Book Excerpt, Deccan Chrnoicle, 13 nov., 2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->âNehru bared fangs at mention of plebisciteâ
By Walter Crocker
Gandhiâs Quit India movement of 1942 had much to do with making Pakistan practical politics for Jinnah, the vain, coldhearted, clever, impressive demagogue, himself so little Muslim that apparently he had not mastered the prayer ritual. How much Nehruâs famous gaffe at a press conference decided, or enabled, Jinnah to turn the agitation for Pakistan from a bargaining point into a commitment for a separate sovereign Muslim state can be left to the historians.
It is enough to say here that after both Congress and the Muslim League, following on the Attlee governmentâs decision in July or August 1945 to give India Independence as soon as possible and to send Cripps and two other ministers out to India to arrange the terms, had accepted the British Cabinet Missionâs plan of a centre with control over defence, foreign affairs, and communications, while other matters were to be left to the control of Muslim provinces and non-Muslim provinces, Nehru, following Azad as president of Congress, suddenly announced, without consulting his party, that the plan, a precarious compromise in a very difficult situation, was not binding on Congress.
He blurted this out because he was hungering for the strongly centralised state dear to all revolutionaries and socialists and was still refusing to see the reality of Muslim fears and hatred and separatism. Jinnah decided to strike. The Congress-Muslim interim government of 1946 thus never really functioned. When Mountbatten arrived in Delhi in March 1947 he decided that the only way to avoid bloodshed and chaos was to accept Partition and for England to quit that summer instead of in June 1948, the date mentioned by Attlee just before Mountbatten had left London.
From time to time it is said by journalists â who often repeat one another â that the Partition of the subcontinent, that is to say, the creation of Pakistan, was âthe supreme failure of the Britishâ. The truth, on the contrary, is that the British had no blame for it. The blame was religious hatred. <b>Religious hatred was stirred up to the pitch where the two communities lacked the necessary minimum homogeneity for constituting a single state.</b>
Rajagopalachari, with his usual penetration, saw, and was reconciled to, the case for Partition years before it came. If Mountbatten can be blamed at all, which is questionable, it would be for hastening with so much speed that the boundaries were not decided upon before Pakistan was created, and that the necessary protective measures against communal disturbances had not been worked outâ.
<b>Partitioning Bengal should have been resisted. At least an attempt should have been made to set it up as a third republic. Here again the blame belongs to the Hindu and Muslim leaders and to religious hatred.</b>Â <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif' /><!--endemo-->
The creation of Pakistan was a disappointment to Nehru; probably a mortifying disappointment as it cut against his conviction that the state must always be secular, and therefore against his sense of the rational. But his own record in the affair was one of exasperation rather than cold statesmanship, and of a hurry to get Independence.
He certainly did not agree with those, reportedly Gandhi among them at the end, who thought that it would have been better to delay Independence for a generation or two rather than to pay the price of Partition. <b>About Muslims he was always ambivalent â insisting on protecting them and encouraging them on the ground that they were Indians but at the same time irritated, often angered, with them because they took their religion, which he little valued, so seriously.</b> Confronted with the existence of Pakistan as a fact, however, Nehru did try his best to coexist with it â to live and let live.
Unluckily, after the death of Liaqat Ali Khan he had to deal with heads of state and heads of government in Pakistan, such as Nazimuddin, Ghulam Mohamed, and the two Mohamed Alis, most of whom were incomparably inferior to him in intellect or in integrity and all of whom were incomparably inferior to him in political standing inside their own country. It was not unreasonable that he should be circumspect or distrustful. Ayub was another matter; but Ayub did not arrive until the end of 1958.
<b>On the issues dividing India and Pakistan, with one exception only, Nehru always insisted, often against the advice or wishes of his ministers or of his senior officials, on the generous view and on giving Pakistan the benefit of the doubt. This was so in the case of the financial disputes, in the canal waters affair, in frontier readjustments, and in movement of persons. In India itself he always made it clear that he was the unflinching protector of the Muslim minority; by then a rather frightened demoralised minority. </b>
<b>Thus the Muslims were allowed to retain customs which Nehru himself regarded as barbarous, such as polygamy, and which were made illegal for Hindus. He also gave place and promotion to more than one Muslim who was inferior to Hindu candidates just because he was a Muslim.</b>
The one exception was Kashmir.
