THE

LONGEST
AUGUST
ALSO BY Dilip Hiro
Nonfiction
A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East (2013)
Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (2012)
After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World (2010) (short-listed for Mirabaud Prize, Geneva, 2011)
Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyr-
gyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran (2009) (on Financial Times’ List of Best History Books of the Year)
Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World’s Vanishing Oil Resources (2007)
The Timeline History of India (2006)
The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies (2005)
Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After (2004) (on Financial Times’ List of Best Politics
and Religion Books of the Year; long-listed for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing)
The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide (2003)
Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (2003)
War Without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response (2002)
The Rough Guide History of India (2002)
Neighbors, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran after the Gulf Wars (2001)
Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of Israelis and Palestinians (1999)
Dictionary of the Middle East (1996)
The Middle East (1996)
Between Marx and Muhammad: The Changing Face of Central Asia (1995)
Lebanon, Fire and Embers: A History of the Lebanese Civil War (1993)
Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War (1992)
Black British, White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain (1991)
The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict (1991)
Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism (1989, re-issued 2013)
Iran: The Revolution Within (1988)
Iran under the Ayatollahs (1985, re-issued 2011)
Inside the Middle East (1982, re-issued 2013)
Inside India Today (1977, re-issued 2013)
The Untouchables of India (1975)
Black British, White British (1973)
The Indian Family in Britain (1969)

Fiction
Three Plays (1985)
Interior, Exchange, Exterior (poems, 1980)
Apply, Apply, No Reply & A Clean Break (two plays, 1978)
To Anchor a Cloud (play, 1972)
A Triangular View (novel, 1969)
THE

LONGEST
AUGUST
The
Unflinching Rivalry
Between India and Pakistan

DILIP HIRO

New York
Copyright © 2015 by Dilip Hiro

Published by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hiro, Dilip.
The longest August : the unflinching rivalry between India and Pakistan /
Dilip Hiro.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-56858-734-9 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-56858-503- 1 (e-book)
1. India—Foreign relations—Pakistan. 2. Pakistan—Foreign relations—
India. I. Title.
DS450.P18H57 2014
327.5405491 dc23
2014045994
ISBN: 978-1-56858-515-4 (INTL)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Maps vii
Preface xi

Introduction 1
1 The Modish Dresser Meets the Mahatma 9
2 Gandhi’s Original Sin: Injecting Religion into Politics 27
3 The Two-Nation Theory: A Preamble to Partition 51
4 A Rising Tide of Violence 75
5 Born in Blood 91
6 The Infant Twins at War 111
7 Growing Apart 134
8 Nehru’s “Forward Policy”: A Step Too Far 158
9 Shastri’s Tallest Order: Pakistan’s
Nightmare Comes Alive 180
10 Indira Gandhi Slays the Two-Nation Theory 200
11 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: The Savior of West Pakistan 221
12 Islamist Zia ul Haq, Builder of the A-Bomb 234
13 Rajiv-Benazir Rapport—Cut Short 263
14 Gate-Crashing the Nuclear Club 280
15 General Musharraf Buckles Under US Pressure 309
16 Nuclear-Armed Twins, Eyeball-to-Eyeball 327
17 Manmohan Singh’s Changing Interlocutors 341
18 Competing for Kabul 369
19 Shared Culture, Rising Commerce 395
20 Overview and Conclusions 413
Epilogue 433

Notes 437
Select Bibliography 471
Index 473
v
 Preface

The first colony of the British Empire that was partitioned at the time
of acquiring a Dominion status within the British Commonwealth of
Nations was Ireland. On December 6, 1922, exercising its right under
the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, Protestant-majority Northern
Ireland seceded from the Irish Free State to remain part of the British
Empire. It was the historic tension between Protestants and Catholics,
dating back to the Battle of Boyne in 1690 between Protestant William III
of Orange and Catholic James II, which led to the division of Ireland.
A quarter century after Ireland’s partition, the Indian subcontinent
became the next colony of Britain to end up divided into the Domin-
ion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. Irreconcilable tensions be-
tween majority Hindus and minority Muslims were the cause of this. The
buildup to this partition, its enforcement, and its immediate and later
consequences were of far greater import to the region and the world at
large than the division of Ireland.
What was common between the two partitions was religious affil-
iation. In the case of Ireland, it was different sects within Christianity,
whereas in united but colonized India it was a clash between polytheistic
Hinduism and monotheistic Islam. In sheer numbers, there were 250 mil-
lion Hindus and 90 million Muslims in the subcontinent on the eve of
the partition. Together, they formed nearly one-fifth of the human race.
As a result of the two-way migration of minorities across the new
borders created in August 1947, millions of families were uprooted from
their hearths and homes of centuries. They left behind their immovable
properties and most of the movable goods. The respective governments
confiscated the assets of the departed with a plan to compensate those
on the other side who had lost their worldly possessions because of the

xi
 PREFACE

partition. This scheme worked well in the two parts of Punjab and adjoin-
ing Delhi, even though the aggregate assets of the Hindus and Sikhs in
West Punjab exceeded those of the Muslims in East Punjab and Delhi.
The case of the small province of Sindh diff ered from Punjab’s in
two ways. It remained united, and it was spared the communal carnage
of Punjab. But in two major cities of Sindh the limited violence against
Hindus, who were far better off economically and educationally than
Muslims, was enough to cause a steady exodus of Sindhi Hindus. Unlike
the Hindus and Sikhs of West Pakistan, however, they did not have a
part of Sindh retained by pre-independence India to which they could
migrate. As a consequence, traveling in comparatively small numbers over
many months by train and ship, they ended up in Indian cities and large
towns along an arc in western India, stretching from Delhi to the south-
ern reaches of Bombay province, which was populated solely by the
Marathi-speaking people.
My family, based in the Sindhi town of Larkana, belonged to this cat-
egory of refugees from West Pakistan. We traveled by ship from Karachi
to the Port of Okha in north Gujarat and ended up in a sprawling, empty
military barracks built during World War II, thirty-five miles southeast of
central Bombay. These were now called Kalyan (Refugee) Camps, num-
bered 1 to 5. Here, in a row of single rooms fronted by a veranda, accom-
modation was free, with the large room serving as the living-cum-sleeping
space, and an area in the veranda allocated for cooking.
Like refugees elsewhere before and since then, we built up our lives
slowly. I managed to pursue a university education, thanks to government
loans to the children of refugees from Pakistan. There was no hope or wish
to return to what had become the “other” country. That door remained shut.
The story of my personal journey from serving as a qualified engineer
on a tube well drilling project in Gujarat to becoming a self-taught pro-
fessional writer in London belongs to another category of my output than
the one to which the present work does.
This book on the troubled relations between India and Pakistan
chronicles not only political and military events and the principal players,
but also trade and cultural links. It covers the involvement of major pow-
ers of the globe—the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s
Republic of China—in shaping the relations between these South Asian
neighbors, which together form one-fifth of humanity.
In the introduction I explain that the sixty-five-year-old Kashmir dis-
pute has its roots in the tensions between Hindus and Muslims dating

xii
 PREFACE

back eight centuries. The subjugation of the Indian subcontinent by Brit-

ain after 1807 gave rise to Indian nationalism within a century. The aim
of the anti-imperialist movement that rose sharply after World War I was
open to two different interpretations. One was to end Britain’s imperial
rule and transform enslaved India into a sovereign state. The other was
to end the subjugations that the majority Hindus—three-quarters of the
population—had borne since 1192; they were now ready to administer a
free India on the basis of one person, one vote. The two interpretations
overlapped because the foremost anti-imperialist party, the Indian Na-
tional Congress, was overwhelmingly Hindu.
In 1915 the return home of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a Gujarati Indian
lawyer, from South Africa sowed a seed in national politics that would
grow into a tree covering much political space. His rivalry with another
Gujarati-speaking lawyer, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, would come to domi-
nate subcontinental politics for three decades. This is the gist of Chapter 1.
A deeply religious man, Gandhi made an alliance with the Muslim
leaders of the Khilafat movement, which was committed to the continua-
tion of the caliphate based in Istanbul that had come under threat after the
defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Allied Powers in 1918. The Khilafat
leaders backed the noncooperation campaign Gandhi launched in 1920.
Its sudden suspension by Gandhi disappointed and bewildered them. The
Hindu-Muslim unity forged to oppose the British Raj proved transitory.
During the rest of the decade, Gandhi took up the causes of exploited peas-
ants and workers; he garnered much publicity by launching such nonviolent
campaigns as making salt from seawater without official permission. In the
face of Gandhi’s spiraling fame, Jinnah moved his legal practice to London.
This analytical narrative forms Chapter 2.
Chapter 3 covers the return of Jinnah from London to take up the
leadership of the Muslim League and his articulation of the Two-Nation
Theory. Though the League performed poorly in the 1937 elections, the
policies of the Congress ministries, composed almost wholly of Hindus,
gave a preview of the insensitivity of Congress officials toward the beliefs
and mores of Muslims. The non-League Muslim leaders closed ranks with
the League. In the 1945–1946 elections, the League won 73 percent of
Muslim ballots, a giant leap from the previous 5 percent.
Britain’s decision to quit India after World War II intensifi ed the
rivalry between the Congress and the League: the former wished to in-
herit a united India from the British, and the latter resolved to establish
a homeland for Muslims by partitioning the subcontinent. Communal

xiii
 PREFACE

tensions turned into violence. The chronology of this period constitutes

Chapter 4.
Chapter 5 narrates the communal frenzy that gripped Punjab at the
time of the birth of independent India and Pakistan in August 1947 and
soon after. As a breakaway political entity, Pakistan faced many hurdles
to get established.
Although the communal bloodbath that marked the birth of inde-
pendent India and Pakistan on August 14–15, 1947, subsided after a few
months, the dispute over Kashmir that broke out soon after has contin-
ued to vitiate relations between the neighbors. Indeed, their subsequent
chronology has been peppered with so many challenges, crises, proxy wars,
ongoing attempts to covertly exploit ethnic and other fault lines in their
respective societies, hot wars, and threats of nuclear strikes that a historian
is moved to encapsulate Indo-Pakistan relations as “the longest August.”
The next chapter outlines the fight between India and Pakistan over
Jammu and Kashmir, whose Muslim majority was ruled by a Hindu ma-
haraja. When threatened by the incursion of armed tribal irregulars from
Pakistan, the maharaja acceded to India, subject to a referendum when
normal conditions had been restored. The issue was referred to the United
Nations, but it would prove insoluble for many decades.
The two neighboring countries developed differently. Democracy
based on a multiparty system and universal suffrage took hold in India.
By contrast, political life deteriorated in Pakistan to the extent that Gen-
eral Muhammad Ayub Khan imposed military rule in 1958. His efforts to
seek a satisfactory solution to the Kashmir problem in consultation with
Indian premier Jawaharlal Nehru got nowhere. Chapter 7 provides the
narrative of this period.
Since, according to India, China had occupied a part of Kashmir,
Nehru had to deal with the Chinese government, which, independently,
disputed the border delineating northeastern India from the Tibet region
of China. When Nehru tried to assert India’s claim by making military
moves, war broke out between China and India in October 1962. It
ended a month later, after China, having proved its military superiority,
declared a unilateral cease-fire and withdrew its forces to prewar posi-
tions. This armed conflict created a bond between China and Pakistan
that has endured ever since. This is the essence of Chapter 8.
The succeeding chapter recounts the war that Pakistan started in India-
held Kashmir in September 1965. The three-week hostilities failed to
deliver what Pakistan had hoped: the destruction of the status quo in

xiv
 PREFACE

Kashmir. Indeed its failure in this war led to the toppling of Ayub Khan
and then to the secession of East Pakistan. Chapter 9 describes the
buildup to the war, the actual fighting, and its consequences.
The narrative in the next chapter deals with the run-up to the two-
week-long Bangladesh War in December 1971, the combat, and its
aftermath. In ideological terms, Indian premier Indira Gandhi slew the
two-nation theory of Jinnah by showing that ethnicity overrides reli-
gion. This was also a setback for the cause of the Muslim separatists in
Indian Kashmir.
Chapter 11 shows how Zulfikar Ali Bhutto salvaged West Pakistan.
Even though he held weak cards in his negotiations with Gandhi in
Shimla in June 1972, he managed to deprive her of her aim to bring the
Kashmir issue to an official closure. In Pakistan, as a result of the rigged
election in March 1977, he faced huge protests in the streets, which he
failed to curb. This provided an opportunity to his Islamist army chief
general, Muhammad Zia ul Haq, to overthrow the government and re-
turn Pakistan to a military administration. It lasted as long as Zia ul Haq
lived—until August 1988. During his rule he Islamized state and soci-
ety, thereby moving Pakistan further away from secular India. Th e So-
viet Union’s military involvement in Afghanistan turned Pakistan into a
front-line state in the Cold War, helping Zia ul Haq accelerate the nuclear
weapons program in which China provided Pakistan with vital assistance.
In early 1984 it tested an atom bomb assembled in Pakistan at its nuclear
testing site.
Rajiv Gandhi’s succession in the footsteps of his assassinated mother,
Indira, in October 1984, went smoothly. He found a congenial political
partner in Benazir Bhutto, a daughter of Zulfikar Ali, after her election to
the premiership of Pakistan in December 1988. The bonhomie dissipated
as separatist insurgency in Kashmir intensified from 1989 onward, with
India resorting to brutish methods to squash it. The protests of Bhutto and
her successor Muhammad Nawaz Sharif fell on stony ground. During the
premiership of P. V. Narasimha Rao after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi
in May 1991, the international scene changed radically. The disintegration
of the Soviet Union in December 1991 signaled the victory of the United
States in the Cold War. Delhi strengthened its links with Washington,
which saw no need to downgrade its historic ties with Pakistan. Rao accel-
erated India’s nuclear arms program. Chapter 13 relates these events.
Rao’s plan to test three nuclear devices in late 1995 was thwarted by
US president Bill Clinton, who was committed to stopping the spread

xv
 PREFACE

of nuclear arms. But to consolidate his thin majority in Parliament, Atal

Bihari Vajpayee, leader of the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), ordered the testing of nuclear bombs. These tests occurred in mid-
May 1998. Two weeks later Pakistan followed suit. With that Pakistan
acquired parity with India in its power of military deterrence, thus offset-
ting its military inferiority in the conventional area. A reassured Pakistani
prime minister Sharif welcomed Vajpayee in Lahore in February 1999.
Visiting the site where the Muslim League had passed its Pakistan reso-
lution on March 23, 1940, Vajpayee noted that a stable, secure, and pros-
perous Pakistan was in India’s best interests. But once again this proved to
be a false dawn. Three months later Pakistan’s army chief general, Pervez
Musharraf, tried to capture the Kargil region of Indian Kashmir by stealth.
He failed. But his surreptitious unveiling of nuclear-tipped missiles was
detected by Clinton, who then intervened. Following tense negotiations
in Washington, he had Sharif agree to withdraw his troops to the Line of
Control (LoC) in Kashmir. Sharif ’s deal paved the way for his overthrow
by Musharraf. This narrative appears in Chapter 14.
The following chapter describes how in the aftermath of 9/11 and the
failed terrorist attack on the Parliament House in Delhi three months
later, the United States succeeded in getting Musharraf to jettison the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan and stop providing military training
and weapons to Kashmiri separatists. But the subsequent lowering of
Indo-Pakistan tensions in January 2002 did not last. Following the ter-
rorist assault on a military camp at Kaluchak in Kashmir in May, Vajpayee
authorized the bombing of training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir. The
lack of enough laser-guided bombs delayed the execution of the order
and gave the United States and Britain a chance to douse passions. They
ordered their eighty thousand citizens to leave India and Pakistan imme-
diately, cooling Vajpayee’s fervor. The nuclear-armed neighbors stepped
back from a nuclear brink.
Chapter 17 covers the dealings of Congress prime minister Manmo-
han Singh from 2004 onward. He and Musharraf set up a back channel
to reach an accord on Kashmir. Their personal envoys forged a plan that
Musharraf outlined in December 2006. It envisaged “open borders” in
Kashmir followed by a phased withdrawal of troops from both sides of the
LoC. Since this did not mean changing the present borders, the plan re-
ceived careful examination by the Indian cabinet. But before it could take
a definite stand, Musharraf was forced to step down as army chief prior to
being sworn in as a civilian president in November 2007. And in August

xvi
 PREFACE

2008 he resigned as president to avoid being impeached by Parliament,

which was dominated by anti-Musharraf parties. Once again the hopes
of resolving the Kashmir conundrum were dashed. Three months later, a
sixty-hour siege of luxury hotels in south Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists
froze Delhi-Islamabad relations. The freeze lasted two-and-a-half years.
As if the decades-long Kashmir deadlock were not enough, the ri-
valry between Pakistan and India for dominant influence in Afghanistan
intensified as the US-led NATO forces prepared to leave Afghanistan by
December 2014. For Pakistani generals brought up on the doctrine of
India as the number one enemy, the Indo-Afghan Strategic Partnership
Agreement signed in October 2011 was a step toward their worst-case
scenario materializing: a simultaneous attack on Pakistan in the east and
the west by the Indo-Afghan alliance. This is the gist of Chapter 18.
In contrast to the opposite pulls of geopolitics, the cultures of Af-
ghanistan, Pakistan, and North India—language, cuisine, dress, sports,
and the performing arts—continue to have much in common. Bollywood
movies and cricket remain popular on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan
border. In the economic arena, as signatories of the South Asian Free
Trade Area treaty, which specified the reduction of customs duty on all
traded goods to zero by 2016 for the eight-member South Asian Associ-
ation for Regional Cooperation, India and Pakistani started liberalizing
mutual trade beginning in 2009. In 2013 they agreed on a nondiscrimina-
tory market access protocol, which was equivalent to most-favored-nation
status. Describing all this is the function of the penultimate chapter.
The concluding chapter provides a summary and conclusions.
The epilogue is not indexed.
A word about the changing exchange value of the Indian and Pakistani
currencies: the exchange value of the Indian rupee fell from Rs 4.75 in
1947 to US$1 to Rs 60 to US$1 in 2014. The Pakistani rupee has depre-
ciated much more.
My gratitude to Carl Bromley, the now former editorial director of
Nation Books, goes beyond the customary thanks. He came up with the
idea for a book on India-Pakistan relations. Familiar with my family and
professional background, he considered me to be the right author to pen
it. And he worked diligently with me to include in the final book proposal
an optimum mix of engaging elements.
London
September 2014

xvii
 Introduction

In March 2013 the air in East Asia was thick with the threat of Ar-
mageddon. In retaliation for North Korea’s underground nuclear test
in mid-February, the UN Security Council imposed further economic
sanctions on Pyongyang. Its young, newly installed leader Kim Jong Un
threatened to transform Seoul, the prosperous, bustling capital of South
Korea with ten million residents, into a “sea of fire” and launch preemptive
nuclear strikes on Washington. He declared that his country would no
longer recognize the 1953 armistice that ended the war between it and
UN forces. The United Nations retorted that the truce could not be ab-
rogated unilaterally.
Yet nothing seemed to change on the ground. The practical outcome
of that truce—the demilitarized zone (DMZ) running roughly along the
Thirty-Eighth Parallel and divided equally by the military demarcation
line—remained intact. So too did the infrastructure at Panmunjom, home
of the Joint Security Area ( JSA) near the western coast of the penin-
sula. There was no decrease in the number of busloads of day-trippers
from Seoul, an hour’s drive from the border through green fields, scrubby
mountains, and army observation posts every few hundred yards.
The only danger that a tourist who wished to enter the JSA faced
was to sign a voucher to take responsibility for “injury or death as a direct
result of enemy action” before boarding a UN bus at Camp Bonifas, with
a soldier as tour guide. The JSA has been the site of negotiations between
the opposing parties inside the building constructed along the military
demarcation line.
The high point for a tourist was to walk around the conference tables
where the North Koreans and the UN Command (chiefly South Koreans
and Americans) sit on opposite sides. Outside, business remained brisk

1
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

at the fast food eateries, the amusement park, and souvenir shops selling
child-sized military uniforms and DMZ-stamped T-shirts and hats.
The 160-mile-long and 2.5-mile-wide buffer between the two Koreas
is hyped as the most heavily fortified and dangerous border in the world—
even though it no longer is. That honor goes to the Line of Control (LoC)
in Kashmir, the 460-mile-long UN-brokered cease-fire line of 1950 that
demarcates the Indian and Pakistan controlled parts of that territory. In
March 2000, during a trip to India to defuse tensions in the region, US
president Bill Clinton called it “the most dangerous place in the world.”1
Both belligerents possess nuclear weapons and have the means to deliver
them. The attempts by Pakistan to change the truce line in Kashmir have
led to two wars: one major in 1985 and the other minor, in the Kargil
region in 1999.

THE GLOBE’S MOST DANGEROUS PLACE

India started to fence the LoC in the mid-1990s but stopped because of
shelling and gunfire from Pakistan, which has opposed any change to the
status quo. India resumed the project in 2001 and finished it in September
2004. The end result was a formidable 375-mile-long barrier. Covering all
of the 178-mile border in the Jammu region and 197 miles in Kashmir,
it passes through dry land, green pastures and valleys, wooded hills, and
rugged mountains.
The barrier is terribly intimidating. It consists of a double row of
twelve-foot-high wire fencing. The space between the rows is filled with
thousands of land mines. At some spots the fence is equipped with ther-
mal imaging devices and motion sensors along with built-in alarm and
lighting systems that alert troops of infiltrators from Pakistan-controlled
Kashmir. The soldiers themselves are equipped with sensors, thermal im-
agers, and night vision devices. Only the areas of highest altitude—the 88-
mile stretch of glacier running from Kargil at 10,764 feet to the Siachen
Glacier at 18,875 feet—have been left unfenced. The total cost of fencing
has been an astronomical Rs 1,620 million ($324 million)—$864,000
a mile.2
The fence is not strictly along the LoC. It stands about 150 yards to
a mile or so away from it—inside Indian-controlled territory. This has
created a no-man’s-land. And because this area is often dotted with agri-
cultural plots and hamlets, it has become a source of periodic killings of

2
 INTRODUCTION

soldiers and civilians, leading to furious accusations and counteraccusations

by Delhi and Islamabad.
In some areas, however, the fence cuts through farms or orchards.
Such was the case with Touseef Bhat’s seven-acre plot near Gurez in the
scenic valley of the same name in Indian Kashmir’s Bandipora district.
“The fence is creating serious difficulties for us,” Bhat told the journalist
Athar Parvaiz. “Sometimes we have to walk several kilometers to a cross-
ing point just to visit a neighbor who may only be a shouting distance
away on the other side of the fence.”3
Though the latest cease-fire agreement signed in November 2003
held, sporadic infiltration into the Gurez Valley from the Pakistan-
administered territory continued despite fortification along the LoC. The
bomb shelters built near schools and other public buildings in Gurez, a
town of thirty-five thousand souls, testified to the time when artillery
exchanges along the LoC were a common feature. For now what worried
the residents of Gurez was the sustainability of farming and livestock
breeding. “There may be no firing but cattle put out to graze in the area
between the fence and the LoC wander off to the Pakistani side and are
lost forever,” Bhat’s neighbor Rashid Lone told Parvaiz. Bhat agreed. “In
July [2011], 85 heads of cattle, belonging to my village of Budap, vanished
and they were worth at least 50,000 dollars,” he said. “We cannot afford
to bear such losses and have asked the authorities to help us recover the
animals or compensate us.”4
Consequently there are no day-trippers bussed to the LoC from Sri-
nagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, or Jammu, the winter capital.
The nearest the most enterprising Indian journalist can get to this barrier
on his own is to arrive at Uri, a town surrounded on three sides by high
hills, about two miles from the LoC. Uri lies at the end of a taxi ride of
twenty-one miles through green valleys and 8,200-foot-high mountains
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424807020

from Baramulla, thirty-five miles from Srinagar. On arrival he or she would

find the settlement swarming with police and informers, since it is situated
in an area bristling with separatist militants.
Four hundred thousand heavily armed soldiers and paratroopers are
posted on the Indian side. Perpetually fearful of invasion from India, Pa-
kistan has deployed two-thirds of its 610,000-strong army along the LoC.
Repeated pleas by the administrations of US presidents George W. Bush
and Barack Obama to Islamabad to bolster its troops in the badlands of
the Afghan-Pakistan tribal region to help crush the Afghan Taliban by
reducing its military deployment in Kashmir have received no response.

3
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

The statement by Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf that

“Kashmir runs in our blood” remains as valid today as it did when he
made it in January 2002. At that time 700,000 Indian troops and 300,000
Pakistani soldiers faced one another across the LoC in a high state of alert
that lasted a whole year.
The conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan poisoned relations
between the two sovereign states within a few months of their inception in
August 1947. The Pakistani government could not bear to see a Muslim-
majority area in British India end up as part of Hindu-dominated India.
At the core of this conflict, which has remained intractable for almost
seven decades, lies the far longer history of unreconciled relations between
Hindus and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent.

HISTORIC ROOTS OF DISCORD

Hinduism is polytheistic and centered around idol worship. Islam is

monotheistic and forbids graven images. Abraham started with breaking
up idols, and Muhammad did the same in Mecca. Hindus worship idols
of gods and goddesses. They believe in reincarnation, with the eternal
spirit taking different physical forms in an endless cycle of birth, death,
and re-birth. Muslims believe that in their afterlife they will be judged by
Allah on the Day of Judgment, known only to Allah. Caste is an integral
part of Hinduism whereas it has no sanctification in Islam.
In the Indian subcontinent, the Hindu-Muslim antagonism is
grounded in eight centuries of history. In 1192 Muhammad Ghori of Af-
ghanistan’s army, in a surprise attack before sunrise, defeated the formida-
ble Rajput army of Hindu emperor Prithvi Raj near Delhi and established
the Delhi Sultanate, which went on to cover most of north India. In 1526
it fell to a siege by Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, then ruler of Kabul,
who founded the Mughal dynasty. It gave way to the British Raj in 1807.
Unlike the previous foreign rulers of the subcontinent, the British, ar-
riving by sea as fixed-term contracted employees of the trading East India
Company, had an island homeland with a distinct identity to which they
returned after their tour of duty. This was not the case with their Afghan
and Mughal predecessors, who settled down in the conquered land and
became an integral part of the indigenous society.
By 1807, Muslims were a quarter of the Indian population, most of
them outcaste and lower-caste Hindu converts to Islam, with a sprinkling

4
 INTRODUCTION

of the original Afghan and Mughal ruling elite settling at the top of so-
ciety. In predominantly rural India, Muslims lived in hamlets outside the
main villages and had their own wells. In towns and cities, Hindus and
Muslims voluntarily lived in separate neighborhoods.
Social intercourse between the two communities was minimal, with
intermarriage nonexistent. At the popular level the communal points of
friction centered around Hindus’ reverence of cows and Muslims’ reli-
giously sanctified loathing of pigs and their flesh. In Hindu kingdoms
killing a cow was deemed a capital offense since the fourth century ce. To
retaliate against Muslims’ slaughtering of cows, die-hard Hindus resorted
to desecrating a mosque by a stealth depositing of a pig’s head or carcass at
its entrance, or by playing music or musical instruments outside a mosque
during prayers.
During the British Raj, the emerging apartheid between the ruling,
white Christian minority and the large, subjugated Indian majority cre-
ated widespread resentment against foreign imperialists among locals.
This sentiment came to dominate the predominantly Hindu Indian Na-
tional Congress (henceforth Congress Party) formed in 1885 in Mumbai
with a modest demand that “the Government should be widened and that
the people should have their proper and legitimate share in it.”5
On the whole, having lost their empire to the British, the Muslim elite
sulked, refusing to accept their dramatically diminished circumstances.
Contrary was the case with upper-caste Hindus. In the past they had
adjusted to the reality of alien rule, learning Persian, the court language of
the Muslim dynasties for seven centuries, to administer their rule. With
the advent of the British Raj, they switched to mastering English. As
such, Hindus started to spawn an English-educated urban middle class.
By contrast, Muslims remained divided between the extremes of illiterate
peasantry and richly endowed aristocratic landlords.
A minority among the Muslim nobility adapted to the new real-
ity. Prominent among them was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898).
A highly educated, pro-British, richly bearded aristocrat, Sir Syed was
a political thinker and an educationist who urged fellow Muslims to
learn English. He founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College
in Aligarh in 1875. He advised his coreligionists to stay away from the
Congress Party and focused on expanding the Muhammadan Educational
Conference.
He perceived the Congress Party’s demand for a wider role for In-
dians in the government as the thin end of the wedge for the departure

5
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

of the British from the subcontinent. “Now, suppose that the English
community and the army were to leave India, taking with them all their
cannons and their splendid weapons and all else, who then would be the
rulers of India?” he asked in a speech in March 1888. “Is it possible that
under these circumstances two nations—the Mohammedans and the
Hindus—could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most
certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other.
To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the
inconceivable. . . . But until one nation has conquered the other and made
it obedient, peace cannot reign in the land.”6
Sir Syed’s statement reflected the rising friction between the two com-
munities, which he pointedly called “nations.” At times these tensions esca-
lated into violence. The first recorded communal riot occurred in the North
Gujarat town of Godhra in 1854. Details of the episode are sketchy.7 More
is known about the communal riot in Bombay (later Mumbai) in August
1893. It erupted against the background of the rise of a militant cow pro-
tection movement—Gaorakshak Mandali—that many Muslims regarded
as provocative and was launched in Bombay Presidency in late 1892. Mus-
lim worshipers leaving the Juma Masjid, a striking mosque in South Bom-
bay, after Friday prayers attacked a nearby temple on Hanuman Lane. In
a predominantly illiterate society in a prebroadcasting era, wild rumors
spread rapidly over the next two days. The army was drafted to restore
control. All together seventy-five people lost their lives.8
In December 1906 the Muhammadan Educational Conference meet-
ing in Dacca (later Dhaka) decided to transform itself into a political
party, the All India Muslim League. Dominated by feudal lords with a
sprinkling of religious scholars and educationalists, it elected Adamjee
Pirbhoy as its president. He was followed by Sir Ali Imam and the twenty-
three-year-old Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah—popularly known by his
title of Agha Khan (or Aga Khan)—in successive years. The League was
headquartered in Lucknow. Its primary goal was to promote loyalty to the
British crown while advancing Muslims’ political rights.
It demanded separate electorates for Muslims when the British gov-
ernment decided to introduce the concept of conferring the right to vote
on Indians with the enforcement of the 1892 India Councils Act. It turned
the hitherto fully nominated central and provincial legislative councils
into partly elected chambers. Nominated municipal boards, chambers of
commerce, landowner associations, and universities were authorized to
submit lists of elected members from which the viceroy and provincial

6
 INTRODUCTION

governors made a final selection of council members. These members,

forming a minority, had the right to debate the budget but not vote on it.
In popular terms it meant franchise for 2 percent of the adult population,
about a third of literate Indians.
Since the League also wanted to promote understanding between
Muslims and other Indians, it did not bar Muslim members of the Con-
gress Party from its membership. It soon became a common practice for
the League and the Congress Party to convene annual conferences in the
same city and around the same time to enable Muslim delegates to at-
tend both assemblies. Among those who did so in 1913 was Muhammad
Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), an elegant but skeletal British-trained lawyer
with an austere, tapering face—an Edwardian gentleman in hand-tailored
suits and starched collars—who had joined the Congress Party seven
years earlier.
Those sponsoring Jinnah’s membership in the League declared that
“loyalty to the Muslim League and the Muslim interest would in no way
and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the national cause
to which his life was dedicated.”9 Jinnah was elected to the League’s coun-
cil, where he came to play a leading role.
By then, however, the India Councils Act, amended in 1909, had in-
corporated the Muslim League’s demand for separate Muslim electoral
constituencies with reduced franchise qualifications. This concession was
made because of the historical reluctance of upper-crust Muslims to dis-
card Persian and learn English, resulting in their reduced socioeconomic
standing vis-à-vis their Hindu counterparts. To qualify as voters, Hindus
were required to have a minimum taxable income of Rs 30,000, whereas
the requirement for Muslims was only Rs 3,000. On the education fran-
chise, a Hindu had to be a university graduate of thirty years’ standing,
while the figure for a Muslim was only three years. Qualified Muslims
were entitled to vote in the general constituencies as well.10
Until 1913 the Congress Party, led by lawyers and journalists, had
limited itself to petitioning the British government in India, based in
Delhi from that year onward (the earlier capital being Calcutta), for
modest administrative-political reform. It had welcomed London’s con-
cession of letting a minority of the provincial and central legislative
council members be elected on a franchise of a tiny 2 percent of the
population. It and the Muslim League backed Britain and its allies in
their war, which broke out in 1914, against Germany and Ottoman
Turkey, whose sultan was also the caliph of Muslims worldwide. Almost

7
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

1,441,000 Indians volunteered to join the British Indian army, with

850,000 serving abroad.
They were shipped out from Bombay and Karachi, the main ports on
the west coast, to fight in the Middle East and Western Europe. While
Delhi was the center of the imperial power exercised by Britain, Bombay,
the capital of Bombay Presidency, had emerged as the focal point for
domestic politics in which lawyers played a vital role. And it was to this
city that Jinnah returned after studying law in London in 1896, and not
to Karachi, his birthplace.
Five years earlier, another lawyer, after having been called to the bar
in London, arrived in Bombay. He shared with Jinnah Gujarati his mother
tongue but not his religion. He was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Jin-
nah and Gandhi would rise to become titanic public figures and dominate
the country’s political landscape for three decades.

8
 1

The Modish Dresser

Meets the Mahatma

Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the only son of Jinnahbhai Poonja, an afflu-
ent, Gujarati-speaking Ismaili Muslim importer and exporter in Karachi,
and Mithi Bai. Poonja had dealings with British trading companies, one
of which was headed by Sir Frederick Leigh-Croft. The avuncular Sir
Fredrick arranged a business apprenticeship in London for the sixteen-
year-old Muhammad Ali. After a brief period of learning the basics of
shipping, the young Poonja decided to study law. He qualified as a bar-
rister in 1896 at the age of twenty. He clipped the suffix “bhai” (Gujarati:
brother) from his father’s name and made Jinnah his surname.
During his time in London, he became an acolyte of Dadabhai
Naoroji, a luxuriantly bearded, Gujarati-speaking Parsi Indian business-
man and politician who was elected a Liberal member of parliament from
a north London constituency in 1892. Jinnah assisted him in his job as an
MP and often attended House of Commons sessions.
On his return to India, Jinnah enrolled as an advocate in Bombay’s
High Court. He rented a room at the Apollo Hotel near the court but
struggled to make a living. Recalling those days, he said, “For two or three
years before I became a magistrate [in May 1900] I had a very bad time,
and I used to go every other day to the Watson’s Hotel down the road.
It was a famous hotel in those days, and I used to take on to a game of
billiards for a wager, and that is how I supplemented my otherwise meager
resources.”1 To be appointed a Bombay Presidency magistrate at the age
of twenty-four was a remarkable achievement for Jinnah. But he quit that
job and returned to his legal career.

9
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

He came under the influence of Justice Badruddin Tyabji. Given

Tyabji’s background as a former Congress Party president, Jinnah came
to view the organization with an approving eye. At the 1904 Congress
convention, he met and worked with Professor Gopal Krishna Gokhale
(1866–1915), a moderate figure in the party. A mustached, spectacled
Hindu Brahmin sporting a flat, round hat, Gokhale won the party’s pres-
idency in 1905. As in the past, Muslim delegates were thin on the ground:
only 20 out of 756, or about 4 percent.2
In 1906—when Jinnah’s thriving legal practice enabled him to pur-
chase a spacious bungalow in Bombay’s upscale Malabar Hills—he at-
tended the Congress Party session in Calcutta (later Kolkata). He acted
as private secretary for the aging Naoroji, who, after his return to India,
had been elected president of the Congress. In that role, Naoroji expli-
cated the ideal of swaraj (Hindi: home rule) for Indians for the first time.
As an opponent of separate electoral rolls and seats for Muslims, then
being advocated by some Muslim leaders, Jinnah established himself as
a noncommunal politician.
In 1909, however, the British government introduced separate Mus-
lim constituencies with reduced franchise qualifications for voters than
those for non-Muslim constituencies, classified as “general.” Later that
year Jinnah defeated Maulavi Rafiuddin, president of the Bombay Mus-
lim League, to represent the Muslims of Bombay Presidency in the vice-
roy’s Imperial Legislative Council. He thus demonstrated his popularity
among Muslims while maintaining his opposition to separate Muslim
electoral rolls. He attended the Congress session in 1910 but not the ones
in the next two years.
However, he remained close to Gokhale. Together with Gokhale, as
part of an Indian delegation, he sailed for London in April 1913 to press
the case for self-rule for India. After his return home in October, he joined
the All India Muslim League at its seventh session in Agra in December.
“Jinnah had by now truly come into his own,” writes the Indian politician-
author Jaswant Singh in his book Jinnah. “At this juncture, not only was he
taking steps to bring about unity between the League and the Congress,
he was also striking a balance between the moderates and the extremists
[within the Congress]. In politics now all factions gave him recognition.”3
Jinnah rightly saw himself taking up the legacy of Naoroji and Gokhale as
a nationalist leader representing all major communities of the subcontinent.
A year earlier, Gokhale, described by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, as “the most

10
 THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

perfect man in the [Indian] political field”4 had been invited to the Union
of South Africa to help invigorate the Indian settlers’ protest against racist
rules and laws. While there, Gokhale urged Gandhi to return to India to
further the cause of home rule there.
Once South Africa had passed the Indian Relief Act in July 1914—
abolishing the tax on former Indian indentured laborers and permitting
free Indians to enter South Africa as part of the British Empire—Gandhi
returned home. When World War I erupted in Europe the next month,
he supported the British Empire against Germany and the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, which were later to be joined by the Ottoman Em-
pire. Also on Britain’s side were the Congress Party, Jinnah, and the Mus-
lim League.
Jinnah and Gokhale were the leading members of the group formed
to welcome Gandhi and his unsmiling, diminutive, snub-nosed wife,
Kasturbai, on their arrival in Bombay on January 9, 1915. Given his
popularity, the local Gurjar Sabha, a Gujarati community council, invited
Jinnah to host a garden reception for the Gandhis on the grounds of the
spacious mansion of Mangaldas Girdhardas, a leading textile magnate,
five days later.

THE CONDESCENDING GANDHI

Speaking in English, Jinnah welcomed Mohandas and Kasturbai Gandhi

“not only on behalf of Bombay but of the whole of India.” He said that
the greatest problem facing them all was “to bring unanimity and coop-
eration between the two communities [of Hindus and Muslims] so that
the demands of India [made on imperial Britain] may be made absolutely
unanimously.” He added, “Undoubtedly, he [Gandhi] would not only be-
come a worthy ornament but also a real [political] worker whose equals
there are very few.”5
Gandhi replied in Gujarati. He said that in South Africa when any-
thing was said about Gujaratis, it was understood to refer to the Hindu
community only, and Parsis and Muhammadans were not thought to be
part of it. He was therefore glad to find a Muhammadan a member of the
Gurjar Sabha and the chair of the reception.6
Leaving aside his mention of the popular perception prevalent in
South Africa, Gandhi conveniently overlooked a critical turn of events
in his own life. It was a Muslim legal firm, Dada Abdulla & Company,

11
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

based in the North Gujarat town of Rajkot that had given him a year-long
contract in early 1893 to work in their office in Durban, the capital of
Britain’s Colony of Natal.7 In any case, to point out the religious minority
status of the keynote speaker at an occasion brimming with promise and
goodwill was in bad taste, to say the least. It did not augur well for a cor-
dial relationship between him and Jinnah.
Unfortunately, Gokhale died suddenly a month later. His loss grieved
Jinnah—“an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” in the words of
Gokhale—as much as it did Gandhi, who likened the departed leader to
“the Ganges in whose refreshing, holy waters one longed to bathe.”8
Unlike Jinnah, Gandhi, a novice on his arrival in Durban, had re-
invented himself a few times during his twenty-one years in South Africa:
a campaigner for Indian settlers’ equality with British colonizers, an ally
of the British Empire in the 1899–1902 Boer War, an associate of the
Natal government’s brutal quashing of the Zulu rebellion with an iron
hand, the leader of the passive resistance movement against the Asiatic
Registration Bill in Transvaal, a political lobbyist in London, the founder
of a rural commune to train civil resistors, and the instigator of an Indian
miners’ strike.
Gandhi’s transformation was captured by the way he dressed. In
1893 he arrived in Durban as an attorney, wearing a tight-fitting busi-
ness suit with a tie around a winged collar and shining shoes. Two de-
cades later, he appeared in a knee-length white shirt, dhoti, turban, and
sandals as the leader of the coal miners’ strike. In between, he acquired
a flair for self-dramatization, a tactic that would serve him well in the
struggle for Indian independence. Overall, his South African experi-
ences furnished him with a successful campaigning template he would
later deploy on a much larger scale in British India.

