the tribal societies and indigenous peoples of India to “ coerce the entire tribal populace to convert to a millenarian tradition.” The study is a bold attempt to investigate into “concerted efforts by several western evangelical denominations to achieve their objective of complete conversion” of the tribal peoples and the inability of the Indian state to support the tribal and the indigenous people to preserve their religious cultural tradition. The state of Tripura, situated in the north-east of India, where the evangelical intrusion has been widespread, forms the universe of the field-study. Tripura, the author notes “was chosen as the subject of the study because its large tribal population is resisting organized armed assault upon its native faith and way of life”.

The problem of evangelical intrusions in India is a part of the larger problem of Semitisation of the Indian Society, which has a longer history in India, and forms an important aspect of the political sociology of the Indian people. The promise of redemption basic to all religious expressions of the Semitic civilization, has been widely used during last several hundred years, more specifically, after the Peace of Westphiallia in 1648, as a portent instrument of state policy for the expansion of the political power and in the consolidation of imperial authority over the peoples subject to colonial dominance. India, a nation of the former colonial peoples, ruled by the British for centuries, was freed from the bondage, two years after the end of Second World War, which brought the era of colonialism to its close. The ideological commitment of the colonial powers to spread the promise of redemption assumed blatantly crude expression in India, where the boundaries of the Sanskrit civilization were remotely visible and less resistant to evangelical intervention.

Sandhya Jain makes a departure from the generally accepted methodological paradigms followed in the study of social change in India. Her work makes the beginning of a new academic effort, which may in the years to come, provide an alternative methodological framework, and which may delink the study of social change in India from its reformist trappings. Sandhya Jain underlines a methodological format which is not confined to the investigation into the structure and function of a fixed-set, which the Semitic methodological paradigms underline. Her work has a normative dimension. The frame of reference she has adopted for evaluation is not located in liberal- reformism and its abstract derivatives of logical positivism. It is located in the history of the Sanskrit Civilization of India. She takes pains to relate the evolution of tribal traditions and ritual cultures of the indigenous peoples of India to the continuity of the Indian History.

The work is a bold attempt to unravel data and facts to establish that the Semitisation, as a part of the political process of the colonial era, continues to be followed uninterruptedly in the independent India. The survey, Sandhya notes, is “aimed to test the hypothesis that over the past few years an increasing number of tribal hamlets and households have been directly or indirectly ‘invited’ to embrace a monotheistic religion.” She notes further: “The questionnaires were designed to learn if inducements were made, if there was any violent incident in the village or its vicinity, if there was an atmosphere of fear due to incidents in the neighboring areas, if there was native resentment against the attempts of proseletisation, and tribal leaders were contacted to understand if change of faith disrupted family or community life and culture and the resultant cultural alienation.” The revelations she has made are startling. “The conversions do not appear suomoto, but by deliberate interventions of other actors, usually organized groups, with the objective of expanding their influence in the life of a community, state and nation. Conversions by external faiths are inherently political, which is why they are backed by foreign funds, foreign evangelists and political support from foreign countries. In the contemporary world conversions are portent political and emotional issues as changes in religious demography have been intimately linked to secessionist movements and partitions. Besides being deeply divisive of natal societies, conversions (and partitions) are usually achieved with violence and foreign interventions.”

Sandhya Jain admits that the inspiration to undertake the study came from the persistent reports of religious political violence in the north-eastern states of India, in some of which proseletisation and religious conversion was accompanied by the growth of separatist and secessionist movements. Her investigations have yielded facts, which establish that the political objectives of the separatists and secessionist movements are “linked to an agenda of religious conversion which is rupturing the cultural and civilisational unity of the native faith and culture”. Evangelical intervention in the traditional social culture of India, she states, is a deliberately planned political campaign to bring about change in the tribal belief-systems and cultural mores which, “involves the rejection of the natal socio-economic tradition and community and transferring allegiance to the faith originating outside the national boundaries.” The objectives, She stresses are evident. With foreign governments, “ playing a pro-active role in funding evangelism and promoting it through a foreign policy and the intrusive activism of human rights groups”, proseletisation assumes the form of a religious campaign for political objectives- a form of neo-colonial expansion under the cover of religious freedom.

A large part of the study is devoted to an in-depth investigation into the religious cultures of tribal peoples of Tripura. The inferences she has drawn from the facts and data, her investigation has yielded, has demolished many myths such as: (a) that the tribal cultures in India are an expression of a historical disconnect in the evolution of the Indian civilization and therefore the religious cultures of the tribal and indigenous people of India form a separate universe of spiritual experience; (b) that the tribal people follow religious practices which form a part of the pagan past of India; (c) that the tribal communities need to be insulated from their environment which is predominantly Hindu to preserve their autochthonous identity; and (d) the tribal people must be assured the right to religious freedom, to accept the promise of redemption that the Semitisation offers, to salvage them from their pagan past.

The study has brought to surface evidence of interlocking processes of social change in India, which relate the belief-systems and the ritual structures of the tribal peoples to the Sanskrit religious culture of India.  The study uncovers the Sanskrit sub-stratum of the religious culture of the tribal people. “In India,” Sandhya notes, “natal faith traditions are viewed as a part of the civilisational continuum, and tribes are embedded in this larger civilization. Movement across the spectrum is neither threatening nor objectionable because there is an intrinsic unity of the civilization as a whole.” Cutting through the conventional approaches to the understanding of the tribal cultures and the cultures of the indigenous people in India, Sandhya Jain formulates a new set of theoretical propositions for a more objective inquiry into the traditions, belief-systems and ritual structures of the tribal people in India. Sandhya notes, “Tripura’s ancient tribes represent the coherence and the continuity of a living civilization, which embraces, absorbs, exchanges values, with peoples and cultures that have arisen from the same socio-geographic matrix”. In her search for a frame of reference, she turns to the history of the Hindu India and writes, “Hindus appreciate diversity as they accept similarity; and the absence of homogeneity does not inculcate fear, loathing or intolerance, much less the desire to enforce uniformity by eradicating cultural distinctiveness A shared universe is quickly established with the threads of unity and multiplicity, and this is the most striking aspect of the description above. The religious beliefs, traditions and rituals of Tripura tribes reveal the integrated matrix upon which their culture and civilization is founded and a cohesiveness that embraces their non-tribal neighbors, whose beliefs, prayers and practices have been joyously embraced by the regions autochthones.”

The study reveals that the traditions and rituals of the tribal communities and indigenous people in India are not pagan practices. The Sanskrit civilization does not have a pagan past. Pagan history is a part of the Semitic civilization. “ Nor can we countenance academic distortion of the spiritual beliefs of vulnerable communities through the use of terminology such as ‘animism’, ‘spirit worship’, ‘ghosts’, or ‘pagan’, which have no basis in the idiom of the tradition being discussed, but are a part of verbal abuse by those seeking to exterminate an ancient way of life”.