Kashmir, like other such cases, Schleswig-Holstein or Trieste or Danzig, attained an emotional and political status altogether out of proportion to its intrinsic importance. The millions of words uttered on Kashmir by both sides inflamed public opinion and produced rigidities and quasi-commitments which made it almost impossible to negotiate. <b>The Security Council had held no less than 124 meetings on Kashmir up to April 1964. The millions of words also befogged the truth. Thus the weaknesses on Pakistanâs side were sometimes overlooked.</b>
Thus, too, little men and big scoundrels were given an importance. It is enough to say here that after fighting broke out in Kashmir, Nehru, in effect, undertook to have âa fair and impartial plebisciteâ and to abide by its results. That is the first plain truth. The Indian delegate told the Security Council in 1948 that the accession to India was not unalterable and that after the Emergency Kashmir would be free to ratify the accession to India, or to accede to Pakistan, or to become independent.
The second plain truth is that after making that promise India refused to hold the plebiscite. Splitting straws and trailing red herrings, such as about aggression or about the validity of the instrument of accession signed by the fugitive maharaja, or about the validity of its confirmation by the packed Kashmir Assembly, and building up a huge sandhill of legalism, has been on a scale, and with a subtlety, familiar to those who know the workings of lawyers and the courts in India and Pakistan. The detached student, however, can find little escape from the presumption that Nehru circumvented the plebiscite because, in the Valley at least â <b>and it is the Valley which is wanted </b>â it would have gone against India.
Why did he persist in this circumvention? <b>The Kashmir affair is one of the mysteries in Nehruâs political life. It remains a mystery even when we allow that the West exaggerated Pakistanâs innocence or Pakistanâs Westernism; Pakistan, as we have noted, joined Seato and Cento as an insurance policy against fire from India. By 1963, when India, under the stress of her fears of China, and of Anglo-American pressures, was offering concessions unimaginable a little earlier, Pakistan refused to compromise.</b>
<b>The West on more than one occasion increased the tension between the two countries by well-meaning but ill-formed efforts to mediate instead of letting the two countries feel their own way to a solution.</b> But why, in the first instance, did Nehru promise a plebiscite? Was it because he thought at the time that he could win it? If so he made a big mistake in not holding the plebiscite at once. <b>And why did he take the issue to the United Nations? </b>
And, not long after promising a plebiscite and taking the issue to the United Nations, why did he do so much, and go so far, to get out of the plebiscite? Had he come to believe that he could not win it? Had he some personal infatuation for Kashmir? His family was Kashmiri Brahmin by origin but they left Kashmir seven generations ago. <b>Or was his motivation political?</b>
â¦Though wavering about Kashmir for a month or so after the Chinese attack in October-November 1962, Nehru soon became adamant again. And, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that Indian public opinion, once it recovered from the shock of the Chinese attack, as expressed in Parliament or the Congress Party or the press, was by then no less adamant than Nehru, and much less restrained.
How easy it was to inflame Indian public opinion was shown in the excited reaction to the request made by Britain in the Security Council when Pakistan once more, in January 1964, brought to it the Kashmir question. <b>The British delegate was unable to accept the Indian plea that no dispute existed and that therefore there was nothing to negotiate; he requested that both parties hold constructive and sincere talks.</b> This was denounced in India as a betrayal by Britain. Krishna Menon brightened his armour, tarnished since his fall a year or so earlier, by denouncing, with much applause in Parliament, âthe temerity of Britainâ in asking India to negotiate with Pakistan âafter Britain had misruled India for 150 yearsâ...
After the fever of nationalism fomented by the Sino-India border dispute Nehru would have seen the acutest political difficulties in changing his old stand on the plebiscite, or to make significant concessions to Pakistan.
Yet after the massacres in Bihar and Orissa in 1964 he came to believe that the change must be made; that communal feeling was rising so dangerously that it risked war with Pakistan as well as massacres inside India on a scale which might end the secular state. So he had Sheikh Abdullah released in April, after 11 years of jail. This was a very courageous step.
<b>According to one of the members of the first UN Commission sent out to Kashmir (1949-51), Nehru was adamant already by 1950. This Commission consisted of five members,â</b> and one of the members happened 13 years later to be a fellow ambassador of mine in a certain European capital and used to talk about his experiences on the Commission. <b>He said that the Commission had come to the conclusion privately that the plebiscite ought to be held;</b> that a plebiscite would result in a majority for Pakistan; and that Nehru, knowing this, was determined to get out of a plebiscite.
He recounted how he and two other members had a meeting with Nehru in Delhi and, on a personal basis, made the suggestion that the only solution was to hold the plebiscite. This apparently provoked Nehru into one of his tempers. The outburst impressed my informant deeply. âWe saw all at once,â he said, âthat inside this fine man was a gorillaâ. Nehru was no gorilla; but for years he always bared his fangs at the mention of a plebiscite or of any real UN intervention in Kashmir.