ATTORNEY GANDHI TURNS INTO A SATYAGRAHI

Born in 1869, Mohandas hailed from the trading caste. He was the last
and fourth child of Karamchand Gandhi, chief minister of the small
princely state of Porbandar within Bombay Presidency, and Putlibai.
While still at school, the thirteen-year-old Mohandas was married off
to Kasturbai Makhanji, an unlettered girl of the same age. He became
a father two years later. But the infant died soon after birth. Mohandas
scraped through the matriculation examination in 1888, the year when

12
 THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

the couple’s first healthy baby boy, Harilal, was born. Soon after, his elder
brother, Laxmidas, sent Mohandas to London to study law.
A 1889 mug shot of Gandhi shows a young face with jug ears, big,
pointed nose, full, sensuous mouth, and eyes dulled by apprehension, the
overall impression being of a man without direction. He studied Indian
law and jurisdiction. A strict vegetarian, he joined the Vegetarian Society,
whose members included the Anglo-Irish playwright and political radical
George Bernard Shaw. He introduced the young Gandhi to the works
of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), a liberal American author and
philosopher, and Count Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the eminent Russian
writer-thinker who was also a vegetarian. Gandhi was called to the bar
in June 1891.
On returning to India, he registered as an advocate at the Bombay
High Court, five years before Jinnah did. Like Jinnah, he had to struggle
to make ends meet. But unlike Jinnah, he soon gave up and left Bombay
for Rajkot. There he made a modest living drafting petitions for litigants.
That stopped when he ran afoul of a British officer. An offer of a paid
job in the Durban office of a local legal firm came as a welcome relief
for him.
In June 1893 while he was on his way to Pretoria by rail, a white man,
boarding the train at the mountainous Pietermaritzburg station, objected
to his presence in the first-class carriage. When he refused to move to the
van at the end of the train, he and his luggage were thrown off the com-
partment. The station staff confiscated his luggage and overcoat. Shivering
through the night in the waiting room, Gandhi resolved to stay on in the
Colony of Natal beyond his yearlong contract and fight racial discrimi-
nation against Indians.9
A cofounder of the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, Gandhi was
elected its secretary. This gave him an opportunity to build up the insti-
tution from the grassroots and in the process develop his organizational
skills. Later he would deploy these on a far wider scale in his native land
to broaden the base of the Congress Party.
During his visit to India in 1896 to bring his family to Durban, he
addressed a meeting in Madras (now Chennai), where he railed against
the Natal government for treating Indians as “beasts.”10 Yet he actively
sided with the British Empire in its fight with the Dutch settlers in the
Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic in the Boer War: he raised
the 1,100-strong Indian Ambulance Corps. The subsequent victory of the
British Empire raised his social and professional status. His legal practice

13
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

thrived to the extent that in 1903 he shifted his successful law firm to
Johannesburg, capital of the province of Transvaal.
Despite his material prosperity an element of early asceticism re-
mained part of his character. It came to the fore when he read the book
Unto This Last by John Ruskin, a British essayist and art critic. That in-
spired him to live simply. In 1904 he bought a thousand-acre farm among
large sugar cane estates near Phoenix, twelve miles north of Durban.
Named the Phoenix Settlement, it became the head office of the weekly
magazine Indian Opinion, founded a year earlier in Durban.
He continued to believe in the benevolence of Britain’s imperial
rule administered from London. When the Natal government declared
martial law in February 1906 to curb a Zulu rebellion led by Bambatha
kaMancinza against oppressive British rule, Gandhi urged the colonial
government to recruit Indians as a reserve force. In his Indian Opinion
column he argued that “the British Empire existed for the welfare of the
world” and reaffirmed “a genuine sense of loyalty” to it.11
In essence, he wanted Indians to ingratiate themselves with the
British Empire to win the same rights as white settlers and thus place
themselves above the indigenous Africans. The government made a mi-
nor concession and let him command a platoon of twenty-one Indian
volunteers as stretcher bearers and sanitary aides to treat wounded British
soldiers. By the time the ferocious military expedition ended, some three
thousand to four thousand Zulus lay dead. In stark contrast, the British
lost only thirty-six men.12
Across the provincial border, in Transvaal, the government published
the draft of the Asiatic Registration Bill in August 1906. It required all
Asiatic people to register and carry a registration card, called a “pass,”
under pain of fine or imprisonment. Gandhi opposed the proposed leg-
islation and urged fellow Indians not to register, but his efforts altered
nothing.
The bill became law a year later. Gandhi refused to register and was
jailed for two months in January 1908. In his talks with Gandhi, colonial
secretary general Jan Smuts promised that if Indians registered volun-
tarily, he would repeal the law. Gandhi agreed to cooperate. He and other
lawbreakers were released. Most Indians followed Gandhi’s advice and
registered. But Smuts reneged. The law remained on the statute books.
This was the pivotal turning point in Gandhi’s political evolution. He
decided to dramatize noncooperation with the unjust laws of the gov-
ernment in a nonviolent way. On August 16, 1908, some two thousand

14
 THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

Indians of different faiths gathered outside the Hamidiya Mosque in Jo-

hannesburg in a protest rally. Gandhi made a bonfire in a cauldron filled
with burning paraffin and encouraged the protestors to throw their passes
into the roaring flames. The fact that they did was a tribute to his orga-
nizational skills.
At the same time, Gandhi remained active at the Phoenix Settlement,
which was run on a cooperative basis. There he and his associates in Natal
decided to defy the Transvaal Immigration Restriction Act, which banned
Indian immigration into Transvaal. Defiance had to be done passively,
though. At the same time Gandhi rejected using the adjective “passive,”
since it resonated with the white settlers’ image of “rice-eating” Indian
immigrants as weaklings.
That led Gandhi to coin the term “satyagraha,” which translates as
“truth force” or “force of truth.” Those who resorted to satyagraha were
called “satyagrahis.” What Gandhi did was to synthesize the Hindu con-
cept of dhama13—squatting in front of a house or office to apply moral
pressure on the occupants—with the concept of civil disobedience. Thus
satyagraha combined nonviolent resistance against, and noncooperation
with, unjust authority.
Each of the potential lawbreakers appeared peacefully at a Transvaal
frontier post, courted arrest, and served a jail sentence. Gandhi did the
same in October 1908. So he spent a month in prison. Here he reread
Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” written in 1849 as tensions over
slavery and America’s invasion of Mexico were stirring up controversy.
Thoreau refused to pay taxes and was jailed. Of the 13,000 Indian settlers
in Transvaal before the civil disobedience movement, almost half of them
left the province. Of the remaining, at one point as many as 2,500 were
behind bars.14
Gandhi continued to make a distinction between the nucleus of the
British Empire in London and its colonies around the world, and took a
benign view of the former. In the second half of 1909 he went to London
to highlight the plight of Indian settlers in South Africa. He won the
backing of many British liberal and enlightened imperialists and suc-
ceeded in getting the Transvaal’s Asiatic Registration Act repealed.
Among his white liberal supporters in Transvaal, a rich German ar-
chitect Hermann Kallenbach stood out, all the more because of his wres-
tler’s physique, handlebar mustache, and pince-nez. In 1910 he purchased
1,100 acres of land at Lawley, twenty miles southwest of Johannesburg,
and donated it to the resistors of the unjust laws of Transvaal. Gandhi

15
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

named the settlement Tolstoy Farm. The idea was to use it as a base to
train satyagrahis and their families to live simply in harmony with one
another. In other words, it was to be an ashram for the acolytes of Gandhi
and his nonviolent civil disobedience movement.
It was at Tolstoy Farm that Gandhi received Gokhale in October
1912. Surprisingly, the government of the two-year-old Union of South
Africa, led by Louis Botha (prime minister) and Smuts (defense and in-
terior minister), facilitated Gokhale’s tour of the country. They promised
him the repeal of the Transvaal Immigration Restriction Act and the £3
annual tax imposed by the Natal government on the freed indentured In-
dian laborers, who had started arriving from southern India beginning in
1860 to work in mines and on plantations. The tax was introduced to en-
sure that indentured laborers whose contracts had ended returned home.15
But nothing changed. Indeed, South Africa’s Immigrant Regulation
Act, enforced in August 1913, imposed further restrictions on former In-
dian indentured laborers wishing to settle in South Africa. Gandhi turned
his attention to the tax required of the freed indentured laborers. This
mattered particularly to the Indians working in coal mines.

WIELDING THE NONVIOLENT WEAPON AGAINST

MINING MAGNATES

Responding to the call by Gandhi and his aides to strike, the Indian min-
ers in Newcastle downed their tools in October 1913. They were joined by
others. The strikers were peaceful. Gandhi led a procession of two thou-
sand miners from Newcastle on foot across the Natal border into Trans-
vaal to defy the immigration restriction law. This was a unique but highly
effective way to raise popular consciousness.
Remarkably, these marchers, almost all of them Hindus from South
India, shouted such religious slogans as “Dwarakanath ki jai” (Victory to
Lord Krishna) and “Ramchandra ki jai” (Victory to Lord Rama). Many
sang Hindu devotional songs.16 Gandhi did or said nothing to cool their
religious ardor. The protestors were arrested inside Transvaal, about sev-
enty miles from their destination—Tolstoy Farm—and returned to Natal
by train. But on November 11 Gandhi was sentenced to nine months in
jail with hard labor.
Nevertheless, by the end of November, the number of strikers soared
to sixteen thousand, affecting sixty-six workplaces. The government

16
 THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

dispatched extra policemen from Johannesburg and Pretoria, the national

capital, to break the strike. Confrontations ensued between them and the
strikers. Six Indians were killed by police bullets.
In Delhi Viceroy Lord Hardinge demanded that the South African
government appoint a commission of inquiry into the Indians’ grievances.
London pressured the Pretoria administration. It yielded and released
Gandhi in December, and appointed a three-person commission.
In its March 1914 report the commission recommended the repeal
of the £3 tax. Four months later the South African parliament passed
the Indian Relief Act. It abrogated the £3 tax, cancelled all arrears, and
allowed South Africa–born Indians unfettered access to the Cape Colony
and free Indians the right to continue to enter South Africa.
Gandhi was basking in this glory as he sailed to Bombay via London.
After setting up a makeshift ashram in Ahmedabad in 1915, and receiving
the British Empire’s Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal for his earlier ambulance
services, he undertook study tours of the subcontinent.

GANDHI AND JINNAH ON DIVERGENT PATHS

Meanwhile, Jinnah was furthering the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity by

nudging the Muslim League and the Congress Party to forge a com-
mon platform. The League held its annual conference at the same time—
December 1915—and the same city, Bombay, as the Congress Party. Their
leaders appointed separate committees to consult one another and pro-
duce a program for reforming the colonial government by London.
The result was a common platform adopted by the two parties at the
time of their annual conferences in Lucknow in December 1916. Its main
points were: “There shall be self-government in India. Muslims should be
given one-third representation in the central government. There should
be separate electorates for all the communities until a community comes
up with the demand for joint electorates. All the elected members of
provincial and central legislatures should be elected on the basis of adult
franchise.”17
Following his election as the League’s president in December 1916,
Jinnah declared, “The Muslim League stands abreast of the Indian Na-
tional Congress and is ready to participate in any patriotic efforts for the
advancement of the country as a whole.”18 He described himself as “a
staunch Congressman” who had “no love for sectarian cries.”19

17
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

He appealed to reluctant Congress Party officials to overcome gen-

uine anxiety among Muslims at the prospect of adult suffrage. Forming
only a quarter of the population, they feared being swamped by the 70
percent Hindu majority. To still their apprehension, he argued, Congress
leaders should concede separate electorates and 33 percent share of power
in the central government for Muslims. His proposal was adopted.
At the same time Jinnah led Bombay Presidency’s Home Rule
League, which demanded the self-governing status of a dominion for
India within the empire, as was the case then with Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, and South Africa.
In the summer of 1916, Jinnah was invited to vacation in the en-
chanting hill station of Darjeeling in Bengal at the summer retreat of
his friend and client Sir Dinshaw Petit, an affluent Parsi textile magnate.
There Jinnah fell in love with Rattanbai (aka Ruttie), the sixteen-year-old
daughter of Sir Dinshaw. Fair-skinned, doe-eyed, with a full, fleshy mouth
in an elliptical face, she was intelligent and mature beyond her years. She
found Jinnah irresistible. But when he approached her father for his per-
mission to marry her, he was rebuffed. Back in Bombay, though, defying
her father’s stricture to stay away from Jinnah, Rattanbai met him secretly.
They decided to wait to marry until she was eighteen.
In politics, Jinnah faced opposition from several Muslim League lead-
ers who were not reassured by the Congress Party conceding separate
electoral rolls and enhanced power for Muslims. They were apprehen-
sive that self-rule would lead to Muslims’ oppression by Hindus and lack
of jobs in government and the Hindu-dominated business world. “Fear
not,” retorted Jinnah in 1917. “This is a bogy put before you to scare you
away from the cooperation and unity [with Hindus] which are essential
to self-government.”20
The December 1916 Congress session in Lucknow proved equally
pivotal for Gandhi. He was approached by Pandit Raj Kumar Shukla, the
representative of the tenant farmers of Champaran, an outlying district
of North Bihar adjacent to Nepal. Shukla seconded the resolution placed
before the conference that urged the government to appoint a committee
to inquire into the strained relations between the indigo farmers and the
European planters in North Bihar. Surprisingly, it was the first time that
a Congress session had given a platform to a rural speaker with firsthand
knowledge of the state of peasants, who were 80 percent of the popula-
tion. (Earlier Gandhi had refused to propose the resolution because of

18
 THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

his ignorance of the problem, committing himself only to undertaking a

study visit later.)
In mid-April 1917, he met the secretary of the Planters’ Association,
the commissioner of the Tirhut Division (covering Champaran district),
and the collector of Muzaffarpur. They told him that since an official in-
quiry had already started, his visit was unnecessary and he should leave.
Disregarding the advice, he proceeded to the nearest town of Motihari21
to tour the affected area.
The crisis was rooted in the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793
between the East India Company and local landlords in Bengal and
Bihar. It invested the latter with permanent ownership of land. So when
British planters started acquiring plots to grow sugarcane and indigo,
the source of natural blue dye used in the textile industry, they became
absolute owners. They rented land to local sharecroppers on the con-
dition that they would grow indigo on 15 percent of the plot—called
teen-katha, or 3/20, in Hindi—and hand over the crop as rent for the
leased land. The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 (covering Bihar) codified
this practice.
In the early twentieth century the introduction of a chemical substi-
tute for blue dye made the market for indigo unprofitable. This had a dev-
astating impact on the lives of a million tenant farmers and their families.
The European planters in Champaran district urged them to abandon
indigo crops and in return pay 75 percent more rent than before. Those
who refused were beaten by the planters’ militia, who harassed them fur-
ther by confiscating their cattle. Many of them signed new contracts only
to find that they could not afford to pay the increased rent. Tensions rose
in 1912. Left with no legal recourse, sharecroppers rebelled in 1914 and
again in mid-1916. Later in the year they dispatched Shukla, a learned
Brahmin, to plead their case before the Congress convention.
Gandhi was no doubt conversant with the historical background as he
mounted an elephant, along with two assistants who would serve as inter-
preters, at nine am on April 16, 1917, in Motihari and went to interview
some tenant farmers in the village of Jasaulipatti. The beast plodded along
at the typical pace of a human adult. Around noon he was overtaken by a
cyclist. The panting rider turned out to be a police subinspector in plain-
clothes. He told Gandhi that the collector D. Weston wanted to see him
immediately. Gandhi got off the elephant and instructed his assistants to
record the testimonies of sharecroppers.

19
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

He then boarded a bullock cart procured by the police officer. On their

way back to Motihari, they were stopped by the deputy superintendent of
police, who was riding in a car. He served Gandhi the collector’s notice, or-
dering him to “leave by the next available train.” Gandhi signed the receipt
but scribbled on the back that he would not abide by it. He was summoned
to court the following day. The news about his brush with officials spread fast.
A couple of hours before his appearance at the court of the district
magistrate, W. B. Heycock, several thousand tenant farmers gathered
around the place for the darshan (Hindi: sight) of the politician who was
ready to face incarceration in order to improve their miserable lot.
Gandhi pleaded guilty. “I am fully conscious of the fact that a person,
holding in the public life of India a position such as I do, has to be most
careful in setting examples,” he said. “I have disregarded the order served
upon me not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to
the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.”22
The magistrate announced a two-hour recess and agreed to release Gandhi
on bail. Gandhi refused to furnish the bail, but he was freed nonetheless.
When the court reassembled, Heycock said he would announce the ver-
dict three days later. On April 21, following the order of the lieutenant
governor of Bihar and Orissa, Sir Albert Gait, the case against Gandhi
was withdrawn.
This was the first victory for civil disobedience in India. Gandhi’s
status was enhanced. The local people started to call him Bapu (Hindi:
Father). He kept this struggle strictly economic, divorced from the po-
litical demand for self-rule, which could have been construed as treason
by the government then empowered with the draconian Defense of India
(Criminal Law Amendment) Act of 1915.
By the middle of June, Gandhi and his team, which included several
Congress-affiliated lawyers, recorded the testimony of more than 8,000
tenant farmers inhabiting more than 2,800 villages—stories of intimidation
and coercion by the British planters and their militia. By then Lieutenant
Governor Sir Albert had accepted the suggestion of appointing the Cham-
paran Agrarian Enquiry Committee, and Gandhi had agreed to serve on it.
In August 1917 the committee adopted Gandhi’s proposal to abolish the
3/20 system. In October, when the committee submitted its report, which
favored the tenant farmers’ case, the lieutenant governor accepted most of
its recommendations. The landlords agreed to forego the rent rise and return
a quarter of the increases already collected.23
This was a moment of glory for Gandhi.

20
 THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

GANDHI ASCENDANT

Gandhi had resorted to traveling in uncomfortable, overcrowded, third-

class train compartments to furbish his image as “a man of the masses.”
He was riding high when he chaired the First Gujarat Political Con-
ference in Godhra on November 3, 1917. He shared the dais with Jin-
nah. When Jinnah rose to speak in English, Gandhi interrupted him and
asked Jinnah in Gujarati to speak in that language. Jinnah was miffed. He
switched to Gujarati but never forgave Gandhi for the slight inflicted on
him in public.24
For his part, Jinnah too was working tirelessly, albeit behind closed
doors, for the welfare of the nation. The newly appointed secretary of state
for India, Edwin Montagu, outlined to the British parliament in Au-
gust 1917 the official policy of “increasing association of Indians in every
branch of the administration and gradual development of self-government
institutions with a view to a progressive realization of responsible govern-
ment in India as an integral part of the British Empire.”25 What had driven
the British cabinet to this position was the declaration in favor of self-
determination for nations by US president Woodrow Wilson after the
entry of America on the Allied side of the war four months earlier.
Montagu arrived in India in October to consult its leading figures.
Jinnah was a member of the three deputations of leaders who met Mon-
tagu and Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, one of these deputations representing
the Congress Party and the Muslim League jointly.26 In these meetings
the forty-one-year-old Jinnah cut a dashing figure. “Raven-haired with
a mustache almost as full as [Field Marshall Herbert] Kitchener’s and
lean as a rapier, he sounded like [British actor] Ronald Coleman, dressed
like Anthony Eden [a future British prime minister], and was adored by
most women at first sight, and admired or envied by most men,” noted
his American biographer, Stanley Wolpert.27 A successful barrister who
craved luxury, he was formal, fastidious, and often imperious and frosty.
By contrast, the forty-eight-year old mustached Gandhi, dressed in
a dowdy dhoti, long shirt, and turban, was accessible and relaxed, with a
ready smile. He was used to a Spartan lifestyle at the ashram along the
bank of Sabarmati River on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, which he built
up properly after the outbreak of plague in the city in August 1917.
To discourage their workers from fleeing to their villages to escape
the epidemic, the textile mill owners belonging to the Ahmedabad Mill
Owners Association (AMOA), led by Ambalal Sarabhai, gave them an

21
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

80 percent “plague bonus.” When the deadly disease subsided in January,

AMOA announced its intention to rescind the bonus. Workers threat-
ened a general strike. Sarabhai approached Gandhi to help prevent it.
Gandhi advised arbitration. It failed. Following sporadic strikes, AMOA
declared a lockout on February 22. Workers demanded a 50 percent hike
in pay to compensate for high inflation caused by World War I. Gandhi
suggested a 35 percent increase. AMOA offered 20 percent and lifted the
lockout to employ all those prepared to accept its deal. But most workers
opted for Gandhi’s figure and leadership.
Gandhi called a total strike on March 12, 1918, but the response was
patchy. As employees started to drift back to work, Gandhi undertook a
fast on March 15 until all workers stayed out or there was a settlement.
This was a novel tactic.
Each day Gandhi published a leaflet to explain his rationale. Stung
by the workers’ remarks that he was eating “sumptuous meals” while they
were suffering “death agonies,” he had decided to share their condition, he
said. Next, he mentioned “the power of suffering voluntarily for spiritual
purpose.” He revealed that he had gleaned from “the ancient culture of
India . . . a truth which, even if mastered by a few persons here at the mo-
ment, gives these few [people] a mastery over the world.” On March 17, in
his lecture at his ashram, he conceded that there was “a taint of coercion”
in his fasting because AMOA feared that he would die of starvation.
Later that day Sarabhai capitulated.28
The mill owners agreed to pay a 35 percent bonus on the first day,
down to 20 percent on the next day, followed by 27.5 percent thereafter
until the new arbitration committee came up with its award. Six months
later it would prescribe 35 percent.
The greatness of Gandhi lay largely in his tactical innovation to
achieve his objectives. As a trained lawyer, he was well placed to argue
his case in legal terms. By setting alight registration cards en masse in
Johannesburg he dramatized violation of an unjust law. By leading a long
land march in South Africa he helped engender political consciousness
at the popular level in a manner not seen before. His field research to
gather evidence of the oppression of tenant peasants in North Bihar broke
fresh ground. To this armory of tactics he added moral coercion through
fasting. His wide array of tactics, all nonviolent, set him apart from Jin-
nah, who remained tied to deploying constitutional means in legislative
chambers or meetings held behind closed doors.

22
 THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

In Ahmedabad, besides inadvertently providing Gandhi a new non-

violent tactic of fasting—which he would deploy sixteen more times
during the next thirty years—the latest episode gave him an urban, indus-
trial base. It would lead to the formation of the twenty-thousand-strong
Ahmedabad Textile Labor Association, which practiced moderate trade
unionism compared to that advocated by the Communist Party’s All India
Trade Union Congress. At the same time Gandhi’s traditionally cordial
relations with textile mill owners and other industrialists enabled him to
secure donations from them to fund the running of the Congress Party
as it expanded its narrow base. Above all else, the events in Champaran
and Ahmedabad gave Gandhi an unprecedented publicity through both
the press and, in a 93 percent illiterate society, word of mouth. Other
politicians, including Jinnah, envied the renown he had gained within a
few years.
When the lieutenant governor of Bihar and Orissa kept his word
by signing the Champaran Agrarian Law (Bihar and Orissa Act I of
1918) in March 1918, Gandhi felt vindicated. On April 27 he attended
the viceroy’s War Conference in Delhi and addressed it in Hindi. Two
months later he toured Kaira District in Gujarat to urge young, able-bodied
farmhands to enroll in the army and boost the empire’s war effort.29 He
reassured women in religious terms: he told them that if their husbands
died while performing their duty—dharma—the couples would be to-
gether again in their “next incarnation.” He urged potential recruits to
“fight unconditionally unto death [along] with the British.” The skeptical
villagers were largely unconvinced.30
Whereas Gandhi built up a mass following by getting involved in
the economic struggles of peasants and workers, Jinnah’s credentials as
a nationalist were underscored by his performances as a member of the
viceroy’s Imperial Legislative Council (ILC) and president of Bombay
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Presidency’s Home Rule League. In early 1918 Bombay Presidency’s gov-

ernor, Lord Willingdon, acknowledged Jinnah’s political status when he
included Jinnah in a list with Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, an eminent
Congressman; Bal Gangadhar Tilak (jailed by the British for six years);
and Annie Besant (interned in 1917), “who were among those extremists
who had no feeling for their duty towards [the] Empire in a crisis.”31
Jinnah wore this label as a badge of honor. Jinnah married Ruttie
Dinshaw, a young nationalist to the core, in April 1918. On converting
to Islam, she acquired the name of Maryam, and the wedding took place

23
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

in South Court, Jinnah’s palatial mansion in Bombay, on Mount Pleasant

Road in upscale Malabar Hill.
A year later Jinnah vociferously criticized the report by Montagu and
Viceroy Lord Chelmsford on reforming the administration of India by
introducing diarchy: three of the seven members of the viceroy’s executive
council would be Indian but charged with such minor ministries as edu-
cation, health, and agriculture.
Jinnah and other nationalist leaders had expected self-government for
India after the Allied victory in November 1918. They had fully backed
the British Empire in that armed conflict during which the draconian
Defense of India (Criminal Law Amendment) Act, passed in March
1915, was set to remain in force six months after the war.
As the expiration date of this act neared, Viceroy Chelmsford pro-
posed replacing it, indefinitely, with the Rowlatt Act—named after Sir
Sidney Rowlatt, chair of the Committee on the Defense of India Act—
empowering him to detain or expel any “suspected terrorist” without any
charge or trial. While the Indian minority on the ILC rejected the bill,
the British majority backed it. In protest, Jinnah resigned from the ILC.
When the Rowlatt Act came into force on March 10, 1919, the Con-
gress Party accepted Gandhi’s proposal for satyagraha on the issue by
calling for a one-day general strike and the wearing of black armbands,
on March 30. The black armband tactic proved very effective—even win-
ning the support of pro-British Indians, when the rumor spread fast in
the crowded bazaars that this gesture was in honor of the 62,000 Indian
soldiers who were killed in the war. Gandhi later changed the protest date
to April 6. But the general strike went ahead in Delhi. Strikers were shot
dead by police, further increasing tensions in the capital and Punjab.
On April 6, Jinnah voiced his support for the strike at a rally in Bom-
bay, thus invigorating the protest. Four days later two Congress leaders—a
Hindu and a Muslim—were arrested at a rally in the Punjabi city of
Amritsar under the Rowlatt Act and taken to an unknown detention
area. Their detention sparked protests, which led to an orgy of arson and
violence. It left five Europeans dead. Additional troops summoned by
Punjab’s jug-eared, thin-lipped lieutenant governor, Sir Michael Francis
O’Dwyer, arrived in Amritsar under the command of the fifty-five-year-
old brigadier general Reginald Dyer. Defying his age, he had retained
his haughty looks. O’Dwyer’s immediate ban on further assemblies was
poorly communicated in the absence of nationwide radio broadcasting,
which did not start in India until 1930.

24
 THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

On Sunday, April 13—coinciding with Baisakhi, a spring festival cel-

ebrated by Hindus and Sikhs—between five thousand and ten thousand
unarmed protestors gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, a park enclosed by walls
with only two gateways. After persuading Viceroy Chelmsford to declare
martial law in Punjab, Dyer, leading ninety Indian and Nepalese soldiers,
marched into the park.
Without warning, he ordered his men to open fire. Finding the troops
blocking the larger exit, the terrorized people herded toward the narrower
one, while others tried to climb the high walls to escape. By the time Dyer
ordered a cease-fire ten minutes later, 1,650 rounds of ammunition had
killed 379 (according to the official report, but unofficially 530) people
and injured about 1,150. Dyer then withdrew his force. The following
day there was more rioting and arson as Dyer advocated a strategy of
“frightfulness” to quell disturbances. This episode won Dyer the moniker
of the Butcher of Amritsar.32
The massacre outraged Indians of all political hues. Though poorly
recreated, this episode marks one of the high points in the biopic Gandhi,
directed by Richard Attenborough. “When the government takes up arms
against its unarmed subjects, then it has forfeited its right to govern,” de-
clared Gandhi after the massacre. “It has ruled that it cannot rule in peace
and justice. . . . Nothing less than the removal of the British and complete
self-government could satisfy injured India. . . . [The Battle of ] Plassey
[in 1758] laid the foundation of the British Empire, Amritsar has shaken
it.”33 He suspended the satyagraha on April 18.
In retrospect the massacre in Amritsar proved to be the beginning of
the end of the British Raj in the subcontinent.
Congress officials held their annual convention in Amritsar; their
Muslim League counterparts did the same. By the time these sessions
were convened at the end of December, the British parliament had passed
the Government of India Act 1919, which incorporated the diarchy sys-
tem recommended by Montagu and Chelmsford. It involved restructuring
the present single-chamber legislature into a bicameral one, with the up-
per house, called the Council of State, reviewing the bills passed by the
Central Legislative Assembly. At the Congress session Jinnah seconded
the resolution that described the 1919 Act as “inadequate, unsatisfactory
and disappointing.”34 Gandhi argued against the resolution, but in vain.
At the Muslim League conference, Jinnah was elected president for
three years. His place in the sun came at a time when Gandhi’s reputation
suffered a setback.

25
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Amritsar was also the venue of the Second All India Khilafat Con-
ference, a fledgling body of Muslims that had emerged after October 30,
1918. On that day the defeated Ottoman Sultan-Caliph Mehmet VI—a
sad-eyed ruler with a walrus mustache and an astrakhan cap embossed
with the Islamic crescent and star—signed an armistice with the victo-
rious Allies. That posed a threat to the future of the caliphate—called
khilafat, derivative of khalifa, meaning “successor” in Arabic and Urdu,
in India—which had been based in Istanbul since 1517. The caliph was
recognized as the religious leader of all Muslims in a world where those
living in India formed his largest constituency.

26
 2

Gandhi’s Original Sin

Injecting Religion into Politics

The seed of the All India Khilafat Conference was planted at the meeting
of fifteen thousand Muslims in Bombay in March 1919, when public
outrage at the Rowlatt Act was running high. It established the Bombay
Khilafat Committee, presided over by Muhammad Chotani, an affluent
businessman, who was respectfully addressed as Seth (Hindi: merchant
or banker) Chotani. It contacted the Muslim League Council. Together
they decided to form a broad-based body since the League at the time
had only 777 paid-up members, mostly lawyers and religious scholars,
called ulema.1
What drove the Muslim elite to take this step was its historical per-
spective. It perceived the fall of the Ottoman Empire as analogous to the
downfall of the Mughal Empire in 1807 at the hands of the British—
albeit not so precipitately. The Ottomans were brought down by an alli-
ance in which imperial Britain was preeminent. Among those who shared
this view, Muhammad Ali Jauhar stood out.

THE ALI BROTHERS

Born in 1878 into an aristocratic family in the princely state of Rampur in

the United Provinces—today’s Uttar Pradesh—he graduated from Aligarh
College and pursued further education at Oxford. Diverting from a study
of law, which was then popular with Indians, he opted for history. On his
return home he served as education director first in Rampur and then in
the much larger princely state of Baroda. In 1911 he moved to Calcutta,
then capital of British India, where he founded the weekly Comrade. He

27
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

was a gifted writer and poet with the pen name of Jauhar (Urdu: jewel).
His Oxford education, superb mastery of English, and hand-tailored suits
marked him as a man of distinction.
When British India’s capital was moved to Delhi in 1913, he fol-
lowed suit. There, assisted by his elder brother Shaukat Ali, he estab-
lished the Urdu weekly Hamdard (Compassionate). With the outbreak
of World War I in August 1914, he urged Ottoman Sultan-Caliph Meh-
met VI to stay neutral. But when Ottoman Turkey declared war against
the Allied Powers in November, he reaffirmed his loyalty to the British
crown. At the same time, in a long article he outlined Turkey’s grievances
against Britain. That was enough to cause the closure of his journal by
an official diktat. Later, because he and Shaukat Ali were seen as pro-
Turkey, the government jailed them under the Defense of India Act 1915
in an obscure central Indian town, Chhindwara, and held them there until
December 1919.
A close study of the Quran in Urdu by the imprisoned Jauhar turned
him into a pious Muslim. The same happened to Shaukat Ali. Both of
them grew beards and switched to wearing knee-length tunics and baggy
pajamas, along with a tall, astrakhan cap. They became known as the Ali
Brothers. Jauhar was sometimes invited to deliver the weekly sermon after
Friday’s congregational prayer at the local mosque. He proved an eloquent
speaker with a sense of humor.
While in prison the Ali Brothers were allowed to maintain censored
correspondence with friends and allies, and they read newspapers pub-
lished under wartime censorship. They endorsed the Lucknow Pact of
December 1916 between the Congress Party and the Muslim League.
Earlier they had heard Ghandi’s 1915 address to students in Calcutta, in
which he had said, “Politics cannot be divorced from religion.”2 They saw
in him a Hindu personage ready to blend religion with politics in order
to attract a mass following.
They asked the government to let Gandhi visit them in prison, but in
vain. On his part, after attending the viceroy’s War Conference in Delhi
in April 1918, Gandhi appealed to him to release the Ali Brothers. Lord
Chelmsford refused. Gandhi continued to correspond with them in jail,
and they supported his Rowlatt Act satyagraha in April 1919.
With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, gloom descended on the
Ali Brothers. Hailing the sultan-caliph as “the personal centre” of Islam,
Jauhar warned Britain against reducing the sovereignty of the caliph, the
warden of Islam’s holiest shrines in Arabia, Palestine, and Iraq, or parceling

28
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

out his empire, which, Jauhar believed would enfeeble the temporal power
of Islam. His views were shared widely by many literate Muslims. This led
to the convening of four hundred delegates in Lucknow in September
1919. They decided to set up the Khilafat Committee, with Chotani as its
president and the imprisoned Shaukat Ali its secretary.
The Khilafat Committee declared October 17, 1919 (the first anni-
versary of the armistice signed by Turkey, according to the Islamic lunar
calendar), Khilafat Day. It urged Muslims to fast and pray and observe
a general strike on that day, and it appealed to Hindus to join them.
Gandhi backed their call. Bazaars in major cities remained closed on that
day. In Bombay Gandhi addressed a Muslim congregation after weekly
prayers. In Delhi a meeting of fifty thousand was addressed by Muslim
notables as well as Swami Shradhanand, leader of the Arya Samaj, a
Hindu reformist group.3
Alarmed at this development, Jinnah advised Gandhi “not to encour-
age fanaticism of Muslim religious leaders and their followers.”4 Gandhi
spurned his advice. The Khilafat Committee was so impressed by Gand-
hi’s spirited advocacy of its cause that it invited him to preside over the
First Khilafat Conference in Delhi on November 23–24. Hindu-Muslim
unity was a recurring theme in the speeches at the assembly, and due sensi-
tivity was shown to Hindus’ opposition to the killing of cows. “The Muslims
honor would be at stake if they forget the cooperation of the Hindus,” said
Maulana Abdul Bari. “I for my part will say that we should stop cow-killing,
because we are children of the same soil.”5
The conference urged Muslims to boycott official peace celebrations
scheduled for December. It resolved that Muslims should withdraw co-
operation from the government if the settlement with Turkey was unjust.
The assessment of what the victorious Allies imposed on Turkey was to
be made by a special committee. If it considered the settlement with Tur-
key unjust, then Muslims would boycott European goods. Gandhi was a
staunch supporter of these resolutions.6
On the eve of the conference Jinnah had sent a goodwill telegram
from Bombay to the conveners, in which he backed the cause of Turkey
while lambasting the British Raj for committing atrocities in Punjab.7 But
he strongly disapproved of the adoption of such unconstitutional tactics
as boycotting European goods.
The Second Khilafat Conference, convened at the end of December in
Amritsar, was dominated by the freshly released Ali Brothers. Their long
incarceration had given them the halo of martyrs and earned them the

29
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

religious title of maulana (derived from mawla, Arabic: master or learned

man). The delegates charged them with drafting the Khilafat Manifesto.
In January 1920, a delegation led by Muslim League president
Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari met Viceroy Lord Chelmsford to press the Brit-
ish government not to deprive Sultan-Caliph Mehmet VI of his suzer-
ainty over Muslim holy places. Gandhi was part of the delegation.8
Working closely with Gandhi, the Ali Brothers produced the Khilafat
Manifesto two months later. It called on Britain not to diminish the
status of the caliph and urged Indian Muslims to hold Britain account-
able on the caliphate issue. The document also incorporated the concept
of nonviolent noncooperation with the government as elaborated by
Gandhi for the first time. Such a campaign would consist of ascending
levels. Starting with the renunciation of government titles and honors, it
would involve boycotting courts, British-supported educational institu-
tions, local council elections, and foreign goods—rising to resignations
from the civil service and then the police and military. The final step
would be refusal to pay taxes. After issuing the manifesto, Jauhar sailed
to Europe as leader of the Khilafat delegation to lobby for Turkey in
Paris and London.
The Third Khilafat Conference on April 17 in Madras was chaired by
Shaukat Ali. It adopted the Khilafat Manifesto.9 Between then and early
September, when the Special Session of Congress voted for noncoopera-
tion, several events helped Gandhi to consolidate his spiraling influence.
At the end of April, Gandhi condemned the resolution of the League
of Nations’ Supreme Council at its meeting in San Remo, Italy, to let
Britain and France decide the nature of the mandates for the non-Turkish
parts of the Ottoman Empire. He called for noncooperation to express
Indian anger at the San Remo decision.

THE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL TURNING POINTS

On May 15, 1920, the Allied Powers published the draft of the peace
treaty with Ottoman Turkey, proposing the severance of all non-Turkish
parts from the Ottoman Empire. Gandhi condemned the document. Do-
mestically, what sharpened anti-British sentiment was the publication on
May 28 of the report by an inquiry commission headed by Lord William
Hunter: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to
Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, Etc.

30
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

According to the report, there were five thousand to ten thousand

people in the Jallianwala Bagh, none of them armed. Brigadier General
Reginald Dyer posted twenty-five soldiers on each of the sides on a higher
ground. When the firing started, the multitude rushed toward the side
of the Bagh with the lowest wall, about five feet high. Dyer ordered his
men to aim at that spot. In his own dispatch to the military superiors,
he wrote, “It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one
of sufficient moral effect not only on those who were present, but more
especially throughout the Punjab” (emphasis in original).10 The report crit-
icized Dyer and condemned some aspects of the martial law administra-
tion but gave general approval to the martial law policy in Punjab. Gandhi
immediately combined protest of the Hunter report with noncooperation
with the government as advocated by Khilafat leaders.
However, Shaukat Ali calculated that if Muslims were to resign their
civil service posts, these would be quickly filled by aspiring Hindus. He
was therefore reluctant to start the noncooperation campaign without the
active support of Hindu leaders. Here the intervention of Gandhi, as a
leading Hindu, became critical.
Gandhi drew much of his nationalist inspiration from the traditional
myths, beliefs, and symbols of Hinduism. As he once explained, “My bent
is not political but religious. And I take part in politics because I feel there
is no department of life that can be divorced from religion.”11
In his book Hind Swaraj, written originally in Gujarati in 1909—and
later translated by him into English with the same title, which means
Indian Home Rule—he argued that India was one nation long before the
British Raj. To support his thesis, he referred to “those far-seeing ances-
tors of ours who established Shevetbindu Rameshwar in the South, Jug-
gernaut (aka Jagannath) in the South-East, and Haridwar in the North
as places of pilgrimage,” thus outlining the geographical reach of Vedic
Hinduism.12 These are exclusively Hindu holy sites. Gandhi made no
mention of the ancient Buddhist pilgrimage places, much less the shrines
of Muslim Sufi saints, scattered all over the subcontinent, some of which
are frequented by both Muslims and Hindus. Their shared belief is that
by praying at the shrine they will be blessed by the spirit of the departed
holy man, who is capable of interceding on their behalf with the Almighty
to resolve their worldly problems. (This practice was condemned by or-
thodox Muslims.)
It is worth recalling that the striking miners in Natal marching behind
Gandhi had shouted, “Dwarakanath ki jai [Victory to Lord Krishna],”

31
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

and “Ramchandra ki jai [Victory to Lord Rama].” Between the two lead-
ing Hindu gods, Rama and Krishna, Gandhi preferred the story of Rama’s
life, captured in the Hindu epic Ramayana, rendered into Hindi by the
seventeenth-century poet Tulsi Das. “I regard the Ramayana of Tulsi Das
as the greatest book in all devotional literature,” he asserted in 1919.13 His
fasting during the textile workers’ strike in Ahmedabad in March 1918
had given him an aura of a Hindu saint. On the second day of that strike
he referred to his gleaning from “the ancient culture of India,” which rep-
resented Vedic Hinduism before it reformed itself to meet the challenge
of Buddhism.14
Gandhi’s veneration for the cow was legendary. “Cow protection is
the outward form of Hinduism,” he declared. “I refuse to call anyone a
Hindu if he is not willing to lay down his life in this cause. It is dearer to
me than my very life.”15
His lifestyle was saturated with religious practices and pieties. At
his ashram near Ahmedabad listening to Hindu devotional songs, called
bhajans, sung by his co-religionists was part of his morning prayer rou-
tine. His saintliness and overt religiosity won him the moniker of Ma-
hatma (Sanskrit: Great Soul). Though documentary evidence is lacking, it is
widely attributed to Rabindranath Tagore, the eminent writer-philosopher-
educationalist.16 Tagore won the Nobel prize for literature in 1913 and
was knighted two years later. A patriot, he would renounce his title in
August 1920, responding to a boycott call by Gandhi. In their correspon-
dence, Gandhi addressed him as Gurudev (Hindi: Godly Master), and
Tagore returned the compliment by calling him Mahatma.
Gandhi’s religious persona was reassuring to the leadership of the
Khilafat movement, dominated as it was by the ulema. During the Cen-
tral Khilafat Committee meeting on June 3, 1920, chaired by Shaukat Ali,
Gandhi explained that under his sole guidance noncooperation, starting
at a low level, would reach its apex of nonpayment of taxes in four to five
months.
He asked to be put in charge of a special noncooperation committee,
operating independently—he would be a virtual dictator.17 Deeply im-
pressed by the success he had achieved with this tactic in South Africa,
the attendees agreed.
The equivocal Hunter report provided Gandhi a chance to sharpen his
attack on the British Raj. “If we are worthy to call ourselves a nation we
must refuse to uphold the government by withdrawing cooperation with
it,” he declared on June 9.18 Two weeks later he called on Viceroy Lord

32
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

Chelmsford to get the humiliating peace terms for Turkey changed by Au-
gust 1 or resign. He started blending the domestic issue of the continued
unrest in Punjab with the demands of the Khilafat movement concerning
Turkey, while stressing that the caliphate had priority. But the Allied pow-
ers’ stance on Turkey remained unchanged.
On August 1, Gandhi inaugurated the noncooperation struggle by
returning the three war medals he had been awarded between the Boer
War and World War I.
When the Treaty of Sevres, a suburb of Paris, was signed by the Allied
powers and Sultan-Caliph Mehmet VI on August 10, keeping the Otto-
man dynasty but severing all of the empire’s territories in the Arab world,
Gandhi condemned it as “a staggering blow to the Indian Mussalmans.”19
Gandhi and the Khilafat leaders then focused on the upcoming spe-
cial session of the Congress Party in early September in Calcutta. To
underscore their sincerity about forging Hindu-Muslim amity, Khilafat
leaders appealed to Muslims to refrain from slaughtering cows for Bakri
Eid (Urdu: Festival of Goat)—the Indian term used for Eid al Adha (Ar-
abic: Festival of Sacrifice)—when it is customary to celebrate by killing a
goat, sheep, or cow. Determined by the lunar calendar, the festival was due
to fall a few days before the Congress convention.20
At the special session, Gandhi’s resolution was opposed by such stal-
warts as Annie Besant, former Congress president, Madan Mohan Mala-
viya, and Jinnah. Among the weighty arguments Gandhi mobilized was
that the Central Khilafat Committee had already launched its noncoop-
eration campaign, and how could the thirty-five-year-old Congress be
seen lagging behind the newly born body? He defeated the opposition by
1,886 to 884 votes.
At the simultaneous extraordinary session of the Muslim League on
September 7 in Calcutta, Jinnah condemned the Hunter report and Dyer.
But his opposition to unconstitutional means remained intact. Though he
and Gandhi were in the same nationalist column, they were poles apart
on tactics.
During its five-day session in late December in Nagpur, at Gandhi’s
behest, Congress delegates changed the party’s aim to attaining swaraj
(“home rule”) for the people of India by all legitimate and peaceful
means. Gandhi forecast that the noncooperation struggle, if conducted
nonviolently, would yield swaraj within a year. Jinnah struck a note of
discord, saying there was no clarity about what swaraj meant in practice.
“This [noncooperation] weapon will not destroy the British Empire,” he

33
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

predicted. “It is neither logical nor is it politically sound or wise, nor prac-
tically capable of being put into execution.” He added that though he had
no power to remove the cause of India having become Britain’s colony, he
warned fellow Indians of the dire consequences of such an extreme act as
wholesale noncooperation.21
But, to his chagrin, even the Muslim League did not agree with his
views. At the simultaneous session of the League in Nagpur chaired by
its president, Ansari, it also decided to support noncooperation. Its other
equally weighty resolution changed its aim to achieving self-rule. The ban-
ners at the convention summed up the League’s updated ideology: “Be
true to your religion” and “Liberty is man’s birthright.”22
Jinnah lost but did not give up. In a letter to Gandhi, he argued that
this kind of unconstitutional program appealed only to the illiterate and
inexperienced youth and that it was bound to lead to disaster.23

GANDHIAN NONCOOPERATION UNLEASHED

Urged by Gandhi, Congress leaders in Nagpur opened party membership

to all Indians for a nominal annual subscription of a quarter rupee (equiv-
alent at the time to a quarter British pence or four American cents). They
also adopted a new constitution drafted by Gandhi. It set up a hierarchy
of committees from the top—the Congress Working Committee—down
to the village level, thus turning their amorphous movement into a disci-
plined organization.
In April 1921 Gandhi launched a campaign to enroll ten million
Indians of all classes as Congress members and raise a national fund of
10 million rupees (£1 million) to advance the noncooperation struggle.
His cordial relations with Rajasthani finance and industrial capitalists
in Calcutta and textile magnates in Ahmedabad helped to shore up the
party’s coffers.
These efforts led to a vastly enlarged constituency ready to express
their feelings against the British Raj in dramatic ways. While Congress
officials’ withdrawal of their lucrative law practices made newspaper head-
lines, what caught the popular imagination among urban Indians was the
boycott of foreign—primarily British—goods.
Accompanied by Jauhar, Gandhi undertook a six-month-long, na-
tionwide tour by train, surviving on a daily diet of a few slices of toast,
grapes, and goat’s milk. He stopped at various places to urge his audience

34
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

to shun foreign clothing and footwear. If they signaled agreement through

applause, he urged them to strip off and make a pile of the discarded
apparel and shoes. Then, in a repeat of the gesture he first made in Jo-
hannesburg on August 16, 1908, he would set the heap alight. He called
on the audience to wear homespun clothes to help the swadeshi (Hindi:
of one’s own country) movement. The public burning of foreign textiles
extended to unsold stocks of local drapers. As a teetotaler, he preached
temperance, which went down very well with Muslim leaders, since Islam
forbids consumption of alcohol.
Ad hoc local committees sprung up. Volunteers were deployed to en-
force the boycott of courts and British-supported educational institutions.
Protestors skirmished with the police. This couldn’t have come at a worse
time for the British. The victorious Allied powers and their colonies after
World War I were experiencing a severe economic downturn—with de-
flation reaching 15 percent in Britain in 1922. Soon the Congress Party
was emboldened with its own volunteer corps, dressed in white homespun
uniforms, and the Khilafat movement had one as well.
The newly arrived viceroy, Lord Reading (aka Rufus Daniel Isaacs,
First Marquess of Reading), a former chief justice of England and a prac-
ticing Jew, was ill-prepared to tackle the turmoil. So for the first half of
1921 he did nothing. Then, to test the waters, he arrested the Ali Brothers
for making seditious speeches. The court sentenced them to two years in
jail. The subsequent protest was mild, encouraging Reading to focus on
suppressing the Khilafat movement.
Gandhi protested. In the September 19, 1921, issue of the weekly
Young India, he argued, “I have no hesitation in saying that it is sinful for
anyone, either soldier or civilian, to serve this government. . . . Sedition
has become the creed of Congress. . . . Non-cooperation, though a reli-
gious and strictly moral movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of
the government and is therefore legally seditious.”24 In other words, if the
Ali Brothers had been seditious, so had been the many thousands who
had participated in the noncooperation campaign.
He underscored his alliance with the Ali Brothers in another Young
India article on October 20: “I claim that with us both the Khilafat is the
central fact, with Maulana Muhammad Ali because it is his religion, with
me because, in laying down my life for the Khilafat, I ensure the safety of
the cow from the Mussalman’s knife, that is my religion.”25
In London, the government decided in July 1921 to send the twenty-
six-year-old, handsome Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) on a

35
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

tour of India to let the people express their loyalty to the empire by wel-
coming him with unbounded enthusiasm and reverence. The viceroy con-
tinued to suppress protest. By early November, more than ten thousand
Indians, mainly part of the Khilafat movement, were in prison.
On his arrival in Bombay on November 17,the prince was greeted
with strikes, rioting, and arson. To restore order during four days of tur-
bulence, police used live ammunition, killing fifty-three people. There
were shutdowns in all major cities. In Calcutta, the uniformed members
of the Congress and Khilafat volunteer forces took charge of the city,
ensuring a total, violence-free strike. At night Calcutta fell into self-
imposed darkness—it became the “city of the dead” as described by the
British writer Rudyard Kipling.26
In early December Jinnah interceded with the viceroy to find a solu-
tion to the deteriorating situation. The viceroy expressed his willingness,
but Gandhi demanded the release of all prisoners associated with the Khi-
lafat movement as a precondition. The viceroy refused.27 Indeed, he went on
to outlaw the recruiting and organizing of Congress and Khilafat volunteers
and the assembly of more than three persons in cities. Defiance of these
bans doubled the number of political prisoners to twenty thousand.