The promise of redemption cannot salvage people who do not have a pagan past. No Right to freedom of religion can entitle the tribal communities and indigenous people in India to opt for salvation by accepting the promise of redemption. Sandhya Jain rightly notes, “Dharma is primarily a matter of family, clan, social, religious and cultural inheritance. All human beings are born into a spiritual tradition and initiated into beliefs, customs, philosophy, tenants and taboos from an early period of life, just as they are provided with a family name, Jati and Kula at birth. Ordinarily a human being does not grow without a faith and then choose a dharma on intellectual merit or emotional appeal on achieving adulthood. The argument that an individual, born embedded in a faith has the right to arbitrarily uproot himself and cause hurt and injury to his natal family, clan, tradition and community is faulty and subversive of ancient societies.” The Evangelical Intrusions exposes the perfidy. She records, “the contention that religion is a matter of individual choice is not borne out by the experience of human society anywhere in the world. This specious plea is in fact a legal subterfuge by those seeking to earn adherents to a particular religious ideology by atomizing human society in order to break and undermine traditions”.

Evangelical interv-ention to induce change in the indigenous social forms, from outside their systemic boundaries, poses a threat to the existence of the indigenous peoples and tribal communities in India. It poses a greater threat to the Sanskrit substratum of their tribal traditions and cultures. The fundamental issue, evangelical intervention underlines, is not whether India recognizes the freedom of choice of the Indian people to accept the promise of redemption for their salvation. The fundamental issue, evangelical intervention in India involves, is whether India recognizes the promise of redemption as the objective of social change. The acceptance of the promise of redemption as an objective of social change by the Indian people, tantamounts to the abandonment of the continuity of the Indian history. The recognition of the continuity of the history of the Indian civilization forms the bedrock of the unity of the Indian people and their national identity.

Sandhya Jain has sounded a warning, “Our study revealed that there is merit in the conviction of Tripura’s tribal communities that there exists a grand coordination between the evangelical and insurgent groups operating in the state. Equally their misgivings that the drive to win converts is powered by a political agenda, viz, to carve out a separate Christian state(s) in the North-east, cannot be dismissed as utterly baseless, particularly after the carving out of an oil rich Christian East Timor from Muslim Indonesia in 2002. Evangelism in the sensitive North-East can thus pose a serious threat to India’s territorial integrity, cultural diversity and civilisational unity.”

The study is expected to be of help to the common reader as well as the researcher. To the former the study is expected to help in the understanding of the issues involved in the various processes of evangelical intervention in the tribal cultures and traditions of the indigenous peoples in the North-East of India. To the latter, the study is expected to provide an alternate methodological model for the study of social change in India as well as furnish him valuable data and facts in respect of the “religio-cultural traditions” and demographic configuration of the indigenous peoples in India. To the scholar the study is also expected to give an insight into the processes of Semitisation of the Indian society, which has been going on this country, almost unnoticed, throughout the years of its freedom. In India, the secularization of government and society is tilted in favour of the, “right to freedom of faith”, more than committed to the secular integration of the Indian people on the basis of the fundamental right to equality. Both, the right to freedom of faith and the right to equality are enshrined in the Constitution of India. The cleavage between the right to freedom of faith and the right to equality as the basis for the secular integration of the Indian people, irrespective of creed and religion, is brought to surface by this study. A new beginning needs to be made to investigate into the political ramifications of the ideological conflict, evangelical intrusion in India underlines.

By M.K. Teng

August 2010

The sudden outburst of anger with which the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Syed Mohamood Qureshi, reacted to what happened in the Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Islamabad, needs to be considered more seriously. The acrimony which pervaded the conference has brought to surface, very wide differences in the perspectives of Government, of India and Pakistan, in respect of South Asia as a regional complex of inter-state relationships and the future Asian balance of power, which is taking shape with the emergence of China as a major Asian military power. The two countries also differ in their strategic outlook and seek to achieve diametrically diverse objectives from the dialogue they have so eagerly continued for many more decade now.

Pakistan has been insisting upon the structurisation of the composite dialogue between the two countries in a way that ensures the priority of the issues which it considers vital to its interests, within a time-frame, it believes, Pakistan has a right to lay down. Obviously the Foreign Minister of Pakistan felt uneasy, when S.M. Krishna stressed upon the need to tackle the problem of terrorism on a basis of priority. Perhaps Qureshi did not expect Krishna to do that. And he had good reason to do so. Infact, India never took a firm stand on terrorism, which the Jehadi war groups in Pakistan waged the Jammu and Kashmir and in the other parts of the country. India always resorted to invoke good neighbourly relations with Pakistan and sought the cooperation of that country to put a curb on the terrorist regimes operating from its soil.

The Indian Foreign Minister did not invite the jibe from his counter-part the Foreign Minister of Pakistan on account of the statement the India Home Secretary had made. For Qureshi, the comment made by the Home Secretary was not so uncommon a statement and was a repetition of what the Indian officials of various stations had been telling Pakistan, right from the time the terrorist violence struck Mumbai. Qureshi felt angry, because everyone in Pakistan was angry on the insistence of India on the urgency to deal with cross-border terrorism. The government and the people of Pakistan never budged from their stand that the settlement on Jammu and Kashmir could not be subjected to the fulfilment of their commitments to fight terrorism. Everyone in Pakistan told the Indians in unmistakable terms that a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir, which was acceptable to them and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir, was a precedent condition for the successful conclusion of the war on terrorism they were waging in Afghanistan and their own country alongside their allies.

One fundamental aspect of the cross-border terrorism, the Jehadi war groups have been incessantly carrying on in India, has received much less attention in this country. The terrorist violence Pakistan has been exporting out of its borders, right from the time it joined the Muslim resistance against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to the time it commenced the militarisation of the Muslim separatist movement in Jammu and Kashmir in 1989, as well as the war of subversion the intelligence agencies of that country has been waging in the other parts of India, during the last two decades, is an organised military campaign committed to the Islamic Jehad. In Afganistan, the Jehad was ideologically committed to the liberation of the Muslims in Afghanistan from the Soviet army of occupation. In Jammu and Kashmir and the other parts of India, the Jehad is ideologically committed to the freedom of the Muslims in a Hindu dominicated India, where they are sub-servient to the law and order of a society, which is not based upon the theological imperatives of Islam.

Jehad is not a political struggle. It is a more profound and subtle prescription for social change than a political struggle is. It is an ideological commitment of the whole Muslim Umah to a social and political order, which is based upon the law and precept of Islam.