-This is an excerpt from Walter Crockerâs Nehru: A Contemporaryâs Estimate, being reissued by Random House on Nehruâs birth anniversary
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think its very crucial to hold the state for purposes of access to Central Asia and the secular state of India. It is essential to have a Muslim majority state that is in India.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->âNehru bared fangs at mention of plebisciteâ
By Walter Crocker
Gandhiâs Quit India movement of 1942 had much to do with making Pakistan practical politics for Jinnah, the vain, coldhearted, clever, impressive demagogue, himself so little Muslim that apparently he had not mastered the prayer ritual. How much Nehruâs famous gaffe at a press conference decided, or enabled, Jinnah to turn the agitation for Pakistan from a bargaining point into a commitment for a separate sovereign Muslim state can be left to the historians.
It is enough to say here that after both Congress and the Muslim League, following on the Attlee governmentâs decision in July or August 1945 to give India Independence as soon as possible and to send Cripps and two other ministers out to India to arrange the terms, had accepted the British Cabinet Missionâs plan of a centre with control over defence, foreign affairs, and communications, while other matters were to be left to the control of Muslim provinces and non-Muslim provinces, Nehru, following Azad as president of Congress, suddenly announced, without consulting his party, that the plan, a precarious compromise in a very difficult situation, was not binding on Congress.
He blurted this out because he was hungering for the strongly centralised state dear to all revolutionaries and socialists and was still refusing to see the reality of Muslim fears and hatred and separatism. Jinnah decided to strike. The Congress-Muslim interim government of 1946 thus never really functioned. When Mountbatten arrived in Delhi in March 1947 he decided that the only way to avoid bloodshed and chaos was to accept Partition and for England to quit that summer instead of in June 1948, the date mentioned by Attlee just before Mountbatten had left London.
From time to time it is said by journalists â who often repeat one another â that the Partition of the subcontinent, that is to say, the creation of Pakistan, was âthe supreme failure of the Britishâ. The truth, on the contrary, is that the British had no blame for it. The blame was religious hatred. <b>Religious hatred was stirred up to the pitch where the two communities lacked the necessary minimum homogeneity for constituting a single state.</b>
Rajagopalachari, with his usual penetration, saw, and was reconciled to, the case for Partition years before it came. If Mountbatten can be blamed at all, which is questionable, it would be for hastening with so much speed that the boundaries were not decided upon before Pakistan was created, and that the necessary protective measures against communal disturbances had not been worked outâ.
<b>Partitioning Bengal should have been resisted. At least an attempt should have been made to set it up as a third republic. Here again the blame belongs to the Hindu and Muslim leaders and to religious hatred.</b>Â <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif' /><!--endemo-->
The creation of Pakistan was a disappointment to Nehru; probably a mortifying disappointment as it cut against his conviction that the state must always be secular, and therefore against his sense of the rational. But his own record in the affair was one of exasperation rather than cold statesmanship, and of a hurry to get Independence.
He certainly did not agree with those, reportedly Gandhi among them at the end, who thought that it would have been better to delay Independence for a generation or two rather than to pay the price of Partition. <b>About Muslims he was always ambivalent â insisting on protecting them and encouraging them on the ground that they were Indians but at the same time irritated, often angered, with them because they took their religion, which he little valued, so seriously.</b> Confronted with the existence of Pakistan as a fact, however, Nehru did try his best to coexist with it â to live and let live.
Unluckily, after the death of Liaqat Ali Khan he had to deal with heads of state and heads of government in Pakistan, such as Nazimuddin, Ghulam Mohamed, and the two Mohamed Alis, most of whom were incomparably inferior to him in intellect or in integrity and all of whom were incomparably inferior to him in political standing inside their own country. It was not unreasonable that he should be circumspect or distrustful. Ayub was another matter; but Ayub did not arrive until the end of 1958.
<b>On the issues dividing India and Pakistan, with one exception only, Nehru always insisted, often against the advice or wishes of his ministers or of his senior officials, on the generous view and on giving Pakistan the benefit of the doubt. This was so in the case of the financial disputes, in the canal waters affair, in frontier readjustments, and in movement of persons. In India itself he always made it clear that he was the unflinching protector of the Muslim minority; by then a rather frightened demoralised minority. </b>
<b>Thus the Muslims were allowed to retain customs which Nehru himself regarded as barbarous, such as polygamy, and which were made illegal for Hindus. He also gave place and promotion to more than one Muslim who was inferior to Hindu candidates just because he was a Muslim.</b>
The one exception was Kashmir.
Kashmir, like other such cases, Schleswig-Holstein or Trieste or Danzig, attained an emotional and political status altogether out of proportion to its intrinsic importance. The millions of words uttered on Kashmir by both sides inflamed public opinion and produced rigidities and quasi-commitments which made it almost impossible to negotiate. <b>The Security Council had held no less than 124 meetings on Kashmir up to April 1964. The millions of words also befogged the truth. Thus the weaknesses on Pakistanâs side were sometimes overlooked.</b>
Thus, too, little men and big scoundrels were given an importance. It is enough to say here that after fighting broke out in Kashmir, Nehru, in effect, undertook to have âa fair and impartial plebisciteâ and to abide by its results. That is the first plain truth. The Indian delegate told the Security Council in 1948 that the accession to India was not unalterable and that after the Emergency Kashmir would be free to ratify the accession to India, or to accede to Pakistan, or to become independent.