FIGHT TO THE FINISH—SUSPENDED

“Lord Reading must understand that the Non-co-operators are at war

with the Government,” said Gandhi in a manifesto he published in Young
India on December 21. “We want to overthrow the Government and
compel its submission to the people’s will. We shall have to stagger hu-
manity, even as South Africa and Ireland, with this exception—we will
rather spill our own blood, not that of our opponents. This is a fight to
the finish.”28
The Congress session on December 27–28 in Ahmedabad, presided
over by Hakim Ajmal Khan, was like no other. Chairs and tables gave way
to carpets on the ground of a huge tent, with most delegates dressed in
homespun cotton and donning white, folded-cloth caps, called “Gandhi
caps.” Sartorially, Jinnah and Gandhi were poles apart. Jinnah appeared in
his usual three-piece suit with a stiff collar and a silk tie, his watch firmly
in his vest, chain-smoking his fifty Craven-A cigarettes a day. In his con-
tinuing drive for a Spartan life, Gandhi had recently discarded his shirt,
dhoti, and white cap for a homespun loincloth and a shawl.

36
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

Semiclad Gandhi introduced a resolution calling for “aggressive civil

disobedience to all Government laws and institutions; for non-violence;
for the continuance of public meetings throughout India despite the Gov-
ernment prohibition, and for all Indians to offer themselves peacefully
for arrest by joining the [Congress] Volunteer Corps.” After much de-
bate, it was passed, with only 10 out of 4,728 delegates dissenting.29 The
conference named Gandhi as the sole executive of the civil disobedience
movement.
The most prominent among the dissenters was Jinnah. His speech was
interrupted by cries of “Shame, shame” from the audience. When he re-
ferred to “Mister Gandhi,” many delegates shouted “Mahatma Gandhi.”30
But he stood his ground then—and thereafter, never veering from his “Mr.
Gandhi” protocol, as did all British officials. For the moment, though,
crestfallen, he left Nagpur on the next train, accompanied by his young
wife, Ruttie (Maryam), who had become the mother of their daughter,
Dinah, two years earlier. This was to be his last Congress session. In his
undeclared competition with Gandhi, he lost by a humiliating margin.
Gandhi chose the Bardoli district, 150 miles north of Bombay in
Gujarat, as a testing ground for his civil disobedience movement. On
February 1 he announced that he would initiate a refusal to pay taxes in
this overwhelmingly rural district. Land revenue was the financial lifeline
of the British Raj in the subcontinent’s predominantly agrarian society.
A week later the news reached him of a violent episode in the small
town of Chauri Chaura in United Provinces, eight hundred miles from
Bardoli, on February 5. A long column of marchers protesting rising
food prices had passed without incident when some stragglers were hit
by armed policemen. When they shouted for help, the protestors turned
around to confront the cops. The lawmen fired, killing three men, and then
rushed to the police station when their ammunition ran out. There they
barricaded themselves. The infuriated mob set the building ablaze. When
the terrified twenty-one policemen and their head constable emerged to
escape incineration, they were captured and hacked to pieces; and their
bodies were fed to the raging flames. Later, of the 225 accused protestors,
72 would be found guilty, with 25 of them hanged.31
On hearing the news, Gandhi was horrified. “Suppose . . . the Gov-
ernment had abdicated in favor of the victors of Bardoli, who would con-
trol the unruly elements that must be expected to perpetrate inhumanity
upon due provocation?” he asked. He said he was unsure he could. He
suspended the civil disobedience campaign in Bardoli. And as the sole

37
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

authorized executive of the noncooperation campaign, he forbade defi-

ance of the government anywhere in India.
Among those who were flabbergasted by his decision and questioned
its wisdom were not only the imprisoned Ali Brothers but some of the
members of the Congress Working Committee, including Motilal Nehru,
former president of the Congress Party and a fabulously successful bar-
rister in Allahabad, United Provinces, whose only son was Jawaharlal.
It would later emerge that Viceroy Lord Reading had sent a despairing
report to London. “The lower classes in towns have been seriously affected
by the non-cooperation movement,” he wrote to Edwin Montagu, secre-
tary of state for India, in early 1922. “In certain areas, the peasantry has
been affected. . . . The Muhammadan population throughout the country
is embittered and sullen.”32
Responding to the criticism at home, Gandhi said, “The drastic rever-
sal of practically the whole of the aggressive program may be politically
unsound and unwise, but there is no doubt it is religiously sound.”33 When
push came to shove, Gandhi invoked Hinduism. Who was there to judge
whether or not his decision was “religiously sound”? It was all subjective,
the judgment resting solely with him. As he once remarked, “Those who
say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion
means.”34 In any case, a quarter century later, his injection of religion into
politics would lead to undermining the unity of the Indian subcontinent.
Undoubtedly, at the core of Gandhi’s faith was orthodox Hinduism,
with its prohibition on beef and the killing of cows as an integral part of
daily life. His view was aptly summed up by the remark “I yield to none
in my reverence for the cow.”35 Like all pious Hindus, he aimed to achieve
moksha (Sanskrit: liberation) from the endless cycle of birth, death, and
rebirth, thus ending the suffering inherent in this cycle. “I am impatient to
realize myself, to attain moksha in this very existence,” he wrote in Young
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424807275

India in 1924. “My national service is part of my training for freeing

my soul from the bondage of flesh. Thus considered, my service may be
regarded as purely selfish. I have no desire for the perishable kingdom of
earth. I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven, which is moksha.”36 Else-
where he said that the path toward moksha was “crucifixion of the flesh,”
without which it was impossible to “see God face to face” and become one
with him. But if such perfection could be attained, the divine would walk
on earth, for “there is no point in trying to know the difference between
a perfect man and God.” Then there would be no limit to his command
of his countrymen: “When I am a perfect being, I have simply to say the

38
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

word and the nation will listen.”37 Around this core of Hinduism was
wrapped a layer of Jainism, an offshoot of Hinduism, with its stress on
nonviolence, or the nonhurting of any life form.
Following his abandoning of the civil disobedience program, Gandhi
undertook a five-day fast of penance as part of his periodic crucifixion of
the flesh. All this reinforced his saintly image as a mahatma among the
illiterate and deeply religious masses.
There was, however, no letup in his campaign against the British Raj.
“How can there be any compromise whilst the British lion continues to
shake its gory claws in our face?” he asked. “The rice-eating, puny millions
of Indians seem to have resolved upon achieving their own destiny with-
out further tutelage and without arms. . . . The fight that was commenced
in 1920 is a fight to the finish.”38
This article was one of three judged to be seditious, the earlier ones
having appeared on September 19 and December 21 of the previous year
in Young India. Gandhi was arrested on March 10, 1922, found guilty of
sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison. As a result of his unexpected
surgery for acute appendicitis, he would be freed in February 1924.
During his absence from the political stage, the landscape changed
radically.

RETREAT AND REACTION

The shattered hopes for self-government within a year and the abrupt
ending of the civil disobedience movement led to disappointment and
frustration among the leaders and the led. There was split among Con-
gress dignitaries, with several of them abandoning noncooperation and
deciding to participate in elections to be held under the Government of
India Act of 1919.
Some at the top who had disagreed with Gandhi’s radical agenda
started to drift away from the Congress Party. Among them was Madan
Mohan Malaviya, who had been the party’s president twice. He transferred
his loyalty to the All India Hindu Mahasabha (Hindi: Grand Council),
a communal organization founded in 1914 as a counterforce to the All
India Muslim League. Addressing the Hindu Mahasabha’s annual confer-
ence in late December 1922, Malaviya detailed the grievances of Hindus.
He referred to the atrocities visited on them by Mopila Muslim peasants
in the southern Malabar region (now called Kerala) since August 1921.

39
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

In the communal rioting in the Punjabi city of Multan in September

1922, Hindus had witnessed the desecration of their temples by Muslim
hooligans, he noted. There were similar instances in Amritsar.39
On their part, the leaders of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu social reform
movement founded originally in 1875 to purge contemporary Hinduism
of the caste system and idolatry, started the Shuddhi (Sanskrit: purifica-
tion) movement to return converted Indian Muslims to Hinduism. Some
Muslim notables were upset by this effort. Justifying the Shuddhi cam-
paign, Malaviya claimed that during the past year one hundred thousand
Hindus had been converted to Islam in Gujarat, an alarming phenom-
enon. “If when now we are badly treated with a numerical strength of
22 crores [220 million out of 300 million Indians], what would be our
condition in future with a much reduced Hindu population if we allow
this rate of conversion from Hinduism and do not allow re-conversion
into Hinduism?”40
Relations between Hindus and Muslims were deteriorating. There
was a major outbreak of Hindu-Muslim violence in Calcutta in 1923. To
reverse the trend, Congress delegates honored Maulana Muhammad Ali
Jauhar by electing him the party’s president at their 1923 session within
months of his second release from jail. He became the sixth Muslim pres-
ident of the organization in its thirty-eight-year history. (Five years ear-
lier, when he was still imprisoned, he had been elected president of the
Muslim League.)
Jinnah kept well clear of the noncooperation and civil disobedience
campaigns. In April 1923 he resigned formally from the Congress Party.
In September he was elected a Muslim member representing Bombay in
the newly established Central Legislative Assembly, the successor to the
old Imperial Legislative Council. In the chamber he continued to press
his demand for “a fully responsible government,” first promised by Edwin
Montagu in 1917.
Gandhi had hardly recuperated fully from his debilitating surgery
after his release from jail when he and Khilafat leaders suffered a major
political setback. On March 3, 1924, at the behest of the Turkish presi-
dent, General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Grand National Assembly in
Ankara deposed Caliph Abdul Majid and abolished the 1,292-year-old
office of the caliph. With that, both planks of Gandhi’s noncooperation
campaign collapsed.
To Jinnah, a secular public figure, the fate of the caliphate mattered
little, if at all. Indeed, he had watched with deepening unease the rising

40
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

influence of Muslim preachers—bearing the title of maulavi (another de-

rivative of mawla, Arabic: master or learned man)—in the community
on the issue of the caliph and his continued control over Islam’s prime
holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. With the abolition of the caliphate,
Jinnah’s stature in the Muslim League rose. Its delegates elected him the
party’s president in 1924 for a three-year term.
As someone who believed that politics should be the privilege only
of the highly educated, he deplored the way Gandhi had opened it up to
semiliterate and illiterate agitators. It was this phenomenon that, in his
view, had led to the rising tensions between Muslims and Hindus.
On his part, Gandhi tried to reverse this worrying trend. For weeks he
listened to both sides and made independent inquiries. The end result was
his article “Hindu-Muslim Tension: Its Cause and Cure” in Young India
on May 29, 1924. Its extraordinary length of six thousand words could not
mask its flaws. It summarized the common perceptions of Hindus about
Muslims, and vice versa. It examined a few cases of communal rioting. It
castigated each community for its seemingly irrational behavior. He recy-
cled his earlier argument that “we [Hindus] say nothing about the slaugh-
ter [of cows] that daily takes place on behalf of Englishmen [living in
India]. Our anger becomes red hot when a Muslim slaughters a cow. . . .
[But] the cows find their necks under the butcher’s knife because Hindus
sell them.”41 What it did not do was to provide an in-depth analysis of the
problem in terms of history, sociology, and economics. In the absence of a
fair grasp of these disciplines, the task was beyond his intellectual powers.
As for the cure for this centuries-old malady, he concluded that Hindu-
Muslim unity was possible because “it is so natural, so necessary for both,
and because I believe in human nature.”42 This circular argument was in
essence a cop-out.
Unsurprisingly, his overlong article in English had no impact on the
situation on the ground. Periodic rioting continued. But the one that stood
out occurred in the town of Kohat (population, forty-four thousand) in
North-West Frontier Province (later Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in September
1924.
The local branch of the Sanatan Dharma Sabha (Sanskrit: Eternal
Law Council), a Hindu revivalist organization like the Arya Samaj,43 pub-
lished a pamphlet containing a scurrilous poem about Islam purportedly
as a riposte to an anti-Hindu poem printed earlier in a Muslim news
sheet. This infuriated Muslims, who were 92 percent of the local popula-
tion. They were not satisfied by the apologies offered by the local Hindu

41
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

leaders. A three-day rampage, September 9–11, with looting, arson, and

violence, left 155 Hindus dead. The authorities evacuated 3,500 Hindus
to the town’s military cantonment area for their safety.44
Fifty-four-year-old Gandhi decided to act in his own peculiar way.
In order to “reform” those who loved him, he would fast. This was his
attempt to reach out to the belligerents’ hearts so that they could share
his feelings and react the way he did. On September 17 he announced a
twenty-one-day fast in the house of Muhammad Ali Jauhar in Delhi. He
was attended by two Muslim doctors. This would show Hindus that their
saintly politician trusted Muslims with his life, and that the world would
see Mohandas and Muhammad as bosom friends.
On October 8 Gandhi broke his fast with a Muslim preacher reciting
the opening verses of the Quran, followed by the singing of the hymn
“When I survey the wondrous Cross,” and ending with the Hindu hymn,
“Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram/ Patita Pavan Sitaram” (“Chief of Raghu’s
house, King Rama/Uplifter of the fallen, Sita and Rama”).45 It was all
very moving and widely publicized. But it made little difference at the
popular level.
Gandhi’s hunger strike was altogether different from what he had
done in Ahmedabad in March 1918. The textile workers’ strike was a
local issue. The mill owners were a small, cohesive group, apprehensive
of Gandhi dying. In stark contrast, the Hindu-Muslim issue existed on
a national scale and concerned vast, amorphous social entities even if
only their urban members were taken into account. The intercommunal
misperceptions and prejudices that had grown over centuries could not be
dissipated by an ascetic politician voluntarily abstaining from food.
In late December 1924 in Belgaum, the day after the end of the Con-
gress session he presided over, Gandhi attended the cow protection con-
ference. It decided to found an All-India Cow Protection Organization.
His strategy was to persuade Muslims to refrain from killing cows and
eating beef voluntarily. “Mussalmans claim that Islam permits them to
kill the cow,” he wrote in the Young India on January 29, 1925. “To make
a Mussalman, therefore, to abstain from cow-killing under compulsion
would amount in my opinion to converting him to Hinduism by force.”46
On a contemporary issue such as the rioting in Kohat, Gandhi was
unable to reconcile his assessment with Shaukat Ali’s. Their joint visit to
Kohat to collect evidence had to be scrapped when they were barred from
entering the town by the viceroy. They decided to conduct their hearings
in Rawalpindi. They ended up viewing the virulent episode from different

42
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

perspectives. In January 1925, Shaukat Ali declared that arson and the
concomitant shootings were accidental, and that there was no preplanned
jihad against Hindus. Gandhi, then serving as the Congress Party’s pres-
ident, stated that the Muslim fury was so intense on September 10 that
if Hindus had not been evacuated en masse, many more would have been
butchered.47

GANDHI-JINNAH—PARTING OF WAYS

A disheartened Gandhi now channeled some of his time and energy into
a campaign to end untouchability practiced by caste Hindus in their treat-
ment of outcastes. At the same time, to bolster support for swaraj, he
resorted to presenting its realization in religious terms. He argued that
the end of the British Raj would lead to the onset of Ram Raj, the golden
age of ancient India, when justice and equity prevailed in a realm ruled by
Lord Rama. This scenario mesmerized particularly the unlettered Hindu
masses in villages but left Muslims cold and alienated. They could not
relate to the Hindu god-king Rama and his kingdom, which supposedly
existed around 700 to 300 bce—two millennia before the founding of
Islam.
On his part, Jinnah remained an active participant in the 145-member
Central Legislative Assembly. He was elected to the assembly’s committee
charged with exploring the possibility of establishing a military defense
academy in India. In that capacity, he spent several months touring major
European countries and North America. Among those who accompanied
the committee members during their visit to Sandhurst Military Col-
lege in Britain was Captain Douglas Gracey—later Sir General Douglas
Gracey, commander in chief of the Pakistani Army. Recalling Jinnah’s
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424807307

arrogant behavior toward the British officers appearing before the com-
mittee, Gracey said, “I had to protest and point out that the officers were
giving evidence voluntarily . . . and that they had the right to be treated
with courtesy. . . . Once Jinnah was challenged, he became reasonable, and
he would never bear malice afterwards.”48
Despite the leadership Jinnah provided the Muslim League, its mem-
bership in 1926 shrank to 1,330.49 That made him immerse himself fur-
ther into politics at the cost of neglecting Ruttie. They became estranged.
In November 1927 Lord Birkenhead, secretary of state for India, ap-
pointed a seven-member commission of MPs, headed by John Simon, to

43
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

recommend a revision of the 1919 Government of India Act. The Con-

gress session in December decided to boycott the Simon Commission
because it lacked any representatives from India. Guided by Jinnah, the
Muslim League’s Council followed suit but by a narrow majority, which
caused a split in the party. Lord Birkenhead challenged Indian politicians
to draft a constitution that would be accepted by the leaders of various
communities.
High Congress officials took up the challenge. They invited all
non-Congress leaders to an All Parties Conference in Delhi in February
1928. At the second such gathering in May, a committee of ten mem-
bers was formed to outline broad principles of the constitution. It was
chaired by Motilal Nehru, an eminent Congressman. Its nine members
included two Muslims—Sir Ali Imam, former Muslim League president,
and Shuaib Qureshi—and one Sikh, Mangal Singh. Its unanimously
agreed-on draft, called the Nehru Report, was published on August 10.
The third All Parties Conference in Lucknow at the end of the month
endorsed it.
The salient features of the Nehru Report were as follows. India should
be granted the status of a dominion within the British Empire with a fed-
eral form of government in which residual powers—that is, the powers
not assigned specifically to the center or the provinces—would be vested
with the center; Muslims should be given one-quarter representation in the
Central Legislature commensurate with their proportion in the population;
there should be no separate electorate for any community, but reservation
for minority seats could be allowed in the provinces where minorities to-
taled at least 10 percent; and the official language should be Hindustani,
written in Devanagari or Urdu script or in any of the other six major scripts.
The Nehru Report’s elimination of separate electorates was rejected
by Jauhar, who quit the Congress Party and joined the Muslim League. In
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424807313

late December 1928, two months after his return from a trip to Europe,
Jinnah went to Calcutta on the eve of the Congress session to lobby an
amendment to the Nehru Report. “Majorities are apt to be oppressive
and tyrannical, and minorities always dread and fear that their interest
and rights, unless clearly safeguarded by statutory provisions, would suf-
fer,” he said. (He could have referred to the way majority-caste Hindus
had oppressed the minority Untouchables for centuries.) He warned that
the alternative to a settlement might be “revolution and civil war.”50 His
plea fell on stony ground. At most, Congress leaders were prepared to
raise the Muslim representation from 25 to 27 percent.

44
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

“Jinnah was sadly humbled, and went back to his hotel,” recalled his
Parsi friend, Jamshed Nusserwanjee, who would later become mayor of
Karachi. “Next morning . . . at the door of his first-class compartment,
he took my hand. He had tears in his eyes as he said, ‘Jamshed, this is the
parting of the ways.’”51 Jinnah’s statement would prove prophetic: it would
be seen in retrospect as marking the first of the three milestones leading
to the partitioning of the subcontinent.
At the Congress session, Gandhi proposed a resolution accepting the
Nehru Report with a rider that the British government must grant India
dominion status within one year. If freedom had not been won under
dominion status by December 31, 1929, then “I must declare myself an
Independence-wala,” concluded Gandhi.52
In March 1929 Jinnah came up with his manifesto of fourteen
points,53 the most important of which were the following: India should
have a federal form of government in which residuary powers are vested
with the provinces; all cabinets at the central or provincial level as well as
the Central Legislature should have at least one-third Muslim represen-
tation; the separate electorate system should continue; Muslims should be
given an adequate share in all the services of the state; and there should
be adequate safeguards for the protection and promotion of Muslim
education, language, religion, personal laws, and charitable institutions.
Despite his position as the Muslim League’s president, he failed to win
the vote of the League’s council for his manifesto. Its meeting in Delhi
dissolved into chaotic argument.54
Jinnah received this political setback at a vulnerable point in his life.
On February 20, 1929, Ruttie, his twenty-nine-year-old, estranged wife,
who had developed abdominal cancer, had died of the disease in Bombay
while he was lobbying his manifesto in Delhi, where the League was
headquartered. He rushed to Bombay and at her burial could not help
weeping—for him a rare display of emotion in public.
In June 1929 Labor leader Ramsay MacDonald became the prime
minister of Britain. India’s viceroy, Lord Irwin, a balding man with a
professorial appearance, spent much of the summer in London. On his
return to Delhi he stated on October 31 that the British government en-
visaged a “Round Table Conference” of British and Indian delegates, and
added that “the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress . . . is the
attainment of Dominion status.” But when Conservative leaders in Par-
liament opposed the idea, he backpedaled. In his meeting with top-level
Indian leaders on December 23, he said that “he was unable to prejudge

45
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

or commit the [Round Table] Conference at all to any permanent line.”55

The Indian deputation included Gandhi as well as Jinnah. It would be the
last time that the two of them participated in a joint political exercise.56
A week later Congress went into session in Lahore. At the stroke of
midnight on December 31, 1929, the conference adopted a resolution,
moved by the forty-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru, who was presiding over
the session: “The British government has not only deprived the Indian
people of their freedom, but has based itself on the exploitation of the
masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spir-
itually,” it stated. “We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British
connection and attain purna Swaraj or complete independence.”57
The convention adopted a green-white-saffron flag with a spinning
wheel in the middle white strip as the emblem for independent India.
It called on its members and friends to withdraw from legislatures, and
it sanctioned civil disobedience and nonpayment of taxes. It authorized
the Congress Working Committee to decide how and when satyagraha
should commence. In practice, the decision rested with Mahatma
Gandhi.

SALT OF THE SEA

Gandhi was intent on keeping the civil disobedience campaign strictly

nonviolent, particularly when, in his own words, “there was a lot of vio-
lence in the air.” The most dramatic example of this came in April 1929,
when militant nationalists Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw
two handmade bombs from the visitors’ gallery inside the Central Leg-
islative Assembly. Gandhi’s focus was to be on the refusal to pay taxes.
In February 1922 in Bardoli the tax protest had been tied to land rev-
enue, a primary source for the Raj’s treasury. This time around he needed
to choose something less vital but at the same time open to a large section
of the Indian society. He hit upon the tax on salt, which the British had
imposed since the days of the East India Company in the mid-eighteenth
century.
The India Salt Act of 1882 specified a government monopoly on the
collection, manufacture, and wholesale sale of salt as well as the tax on it.
Possessing salt not purchased from the state monopoly became a punish-
able crime. Under Viceroy Lord Reading, the tax was doubled in 1923.
To make his case, Gandhi fired off a long missive to Viceroy Lord Irwin

46
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

on March 2, 1930, dealing generally with the British Raj’s iniquitous tax-
ation system before turning to the salt tax and its deleterious effect on
the Indian peasant. “The British system seemed to be designed to crush
the very life out of him,” Gandhi wrote. “Even the salt he must use to live
is so taxed to make the burden fall heaviest on him.”58 He concluded by
saying that if the viceroy failed to “deal with this evil,” he would proceed
with his coworkers at the Ahmedabad ashram to disregard the Salt Acts
on March 11. The viceroy ignored the letter.
Gandhi’s epic journey on foot started on March 12. He was joined on
this 241-mile-long trip by eighty of his followers.
As usual, Gandhi, now sixty-one, wrapped his actions and words in
religion. “My feeling is like that of the pilgrim to Amarnath or Badri-
Kedar,” he said, referring to the Hindu holy places in the mountainous
region of northwestern India. “For me this is nothing less than a holy
pilgrimage.” Motilal Nehru followed suit: “Like the historic march of
Ramachandra [Lord Rama] to [Sri] Lanka the march of Gandhi will
be memorable.”59 Typically, there was only one Muslim, Abbas Varteji,
among the satyagrahis accompanying Gandhi.
Passing through almost three hundred villages, the march ended on
April 5 at the village of Dandi, known for its salt pans, 160 miles north of
Bombay. At numerous rural stops Gandhi exhorted his audience to wear
handspun and handwoven cotton—called khadi or khaddar—and shun
alcohol, child marriage, and untouchability. He made a point of bathing
at wells used by local outcastes.
On the morning of April 6, after the ritual of listening to Hindu de-
votional hymns, he waded into the Arabian Sea and, picking up a handful
of salty mud (the salt pans had been stirred up earlier by government
agents), symbolically proclaimed his country’s full independence as his
admirers shouted, “Kanoon Torhnewala zindabad ” (Hindi: Long live Law
Breaker).
Given the long shoreline of India, there were ample opportunities to
break the Salt Acts. Mass disobedience followed. After his arrest on April
14, Jawaharlal Nehru was sentenced to six months in prison. The port
cities of Karachi, Madras, Calcutta, and Chittagong emerged as major
sites of nonviolent protest.
Having stayed in the house of a local Muslim, Shiraz Abdullah, in
Dandi, Gandhi moved to a specially built palm-leaf hut. It was there that
he was arrested after midnight on May 4, 1930, under Bombay Regulation
XXV of 1827, which provided for detention without trial.

47
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

With this, the mantle fell on seventy-six-year-old Abbas Tyabji, a

retired Muslim judge, whom Gandhi had named as the alternate leader
of the satyagrahis. Accompanied by Gandhi’s wife, Kasturbai, he led the
march on Dharasana Salt Works twenty-five miles to the south of Dandi.
En route, Tyabji was arrested and sentenced to three months in jail.
The leadership then passed successively to Sarojini Naidu, an Oxford-
educated, outspoken poet, and Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed
Azad, who had fallen under Gandhi’s spell during the Khilafat movement.
By then the number of satyagrahis had soared to two thousand. As they
approached the salt plant, they were turned back by police. Frustrated,
they resorted to a sit-in, which lasted a couple of days. Hundreds were
arrested.
On finally reaching their destination on May 21, some of the sa-
tyagrahis attempted to remove the barbed wire surrounding the salt
works. The police charged them with steel-tipped staves. Obeying Gand-
hi’s strict instruction to the nonresistors to “answer organized hooliganism
with great suffering,” they remained passive.
“Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows,”
reported Webb Miller, an American correspondent of United Press
International.

From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unpro-
tected skulls. . . . Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing
in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes
the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on
their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and dog-
gedly marched on until struck down. When every one of the first column
was knocked down stretcher bearers rushed up unmolested by the police
and carried off the injured to a thatched hut which had been arranged as a
temporary hospital.
At times the spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed
into a bloody pulp sickened me so much I had to turn away. I felt an inde-
finable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men
who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police
wielding the clubs. . . . Group after group walked forward, sat down, and
submitted to being beaten into insensibility without raising an arm to fend
off the blows. Finally the police became enraged by the nonresistance. . . .
They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and
testicles. The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to

48
 GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

inflame the fury of the police. . . . The police then began dragging the sitting
men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them
into ditches.

On his later visit to the hospital Miller counted “320 injured, many still
insensible with fractured skulls, others writhing in agony from kicks in the
testicles and stomach. . . . Scores of the injured had received no treatment
for hours and two had died.”60
His first attempts at wiring the story to his agency in London were
censored by the British telegraph operators in India. Only after he had
threatened to expose British censorship was his report transmitted un-
censored. His story appeared in 1,350 newspapers worldwide. And it was
read into the official record of the US Senate by Senator John J. Blaine.61
Miller’s report described the tragic event more graphically than the
sequence in Attenborough’s biopic Gandhi. Like his depiction of the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which failed to capture the chaos and terror
of the victims, the film’s recreation of the Salt March was marred by the
sanitized appearance of the nonviolent resistors in freshly laundered and
pressed white shirts, pajamas, and Gandhi caps, without the faintest no-
tion of even armpit sweat on their clothes in the dusty, subtropical land-
scape in the sweltering heat of May before the onset of monsoon.
Viceroy Lord Irwin’s note to King George V was a case of describ-
ing a moonless night as a penumbra. “Your Majesty can hardly fail to
have read with amusement the accounts of the severe battles for the Salt
Depot in Dharasana,” he wrote. “The police for a long time tried to re-
frain from action. After a time this became impossible, and they had to
resort to sterner methods. A good many people suffered minor injuries in
consequence.”62
The mass arrests by the government pushed up the number of po-
litical offenders to somewhere between sixty thousand and ninety-two
thousand.63
In his rivalry with Gandhi as the primary spokesman of Indians, Jin-
nah had a built-in disadvantage. It was not just that as a Hindu, Gandhi
belonged to the majority community, but by invoking the symbols and
mythology of the religion, he had given himself a Hindu halo.
By contrast, Jinnah’s distaste for street politics remained unabated. He
and Gandhi lived in totally different worlds, politically and socially. Tem-
peramentally, Gandhi was a man of heart, skillful in pulling emotional
strings, creating and applying “moral pressure.” He tried diverse ways to

49
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

win, particularly when he could not marshal rational argument to support

his stance. As his polar opposite, Jinnah was a man of intellect, steeped in
logic, unsentimental, a lawyer to his fingertips. He was cold, conservative,
constitutionalist, and consistent.
Jinnah realized that the dramatic events of the Salt March and its
aftermath, reported worldwide, had overshadowed his efforts at advanc-
ing the cause of Indian nationalism through constitutional means. In his
political joust he had lost to Gandhi. He decided to quit India. In October
1930 he sailed to London and returned to practicing law.
In stark contrast, Gandhi and other Congress luminaries were lan-
guishing in dirty, poorly maintained jails. There was therefore no prospect
of them attending the first Round Table Conference on India in London
later in the year.

50
 3

The Two-Nation Theory

A Preamble to Partition

When the first Round Table Conference on India opened in London on

November 12, 1930, it turned out to be anything but round. The eighty-
nine delegates sat around an E-shaped configuration. Among the Muslim
representatives, Jinnah stood out because of his distinctive hand-tailored
suit and his attention-drawing behavior. “Jinnah did not at the open-
ing of the Conference say what his party [Muslim League] had agreed
on, and they are a little sore in consequence,” wrote Sir Malcolm Hailey,
the Indian government’s consultative official, in a private note to Viceroy
Lord Irwin. “He declined to give the Conference Secretariat a copy of his
speech in advance as all the others had done. But then Jinnah, of course,
was always the perfect little bounder.”1
In his opening speech Jinnah said that there were four parties in-
volved: the British, the princely states, the Hindus, and the Muslims. Thus
he made Muslims a distinct group, rather than Indians with special in-
terests and demands. He made explicit what was implicit in his earlier
Fourteen Points.
Back in India, the League’s acting president, Sir Muhammad Iqbal,
also made an original point in his address to the organization’s annual
conference in Allahabad in late December. A mustached man with a re-
ceding hairline and a middle-distance gaze, he was a Cambridge-educated
barrister and poet-philosopher. He stressed the distinction of Muslims
in a territorial context. “I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West
Frontier Province, Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single
state,” he said. “Self-government within the British Empire, or without
the British Empire, the formation of the consolidated North-West In-
dian Muslim State appears to me to be the destiny of Muslims, at least of

51
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

North-West India.”2 In retrospect, this would prove to be the germ out of

which sprouted Pakistan.
In London the conference set up eight subcommittees to deal with
different subjects, the most important being the federal structure, provin-
cial powers, and minorities. At the end of the deliberations on January
19, 1931, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald said that his government
was prepared to “accept devolution of power at the Center if the [central]
legislature could be constituted on a federal basis”3—and hoped the Con-
gress Party would attend the next conference.
Alert to his superior’s cue, Viceroy Lord Irwin released Congress
leaders on January 25 on the eve of the party’s Purna Swaraj (Full Inde-
pendence) Day. He invited Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi for talks.

THE GANDHI-IRWIN PACT

Gandhi had a three-and-a-half-hour, one-on-one meeting with the vice-

roy in Delhi on February 17, a groundbreaking event. According such
privilege to the leader of a party committed to ending the British Raj
raised hackles among many British politicians, especially Conservatives.
Preeminent among them was Winston Churchill, former chancellor of
the exchequer and secretary of state for the colonies. He could not bear
“the nauseating and revolting spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple
lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-
roy’s palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the repre-
sentative of the King Emperor.”4 The viceroy’s game-changing invitation
thrust Gandhi into the celebrity stratosphere.
He and Lord Irwin met several times to hammer out an agreement.
During one of these sessions, the viceroy asked his interlocutor if he
would like tea. “Thank you,” replied Gandhi as he adjusted his shawl.
Holding up a paper bag, he said, “I will put some of this salt into my tea to
remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party.” The air rippled with laughter.
During the hard-nosed bargaining, one of the concessions that
Gandhi wrung from Lord Irwin was the permission for Indians to make
salt on the seacoasts. Overall, though, this turned out to be a token gesture
by the viceroy, who compelled Gandhi to accept a future constitution in
which Britain would retain control over defense, foreign relations, mi-
nority problems, and financial obligations to foreign countries. This was

52
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

summed up in Article 2 of the pact.5 Yet, in retrospect, this agreement

would prove to be the apogee of Gandhi’s political achievement.
In exchange for the Congress Party ending civil disobedience, and
agreeing to participate in the next Round Table Conference, Lord Irwin
pledged to release all political prisoners and return their confiscated lands.
The Gandhi-Irwin Pact was inked on March 5. Though its terms
did not meet the minimum that Gandhi had prescribed for a “truce,” he
vouched for the sincerity of Lord Irwin, who was set to retire the next
month. Despite grumbling from its younger members about Article 2,
the Congress Working Committee (CWC, or Congress high command)
endorsed the deal. But the special session of the All India Congress Com-
mittee (AICC) at the end of March did not. It instructed Gandhi to
disown Article 2 at the Round Table Conference.
This hiccup in the Congress camp did nothing to douse the
fast-spreading rumor in the predominantly Hindu rural areas of India
that the great Mahatma had triumphed over the British king and that
Ram Raj was now in the offing.
What transpired at the next conference in London, which opened a
fortnight after the collapse of the Labor government of MacDonald, was
the exact opposite of the Hindu villagers’ expectations.

SECOND AND THIRD ROUND TABLE CONFERENCES

The second Round Table Conference convened on September 7, 1931,

against the background of a deepening political crisis in Britain caused
by the Great Depression. Mahatma Gandhi was the sole delegate of the
Congress Party, claiming to represent 85 percent of all Indians. But he
could not sustain his party’s claim in the face of 111 other delegates:
nearly three-fifths of them from British India, one-fifth from the princely
states nominated by the viceroy, and the rest from the British government.
Each of the main issues—the federal structure and the minorities—
was taken up by a committee. Gandhi was appointed to both. On the
thirty-eight-strong Minorities Committee, however, there were more
Muslims (13) than caste Hindus (10), with the remaining seats allocated
to the Untouchables (Hindi: Achhut)—officially called Depressed Classes,
forming 11 percent of the Indian population—along with Sikhs, Chris-
tians, Anglo-Indians, Europeans, and women.