The Jehad in Jammu and Kashmir, the leadership and the people in Pakistan including the so-called civil society  believe, cannot be subjected to the process of a dialogue between India and Pakistan, which is aimed at the settlement of the issues between the two countries. For any Islamic state, including Pakistan, Jehad transcends all limitations on national power imposed internally or externally.

For the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Shah Mohammad Qureshi, the priority therefore was not the end of the cross-border terrorism the Indian Foreign Minister sought to take up for consideration. The priority was the discussion on Kashmir, where the Muslim separatist mobs were actively engaged in an anti-India agitation. Qureshi sought to send the Muslim separatist mobs a message. He did that effectively. The Muslims in Kashmir quickly erupted, into a widespread ding dong battle with the Indian security forces and left about thirty five protestors dead. S.M. Krishna, who bore the insult hurled on him by Qureshi with a stoic indifference, rued the indiscretion of the Indian Home Secretary unmindful of what his counterpart had accomplished.

The intolerance of the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, to the Indian way of carrying on the dialogue, manifest in his anger, reflected his eagerness to pin down India on Jammu and Kashmir. For Pakistan, the composite dialogue with India is aimed to achieve one political objective : secession of Jammu and Kashmir from India and its eventual inclusion in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Once India is pinned down to a discussion on Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan will repeat its star performance to coax India to handover Jammu and Kashmir to that country on account of the Muslim majority composition of its population, or more conveniently, handover to that country the Muslim majority regions of the state situated to the west of the river Chenab. Infact, all the proposals which Pakistan has agreed to discuss as a basis for a settlement of the Kashmir dispute so far, have revolved round the secession of the Muslim majority region of the state, situated west of the river Chenab from India, while Pakistan retained its hold on the occupied territories of Pak occupied Kashmir, the Northern Areas, now renamed as Gilgit-Baltistan province of Pakistan along with the tribal Dardic dependencies of the state, which were annexed by Pakistan to its territories in 1947.

The much-hyped Manmohan Singh-Musharraf plan too underlined the same proposals of delinking of the Muslim majority regions of the state from India, under the cover of self-rule, demilitarisation and joint control. Musharraf knew what he had accomplished. Manmohan Singh unaware of what he was asked to give away, groped in the dark.

Manmohan Singh walked the proverbial “extra-mile”, but Musharraf was cast aboard by the so-called civil society in Pakistan which was backed by the Muslim fundamentalist flanks in that country as well as its army command. Neither the Jehadi war groups nor the armed forces in Pakistan approved of the Manmohan Singh Musharraf plan. This plan did not receive the approval of Jehadi war-groups operating inside Jammu and Kashmir as well.

The present Government of Pakistan has no need for the Musharraf proposals. Qureshi’s demand for a “time-bound” and “result oriented” dialogue” between the two countries, reveals the real intentions of the Government of Pakistan to carry the dialogue process further. Pakistan seeks to confront India with the apparently simplicitic demand of a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir, which is acceptable to the Muslims in there. Further Pakistan wants India to take the initiative to re-shape the composite dialogue and put up the Kashmir issue on the top of its agenda.

That is the message, Qureshi actually sent to India, when he told the the Indian Foreign Minister that Pakistan wanted the talks between the two countries to be meaningful and effective. In carefully chosen words the Foreign Minister of Pakistan told S.M. Krishna to convey to his government in Delhi that, (a) Pakistan considered the dispute between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir central to the composite dialogue; (b) Pakistan would not agree to subordinate the Kashmir dispute to the Indian complaint on terrorism or any other extraneous issue, including Siachin and Sir Creek; (c) Pakistan would accept a settlement on the Kashmir dispute which is approved by the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir; and (d) Pakistan would want the dialogue to be time bound, to ensure that it is result oriented.

Qureshi left no one in India in doubt that in case India refused to shape the dialogue process the way Pakistan wanted to, the blame for obstructing purposeful talks, would fall upon India. Qureshi did not tell the Indian people that Pakistan would use the refusal of India to negotiate a settlement on Kashmir, to legitimise the Jehad against India. The Indian office missed to pick up the signal. The ongoing strife and violence in the State cannot be delinked from the acrimony in which the Islamabad conference ended.

*(The author heads Panun Kashmir advisory)

By Dr. M.K. Teng

November 2010

Distortion of the history of the partition of India, false propaganda and lies, shroud the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India in 1947, as well as the exclusion of the State from the Indian Constitutional organization by virtue of Article370 of the Indian Constitution in 1950. The Indian political class in its attempt to substitute “greater autonomy “of the State, for the “right of self-determination” , Pakistan and the Muslim separatist forces have been demanding during the last six decades, has undermined the national consensus on the unity of India and the secular Integration of the people of the State and people of India on the basis of the general  right to equality.

Today the whole nation is confronted with a situation which threatens to disrupt the unity of the country and endanger its territorial integrity. The people of India need to stand up as one man to expose the perfidy which has virtually pushed the State of Jammu and Kashmir to the brink of disaster. Nearly half of the State is under the occupation of Pakistan. To allow the reorganization of the other half into a separate sphere of Muslim power, will eventually pave the way for the disintegration of the civilisational boundaries of the Indian State.

Partition and the States

The creation of two Dominions of India and Pakistan was restricted to the division of the British India and the separation of the British Indian provinces of Sind, Baluchistan, North-west Frontier Province, the Muslim majority contiguous regions of the province of the Punjab, the Muslim majority eastern region of the province of Bengal along with the Muslim majority regions of the Hindu majority province of Assam. The princely States, which formed an integral part of the British Indian Empire, were not brought within the scope of the partition plan.

The process of the transfer of power envisaged the lapse of Paramountacy, the authority the British Crown exercised over the States, liberating them from the British imperial authority. The lapse of the Paramountacy underlined the reversion of the powers, which the British exercised in respect of the princely States, to their rulers who were required, in accordance with the transfer of power, to accede to either of the two dominions or come to such agreements with them as they deemed fit. The British as well as the Muslim League insisted upon the lapse of the Paramountacy and the reversion of the powers to determine the future of the States, to their rulers. Both the British as well as Muslim league stubbornly opposed the proposals made by the Indian National Congress to empower the people of the States to determine the future disposition of their States in respect of their accession. 

It is important to note that the States formed an integral part of the British Empire in India and were never recognized as independent entities by the British during their rule over India. The lapse of the   Paramountacy did not imply the independence of the States. This was made expressly clear by   British under-Secretary of State for India, during the debate on the Indian Independence Bill in the British Parliament, when he categorically stated that the British Government would neither accord the status of Dominions to any princely State nor recognize its independence. In fact, the truth is that while negotiations on the partition plan were in progress, the British officials assured Nehru and the other Indian leaders that if the partition plan was accepted, the Hindu majority provinces and regions of the British India as well as the princely States would be united in the Dominion of India. 

