Part 2 of 6
Part 2: India, Pakistan, Kashmir (1885 to 1977)
The Partition of India
In 1906 the “Muslim League” was founded as a counterpart to the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress, which had been fighting for India’s independence from British colonial rule since 1885.
After compromises with the Indian National Congress failed, a “two-nation theory” emerged from the 1930s onwards, with which the leader of the Muslim League, Ali Jinnah, was able to win over the majority of Indian Muslims for the creation of a separate Islamic state.
The independence movement of India’s Muslims formed a temporary unity between the Western-oriented Muslim middle class, the large landowners, the rural population and the emerging proletariat – and so, with the Lahore Resolution of 1940 (not to be confused with the Treaty of Lahore, see Part 1), the Muslim League resolved to create a separate Muslim nation – a “land of the pure”, in Urdu “Pakistan”. [1]
After the Second World War, Britain was so heavily indebted that the continued administration of India appeared too costly. Particularly in the light of the man-made famine in Bengal, in which the British colonial government let around 3 million Bengalis starve to death, the reconstruction of India for further colonial exploitation no longer seemed profitable. Above all because the Indian (and Muslim) independence movement had grown to a scale that made the continued administration of India impossible for the colonial government. By that point the Muslim League had grown to more than 20 million members.
The last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, therefore pushed the partition of India through within a few months, in order to hand the expiring colonial responsibility for religious and ethnic tensions over to the parties to the conflict: After India’s independence in 1947, the princes of the semi-autonomous individual states were to decide for themselves whether they wanted to join India, Pakistan or neither of the two new states. “Never before had so many people won their freedom as at midnight from 14 to 15 August 1947: the Indian subcontinent shook off British colonial rule – and sank into a frenzy of bloodshed.” (Cay Rademacher)
The partition of India led to one of the largest waves of flight and violence of the 20th century. In the course of the division there were civil-war-like clashes between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs which caused the deaths of several hundred thousand people; some estimates even speak of up to one million victims. Around 14.5 million people were expelled or forced to flee immediately after partition; in total some 20 million people were affected by resettlement, deportation or expulsion. Along the new borders there were massacres, rapes, abductions and forced marriages; hundreds of thousands of women became victims of sexualised violence. “The bloody mortgage with which the British colonial power released India into independence on 15 August 1947 was the partition of the subcontinent along religious majorities” (Barbara Wahlster)
The sexualised violence during the partition unrest in particular is appalling: “There was an enormous amount of sexual violence, some of them had their breasts cut off, some were paraded naked (…) It is estimated that around 100,000 women were raped, abducted and forcibly married. ” (Urvashi Butalia)
Here it is wrong, contrary to today’s Indian historiography, to describe Hindus (as well as Sikhs and Muslims) as victims (or perpetrators) more than any other group:
“There is no aggressor and no victim; Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs, all were equally violent towards one another.” (Urvashi Butalia) [7]
One guilt, however, must be named explicitly and clearly; “”Had the British not spent a hundred years creating a sense of separateness and difference, had they not tried to divide and promote the national movement along religious communities rather than along ideological lines, and had they not thereby contributed directly to the horrors of partition, then we would not still have to live with their tragic legacy decades later.” (Dr. Shari Tharor) [7]
The Kashmir Wars and Genocide
The majority-Muslim princely state of Jammu and Kashmir likewise faced the decision in 1947 of whether to join India or Pakistan. The Muslim League claimed Kashmir for Pakistan on the basis of its Muslim population majority, while the Kashmiri “Jammu & Kashmir National Conference” (JKNC) spoke out against accession to Pakistan and wanted to remain part of India.
The political uncertainty led to growing unrest in the Kashmir Valley. Muslim peasants and urban working-class strata, who had suffered for decades under Dogra rule, saw in accession to Pakistan the prospect of social and political emancipation. At the same time, many Hindus and Buddhists in Jammu and Ladakh feared becoming a national minority through accession to Pakistan.
Hindu nationalists, among them the RSS (today close to the BJP), began in cooperation with Maharaja Hari Singh to lead pogroms against the Muslim population of Jammu, in order to shift the demography in favour of a Hindu majority.