53
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Gandhi presented the (Motilal) Nehru Report, which rejected

separate electoral rolls for Muslims, as the solution to the contentious
Hindu-Muslim problem. He got nowhere. All other groups, except caste
Hindus, lined up behind an agreement with separate electorates for dif-
ferent communities at its core.
Challenging the official decision to list the Untouchables as a separate
community, Gandhi claimed that he represented all the castes of Hindu-
ism “in my own person.” This failed to convince the Untouchables’ leader,
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. A young, fiendishly articulate law graduate of
Columbia University, he slammed Gandhi’s practice of calling the Un-
touchables “Harijans” (Hindi: Children of God), an unworthy example of
political posturing. As outcastes, the Untouchables stood apart from caste
Hindus, he insisted.
Anticipating failure at the conference, Gandhi spent much time and
energy lobbying for India’s total independence by trying to convert the
British public to his cause. He stressed that quitting the British Empire
would not mean severing ties with the people of Britain. He deployed his
charm, wit, and self-dramatizing skills to the hilt. Dressed in his trade-
mark loincloth and shawl, with a dangling watch and sandals, he pro-
vided an exotically attractive image for British newspapers. He traveled
to Manchester, the textile heart of the empire, and Oxford, addressing
altogether different audiences. In London he stayed at Kingsley Hall in
the impoverished East End.
While Gandhi grabbed newspaper headlines and entertained read-
ers with occasional quips—“You, in your country wear plus-fours, I pre-
fer minus-fours”6—Jinnah applied his advocacy talent to enrich himself
in London.
Specializing in India-related cases, he practiced law before the Judicial
Committee of the (king’s) Privy Council. “Contrary to my expectations,
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424807377

I was a success,” Jinnah would tell American journalist-author Louis

Fischer a decade later, with characteristic British understatement.7 This
success amounted to him earning £25,000 (today’s £1.44 million) a year.
He lived in a three-story villa in upscale Hampstead with eight acres of
garden, where Fatima, his seventeen-years-younger dentist sister acted as
his housekeeper and surrogate mother of his daughter, Dinah. He traveled
in a chauffer-driven Bentley. In the midst of an economic depression, he
purchased several apartments in the posh Mayfair neighborhood.
Following the October 1931 general election, which Labor lost heav-
ily, MacDonald continued as the prime minister of a national government

54
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

that was dominated by the Conservatives. Sir Samuel Hoare, the new
Conservative secretary of state for India, was ill-disposed toward the
Congress Party, a feeling shared by Viceroy Lord Willingdon in Delhi.
Within weeks the viceroy proclaimed Emergency Powers Ordinances in
the Congress strongholds of Bengal and United Provinces.
Yet Sir Samuel showed sufficient sensitivity toward Gandhi’s sartorial
appearance. When King George V and Queen Mary decided to invite all
Conference delegates to a tea party at Buckingham Palace, the king said
to Sir Samuel, “What? This little man to be in the Palace without proper
clothes on, and bare knees!” Summoning his best diplomatic manner,
Sir Samuel persuaded the king not to mention dress restrictions on the
invitation cards. After the event, when a journalist asked Gandhi if he
had had enough clothes on, he replied, “The King had enough on for
both of us.”8
Joking aside, neither Gandhi nor Jinnah was surprised that the con-
ference failed to resolve the communal issue. MacDonald disbanded the
assemblage on December 1, saying that the Indian representatives’ failure
to reach a communal settlement left his government no option but to
make a unilateral decision.
After Gandhi returned to India empty-handed in late December, the
CWC decided to renew the civil disobedience struggle. Over the next few
months Gandhi and other party leaders were jailed.
On August 16, 1932, MacDonald announced the Communal Award.
It granted separate electoral rolls and seats to Muslims, Sikhs, Untouch-
ables, Christians, Anglo-Indians, and Europeans. From a communal
perspective, Punjab and Bengal mattered most. In Punjab, Sikhs were a
substantial minority, and in Bengal, the miniscule European settler com-
munity, dating back to the days of the East India Company (1600–1874),
loomed large in British eyes. The government in London proved iniq-
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424807384

uitous in its allocation of communal representation. In Punjab, it gave

Muslims, forming 56 percent of the population, 51 percent of the legis-
lative seats; Hindus, including the Untouchables, 30 percent; and Sikhs
19 percent. In Bengal, it awarded Muslims, constituting 54 percent of the
population, 48 percent of the seats; Hindus 32 percent, down 12 percent
on their actual proportion; and Europeans, forming a puny 1 percent of
the total, beefed up tenfold.9
Congress rejected the Communal Award outright. The Muslim
League grumbled, prevaricated, and in January 1935 accepted it “until a
substitute is agreed upon by the various communities concerned.”10

55
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

The third Round Table Conference, which opened in London on No-

vember 17, 1932, was boycotted by the Congress Party. Sir Sultan Mu-
hammad Shah, known popularly as the Aga Khan—the official protégé of
the British charged with selecting the Muslim delegates—excluded Jin-
nah from his list. The attendees were down to forty-six. After scrutinizing
and summarizing several reports, they disbanded on Christmas Eve. Their
recommendations were incorporated in a white paper published in March
1933. Between then and April 1, 1936, when the Government of India
Act 1935 promulgated on August 2 was enforced, there was a succession
of momentous events that led to a growing divergence between majority
Hindus and minority Muslims.

NOW OR NEVER

As an accomplished barrister and fabulously rich man in London, Jinnah

was admired by Indian expatriates, especially Muslims. In early 1933 he
was one of the honored guests at a black-tie dinner party given by the Aga
Khan at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in London. At the predinner recep-
tion he found himself accosted by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, who pressed on
him a pamphlet titled “Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?11
The document included a letter dated January 28, 1933, and addressed to
“My Lord,” for his opinion on “the proposed solution of this great Indian
problem as explained herein.”
The author was Rahmat Ali, a tall, powerfully built, thirty-five-year-
old bachelor. After graduating from Islamia Madrassa in Lahore and
teaching at the prestigious Aitchison College, he had obtained a law de-
gree from Punjab University before moving to Britain in 1930. The next
year he enrolled at Emmanuel College in Cambridge.
In his 2,350-word essay, described as an appeal on behalf of “our 30
million Muslim brethren who live in “PAKSTAN—by which we mean
the five Northern units of India, viz.: Punjab, North-West Frontier
Province (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan” for “your
sympathy and support in our grim and fateful struggle against political
crucifixion and complete annihilation.” It excoriated the Muslim delegates
at the Round Table Conferences for agreeing to a constitution “based
on the principle of an All-India Federation,” which amounted to “noth-
ing less than signing the death-warrant of Islam and its future in India.”
Like Muhammad Iqbal, a fellow Punjabi, Rahmat Ali focused on the

56
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

northwestern zone of India, overlooking the Muslim-majority Bengal in

the east.
Jinnah responded coolly toward Rahmat Ali and his pamphlet. When
Ali and his three cosignatories contrived to meet him to gain his backing
for “PAKSTAN,” Jinnah replied: “My dear boys, don’t be in a hurry; let
the waters flow and they will find their own level.”12
Nonetheless, a decade later, Jinnah, then called Quaid-i-Azam (Urdu:
Great Leader) by his admirers, referred to “some young fellows” in a
speech to the Muslim League session of April 1943.

What is the origin of the word Pakistan? It was not Muslim League or
Quaid-i-Azam who coined it. Some young fellows in London, who wanted
a particular part of north-west to be separated from the rest of India, coined
a name in 1932–1933, started the idea and called the zone Pakistan. . . . A
name was coined. Thus, whatever may have been the meaning of this word
at the time it is obvious that language of every civilized country invents new
words. The word Pakistan has come to mean the [1940] Lahore resolution
[of the League].13

While Jinnah thrived financially and socially in London, Gandhi

languished in His Majesty’s Yerwada High Security Jail in Poona (now
Pune). On May 1, 1933, troubled by the continuing stories of caste Hin-
dus’ atrocities against the Untouchables, he announced that he would
start a twenty-one-day fast a week later as a “heart prayer to God for
the purification of myself and my associates for our work to improve the
lot of India’s untouchable caste.”14 Despite appeals from his worldwide
well-wishers to drop the idea, he stuck to his plan. For him, this was a
“Now or Never” moment.
Nervous about the consequences of his death in one of its jails,
the government released him on the second day of his hunger strike. To
the relief of his followers and admirers, he survived the fast, during which
he continued to edit the Harijan, a weekly he had established a year earlier.
Following a period of suspension, the civil disobedience campaign
came to an official end on April 7, 1934—the year Gandhi discontinued
his formal membership of the Congress Party and decided to focus on
eradicating untouchability. After touring the country for almost a year to
uplift the status of the Untouchables, he settled down in a new ashram
at Sevagram (Hindi: Village of Service) near the central Indian town of
Wardha. From here he mounted his constructive work designed to turn

57
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

villages into self-reliant settlements, with small-scale, labor-intensive in-

dustries such as handlooms. Given his propensity to advertise the latest
of his many fads, he used the Harijan to hold forth on the virtues of a diet
of milk and bananas, his experiments with eating uncooked foods, and the
ill effects of machine-polished rice.
Just as Gandhi took a voluntary holiday from active politics, Jinnah
was persuaded to reenter the political arena in his homeland.

RETURN OF THE EDWARDIAN DANDY

During his absence from India, the Muslim League, a weak organiza-
tion lacking a mass base, had atrophied. Muhammad Ali Jauhar, a pillar
of the League, died in 1931. Though its titular head, Jinnah refused to
sail to India to preside over its annual session in April 1933. In July
thirty-seven-year-old Liaquat Ali Khan—a bespectacled, fair-skinned,
Punjabi aristocrat, Oxford-educated lawyer with a prematurely receding
hairline—called on Jinnah during his honeymoon in Europe. Both Khan
and his wife, Raana, urged Jinnah to return home to save the League and
the Muslims. Jinnah advised Khan to consult a sample of Muslim politi-
cians. He did and got a positive response.
In April 1934 the Muslim League session named Jinnah president
for two years. In the October 1934 election to the Central Legislative
Assembly (CLA)—when nationally only 1,415,892 voted, a fraction of
the tiny enfranchised minority15—the Muslim voters of Bombay elected
him to the chamber.
In the 145-strong, partly nominated legislature, Jinnah became the
leader of an independent group of 22, with all but 4 being Muslim.
The house was evenly balanced between, on the one hand, Congress-
men and their allies and, on the other, their pro-British opponents. This
enabled Jinnah’s group to be the swing voters. He performed skillfully
in the chamber and traveled up and down the country, shoring up the
League.16
In London, the fifty-nine-strong Joint Select Committee of British
MPs, Indian CLA deputies, and nominated representatives of the princely
states, chaired by Lord Linlithgow, produced a draft bill on constitutional
reform in India in February 1935. After eight weeks of debate in the Par-
liament’s two chambers, it was passed as the Government of India Act

58
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

1935—shortened to GOI Act 1935—on August 2. It was the longest act

the British parliament had adopted in its 676-year history.
One of its major objectives—to establish an All India Federation of
the British India Provinces and the Princely States—remained unfulfilled
because of the ambiguities about safeguarding the princes’ privileges. The act
divided the lawmaking powers between the provincial and the central leg-
islatures. The bicameral central legislature was to consist of a partly elected
and partly nominated Federal Legislative Assembly and Council of State.17
The continuing diarchy in Delhi meant that important ministries
such as defense and foreign aff airs were run by the nominees of the
viceroy, who remained accountable to the British government. He was
authorized to dissolve legislatures and rule by decree. The provincial ju-
risdiction included police, provincial public service, health, and education.
(The concurrent list consisted of matters over which both the federal and
the provincial legislatures had competence to legislate.) Provincial cabi-
nets were to be responsible to the popularly elected legislature. But pro-
vincial governors were given special powers to veto legislation and issue
ordinances on law and order, interests of minorities, and the protection
of British commerce. Separate electorates were to continue. And Mus-
lims were given one-third representation in the central legislature. Most
tellingly, there was no mention of the goal of dominion status for India.
Jinnah was in London when the GOI Act 1935 was passed. On his
return home two months later he described it as a law that was “forced
upon us,” and called on fellow politicians to forge a common response.
Things didn’t happen that way, partly because Gandhi had taken a back-
seat, and Jawaharlal Nehru, released from jail only in September 1935,
had to rush to the bedside of his thirty-six-year-old, tuberculosis-afflicted
wife, Kamala, in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland.
It was only after her death on February 28, 1936, that a grief-stricken
Nehru could focus on the latest law. Presiding over the Congress session
in Lucknow on April 23, 1936, he declared that the party would combat
the GOI Act inside and outside the legislature in order to kill it. This, he
argued, could best be done by participating in those elections in which
the executive was accountable to the fully elected legislature. Since this
was the case with provincial assemblies, the party decided to contest elec-
tions in provinces. Behind the brave talk of undermining the 1935 Act,
Congress leaders espied a golden opportunity to propagate their program
legally among the electorate.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

A week earlier Lucknow had been the site of the annual Muslim
League session. Though wary of the provision for the All India Federa-
tion, it noted approvingly the retention of separate electorates and one-
third Muslim representation in the central legislature. “It is essential that
the Muslims should organize themselves as one party, with an advanced
and progressive program,” stated its leading resolution. “For this purpose
the party appointed Mr. Jinnah to form a Central Election Board under
his presidency . . . with powers to constitute affiliated Provincial Election
Boards.”18 Jinnah did so in June. And the board also drafted the party
manifesto.
At the AICC session on December 27 in Faizpur, presided over by
Nehru, the party drew a line between contesting elections and taking
office in case of victory. The issue on forming ministries was to be settled
by the CWC after the polls, taking into account the delegates’ bitter op-
position to the provincial governor’s overriding powers.

1937 ELECTIONS: A BENCHMARK

Of the 30.1 million eligible voters, about half exercised their right in
the eleven provincial assembly elections held in January and Febru-
ary 1937. Seventy percent of them favored the Congress, awarding it
707 seats out of 1,585. Of these, 617 were in “general”—that is, non-
Muslim—constituencies.19 The triumph of the Congress was unexpected
and striking. The most stunning was its victory in the populous United
Provinces (UP). It bagged 133 of the 138 seats it contested, defeating
the National Agriculturist Party, a powerful body of landlords, whose
98 candidates managed to eke out 18 seats.20 Overall, it garnered a clear
majority in five provinces and a slim one in Bombay.21 In Assam, Bengal,
and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) it emerged as the largest
group.
Its stellar performance was the result of three major factors. The ado-
ration and affection in which the preponderant Hindu voters held Gandhi
as the Mahatma rubbed off on the party. The grueling, whirlwind election
campaign by Nehru, flying hundreds of miles, to lend his charismatic
support to local candidates, was another salient element. And the su-
perb organizing skills of the Bombay-based chair of the Congress parlia-
mentary board, Vallabhbhai Patel, equally adept at raising funds from the

60
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

captains of industry in Bombay and Ahmedabad, was the final factor in

the winning formula.
Of the 485 Muslim seats, the Muslim League won only 106. Yet
its achievement outshone the Congress’s score of 25. Of these, 15 were
in the predominantly Muslim province of the NWFP, leaving only 10
Muslims on Congress benches in ten provinces—an unmistakable index
of its unpopularity among Muslims. This corresponded with the fact that
of its 3.1 million members, only about 100,000 were Muslim, a little over
3 percent.22 The Muslim League did well in Bombay and UP, gaining 20
out of 29 seats in the former and 29 out of 69 in the latter.23
Basking in their success, Congress leaders played hardball with the
British. They insisted on an assurance that provincial governors would
not use their overriding powers to veto a law or dismiss the council of
ministers as a precondition to let their members form ministries where
they constituted a majority.
Protracted talks followed. The viceroy agreed to this condition verbally
without amending the law. When Congress leaders approached Gandhi
for advice, he told them to settle for a gentlemen’s agreement. It was early
July when Congress legislators assumed office in six provinces and led
coalition governments in two.
In Punjab the 18 Congress members were a tiny fraction compared
to the Unionist-led coalition of 110. It drew comfort from the fact that
the Muslim League won only 2 seats, whereas the Muslim-dominated
Unionist Party of landlords, also open to Hindus and Sikhs, gained 89.24
With only 3 seats to its credit in a chamber of 60 in Sindh, the Muslim
League was a cipher there. In Bengal, despite winning 5 seats more than
the 35 gained by the (Muslim) Krishak Praja Party (Bengali: “Peasants’
People”) of Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq, the League ceded the chief minis-
ter’s office to Huq. By securing the backing of the Europeans (25), and
the independent Untouchables and caste Hindus (37), he isolated the
60-strong Congress group.
Jinnah tried to make the most of the League’s gains in Bombay and
UP. With Congress having a precarious majority in Bombay, he thought
that its leader, Bal Gangadhar Kher, would be willing to form a coalition
with his party. To achieve his aim, in his message to Gandhi through
Kher, Jinnah invoked the cause of forging Hindu-Muslim unity in order
to smooth the path to independence. He failed. “I wish I could do some-
thing, but I am utterly helpless,” wrote Gandhi to Jinnah. “My faith in

61
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Unity is bright as ever, only I see no light out of the impenetrable dark-
ness, and in such distress I cry to God for light.”25
A year earlier, though, God seemed to have guided Gandhi to lec-
ture his eldest son, Harilal, that converting to Islam would mean breach-
ing his dharma and would be equivalent to putting two swords in the
same sheath.26 His admonition to Harilal provided a rare glimpse of his
innermost view about Islam. He faced this situation because the Bombay-
based, forty-eight-year-old widower Harilal had fallen in love with Gulab
Vohra, a Muslim, and wanted to marry her. He ignored his father’s ex-
hortation, converted to Islam, and, to the regret of the Mahatma, became
Abdullah Gandhi.
In the electoral arena, rebuffed by Gandhi, Jinnah lowered his sights
and discussed a possible Congress-League partnership under Kher. But
Patel ruled that League legislators would have to merge with the Con-
gress before any of them could be appointed a minister. The same scenario
repeated itself in UP, the main base of Nehru. Here, too, the talks between
the two parties broke down in the face of Patel’s diktat. To respond to
Jinnah’s offer to cooperate with the Congress with a demand that he
liquidate his party was the height of arrogance on the part of Congress
leadership.
For its haughty behavior it would pay dearly a decade later. In that
narrative, which ended with the partition of the subcontinent, its rebuffing
of the League’s friendly gesture in July 1937 would be seen as the second
landmark, the earlier one dating back to December 1928 at the Calcutta
session of the Congress, which rebuffed Jinnah.
The haughty behavior of the Congress in Bombay and UP toward the
League made even neutral Muslim leaders suspicious of its real intentions
toward their community. (The example of the sparsely populated NWFP
along the Afghan border, governed by the Congress and its allies, was
irrelevant to the vast bulk of the Muslim population in the subcontinent.)
“When the Congress formed a government with almost all of the Muslim
MLAs [members of the legislative assembly] sitting on the Opposition
benches, non-Congress Muslims were suddenly faced with this stark re-
ality of near total political powerlessness,” wrote Jaswant Singh, a former
minister in a Bharatiya Janata Party–led government, in his biography of
Jinnah. “It was brought home to them, like a bolt of lightning, that even if
the Congress did not win a single Muslim seat, as had happened now [in
the 1937 election], as long as it won an absolute majority in the House on
the strength of the general seats, it could and would form a government

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 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

entirely on its own—unless Muslim politicians surrendered altogether

their separate political identity, in which case they would hardly be elected
in the first place.”27

JINNAH, SCORNED, HITS BACK

Rebuffed, Jinnah described Congress ministries as the Hindu Raj, in

which “Muslims can expect neither justice nor fair play.”28 With khadi-
clad ministers in Gandhi caps almost monopolizing the seats of power
in eight provincial capitals, it became increasingly difficult for ordinary
Muslims as well as non-League Muslim politicians to disagree with Jin-
nah’s assessment. Such was the case with Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, the
Unionist chief minister of Punjab, and Huq in Bengal. Responding to
friendly overtures from Jinnah, they decided to associate their parties with
the League.
On the other side, unlike Gandhi, Nehru did not view fraught Hindu-
Muslim relations as a major hindrance to achieving independence. Accord-
ing to him, the League’s leadership, consisting of intellectual landlords and
capitalists, was cooking up the problem of Hindu-Muslim disharmony,
which did not exist at the popular level.29 Having spent time in Europe in
1936, which included a trip to Spain in support of the Republican regime
in the civil war, Nehru had started to view politics in class terms, ignor-
ing the different stages of economic development in India and in Europe.
At the same time he could not overlook the stark fact that his party had
contested only one-eighth of the Muslim seats and had an average of one
Congress Muslim MLA in ten of the eleven provinces. To rectify this dis-
mal reality, he initiated a program of mass contact with Muslims.
This led the League’s leadership to redouble its earlier drive to create a
popular base by recruiting members at the rock-bottom annual subscrip-
tion of one-eighth of a rupee (two US cents).
Jinnah’s pioneering appearance in a long coat and tight pajamas at the
Muslim League’s annual session in Lucknow in October 1937 was more
than symbolic. It signaled the beginning of a new chapter in his political
career. It rested on two pillars: opposition to the Congress Party and an
uncompromising insistence that the League should be recognized as the
only authoritative and representative organization of Indian Muslims.
In his speech he blasted the Congress Party for its hypocrisy, “having
complete independence on your lips and the Government of India Act

63
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

1935 in your hands.” Summarizing the scenario under the Congress Raj,
he said, “Hindi is to be the national language of all India, and the “Vande
Mataram” [aka, “Bande Mataram”; Sanskrit: I bow to Mother] is to be
the national song, and is to be forced upon all,” and “The Congress flag is
to be obeyed and revered by all and sundry.” He then turned to possible
Congress-League cooperation in the future. “Honorable settlement can
only be achieved between equals, and unless the two parties learn to re-
spect and fear each other, there is no solid ground for any settlement,” he
declared. “Politics means power, and not relying only on cries of justice or
fair play or good will.” He ended his speech with an appeal to Muslims to
join the Muslim League “by hundreds and thousands.”30
At this conference Sir Sikandar decided to associate his Unionist
Party with the Muslim League by agreeing to support the League on
national issues while implementing the agenda of his own organization,
open to non-Muslims (with Sir Chhotu Ram, a Hindu, being the party’s
deputy leader), in Punjab. Just before attending the League’s session, Huq
had found his position weakened when his party split, emboldening the
Congress opposition. He therefore joined the League while heading his
party’s rump. To seal Huq’s loyalty, Jinnah had him elected leader of the
Bengal Muslim League.
Untroubled by factional politics that plagued Bengal and Punjab,
Congress ministries removed restrictions on the press and released most
political prisoners. They focused on uplifting rural life by improving ir-
rigation, developing traditional crafts, promoting handspun and hand-
woven cloth while paying particular attention to mitigating the plight of
Untouchables. Their reform of the land tenancy law benefited all tenant
farmers, Hindu and Muslim. But since most of the sharecroppers were
illiterate and lacked voting rights, the potential electoral gain for the party
was minimal.
Voters living in urban areas felt the most impact. Here schools and col-
leges underwent change. The Congress ministries introduced the teaching
of Hindi; adulation of Mahatma Gandhi; singing of “Vande Mataram,”
which had been banned by the British Raj; and saluting the Congress flag
in government-run educational institutions. These moves ran counter to
the beliefs and feelings of Muslims, irrespective of their political leanings.
The six-stanza “Vande Mataram” was the most controversial. It ap-
peared as a song sung by Hindu priests in Ananda Math (Bengali: Mon-
astery of Bliss), a novel steeped in Hinduism written by Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay in 1882. Its fourth stanza reads: “Thou art Durga, Lady

64
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

and Queen, / With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen, / Thou
art Lakshmi lotus-throned, / And the Muse a hundred-toned, / Pure and
perfect without peer.”
From 1911 onward, Congress leaders had started promoting the poem
as the national anthem for free India, the motherland. Over the years their
enthusiastic Hindu followers transformed the concept of motherland into
Mother India: a matronly goddess with bulging breasts, clad in a color-
ful sari, holding the tricolor of the Congress Party as if it were a trident
held by a militant Hindu god, with a docile calf by her side and embel-
lished with the halo traditionally associated with the goddesses Durga and
Lakshmi. Gaudy posters of Mother India were printed by the thousand.
Seven years earlier, Muhammad Iqbal, then a college lecturer in La-
hore, had published an anthem for India (Urdu: Tiran-e Hind), Saare
Jahan Se Achha Hindustan Hamara (Urdu: Better Than the Entire World
Is Our Hindustan), in the Ittehad (Unity) weekly. It was a moving, image-
filled ode to the homeland in words that were part of everyday language
in North India—a mixture of Urdu and Hindi, called Hindustani, rather
than Urdu suffused with Persian words. This patriotic song came to
symbolize opposition to the British Raj. Yet it was ignored by Congress
leaders.
During the debate on the suitability of “Vande Mataram” as the na-
tional anthem for free India in 1937, Rabindranath Tagore in his letter
to future Congress president Subash Chandra Bose wrote: “The core of
Vande Mataram is a hymn to goddess Durga: this is so plain that there can
be no debate about it. . . . No Mussalman [Muslim] can be expected pa-
triotically to worship the ten-handed deity as ‘Swadesh’ [Our Nation]. . . .
Parliament is a place of union for all religious groups, and there the song
cannot be appropriate.”31
In Islam, deifying or worshiping anyone or anything other than the
One and Only (unseen) God constitutes shirk (Arabic: to share)—that
is, practicing idolatry or polytheism. Congregational singing of “Vande
Mataram” as part of the official protocol during the rule of Congress min-
istries was one of several points Jinnah broached in his correspondence
with Nehru, as Congress president, in 1937–1938. He demanded that this
practice be ended.
“It is true that the Vande Mataram song has been intimately asso-
ciated with Indian nationalism for more than 30 years and numerous
associations of sentiment and sacrifice have gathered around it,” replied
Nehru. “During all these thirty or more years Vande Mataram was never

65
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

considered to have any religious signifi cance and was treated as a na-
tional song in praise of India. Nor, to my knowledge, was any objec-
tion taken to it except on political grounds by the Government. When,
however, some objections were raised, the Working Committee care-
fully considered the matter and ultimately recommended [in October
1937] that certain stanzas, which contain certain allegorical references,
might not be used on national platforms or occasions. The two stanzas
which have been recommended by the Working Committee for use as
a national song have not a word or phrase which can off end anybody
from any point of view.”32 Obviously, he and Jinnah were operating on
different wavelengths.
As for the national language, Jinnah wanted Urdu to be accorded
this status. Nehru pointed out that the policy of the Congress was to
make Hindustani, as written both in (Sanskrit) Devnagri and (Persian)
Urdu scripts, the national language, and that both scripts should be offi-
cially recognized, and the choice left to the people concerned. In practice,
to teach Hindustani to a class of Hindu and Muslim pupils required a
teacher well versed in two scripts. Such teachers did not exist. So Hindu-
stani was taught in the Devnagri script only.
Within the Congress, Nehru represented the modern, secular trend.
Yet he overlooked the conflation of the abstract concept of praise of the
motherland into a Hindu goddess called Bharat Mata, and the origins of
“Vande Mataram” in Goddess Durga, as pointed out by the nationalist
poet-philosopher Tagore. On the other side in the Congress was Patel,
a proto-Hindu nationalist with cordial relations with the communalist
Hindu Mahasabha. Patel supervised the functioning of the Congress
ministries—and did so with an iron rod.
The assuming of power by the Congress Party exposed the fault line
between Hindu nationalists and secular nationalists within it. Secular
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424807455

nationalists perceived the anti-imperialist movement as aiming to end

Britain’s imperial rule and transform the enslaved India into a sovereign
state. But Hindu nationalists, who took a longer view of India’s history
and formed a significant part of the Congress, regarded the party as the
vehicle to end the subjugation that the Hindu majority had suffered
since 1192, when the Afghan conquerors set up a sultanate in Delhi. Pre-
eminent among the nationalists were Patel and Madan Mohan Malaviya.
Indeed, Malaviya, who served as Congress president in 1909–1910 and
1918–1919, was elected president of the Hindu Mahasabha, an unambig-
uously Hindu nationalist organization, in 1922.

66
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

As for Jinnah, he did more than complain to Nehru in his corre-

spondence. A committee chaired by the Muslim League leader Muham-
mad Mehdi of Pirpur published a document that among other points
debunked Nehru’s arguments. And, feeling the heat of the hyperactive
Congress opposition in Bengal, Huq issued his report in mid-1939, titled
“Muslim Sufferings Under Congress Rule.”
To the relief of the League’s leaders, midway through their five-year
tenure, Congress ministries resigned in the wake of the war in Europe.

POINT OF NO RETURN

Exercising his authority as viceroy and commander in chief of India, Lord

Linlithgow declared before the CLA on September 3, 1939, that India
was at war with Nazi Germany following its invasion of Poland. He pro-
mulgated the draconian Defense of India Act 1939.
Protesting vehemently against the viceroy’s unilateral decision, the
CWC said that it would cooperate with Britain if a new national gov-
ernment was formed and promised India independence after the war.
But, it added, first the viceroy must state the war’s aims. Lord Linlithgow
referred the CWC to the speech by the British prime minister Neville
Chamberlain. That, however, only referred to peace in Europe and an ad-
justment of international relations. The words “freedom” and “democracy”
did not appear there or in the viceroy’s statements. Therefore, on October
22, obeying the CWC’s instruction, Congress ministries in eight prov-
inces resigned. The viceroy imposed direct rule. This left the remaining
three provincial cabinets intact.
In stark contrast, Jinnah urged Muslims to cooperate with the British
Raj at this “critical and difficult juncture.” To poke the Congress in the
eye, on December 2 he called on Muslims to observe December 22, a
Friday, as the “Day of Deliverance” from the “oppression” of the “Hindu”
ministries. He urged them to offer thanksgiving after the congregational
prayer and hold public meetings. The widespread response by Muslims
heartened him and his colleagues. The high point of the day was a rally
in the Bhindi Bazaar (Muslim) neighborhood of Bombay, which was ad-
dressed not only by Jinnah but also by the Untouchables’ leader, Bhimarao
Ramji Ambedkar.
Responding to the dramatic events before and soon after the outbreak
of the war, Gandhi ended his semiretirement from politics. The CWC

67
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

started conferring in Wardha to be near his ashram in Sevagram. Working

with Nehru, Gandhi tried to persuade Jinnah to call off the observance of
the Day of Deliverance. He pointed out that Nehru had agreed to a third-
party review of the League’s claims of the Congress Party’s mistreatment
of Muslims. In return Jinnah demanded that the Congress stop dealing
with Muslims unaffiliated with the League. Nehru refused.
Gandhi and the CWC decided to show that the support the Congress
enjoyed among Muslims was not insubstantial. At Gandhi’s behest, the
delegates at the annual session of the Congress in Ramgarh, Bihar, elected
Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed Azad president on March
18, 1940.33 Born of Indian parents in Mecca, he grew up in Calcutta.
An Islamic scholar with a well-trimmed mustache and goatee, wearing
a black astrakhan cap, he was a poet fluent in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian
who had the distinction of being elected Congress president at the age of
thirty-five, in 1923.
On March 23 the Muslim League session in Lahore adopted its
landmark resolution. It said that since Muslims were “a nation by any
definition,” the League demanded a constitution whereby “the areas in
which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western
and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute Independent
States in which the constituent units will be autonomous and sovereign.”34
The resolution, proposed by Huq, was adopted unanimously.
Jinnah spelled out his two-nation theory:

It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to un-

derstand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religions
in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct so-
cial orders. . . . The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious
philosophies, social customs, and literature[s]. They neither intermarry nor
inter-dine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations
which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their [per-
spectives] on life, and of life, are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and
Mussalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They
have different epics, their heroes are diff erent, and [have] different epi-
sode[s]. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their
victories and defeats overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a
single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must
lead to growing discontent, and final destruction of any fabric that may be
[so] built up for the government of such a state.35

68
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

In response Gandhi fell back on the argument, popular among Hin-

dus, that since Indian Muslims were “a body of converts and their de-
scendants,” they could not claim to be “a nation apart from the parent
stock.” It was true that most Indian Muslims were originally outcaste or
lower-caste Hindus, the estimates varying from 75 percent (according to
Jinnah, whose grandfather converted to Islam and whose mother carried
a Hindu name, Mithibai) to 95 percent (according to Nehru).36 The small
elite among Indian Muslims—descendants of Afghan, Turkish, and Mu-
ghal tribes—were identified in the community as sharif, noble. But this
argument, rooted in ethnicity and geographic origins, ignored the differ-
ences in several other salient elements that together constitute civilization,
as pointed out by Jinnah.
Once Winston Churchill, a staunch believer in maintaining the Brit-
ish Empire, became the prime minister of a coalition government in Lon-
don in May 1940, Britain hardened its position on self-rule for India. In
response to the CWC’s March 1940 offer of cooperation if the viceroy set
up a provisional national government in Delhi, Viceroy Lord Linlithgow
made a counteroffer in August. He held up the promise of dominion sta-
tus for India after the war with an immediate plan to expand the present
Executive Council with Indian members and form a War Consultative
Council. At the same time he ruled out Britain transferring its imperial
powers to “any system of government whose authority is directly denied
by large and powerful elements in India’s national life.”37 This was seen by
most observers as giving a veto to the League on any future constitutional
reform. Yet Jinnah spurned the offer, as did the Congress.

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S NUDGE

When, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941,

the United States joined the Allies in World War II against the Axis
powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—President Franklin D. Roosevelt
became a factor, albeit minor, in Indo-British relations. Four months
earlier, he and Churchill had issued an eight-point Atlantic Charter
summarizing their war and peace aims, after their meetings in New-
foundland, Canada. The charter included a clause stating that all people
had a right to sovereignty and self-determination. Citing this statement,
Roosevelt pressed Churchill to win the cooperation of the nationalists
in India.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

This was bitter medicine for Churchill, whose distaste for Gandhi,
and therefore the Congress, had grown since the end of World War I.
But to avoid displeasing Roosevelt, whose financial aid Britain needed
desperately, he brought up the Muslim factor. He did not wish to let
Indian Muslims be governed by “the Congress Caucus and the Hindu
priesthood,” he told his American benefactor, adding that “there would be
great risk in declaring a post-war abdication and exodus [of the British] at
this time.”38 He also made a false claim that 75 percent of Indian soldiers
were Muslim, more than twice the actual figure.39
Roosevelt was not satisfied. He sent a special envoy to London in
February 1942, when, in the aftermath of the fall of British Malaya and
Singapore to the Japanese, the mood in the British capital was bleak. In
response Churchill dispatched Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labor member of
the cabinet, to Delhi in March, after the fall of Rangoon to the Japanese,
to defuse the political crisis in India.
Cripps offered dominion status for India after the war, with the right
to leave the Commonwealth; a constituent assembly, elected by provincial
legislatures, except for a proportion nominated by the princely states; and
an immediate formation of a national government comprising represen-
tatives of the leading parties, with the viceroy retaining his overriding
powers. To meet Jinnah’s main demand, he agreed to give the provinces
the option to secede from the dominion after it had been established. This
provision was unacceptable to Congress leaders. And Jinnah was not fully
satisfied because the plan did not give the “Muslim nation” the right to
secede. So he too rejected the package.

DO OR DIE

In May 1942 the Japanese completed their occupation of Burma and

planned an invasion of northeast India after the monsoon. That month,
inspired by Gandhi’s hardening stance, the AICC meeting in Allahabad
called on Britain to declare its date of withdrawal from India, failing
which the Congress would unleash a nonviolent civil disobedience
campaign. At the CWC’s meeting in Wardha on July 18, Gandhi won
over the skeptics by stating that an independent India would join the
Allies as a free nation and off er its soil to their troops to fi ght Japan.
Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, a Tamil Brahmin lawyer from Madras
(now Chennai), argued that Britain should and would not leave India

70
 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

at this critical moment. He was not swayed by Gandhi, and resigned

from the party. (Later he would emerge as an acutely realistic politician,
realizing, for instance, that Britain in the midst of World War II would
never quit India.) The CWC authorized Gandhi to take charge of the
nonviolent mass movement. Its resolution—known as the “Quit India”
call to the British—was approved by AICC delegates in Bombay on
August 8, 1942.
In his “Do or Die” speech to launch the civil disobedience campaign,
Gandhi made a brief reference to Jinnah. “A day will certainly come when
he will realize that I have never wronged him or the Muslims,” he said. “I
cannot wait till Jinnah Sahib is converted for the immediate consumma-
tion of Indian freedom.”40
Jinnah was furious that Gandhi had decided to launch his campaign
without bothering to consult him and that he assumed he alone could deal
with Britain and other powers on behalf of India. The League’s president
perceived the Quit India resolution as “the culminating point in the policy
and program of Mr. Gandhi and his Hindu Congress of blackmailing and
coercing the British to transfer power to a Hindu Raj immediately.”41
What followed the instant arrest of Gandhi and top Congress officials
was more a rebellion than a nonviolent civil disobedience struggle. In the
first week, militant Indians attacked 500 post offices, 250 railway stations,
and 150 police stations, and derailed 60 trains. By the end of September,
the authorities had arrested sixty thousand agitators—or freedom fighters,
in the nationalist lexicon—and shot dead about a thousand.42
The viceroy banned the Congress Party. He deployed fi fty-seven
battalions of regular British soldiers to contain and suppress the civilian
revolt. He issued the Revolutionary Movement Ordinance, which further
tightened his government’s control. “I am engaged here in meeting by far
the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424807644

which we have so concealed from the world for reasons of military secu-
rity,” Lord Linlithgow informed Churchill in a secret telegram on August
31. “Mob violence remains rampant over large tracts of the countryside.”43
The viceroy’s iron fist strategy was applauded by Churchill. “I have not
become the King’s First Minister in order to preside at the liquidation
of the British Empire,” he thundered before the House of Commons on
November 10, 1942.44
By the time the one-eyed Field Marshal Archibald Wavell succeeded
Lord Linlithgow in September 1943 as viceroy, British India had been
pacified, its jails overflowing with Congress partisans.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

The Congress Party’s loss proved to be Jinnah’s gain, with the League
filling some of the vacuum left by the banishing of the country’s leading
political organization. Within two months of the Quit India campaign,
the Dawn, founded as a weekly journal in Delhi by Jinnah, was turned
into a daily newspaper as the official mouthpiece of the Muslim League.
Jinnah toured the country propagating his two-nation theory. The
League made solid gains, winning forty-seven of the sixty-one by-elections
in Muslim constituencies between 1937 and 1943, with Congress Mus-
lims securing a derisory four—the remaining seats going to unaffiliated
Muslims. Nehru’s membership drive among Muslims, and the reelection
of Maulana Azad as Congress president in 1941 and 1942, had left most
Muslims unmoved. By contrast, in 1944 the League claimed a member-
ship of two million.45 Part of the reason for Jinnah’s mushrooming success
was his deliberate decision not to spell out the details of the Muslim
homeland he had in mind.

THE LAST THROW OF THE DICE

After the February 1944 death of Kasturbai Gandhi, jailed along with
her husband in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, the government eased
off on the bereaved widower. It allowed him to receive Rajagopalachari,
who had remained a free man. He discussed with Gandhi a plan for a
joint League-Congress demand for a national government based on an
understanding that “contiguous Muslim majority districts” could secede
following independence, if separation was the preference of their adult
populations. Gandhi endorsed this formula.
Rajagopalachari met Jinnah in April and told him that Gandhi was
ready to discuss secession. Soon after, Gandhi suffered a near-fatal attack
of malaria. He survived. But fearing his death in prison, Viceroy Wavell
released him on May 6. After conferring with Gandhi, Rajagopalachari
informed Jinnah that Gandhi was favorably inclined toward his formula.
Jinnah replied that if Gandhi dealt with him directly, he would refer the
plan to the League’s Council.
On July 17, Gandhi dispatched a missive in Gujarati, with a copy in
English, to Jinnah: “Brother Jinnah . . . Today my heart says that I should
write to you. We will meet whenever you choose. Don’t regard me as the
enemy of Islam or of the Muslims of this country.” Jinnah’s reply, mailed
from Kashmir, where he was on vacation, written in English—“the only

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 THE TWO-NATION THEORY

language in which I can make no mistake”—read: “Dear Mr. Gandhi . . .

I shall be glad to receive you at my house in Bombay on my return. . . . By
that time I hope you will have recuperated your health fully. . . . I would
like to say nothing more till we meet.”46
As it was, both of them were old—Gandhi, almost seventy-five, and
Jinnah his junior by only seven years—and in poor health. What kept
Jinnah, suffering from lingering pneumonia in the base of his lungs, going
were calcium injections, tonics, and shortwave diathermy.
From September 9 to 27, they negotiated daily. Their seeming cordial-
ity was captured daily by press photographers: the shorter, bald, jug-eared
Gandhi, wearing moon-shaped spectacles and flashing an open-mouth,
broken-teeth smile, placing his brotherly arm around the shoulder of the
tall, reedy Jinnah, with sunken cheeks and a thatch of thinning gray hair,
managing to bare his front teeth. This daily ritual raised hopes.
In the end, nothing came of it. Gandhi proposed that the areas in
which Muslims were in majority should be demarcated by a commission
appointed jointly by the Congress and the League. Then their wish re-
garding secession should be tested through a referendum based on adult
franchise. But the seceding areas could be consolidated into a separate
state according to a treaty only after India had become independent, and
that such a treaty should specify “an efficient and satisfactory adminis-
tration of foreign affairs, defense, internal communications, and customs”
between the two independent neighbors.
Jinnah wanted the right to secede accorded only to the Muslim na-
tion. That meant giving the right to vote in a referendum only to Muslims
in the Muslim-majority areas. Also he proposed partition before indepen-
dence. Aware of the Congress ministries’ neglect of Muslims’ communal
interests, he did not trust Congress-governed independent India to im-
plement the promise of Pakistan. But his proposal was unacceptable to
Gandhi. A desperate Gandhi proposed that a third party be selected by
them to arbitrate. Jinnah declined.
On the whole, this exercise, conducted in good faith by both titans,
raised Jinnah’s status. It was Gandhi who came knocking at his door. It
was Gandhi who, after much resistance and rhetoric, conceded the prin-
ciple of secession from the center. It became crystal clear to all that Jinnah
now wielded a veto over the future status of India as a political entity.
Within two weeks of the end of World War II in Europe on May 9,
1945, Viceroy Wavell announced a plan to transform his Imperial Exec-
utive Council into a national cabinet of Indian leaders. This was to be the

73
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

first step toward self-rule for India with provisions for separate represen-
tation for Muslims and reduced powers for both Hindus and Muslims in
their majority provinces.47 He lifted the ban on the Congress Party and
freed its leaders on June 15.
They and their League counterparts were invited to a conference in
the summer capital of Simla on June 25. They were charged with nom-
inating their representatives to the proposed national cabinet and dis-
cussing the rest of the Wavell Plan. The talks failed. Jinnah insisted on
nominating all Muslim members of the cabinet, and Congress president
Maulana Azad refused to abandon his party’s right to include a Muslim
in its list. Earlier Jinnah had pointedly avoided shaking hands with Mau-
lana Azad.48
The failure of the Simla Conference scuttled the last viable opportu-
nity for a united India whose chances of independence rose sharply when
Britain’s Labor Party, led by Clement Attlee, won a two-thirds majority
in the general election on July 26.
As leader of the opposition in 1935, Attlee had proposed an amend-
ment to the Government of India Act 1935 providing for a dominion
status for the colony, only to see it defeated. Now he, instead of Churchill,
had the honor to be among the leaders of the Allied powers to accept the
unconditional surrender of Japan on August 14, 1945.