The Indian Independence Act did not lay down any provisions in respect of the procedure for the accession of the princely States to the two dominions and the terms on which the accession would be accomplished. After the 3 June Declaration the States Department of the Government of India was divided into two sections: the Indian Section which was placed under Sardar Patel and the Pakistan Section which was placed under Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar of the Muslim League. The task of laying down the procedure of the accession of the States to India was entrusted to the Indian Section and the task of laying down the procedure for accession of the States to Pakistan was entrusted to the Pakistan Section. The Indian Section drew up an Instrument of Accession for the accession of States to India. So did the Pakistan Section for the accession of States to Pakistan. The Instrument of Accession enshrined the procedure and the terms in accordance with which the rulers acceded to either of the two Dominions. The Instrument of Accession drawn up by the Indian Section laid down two sets f terms and procedures, one for the larger princely States and the other for the smaller princely States. It is important to note here that the States were provided no option, except to accede to India on the terms and conditions laid down by Indian Section or to accede to Pakistan on the terms and conditions laid down by the Pakistani Section of the Indian States Department. All the larger princely States which acceded to India, including Jammu and Kashmir, signed the same standard form of the Instrument of Accession and accepted the terms it enshrined.

The Instrument of Accession enshrined acceptance by the rulers of princely States to unite their domains with the Dominion of India on terms and conditions and in accordance with the procedure laid down by it. It has been already noted here that princely States were never recognized by the British as independent entities. They formed a subsidiary structure of the British colonial organization of India which was subject to the British Crown. The lapse of Paramountacy did not alter their status. Yes, the dissolution of the Paramountacy opened the way for them to stake claim to independence. Several of the princely States in fact did stake their claim for independence. When the British refused to recognize the independence of the States, the Nawab of Bhopal, who was then the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes approached the American Diplomatic Mission in India to solicit support for the independence of the States. The American Mission promptly turned down the request of the Nawab. That left no option for the Nawab to accept to accede to India, which he did without any loss of time. The ruler of Jammu and Kashmir was not among the rulers, who staked claim for independence of his State.

The Instrument of Accession signed by the rulers of the princely States, including Jammu and Kashmir, stipulated the unification of the States with the two successor States of the British Empire in India. The transfer of power in India underlined the creation of only two successor States of the British Indian Empire: the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. The lapse of the Paramountacy put the States on the inevitable course which led them to accede to either of the two successor States.

The rulers located within the geographical boundaries of the Dominion of Pakistan, acceded to Pakistan. The ruler of Kalat, who was opposed to the accession of Kalat to the Dominion of Pakistan, was smothered into submission by the Muslim League with the active support of the British. All the other princely States were situated in the geographical boundaries earmarked for the Dominion of India. The State of Jammu and Kashmir was contiguous with both India and Pakistan. Its borders stretched along the boundaries of the Dominion of Pakistan in the West and the South-west, while its borders in the East and the South-east rimmed the frontiers of the Dominion of India. The ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh harbored no illusions about the accession of his State to Pakistan and eagerly awaited a clearance from the Congress leaders, who had secretly advised him not to take any precipitate action in respect of the accession of his State, till Hyderabad and Junagarh were retrieved. He himself was aware of the dangers of any wrong step on his part, which he knew would lead to a chain reaction in the States ruled by the Muslim rulers. He did not want his State to be used as a pawn by Pakistan.

 Pakistan had no special claim to Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Muslim majority composition of its population. As already mentioned here the Muslim League strongly opposed any suggestion to recognize the right of the people of the princely States to determine the future of the States. It was only when Pakistan failed to grab Jammu and Kashmir after it invaded the State in October 1947, and the Indian military action frustrated its designs to swallow Hyderabad and Junagarh, both the States located deep inside India, that Pakistan raised the bogey of self-determination of the Muslims of the State of Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of their numerical majority.

Accession    

The Instrument of Accession was executed by the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir State on the terms specified by the Dominion of India. Neither the ruler of the State, Maharaja Hari Singh, nor the National Conference leaders played any role in the determination of the terms, the Instrument of Accession underlined. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and many National conference leaders were in jail when the transfer of power in India was accomplished by the British. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was released from Jail on 29 September 1947, about a month and a half after the British had left India. Three days after his release the Working Committee of the National Conference met under his presidentship and took the decision to support the accession of the State to India. The decision of Working Committee was conveyed to Nehru by Dwarka Nath Kachroo, the Secretary General of the All India States Peoples’ Conference, who was invited to attend the Working Committee meeting of the National Conference as an observer. Kachroo was a Kashmiri Pandit who had steered the movement of the All India States Peoples’ Conference during the fateful days in 1946-1947, when partition and the transfer of power in India were on the anvil.

Interestingly the National Conference leadership kept the decisions of the Working Committee as a closely guarded secret. Within a few days after the Working Committee meeting, the National Conference leaders sent secret emissaries to Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the other Muslim League leaders. While Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah held talks with a number of Muslim League leaders of  the Punjab, who had come to Srinagar after his release, he sent two of the senior most leaders of  the National Conference, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq, to Pakistan to open talks with the Muslim League leaders. Jinnah spurned the offer of reconciliation the National Conference leaders made and refused to meet the National Conference emissaries. Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq was still in Pakistan when Pakistan invaded the State during the early hours of 22 October 1947.

While the invading army spread across the State Hari Singh sent his Prime Minister, Mehar Chand Mahajan to Delhi to seek help to save his State from the invasion and offered accession of the State with India. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah had already reached Delhi. He made no secret of the danger the State faced and asked Nehru to lose no time in accepting the accession and ensuring the speedy dispatch of the Indian troops to the State. The instrument of Accession was taken to Jammu by V. P. Menon, where it was signed by the Maharaja. Menon then rushed back to Delhi and got the Instrument Accepted by Mountbatten. Next day, the air-borne troops of the Indian Army, reached Srinagar.

Hari Singh laid no conditions for the accession of the State to India. The National Conference leaders were nowhere near the process of the Accession of the State, to lay down any condition for the accession of the State to India. The Congress leaders including Nehru made no promises to the National Conference leaders. The terms of the Instrument of Accession were not altered in any respect by the Viceroy. Nehru, Patel or any other Congress leader gave no assurance to the Conference leaders about autonomy or Special Status of the State. In fact the National Conference leaders did not make any such demands at any time, while the process of the accession was in progress.

