Follow-up: The Kashmir analogy

This follows on Syed Badrul Ahsan's wonderful piece "Hannan Shah's Kashmir analogy". Ahsan has used a fine toothcomb to scan Hannan Shah's Kashmir analogy and, in the process, set the historical record straight. I don't plan to do a repeat, but cannot resist the temptation to discuss why the Bengali struggle for independence succeeded and why the separatist struggle in Kashmir did not.

I would imagine the answer is not so difficult to find. Indian military intervention may have helped hasten the process of Bangladesh's ultimate liberation but it surely did not explain by itself the success of the Liberation War. It was crucial for the success of the Bengali Liberation struggle to spell out the independence agenda early on and for India to have extended unqualified support for it, with or without Bangabandhu.

The all-party resolution in the Indian parliament in April 1971  made it clear that the representatives of the Indian people, cutting across the regional and political divides that are sharp enough at all times, were backing the struggle of an oppressed people who had been mercilessly subjected to genocide by what was their own government. From that resolution, every subsequent action of the Indian government recognised the independent entity of the Bangladesh government in exile as Yahya and his advisers lost the script.

India understood well enough that the proud Bengali people would never accept a frying pan to fire situation – it would never accept Indian domination in place of domination by Pakistan. India's essential security objectives, of creating a friendly state in the East to spare it a two-front dilemma, was more than fulfilled if a secular and friendly Bangladesh emerged from Pakistan. There was no reason to ask for anything more.

In fact the first Indian public figure to advocate a major Indian role in liberating Bangladesh was Tripura's Chief Minister Sachindralal Singha. In my forthcoming book "Agartala Doctrine: a proactive Northeast in Indian foreign policy" published by the Oxford University Press, I have detailed how Singha had started campaigning for direct Indian support as early as 1962, even as the Bengali movement for autonomy slowly transformed into one for independence – and not the least because of the response from Islamabad.

Nehru told Singha bluntly he was in no mood for a foreign adventure in view of the 'war clouds on the Himalayas' (border problem with China). Singha later renewed his not-so-discreet campaign when Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister, but he told me later in a detailed interview in 1986  that while campaigning with Indira Gandhi and her advisers, Singha controlled his 'Bengali emotionalism' and pitched for a 'friendly Bengali state' to ensure the security of India's northeast, where the Pakistanis and the Chinese had jointly started backing a number of insurgent groups in the late 1960s.

Singha got huge support from one of India's legendary intelligence officers, P N Banerji, the last to hold the joint charge of Intelligence Bureau and the newly created RAW. He held the dual charge in the East.  Banerji had been Singha's police chief in the mid-1950s and had developed sources in the Bengali autonomy movement. To most Awamji Leaguers — as old-timers like Tofail Ahmed and Amir Hussain Amu will recall – he was known as Nath Babu, someone who pushed for an interventionist Indian policy on grounds that 'if we don't get them out of East Pakistan, they will get us out of Northeast."

I have never met P N Banerji because he died under controversial circumstances in Dhaka in 1975 at least two years before I came to know his son in Jadavpur University as a fellow student of International Relations, but I have seen notes taken by Indian intelligence officers during a briefing by P N Banerji in early April 1971 (quoted in Chapter 2 of my book 'Insurgent Crossfire') where the late spymaster had advocated for Indian intervention in East Pakistan and direct support for the Bengali Muktijoddhas to ensure the security of India's Northeast.

I will argue that the complete unanimity of the liberation movement (leaving aside the usual factional bickering) was because no Bengali in 1971 doubted this was a fight for freedom – and a fight to finish, and because no one doubted Indian intentions.

Spool over to Kashmir. In both 1948 and 1965, when Pakistan's army sent in waves of armed tribals from the upper reaches of what is now Pakistan held Kashmir, the essentially liberal Sufi Kashmiris of the Srinagar valley supported the Indian army . The horrible pillage and orgy of rape and loot unleashed by the Pakistan-backed armed tribesmen not only delayed their approach to Srinagar and helped the Indian army reach the city just in time , but it also made the valley Kashmiris hate the 'kabailis" (tribesmen) and their Pakistani sponsors for all time to come.

Many authors like Altaf Gauhar (Inside the 1965 War) have detailed the failure of Bhutto's ambitious' Operation Gibraltar' because the valley Kashmiris, instead of joining the armed infiltrators, gave them away to the Indian army. And though the situation changed in the 1990s because of Delhi's failures to handle the renewed Pakistani bid to unsettle Kashmir,  the fact that Pakistan wants a merger and not liberation has divided the rank and file of the armed movement in Kashmir.

Pakistan's ISI has constantly tried to root out the pro-azadi groups and boost the more fundamentalist pro-merger groups. That is why the Pakistanis decimated the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front that was at the forefront of the azadi (liberation) movement. Pakistan's aims, made clear by its ISI, has divided the Kashmir movement down the middle – and since the dominant feeling in the anti-Indian movement was separatist and not pro-merger, the movement never really took off in the way the liberation war in Bangladesh took off in 1971.

I am aware of the debates within the Kashmir movement. Top former separatist commander Abdul Majid Dar, who was later killed by the Islamist hardliners apparently at the behest of ISI, had told me once in no uncertain terms – Yes we want azadi from India but we don't want to join Pakistan. The Bengali Muslims who were the majority in undivided Pakistan got nothing but bullets and blood when they asked for autonomy, so what are we Kashmiris likely to get in Pakistan." Dar later broke away from the ISI controlled United Jihad Council and joined hands with India – as so many other seperatists have done ever since.

One can read former RAW chief A S Dulat's memoirs and it is clear all that Indian intelligence had to do was to play on the merger versus azadi divide in the movement to find allies and break the separatist ranks in Kashmir. As an Islamist religion-driven state, it is impossible for those who run Pakistan to understand the power of ethnic language-and-culture driven nationalism. The Indian state understands that after handling scores of such armed and mass movements, seeking anything from independence to autonomy. But I have no doubt in my mind that the unity of purpose that was the real strength of the Bangladesh liberation movement would never have been possible if there was any doubt in anyone's mind about Indian intentions. That explained the success in 1971 – something that eluded the Kashmiris.

Pakistan lost its east and failed to wrest Kashmir because it did not understand the power of nationalism minus religion. One should never forget that Sher-e-Kashmir Sheikh Abdullah signed the 1975 accord with Indira Gandhi to 'close the Kashmir issue' because after 1971, he did not see Pakistan capable of getting the better of India. The plight of the Bengali Muslims in 1971 also might have influenced Sheikh Abdullah's decision to shut all doors on Pakistan. The victory in Afghan jihad did revive the morale of the Pakistan army and ISI to some extent and they went ahead to push the unfinished agenda in Kashmir, but at the back of the Kashmiri's mind lurks the question Abdul Majid Dar asked me in the mid-1990s – "What will we get from Pakistan if the Bengali Muslims got nothing after being a majority".

In a way therefore, Bangladesh settled the Kashmir question – the failure of Jinnah's Two Nation theory in the lush green battlefields of East Bengal left no Kashmiri, except those bankrolled by the ISI, in any doubt about what lay in store for them in what has been often described as a 'failed state'.