74
 4

A Rising Tide of Violence

Starting in August 1945, the pace of Indian history accelerated. While

the Labor government in London set out to withdraw from India against
the background of the uncertain loyalty of its Indian military, tensions
between the Congress Party and the Muslim League intensified and
morphed into savage Hindu-Muslim violence.
Stung by Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s manifest discourtesy to him at the
Simla Conference, Congress president Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyud-
din Ahmed Azad invited several Muslim groups opposed to the Muslim
League to attend the Nationalist Muslim Conference in Delhi on Sep-
tember 8. This was a preamble to establish the Azad Muslim Parliamen-
tary Board to contest elections starting in January 1946.

BRITAIN’S INDIAN MILITARY FOUNDATION SHAKEN

In the interim, public attention turned to the military trials of General

Shah Nawaz Khan and Colonels Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Singh Dhil-
lon, which started in November. They were ex-officers of the British In-
dian Army who, as Japan’s prisoners of war in Malaya-Singapore, had
joined the Indian National Army (INA) led by Subash Chandra Bose,
a former Congress president. He had allied with the Axis powers after
escaping his house arrest in Calcutta in January 1941. Khan, Sahgal, and
Dhillon became the best known faces of the six thousand Indian POWs
the British Raj decided to prosecute for treason.

75
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

As symbols of Indians’ armed resistance to British imperialism, this

Hindu-Muslim-Sikh trio mesmerized the public, which had so far been
exposed almost exclusively to the virtues of nonviolent struggle against
foreign domination.
Reflecting the popular mood, the All India Congress Committee
(AICC) session in September had passed a resolution warning that “it
would be a tragedy if these officers were punished for the offense of hav-
ing labored, however mistakenly, for the freedom of India,” and demanded
their release.1 The Congress Working Committee (CWC) formed the
INA Defense Committee. The proceedings of the trial in Delhi’s historic
Red Fort took a dramatic turn when Jawaharlal Nehru appeared before
the military judges in the barrister’s gown he had discarded a quarter
century earlier. Jinnah expressed his readiness to defend General Khan if
he dissociated himself from the other (non-Muslim) codefendants. Khan
declined the offer.
Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, an apostle of nonviolence, set aside his
creed. “The hypnotism of the Indian National Army has cast its spell
upon us,” he conceded in his article in the Harijan of February 24, 1946.
“Netaji’s [Subash Chandra Bose’s] name is one to conjure with. His pa-
triotism is second to none. . . . His bravery shines through all his actions.
He aimed high and failed.”2
By early 1946 the INA’s militant nationalism began to resonate among
the hitherto loyal ranks of Britain’s Indian military. As it was, the discon-
tent about food and working conditions among the enlisted of the Royal
Indian Navy (RIN) had been building up. It came to the fore on February
18, when disgruntled naval troops formed a Naval Central Strike Com-
mittee, led by M. S. Khan in Bombay. The mutiny at HMS Talwar, an
onshore signals school, spread to the RIN’s seventy-eight ships and twenty
on-shore establishments in Bombay, Karachi, Cochin, and Vishakhapat-
nam (aka Vizag), involving twenty thousand sailors. The next morning they
lowered the Union Jack and hoisted the nationalist tricolor on most of the
ships and establishments. In Bombay the mutiny on twenty-two ships was
backed by workers’ strikes and commercial shutdowns. The effort to quell
the resulting rioting and violence led to 228 deaths by police fire.3
The naval mutiny shook the government of Prime Minister Clement
Attlee, who ordered the Royal Navy to quash it. Admiral J. H. Godfrey,
the flag officer commanding the RIN, went on air, bellowing “Submit or
perish.” By then the mutineers’ demands had included the freeing of all
ex-INA troops.

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 A RISING TIDE OF VIOLENCE

The Bombay-based Congress leader Vallabhbhai Patel intervened to

secure a peaceful end to the mutiny, an enterprise to which Jinnah also
made a contribution. By February 21 a British destroyer arrived from
Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) and anchored near the Gateway of India in
Bombay. The mutiny ended two days later, with the authorities appointing
five courts of inquiry to delve into the strikers’ demands.4
Later, in Delhi, the INA officers’ life imprisonment sentences were ca-
shiered by the Indian commander in chief Field Marshal Sir Claude John
Auchinleck. His hand was forced by the intensity of the popular protest
and barely disguised signs of discontent among serving Indian soldiers.
The decisive roles of the naval mutiny and the widespread disapproval
of the INA officers’ trials were conceded by Attlee a decade later as a guest
of P. V. Chuckraborty, the acting governor of West Bengal. In his letter of
March 30, 1976, Chuckraborty wrote:

I put it straight to him [Attlee] like this: “The Quit India Movement of
Gandhi practically died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the
Indian situation at that time, which made it necessary for the British to
leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?” In reply Attlee cited sev-
eral reasons, the most important of which were the INA activities of Netaji
Subash Chandra Bose, which weakened the very foundation of the British
Empire in India, and the RIN Mutiny which made the British realize that
the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British.
When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was
influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s 1942 movement, Attlee’s lips widened in
smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, “Minimal.”5

By espousing the INA’s cause, the Congress garnered the support of those
Indians who had little faith in Gandhi’s nonviolent strategy. This became
apparent in the electoral contests of January through March 1946.

ELECTORAL MANDATES

In the 103-seat election in the Central Legislative Assembly (CLA), the

Congress won all of the 51 general (Hindu) seats plus 5 more non-Muslim
seats. At the same time the Muslim League roared to victory, winning
all 30 Muslim places and polling 86.6 percent of the Muslim vote. These
elections were based on the extremely restricted franchise of the 1919 Act,

77
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

with only 586,647 casting their ballots, representing almost exclusively the
propertied classes.
For the provincial elections, spread over late January to mid-March,
the electoral base was over 35 million. The turnout of 26 million was an
impressive 75 percent. The aggregate count gave the Congress 19 million
ballots and the League 4.5 million. The Congress increased its total from
701 seats in the 1937 poll to 923. But the League quadrupled its strength,
to 425 out of 485 Muslim seats. To Maulana Azad’s profound chagrin, the
Nationalist Muslims scored a derisory 16.6
Jinnah had masterminded the campaign while staying out of the feuds
among provincial leaders. League candidates deployed Islamic symbols
and slogans to garner support. In the Muslim-majority provinces they
turned, successfully, to such traditional power centers and networks as
feudal lords, clan elders, and religious notables. With this, Indian politics
came full circle. A generation earlier, Jinnah had warned Gandhi against
mixing religion with politics. Now he presided over a political party whose
candidates pulled religious strings unashamedly to win electoral contests.
He hammered home the message that every ballot cast for the League
was a vote for the welfare of one hundred million Indian Muslims and
Islam. “Your votes are not for individuals but . . . for Pakistan,” he repeated
in his election speeches up and down the country.7 Oddly, he articulated
all this in English, which was translated into Urdu by an assistant. This
and his traditional aloofness had become part of the mystique surround-
ing him, which enhanced his charisma among his coreligionists.
By then the term “Pakistan”—an Urdu compound of pak, meaning
“pure” and istan meaning “place”—had acquired a talismanic quality
among Muslims of all classes. It was perceived as a panacea for all the
problems Muslims faced. Its exact meaning was kept deliberately vague.
“Muslim businessmen foresaw new markets [in Pakistan] free from Hindu
competition,” notes Alan Hayes Marriam, an American academic. “Land-
lords hoped for a perpetuation of the zamindari system [which guaran-
teed perpetual ownership of vast, inherited agricultural plots] which the
Congress had vowed to abolish. Intellectuals envisioned a cultural rebirth
free from the British and Hindus. To the orthodox, Pakistan promised
a religious state. . . . To officials and bureaucrats a new nation offered a
shortcut to seniority.”8
After the elections, the Congress formed ministries in eight provinces.
As the largest group in Bengal’s legislature, the League led the coalition
government, with Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy as chief minister.

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 A RISING TIDE OF VIOLENCE

In Sindh, where the total electorate was less than one million, the
League’s 28 seats were equal to those of the Sindh Assembly Coalition
Party, comprising 21 Congress lawmakers and 7 dissident Leaguers and
Nationalist Muslims, in a chamber of 60, with the remainder being neu-
tral. As “a great sympathizer of Muslims and supporter of the Pakistan
cause”—in the words of his secretary, Naseer Ahmad Faruqi9—Governor
Sir Francis Mudie invited the League leader Sir Ghulam Hussain Hida-
yatullah to form a ministry. Sir Francis would later be appointed governor
of West Punjab by Pakistan’s governor-general Jinnah.
But in Punjab Maulana Azad cobbled together a coalition of the
Congress (51 seats), the Akali Party of Sikhs (23 seats), and a much re-
duced Unionist Party (20 seats) under the leadership of Sir Khizr Hayat
Tiwana.10 By depriving the largest group, the League (73 seats), of power,
Azad struck a hard blow at Jinnah’s conceit. Punjab was at the core of the
Muslim League leader’s demand for Pakistan in the northwestern region.
He found the ignominy of defeat by his bête noire hard to stomach.
The provincial legislatures then elected members to the 300-strong
Constituent Assembly in Delhi. The Congress won 150 seats, and the
League 79 Muslim places.11 The latest elections underscored the political
dominance of the Congress and the League.
Attlee dispatched a team of three cabinet ministers, led by the seventy-
four-year-old Lord Pethick-Lawrence, secretary of state for India, to
Delhi on March 22. His colleagues were Sir Stafford Cripps and Albert
Victor Alexander. They and Viceroy Archibald Wavell became the quar-
tet charged with finding a formula to transfer Britain’s imperial power to
Indian representatives.

THE BRITISH QUARTET’S INTRACTABLE TASK

Of the three wise men from London, only Cripps had a full grasp of the
complexities of the Indian political scene.
The quartet’s talks with Congress and League leaders proved sterile.
So on May 16 the cabinet mission, in consultation with Wavell, issued
its own Constitutional Award. It rejected Pakistan, as demanded by the
League, as well as a smaller version of it. In the League’s blueprint, the two
parts of Pakistan lay a thousand miles apart, with its western wing being
37 percent non-Muslim and the eastern 48 percent. That would have left
the communal minority problem unresolved. The smaller Pakistan, stated

79
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

the British cabinet ministers, would involve partitioning Assam, Bengal,

and Punjab, a step that, in their opinion, “would be contrary to the wishes
of a very large percentage of these provinces.” Bengal and Punjab, they
argued, “each had its own language and a long history and tradition.”12
The Constitutional Award therefore envisaged a united India, includ-
ing the princely states, with a federal government in charge of defense,
foreign affairs, and communications; a federal parliament, which could
pass a major law of racial or religious nature only if a majority of Hindu or
Muslim members backed it; and provincial governments with wide pow-
ers. A constituent assembly, elected by existing provincial legislatures and
charged with drafting a constitution resting on these principles, would
convene in Delhi briefly and then divide into three sections. Section A
would be Hindu majority, and Sections B and C would comprise the
Muslim-majority northwestern region and Bengal-Assam respectively.
The aim would be to frame a constitution for three subfederations into
which federal, independent India was to be divided.13
In order to satisfy the two contending parties—the Congress and the
League—the cabinet mission’s award included two contradictory clauses.
Paragraph 15 stated that “provinces should be free to form groups with
executives and legislatures.” But Paragraph 19 said that representatives
from the groups “shall proceed to settle provincial constitutions” and
“shall also decide whether any group constitution shall be set up for those
provinces.”14
On June 6 Jinnah and the League accepted the Constitutional Award,
claiming that the founding of Pakistan was “inherent” in the “compulsory
grouping,” adding that by implication this document gave a Muslim group
“the opportunity and the right of secession.”
Congress leaders were of two minds. With the Congress presidency
passing from Maulana Azad to Jawaharlal Nehru, a Hindu, in early May
1946, Viceroy Wavell saw an opportunity to satisfy Jinnah’s demand that
the League should have the monopoly over nominating Muslim repre-
sentatives to the interim cabinet the viceroy wished to form. On June
16, Wavell announced that he was inviting Jinnah and four of his party
colleagues; Nehru and five other Hindu Congress leaders, including one
Untouchable; and a Sikh, a Christian, and a Parsi to form the interim
government. If the League or the Congress spurned his offer, then he
intended to appoint the new cabinet, which, in his view, would be as
representative as was possible of those willing to accept the May 16 con-
stitutional statement.

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 A RISING TIDE OF VIOLENCE

Thus pressed, on June 25 Congress leaders accepted the Constitu-

tional Award, while stressing that Paragraph 15 gave provinces the option
to stay out of either of the “Pakistan” groups. But they turned down Wavell’s
invitation to join the proposed interim government. (The unstated reason
was that it deprived them of nominating a Muslim Congressman as a
cabinet minister.) They calculated that it would be disastrous for Wavell
to appoint a cabinet led by Jinnah. They proved right. Wavell withdrew
his offer of June 16, thus depriving Jinnah of his lifelong ambition to be
the highest representative of united India.
Jinnah felt cheated. He savaged the viceroy for his betrayal, Pethick-
Lawrence and Cripps for their treacherous behavior, and Congress lead-
ers for their dishonesty. What the CWC had done in reality was to win
their right to be represented in the viceroy’s proposed provisional cabinet
and then turn down the chance to exercise it. They had made a fiendishly
clever move that stopped Jinnah in his tracks.
Flushed by the crushing of Jinnah’s fondest dream and the endorse-
ment of the CWC’s decision by 204 to 51 votes at the AICC session in
Bombay on July 7, an overconfident Nehru overplayed his hand at the
subsequent press conference. He explained that his party had agreed only
to participate in the Constituent Assembly and that once convened, the
Assembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award’s
provisions, if it so wished and that the grouping scheme would most likely
not materialize at all.
Nehru’s indiscreet, aggressive statement finally and irrevocably killed
the scenario of a united, independent India. It led Jinnah to withdraw the
League’s acceptance of the Constitutional Award. This was the last in a
series of three landmark events—all of these wrought by the Congress
Party—which culminated in the partition of the subcontinent.

JINNAH ON THE OFFENSIVE

At Jinnah’s behest the Muslim League Council meeting in Bombay

from July 27 to 29 adopted the path of “Direct Action” to achieve Paki-
stan. “This day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods,” he declared.
“[So far] the British and the Congress held a pistol in their hand, the
one of authority and arms and the other of mass struggle and nonco-
operation. Today we have also forged a pistol and we are in a position
to use it.”15

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Summarizing his party’s recent history, Jinnah said that for the sake
of fair play, the Muslim League had “sacrificed the full sovereign state
of Pakistan at the altar of the Congress for securing the independence of
the whole of India” but had been repaid with “defiance and contempt.”16
The Council named August 16 as the Direct Action Day for the achieve-
ment of Pakistan. Th us a quarter century after lambasting Gandhi
for resorting to extraconstitutional methods, the seventy-fi ve-year-
old Jinnah emulated his rival, but without the Mahatma’s stress on
nonviolence.
Gandhi was equivocal about the Constitutional Award. “Let us not
be cowardly, but approach our task with courage and confidence,” he told
the AICC delegates in Bombay. “Never mind the darkness that fills my
mind.”17 His mind filled with a deeper shade of darkness as he noted a
sharp rise in Hindu-Muslim alienation. He blamed Jinnah for this in his
long interview on July 17 with Louis Fischer, the American journalist
who went on to publish two glowing biographies of the Mahatma.

GANDHI: The Muslims are religious fanatics but fanaticism cannot be an-
swered with fanaticism. . . . Brilliant Muslims in Congress became dis-
gusted. They did not find the brotherhood of man among the Hindus.
They say Islam is the brotherhood of man. As a matter of fact, it is the
brotherhood of Muslims. . . . [But] Hindu separatism has played a part
in creating the rift between Congress and the League. Jinnah is an evil
genius. He believes he is a prophet.
LF: He is a lawyer.
GANDHI: You do him an injustice. I give you the testimony of my 18 days
of talks with him in [September] 1944. He really looks upon himself as
the savior of Islam.
LF: He pleads a case; he does not preach a cause.
GANDHI: But I don’t consider him a fraud. He has cast a spell over the
Muslim who is [a] simple-minded man.
LF: Sometimes I think the Muslim-Hindu question is the problem of finding
a place for the new Muslim middle class in an underdeveloped India. India
is even too underdeveloped to offer a place to the poor. Jinnah won over
the middle because he helped it to compete with the other entrenched
Hindu middle class. Now he is bridging the chasm between the landlord
and peasant. He has done it with Pakistan.
GANDHI: You are right. But Jinnah has not won the peasant. He is trying
to win him.

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LF: Jinnah told me in 1942 you did not want independence. . . . He said you
want Hindu rule.
GANDHI: This is absurd. I am a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew, a
Parsi. . . . He is not speaking the truth. He is speaking like a pettifogging
lawyer. . . . Only a maniac resorts to such charges. . . .
LF: What did you learn from your 18 days with Jinnah?
MG: I learned that he was a maniac. A maniac leaves his mania and becomes
reasonable at times. I have never been too stubborn. . . . I could not make
headway with Jinnah because he is a maniac. . . .
LF: What is the solution?
GANDHI: Jinnah has twenty-five years more to work. . . . Jinnah is incor-
ruptible and brave. . . . If Jinnah stays out of the Constituent Assembly the
British should be firm and let us work this plan alone. The British must
not yield to [a] Hitler.18

With Jinnah pulling out of both plans of the British Raj, Lord Wavell
was left with only one Indian partner: Nehru. He approached the Con-
gress president to reconsider his party’s stance on an interim government.
Once he got a nod from Nehru, the viceroy announced on August 12
that he was inviting him to form an interim cabinet. At Nehru’s initiative,
Jinnah met him on August 15, on the eve of the League’s Direct Action
Day. They failed to reach an agreement. Nehru refused to raise his offer of
5 seats out of 14 to the League with Jinnah demanding 7.
Nationally, the League leaders were feverishly planning street action
on August 16, a Friday.

A DRAMA ON A DUAL STAGE, ACT I

With Bengal ruled by the Muslim League’s Suhrawardy, who was chief
minister, the Direct Action Day had official backing. On that morning
in Calcutta—a city of 4.2 million, three-quarters Hindu—the two-year-
old Muslim League National Guard (MNG), the League’s militia, forced
Hindu shopkeepers to close their stores in the Muslim majority districts of
North Calcutta. The angered Hindus responded by blocking the advance
of several small League processions after the Friday congregation prayers
toward the commons around Ochterloney Monument in the city center. All
the same, between 50,000 and 100,000 Muslims gathered to listen to fiery
speeches by League leaders, including Suhrawardy, about achieving Pakistan.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

While heading back home after the rally, fired by the political-
religious rhetoric of the speakers, some of the Muslims, armed with iron
bars and bamboo sticks, attacked Hindus and ransacked their shops. In
the main, the anti-Hindu violence was triggered by the MNG, described
by Suhrawardy as soldiers of the envisaged Pakistan. Rioting increased as
truckloads of Muslims, armed with brickbats and broken bottles, resorted
to looting Hindu stores. In retaliation Hindus and Sikhs hit back with a
vengeance. They attacked Muslims on streets and shops and even in their
homes. With Suhrawardy refraining from pressing the police to quell the
rioting, violence spread quickly.
Murder, arson, rape, and looting ravaged the city. The bloody mayhem
continued for three days and included several massacres, followed by two
days of occasional skirmishes. Its end came on August 21, only after Gov-
ernor Sir John Burrow intervened and deployed five battalions of British
troops, backed by four battalions of Indian soldiers, with orders to use live
ammunition to restore order.
The estimated death toll varied between five thousand and ten thousand,
with fifteen thousand more suffering injuries. Over one hundred thousand
people became homeless. These statistics made it the bloodiest commu-
nal riot in India’s history. The murdered victims were often mutilated—
a pattern that would be repeated on a much larger scale in Punjab a year
later. For the first time in communal riots, there were cases of rape, a fea-
ture that would become part of such violence later.
According to most accounts, the majority of the victims belonged to
the Muslim community, which was by and large poor. “Thus, the massacre
could be described as the combination of one large pogrom against poor
Muslims by Hindu toughs [called goondas in Hindi and Bengali], with
one smaller pogrom against poor Hindus by Muslim toughs,” concluded
Claude Markovits, a researcher of mass violence, in his 2008 study of the
dreadful episode.19 The same conclusion was drawn nearer the time. In his
letter to Chakravarti Rajagopalachari on August 21, 1946, Patel wrote:
“This [the Calcutta killings] will be a good lesson for the League, because
I hear that the proportion of Muslims who have suffered death is much
larger.”20 With this horrendous bloodletting and arson, Calcutta lived up
to the title “City of Dreadful Night,” as it had been named by the British
writer Rudyard Kipling.
On August 22 the governor of Bengal dismissed the Suhrawardy gov-
ernment and imposed direct rule. Many of the Muslims who fled Calcutta

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returned to their villages in Muslim-majority East Bengal. This ramped

up interreligious tensions in rural Bengal.
In Delhi the viceroy announced on August 24 that the existing mem-
bers of his Executive Council had resigned and their successors would be
installed on September 2. On that day, a cabinet of twelve ministers—
including one Congress and two independent Muslims—was sworn in,
with Nehru as vice president of the Executive Council in charge of foreign
affairs.21 As foreign minister Nehru said, “India will follow an independent
policy [and] keep away from the power politics of the groups aligned one
against another.”22 Soon after the United States decided to upgrade its
diplomatic mission in Delhi to the ambassadorial level, Nehru named his
erstwhile cabinet colleague, Asaf Ali, a Congress lawyer-politician, ambas-
sador to Washington, where he would take up his post in February 1947.
Meanwhile, Jinnah responded to the inauguration of the interim
government by calling on his followers to unfurl black flags as a sign of
mourning. He slammed the viceroy for including three Muslims in his
cabinet, including Asaf Ali, who lacked the confidence of their coreligion-
ists. His statement triggered communal riots in Bombay and Ahmedabad.
This led the viceroy to try to get the Congress and the League to cooperate.
He was helped by Sir Muhammad Hamidullah Khan, the Nawab
(aka Nabob) of Bhopal, a friend of Jinnah as well as Gandhi and who
was then based at Panchgani, a hill station a hundred miles from Bom-
bay. With Khan’s intercession, the two titans met in early October. They
managed to come up with a compromise. Gandhi conceded that only the
League had “the unquestionable right to represent the Muslims of India,”
and Jinnah said that the Congress could have “such representatives” in a
Congress-League coalition as “it thinks proper.”23
The five names Jinnah gave Lord Wavell on October 13 included
Jogindar Nath Mandal, an Untouchable leader from Bengal. This was his
way of getting even with the Congress after it insisted on nominating a
Muslim Congressman, Asaf Ali, as a minister. Nehru dropped two inde-
pendent Muslims and Sarat Chandra Bose (an elder brother of Subash
Chandra Bose) from the cabinet and added Jinnah’s five nominees, led
by his deputy, Liaquat Ali Khan. The reconstituted cabinet took office on
October 25. It included Baldev Singh, a Sikh, as defense minister.
By coincidence, October 25 was declared Noakhali Day in the Congress-
ruled Bihar by Hindu leaders, many of them affiliated with the Congress
Party.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

A DRAMA ON A DUAL STAGE, ACT II

They were reacting to the news of violence against Hindus in the pre-
dominantly Muslim districts of Noakhali and Tippera districts in the
waterlogged delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers in East Bengal.
Four-fifths of the population in the area was Muslim, whereas most of the
agricultural land belonged to Hindu landlords. The religious divide was
thus reinforced by gross economic inequity. In light of the recent Great
Killings in Calcutta, it was payback for the violence perpetrated against
Muslims in the metropolis.
The rioting started on October 10 in Ramganj after a pro-Pakistan
rally and spread to ten other settlements. By the time it ended a week
later, the number of Hindus killed was likely at least five hundred (official
figure) or as many as five thousand—with sixty thousand made homeless.
In Tippera district nearly 9,900 Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam,
with many of them paraded in the streets wearing caps inscribed with
“Pakistan.” A larger number were converted to Islam in the Noakhali
district. Abducted Hindu women were married to Muslims.24
The rumor spread in the adjoining Bihar that fifty thousand Hindus
had been slaughtered in the Noakhali-Tippera area. Bihar, a 90 percent
Hindu province, was ruled by Chief Minister Krishna Singh, a Hindu Con-
gress leader. Following the declaration of Noakhali Day on October 25,
thousands of Hindus, often led by local Congress figures, marched while
shouting, “Blood for blood.” Murder, arson, and pillage rocked four districts
of Bihar, including Patna, for more than a week. The victims were Muslim.
By the time the savagery ended, different estimates of fatalities were
published. Congress leaders admitted 2,000. The number mentioned in
the British parliament was 5,000. The prestigious Calcutta-based States-
man reported 7,500 to 10,000, with the latter statistic accepted by Gandhi.
In contrast, Jinnah came up with the figure of 30,000.25
To extinguish the fire of communal passion, Nehru, accompanied by
the communications minister, Abdur Rab Nishtar, a League nominee,
flew to Patna, the capital of Bihar. Escorted by a contingent of the Fron-
tier Force Regiment, he toured the riot-stricken areas in an open jeep.
“Murder stalks the streets, and most amazing cruelties are indulged in by
both the individual and the mob,” he wrote later. “It is extraordinary how
our peaceful population has become militant and bloodthirsty. Riot is not
the word for it—it is just a sadistic desire to kill.”26 He was so shocked
that he threatened to “bomb the rioters.”

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 A RISING TIDE OF VIOLENCE

The horrendous events in rural East Bengal and Bihar demolished the
theory of Gandhi and Nehru that communal tensions existed only among
the upper echelons of the two communities and that the village folks of
different faiths led a peaceful coexistence.
Predictably, contrary was the case with Jinnah. His warnings of perse-
cution of Muslims by the Hindu majority government were being borne
out. The League’s newspaper Dawn called on the surviving Bihari Mus-
lims to “remain united and invincible in the face of Hindu aggression.”27
With the pogrom in Bihar, the slogan of “Islam in danger” in Hindu India
gained enhanced credibility. And Jinnah would later tell the Bihari refu-
gees in Karachi that Pakistan became imperative because of the sufferings
of the Muslims of Bihar.28

THE PENULTIMATE STEP

With the inauguration of the Constituent Assembly on December 9 near-

ing, Attlee summoned Nehru, Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Baldev Singh,
and Wavell to 10 Downing Street in London on December 2. During
four days of meetings, British constitutional experts backed the League’s
interpretation of the May 16 constitutional statement about grouping. On
December 6 Attlee announced that if the Constituent Assembly adopted
a constitution without the cooperation of the Muslim League, “His Maj-
esty’s Government could not, of course, contemplate . . . forcing such a
constitution on any unwilling parts of the country.”29
While in London, Jinnah said publicly that he expected India to be
divided into a Hindu state and a Muslim state. He added that he shared
Churchill’s apprehensions regarding “civil war and riots in India.30 Given
this, the talks in Downing Street failed.
In Delhi, when the Constituent Assembly convened on December 9,
its League members stayed away. The Assembly adjourned to January 20,
1947, to await participation by the League and the quasi-independent
princely states. Sporadic communal violence broke out in major cities. By
Christmas Eve, for instance, it claimed more than 450 lives in Bombay.
While resisting the constitutional plans of the Congress, League lead-
ers consolidated or expanded their popular base in Muslim-majority prov-
inces. Once the shaky Hidayatullah ministry fell in Sindh in December
1946, the League’s Parliamentary Board, headed by Jinnah, focused on
winning all of the 35 Muslim legislative seats in the upcoming election.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Jinnah put his friend Ghulam Ali Allana in charge of electioneering. He

in turn invited contingents of students from Aligarh Muslim University
who narrated the killings of Bihari Muslims in gory detail. Another tac-
tic was to use the network of the caretakers of the Sufi shrines to garner
votes. And by giving the League’s tickets to leading feudal lords, Allana
strengthened the party’s electoral card. The League scored all the Muslim
seats except 2. With a firm majority in the chamber, the new Hidayatullah
government assumed office in mid-February 1947.31
The year 1947 unrolled in India with an emergency session of the
AICC in Bombay. On January 6 it adopted a resolution by a vote of 99
to 52 to accept the British interpretation of the May 16 statement “under
protest,” and subject to the qualification that no province or part of it
would be forced into a settlement.32
On January 20 League members did not turn up for the Constituent
Assembly. A week later the League’s Council said that since the Con-
gress did not accept the May 16 statement unconditionally, the election
to the Constituent Assembly and the Assembly itself had become invalid.
In early February intracabinet tensions intensified when the nine non-
League cabinet ministers asked the viceroy to demand the resignation of
the five League ministers.
In the pivotal province of Punjab, the League’s leaders decided to
undertake “direct action” to topple the coalition cabinet headed by Sir
Khizr, a Unionist luminary. It started on January 24, when the govern-
ment outlawed the MNG as well as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS; Sanskrit: National Volunteer Association), a Hindu militia. League
leader and central cabinet minister Ghazanfar Ali Khan contended that
proscribing the MNG was tantamount to banning his party’s most im-
portant activity. Thus challenged, Sir Khizr lifted the ban on January 28.
But when the League did not call off its civil disobedience as promised,
he jailed its top officials.
While jails filled with the Leaguers defying the ban on public gather-
ings, their slogans grew more menacing with each passing day. The most
popular were Pakistan ka nara kiya? La illahahillillah (“What is the slogan
of Pakistan? There is no God but Allah”) and Assay leingey Pakistan, jaisey
liyatha Hindustan (“We will gain Pakistan the way we [Muslims] con-
quered India”). Abusive slogans were coined to insult the chief minister.
Increasingly aggressive demonstrators started harassing Hindus and Sikhs
and forcing them to fly the Muslim League’s green emblem on their stores
and vehicles. These slogans and actions made Hindus and Sikhs fearful.

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Such activities by the League kept it and Jinnah in the limelight. By

contrast, the undramatic reports of Gandhi’s intermittent walking tours—
alternating between the strife-torn villages in Noakhali, East Bengal, and
western Bihar—preaching Hindu-Muslim amity merited less space and
attention in the press and All India Radio. Gandhi had an arduous task to
perform. In East Bengal, Muslims viewed him as an epitome of the Ram
Raj, whereas in West Bihar Hindus saw him as an appeaser of Muslims.
To meet the challenge Gandhi dispersed his dozen-strong retinue to
different settlements. He retained only his stenographer, R. P. Parasuram;
his Bengali interpreter, Professor Nirmal Bose; and his eighteen-year-
old grandniece, Mridula—popularly known as Manuben, Sister Manu—
daughter of Jaisukhlal Gandhi, whom he had added to his staff earlier in
the year.33 Gandhi used Mridula as part of his “experiments” in brahmach-
arya (Sanskrit: literally, to follow the Eternal; figuratively, self-imposed
celibacy). He had grown up with a notion about the power of semen,
originating in ancient Hindu scriptures and summarized in the sentence:
“One who conserves his vital fluid acquires unfailing power.”34
Gandhi’s regular sharing of his bed with Mridula had become an
embarrassment at best and a scandal at worst. Among others, Patel, in
his letter to Gandhi on January 25, 1947, urged him to suspend the ex-
periment, which he called a “terrible blunder” on the Mahatma’s part that
pained his followers “beyond measure.”35
On February 1, 1947, in his prayer meeting speech in the village
of Amishapara, Gandhi said, “I have my grandniece [Manuben] with
me. She shares the same bed with me. The Prophet [Muhammad] . . .
welcomed eunuchs made so through prayer by God. This is my aspira-
tion. I know that my action has excited criticism among my friends. But
a duty cannot be shirked.” His interpreter, Bose, skipped these sentences
while translating his speech in Bangali. And the editors of the Harijan
weekly, Kishorelal Mashruwala and Narhari Parikh, censored them from
the published text. But Gandhi was stubborn. “If I don’t let Manu sleep
with me, though I regard it as essential that she should, wouldn’t that be
a sign of weakness in me?” he countered. Privately, he had told Manuben,
“We both may be killed by the Muslims, and must put our purity to the
ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices,
and we should now both start sleeping naked.”36
It transpired that the critical significance Gandhi attached to this
“experiment” to control his sexual impulses had a political motive, shorn
of any spirituality. Bose once overheard him saying to an associate about

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

brahmacharya, “If I can master this [sexual impulse], I can still beat Jin-
nah.”37 It appears that the Mahatma was secretly, and innovatively, prim-
ing himself to get the upper hand in his decades-old rivalry with Jinnah
around the time Prime Minister Attlee was drafting a historic statement
on India.

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 5

Born in Blood

On February 20, 1947, British prime minister Clement Attlee announced

that Britain would “transfer power into responsible Indian hands by a
date not later than June 1948.”1 He added that the British government
would have to “consider to whom the powers of British India should be
handed over, on the due date, whether as a whole to some form of Central
Government or in some areas to existing provincial governments or in
such other way as may seem most reasonable.”2 The transition was to be
implemented under the viceroyalty of a cousin of King George VI, Lord
Louis Mountbatten, who would succeed Lord Wavell.
The immediate and adverse impact of Atlee’s historic declaration was
felt by the Unionist Party in Punjab, which had a long history of loyalty to
the British emperor. Its prestige plummeted. The Muslim League, which
had already been agitating in the province, took advantage of this change
in status. Since the first letter of the envisioned Pakistan stood for Punjab,
local League leaders redoubled their campaign against Chief Minister Sir
Khizr Hayat Tiwana.
Unable to bear the label of “traitor to Islam” that League partisans
had vociferously pinned on him, he resigned on March 2. But when Gov-
ernor Sir Evan Jenkins called on League leader Iftikhar Hussain Khan
Mamdot to form a ministry, he failed to line up a majority. This was just
as well. As chief minister, he would have found it an uphill task to main-
tain law and order in a province of over thirty-five million, where com-
munal passions were escalating rapidly—with Hindus and Sikhs, forming
45 percent of the population, on one side, and Muslims, constituting 53
percent, on the other.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Nearly six million Sikhs, half as numerous as Hindus, were vehe-

mently opposed to Pakistan, which would have sliced the community
into two parts, with one in the Muslim homeland. Their leader, seventy-
two-year-old Master Tara Singh, a former Hindu, declared March 11 as
Anti-Pakistan Day. To spur fellow Sikhs, he recycled the slogan of the last
Sikh guru, Gobind Singh (died 1708), Raj karega Khalsa, aki rahe na koi
(Punjabi: “The pure Sikhs will rule, no resister will live”).3 Sikhs’ animosity
toward Muslims was grounded in the defeats that their warlord Maharaja
Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) had inflicted on the Mughals, resulting in the
rise of the Sikh kingdom, which covered most of northwestern India.
Incendiary speeches stoked hatred between Sikhs and Muslims. The
militant Muslim League National Guard and Muslim ex-servicemen at-
tacked Sikhs. Within days communal violence spread to the villages of
Rawalpindi and Multan districts. In the former, Sikhs were butchered. “In
many villages they were herded into houses and burnt alive,” noted Gov-
ernor Sir Evan Jenkins in his report of April 16. “Many Sikhs had their
hair and beards cut, and there were cases of forcible circumcision. Many
Sikh women who escaped slaughter were abducted.”4 Pillage and arson
accompanied the murder of an estimated 3,500 Sikhs. More than 40,000
displaced Sikhs were sheltered in hastily established refugee camps.
In polar contrast to the condoning of this mass violence by the
League’s leaders, General Sir Frank Messervy, then posted in the prov-
ince, was horrified. “Having served for 34 years, mostly in the Punjab and
with Punjab troops, I would never have believed that agitation could have
aroused the normally chivalrous and decent Punjabi Muslim peasant to
such frenzied savagery as was widely prevalent,” he wrote. Besides the
major communal factor, he mentioned two minor causes.

The first is the economic element. Scarcity of cloth and some items of food,
such as sugar, have been exploited by the Hindu-Sikh bania [shopkeeper]
community to profiteer and indulge in black-market operations. The gov-
ernment controls were also mostly in the hands of Sikh or Hindu agents and
clerks. The Muslim peasant and laborers were only too ready to get some of
their own back when they got the chance. The second is the “goonda” [goon]
element in every community, which is always ready to take full advantage
of such disturbances to practice arson, loot and dacoity [armed robbery].5

In retrospect this carnage would prove to be the rumbling of a volcano

that would erupt with searing ferocity five months later.

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 BORN IN BLOOD

PARTITION BECOMING INEVITABLE

It was this Cyclopean convulsion in Punjab that awaited Lord Louis

Mountbatten—tall and handsome in his naval white uniform, embel-
lished with an impressive array of decorations and orders—along with
his slim, gangling wife, Edwina, when they arrived in Delhi on March 22.
The next day, the seventh anniversary of the Muslim League’s Lahore
resolution, Jinnah warned that “terrific disasters” awaited India if there
were no Pakistan. On March 27, Finance Minister Liaquat Ali Khan
presented his first budget, proposing a business profit tax, a capital gains
tax, and a higher duty on tea. In their criticism, instead of describing his
budget as antibusiness or socialistic, and likely to be seen as progressive,
opponents accused him of grinding his communalist axe.
Khan was indignant. “If I present a budget which according to me is
the budget which consists of principles which I believe India should fol-
low, they [critics] say now here is Pakistan.” He regretted that the budget
was seen as an attempt by him to “ruin the economic life of the country
and then go away to Pakistan.”6
On March 31, Viceroy Mountbatten had the first of six meetings with
Gandhi that stretched over the next twelve days. He had an equal num-
ber of face-to-face conversations with Jinnah. On April 12, he deliberately
allowed his meeting with Gandhi to overrun because his next interviewee
was Jinnah. He hoped that if these two estranged political titans could
be induced to speak to each other, progress might be made. Arriving on time,
Jinnah occupied a large leather armchair as distant from Gandhi as possible.
Both of them lowered their voices as they spoke to the viceroy. He acted as
the common interlocutor. He suggested they meet separately. They agreed.
Since Gandhi was staying in the insalubrious quarters of the Un-
touchables, their meeting could only take place at Jinnah’s spacious bun-
galow surrounded by a neatly maintained garden on Aurangzeb Road
in New Delhi. At the end of a three-hour-long “friendly” talk on April
15,they disagreed on partitioning India. But they issued a joint commu-
niqué, deploring “the recent acts of lawlessness and violence that have
brought the utmost disgrace to the fair name of India” and denouncing
“the use of force to achieve political aims.”7 Characteristically, Gandhi
signed the statement in Hindi, Urdu, and English, whereas Jinnah did so
only in English. Their appeal received no response.
Relations between Congress and League members of the interim
cabinet were so fraught that Congress ministers could not fill a post or

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

transfer an official with the consent of their League colleagues. There was
a food shortage in the country, but polarization in the government and
bureaucracy blocked remedial action. Frustrated by the internecine war
within his cabinet, Jawaharlal Nehru declared on April 21: “The Muslim
League can have Pakistan if they wish to have it, but on condition that
they do not take other parts of India which do not wish to join Pakistan.”8
Gandhi saw the writing on the wall. “The Congress has accepted Pa-
kistan and demanded the division of the Punjab and Bengal,” he said
during his prayer meeting on May 7. “I am opposed to any division of
India now as I always have been. . . . The only thing I can do is to disas-
sociate myself from such a scheme.”9

MENON’S ASTUTE PLAN

Now the practicalities of the transfer of power had to be worked out. Here
a senior Indian civil servant bearing the title of reforms commissioner,
Vapal Pangunni Menon, proved innovative. He proposed that power
be transferred to two central governments, one each in India and Paki-
stan, which should simultaneously be accorded the status of Dominion
within the British Commonwealth of Nations (British Commonwealth,
for short). The provincial assemblies in Punjab and Bengal should decide
partition or continued unity. Instead of waiting for a new constitution to
be framed by the present Constituent Assembly, Britain should pass on
power immediately to the new central governments, which would operate
under the Government of India Act 1935 until the declaration of their
own constitutions.
Mountbatten had a meeting with Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan on
May 17 as he prepared to fly to London for urgent meetings there, start-
ing with Attlee. They concurred with the Menon Plan. Nehru had earlier
accorded it an informal nod.
By the time Mountbatten was summoned by Attlee on May 18, he
could claim a provisional acceptance of the Menon Plan by the two In-
dian principals. He took Menon with him. In London, he lobbied the
Menon Plan successfully first with Attlee, then his cabinet, and lastly Sir
Winston Churchill, leader of the opposition Conservative Party. This kept
him busy for ten days.
On May 25 in Delhi, keenly aware that the final die was being cast in
London, Nehru urged Gandhi, then preaching Hindu-Muslim amity

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 BORN IN BLOOD

in East Bengal, to rush to Delhi to join him at the center-stage of history.

But instead of boarding the special aircraft offered to him, Gandhi stuck
to traveling by train.
Mountbatten and his party returned to Delhi on May 31. Two days
later, in the pale gray office at the viceroy’s house, he chaired a meeting of
seven Indian leaders. On his left sat Jinnah, flanked by Liaquat Ali Khan,
next to Abdur Rab Nishtar with his jet black walrus mustache and a white
turban with upright, pleated top, and on his right was Nehru, next to the
bald-headed, leathery-faced home minister Vallabhbhai Patel; Jiwatram
Bhagwandas Kripalani, the mustached, skeletal Congress president; and
defense minister Baldev Singh, a robust, turbaned Sikh. Mountbatten
briefed the august assembly on the details of the transfer of power. He let
the assorted leaders consider the details overnight and give their opinion
the next day.
Soon after the end of this meeting and the departure of the leaders,
Gandhi was ushered into his office. Being Monday, it was the Mahatma’s
weekly day of silence. After sitting down without uttering a word, he in-
formed the viceroy of his vow of silence in his scrawling handwriting. He
did not comment on the Menon Plan. Instead, he referred to the cabinet
mission’s May 16 statement, which had rejected partition.10
That evening Mountbatten left a dinner party early for a one-on-
one dialogue with Jinnah. He gave an account of this crucial meeting
in his speech, titled “Transfer of Power in India,” to the Royal Empire
Society in London, on October 6, 1948. “The Congress leaders agreed
that they would accept partition to avoid civil war,” he told his audience.
But they refused to let large non-Muslim areas go to Pakistan. “That
automatically meant a partition of the great provinces of the Punjab
and Bengal,” so their non-Muslim areas would not be incorporated into
Muslim Pakistan.