The National conference leaders demanded the exclusion of Jammu and Kashmir from the Indian constitutional organization in the summer of 1949, when the Constituent Assembly of India was in the midst of framing the Constitution of India. This was the time when the foreign power intervention in Jammu and Kashmir had just begun to have its effect on the deliberations of the Security Council as well as the developments in the State. 

Legal platitudes apart, the letter written by Mountbatten to Hari Singh suggesting to elicit the opinion of his people, did not prejudice the stipulations of the Instrument of Accession. The Governor General of India did not have the power to alter the stipulations of the Instrument of Accession, nor did Nehru, the Prime Minister of the Interim Government of India, have any powers to make any alterations.

The Instrument of Accession was an act performed by the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir to unite his domains with the State of India. Mountbatten, in the capacity of the Crown Prince as well as in the capacity of the Governor General of India, had only one power to exercise: to accept the Instrument of Accession, executed by the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir. The fact is that as the Crown Prince and the Governor General of the Indian Dominion, he exercised powers vested in him by the Indian Independence Act, which were strictly limited to his acceptance of the accession of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh offered. It is important to note that Mountbatten could not refuse to accept the Accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India. Indeed he had no powers to refuse to accept the Accession of any other State to India. So much so that he did not refuse to accept the accession of Junagarh to India, which was accomplished in a political crisis, the rebellion of the people of the State against the ruler led to.

Moreover Mountbatten did not write the covering letter to Maharaja, because the National Conference leaders had laid down any condition to that effect, or because composition of the population of the State of Jammu and Kashmir was dominantly Muslim. Both Mountbatten’s letter and Nehru’s commitment to elicit the opinion of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, was in continuation of the commitments the Congress rulers had made to rulers and the people of Hyderabad and Junagarh.

Nawab of Hyderabad was trying frantically to align his State to Pakistan against the wishes of his people. Hyderabad was situated deep inside the Indian mainland, south of the Vindhyas and Junagarh was situated in the midst of Kathiawad States which had acceded to India. The accession of Junagarh to Pakistan and the insistence of the Nawab of Hyderabad threatened to disrupt the unity of India and balkanize it. Nehru as well as Patel pleaded with the Nawab of Hyderabad to ascertain the wishes of his people in respect of the accession of his State. Nehru as well as Mountbatten repeatedly requested the leaders of Pakistan to agree to refer the accession of Junagarh to Pakistan, to the people of the State. While Mehar Chand Mahajan was pleading with Nehru to accept the accession offered by Hari Singh, Junagarh was in a state of civil war and Nawab of Hyderabad was secretly plotting with Pakistan the course of action he would take after Hari Singh had acceded with India. Nehru sought to reinforce his interests in Hyderabad and Junagarh by repeating the offer of eliciting the opinion of the people of Jammu and Kashmir in respect of their accession.

The Instrument of Accession was a political instrument and the accession of Jammu and Kashmir was a political act, which had international implications for it formed a part of the process of the creation of the state of India. As such the Instrument of Accession, executed by Maharaja Hari Singh, was irreversible and irreducible, irrespective of the circumstances and events in which it was accomplished.

The Indian princely States were not required to execute any Instrument of Merger. The claim made by some quarters in Jammu and Kashmir that the State had not signed the Instrument of Merger, which such quarters insist, saved Jammu and Kashmir from being integrated in the constitutional organization of India, is a travesty of History. The State Department of India laid down a procedure for the integration of smaller princely States into administratively more viable Unions of States. To complete the procedure of integration of the small princely States into the Unions of States, The State Department drew up an Instrument of Attachment, erroneously described as Instrument of Merger. The major Indian States, including Jammu and Kashmir were not required to sign the Instrument of Attachment. Also Instrument of Accession had no bearing on the integration of the States into the Indian Constitutional Organization.

The withdrawal of the invading army of Pakistan from territories of the State under its occupation was the precedent condition, laid down by Mountbatten, Nehru and the Security Council for any reference to the people of Jammu and Kashmir State. Pakistan refused to withdraw its forces from the occupied territories of the State. It has so far distorted the discourse of the accession of the State to suit its denial.

(Dr Mohan Krishen Teng is a retired Head of Department of Political science of Kashmir University. He has written extensively on the constitutional and political history of Jammu and Kashmir. His seminal works on Article 370, Special Status, and government and politics in Jammu and Kashmir have been internationally acclaimed.)

By Dr. M.K. Teng

January 2011

The so-called composite dialogue between India and Pakistan, aimed to find a settlement on the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir, has so far revolved round two main presumptions: first, that the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir is a Muslim problem confined to the valley of Kashmir and secondly, a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir must be acceptable to the Muslims of Pakistan and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir. A feeling has been allowed to grow in this country and abroad that the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir was never so intractable that an agreement could not have been reached between India and Pakistan and the sufferings to which Muslims in Kashmir are subjected to, mitigated. The presumption that the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir is in its essence a Muslim problem has its basis in the ideological commitments of the Muslim struggle for Pakistan, the All India Muslim League spearheaded. The Muslim League claimed Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Muslim majority composition of its population. In Pakistan, at various levels of public debate on Jammu and Kashmir, the issue is not where Jammu and Kashmir belongs to. The issue is how to bring the unification of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan. People of Pakistan do not entertain any doubt about the legitimacy of their territorial claim on Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Muslim majority composition of its population. They insist upon a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir, which is acceptable to them as well as  to the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir.

The claim, that Pakistan has made, that the unification of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan was an essential condition for the completion of the partition of India is a primary misnomer. That it was never contested by the Indian political class, led in the long run to its growing into a gospel of faith amongst the Muslims in Pakistan and everywhere else, Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of India being no exception. Partition was confined to the British India and the princely States including Jammu and Kashmir were excluded from the purview of the partition. More importantly, the composition of the population of the States, Jammu and Kashmir being no exception, was never recognized as a concomitant condition for the founding of the Muslim homeland of Pakistan. In fact, the severest of the opposition to the recognition of the composition of population as a factor in the determination of their future affiliations, came from Muslim League leaders-the founding fathers of Pakistan, and the British who supported the Muslim League in its struggle to divide India.

The Indian political class has allowed another misnomer to become a part of the Kashmir dispute and that is: the Valley of Kashmir makes the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir Valley is only a small part of the Jammu and Kashmir State. The Jammu and Kashmir State, as it emerged from the British Indian empire after the British quit India in 1947, constituted of (a) the province of Kashmir (b) the province of Jammu (c) the frontier division of Gilgit, Baltistan and Ladakh along with the Dardic Dependencies of, Hunza, Nagar, Yasin, Punial, Ishkoman, Darel and Koh Gizir. The province of Jammu was larger than the province of Kashmir in area and population. The frontier division of Gilgit, Baltistan and Ladakh was larger than the two provinces of Kashmir and Jammu put together, though it was sparsely populated.

