Abstract
When the British departed the Indian subcontinent on 15 August 1947 all but three of the 600-odd erstwhile princely states had been peacefully integrated into one or other of the successor dominions of India and Pakistan. Subsequently the fate of Junagadh and Hyderabad was sealed by Indian ‘police action’. This left only Kashmir. By October its future was still unsettled. Thirty years later it remains uncertain. Why has the Kashmir problem proved so intractable?
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Notes
The Pakistani case is put in G. W. Choudhury, Pakistan’s Relations with India (Meerut, 1971);
Muhammad Yusuf Saraf, Kashmiris Fight for Freedom (London, 1977);
and Ian Stephens, Pakistan (London, 1967).
The Indian viewpoint is expressed in Surendra Chopra, U.N. Mediation in Kashmir: a Study in Power Politics (Kurukshetra, 1971);
P. B. Gajendragadkar, Kashmir: Retrospect and Prospect (Bombay, 1967);
and A. G. Noorani, The Kashmir Question (Bombay, 1964). The best accounts of the dispute are mostly by Westerners.
They include Michael Brecher, The Struggle for Kashmir (Toronto, 1953);
Sisir Gupta, Kashmir: a Study in India-Pakistan Relations (Bombay, 1966);
Josef Korbel Danger in Kashmir (revised ed., Princeton NJ, 1966);
Alistair Lamb, Crisis in Kashmir 1947 to 1966 (London, 1966);
and R. J. Moore, The Making of the New Commonwealth (Oxford, 1987).
Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Madras, 1983) p. 427.
C. H. Philips (ed.) The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858–1947: Select Documents (London, 1962) pp. 354–5.
Even this tenuous link would have been unavailable had not Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s Boundary Commission unexpectedly awarded the ‘Gurdas-pur salient’ to India. Not surprisingly, this decision has given rise to Pakistani allegations of conspiracy, and the judge’s subsequent destruction of his notes and refusal to speak publicly about the issue makes this difficult to disprove. Moreover there is some circumstantial evidence of Indian pressure. On 4 August Mountbatten observed that ‘Kashmir was so placed geographically that it could join either Dominion, provided part of Gurdaspur District was put into East Punjab by the Boundary Commission’. [my emphasis] Note of interview between Mountbatten, the Nawab of Bhopal, and the Maharaja of Indore, 4 August 1947, in Nicholas Mansergh et al (eds), Constitutional Relations between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power 1942–7, vol. XII (London, 1983) p. 509. Still, the award of Gurdaspur to India was quite legitimate, as the Commission’s terms of reference included ‘other factors’ besides religion.
Stephens, Pakistan, p. 197. See also B. M. Kaul, Confrontation with Pakistan (Delhi, 1971) p. 27; Korbel, Danger, p. 62; and Lamb, Crisis, p. 38.
Minutes of WC meeting, 22 February 1941, AIML file 133 pt. I of 1941. See also Sir Sikander’s speech in the Punjab LA, 11 March 1941, quoted in L. A. Sherwani (ed.), Pakistan Resolution to Pakistan 1940–1947: a Selection of Documents (Karachi, 1969) p. 30, and Sir Hassan Suhrawardy’s speech to the Royal Central Asian Society and East Indian Association, London, 4 November 1942, ibid., p. 36.
For details see Ian Copland, ‘Islam and Political Mobilization in Kashmir, 1931–34’, in Pacific Affairs, vol. 54, no. 2 (Summer, 1981) pp. 233–5.
For the beliefs and history of the Ahmadiyyas, see Spencer Lavan, The Ahmadiyya Movement: a History and Perspective (Delhi, 1974).
Quoted in H. L. Saxena, The Tragedy of Nashmir (New Delhi, 1975), p. 350.
According to Bazaz, only three of the six actually voted against the resolution at the General Council, but Rashid Taseer, who was also present, says in his Tehrik-i-Hurriyat-i-Kashmir that the three merely abstained. Further opposition was registered at the party’s annual session on 10 June 1939, when, according to Saxena, debate went on all night and was only wound up at 2 a.m. on 11th. Abbas refers in his autobiography, published in 1950, to a number of ‘conditions’ which he says were ‘agreed to’ by the WC beforehand — but this assertion was vigorously denied by Abdullah’s supporters. Muhammad Yusuf Saraf, Kashmiris fight for freedom, vol. I (Lahore, 1977) pp. 535–8, and Saxena, op. cit., p. 365.
Quoted in Inderjit Badhwar, ‘Kashmir coalition: will it work?’ in India Today, vol. XI, no. 22 (30 November 1986) p. 19.
On the reasons for this, see Ian Copland, ‘Congress paternalism: the “high command” and the struggle for freedom in princely India, c. 1920–1940’, in South Asia, new series, vol. VIII, nos 1 & 2 (1985) p. 12.
Kak to Patel, 12 September 1946, Durga Das (ed.) Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, 1945–50 vol. I (Ahmedabad, 1971) p. 18.
Note drafted for AICC, 12 August 1946, S. Gopal (ed.), Nehru: Selected works, vol. 15 (New Delhi, 1982) p. 418.
Nehru to Patel, 27 September 1947, Durga Das (ed.), Sardar Patel’s Correspondence 1945–50, vol. I (Ahmedabad, 1950) p. 47.
Gopalaswamy Iyyengar to Sheikh Abdullah, 2 October 1948. Quoted in Karan Singh, Heir Apparent: An Autobiography, vol. 1 (New York, 1982) p. 82.
Patel to Nehru, 3 July 1950, ibid., p. 317. Compare Defence Minister Krishna Menon’s answer to a journalist who enquired, in 1965, why India had never held the promised plebiscite: ‘Because we would lose it’. Quoted in Khalid B. Sayeed, The political system of Pakistan (Boston, 1967) p. 266.
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© 1991 D. A. Low
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Copland, I. (1991). The Abdullah Factor: Kashmiri Muslims and the Crisis of 1947. In: Low, D.A. (eds) The Political Inheritance of Pakistan. Cambridge Commonwealth Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11556-3_10
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