When I told Mr. Jinnah that I had their [Congress leaders’] provisional
agreement to partition, he was overjoyed. When I said that it logically fol-
lowed that this would involve partition of the Punjab and Bengal he was
horrified. He produced the strongest arguments why these provinces should
not be partitioned. He said that they had national characteristics and that
partition would be disastrous. I agreed, but I said how much more must I
now feel that the same considerations applied to the partitioning of the
whole of India. He did not like that, and started explaining why India had to
be partitioned. So we went round and round the mulberry bush until finally

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he realized that either he could have a United India with an un-partitioned

Punjab and Bengal or divided India with a partitioned Punjab and Bengal.
And he finally accepted the latter solution.11

When the seven Indian leaders met again on June 3, they formally en-
dorsed the Menon Plan, which meant the Congress giving up its demand
for a transfer of power and the framing of a constitution before partition.
It also meant a smaller Pakistan than the one envisaged by Jinnah. At the
end, Mountbatten produced a communiqué to be signed by the attendees.
Jinnah refused to do so, giving his assent only with a nod.12
That evening, as the viceroy, accompanied by Nehru, Jinnah, and Bal-
dev Singh, waited in the studios of All India Radio (AIR), Attlee an-
nounced the details of the handover to the House of Common. In his
speech on AIR, Mountbatten said that “if ” there is partition—implying
that it depended on the vote in the Punjab and Bengal Assemblies.
In his broadcast, Jinnah stated that the final decision on the British
plan rested with the Muslim League Council, scheduled to meet on June
9. After paying tribute to the viceroy’s “fairness and impartiality,” he re-
ferred to the referendum to be held in the Congress-ruled North-West
Frontier Province (NWFP) whether to join Pakistan or Hindustan. He
called on the provincial League leaders to end the civil disobedience cam-
paign they had launched there. He signed off with the slogan “Pakistan
zindabad ” (“Long live Pakistan”).13
At the press conference on June 4, Mountbatten said, “I think the
transfer [of power] could be about the 15th of August.” Soon after, under
his chairmanship, he set up the four-member Partition Council, two each
from the Congress (Patel and Rajendra Prasad) and the League ( Jinnah
and Liaquat Ali Khan). Their tasks were to supervise the division of civil
servants and military personnel as well as governmental assets—from
typewriters to locomotives, including the treasury of British India—into
the two successor states.
With the Congress-majority government in Delhi regarding the im-
minent partition as secession of some parts from the center, the (Muslim)
officials opting for Pakistan found themselves ejected from their offices.
Therefore the planning for Pakistan was carried out in tents. Later, with
the population and the area of Pakistan estimated respectively at 17.5
percent and 20 percent of the India of the British Empire (British India
and 562 princely states), it was to be allocated 18.75 percent of the assets
of the existing political entity.

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 BORN IN BLOOD

Thus Jinnah got what he called a “maimed, moth eaten” Pakistan, with
its eastern and western wings separated by one thousand miles of Indian
soil, hanging like two lobes on either ear of the body of India. Of its seventy-
seven million inhabitants, forty-one million were concentrated in the
eastern wing, occupying only one-sixth of the national territory.
The members of the League’s Council assembled in New Delhi’s Im-
perial Hotel on June 9. By a vote of 300 to 10 they adopted a resolution
stating that though the Council could not agree to the partition of Ben-
gal and Punjab, it considered the transfer-of-power plan as a whole and
decided to give full authority to Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah to accept its basic
principle as a compromise, and left it to him to work out the details.14 The
Council’s meeting in the ballroom on the first floor was distracted by a
band of fifty Khaksars, a militant Muslim group demanding the inclusion
of Delhi in Pakistan. They were thrown out by uniformed Muslim League
National Guard volunteers before they could reach the ballroom.15
On June 15 the All India Congress Committee (AICC) passed a
resolution by 153 to 29 votes to accept the June 3 plan. To sweeten the
bitter partition pill, Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed Azad, the
former longest serving Congress president, said: “The division is only of
the map of the country and not in the hearts of the people, and I am sure
it is going to be a short-lived partition.”16
As expected, the legislative assemblies of Bengal and Punjab opted
for division, with the latter doing so on June 23. With Hindus lacking
majority in any district of Sindh, that provincial assembly decided to join
the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. In Baluchistan the same decision was
reached by the local tribal leaders, appointed by the British Raj, and the
nominees of Quetta’s municipality.
In the July 6–7 referendum in Sylhet, the Muslim-majority district
of Assam, 239,600 favored joining East Bengal, while 184,000 voted to
stay with the Hindu-majority Assam.17 Sylhet and East Bengal together
formed East Pakistan. Three days later, it was announced that Jinnah
would be the governor-general of Pakistan.
In the highly strategic NWFP, the Congress Party called for a boycott
of the referendum held between July 6 and 17 under the supervision
of British officers of the Indian Army. Of the 572,800 eligible voters,
51 percent participated, and 99 percent opted for the Pakistan Constitu-
ent Assembly. With the total votes cast in the referendum being only 25
percent less than in the 1946 provincial assembly election, the call of the
Congress for a boycott had proved virtually ineffective.18

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

On July 18, King George VI signed the Indian Independence Act

1947. The government in Delhi informally split into two cabinets, with
the one for Pakistan led by Liaquat Ali Khan.
A week later Mountbatten addressed the issue of the future of the
princely states (aka, native states), which had signed treaties with Britain
accepting the paramountcy of the British crown. More than 560 such
entities occupied a third of India under the British Empire, their sizes
varying from a few square miles to eighty-thousand-plus square miles in
the case of Hyderabad and that of Jammu and Kashmir.
In his speech to the Chamber of Princes, the viceroy offered them
the chance of signing an instrument of accession with India or Paki-
stan: it would ensure their continued autonomy and access to their “privy
purses”—part of the taxes due to them for their royal upkeep—in lieu
of letting the new dominion conduct their international relations and
defense. Referring to his blood relationship with the British monarch,
Mountbatten stated that the emperor of India would be offended if they
did not accede to one or the other dominion under the British crown. The
native rulers were also aware of Nehru’s warning that any independent
state would be considered an enemy by the Indian Dominion—as well
as the declaration by the Congress Working Committee in June that the
end of the British paramountcy did not mean sovereign independence.
Little wonder that signed instruments of accession to the “Indian
Union”—which was yet to emerge—landed on Mountbatten’s desk thick
and fast just as the Congress-dominated interim government set up a
“States Department” under Patel assisted by Menon.19 But the Muslim Ni-
zam of Hindu-majority Hyderabad and the Hindu Maharaja of Muslim-
majority Jammu and Kashmir sat on the fence.
The decision of the Muslim ruler of the Hindu-majority Junagarh,
measuring twenty-three square miles along the coast of north Gujarat, to
accede to Pakistan could not be implemented. But this was a trivial matter
compared to the complexities of Punjab.

BLOOD-SOAKED DIVISION OF
THE LAND OF FIVE RIVERS

In British India, the five tributaries of the Indus that gave the province its
name Punjab (Urdu: Punj, five; aab, water) were, from east to west, Beas,
Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab, and Jhelum. In terms of religion, the western sector

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 BORN IN BLOOD

beyond the Chenab River was clearly meant to go to Pakistan and the
sectors between Sutlej and Jamuna (later Yamuna) in the east to India. The
populous central zone, rich and strategically important, was in dispute.
Here the lives of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs were intricately integrated.
There were also conflicting demands on holy shrines, railways, defensive
frontiers, and irrigation facilities.
Baldev Singh’s acceptance of the June 3 plan was challenged by mili-
tant Sikh leaders. In July they submitted a memorandum to the Boundary
Commission, chaired by the eminent British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe,
which proposed using the Chenab River to divide Punjab in order to keep
90 percent of its Sikhs in India. Since this would have further reduced
the “maimed, moth-eaten” Pakistan Jinnah had reluctantly agreed to, the
proposal was summarily rejected.
The Sikhs grew apprehensive. Militancy rose steeply in a community
that had once been classified by the British as one of the “martial races” of
India. Agitated Sikh leaders convened political assemblies in their gurdwaras,
or temples, to plan anti-Muslim strikes. They recruited ex-servicemen and
armed them with private stockpiles of revolvers, rifles, shotguns, tommy
guns (aka, Thompson submachine guns), and light machine guns as well
as grenades, spears, and axes. They decided to avenge the earlier anti-Sikh
carnage in northern Punjab with unremitting vengeance in the central
Punjab districts of Lahore and Gurdaspur. Their savage assaults were
conducted with military precision. Terrified Muslims struggled to defend
themselves.
When Muslims sighted an armed Sikh squad, they would rush to
their roofs and beat gongs to alert neighboring Muslim settlements. The
gun-toting Sikhs targeted their prey as other members of the attacking
party threw grenades over compound walls to force the residents into the
street, where the attackers, armed with tridents, spears, and sharp, small
swords—called kirpans, carried as a religious obligation—slaughtered
them. Finally, the older members of the Sikh squad set alight the village
with outriders ready with spears and kirpans to hack the escapees.
In his fortnightly report to the viceroy, Punjab governor Jenkins noted
on August 4 that he was witnessing nothing less than a “communal war of
succession” in the province as competing groups struggled “for the power
we are shortly to abandon. . . . Moreover, there is very little doubt that
the disturbances have in some degree been organized and paid for by
persons or bodies directly or indirectly under the control of the Muslim
League, the Congress, and the [Sikh] Akali Party.”20 His chief investigator

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

of crimes, Gerald Savage, personally informed Mountbatten that his in-

telligence showed the militant Sikhs of the Akal Fauj (Punjabi: Eternal
Army) planning bombings and train derailments.
To cope with the expected surge in stomach-churning violence, Field
Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander in chief of the British
Indian Army, transformed the Fourth Indian Division into the Punjab
Boundary Force under Major General Thomas Pete Rees on July 17. Rees
was given four brigadiers (two Muslim, one Hindu, and one Sikh) as ad-
visors. It started functioning on August 1.21
But reports of an exponential rise in bloodletting and arson piled up
by the time Jinnah flew from Delhi to Karachi, the temporary capital of
Pakistan, on August 7. Before boarding Lord Mountbatten’s silver Dakota
along with his sister Fatima, he rued: “I suppose this is the last time I’ll be
looking at Delhi.”22 He was received in Karachi as the governor-general
designate of Pakistan. Four days later the inaugural session of the Paki-
stan Constituent Assembly gave emergency powers to Jinnah as well as
electing him president of the Assembly.
Officially, Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s decision on the demarcation of bound-
aries in Bengal-Assam and Punjab was to be announced on August 16.
But leaks started much earlier.
On August 8, the sketch map of the Radcliffe Line, showing the allot-
ment to Pakistan of the tehsils (subdistricts) of Ferozepur and Zira form-
ing the Ferozepur salient east of the Sutlej River, was leaked to Nehru and
Patel by Radcliffe’s Indian assistant secretary.23
Radcliffe informed the civil, military, and police officers of the central
districts of Punjab to make advance police and troop deployments. In
Delhi this news leaked through other sources, including Mountbatten’s
Indian administrative staff. This demarcation was equivalent to pointing
a dagger at the core of the Sikh heartland. It also meant Nankana Sahib,
the birthplace of Guru Nanak Dev (1469–1539), the founder of Sikhism,
going to West Punjab. Sikh militants were furious.
On the night of August 9 they unleashed a war of attrition. A squad
of Sikhs, using electronic devices, derailed the Pakistan Special No. 1 train
carrying senior Muslim civil servants who had opted for Pakistan, along
with their families, from Delhi to Lahore near the border of the princely
state of Patiala in East Punjab. Several passengers were killed.
“Feeling in Lahore city is now unbelievably bad and Inspector Gen-
eral [of Police] tells me that Muslim League National Guard appearing
in uniform and that Police are most unsteady,” read Governor Jenkins’s

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 BORN IN BLOOD

wire to the viceroy on August 12. The next day he reported the murders
of nearly four hundred people in Punjab, and flames ravaging Amritsar.
“General situation deteriorating,” concluded his telegram.24 The caul-
dron that had been boiling since March now spilled over, with ghastly
consequences.
Among others, Jinnah was horrified by the heart-wrenching butch-
ery being perpetrated in Punjab. This was the background against which
he addressed the seventy-nine-member Pakistan Constituent Assembly
on August 11. “I know there are people who do not quite agree with the
division of India,” he said. “But in my judgment there was no other solu-
tion and I am sure future history will record its verdict in favor of it. . . .
Maybe that view is correct; maybe it is not; that remains to be seen.” He
added that his ambition was that Pakistan should become a nation in
which there were no distinctions of “color, caste or creed”:

You are free, you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your
mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You
may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with
the business of the State. . . . We are starting in the days when there is
no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no
discrimination between one caste or creed or another. We are starting with
this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one
State. . . . Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and
you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus
and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because
that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as
citizens of the State.25

Extracts of this speech were widely disseminated in the hope that

these would dampen the bloodthirsty frenzy that had gripped Hindus,
Muslims, and Sikhs alike in Punjab and the NWFP. The tactic had little,
if any, impact on the horrendous barbarity that was being perpetuated on
the plains of Punjab.

A COMMUNAL HOLOCAUST

As India and Pakistan gained, respectively, their independence on August

14 and 15, 1947, the communal holocaust, the likes of which had never

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been witnessed before, continued. By the time it was over toward the
end of October, it had claimed the lives of two hundred thousand to one
million people. More recent research has gravitated toward a consensus
around a death toll of five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand,
divided almost equally between Muslims and non-Muslims.26
In economic terms, the losses of the comparatively better-off Hindus
and Sikhs who moved to India far exceeded those of the Muslim migrants
arriving in Pakistan. The 4.35 million Muslims who migrated to Pakistan
from East Punjab left behind 4.7 million acres of land, whereas the 4.29
million Sikhs and Hindus who moved to India from West Punjab had to
part with more fertile 6.7 million acres.27 Moreover, as majority residents
of urban areas in West Punjab, non-Muslims possessed assets that far ex-
ceeded those of Muslims in East Punjab. In Sindh, forming only a quarter
of the population, Hindus owned almost three-quarters of the moveable
and immovable property.
The unbridled savagery consisted of attacks by marauding mobs on
villages, railway stations, trains, long caravans of displaced persons on the
move, and refugee camps. These assaults involved mass murder, castration,
mutilation, rape, looting, arson, abduction, and derailing of trains followed
by the slaughtering of passengers. The most commonly used weapons were
axes, scythes, swords, spears, and clubs, with revolvers, rifles, and light
machine guns playing a minor role. Throwing the hapless members of the
local minority into wells, the sole source of potable water in the subcon-
tinent’s villages, was a special feature of communal frenzy. Sexual assault
of women became a dramatic means to highlight the victim community’s
vulnerability and the humiliation of its men folk.
On August 13 Lord Mountbatten and Edwina flew to Karachi. As
a secondary school student in Karachi at the time, I had witnessed the
building of barracks-like structures on the vast empty plots of the city
to serve as Pakistan’s sprawling secretariat, posthaste, with construction
workers laboring around the clock. On August 14, along with many thou-
sands of other spectators, I saw the skeletal Jinnah, in salwar and long coat
topped with a black karakul hat, and Viceroy Mountbatten, dressed as
an admiral, standing side by side in an open-roofed Rolls Royce as their
vehicle traveled slowly from the provincial governor’s residence to the
Constituent Assembly.
In stark contrast to Punjab, the small province of Sindh, with a little
over five million inhabitants—a quarter of them Hindus—was peace-
ful. The half million residents of its capital, Karachi, were divided almost

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equally between Hindus and Muslims. On the birthday of Pakistan, there

was a carnival atmosphere in the capital. This atmosphere was heightened
by the authorities’ decision to make travel by buses and trams free. The
pleasant sea breeze of the port city was filled with hope and exuberance.
The milling crowds inhaling it were in high spirits—unmindful of the
human blood flowing into the soil of Punjab, or the fact that the coming
influx of Urdu-speaking Muslims from adjoining Gujarat and Rajasthan,
as well as distant United Provinces (UP) and Bihar, into the city would
turn the local Sindhi- and Baluchi-speaking Muslims into a minority.
After addressing the Pakistani Constituent Assembly, Mountbatten
boarded his Dakota at noon. As his plane flew over the plains of Punjab
on its way to the Indian capital, the viceroy saw many of the province’s
seventeen thousand villages in flames. Mindful of the dreadful violence
ravaging neighboring Punjab, the authorities in Delhi cancelled formal,
colorful ceremonies. Instead, they settled for speeches from the ramparts
of the seventeenth-century Red Fort. The walls of the streets were re-
painted and banners hung, with fences and trees wired with countless
orange, green, and white lights—the colors of the national flag—while
horse carriage drivers painted the legs of their animals in the national
colors, and cloth merchants did a roaring trade, selling tricolored saris.
At eleven pm Nehru started addressing the mammoth crowd outside
the Red Fort. “At the stroke of the midnight hour,” he said, “India will
awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely
in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends,
and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” But the
loudest applause that stirred the air on that momentous day came when
Viceroy Mountbatten declared, “At this historic moment let us not forget
all that India owes to Mahatma Gandhi—the architect of her freedom
through nonviolence. We miss his presence here today and would have
him know how he is in our thoughts.”28 That remark earned Mountbat-
ten popular goodwill on the eve of becoming the governor-general of the
Dominion of India.
Unreconciled to the partition of the subcontinent, which he called “a
spiritual tragedy,” Gandhi had stayed away from the official ceremonies
in Delhi. A week earlier, arriving in Calcutta, he had lodged himself in
the mansion of a Muslim widow in the suburb of Belliaghatta along
with Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, praying and fasting to bring about
Hindu-Muslim amity.29

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

UPSURGE IN CATHARTIC BLOODLETTING

Just as Indians were celebrating their first day of independence, a Paki-

stan Special train heading for Lahore was derailed near Amritsar by Sikh
extremists. There were two similar derailments over the next couple of
days. In retaliation, enraged Muslim mobs ambushed three overcrowded
India-bound trains in the Wazirabad-Sialkot area and massacred the pas-
sengers.30 The frenzied crowds vented their primeval religious hatred and
animosities, bottled up during the past many generations, in an orgy of
cathartic bloodletting.
Though the fatalities caused by the wholesale murder of packed trains
were a fraction of the grand total, the novelty of this sort of mind-numbing
carnage left a lingering mark on the popular psyche. This was brought
home by Khushwant Singh (1915–2014), the author of the classic novel
Train to Pakistan. One sunny summer day in 1947, when this thirty-
two-year-old, turbaned and spectacled Sikh lawyer was being chauffeured
from his home in Lahore to his family’s summer residence in Kasauli
at the foothills of the Himalayas, he encountered a jeep carrying Sikhs,
armed with rifles and blood-covered spears, on an unusually empty road.
The Sikhs stopped his car and triumphantly described in grisly detail how
they had butchered in cold blood all the inhabitants of the nearby Muslim
village. The attackers’ gratification in indulging their blood lust left a deep
mark on Khushwant Singh’s secular psyche. It became the seed out of
which grew his novel, published in 1956.31
The story is set in an imagined Indian village of Mano Majra near a
railway bridge on the Indo-Pakistan border, a settlement mainly of Sikhs
and Muslims, coexisting peacefully in their separate quarters. When
the local Hindu moneylender is killed, suspicion falls on Juggat Singh,
a brawny Sikh convict on parole, who holds a secret rendezvous with
Nooran, the nubile daughter of the near-blind mullah. When a train ar-
rives at the village railroad station carrying the corpses of Sikhs from
Pakistan, tension escalates rapidly. The police are unable to cope with
spiraling communal violence. The government orders all Muslims to leave
by a special train at night. A Sikh gang plans to ambush it and kill its
passengers. Aware that the train is carrying Nooran, pregnant with his
child, Juggut Singh foils the marauding scheme and in the process gets
killed by the Sikh band. The novel admirably captures the gritty reality and
spine-chilling horror of the partition memorably.

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 BORN IN BLOOD

Factual accounts of the time describe Nehru, deeply shaken by the

horrifying events, flying to Lahore, where the Hindu-Sikh population
had shrunk from three hundred thousand to ten thousand, on August 17
to meet his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan. They appealed for
peace in their broadcasts—but to no avail.
During the rest of August, Nehru made forays into East Punjab three
times, talking to people on both sides of the newly created border, to take
stock of the rapidly worsening situation. Sadly, he concluded, “Both sides
have been incredibly inhuman and barbarous.”32
As Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab started pouring into
Delhi, to be herded into makeshift refugee camps, anti-Muslim sentiment
rose steeply, reaching fever pitch by late August. Soon the Indian capital
would become the crucible for the murderous passions consuming the
adjoining Punjab.
On August 31 the eighteen-day peace in Calcutta, mediated by
Gandhi, broke down when one thousand Hindu youths brought a
wounded Hindu to his house in Belliaghata, claiming that he had been
stabbed by Muslims. Gandhi faced the angry, screaming mob with folded
arms. A stick thrown at him failed to strike. That ended the showdown.
But the Mahatma was troubled. On September 2 he started to fast.
Within a day leaders of all faiths and parties came to plead with him
to end it while Hindu and Muslim goons turned up to apologize with
tearful eyes. Calm returned to the city. On September 4 he ended his
hunger strike.
In Delhi, the unending stream of Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring
into the capital energized the cycle of reprisals and revenge. Their nar-
ratives, often exaggerated and embellished, fed the anti-Muslim mania
already on the upswing. On September 4 serious rioting erupted in Delhi,
with Muslims bearing the brunt. Two days later, a bomb thrown into
New Delhi’s railway station, packed with Muslims departing for Pakistan,
killed many.
On September 7, looters descended on the Connaught Circus, the
huge plaza in the capital’s heart. “The dead [Muslims] lay rotting in
the streets, because there was no one to collect and bury them,” noted
General Hastings Ismay, the viceroy’s chief of staff. “The hospitals were
choked with [the] dying and wounded, and in imminent danger of attack
because of the presence of Muslim staff and Muslim patients. Arson and
looting were widespread. . . . The Muslim members of the Delhi police

105
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

had either deserted or were disarmed: the Hindu members had either
been suborned or were afraid to do their duty.”33
The government imposed a curfew, called the army, and issued a
shoot-to-kill order. In his September 9 radio broadcast, Nehru said, “We
are dealing with a situation that is analogous to war, and we are going
to deal with it on a war basis in every sense of the word.”34 By the time
law and order was restored, 10,000 Muslims were dead, and 330,000,
forming a third of the city’s total population, had fled their homes out
of fear.35
Nehru rose to the occasion with exemplary courage and conviction.
He turned the vast garden of his official residence into a campsite of tents
for Muslim refugees. He walked into the streets fearlessly and conversed
with common folk. He single-handedly challenged the rioters and looters.
His spontaneous forays into the street to confront violent hooligans were
sufficiently dramatic to warrant a moving sequence in Richard Attenbor-
ough’s Gandhi.
Behind closed doors, Patel and Prasad—both members of the Parti-
tion Council—advocated the dismissal of all Muslim officials and argued
that there was little point in deploying Indian soldiers to protect Muslim
citizens. By contrast, Nehru personally rushed to Connaught Circus and
Old Delhi to stop murder and pillage, and to assure Muslim families
that they could rely on the protection of his government. To him—in the
words of Sunil Khilnani, an Indian chronicler—“partition was above all,
however, a test of the Indian state’s sovereignty, its capacity to protect its
citizens, keep order, and justify its territorial ownership.”36
Shocked by the tales of violence against the Hindus and Sikhs of
Punjab, almost half of Nehru’s cabinet, led by Patel, seemed inclined to
opt for a “Hindu Pakistan.” Nehru put his foot down. “As long as I am
at the helm of affairs, India will not become a Hindu state,” he declared.
“The whole idea of a theocratic state is not only medieval but also stu-
pid.”37 He was not prepared to remain the prime minister for a single day
if that was the price he had to pay for Hindu India.38
Nehru, a staunch secularist, thus proved his mettle in the face of a
gargantuan challenge at a most crucial moment in India’s history. In the
acute crisis of explosive proportions, he remained clear-eyed, resolute,
and perceptive. He described the situation in India as “a ship on fi re in
mid-ocean with ammunition in hold.”39 He ignored the argument that
Prasad advanced in his letter of September 17: the use of the army to save
Muslims was making the government unpopular. Disagreeing with Patel,

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 BORN IN BLOOD

Nehru said that he did not want to exact a price from Muslims for having
supported the Pakistan movement in the past. If for that reason he was to
be dubbed “Maulana Nehru,” so be it.
He was helped by the timely arrival of Gandhi from Calcutta on
September 10. The Mahatma had intended to proceed to Punjab to break
the murderous cycle of revenge and counterrevenge, but Patel dissuaded
him: the situation there was far too explosive. So instead of setting up his
modest office in the Untouchables’ colony, as he had done before, he chose
the safe address of the Birla House, the spacious mansion of the textile
millionaire Ghanshyam Das Birla, his long-time patron and financier.
Gandhi argued that besides looking after the Hindu and Sikh refugees
from Pakistan, the Indian government should take care of the internally
displaced Muslims in the capital’s assorted refugee camps, including such
historic sites as the dilapidated Old Fort.
With population exchange across the newly created Indo-Pakistan
increasing in speed by the day, the number of refugees swelled. The ad hoc
refugee colonies burst at the seams. The only way to register the size of
this unparalleled exodus was to survey the scene from the air. So that was
what Mountbatten did, together with the most senior cabinet ministers.

CARAVANS OF DESPAIR

On September 21 Mountbatten took Patel and Nehru along with a few

aides on a round trip in his Dakota to “view the Punjab migration.” Near
Ferozepur in the vicinity of the Indo-Pakistan border, they noticed the
first caravan of non-Muslim refugees—and continued to see it for fifty
miles without finding its source.40
Earlier, on September 2, a press report from Lahore headlined, “Gi-
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424808217

gantic Exchange of Two Million People Begins in the Punjab,” referred

to a sixty-mile-long caravan of non-Muslims. Consisting mainly of those
possessing bullock carts or pack animals, it took thirty-six hours to cross
the Sulaimanki Barrage Bridge over the Sutlej River in West Punjab.41
These groups were part of the biggest mass migration in history.
An insight into the creation of such seemingly endless caravans—
which dwarfed the biblical exodus of the Israelites from Egypt—was pro-
vided later by the father of Dalvinder Singh Grewal, a retired colonel born
in the village of Rattan in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) district, West Punjab.
As part of a caravan, the senior Singh had kept a diary.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

On September 4, 1947, a train from India arrived at Gojra, thirty

miles from Rattan, stacked with corpses and hideously injured Muslims.
Local Muslims were enraged and vowed to avenge the massacre. The in-
habitants of the almost exclusively Hindu-Sikh village of Rattan began
to seriously consider migrating to the Indian Punjab. They resolved to
leave when they heard of the appearance of another train, drenched with
Muslim blood, at the nearby Pakka Anna station.
On September 10 the Hindu and Sikh households in Rattan started
loading their essential possessions, including food and clothing, on bull-
ock carts. They let loose their cattle. The next afternoon all non-Muslim
families quit their ancestral settlement, reducing it to three Muslim house-
holds. While the carts carried children, the elderly, and the infirm, adult
men and women walked. In the evening they reached Dhaipai, where
they became part of a bigger caravan, which included the non-Muslim
residents of six other villages.
The long caravan started trudging before sunrise and was escorted by
a squad of mounted young Sikhs carrying rifles to secure its flanks, front,
and rear. When its members reached the Theekriwala Canal Rest House
in the evening, they camped along the canal. They fed fodder collected
from the nearby fields to the oxen and had their first meal after covering
fifteen miles in fourteen hours. They obtained water from local pumps
and wells, even though some wells, containing corpses, were polluted. At
the next stop at Sudhir they were instructed by the district commissioner
to stay put to avoid a brutal attack by a band of enraged Muslims. They
did—for three days. They suffered from water scarcity because the nearby
ponds and wells were polluted by floating corpses.
It was only when they reached Lyallpur that local Sikhs provided
them food and water. On September 19, when the caravan was a mile
short of Balloki Head, it was fired on by an armed band of Muslims. Its
mounted Sikh guards responded in kind. Nonetheless, a Hindu resident
of Rattan was killed. (Instead of being cremated, he was buried in an
open field.) The episode heightened fear among the refugees, surrounded
as they were by burning villages and intermittent cries of “Allah-u-Akbar”
(“God is great”). After they had crossed the Ravi River and camped along
its other bank, the Sikh men armed all women, Sikh and Hindu, with a
sheathed kirpan, held by a strip of cloth across the torso. If assaulted, the
women were to kill the attacker, failing which they were instructed to turn
the deadly weapon on themselves. Mercifully, such an eventuality did not
come to pass.

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 BORN IN BLOOD

After four more days of dreary marching, and the deaths of many chil-
dren and elderly people from diarrhea caused by drinking polluted water,
the caravan crossed the unmarked Indo-Pakistan border at Khem Karan on
September 25. That was the end of their two-week-long life-saving trek.42
Earlier, the displaced Muslims from East Punjab and the neighboring
areas trekking their way on foot or in caravans to West Punjab had faced
the additional strain of observing the daytime fast during the month of
Ramadan, which started on July 19. Because of the delayed monsoon
rains, the temperature was often 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.
“There is another sight I am not likely to easily forget,” reported the
Punjab correspondent of the Madras-based, English-language weekly
Swatantra:

a five mile long caravan of 20,000 Muslim refugees crawling at a snail’s

pace into Pakistan over the Sutlej Bridge, with bullock carts piled high with
pitiful chattels, cattle being driven alongside, women with babies in their
arms and wretched little tin trunks on their heads. 20,000 men, women and
children trekking into the promised land—not because it is the promised
land, but because bands of Hindus and Sikhs in Faridkot [Princely] State
and the interior of Ferozepur district had hacked hundreds of Muslims to
death and made life impossible for the rest.43

During Governor-General Jinnah’s visit to Lahore, his rehabilitation

minister, Mian Iftikharuddin, and editor of the Pakistan Times, Mazhar
Ali Khan, flew him over the divided Punjab. On sighting the endless
streams of people pouring into and out of West Punjab, he reportedly
struck his forehead with a hand in a sign of remorse and said, “What have
I done?”44
It was not until the end of October that the population exchange
in the partitioned Punjab was completed. And it was not until a year
later that there was a one-way exodus of a million Hindus from Sindh to
different parts of India. By then an equal number of Hindus had moved
to West Bengal from East Pakistan. According to India’s 1951 census
of displaced persons, 7.226 million Muslims migrated to East and West
Pakistan from India, while 7.249 million Hindus and Sikhs moved in the
other direction.45
Daunting though these challenges were for Nehru’s cabinet, they
paled before the steep hurdles Jinnah and his government had to sur-
mount at the birth of Pakistan.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

PAKISTAN: YEAR ZERO

When Pakistan’s finance minister Ghulam Muhammad arrived in his Ka-

rachi office for his first day’s work on August 15, 1947, he found it bare
except for a single table. Everything else dispatched by train from Delhi
had been looted en route.46 As for his treasury, it had only Rs 200 million
on hand. Pakistan was entitled to 18.75 percent of the current cash bal-
ances in Delhi, a little over Rs 4,000 million, amounting to Rs 750 million
(worth $2.4 billion today), to be paid in two installments. For the present,
Pakistan’s available cash was barely enough to pay the Pakistani army for
four months. Its outstanding debts amounted to almost Rs 400 million.
Jinnah, who had a flair for handling his own money skillfully, de-
ployed all means to keep Pakistan solvent. His entreaty to the Nizam of
Hyderabad, Sir Osman Ali Khan, resulted in an eagerly welcomed loan
of Rs 200 million. Patel and his cohorts in Nehru’s government were de-
termined to strangle the nascent Muslim homeland at birth. Jinnah’s ap-
peals to other members of the British Commonwealth, including Britain,
for financial assistance drew a blank. “Every effort is being made to put
difficulties in our way by our enemies to paralyze or cripple our State and
bring about its collapse,” he complained to Attlee in his letter of October 1.
“It is amazing that top-most Hindu leaders repeatedly say that Pakistan
will have to submit to the Union of India. Pakistan will never surrender.”47
Besides serving as the governor-general, president of the Constituent
Assembly, and president of the Pakistan Muslim League, Jinnah took
charge of dealing with the princely states and the tribal agencies of the
NWFP. He also laid out foreign policy guidelines. Pakistan, he stressed,
should develop friendly relations with the United States and Britain while
projecting itself as a buffer zone between communist Soviet Union and
dubious India, and a vantage point between China, then in the midst of a
bloody civil war, and the Middle East.
Once Paul H. Alling had been named the US ambassador to Paki-
stan on September 20, Jinnah directed his appeal for funds to Washing-
ton. But before the State Department got around to sanctioning $10
million (Rs 48 million) as aid to the nascent nation in December 1947,48
Jinnah found himself faced with a political-ideological challenge of enor-
mous import—in Jammu and Kashmir. At the center of this crisis was
Maharaja Sir Hari Singh.

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 6

The Infant Twins at War

Born in Jammu as the only child of General Sir Amar Singh and Rani
Chib Devi, Hari Singh showed promise as a teenager. After attending the
Princes’ Mayo College in Ajmer, he graduated from the Indian Defense
Academy in 1915 at the age of twenty. He was immediately appointed
commander in chief of the Jammu and Kashmir state armed forces by
Maharaja Partap Singh, his richly bearded, heavily turbaned uncle. His
big-boned, muscular frame, topped by a jowly face, lent him gravitas be-
yond his age.
Fourteen years before Hari Singh’s birth, Jammu and Kashmir became
the largest princely state in India, at 84,470 square miles. Its constitu-
ent vassal territories of Gilgit Wazarat and Ladakh Wazarat, occupying
three-quarters of its area, were sparsely populated because of high moun-
tains, creating an inhospitable climate with an arid, treeless terrain. In
1941 only 311,500 people lived there. By contrast, the Jammu Province,
abutting Punjab, was home to almost 2 million souls and the Kashmir
Province to nearly 1.75 million. Overall, the state was 85 percent Mus-
lim. The Jammu region, predominantly Muslim in the west, contained
a Hindu-Sikh majority in the east. But in Kashmir, non-Muslims were a
puny minority of 6 percent.1

SIR HARI SINGH VERSUS SHAIKH ABDULLAH

After the death of the childless Partap Singh in 1925, Hari Singh as-
cended the throne in Srinagar. The tension between this autocratic Hindu

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

ruler and the largely Muslim population came to the fore with the for-
mation of the Muslim Conference in 1932. Presided over by Shaikh Mu-
hammad Abdullah, it demanded an end to the discrimination against
Muslims in civil service. Two years later, responding to popular discontent,
the maharaja established a State Assembly of 75 members, with only 30
members elected by a limited franchise.2 In 1939 he raised the number of
elected representatives to 40. But the gesture was meaningless since the
Assembly lacked power.
The rising star in Kashmiri politics was Shaikh Abdullah. Since his
father died soon after Abdullah’s birth in a village near Srinagar, he grew
up in poverty.3 Yet he managed to obtain a master’s degree in science from
Aligarh Muslim University. He was a gangling young man, six-foot-four,
oval-faced, with a sharp straight nose and a middle-distance gaze. He
made his living as a schoolteacher.
In 1937, the thirty-two-year-old Abdullah was introduced to Jawa-
harlal Nehru in the waiting room of the Lahore railway station while the
latter was en route to a tour of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Their cordial talks became so engrossing that Nehru asked Abdullah to
accompany him to Peshawar. He did. Nehru—a descendant of Kashmiri
Brahmins who was born in the north Indian city of Allahabad—told
Abdullah that he regarded himself a Kashmiri and advised him to open
the Muslim Conference to all Kashmiris.4 As a result of Abdullah’s lobby-
ing, the Muslim Conference’s General Council changed the name to the
National Conference in June 1939 and opened its doors to all those living
in Kashmir. The dissidents, led by Ghulam Abbas, retained the original
title of the party.
During World War II, thanks to Sir Hari’s active encouragement of
his subjects to join the British Indian Army, 71,667 signed up. Seven-
eighths of them were Muslim, chiefly from the Poonch-Mirpur area of
the Jammu region.5 Aware of this, and the maharaja’s military background,
Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill invited him to a meeting of the
War Cabinet in April 1944. He felt honored.
After his return to Srinagar later in the year, he was presented with
the National Conference’s manifesto, titled “Naya Kashmir” (Urdu: New
Kashmir), by Shaikh Abdullah. It demanded a fully democratic govern-
ment with a constitutional monarch. Its economic blueprint called for the
abolition of zamindari (Urdu: landlordism) under the slogan “Land to the
Tiller.” The autocratic Sir Hari rejected the manifesto summarily.

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

In the summer of 1944, when Muhammad Ali Jinnah was vacationing

in Kashmir, he was invited to receptions by both the National Conference
and the Muslim Conference. After meeting Shaikh Abdullah, Jinnah ex-
pressed ambivalent views about his party. But he was unequivocal in his
comment on the Muslim Conference. “The Muslims have one platform,
one kalma (Islamic creed), and one God,” he said. “I would request the
Muslims [of Kashmir] to come under the banner of the Muslim Confer-
ence and fight for their rights.”6
Once World War II ended, Shaikh Abdullah tried to rally Kashmiris
around the democratic model outlined by the New Kashmir manifesto.
The pompous maharaja—given to decking himself in a much decorated
military uniform—showed no sign of surrendering any of his powers.7
That led Abdullah to emulate the Congress Party’s 1942 Quit India
movement and launch the Quit Kashmir campaign in May 1946. Its aim
was to secure the resignation of the maharaja. Hundreds of people, includ-
ing Abdullah, courted arrest.
Nehru, accompanied by another Congress leader, Asaf Ali, a lawyer,
entered Kashmir by road with the intention of defending Abdullah in
court. Nehru was arrested and deported instantly. Abdullah was sentenced
to three years imprisonment.
Unsurprisingly, Jinnah dismissed the Quit Kashmir movement as “an
agitation carried out by a few malcontents to create disorderly conditions
in the State.”8 He urged the Muslim Conference to stay away from the
campaign.
Like the pro-British Unionist politicians in Punjab, Sir Hari was
shocked to hear Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s February 1947 plan
to quit India. He tried to distract himself from this news by indulging
further his passion for polo and golf as well as poaching and wild game
hunting.
As Britain’s withdrawal gathered momentum, Sir Hari—influenced
by his anti-Nehru prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak, who was married to
a British woman—tilted toward declaring independence in order to main-
tain friendly relations with both India and Pakistan. In military-strategic
terms, the chief of staff of the state’s armed forces, Major-General H. L.
Scott, could see merit in an independent Kashmir. In addition, the maha-
raja’s astrologer, who claimed clairvoyant powers, declared that Maharaja
Gulab Singh (ruled 1846–1857), the founder of the state, favored the
inauguration of a sovereign Kashmir.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

On the other hand, during his four-day stay in Srinagar in mid-June,

Viceroy Lord Mountbatten advised Sir Hari to choose India or Pakistan
before August 14. On the last day of his sojourn, when the maharaja was
expected to convey his decision to the viceroy, Sir Hari feigned an attack
of colic and cancelled the meeting. All the same, as promised, the British
Raj returned the leased area of Gilgit Wazarat to the maharaja in July.
Nehru decided to fly to Srinagar but was dissuaded by Vallabhbhai
Patel, who was in charge of the States Department. Instead, Mahatma
Mohandas Gandhi was dispatched. During his meeting with Hari Singh
and his pro-India wife, Tara Devi, on August 1, Gandhi repeated what
the viceroy had told the Chamber of Princes a week earlier. By signing an
instrument of accession with India he would continue to enjoy autonomy
and receive his privy purse in exchange for surrendering foreign relations
and defense to the imminent Dominion of India. Sir Hari, however, was
disconsolate at the thought of Nehru settling old scores with him about
his unceremonial ejection from the state a year earlier. Nevertheless, ac-
cepting Gandhi’s advice and buttressed by his wife’s inclination, he sacked
the pro-independence Kak on August 10.
Two days later the newly appointed prime minister Major-General
Janak Singh sent telegrams to the Pakistani and Indian governments of-
fering a standstill agreement. Pakistan agreed; India did not. As for Gandhi’s
plea for the release of Abdullah, as part of his overarching counsel to the
maharaja not to act against the wishes of his people, Sir Hari put it in his
“pending” tray. He was not yet ready to make peace with long-time bête
noire.