After the Truce Agreement and the Cease-Fire which ended the fighting in Jammu and Kashmir in 1949, more than forty percent of the territories of the State remained under the occupation of Pakistan. The fighting in Jammu and Kashmir began with the invasion of the State by Pakistan in October 1947. The occupied territories included the district of Muzaffarabad and a part of the district of Baramullah in the Kashmir province, the district of Miprur, and a part of the district of Poonch in the Jammu province and the frontier region of Gilgit, along with the Gilgit, Agency and the region of Baltistan and the Dardic dependencies. The rest of the Jammu and Kashmir State, which lies on the Indian side of the cease-fire Line, now called the Line of Control, constitutes of the province of Kashmir, the province of Jammu and the frontier division of Ladakh. It is not fairly well known that the province of Jammu is larger than the province of Kashmir in area and population.

In Pakistan there is no confusion about the territorial content of the dispute. The Government of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan have never accepted the reduction of the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir to the dispute over the Valley of Kashmir. It will be of interest to note that in 1947, when Pakistan invaded the State, the invading army swept into the Jammu province and Kashmir province simultaneously, breaking through the borders of the state with Pakistan.  On 1 November, five days after the airborne troops of the Indian army landed in Srinagar, airborne troops of the armed forces of Pakistan landed on the airstrip in Gilgit opened for them by the Gilgit Scouts, the force raised by the British from among the local Muslim population to garrison the Gilgit Agency. The Gilgit Scouts joined the invading army of Pakistan and lost no time to press eastwards into Baltistan. The Muslim troops of the State army and their Muslim officers posted at Bunji in Baltistan, mutinied and joined the invading hoards. Remnants of the State army, joined by the Buddhist population of Ladakh, held the invading forces at bay till the Indian troops marched up the Zojilla pass to relieve them.

Just as the Jammu and Kashmir State cannot be identified with the Valley of Kashmir, the people of the State cannot be identified with the people of the Kashmir Valley, who are predominantly Muslim. The dispute over Jammu and Kashmir is a Muslim problem. But it is more a problem of the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Buddhists, who are living in the State and who form more than forty percent of the population of the State on the Indian side of the Line of Control. The reduction of the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir to a dispute over the Valley of Kashmir, which is predominantly Muslim, is deceptively simple and viciously aimed to project the Muslim content of the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir. The dispute over Jammu and Kashmir has a Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist content as well, which is more significant than its Muslim content. The Hindus and the Sikhs constitute a dominant majority of the population of Jammu province, while the Buddhists form a majority of the population of Ladakh. The Muslims form a majority of the population of only the province of Kashmir.

No settlement on the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir can be reached, so long the dispute is treated as a Muslim problem confined to the Valley. The right to life and freedom of the Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists and their aspirations are as factoral to a peace-settlement on Jammu and Kashmir as the right to life and freedom of the Muslims and their aspirations are.

The Hindus and Sikhs played a decisive role in shaping the peoples’ struggle in the State, for the freedom of India. Ideologically committed to the unity of India, the Hindus and the Sikhs in the State fought shoulder to shoulder with the Indian people for the liberation of India from the British rule. The Hindus and Sikhs in the State joined the non-cooperation movement in the Punjab in the aftermath of the Rawlatt agitation. A year after, they joined the Muslims in the Khilafat Movement which took Jammu and Kashmir by storm. The Hindus and Sikhs joined the civil-disobedience movement which followed the Salt Satyagrah in 1930.

The Hindus and the Sikhs put themselves in the forefront of the States Peoples Movement. It may not be out of place to mention, that the first plenary session of the All India States Peoples Conference held in Kathiawad in 1926, was presided over by Shankar Lal Koul, a Hindu of Kashmir. Shankar Lal Koul, along with Lala Muluk Raj Saraf of Jammu, represented Jammu and Kashmir State in the plenary session of the All India States Peoples Conference. In his presidential address Shankar Lal Koul called for liberation of the peoples of the States from the princely rule as well as the British Paramountacy.

Inside the state, the Hindus and the Sikhs initiated the effort to forge a secular peoples’ movement for constitutional reform. Of the twelve signatories to the National Demand, which provided the basis of a movement for constitutional reform in the State, five were Kashmiri Hindus, one represented the Sikhs and six were Muslims. The National Demand formed the basic structure of the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference which led the national movement in the State till 1947. The National Conference committed itself to the Indian unity and the Indian freedom from the British Colonial rule and joined the All India States Peoples’ Conference, due to the indefatiguable efforts of its Hindu and Sikh leaders. During the crucial years, after the Second World War, when the British prepared to quit India, the Secretary General of the All India States Peoples’ Conference, Dwarka Nath Kachru, a Kashmiri Hindu, initiated a vigorous movement to integrate the States peoples Movement with the National Movement led by the Indian National Congress and forge a common front of the peoples of the British India and the princely States against the British and the Muslim League. Kachru spared no efforts for the inclusion of the princely States in the future constitutional reforms in India, which proved to be decisive in the integration of the States with India, when the British quit India and left the princely States in a state of disarray.

When Pakistan invaded the State in 1947, the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists along with the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims, who formed the main support base of the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, formed the core of the resistance the invading army met with. However the Muslim officers and ranks in the State army, about 45 percent of its strength, mutinied, massacred their Hindu officers and comrades-in-arms in cold blood and joined the invading columns as they poured into the State across its borders with Pakistan. The Hindu and Sikh officers and other ranks of the State army, joined by the Hindus, Sikh and Buddhists, fought to the last man, to keep the invading army at bay, till the airborne Indian troops reached Srinagar. In Gilgit, the Gilgit Scouts mutinied on 1 November 1947, imprisoned the  Governor of Gilgit, Ghansara Singh, killed the Hindu and Sikh military and police officials and opened up the air-strip which was built by the British for the airborne troops of Pakistan to land in Gilgit. The fall of Gilgit was followed by the mutiny of the Muslim officers and men of the State army regiment posted at Bunji in Baltistan, who joined the invading armies in their advance into Baltistan and Ladakh.

In the territories of the State, which were overrun by the invading hordes, more than thirty-eight thousand Hindus and Sikhs were massacred. Thousands of women were abducted; hundreds of them committed suicide to escape capture. All Hindu and Sikh temples and shrines were burned down or destroyed to erase the last vestiges of the Hindu and Sikh culture and religion in the occupied territories. The whole Hindu and Sikh population of the territories occupied by the invading army, which escaped the holocaust took refuge in Jammu. The Buddhists in Baltistan who escaped the onslaught of the invading army took refuge in Ladakh. The assertion that Jammu and Kashmir presented a heaven of peace and brotherhood while the rest of India smoldered in communal violence is a myth.