With the participation of the Indian army, they massacred between 100,000 and 200,000 Muslims in Jammu between October and November 1947:
“The Maharaja deliberately targeted and killed the Muslims of Jammu for the obvious reason that the Jammu-based Muslim Conference (MC) was taking significant steps against Maharaja Hari Singh. (…) First, on 19 July 1947 the General Council of the Muslim Conference passed a resolution on the accession of the princely state of Kashmir to Pakistan. Second, the Muslims of Jammu, particularly from the western districts of Mirpur, Poonch and Kotli, rose up against the Maharaja’s troops and launched a widespread and popular uprising to free themselves from the tyrannical and despotic rule of Maharaja Hari Singh.” [2]
Under the guidelines of the Rome Statute, the systematic massacres in Jammu constituted a genocide – yet “genocide” was not a term defined under international law until the following year (UN Genocide Convention, 1948), which is why neither the Indian central government nor the participants of the Hindu nationalist movements were ever held to account internationally.
The situation escalated further when, on 22 October 1947, armed tribal fighters from Pakistan invaded Kashmir in solidarity with the massacred population in Jammu and with the tacit support of the Pakistani government, in order to force accession to Pakistan and to end the Maharaja’s rule.
Faced with this threat, Hari Singh asked the Indian government for military assistance. India agreed to send troops, but demanded as a condition the signing of the “Instrument of Accession”, by which Kashmir was formally annexed to India. Indian troops were flown in and began to push back the Pakistani “invaders”. The result was the first Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir, which ended in 1949 with a ceasefire mediated by the United Nations and claimed around 4,000 dead soldiers and civilians.
The subsequent UN Resolution 47 provided that Pakistan, as the aggressor, should withdraw its troops completely and that India should reduce its troops to a minimum – after which a referendum was to be held under the supervision of the United Nations, in which the inhabitants of Kashmir themselves would decide whether they wished to belong to India or Pakistan (Dixon Plan).
India insisted on maintaining the sequence of the troop withdrawals, while Pakistan, contrary to the agreement, insisted that India should withdraw its troops first and at the same time – and so, because of inconsistencies over the preconditions for the referendum (and much more, as you will learn in what follows), it was never carried out.
For India in particular, the (likely) loss of the referendum would have meant risking the strengthening of local separatist movements in other Indian regions (for example the Khalistan movement in Punjab).
For Pakistan, an (unlikely) loss of the referendum would have meant possibly losing the economic and military support of the West, and of the USA in particular. India’s rapprochement with the Soviet Union meant that the West supported Pakistan in line with its own interests – a loss of the claim to Kashmir would have meant a massive loss of legitimacy for Pakistan.
Thus, although the majority of Kashmir’s population in 1947 was Muslim (77%) and increasingly opposed to the Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh, it was not necessarily in favour of joining Pakistan – not least because of the influential political leader Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, who had already won hundreds of thousands of supporters in the mid-1940s for an autonomous, socialist Kashmir – but rather in favour of complete autonomy for Kashmir.
The larger part, which remained under Indian administration after partition, was the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was composed of three main regions: the Kashmir Valley, Jammu and Ladakh. The Kashmir Valley was essentially Muslim, with a large majority of Kashmiris who had their own culture and language. In cities such as Srinagar, however, smaller communities of Hindus and Sikhs also lived. In Jammu, further south, the majority of the population was Hindu, in particular the Dogra Hindus, who made up the bulk of the land- and capital-owning class. Ladakh in the north had a lower population density and was predominantly Buddhist, with a smaller Muslim minority in some parts.
The smaller, Pakistani part consisted of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. Azad Kashmir was largely Muslim, with a social composition similar to that of the Muslim Kashmiris in the Indian part. There were, however, smaller Hindu communities here as well, which largely settled in India after partition. Gilgit-Baltistan, in the northernmost part, was ethnically the most diverse – the region was home to the Shina, Baltis and Gilgitis, many of whom belonged to Shia Islam, which distinguished them religiously from the Sunni majority in the rest of Kashmir – smaller Buddhist and Christian minorities also lived in Gilgit-Baltistan.
After partition, Article 370 was incorporated into the Indian constitution in order to grant the state of Jammu and Kashmir a special status of autonomy in accordance with the Instrument of Accession. This article stipulated that the state must consent to the application of laws by the Indian parliament, with the exception of those relating to the areas of communications, defence and foreign affairs.
Sheikh Abdullah
“In 1947 the National Conference was a mass political party with a left orientation, though not strictly left, but rather left-leaning. The reason for this was that all Marxist and Leninist groups were represented within the National Conference. They regarded Sheikh Abdullah as a progressive and left-thinking person and believed that they could help him avoid the sectarian approach to politics that Pakistan wanted to impose. They placed their hopes in Sheikh Abdullah. There was no separate left party with influence over the masses. Nevertheless, the NC followed India’s line. They had no international figure to whom they could turn at the United Nations.” (Hamid Bashani [4])
Between 1947 and 1953 the “Lion of Kashmir”, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, already served as head of government of Kashmir, but was first banished by the Indian authorities in 1953 and imprisoned in 1964, because as head of government he had opposed the complete annexation of Kashmir to India.