POST-MIDNIGHT BIRTHS OF TWINS

In July, noticing signs of discontent in the Muslim-dominated western

Jammu Province, which had supplied tens of thousands of recruits to the
Indian Army during the war, the maharaja urged ex-servicemen to surren-
der their arms to the local police. The response was lackadaisical. To the
maharaja’s alarm, many Muslim farmhands, working for Hindu landlords,
defiantly displayed Pakistan’s green flag, emblazoned with the star and
crescent, after August 14.
This was a preamble to the anti-maharaja revolt by Muslims in
the Poonch-Mirpur area of western Jammu, leading to the killing of
some Hindus and displacement of many more. Sir Hari responded by

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

unleashing his Hindu troops to quell the rebellion. They resorted to a

scorched-earth policy. They fired on crowds, set alight houses and whole
villages, looted, imposed curfews, and carried out wholesale arrests. There
were many instances of collective punishment when, for instance, they
burnt a whole village because of the rebellious act of just one family.9
“Within a period of about 11 weeks, starting in August, system-
atic savageries [in Jammu] . . . practically eliminated the entire Mus-
lim element in the population, amounting to 500,000 people,” wrote Ian
Stephens, editor of the Calcutta-based Statesman, in his book Pakistan.
“About 100,000 just disappeared, remaining untraceable, having presum-
ably been butchered or died from epidemic or exposure. The rest fled to
West Punjab.”10
The maharaja’s iron-fist policy inflamed the local Muslims, who
joined the militia organized by the Muslim Conference, later to be called
Azad Fauj (Urdu: Free Army) or Azad Army, with a claimed strength of
fifty thousand, most of them being ex-servicemen. It would later come
under the command of one General Tariq, the pseudonym of Brigadier
Muhammad Akbar Khan of the Pakistan Army. “A few weeks after par-
tition, I was asked by Mian Iftikharuddin [the minister for refugee re-
habilitation] on behalf of [Prime Minister] Liaquat Ali Khan to prepare
a plan for action in Kashmir,” he would reveal in his interview with the
Karachi-based Defence Journal published in the June–July 1985 issue. “I
was called to a meeting with Liaquat Ali Khan at Lahore where the plan
[of mine] was adopted, responsibilities allocated and orders issued. Every-
thing was to be kept secret from the Army.”11 While remaining in charge
of the princely states and the tribal areas, Jinnah had assigned Ali Khan
the task of dealing with Kashmir.
On September 4, the Lahore-based Civil and Military Gazette re-
ported an uprising in the Poonch area. And four days later the Times
(of London) followed suit. By September 22, despite inadequate supplies
of arms and ammunition, and poor communications, the Azad Army
was doing so well that the outgoing Major General Scott, commanding
only three brigades, informed the maharaja that his soldiers scattered in
small pickets over a large area were finding it hard to control the situation
against the much larger size of the insurgents. Brigadier Rajinder Singh
Jamwal, who succeeded Scott, was inclined to be pro-India.
Frantic diplomatic moves were afoot in Karachi, Delhi, and Sri-
nagar. By spurning Jinnah’s offer, made in mid-September, to meet him
in Srinagar, Sir Hari upset Pakistan’s highest official. The offended Jinnah

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

retaliated by imposing a loose blockade in early October, depriving the

state of such essentials as salt, edible oil, sugar, kerosene, gasoline, and
cloth. He was helped by the fact that the Muslim truck drivers from West
Punjab were vulnerable to attacks by Hindu and Sikh militants in Jammu.
On the Indian side, there was rapid upgrading of communications be-
tween Kashmir and India by post and telegraph, telephone, wireless, and
roads. “The metaling of the road from Jammu to Kathua is also proceeding
at top speed,” reported the Lahore-based Pakistan Times on September
27. “The idea is to keep up some sort of communication between the
State and the Indian Union, so that essential supplies and troops could
be rushed to Kashmir without having to transport them through Paki-
stani territory.”12 The building of a boat bridge over the Ravi River near
Pathankot was meant to improve access from Gurdaspur in East Punjab.
On September 27 Nehru wrote to Patel that the maharaja should
make friends with the National Conference so that “there might be pop-
ular support against Pakistan.” (A day earlier the imprisoned Abdullah
had expressed his written allegiance to the maharaja in a letter that was
widely publicized.) Sir Hari released Abdullah on September 29. During
their subsequent meeting Abdullah reportedly offered the maharaja a few
gold coins as a tribute, thus accepting his paramountcy.
Abdullah’s release created another track of diplomacy. On October 1
a Pakistani delegation, headed by Dr. Muhammad Din Taseer, an aca-
demic friend of Abdullah who had later settled in Lahore, conferred with
Abdullah and his colleagues in Srinagar. Abdullah agreed to meet Jinnah
but only after he had seen Nehru in Delhi. Nonetheless, his friend, Ghu-
lam Muhammad Sadiq, accompanying Taseer, traveled to Lahore where
Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, another colleague of Abdullah, had arrived
earlier. Their various meetings with Pakistani officials climaxed with one
with Ali Khan on October 8.
In Delhi, in his talks with Abdullah, Nehru reiterated Mountbat-
ten’s terms to the princely states that they would have to surrender only
defense, foreign affairs, and communication to the Indian Union. In ad-
dition, he assured Abdullah that those living outside Kashmir would be
barred from owning property in the state, as had been the case during
the British Raj. Abdullah demanded that these guarantees be written into
the Indian constitution. Nehru agreed. Referring to the reports that feudal
lords in West Punjab were eyeing to buy agricultural land in Kashmir,
Nehru pointed out the commonality between the Congress Party’s com-
mitment to abolish zamindari and the New Kashmir manifesto.

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

From early October, reports of rapid deterioration in law and order

in Kashmir started appearing in the Civil and Military Gazette. By Oc-
tober 7 the Kashmir government had arrested the correspondent for the
Associated Press of India, a major source of news about the state; im-
posed “rigorous pre-censorship on all news and views” published in the
local press; and banned the import of four daily newspapers from West
Punjab. Protesting at the official order not to print matter advocating
Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, the editor of the Kashmir Times ceased
publication.13
The situation changed abruptly when the maharaja replaced Prime
Minister Janak Singh with Mehr Chand Mahajan, an Indian judge, on
October 15. Mahajan immediately ordered A. K. Shah, Pakistan’s joint
secretary of foreign affairs and states, who had tried to persuade Janak
Singh to opt for Pakistan, to leave Srinagar.
But this left intact the two-pronged scheme the Pakistani premier
had devised earlier: to take charge of the Azad Army created by the local
Muslim Conference and to forge an independent plan to secure Srinagar
by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas.

LIAQUAT ALI KHAN, THE PRIME PLOTTER

On September 21 Liaquat Ali Khan chaired a top-secret planning meet-

ing on Kashmir in Lahore. It was attended by civilian and military offi-
cials, including the chief ministers of Punjab and the NWFP—Iftikhar
Hussain Mamdot and Abdul Qayyum Khan respectively—as well as
Mian Iftikharuddin, (Retired) Major Khurshid Anwar, and Brigadier
Muhammad Akbar Khan, who was in charge of the weapons and equip-
ment department at general headquarters in Rawalpindi. The agreed-on
strategy involved intensifying the insurgency in the Poonch-Mirupr area
and opening a new front in western Kashmir to be accomplished by the
tribal irregulars led by Anwar. Akbar Khan was charged with arming these
fighters without his British commander detecting the loss from the armory.
A native of a princely state in Punjab, Anwar became a high-ranking
official in the civil supplies department in Delhi. Because of the close
association of this department with the military during World War II,
he gained the rank of major. After being discharged from the army for
suspected bribe-taking while supplying scarce goods to civilians, he joined
the Muslim League in Punjab. He was appointed commander of the

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Muslim National Guards (MNG; aka Muslim League National Guard)

for the “Pakistan” provinces. He set up the MNG headquarters in Lahore.
During the League’s civil disobedience campaign against the Unionist-led
ministry, he went underground and kept the agitation going. After the
fall of the Unionist government in March 1947, he turned his attention
to the NWFP. There he worked with Qayyum Khan and other League
officials to launch direct action against the Congress ministry. Operating
incognito, he remained active while other leaders served prison sentences.
Though the voters opted for Pakistan in a referendum in mid-July,
the cabinet of Abdul Jabbar Khan (aka Dr. Khan Sahib), a Congress ally,
maintained its majority in the legislature. And yet Jinnah ordered NWFP
governor Sir George Cunningham to dismiss the ministry of Dr. Khan
Sahib on August 22. That dismissal led the Muslim League’s Qayyum
Khan, a Pashtun of Kashmiri origin, to form the next cabinet.
Anwar claimed to have gotten clearance from Ali Khan in late Au-
gust to turn his attention to Kashmir. He and Qayyum Khan set about
raising a force of tribal men from the Tirah region and North and South
Waziristan Agencies. The number of volunteers rose quickly. By early
October about five thousand armed men from the Afridi and Mahsud
tribes, embedded with a few hundred Pakistan soldiers on leave, would be
assembled in the NWFP city of Abbottabad.
Inside Kashmir, by mid to late October, the Azad Army controlled
large parts of Poonch and Mirpur, while much of the Muzaffarabad sub-
district was being cleared of non-Muslims in reprisal for the continued
violence against Muslims in eastern Jammu.
On the diplomatic front, Kashmir’s prime minister Mahajan side-
stepped Jinnah’s offer of an impartial inquiry by a third party to inves-
tigate his government’s allegation of armed infiltration into Poonch by
Pakistan. Instead, on October 18 he sent Jinnah a telegram threatening
to ask for “friendly” assistance by India if the Pakistanis continued their
armed infiltration into Poonch while blockading the border for transport
of goods and persisted in their anti-maharaja propaganda.14
Jinnah responded by sending a telegram to the maharaja. “The real
aim of your Government’s policy is to seek an opportunity to join the
Indian Dominion through a coup d’état by securing the intervention and
assistance of that Dominion,” he said. Then he offered to invite his prime
minister to visit Karachi “to smooth out the difficulties and adjust matters
in a friendly way.”15

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

On October 20 relations between Karachi and Srinagar deteriorated

when the maharaja’s soldiers assaulted four villages inside West Punjab
with mortars, grenades, and automatic fire, causing heavy casualties.16
That day, as previously planned, the tribal warriors began marching
from Abbottabad toward Kashmir. So far Sir George, the governor of
NWFP, had been in the dark about the preparations Anwar had made
with the cooperation of his chief minister, Qayyum Khan. When he
learned about the march the following day, he immediately informed
Prime Minister Ali Khan.
“On October 21, Liaquat Ali Khan told me in a state of unusual ex-
citement that a tribal lashkar [Urdu: army], some thousands strong, was on
the way to Kashmir,” wrote Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, the chief secretary
of Pakistan, in his book The Emergence of Pakistan. “I asked him if he had
informed the Quaid-i-Azam and he said, ‘Not yet,’ as he had just received
the report.”17
Did the prime minister mislead his topmost civil servant? The answer
is to be found in Anwar’s statement, as cited later by his friend M. Yusuf
Buch, a Pakistani expert on Kashmir since 1947. “The old man never gave
it the green light,” Anwar told Buch after he had retired and set up an ice
factory in Rawalpindi. “The old man” was Jinnah, who had not been kept
fully briefed by Ali Khan.18

THE DENOUEMENT

After crossing into western Kashmir along the Jhelum Valley road on Oc-
tober 22, (Retired) Major Anwar launched Operation Gulmarg by leading
a convoy of two hundred trucks filled with sturdy Pashtuns armed with
small weapons and mortars. His strategy was to advance along the axis of
Muzaffarabad, Domel, Uri, and Baramula to capture the Srinagar airfield
and the city, and then proceed to secure the Banihal Pass to block the road
from Jammu and cut off the state from the rest of India. Following his
capture of two outposts, the Muslim companies of the state’s army started
defecting to his side.
When the news of the tribal attack reached the maharaja on the af-
ternoon of October 22, he ordered Brigadier Jamwal to fight the invaders
to the last man and the last bullet. Jamwal’s company of 150 men en-
countered the raiders at Garhi, forty-five miles west of Uri, in the early

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

hours of the next day. Heavily outnumbered and weakened by the earlier
defection of the Muslim units, he withdrew to Uri after blowing up the
bridge. That delayed the attackers by one day. His soldiers then fought
them at Baramulla, straddling the Jhelum, thirty miles east, on October
24. They were all killed in action.
That day, the local insurgents in the Poonch-Mirpur region formed
the independent government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir—shortened to
Azad Kashmir—under the presidency of Muhammad Ibrahim Khan of the
Muslim Conference in Palundari. Announcing the aim of his government
as liberation of the rest of the state, he appealed to Pakistan for assistance.
The Indian government learned of the extent of the invasion on the
evening of October 24, when Kashmir’s deputy prime minister, R. L.
Batra, arrived with letters addressed to Nehru and Patel and seeking mil-
itary assistance. The next morning, October 25, the defense committee of
the Indian cabinet met under Governor-General Lord Mountbatten. He
argued that sending troops to a neutral state would be a great folly in the
eyes of the world.
The committee then dispatched Vapal Pangunni Menon, along with
civil and military officials, to Srinagar to assess the situation on the ground
and find out whether or not the maharaja was prepared to accede to India.
After his meeting with Prime Minister Mahajan, Menon and Maha-
jan conferred with the maharaja, who was in a nervous state. Giving cre-
dence to the rumors that some invaders had infiltrated Srinagar, Menon
advised the maharaja to drive to the winter capital of Jammu posthaste.
In retrospect, the precaution proved unnecessary. According to Oper-
ation Gulmarg, the tribal warriors should have reached Srinagar by Oc-
tober 25 to celebrate Eid al Adha in the city along with local Muslims.
As a result of unexpected delays, on that day they found themselves in
Baramulla. Home to fourteen thousand people, it was the commercial
gateway to the Vale of Kashmir, with a high proportion of non-Muslims.
The population included the staff and patients at Joseph’s College, Con-
vent, and Hospital, built on a hill, some of them being European.
Before being recruited, the tribal men had been told by Anwar that
in the absence of any remuneration upfront, they were entitled to loot
the properties of infidels in the conquered parts of Kashmir. Now, given
the opportunity, the invaders went beyond pillaging non-Muslim posses-
sions. They snatched jewelry from local women (irrespective of their reli-
gion), plundered the bazaar and homes, and vandalized Hindu and Sikh
temples. They shipped their plunder back to Abbottabad in trucks. They

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used the local cinema as a rape center. Among those they shot dead were
Lieutenant Colonel D. O. Dykes and his English wife, ready to leave the
hospital that day with their newborn baby, and two European nuns. They
abducted hundreds of girls, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim alike. They ignored
the pleas of Anwar to advance to Srinagar, only thirty miles away along
a level road. In desperation, Anwar led a few bands of regular Pakistani
soldiers in civilian clothes to the capital.
The two days’ delay by the main force in order to indulge in an orgy
of plunder, rape, and murder made all the difference between success and
failure of this armed venture.
After the maharaja along with his entourage and valuable possessions
fled to Jammu in a convoy of cars around two am on October 26, Menon
and his party, accompanied by Mahajan, boarded a Dakota to fly to Delhi.
Once Menon had apprised the Defense Committee of the dire situation
in Kashmir, a debate followed. Mountbatten pointed out that Indian sol-
diers could not be dispatched to the state until and unless the maharaja
had signed the Instrument of Accession. He added that he would accept
the accession subject to ascertaining the will of the people in a plebiscite
after law and order had been restored. Nehru, Patel, and other members
of the committee agreed.
Menon flew back to Jammu. At the royal palace he woke up the ma-
haraja, slumbering after a night-long drive from Srinagar. Maharaja Sir
Hari Singh signed the instrument of accession, which specified autonomy
for the state. (Later, an article in the Indian Constitution would specify
that the Indian parliament would need the state government’s agreement
to apply laws in other administrative areas to the state’s territory.) In his
forwarding letter to Governor-General Mountbatten, he said that, fol-
lowing the acceptance of the accession, he would ask Shaikh Muhammad
Abdullah, lodged in a Delhi hotel as an official guest for the previous
week, to form an interim government.
That evening Defense Minister Baldev Singh sent a message to the
military command in Delhi to airlift troops to Srinagar early the follow-
ing morning. Overnight, supported by the swift acquisition of all civil-
ian aircraft by Patel, about a hundred civilian and air force planes were
mobilized to ferry men, weapons, and ammunition to Srinagar. The first
airplane carrying Indian soldiers arrived at ten thirty am on October 27
at the unguarded Srinagar airport, eight miles from the city center.
While accepting the Instrument of Accession by the maharaja on
October 27, Lord Mountbatten wrote in his cover letter:

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

In the circumstances mentioned by Your Highness, my government has

decided to accept the accession of Kashmir State to the Dominion of India.
In consistence with their policy that in the case of any State where the issue
of accession has been subject to dispute, the question of accession should
be decided in accordance with the wishes of the people of the state, it is
my government’s wish that, as soon as law and order have been restored in
Kashmir and its soil is cleared of the invaders, the question of the state’s
accession should be settled by a reference to people.19

On October 28 Nehru sent a long telegram to his Pakistani counterpart.

After summarizing the background to the signing of the Instrument of Ac-
cession by the maharaja, he added: “In regards to accession, it has been made
clear that it is subject to reference to people of the State and their decision.
The Government of India have no design to impose any decision and will
abide by people’s wishes. But those cannot be ascertained till peace and law
and order prevail.” Two days later Ali Khan replied by telegram. He alluded
to the killings of Muslims in Poonch and their massacres in Jammu, and
how those atrocities and the earlier butchering of Muslims in East Punjab
had inflamed feelings among the tribes. “When there was evidence that
there was to be repetition of that in Kashmir as in East Punjab, it became
impossible wholly to prevent the tribes from entering Kashmir without us-
ing troops which would have created a situation on the frontier that might
well have got out of control,” he explained. “The Pathan [aka Pashtun] raid
did not start until 22 October. It is clear therefore that Kashmir’s plan of
asking for Indian troops . . . was formed quite independently of this raid,
and all evidence and action taken shows [that] it was pre-arranged.”20
The sharply divergent ways in which the two leaders presented their
respective cases on Kashmir foreshadowed the severity of the challenge
the neighboring nations would face in resolving this dispute over the next
many decades.
Jinnah noted with growing anxiety the events in Kashmir. When
Indian soldiers flew into Srinagar, he ordered his commander in chief
General Sir Frank Messervy to dispatch troops to Kashmir. Messervy
was a subordinate of the Delhi-based Field Marshal Sir Claude Achin-
leck, the supreme commander of the British forces remaining in India
and Pakistan.21 His superior ruled out such a move because that would
have resulted in British officers commanding their respective Indian and
Pakistani contingents fighting one another. Messervy therefore refused to

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

implement Jinnah’s order, arguing that the presence of the Indian forces
in Kashmir was justified since the maharaja had acceded to India and that
introducing Pakistani forces into Kashmir would compel him to withdraw
all British officers from Pakistan’s military. Thus Jinnah, a lawyer by train-
ing, found his hands tied. His subsequently tense relations with Messervy
would lead the general to take an early retirement, in February 1948.

THE DAY AF TER

On October 30 Pakistan said that since Kashmir’s accession to India was

based on “fraud and violence,” it could not be recognized. That day Jinnah
met Mountbatten in Lahore. They failed to agree on the modalities of the
plebiscite on the state’s future. In his broadcast to the nation on Novem-
ber 2, Nehru reiterated his promise to hold a plebiscite in the state under
international auspices after law and order had been established. Two days
later Ali Khan responded in a broadcast from Lahore, describing Kash-
mir’s accession as immoral and illegal.
Once Shaikh Abdullah—popularly called Sher-i-Kashmir (Urdu:
Lion of Kashmir)—formed an interim administration as its chief admin-
istrator, on October 30, his party activists greeted the incoming Indian
soldiers with slogans such as Hamlavar Khabardar, Hum Kashmiri Hai Ta-
yar (Urdu: Invaders beware, we Kashmiris are ready), and Sher-i-Kashmir
Ka Kya Irshad, Hindu Muslim Sikh Ittihad (Urdu: What’s Lion of Kash-
mir’s guidance—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs are united).
On October 31 the vanguard of Azad Kashmir’s army reached the out-
skirts of Srinagar and engaged Indian troops. They fared badly. Once the
Indian force had retaken Baramulla on November 8 and cut off the supply
lines of the enemy forces, their opponents withdrew.
The recaptured Baramulla, now a deserted town of a thousand people,
was opened to local and foreign journalists. “The once lovely town . . . was
heaped with rubble and blackened with fire,” wrote Margaret Bourke-
White, a reporter-photographer for Life magazine, in her book Halfway
to Freedom, published in 1949. “The deserted [St. Joseph’s] Convent on
the hill was badly defaced and littered. . . . We made our way into the
ravaged Chapel, wading through the mass of torn hymnbooks and broken
sacred statuary. The altar was deep in rubble.” She described what hap-
pened when the town was raided by the armed tribesmen:

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

The nuns, their hospital patients, and a few stray townspeople who had
taken refuge at the Mission were herded into a single dormitory and kept
under rifle guard. On one of these days, after an air attack from the Indian
Army had left the tribesmen in a particularly excited and nervous mood,
six of the nuns were brought out and lined up to be shot. [But] one of their
chiefs arrived; he had enough vision to realize that shooting nuns was not
the thing to do, even in an invasion, and the nuns were saved.22

On November 11 the Indian soldiers recaptured Uri, and the raid-

ers withdrew from the nearby towns of Gulmarg and Tanmarg. On the
other side, Azad Kashmir forces intensified their campaign and captured
Mirupr on November 26.
That day the Joint Defense Council of India and Pakistan meeting in
Delhi decided to maintain the council, despite London’s decision to close
down the Joint Supreme Command ( JSC) of the British forces in India
and Pakistan on November 30.
On December 8, Mountbatten and Nehru attended the meeting of
the Joint Defense Council in Lahore. Nehru argued that letting the tribal
raiders use Pakistani territory to attack India was tantamount to an act
of war by Pakistan, and that it should call on the raiders to return home.
Ali Khan contended that such an appeal by him would lead to the fall of
his government. Mountbatten then suggested that the United Nations
may be invited to mediate between India and Pakistan. His idea merited
serious consideration. And Nehru would later accept it.
As foreign minister Nehru had pursued a policy of nonalignment by
sending his sister Vijay Lakshmi Pandit as ambassador to the Soviet
Union on the eve of independence to balance the appointment of cabinet
minister Asaf Ali as the Indian ambassador to Washington six months
earlier. He was therefore confident of not falling afoul of the United
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424808319

States or the Soviet Union at the UN Security Council.

Nehru referred the turmoil in Kashmir to the UN Security Council
on January 1, 1948, in the form of a complaint against Pakistan under
Chapter VI of the UN Charter (Pacific Settlement of Disputes), Article
35. Along with the preceding article, this one authorizes the Security
Council to investigate any dispute in order to determine if it was “likely
to endanger international peace and security.”23 Pakistan had armed and
abetted the tribal men from its territory to attack Kashmir, and that
should vacate the gains of its aggression, argued India’s representative to
the United Nations.

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

Two weeks later Pakistan filed a countercomplaint. It alleged that In-

dia had persistently attempted to undo the partition scheme; launched a
preplanned, wide-scale genocide of Muslims in East Punjab and Punjab’s
princely states; and secured Kashmir’s accession by fraud and violence. It
referred to Delhi’s nonpayment of Pakistan’s share of the cash balances.24
Earlier, quite independently, in his report to Prime Minster Attlee on the
eve of the closure of the JSC of the British forces in India and Pakistan,
Auchinleck had said that he had “no hesitation in affirming that the pres-
ent Indian Cabinet are implacably determined to do all in their power to
prevent the establishment of the Dominion of Pakistan on a firm basis.”25

APOSTLE OF NONVIOLENCE FELLED BY GUNSHOTS

At Pakistan’s inception,26 India paid it Rs 200 million as the first install-

ment of its share of the cash balance in Delhi. But before the remain-
ing balance was due—Rs 550 million—war broke out in Kashmir. India
held back this payment, arguing that Pakistan would use it in its ongoing
armed conflict in Kashmir. Jinnah complained to India’s governor-general,
Lord Mountbatten. When he failed to convince Nehru and Patel to meet
India’s legal obligation, he turned to Gandhi. The Mahatma agreed with
him.27 In a prayer meeting speech in mid-December he publicly urged
the Indian government to honor its moral and legal financial agreement
with Pakistan.
On December 22 he referred to the shrine of the Sufi saint Khwaja
Qutb-ud-din Chishti in the village of Mehrauli, twelve miles from cen-
tral Delhi, which tens of thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims visited
annually. It was “subjected to the wrath of Hindu mobs” in September, he
regretfully informed his audience. As a result, the Muslims living in its
vicinity for the past eight hundred years had fled. “Now though Muslims
honor the shrine, no Muslim can be found anywhere near it,” he said. “It
is the duty of Hindus, Sikhs and the officials of the government to open
the shrine, and wash this stain off us. The same applies to other shrines
and religious places of Muslims in and around Delhi.”28
When Gandhi’s plea went unheeded, he began a fast on January 13,
1948. “I will terminate the fast only when peace has returned to Delhi,”
he declared. “If peace is restored to Delhi it will have an effect not only
on India but on Pakistan.” Later, he explained that his fast was “against
the Hindus and Sikhs of India, and against the Muslims of Pakistan.”29

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Addressing a mammoth rally in Delhi in January 17, Maulana Abul

Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed Azad explained that people of all faiths
should be able to move around the capital without fear and that the Mus-
lims who had been chased out of the city should be advised to return.
The next day a collective of political and religious leaders issued a joint
statement signed in Gandhi’s presence:

We take the pledge that we should protect the life, property and faith of
Muslims and [that] the incidents that have occurred in Delhi shall not hap-
pen again. We want to assure Gandhiji that the annual fair held at Khwaja
Qutb-ud-din’s shrine will be held this year as before. . . . The mosques which
have been left by Muslims and are now in the possession of Hindus and
Sikhs will be returned. We shall not object to the return to Delhi of Muslims
who had migrated. All these things will be done by our personal effort and
not with the help of the police and military.30

While many community leaders were urging Gandhi to end his fast,
militant Hindu demonstrators marched past Birla House, his base, shout-
ing “Let Gandhi die!” They mocked him as “Muhammad Gandhi.” Their
hatred of Gandhi intensified on January 15, when, heeding his appeal,
the Indian government announced that it was transferring Rs 550 million
(worth $1.6 billion today) due to Pakistan forthwith.31
At his prayer assembly on January 19, held in the garden of Birla
House, Gandhi told his audience that an official of the communalist
Hindu Mahasabha had repudiated his endorsement of the earlier Hindu-
Muslim amity pledge. Hindu Mahasabha was a counterforce, albeit a
weak one, to the League’s communalism. It was allied with the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu militia.
The next day, as he spoke at the prayer meeting, a handmade bomb,
placed on the wall about seventy-five feet behind Gandhi’s podium, ex-
ploded. It was ignited by Madan Lal Pahwa, a refugee from West Punjab,
who had learned to make grenades as an employee of a fireworks factory
in Bombay. A strong woman in the audience grappled with Pahwa until
others rushed forward. He was part of a plot to create panic during which
Gandhi was to be shot by two of the seven-strong assassination team
that had traveled from Poona and Bombay to Delhi. By the time Pahwa
led the police to the two hotels where the rest of the gang were staying,
they had fled in a hurry. In a room at the Marina Hotel, they found a few
clothes carrying the initials “NVG.” Gandhi, who had remained calm

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

during the episode, refused to restrict access to his daily prayer assembly
as advised by the police.
Once the police heat was off, NVG—Nathuram Vinayak Godse—a
sturdy man of medium height with owlish eyes and a jowly face, carried
out repeated reconnaissance of the Birla House and its environs.
Meanwhile, Gandhi was troubled by reports of increased tensions
between Nehru and Patel, who among other things had disapproved of
Nehru’s complaint about Kashmir to the UN Security Council, which in
turn had led to Pakistan filing an unwieldy countercomplaint. Gandhi de-
cided to mediate. On January 30 he addressed a letter to Nehru to bridge
his differences with Patel. That day at four pm Gandhi had a meeting with
Patel on the same subject. Their talk went on beyond the scheduled hour.
Among those who had gathered in the front row of the congregation
for the prayers was Godse. Gandhi emerged from the building. He passed
through the garden, leaning, as usual, on the shoulders of Abha Gandhi,
his granddaughter-in-law, and Manu Gandhi, his grandniece. As he as-
cended the four steps leading to the prayer marquee, Godse, wearing a
loose jacket over his cotton shirt and pajamas, approached him. Standing
about six feet from Gandhi, he pressed his palms together in reverence.
Gandhi returned his salutation. “You are late today for the prayer,” re-
marked Godse as he bowed to touch the Mahatma’s feet as a further sign
of respect. “Yes, I am,” Gandhi replied. Godse pulled out his six-chamber
Beretta M 1934 semiautomatic pistol from his jacket pocket. He fired
three shots near Gandhi’s heart. It was 5:12 pm. Gandhi collapsed, but
his consorts held him up. He was taken to his room, where he died fifteen
minutes later.32
Godse was seized by those around him and beaten. When the police
arrested him, he described himself as editor of the Poona-based Hindu
Rashtra (Marathi: Hindu Nation), a weekly journal of the Hindu Ma-
hasabha. He was a former member of the RSS, spawned by the Ma-
hasabha, which believed in Hindu supremacy.33 At his trial he would say
that he killed Gandhi for “weakening India” by insisting on payments
to Pakistan.
Heartbroken, Nehru wept openly; he had established a son-father
relationship with Gandhi. Patel felt guilty for having failed to provide ad-
equate security to the Mahatma and for the ineptitude of the Intelligence
Bureau in unearthing the assassination plan in the making. He banned
the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, whose members he had described
three weeks earlier as “patriots who love their country.”34 The searing

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

tragedy brought the leading Congress officials together and strengthened

the Nehru-led secular wing in the party.
An emotional tide washed over the Indian nation while condolences
poured in from around the globe. Among them was one from Jinnah, who
ordered the closure of all government offices in Pakistan the following
day. Describing him as “one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu
community, and a leader who commanded their universal confidence and
respect,” he sincerely sympathized with “the great Hindu community and
his family in their bereavement at this momentous, historical and critical
juncture.” (This was payback for Gandhi’s remark in 1915 of finding a
Muslim like Jinnah as head of the multi-religious Gurjar Sabha in Bom-
bay.35) It was only the last sentence—“The loss to the Dominion of India
is irreparable”—that did not tie Gandhi to the Hindu community.36
Reversing his earlier rejection of the advice of his military aide-
de-camp, General Muhammad Akbar Khan, Jinnah quietly ordered
that the low compound wall of the Government House, his base in
Karachi, be raised, ostensibly to make him and his office safe from a
bomb thrower.
A far more important reversal from Jinnah was his stance on the fu-
ture constitution of Pakistan, which he had expressed publicly almost a
week earlier. His change of position was caused by recent developments in
the subcontinent and elsewhere. In Delhi Patel had resorted to demanding
that India’s Muslim leaders should vociferously support the government’s
military intervention in Kashmir, thereby raising communal tension. And
the Indian move in Kashmir had weakened the position of the Hindus
in Pakistan, with the Muslim majority there viewing them as unpatri-
otic. Lastly, Washington’s decision in December to award $10 million
in financial assistance to Pakistan gave Jinnah a badly needed economic
boost, which, in turn, encouraged him to harden his ideological position.
“I cannot understand the logic of those who have been deliberately
and mischievously propagating that the Constitution of Pakistan will not
be based on Islamic Sharia.” Jinnah said in his address to the Sindh Bar
Association in Karachi on January 25. “Islamic principles today are as
much applicable to life as they were 1300 years ago.” He added that Paki-
stan’s constitution would be based on the Sharia canon to make it “a truly
great Islamic state.”37
Jinnah reiterated this message in his speech to the Fifth Heavy and
Sixth Light Ack Ack Regiments based at Malir, a suburb of Karachi, on
February 21, a fortnight after the early resignation of General Messervy:

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

“You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of

Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood
in your own native soil.”38 It is worth noting that it was the first time in
modern history that the term “Islamic democracy” was used by a leading
Muslim politician.

JINNAH’S TERMINAL ILLNESS

Once General Messervy was succeeded by General David Gracey, and

the remaining four thousand British troops in India had sailed away on
February 28, Jinnah felt freer to commit regular troops in Kashmir. As it
was, on October 31 the Gilgit Scouts, led by British officers who had all
opted for Pakistan, arrested the maharaja-appointed governor and set up
a provisional administration that affiliated with the Azad Kashmir gov-
ernment. Three days later the ruler of Chitral signed the Instrument of
Accession with Pakistan. This amounted to Pakistan controlling directly
or indirectly, through the Azad Kashmir government, most of the sparsely
populated areas of Kashmir except Ladakh. But the coveted prize of the
Vale of Kashmir—measuring 6,160 square miles at an average altitude of
6,000 feet—had escaped Jinnah. “The turn of events in Kashmir had an
adverse effect on the Quaidi Azam’s health,” wrote Chaudhri Muhammad
Ali. “His earlier optimism gave way to a deep disappointment. ‘We have
been put on the wrong bus,’ he remarked.”39
After a lull in the fighting in Kashmir caused by winter snows, the
Indians geared up to recapture the lost area, particularly in the populous
Kashmir region, which was partly controlled by Azad Kashmir forces.
Fearing a breach of Pakistan’s border in the course of India’s offensives,
Jinnah ordered the deployment of Pakistani troops in early April. By so
doing he risked Delhi’s refusal to deliver the bulk of the 18.75 percent
share of the 165,000 tons of ordnance stores, which had been allocated to
Pakistan by the Partition Council.40
At the United Nations, having listened to both sides, the Security
Council passed Resolution 47 on April 21, 1948. It stated that to en-
sure the impartiality of the plebiscite on the state’s future, Pakistan must
withdraw all tribesmen and nationals who entered the region to fight,
and India should leave just enough troops to maintain civil order. Since
it was passed under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, it was nonbinding
and lacked mandatory implementation.41 Only resolutions passed under

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Chapter VII (“Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of

the Peace and Acts of Aggression”) require mandatory enforcement.
Jinnah demanded that both sides withdraw their forces simultane-
ously. Delhi rejected this. So the state of war between the two neighbors
continued, both of them deciding to ignore the Security Council’s call for
an immediate cease-fire.
For administrative purposes, Jinnah established the Ministry of Kash-
mir Affairs in Karachi. Across the border, pressured by Delhi, the ma-
haraja had replaced his Hindu prime minister, Mahajan, in March with
Shaikh Abdullah, the erstwhile chief administrator, thus making his gov-
ernment appear more representative of the Muslim majority.
In Karachi, Jinnah by now was too ill to use his desk in the Govern-
ment House office as his workplace. He could perform his job only while
lying down on a sofa, surrounded by documents, newspapers, and endless
news-bearing telex tape. In June he and his sister-carer Fatima moved to
cooler Quetta. Black dispatch boxes, stamped with the initials “M.A.J.,”
were airlifted daily from Karachi for his attention and action. He still
managed to muster enough energy to address the cadets at the local Com-
mand and Staff College. “You, along with the other forces of Pakistan, are
the custodians of the life, property and honor of the people of Pakistan,”
he told them.42 He would have hardly predicted that a decade later the
military leaders would prove more than mere custodians and that they
would seize total power and send all politicians packing.
Jinnah flew to Karachi on July 1 to inaugurate the State Bank of Pa-
kistan. On his return to Quetta some days later, he was advised to move
to the hill town of Ziarat seventy miles away. He did so, and he continued
to work ceaselessly. Toward the end of the month, Colonel Dr. Illahi Bux,
who had been invited to Ziarat by Fatima Jinnah, told his patient and
Fatima that Jinnah’s lungs were afflicted with tuberculosis and cancer. The
news was withheld even from Prime Minister Ali Khan when he arrived
in Ziarat.
Invited by Bux and Fatima Jinnah, the British nursing superintendent
of Quetta’s civil hospital, Sister Phyllis Dunham, arrived in Ziarat on July
29 to give Jinnah professional nursing care. Despite the strict secrecy, the
public knew vaguely that their Quaid-i-Azam—Great Leader—was ill
and resting in Ziarat in the hills of Baluchistan. On Eid al Fitr, which fell
on August 7, public prayers were offered in mosques for his recovery. Two
days later Jinnah, now reduced to 79 pounds from an earlier 120 pounds,

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

his face shrunken to hollow cheeks and blank stare, was moved back to
Quetta. To maintain a semblance of official normality, on the eve of In-
dependence Day, August 14, the government broadcast a ghostwritten
message from him.
Belying a slight improvement in his health, on August 29 a tearful
Jinnah said to Bux, “You know, when you first came to Ziarat, I wanted
to live. Now, however, it does not matter whether I live or die.”43 It was
imperative for political stability that he should return to Karachi while he
was still alive. Being vain, Jinnah did not want to be seen arriving in the
capital on a stretcher. When he developed pneumonia on September 9,
however, he had no option but to fly to Karachi to receive better medical
treatment.
On Saturday morning, September 11, Jinnah’s Viking touched down
at Quetta’s airport. Ali Khan was informed but told not to come to the
Mauripur Airport located ten miles from the Government House in Ka-
rachi. At four fifteen pm, Jinnah’s plane was met by his state-owned Ca-
dillac, an army ambulance, and a truck for luggage and servants. Jinnah,
lying on a stretcher, was placed in the ambulance, which moved slowly.
Almost halfway to his destination, it broke down. When the driver failed
to get it moving again, Jinnah’s military secretary was sent off to fetch
another ambulance.
Jinnah could not be transferred to the Cadillac as he was too weak
to sit up in the backseat, and the stretcher could not be fitted into the
automobile. Since the ambulance was not carrying the governor-general’s
flag, nobody in Jinnah’s party could stop any of the buses or trucks passing
by. It was hot and close inside the ambulance. Jinnah was perspiring even
when Sister Dunham fanned him vigorously with a piece of cardboard.
In gratitude, the speechless Jinnah touched her arm with his hand and
smiled weakly. It was an excruciatingly long hour before the next ambu-
lance arrived. The party reached the Government House at 6:10 pm. 44
Jinnah was put to bed. He died at 10:25 pm.
The government announced three days of mourning. On September
12 almost a million people gathered for the funeral service of Quaid-i-
Azam Jinnah, who was succeeded by Khwaja Nazimuddin, the Bengali
president of the Pakistan Muslim League. The state of mourning was
announced in Delhi on that day, and flags flew at half-mast on all official
buildings.
Nehru said:

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Jinnah did mold history in India in the wrong way, it is true, and let loose
forces which have done so much evil. How shall we judge him? I have been
very angry with him often during these past years. But now there is no bit-
terness in my thought of him, only a great sadness for all that has been. . . .
Outwardly he succeeded in his quest and gained his objective, but at what
a cost and with what a difference from what he had imagined. What must
he have thought of all this, did he feel sorry or regret for any past action?
Probably not, for he had wrapped himself in a cloak of hatred and every
evil seemed to flow from those whom he hated. Hatred is poor nourishment
for any person.45

In his evaluation of Jinnah, Nehru showed no sign of self-examination.

Nor did he attempt to apportion blame for the tragic partitioning of the
subcontinent. It was all the fault of malevolent Jinnah. Self-righteousness
remained a salient feature of Nehru’s character until his death while prime
minister sixteen years later.
With the exit of Jinnah and Gandhi, the giants of subcontinental
politics for three decades, an era came to an end. Jinnah’s death just a year
after the birth of a new nation he had conceived deprived it of strong
moorings at a critical moment. And top policymakers in independent
India, focusing on rapid economic development with a stress on indus-
trialization, found Gandhi’s utopian ideas of self-sufficient village com-
munities outdated.
Whereas a Hollywood biopic on Gandhi was produced in 1982 and
proved a critical and box office success, a movie on Jinnah, carrying his
name, materialized only in 1998. The Hindi version of Gandhi helped
enormously to establish him as an iconic figure, particularly among the
younger generations. Jinnah, produced and directed by the London-based
Jamil Dehlavi, cast the British horror movie actor Christopher Lee in
the lead role. Its Urdu version did well in Pakistan; its impact elsewhere
was negligible.

TRUCE IN KASHMIR

Following Jinnah’s death, Ali Khan bore the full burden of shepherding
the fledgling Pakistan. His aristocratic background, formalized in his title
of Nawabzad (Urdu: Son of Nabob) from Punjab, his profession as an

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 THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

Oxford-trained attorney, and many years in politics made him feel at ease
with Nehru, a Cambridge-educated lawyer.
On Kashmir, he opted for the “harder diplomatic” track by downgrad-
ing the military option that his government was finding too expensive to
continue—a policy he had failed to sell to Jinnah earlier. Nehru’s adminis-
tration was also feeling the adverse effect of the drain caused by the war in
Kashmir. With winter snows freezing the battle lines, the two neighbors
decided to silence their guns by agreeing to a truce brokered by the UN
Commission for India and Pakistan. Despite unpublicized disapproval
by the top military brass at the general headquarters in Rawalpindi, the
cease-fire went into effect on January 1, 1949. It was decided that a free
and impartial plebiscite would be held under UN supervision.
Pakistan controlled 37 percent of Jammu and Kashmir, later divided
into Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir, with its capital in Muzaffarabad.
To monitor the cease-fire line, the Security Council appointed the UN
Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan. Crucially, India retained
control of the eighty-five-mile-long and twenty-mile-wide Vale of Kash-
mir, which lies between the Pir Panjal and Karakoram mountain ranges
of the Himalayas. Guarded by snow-capped peaks, carpeted with verdant
forests of fir and pine trees along with wildflowers of riotous colors in the
spring, and irrigated by the Jhelum River and its tributaries, it has been
described by poets and people alike as “Paradise on Earth.”
On the eve of their independence the two Dominions had decided
to allow free movement of goods, persons, and capital for one year. But
because of the rapid deterioration in relations after the Kashmir conflict,
this agreement broke down. In November, Pakistan levied export duties
on jute, which was processed in the mills of Calcutta. India retaliated with
export duties of its own. The trade war escalated to a crisis on September
19, 1949, when Britain devalued the pound against the US dollar by 30.5
percent, to $2.80. Both the Indian rupee and the Pakistani rupee were
pegged to the British pound. India followed Britain’s lead, but Pakistan
did not. That made Pakistani exports almost a third more expensive. Delhi
terminated its trade relations with Karachi.

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 7

Growing Apart

The rupture in Indo-Pakistan trade links ended the export of Hindi mov-
ies to Pakistan. These films often starred Punjabi actors endowed with
good looks and fluency in Hindustani—an amalgam of Urdu and Hindi.
West Pakistanis thus found themselves deprived of their staple in mass
entertainment. The studios in Lahore produced only nine movies a year,
compared to Bombay’s output of seventy-five.
Whereas most Muslim businessmen and professionals in the Muslim-
minority provinces of British India migrated to Pakistan to escape com-
petition from their more advantaged Hindu counterparts, this was not
the case with the socially liberal and politically progressive Muslims in
Bombay’s thriving movie industry. As scriptwriters, lyricists, directors, and
producers, they stayed in Bombay—all except Sadat Hassan Manto.