After the Truce Agreement, negotiated by the United Nations and the consequent cease-fire in the fighting in the State in January 1949, the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists continued to fight against the war of subversion, Pakistan waged from the occupied territories of so called ‘Azad Kashmir’ to foment Muslim distrust in the State. In 1953, the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims who had supported the accession of the State to India in 1947, repudiated their commitment to the unity of India on the ground that India had denied them the right to reorganize Jammu and Kashmir into another Muslim nation in between India and Pakistan. The Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists arraigned themselves with the forces which opposed to the Muslimisation of the State and fell into a head on collision with a new Muslim separatists movement led by the All Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front, which was founded in 1955, to ensure the implementation of the United Nations resolutions on Kashmir, envisaging a plebiscite to determine the future affiliations of the State. The Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhist formed the main resistance to the Muslim struggle for self-determination, the Plebiscite Front spearheaded till 1975, when the Indira-Abdullah Accord was concluded and the Plebiscite Front dissolved.

The Jihad which Pakistan launched in Kashmir in 1990, to liberate Jammu and Kashmir from the Indian hold, mounted its first attack on the Hindus in Kashmir. The terrorist assault on the Hindus in Kashmir commenced in the fall of 1989, and by the summer of 1990, more than seven hundreds of them had been assassinated in cold blood. Most of the victims were innocent people who lived in poverty and persecution in the Muslim dominated constitutional organization of the State. Among those killed were people from all section of the Hindu Society; teachers, lawyers, political activists, media men, intellectuals, errand boys and men of small means. The massacre of the Hindus was accompanied by a widespread campaign of intimidation and threat to drive out the Hindus from the Kashmir province, burn their temples and religious shrines and homes and loot their property. By the end of the year 1990, the whole community of the Hindus in the Kashmir province was driven out of their homes and hearths. For the last two decades, during which the terrorist violence in the State has continued unabated, the Hindus have been living in exile in improvised refugee camps in Jammu and elsewhere in the country.

The interests and aspirations of the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists, who constitute nearly half the population of Jammu and Kashmir, are central to any settlement reached between India and Pakistan. Muslim separatist forces insist upon negotiations which lead to a settlement, acceptable to the Muslims in Pakistan and the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir, raises three basic questions: (a) which principles of nation building and international law, past or present, sanctify the territorial claim made by the Muslims In Jammu and Kashmir to the secession of the State from India and its unification with Pakistan?; (b) Why should India accept a Muslim- centric settlement on Jammu and Kashmir and accept negotiations which also are Muslim-centric?; (c) why should India not insist upon a Hindu- Sikh – Buddhist centric settlement of Jammu and Kashmir on account of its commitment to secularism and the right to equality of all communities irrespective of their religion? If the British foisted the Two-Nation theory on the Indian people in 1947, and divided India on the basis of separating the Muslim majority provinces of the British India to constitute the Muslim homeland of Pakistan, why should the Indian people, now six decades after British quit India, accept the Two Nation theory again to concede the second partition of India. And if the Indian political class finds itself helpless in the face of Jihad in Jammu and Kashmir being waged by Pakistan and the Muslim Jihadi forces in Jammu and Kashmir, why should the Indian government not insist upon the breaking up of Kashmir valley to secure Hindus their territorial claims as well as the breaking of the occupied territories of Jammu the so called ‘Azad Kashmir’ to secure the Hindus and Sikh refugees of these areas, who are more than a million people, their territorial claims.    

The Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists have as sacrosanct a right to Jammu and Kashmir, as their Muslim compatriots have. An exception to the right to equality may be acceptable in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan where the rights of the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists to their homeland may not be recognized as sacrosanct as the rights the Islamic Republic bestows upon its Muslims subjects. India is a secular state and no government in India can consign the Hindus, Sikhs and the Buddhists to the servitude of a Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir.

By Dr. M.K. Teng

April 2011

Now that the Government of India has repeated its Sharam-ul-Sheikh performance at Thimpu and offered to resume the composite dialogue with Pakistan, virtually jumping over the stand it had taken in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Mumbai, there is much more that the Indian Government has to explain about what it intends to do in Jammu and Kashmir. Evidently the climb-dam by the Government of India on crucial issues involved in its policy in respect of Jammu and Kashmir, reflects a willful surrender. This perhaps eminates from its inability to face political blackmail and pressure brought to bear on the Indian leaders in the name of economic development and under the cover of peace and security of the region.

The Indian policy reflects a strange sense of helplessness, which pervades the outlook of the Indian political class and which acts as an impelling force to drive those in power to invite Pakistan to the conference table again and again, after every small and major misdemeanor Pakistan has committed. Every time, Pakistan has returned to the conference table, grumbling and growling at the inability of the Indian Government to make the composite dialogue purposeful and result oriented. The cause of concern is not the abrasive attitude of Pakistan, but the uneasiness with which the Indian political class reacts to it.

The Indian Government has rather, with deliberate intent, tried to play down the way Pakistan has expressed its dissatisfaction with the purpose and the pace of the peace-process. It is mainly because the Indian leadership has shown reluctance to face the prospect of laying down a baseline of its policy on the Kashmir issued In fact, the Indian political class has sofar evaded the crucial decision of fixing the “irreducible minimum”, beyond which it would not go to reach a settlement with Pakistan on Jammu and Kashmir. Its exhortations to urge upon the Indian Government” to walk an extra-mile” from its “stated positions” in order to be able to reach an “out of the box” solution of the Kashmir problem and its extravagant eagerness to nudge the Indian Government “to go far enough in its engagement with Pakistan, to reach, a settlement on Kashmir”, are idle expressions used to camouflage the subterfuge it has indulged in so far. The truth is that the Indian political class has never mustered courage to stand up to its neighbours. In fact, the Indian political class has never shared with the Indian people the import of defending their borders.

Muslim outlook

The Government of Pakistan, its military establishment as well as the civil society in Pakistan, are, all agreed upon the baseline of their stand on Jammu and Kashmir. The civil society in Pakistan has, on no occasion, found it necessary to urge upon the Government of Pakistan, “to walk an extra-mile” in order to reach an “out of the box settlement” on Kashmir. Pakistan has stuck to its stated position that : (a) the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir are a part of the Muslim nation of Pakistan (b) the Muslims of the state of Jammu and Kashmir acquired the right to unite the State with the Muslim homeland of Pakistan from the partition of India, (c) the Muslims of the State were denied their right to unite the state with Pakistan in 1947, when the ruler of State Maharaja Hari Singh acceded to India, against their wishes and (d) India, which pledged itself to implement the United Nations resolutions, envisaging a plebiscites to enable the Muslims of the State exercise their choice to determine the final disposition of the State in respect of accession, has not redeemed its promise.