Following Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971 and the India-Pakistan war of 1972, the political status quo in Kashmir shifted from the holding of a referendum as a political priority to a wide range of political concerns, brought about by the emergence of numerous new political parties. The weakening of Pakistan through the autonomy of East Pakistan as Bangladesh and its defeat in the war against India shifted the balance of power between Pakistan and India in such a way that, for the time being, Kashmir had de facto no alternative but to make concessions to the Indian central government under Indira Gandhi.
Abdullah’s party, the “All Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front”, whose platform had until then been the holding of a referendum (plebiscite), was reconstituted in the course of the India-Sheikh Accord between Abdullah and India as the “Jammu & Kashmir National Conference” (JKNC), and the demand for a referendum was formally dropped – a decision that, without the weakening of Pakistan, would never have happened just a few years earlier.
The Accord reformulated the conditions for the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India. Jammu and Kashmir was now considered a “constitutional unit” of India. The Indian government could now control “the most important areas” of the state by enacting laws on activities aimed at rejecting Indian control over Kashmir.
Abdullah’s concessions to India enabled his return as “Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir” – in 1977 he was re-elected with an absolute majority and remained head of Jammu and Kashmir until his death in 1982.
Pakistan initially regarded Sheikh Abdullah and his party as the “long arm of Nehru” (India’s first prime minister) and refused to recognise him as the legitimate representative of Kashmir. At the United Nations, Abdullah sharply criticised the Pakistani government, compared it to Hitler and supported the Indian position.
Over time, however, Pakistan’s attitude changed. During his state visit in 1964 he was received with great enthusiasm by the population and was also publicly honoured by former political opponents such as Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas. This change was above all a consequence of the intensification of tensions between India and China in the early 1960s, which made a rapprochement with Kashmir appear productive once again.
From 1953 to 1964, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad (JKNC) governed; since the coup against Abdullah he had held office as a de facto puppet of New Delhi and served as Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. The political scientist Sumantra Bose summarises his term in office as follows: “The sequence of events in that decade suggests that there was a contractual relationship between Bakshi and the Indian central government, according to which he was permitted to run an unrepresentative, unaccountable government in Srinagar – in return for facilitating the ‘integration’ of Jammu and Kashmir on New Delhi’s terms. The result was twofold: a severe weakening of the rule of law and of democratic institutions in Jammu and Kashmir, as well as an erosion of the region’s autonomy which – as required by Article 370 – took place with the ‘consent’ of the government there, which consisted essentially of a motley crew of New Delhi’s clientelist politicians.”
Shortly before Abdullah’s second term in office, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency across the whole of India, officially in order to combat unrest and economic problems. In reality it served to secure the power of the central government, which had come under enormous pressure from the opposition because of electoral fraud.
For Kashmir, the state of emergency meant a further worsening of an already precarious political situation. The region, which was already under tight control from New Delhi, was subjected to even greater surveillance and political tutelage. Democratic processes were suspended or manipulated, local politicians had to submit to the instructions of the central government, and numerous members of the opposition were silenced through arrests or intimidation.
One third of the well-paid state posts were occupied by Kashmiri Pandits (that is, Hindus), while many young Muslims had barely any access to work and public office – this economic and social disadvantaging of the Muslim majority population led to growing frustration and radicalisation. In this tense atmosphere, far-reaching pogroms against the Hindu minority took place, fuelled by Islamist fanaticism.
The violence escalated to such an extent that most Hindus had to flee the Kashmir Valley. Kashmir’s already precarious material conditions, worsened by the intensified repression of the central government, became ideal preconditions for the development of radical Islamic groups which pursued the liberation of Kashmir in a religious context. The population lived in a climate of fear, insecurity and political oppression, which was further aggravated by the repressive measures of the central government and the increasing division of society.
[1] https://ijrar.org/papers/IJRAR22A2398.pdf (Translated by Kritikpunkt)
[2] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ce1b/d7b2edc393ad56cb0e11d5e8443aed040322.pdf (p. 97, Translated by Kritikpunkt)
[3] Sources are various Wikipedia pages, among them “Indo-Pakistani War of 1965” and “Sino-Indian War”.
[4] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/707.html (Translated by Kritikpunkt)
[5] Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (p. 68, translated by Kritikpunkt)
[6] Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (p. 90 ff. Translated by Kritikpunkt)
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0B2qlb8eVI Minute 30 ff., translated by Kritikpunkt