The second plain truth is that after making that promise India refused to hold the plebiscite. Splitting straws and trailing red herrings, such as about aggression or about the validity of the instrument of accession signed by the fugitive maharaja, or about the validity of its confirmation by the packed Kashmir Assembly, and building up a huge sandhill of legalism, has been on a scale, and with a subtlety, familiar to those who know the workings of lawyers and the courts in India and Pakistan. The detached student, however, can find little escape from the presumption that Nehru circumvented the plebiscite because, in the Valley at least â <b>and it is the Valley which is wanted </b>â it would have gone against India.
Why did he persist in this circumvention? <b>The Kashmir affair is one of the mysteries in Nehruâs political life. It remains a mystery even when we allow that the West exaggerated Pakistanâs innocence or Pakistanâs Westernism; Pakistan, as we have noted, joined Seato and Cento as an insurance policy against fire from India. By 1963, when India, under the stress of her fears of China, and of Anglo-American pressures, was offering concessions unimaginable a little earlier, Pakistan refused to compromise.</b>
<b>The West on more than one occasion increased the tension between the two countries by well-meaning but ill-formed efforts to mediate instead of letting the two countries feel their own way to a solution.</b> But why, in the first instance, did Nehru promise a plebiscite? Was it because he thought at the time that he could win it? If so he made a big mistake in not holding the plebiscite at once. <b>And why did he take the issue to the United Nations? </b>
And, not long after promising a plebiscite and taking the issue to the United Nations, why did he do so much, and go so far, to get out of the plebiscite? Had he come to believe that he could not win it? Had he some personal infatuation for Kashmir? His family was Kashmiri Brahmin by origin but they left Kashmir seven generations ago. <b>Or was his motivation political?</b>
â¦Though wavering about Kashmir for a month or so after the Chinese attack in October-November 1962, Nehru soon became adamant again. And, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that Indian public opinion, once it recovered from the shock of the Chinese attack, as expressed in Parliament or the Congress Party or the press, was by then no less adamant than Nehru, and much less restrained.
How easy it was to inflame Indian public opinion was shown in the excited reaction to the request made by Britain in the Security Council when Pakistan once more, in January 1964, brought to it the Kashmir question. <b>The British delegate was unable to accept the Indian plea that no dispute existed and that therefore there was nothing to negotiate; he requested that both parties hold constructive and sincere talks.</b> This was denounced in India as a betrayal by Britain. Krishna Menon brightened his armour, tarnished since his fall a year or so earlier, by denouncing, with much applause in Parliament, âthe temerity of Britainâ in asking India to negotiate with Pakistan âafter Britain had misruled India for 150 yearsâ...
After the fever of nationalism fomented by the Sino-India border dispute Nehru would have seen the acutest political difficulties in changing his old stand on the plebiscite, or to make significant concessions to Pakistan.
Yet after the massacres in Bihar and Orissa in 1964 he came to believe that the change must be made; that communal feeling was rising so dangerously that it risked war with Pakistan as well as massacres inside India on a scale which might end the secular state. So he had Sheikh Abdullah released in April, after 11 years of jail. This was a very courageous step.
<b>According to one of the members of the first UN Commission sent out to Kashmir (1949-51), Nehru was adamant already by 1950. This Commission consisted of five members,â</b> and one of the members happened 13 years later to be a fellow ambassador of mine in a certain European capital and used to talk about his experiences on the Commission. <b>He said that the Commission had come to the conclusion privately that the plebiscite ought to be held;</b> that a plebiscite would result in a majority for Pakistan; and that Nehru, knowing this, was determined to get out of a plebiscite.
He recounted how he and two other members had a meeting with Nehru in Delhi and, on a personal basis, made the suggestion that the only solution was to hold the plebiscite. This apparently provoked Nehru into one of his tempers. The outburst impressed my informant deeply. âWe saw all at once,â he said, âthat inside this fine man was a gorillaâ. Nehru was no gorilla; but for years he always bared his fangs at the mention of a plebiscite or of any real UN intervention in Kashmir.
-This is an excerpt from Walter Crockerâs Nehru: A Contemporaryâs Estimate, being reissued by Random House on Nehruâs birth anniversary
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think its very crucial to hold the state for purposes of access to Central Asia and the secular state of India. It is essential to have a Muslim majority state that is in India.