From the very inception of the peace-process, which was primarily an Indian initiative, Pakistan has unflinchingly stuck to its self-righteous commitment that its claim to Jammu and Kashmir, based upon the Muslim majority composition of the population, is non-negotiable. Pakistan has stressed time and again that its claim to Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Muslim majority composition its population underlines the principle on the basis of which India was divided in 1947 and the Muslim homeland of Pakistan was created. Pakistan has repeatedly stated that the partition of India marked the culmination of a historical process which underlined the Muslim struggle for a separate Muslim homeland in India, comprising the provinces and the regions of the British India populated by the majority of Muslims and Muslim princely states. Pakistan has consistently held that the partition of Indian recognized the Muslim majority composition of the population of the British India and the princely States as the basis on which the territorial jurisdiction of the Muslim homeland was determined. The Kashmir dispute, Pakistan has claimed in unequivocal terms, is a manifestation of the unfinished agenda of the partition of India.

The Muslim League laid claim to the Muslim ruled princely states as well, on the basis of prescription and conquest because it could nor bring itself round to accept the exclusion of the Muslim ruled states from the Muslim homeland of Pakistan. The Muslim League leaders considered the Muslim ruled princely states to be the citadels of the Muslim power in India, which had survived the establishment of the British rule in India. The insistence of the Muslim League on the lapse of the Paramountcy was used by it to isolate the Muslim ruled states. Except that the lapse of the Paramountcy caused the Muslim League some tactical disadvantage in the Jammu and Kashmir, its acceptance by the Congress brought India to the verge of disintegration. Were it not for the people of the Muslim ruled States, who defeated the designs of the Muslim League and the Muslim rulers, India would have been divided further. The ideological commitment of the Muslim struggle for a separate Muslim homeland in India to secure the Muslims in India, a separate freedom which ensured them the realisation of their Islamic destiny was fundamentally Muslim in outlook. The territorial claim to a Muslim India, comprising the Muslim majority provinces of the British India and the Muslim ruled States the Pakistan Resolution envisaged, was also Muslim in outlook. The claim that the unification of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan is the unfinished agenda of the partition of India is also Muslim in outlook.

Irreducible Minimum

Pakistan has not allowed its stand on Jammu and Kashmir to be wrapped in any ambiguity. In fact it has spelt out the baseline of its stand on Jammu and Kashmir in unmistakeable terms. It has refused to deviate from its stated position that the Muslim majority composition of the population of the State is basic to any settlement on Jammu and Kashmir. It has refused to delink the Muslim majority composition of the state from the right of self-determination, which it has consistently maintained, flowed from the partition of India. Exactly, as the Muslim League agreed to divide the Muslim majority provinces of the Punjab and Bengal and the Hindu majority provinces of Assam, on the basis of population, Pakistan has offered to accept the division of the State on the basis of population, as a basis for a settlement on Jammu and Kashmir. It has proposed the separation of the Muslim majority regions of the State, comprising the Muslim provinces of Kashmir, the Muslim majority districts of the Jammu province and the Muslim majority district of Kargil in the frontier division of Ladakh and their unification with the Muslim homeland of Pakistan, as the irreducible minimum which it is ready to accept as the basis of a solution of the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir. The participation of Pakistan in the peace-process, in the ultimate analysis, is aimed to persuade the Indian people to accept the application of the principle which underlined the partition of India, as a basis of a settlement on Kashmir.

Interestingly the peace-process carried on between the Bajpai Government and the Government headed by Nawaz Sherrif; followed by negotiations between the Bajpai Government and the military regime headed by General Musharraf; the long and atrocious talk held at the Track Two level, largely a framework of conflict resolution, fabricated by the American diplomacy and the Manmohan Singh-Musharraf parleys leading to the so-called “non-territorial settlement” on Kashmir; reveal a continuity in the stand taken by Pakistan. The stand taken by Pakistan has underlined; the separation of the Muslim majority regions of the State, on the Indian side of the Line of Control with their eventual disengagement from the Indian Union and their re-integration within a framework of political imperatives evolved by the two countries India and Pakistan, with the consent of the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir.

The Musharraf plan lay bare the perfidy. It recognized the separation of the Muslim majority regions of the State and their reorganisation into a new political entity on the territories of India which was governed by Pakistan. The Musharraf plan envisaged the division of the State into six geographical zones of which five were Muslim majority zones, the transfer of power in the state to the Muslim separatist regimes under the garb of self-rule; withdrawal of the Indian armed forces from the State in the name of demilitarization; the unification of the Muslim majority zones situated on the Indian side of the Line of Control with the occupation territories of Azad Kashmir under the cover of “irrelevant borders” and the placement of the State under the joint-control of India and Pakistan. Manmohan Singh cried aloud, undoubtedly to attract the attention of the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir and perhaps, the Muslims in India, to the historical task, he had accomplished by putting Jammu and Kashmir on a ten year long journey to join Pakistan. The Musharraf plan provided for the revaluation of the arrangements made in accordance with its provisions after ten years a stipulation which the Indian Government tried to underplay.

Greatest Betrayal

Pakistan appears to have convinced itself that India has finally accepted the principle of the partition of India as the basis of a settlement of Jammu and Kashmir. Evidently the impatience and the urgency, the Foreign office of Pakistan has exhibited about the progress of the peace-process, arises out of its eagerness to evolve a procedure for the separation of the Muslim majority regions of the State, their disengagement from the Union of India and their eventual integration with the Islamic power-structure of Pakistan.

The territorial boundaries of Pakistan, laid down by the partition of India in 1947, were confined to the territories of the British India. The Indian princely states were not brought within the scope of the partition of India. The claim Pakistan has laid to Jammu and Kashmir on the basis of the Muslim majority composition of its population did not from a part of the process of the partition and the transfer of power in India. The right of the self-determination of the colonial peoples was an expression of the historic process of decolonisation, the second world war set into motion. The right of self-determination was never conceived as an instrument of any religious war. India was not divided to ensure the Indian people their right of self-determination.

Jammu and Kashmir forms the most crucial part of the northern frontier of India. It continues to be central to the security of the Indian borders in the north. Any prescription for a second partition of India, to disengage the State from the Indian Union will not usher in a State of peace between India and Pakistan. Peace between the two countries will always depend upon the mutual respect they have for each other’s strike capabilities. The Indian political class, whatever, the nature of its commitment to the Indian unity, cannot ignore the hard fact that Pakistan has a stockpile of nearly two hundred nuclear weapons in its basement. Pakistan is an ideological state-a fact, which the Indian people can overlook at their own peril.