SADAT HASSAN MANTO

A bespectacled, oval-faced native of Samrala near Ludhiana in East Pun-

jab, Manto was a prolific short story writer in Urdu who made a com-
fortable living penning screenplays. He made his debut as a writer with
“Tamasha” (Urdu: Show), a short story based on the 1919 Jallianwala
Bagh massacre in Amritsar.
After partition, the thirty-five-year-old Manto migrated to Lahore.
Faced with a lack of demand for movie scripts, he had to rely exclusively
on publishing short stories in literary magazines or newspaper supple-
ments for paltry sums. His sexually explicit tales fell afoul of the socially

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conservative readership of Urdu publications. Because he wrote freely

about social and sexual issues considered taboo in Indo-Pakistan society,
he was charged with obscenity six times, three times in India and three
times in Pakistan. Though he was not convicted, he switched to writing
a regular newspaper column. It provided him with an outlet for drawing
pen-portraits of leading Indian actors and writers as well as Muhammad
Ali Jinnah. (His eye-opening essays on working in the Hindi movie
industry—at turns nostalgic, acerbic, poetic, and gossipy—are collected
in a remarkable collection Stars from Another Sky.) The constant struggle
to support his wife, Safiya, and their three daughters drove him to cheap,
illicitly brewed alcohol—and an early death in 1955 from cirrhosis.
He left behind twenty-two collections of short stories, a novel, and
five collections of radio plays as well as three of essays. Yet it was only
on January 18, 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, that he was
commemorated on a Pakistani postage stamp and awarded the Nishan-e
Imtiaz (Urdu: Order of Excellence), the highest official honor.
Some months before his demise he published a satirical tale, “Toba
Tek Singh.” Set in 1950, when India and Pakistan exchanged the in-
mates of their lunatic asylums, “Toba Tek Singh” has become a classic
because it captures the demented logic of the partition. The story is
based on the premise that the inmates of these asylums were largely
unaware of the dramatic events in the subcontinent.
Bishan Singh, an old Sikh lunatic in Pakistan, had owned land in his
hometown, Toba Tek Singh (the name of an actual town, which remains
unchanged), before going mad and was known as Toba Tek Singh among
his fellow lunatics. On the day of the exchange of mad men, when Bis-
han Singh’s turn comes to give his personal details for the records before
being transferred to India, he asks the official, “Where’s Toba Tek Singh?
In India or Pakistan?” The official laughs and answers, “In Pakistan, of
course.” Hearing this, Bishan Singh turns and runs back to join his com-
panions in Pakistan. The Pakistani guards catch hold of him and try to
push him across the line to India. Bishan Singh refuses to budge. “This
is Toba Tek Singh,” he announces. In order to persuade him to cross the
border into India, he is told falsely, repeatedly, that Toba Tek Singh is in
India, or very soon will be. But he remains unconvinced. When they try
to drag him to the Indian side, he resists. Since he is a harmless old man,
the officials leave him alone for the time being and proceed with the rest
of the exchange. Engrossed in the demanding task of accomplishing the
exchange, the guards forget about him. At dawn they hear a heart-rending

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scream. They find Bishan Singh’s corpse, face down and sprawled between
two barbed pens—one of Indian lunatics and the other of their Pakistani
counterparts—on a land without name.1
As it was, in real life, a no-man’s land had come into existence along
some sections of the Indo-Pakistan cease-fire line in Kashmir—an issue
that continued to exercise the United Nations Commission for India
and Pakistan (UNCIP) as well as the military representatives of India and
Pakistan during 1949.

NEHRU’S NONALIGNMENT IRRITATES WASHINGTON

That year witnessed the twin dominions drifting apart in such vital ar-
eas as foreign affairs. In pursuit of his policy of nonalignment with ei-
ther power blocks—led respectively by the Soviet Union and the United
States—Jawaharlal Nehru transferred his sister Vijay Lakshmi Pandit
from Moscow to Washington as India’s ambassador in August. She set
the scene for her brother’s visit to America two months later.
Nehru started his four days of official visits and conferences in Wash-
ington with a meeting with President Harry Truman on October 13. He
then addressed the US House of Representatives. “I have come here on a
voyage of discovery of the mind and heart of America and to place before
you our own heart,” he said. “Thus we may promote that understanding
and cooperation which, I feel sure, both our countries earnestly desire.” He
assured his audience that “where freedom is menaced or justice threatened
or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.”
Then he rushed to the Senate, temporarily meeting in the old Supreme
Court Chamber, to deliver the same speech.2
As the leader of a newly independent nation of 360 million people
with a legacy of ancient civilization, Nehru was treated as a political
superstar. “Washington’s hopes for a democratic rallying point in Asia
have been pinned on India, the second biggest Asiatic nation, and the
man who determines India’s policy—J L Nehru,” said the New York Times
in its editorial on October 14, 1949. Time chimed in by featuring a flat-
tering portrait of Nehru on the cover of its October 17 edition. He then
undertook a three-week tour of the United States, visiting cities on the
East and West Coasts and the Midwest.
In June 1950, as one of the six nonpermanent members of the UN
Security Council, India backed its Resolution 82, calling on North Korea

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 GROWING APART

to withdraw immediately to its border with South Korea. A few days later
it supplied a medical unit to the UN Command charged with reversing
North Korea’s aggression.
But later, as the United States embarked on a policy of encircling
the Soviet Union with a string of regional defense treaties, Nehru parted
company with Washington in defense matters. In early October 1949,
Truman signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Act to complement the
Economic Cooperation Act (the Marshall Plan) of April 1948, both
aimed at Europe. In 1951 these two acts were merged into the Mutual
Security Act under the Mutual Security Administration, charged with
overseeing all foreign aid programs, military and nonmilitary, to bolster
the defense capability of Washington’s allies. This step integrated the mu-
tual security pacts and the concept of security assistance with the US-led
Western world’s global strategy of containing the Soviet Union.
However, Washington’s modest economic aid to India, which started
after Nehru’s sojourn to America, continued. In January 1952 India and
the United States inked a five-year Technical Cooperation Agreement,
with Washington providing funds for specific technical projects.
The outbreak of war between North Korea and South Korea in June
1950 drew America’s attention toward Asia and heralded globalization of
its security policy. Six months earlier India had recognized the People’s
Republic of China (PRC), which came into existence on October 1, 1949,
with the military defeat of the Republic of China. India thus became the
first noncommunist country to recognize the PRC. (Its ambassador K. M.
Pannikar arrived in Beijing in April 1950.)
In October 1950 the PRC stepped into the Korean War to ensure
that the US-led UN forces did not reach its frontier. At the UN India
disagreed with America in February 1951 and refused to censure Com-
munist China as an aggressor in the ongoing war. Washington considered
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Delhi’s stance an example of communist appeasement. India’s refusal to

join the US-sponsored 1951 Treaty of Peace with Japan—a pact designed
among other things to recruit Japan as an ally against communist suc-
cesses in Asia—signaled further divergence between the two nations.
With India refusing to ally with America, the Truman administration
focused on Pakistan, which had been courting the United States since its
inception under Jinnah, who was paranoid about the Kremlin’s ambitions
in South Asia. Little wonder that it was fifteen months after his death
that, following the establishment of Pakistan’s diplomatic ties with the
Soviet Union, the first Pakistani ambassador arrived in Moscow.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

President Truman laid out the red carpet for Ali Khan at the airport
in Washington on May 3, 1950. After their meeting the next day, the
Pakistani leader addressed the two chambers of Congress separately. He
reemphasized the importance of his country’s geostrategic location adja-
cent to Afghanistan, which shared a long border with the Soviet Union.
He lined up with America to meet the Soviet menace.3 To achieve this
common aim, he asked for military aid, which Truman promised to con-
sider. Then, emulating Nehru, he toured the United States for more than
three weeks.
Soon after, he backed the UN use of force to reverse North Korea’s
invasion and occupation of part of South Korea. And, unlike Nehru, he
supported Washington’s peace treaty with Tokyo.
Once the Mutual Security Act came into force in 1951, it became
comparatively easy for Washington to combine its military and nonmili-
tary aid to Pakistan. But Truman was cautious about granting Ali Khan’s
request for arms, fearing that he would use US weapons against India in
Pakistan’s ongoing dispute in Kashmir. On his part, frustrated by Truman’s
prevarication, Ali Khan established diplomatic relations with the PRC on
May 21, 1951.
The divergence of the two neighbors in foreign policy was reflected
in their bilateral commerce. Following India’s virtual suspension of trade
with it in early 1950, Pakistan tried to forge trade links with America.
The outbreak of war in the Korean peninsula in June 1950 helped. The
subsequent hike in the prices of such raw materials as jute, leather, and
cotton benefited Pakistan, being a supplier of raw materials. Th e trade
rupture with India also accelerated the building of cotton and jute mills
in Pakistan by newly arrived Indian Muslim businessmen, whose backing
of the Muslim League prepartition was premised on the hope that one
day, in a Muslim state, they would no longer face competition from Hindu
industrialists. These new factories reduced Pakistan’s dependence on India
for finished goods. And an increased demand for raw materials enabled it
to diversify its foreign commerce.

NEHRU-ALI KHAN INTERLUDE

At home the Liaquat Ali Khan government resolved to crush the Com-
munist Party in East Pakistan, where it had substantial support among
Untouchable Hindus. During a police raid to arrest communists in the

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 GROWING APART

Untouchables’ settlement of Kalshira in mid-December 1949, a policeman

was killed. In retribution, a contingent of armed policemen and troops
raided Kalshira on December 20, beat up the villagers, and let neighbor-
ing Muslims loot their properties, kill some men, and abduct women. All
except three homesteads were razed. The nearby Hindu villages suffered
a similar fate. Some of the refugees from Kalshira arrived in Calcutta.
Their tales of woe were publicized in the West Bengal press, inflaming the
feelings of local Hindus. The result was communal rioting in Calcutta. The
exaggerated reports of these events in East Pakistan’s newspapers strained
fragile Hindu-Muslim relations.
In early February the Speaker of the East Pakistan Assembly dis-
allowed discussion of the incidents in Kalshira, which had been demanded
by the Congress Party members, all of them Hindu. The simmering com-
munal tensions escalated into violence in the capital, Dacca (later Dhaka),
following a February 10 rally in which speakers delivered anti-Hindu
tirades.
The dispersed crowd of Muslims went on a spree of looting Hindu
shops and housing, setting some of them alight. An estimated 50,000 Hin-
dus out of 80,000 among the city’s 417,000 residents became homeless
during seven hours of murder, pillage, and arson. “What I saw and learnt
from firsthand information was simply staggering and heart-rending,”
wrote Jogendra Nath Mandal, the (Untouchable) law minister of Pakistan.4
The weak government of Chief Minister Nurul Amin proved unequal
to the task of curbing the rioting. It also failed to instruct the authori-
ties in district capitals to take precautionary measures. As a consequence,
communal violence spread to several district capitals and rural areas. It
included looting, murder, rape and abduction of women, and forcible con-
versions to Islam. By collating detailed information, Mandal concluded
that the total Hindu deaths in Dacca and elsewhere were “in the neigh-
borhood of 10,000,” with the district of Barisal accounting for a quarter
of the figure.5 Large-scale exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan started
in the second half of March.
Reprisals followed in West Bengal with attacks on Muslims. In one
instance more than one hundred Muslim workers of a jute mill were
murdered in Howrah in late March. Nearly two hundred thousand
Muslims from the bordering villages of West Bengal were driven into
East Pakistan.6
Both Nehru and Ali Khan realized that if they failed to act ur-
gently in unison to stem the tide of communal violence, there would be a

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

nightmarish reprise of divided Punjab at the time of the partition. Nehru

invited his Pakistani counterpart to Delhi. Ali Khan arrived with a large
delegation. After six days of intensive negotiations, on April 8 the prime
ministers signed major documents on minorities’ rights, resolving disputes
through peaceful means, and trade, with commercial links to be restored
in February 1951.7
The two leaders agreed to set up a Ministry for Minority Affairs to be
headed by a member of the minority community. The newly established
Minority Commission in each country was charged with ensuring that
the refugees were allowed to return unmolested to sell their property, the
pillaged possessions were returned to the owner, the abducted women
repatriated, and forced conversions nullified. Even so, by the end of 1950,
more than one million Hindu refugees migrated from East Pakistan to
West Bengal. In contrast, of the seven hundred thousand Muslims who
left West Bengal because of communal turbulence, five hundred thousand
returned later.8
On the eve of the 1951 census, East Pakistan had nine million Hin-
dus, forming 22 percent of its population of forty-one million. In polar
contrast, West Pakistan had only one million Hindus, almost all of them
in Sindh. Altogether Hindus were nearly 13 percent of Pakistan’s popula-
tion. And Muslims in India constituted a minority of 10 percent.

ALI KHAN AND HIS ASSASSIN KILLED

On the afternoon of October 16, 1951, Ali Khan was the star speaker at
a huge public rally held at the Company Park in Rawalpindi. At 4:10 pm,
as he opened his speech with the welcoming words “Braadran-e-Millat”
(Urdu: Brothers of the nation), two shots fired from a Mauser pistol from
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424808577

a distance of six feet hit him in the chest. He collapsed, muttering the Is-
lamic creed in Arabic, “La ilaha illallah, Muhammad ur rasul Allah” (“There
is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is messenger of Allah”).
The weapon was fired by the twenty-nine-year-old Saad Akbar, a res-
ident of Abbottabad, where he had settled as a political refugee from
Afghanistan in 1944 and survived on a modest government stipend. In-
triguingly, he had arrived a few hours before the event and had assisted
the volunteers of the Muslim League National Guard to fix the dais and
make other arrangements for the rally.

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 GROWING APART

In the melee that followed his murderous act, Akbar was hit by five
shots fired by police subinspector Muhammad Shah Gul. His fatal inju-
ries did not spare him further stabbings, breaking of his arms, and goug-
ing of his eyes by those who pounced on him. Meanwhile, Ali Khan was
rushed to the hospital, where he died at 4:50 pm.9
The inquiry commission led by Justice Muhammad Munir, in its re-
port on August 17, 1952, said that it had not been possible to decide
definitively whether the assassin, Akbar, had acted as an individual or as
the agent of a conspiracy. The known facts and documents tended to sug-
gest that he was “the conscious or unconscious tool of some clever third
party.”10 The matter rested there, enveloped in mystery—the first in a
series that dogged the history of Pakistan, the other unsolved cases being
those of General Muhammad Zia ul Haq and Benazir Bhutto.
Thus within four years of its birth, Pakistani lost its two prime co-
founders, known respectively as the Quaid-i-Azam and Quaid-i-Millat
(Urdu: Leader of the Nation). Since none of the succeeding politicians
had the charisma or popularity of either one, the politics of the fledgling
state started to unravel.
Contrary was the case in India. There Nehru went from strength to
strength. In Delhi the Constituent Assembly adopted a new constitution
in November 1949 that came into effect two months later. The newly
inaugurated Republic of India (Bharat in Hindi), with Rajendra Prasad
as its president, was able to maintain its membership in the British Com-
monwealth thanks to the change in Britain’s law. With the December
1950 death of Vallabhbhai Patel, who represented the Hindu nationalist
trend within the Congress, the grip of the Nehru-led secular wing in the
ruling party tightened.
The first general election for the directly elected lower house of the
national parliament, called the Lok Sabha (Hindi: People’s Council), was
held with universal suffrage between October 1951 and February 1952.
The Congress Party won three-quarters of the 491 seats. As in the past,
the party’s star vote-puller was Nehru, who undertook a whirlwind tour
of the country. He continued as the prime minister and foreign minister,
assiduously pursuing his nonalignment policy.
By contrast, Ali Khan’s successor, Khwaja Nazimuddin (in office Oc-
tober 1951–April 1953) kept up the practice of periodically dispatching
a delegation to Washington to seek arms. His chances brightened when
(Retired) General Dwight Eisenhower followed Truman into the White

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

House in January 1953 and appointed the rabidly anticommunist John

Foster Dulles as his secretary of state.
By then the two neighbors in South Asia had consolidated their po-
sitions in Kashmir.

CONSOLIDATION IN KASHMIR

Following the truce on January 1, 1949, the Azad Kashmir government

became the administrative authority for the territory west of the cease-
fire line, including Gilgit Agency—composed of Gilgit, Hunza, and
Nagar—and Baltistan. Later in 1949, Pakistan imposed direct rule on
Gilgit Agency and Baltistan after merging them and named the new
entity Northern Areas. Next year it issued an ordinance, “Rules of Busi-
ness of the Azad Kashmir Government,” which served as the basic law
for the territory. The supreme head of this government functioned under
the watchful eyes of the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs. Pakistan retained
control of defense, foreign policy, and dealings with the United Nations,
while Azad Kashmir authorities continued to administer the territory and
develop it economically.
In March 1950 the UNCIP gave way to the UN representative
charged with the task of bringing about demilitarization in both parts
of Kashmir. The first such representative, Australian judge Owen Dixon,
reported that since Delhi would never agree to demilitarization, two other
alternatives should be considered. One: hold four regional plebiscites—in
Jammu, Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and the Northern Areas. Two: partition
the state, with some areas to India and others to Pakistan, and hold a
plebiscite only in the Kashmir Valley.
Nehru showed interest, but Ali Khan rejected Dixon’s proposals. He
insisted on a plebiscite to decide the fate of all of Jammu and Kashmir,
confident that its Muslim majority would opt for accession to Pakistan.
This was the earliest of several missed opportunities to peacefully resolve
the dispute, which has since then proved intractable.
Forced by Delhi, Maharaja Sir Hari Singh abdicated in favor of his
eighteen-year-old son, Karan Singh, in 1949, while Shaikh Muhammad
Abdullah remained the state’s chief executive. Article 370 in the secular
Indian constitution accorded Kashmir the right to have its own constitu-
tion. Elections for the 75-member Constituent Assembly were scheduled
for August through September 1951. In the end polls were held only in

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 GROWING APART

four constituencies because those opposing Abdullah’s National Confer-

ence, concentrated in the Jammu region, were told that they had all filled
their nomination papers “incorrectly” and could therefore not contest the
election! Such tactics were the staple of a one-party dictatorship rather
than a multiparty democratic entity.
By so doing, Abdullah accentuated the traditional animosity that had
existed between the Hindus in Jammu who had identified with the ma-
haraja and the Muslims in Kashmir who loathed the Hindu ruler. Now
the Hindus in Jammu began protesting against “Kashmiri domination”
and demanding closer ties with India. Abdullah agreed to give the Indian
president power to “declare state of emergency” in Jammu and Kash-
mir in the event of external aggression. This did not satisfy the staunchly
pro-India elements in Jammu. Led by the communalist Bharatiya Jan
Sangh (Hindi: Indian People’s Union), they launched an agitation for
“One constitution, one flag, and one president” in late 1952. This caused
apprehension among Kashmiri Muslims, who saw in this a threat to the
special status conferred on the state by the Indian constitution.
It was in this atmosphere of escalating tension and suspicion in the
state that a plan to arrest Abdullah was hatched in Delhi by a Nehru-
guided cabal, which included Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, deputy of
Abdullah; Durga Prasad Dhar, a Hindu colleague of Abdullah; and
Karan Singh. What spurred them into action was the letter by President
Prasad to Nehru on July 14, 1953, in which he wrote that on his return
from a visit to Kashmir, Vice President Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
told him that “even Shaikh Abdullah thought that we would lose in a
plebiscite.”11
On August 9, 1953, on the order of Karan Singh, Abdullah was ar-
rested under the state’s Public Security Act and detained “for the time
being.”12 His incarceration ended briefly in January 1958.
Much changed during the intervening period in Pakistan, domesti-
cally and externally.

PAKISTAN IN WASHINGTON’S ORBIT

The Eisenhower-Dulles duo set out to build a ring of containment around

the Sino-Soviet bloc, and Pakistan was a key part of that ring. Washing-
ton viewed Pakistan as a strategically located country with “a volunteer
army of 300,000,” which was “not neutral but [was] anti-communist.” It

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

was “extremely well-disciplined, professional, well trained armed forces

whose morale and bravery are unquestionable.”13
Muhammad Ali Bogra, the prime minister of Pakistan, had previously
served as his country’s ambassador to the United States from February
1952 to April 1953. On April 2, 1954, the United States signed a Mutual
Defense Assistance Agreement with Pakistan, capped by a separate pact
to meet Congressional requirements on May 19.
“I send you this personal message because I want you to know about
my decision to extend military aid to Pakistan before it is public knowl-
edge, and also because I want you to know directly from me that this step
does not in any way affect the friendship we feel for India,” wrote Eisen-
hower to Nehru on February 24.

What we are proposing to do, and what Pakistan is agreeing to, is not di-
rected in any way against India. I am confirming publicly that if our aid to
any country, including Pakistan, is misused and directed against another in
aggression I will undertake immediately . . . appropriate action, both within
and without the U.N., to thwart such aggression. . . . We also believe that it
is in the interest of the free world that India should have a strong military
defense capability, and have admired the effective way in which your gov-
ernment has administered your military establishments. If your government
should conclude that circumstances require military aid of a type contem-
plated by our mutual security legislation, please be assured that your request
would receive my most sympathetic consideration.14

Nehru declined Eisenhower’s offer. “You are, however, aware of the

views of my Government and our people in regard to the matter,” replied
Nehru on March 1. “Those views and policy which we have pursued after
most careful thought are based on our desire to help in the furtherance of
peace and freedom. We shall continue to pursue that policy.” By making
this suggestion, he observed, “the President has done less than justice to
us or to himself. If we object to military aid being given to Pakistan, we
would be hypocrites and unprincipled opportunists to accept such aid
ourselves.”15
On that day Nehru publicly denounced Washington’s military assis-
tance to Pakistan as “intervention” in Indo-Pakistan affairs. As such, his
government was no longer prepared to accept the American members of
the UN observers’ team in Kashmir as neutral. Domestically, by leading

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 GROWING APART

the denunciation of the Pakistan-US pact in its demonstrations and ral-

lies, the Congress Party preempted any chances of the right-wing Bhara-
tiya Jan Sangh or the Communist Party of India exploiting the issue to
shore up its popular following.
Before Nehru’s open disagreement with Eisenhower, his administra-
tion had made use of its neutrality to end the war in Korea. During his
spring 1953 global tour, Dulles visited Delhi, where he paid tribute to “In-
dia’s efforts at the UN to end the war in Korea.” He also said that Wash-
ington would aid India’s First Five Year Plan for economic development.16
When the negotiations for a cease-fire in the Korean War became
deadlocked on the issue of the repatriation of prisoners of war, a solution
was found in establishing the Neutral Nations Repatriations Commis-
sion, headed by India. It was mandated to interview in a neutral setting
individual prisoners who refused repatriation and have them choose their
side. That process finally led to the signing of the truce on July 27, 1953.
By strange coincidence, it was during that month that, overriding Amer-
ica’s objections, India went ahead with a shipment of thorium nitrate—a
substance with potential for use in nuclear industry—to Communist
China. To qualify for receiving any aid from the United States, Delhi
had to abide by its End User Agreement, which incorporated its Export
Control Act of 1949. That act restricted export of certain strategic or
military items to the Soviet bloc and covered a wide range of materials
needed for the production of weapons, with particular focus on anything
that could aid atomic weapons research and construction. In 1953, when
Washington learned of India’s impending export of thorium nitrate to
Communist China, which it considered part of the Soviet bloc, it pointed
to its acts to abort the shipment. Keen to assert his country’s newly won
independence, Nehru refused to accept any US-imposed restrictions on
India’s trade. Breach of the US law would have led to the termination of
aid by Washington. Realizing that cutting off all aid to India would do
more harm than good, Dulles negotiated a compromise whereby India
agreed to send only one shipment to Communist China.17
This minor concession to India left untouched the Eisenhower-Dulles
strategy to cordon off the Sino-Soviet bloc. Four months after signing the
Mutual Security Assistance Agreement, Pakistan attended a meeting of
eight nations in Manila to form the South-East Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO).18 This was followed by Pakistan joining Iran, ruled by the shah
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, and Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Treaty Organization (NATO), to form the Central Treaty Organization

(CENTO) in 1955.
After the signing of the US-Pakistan military pact, hundreds of Paki-
stani officers were sent to the Pentagon’s military academies for advanced
training. The US Military Assistance Advisory Group set up its office at
Pakistan’s Army Headquarters in Rawalpindi.
With US military aid of $266 million in 1955 rocketing to $1.086
billion the following year,19 the budget and the popular standing of Pa-
kistan’s armed forces rose sharply. By contrast, the prestige of politicians
sank ever lower.
In the March 1951 elections in Punjab during Ali Khan’s pre-
miership, the Muslim League fared well. But it failed to repeat the
performance in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) election
in December. Its achievement in the legislative election in Sindh in
May 1953 was lackluster. And in the populous East Pakistan in March
1954 it suffered a humiliating defeat by the United Front of Bengali
nationalists.
Reflecting this dramatic development, Governor-General Ghulam
Muhammad dissolved the Constituent Assembly on October 24, 1954,
saying it had become unrepresentative. This in turn led Bogra to form a
new cabinet. He appointed Major-General Iskander (also spelled Sikan-
der) Ali Mirza to be his interior minister and the chief of army staff,
Major-General Muhammad Ayub Khan, as his defense minister, a post
held until then by civilian premiers. When the ailing Muhammad spent
two months in Britain for medical treatment, Mirza served as the acting
governor-general.
A month later Bogra announced a plan to merge the western wing’s
four provinces, former princely states and tribal agencies into one unit,
to be called West Pakistan. It came into being in October 1955. A new
Constituent Assembly of 80, with its members divided equally between
West and East Pakistan, was elected by the members of their respective
legislatures in April.
When the terminally ill Muhammad resigned as governor-general in
August 1955, Major-General Mirza succeeded him, a sign of the ascend-
ing power of the military in administering Pakistan. As an ethnic Bengali,
he considered it politically unwise to have another Bengali, Bogra, con-
tinue as the prime minister. So he dispatched him back to Washington as
Pakistan’s ambassador.

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 GROWING APART

PAKISTAN LOSES ITS CONSTITUTION AND

GAINS A MILITARY RULER

Mirza called on Chaudhri (also spelled Chaudhry) Muhammad Ali, a

Punjabi bureaucrat turned Muslim League leader, to form the next gov-
ernment. Thanks to his determined push, the new Constituent Assembly
adopted a republican constitution with a provision for universal suffrage
on February 29, 1956. It prescribed a parliamentary form of government,
with Islam as the state religion and Urdu, English, and Bengali as the
state languages. However, objecting to the absence of regional autonomy,
the sixteen members of the East Pakistan-based Awami League, led by
Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, walked out. The constitution came into
force on March 23, 1956—the sixteenth anniversary of the Lahore Res-
olution of the All India Muslim League—with Major-General Mirza
unanimously elected as the first president of the Islamic Republic of Pa-
kistan by its National Assembly.
With its republican constitution, Pakistan caught up with India. But
by having a retired major-general as its president, Pakistan set itself apart
from its bigger neighbor, where all power rested with elected civilians.
Moreover, the constitutional article in Pakistan that “the ministers shall
serve at the pleasure of the president” accorded the president a most pow-
erful lever. Mirza used this authority freely to dismiss ministries at the
center and in the provinces. He constantly misused his clout to promote
political intrigue and horse-trading.
When the Muslim League group in the National Assembly split
and the defectors joined other politicians to form the Republican Party,
Muhammad Ali resigned in September 1956. He was followed by
Suhrawardy, who led a coalition of his Awami League and the Republican
Party. He was married to Vera Tiscenko, a Moscow-born Russian actress
who had found refuge for herself and her infant son from the impending
war in Europe by moving from Rome to Calcutta in the late 1930s. As a
result Suhrawardy had become keenly interested in international affairs.
Within weeks of becoming the premier and defense minister,
Suhrawardy, accompanied by his foreign minister, Firoz Khan Noon, vis-
ited Beijing. They told Prime Minister Zhou Enlai (Chou Enlai) that
Pakistan had made its choice to stand with the United States, and hoped
Communist China would move toward more friendly relations with Pa-
kistan as well as America.20 Zhou lent them a sympathetic ear. He paid a

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

return visit to Karachi in December. By happenstance, during that month

Nehru visited Eisenhower at his Gettysburg Farm.
The coveted prize for Suhrawardy was a meeting with Eisenhower.
This materialized on July 10, 1957, at the White House. In return for
US civilian and military aid to Pakistan of $2.142 billion in the previous
year, Eisenhower asked for secret intelligence and military facilities on the
Pakistani soil. Suhrawardy agreed, according to Syed Amjad Ali, a former
Pakistani ambassador to Washington.21 The United States was allowed
to fly its high altitude U-2 reconnaissance planes over the Soviet Union
from the Pakistani Air Force’s section of the Peshawar airport. In return
Eisenhower agreed to include F-104 fighter jets and Patton tanks, both
superior to India’s weapons, in Washington’s arms shipments.
After lengthy negotiations, the two governments signed a ten-year
agreement in July 1958. It provided the six-year-old US National Security
Agency (NSA) a base at Badaber, ten miles from Peshawar.
The agency’s task was to monitor communications at the sites of bal-
listic missiles and nuclear tests in Soviet Central Asia, and other related
exchanges.22
At home Suhrawardy came under pressure to confirm March 1958 as
the date for the general election under the new constitution. Arguing that
he needed two years to implement his program, he advanced that date to
the end of 1958. President Mirza feared that Suhrawardy’s success as pre-
mier would weaken his hand. So he fired Suhrawardy in October. He called
on Ismail Ibrahim Chundrigar, a Gujarati-speaking contemporary of Jin-
nah, to head the new government. Chundrigar failed to assemble a cabinet.
Mirza’s next choice fell on Noon, a Punjabi feudal lord and leader of
the Republican Party. Noon headed a coalition of five groups, including
the Muslim League, which assumed office in mid-December 1957. It was
during Noon’s tenure that the NSA started building the Peshawar Air
Base complex, with Washington’s overgenerous aid to Pakistan running
at $1.5 billion annually.23 Known locally as Little America, the completed
Badaber complex included technical infrastructure, residential quarters,
and sports facilities, with access to it controlled by the United States.
Domestically, Mirza reveled in political intrigue. As a result the Mus-
lim League withdrew from the coalition. On September 28, 1958, its lead-
ers threatened to dislodge Noon’s government through extraconstitutional
means, if necessary.
That gave Mirza a convenient rationale to scrap the constitution on
October 7, 1958. He claimed it was unworkable because of dangerous

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 GROWING APART

compromises. He dismissed the national and provincial cabinets, dissolved

the national and provincial legislatures, and banned all political parties.
He imposed martial law and appointed Major-General Ayub Khan as the
chief martial law administrator.24
When he and Ayub Khan could not work out the modalities of power
sharing, Mirza unilaterally appointed Ayub Khan prime minister and se-
lected a cabinet of technocrats for him. Ayub Khan protested Mirza’s
high-handedness. An arch manipulator, Mirza tried to gain support of
Ayub Khan’s rivals within the military. Informed of Mirza’s chicanery,
Ayub Khan, backed by the high command, dispatched three generals to
the presidential residence in the middle of the night on October 26–27
to put Mirza on a plane to London. Ayub Khan became the sole ruler. By
abolishing the post of prime minister, he became the president.
He explained to the nation that Pakistan needed stability that could
only be achieved by turning out “the inefficient and rascally” politicians
responsible for political instability and letting the army play a central role
in administering the republic. Since day-to-day administration remained
with civil servants, it led to an alliance between the upper ranks of bu-
reaucracy and the military.
With that an era ended in Pakistan. It now stood starkly apart from
India, where the second general election in 1957 had returned the Con-
gress Party and Nehru to power. By then the stances of the two neighbors
on Kashmir had become unbridgeable.
Military ties between Karachi and Washington were reinforced as a
consequence of the Joint Resolution to Promote Peace and Stability in
the Middle East passed by the US Congress in March 1957. It autho-
rized the president to use the armed forces to assist any nation or group
of nations in the Middle East against armed aggression from any country
“controlled by international communism.”25 Washington treated Pakistan
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424808635

as part of the Middle East by virtue of its defense alliance with Iran and
Turkey under CENTO.

KASHMIR ISSUE HARDENING

In the wake of their bilateral meeting in London during the Common-

wealth prime ministers’ conference in June 1953, Bogra and Nehru de-
cided to continue their dialogue on Kashmir and other issues. During
his three-day visit to Karachi toward the end of July, Nehru was received

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warmly at the official and popular levels, with Bogra repeatedly referring
to him as “my elder brother.” They parted with an agreement to meet in
Delhi in October.
But Shaikh Abdullah’s overnight arrest in early August led to a change
in the timing. Anti-India protests in the Kashmir Valley at Abdullah’s
detention were suppressed with a heavy hand by his successor, Bakshi
Ghulam Muhammad. Across the border, Abdullah’s incarceration turned
him into a hero. The demonstrators in major Pakistani cities demanded
urgent and strong action by their government on Kashmir.
Pressed by Bogra, Nehru agreed to meet in Delhi on August 16. Their
joint communiqué referred to a fair and impartial plebiscite agreed to
“some years” ago and a lack of progress because of certain “preliminary
issues.” It was decided to appoint committees of military and other ex-
perts to advise the prime ministers to resolve the “preliminary issues” as a
preamble to appointing the plebiscite administrator by the end of April
1954. The administrator would then outline preparations for holding a
plebiscite in “the entire State [of Jammu and Kashmir].”26
This communiqué went down badly in West Pakistan. Its critics de-
nounced the sidelining of the United Nations, the proposed replacement
of Admiral Chester Nimitz of the United States as the plebiscite admin-
istrator, and the possibility of zonal plebiscites. Popular disapproval and
the lack of unanimous backing by his cabinet tied Bogra’s hands. His
initial enthusiasm died when Nehru repudiated his agreement about the
return of refugees to their homes because of “practical difficulties.” That
meant disfranchising hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from the
Jammu region who had migrated to West Pakistan out of fear.
As US arms poured into Pakistan, Nehru, in his letter to Bogra on
December 3, 1953, said that American military aid would have direct
bearing on the Kashmir issue, and advised the Pakistani government to
stay away from power blocs. Later, when the delegates of the two coun-
tries met in Delhi to discuss demilitarization, the Indians insisted that the
issue of US military assistance be discussed first. The Pakistanis refused.
The meeting ended with the agenda untouched.
In his letter of March 29, 1954, Bogra explained to Nehru that Wash-
ington’s military aid had nothing to do with either the Indo-Pakistan
dispute over Kashmir or the right of self-determination for Kashmiris.
Nehru ignored the argument. Two weeks later he informed Bogra that
the situation had changed as a result of the US-Pakistan military pact and
that the deadline of appointing the plebiscite administrator by the end

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 GROWING APART

of April had become redundant. “It is with profound regret that I have
been led to the conclusion that our talks regarding Kashmir have failed,”
concluded Bogra in his letter of September 21.27
If, by some miracle, Bogra would have seen the note Nehru addressed
to Kashmir’s prime minister Abdullah on August 25, 1952, from Sonamarg
in Kashmir, he would have concluded that his “elder brother” was just
going through ritualistic motions about a plebiscite. In it Nehru virtually
conceded that he had decided against a plebiscite “towards the end of
December 1948.” He had accepted the UN Commission for India and
Pakistan’s plebiscite proposals on December 23, 1948, in order to achieve
a cease-fire, since the Indian Army had reached the desired line on the
ground. He was determined to maintain “the status quo then existing” by
force. “We are superior to Pakistan in military and industrial power,” he
wrote. “But that superiority is not so great as to produce results quickly
either in war or by fear of war. Therefore, our national interest demands
that we should adopt a peaceful policy towards Pakistan and, at the same
time, add to our strength.”28 In short, Nehru, a self-righteous moralizer,
sacrificed morality and legalism on the altar of power politics.
Compared to this sensational admission, his revelation in April 1956
that about a year earlier he had made an unsuccessful offer to Bogra in-
volving a permanent de jure partition of Kashmir along the cease-fire line
was bland.29

NEHRU’S HENCHMAN IN SRINAGAR

While Nehru conducted diplomatic dialogue with Bogra, in Srinagar

Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad proved more pro-India than Indians them-
selves. Led by him, 64 of the 74-strong Constituent Assembly members
ratified the state’s accession to India on February 15, 1954. “We are today
taking the decision of final and irrevocable accession to India and no
power on earth could change it,” declared Bakshi Muhammad.30 Later
that year he said that Shaikh Abdullah would be “detained as long as the
future of Kashmir remains undecided.”31
In Moscow, the communist leadership was alarmed by the way the
US-led alliance was circling the USSR with regional defense pacts. It
noted that Pakistan had the distinction of belonging to both SEATO
and CENTO. By contrast, Nehru was unswervingly committed to his
doctrine of nonalignment. After the death of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

in March 1953, relations between Moscow and Delhi had improved, with
the two nations inking a trade pact at the end of the year. In 1954 the
Kremlin agreed to build a steel plant in India’s public sector. Four months
later, Nehru undertook a sixteen-day official tour of the Soviet Union.32
Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, the Soviet premier, paid a return
visit to India from November 18 to December 1.
To register their disapproval of Pakistan’s foreign policy, the Soviet
dignitaries visited Srinagar. “The people of Jammu and Kashmir want
to work for the well being of their beloved country—the Republic of
India,” said Khrushchev. “They do not want to become toys in the hands
of the imperialist powers. This is what some powers are trying to do by
supporting Pakistan on the so-called Kashmir question. . . . That Kashmir
is one of the States of the Republic of India has already been decided by
the people of Kashmir.”33 While the Soviet leader’s statement was thun-
derously lauded in Delhi, the disillusioned top officials in Karachi called
it “extraordinary.”
Bogra and his succeeding prime ministers rejected anything less than
a plebiscite. They were confident that in any fair plebiscite the predomi-
nantly Muslim population would opt for Jammu and Kashmir acceding
to Pakistan.
This point was conceded, implicitly, by Arthur Lall, India’s represen-
tative to the United Nations, in his private meeting with James W. Barco,
counselor in the US delegation at the United Nations, in New York in
early January 1957. “Lall maintained that the only way Pakistan could win
[the plebiscite] would be on religious issue and this would fan religious
tensions among Moslems in India and could produce another round of
communal riots,” read the telegram sent by the American mission at the
United Nations to the Department of State on January 10.34
Working in close cooperation with Delhi, Muhammad used bribes,
repression, and election rigging to consolidate his power. On Novem-
ber 17, 1956, the Constituent Assembly adopted the state’s constitution,
which came into effect on January 26, 1957. Section 3 stated that “the
State of Jammu and Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union
of India.” This section was declared immune from any amendment in the
future.
Responding to Pakistan’s lobbying of SEATO, three of its mem-
bers—the United States, Britain, and Australia—submitted a resolution at
the UN Security Council on February 20, 1957, backing its proposal for

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the deployment of “a temporary United Nations force in connection with

demilitarization” in Kashmir. It won 9 out of 11 votes, but the Soviet
Union vetoed it, arguing that the two contending parties had not ex-
hausted bilateral means of resolving the dispute.35 As a result, the prestige
of the Soviet Union in India rocketed. In October it was boosted further
with Moscow’s successful launch of the world’s first artificial satellite,
named Sputnik.
In March 1957, in a blatantly rigged election in Indian Kashmir, the
National Conference won 68 of the 75 seats in the Legislative Assembly.
Shaikh Abdullah was released from house arrest in January 1958. He
became the chief patron of the Plebiscite Front. Formed by his deputy
Mirza Afzal Beg during his incarceration, the Front demanded a ref-
erendum under the aegis of the United Nations to decide the issue of
Kashmir’s sovereignty. Abdullah blasted Muhammad’s government as
one composed of goons, opportunists, and thieves. Delhi attributed his
uncompromising stance to contacts with Pakistan, which was allegedly
funding him. He was rearrested in late April and charged, along with
twenty-two others, of hatching a conspiracy to bring down the govern-
ment through chaos and violence. Livid at Abdullah’s rearrest, Muslim
Conference activists from Azad Kashmir decided to cross the cease-fire
line into Indian Kashmir. President Mirza did not want to provoke India.
So the Pakistani authorities arrested hundreds of Muslim Conference
volunteers and their leaders.
The trial against Abdullah and others, which started in March 1959,
involving 223 prosecution witnesses and nearly three hundred exhibits,
would drag on until early 1964, when it would be withdrawn.

DIFFERING PRIORITIES

Ayub Khan’s first priority was to consolidate and legitimize his authority
at home. He set in motion a process to draft a new constitution. At the
same time he needed to assure the military and the public that he was not
neglecting the emotionally and ideologically charged issue of Kashmir.
In March 1959 he cosigned the Pakistan-US Cooperation Agree-
ment. After stating that the United States “regards as vital to its national
interests and to world peace the preservation of independence and ter-
ritorial integrity of Pakistan,” Article 1 added that “in case of aggression
against Pakistan . . . the United States of America . . . will take such

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

appropriate action, including the use of armed forces, as may be mutually

agreed upon, and as is envisaged in the [March 9, 1957] Joint Resolution
to Promote Peace and Stability in the Middle East in order to assist Pa-
kistan in its requests.”36
In Delhi, escalating tensions between India and China on their border
dispute, which had been building up since 1954, had made Nehru pliable
to discuss the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan and set aside his objections
about the Pakistan-US Cooperation Agreement.
Thus, on September 1, 1959, Ayub Khan, now a self-promoted field
marshal, stopped over at New Delhi’s Palam airport on his way from
Rawalpindi to Dacca to meet Nehru. (On that day Indian newspapers
splashed the news of the resignation of the chief of army staff, General
K. S. Thimayya, in protest of the government’s tepid response to Chi-
na’s inroads in the Aksai Chin region of Kashmir.) The Nehru–Ayub
Khan communiqué stated that “there was need to conduct their relations
with each other on a rational and planned basis, and not according to
the day-to-day exigencies as they arose, and that their outstanding issues
and other problems should, in mutual interest, be settled in accordance
with justice and fair play in a spirit of friendliness, cooperation and good
neighborliness.”37
The conciliatory approach led to a successful end to the long, tortuous
negotiations on the distribution of the waters in the Indus River basin.
In May 1948 the two neighbors had signed the Inter-Dominion Accord
on apportioning the waters of the Indus basin, whereby India agreed to
release sufficient waters to West Pakistan for an annual payment. This was
a temporary arrangement. When it came to negotiating a permanent ac-
cord, Pakistan realized anew that with the source of all six major rivers of
the basin being in India, it held weak cards. Yet it insisted on perpetuating
its prepartition right to the waters of all the Indus tributaries, arguing that
the absence of this resource would turn the eastern zone of West Punjab
into a desert. India maintained that the previous distribution of waters
should not determine future allocation. Pakistan suggested referring the
matter to the International Court of Justice. India rejected the idea.
Instead, in 1952 both agreed to invite the World Bank initially to offer
advice on the technical aspects of the problem. Two years later, however,
the World Bank came up with its own award. It offered India the three
eastern tributaries of the basin—Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi—and Pakistan
the remaining three western ones: Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab. To com-
pensate Pakistan for ceding its (partial) rights to the eastern tributaries,

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 GROWING APART

India was required to build canals and storage facilities to transfer wa-
ter from the eastern Indian rivers to West Pakistan. Whereas Delhi was
amenable to the bank’s proposal, Karachi rejected it.
Bilateral negotiations reached a breaking point but were not called off.
The successive short-term Pakistani governments realized that ending the
talks would raise tensions with India to a boiling point, which they could
not risk. In the absence of a permanent treaty, Delhi was forced to put on
hold large development projects in the Indus basin area.
Now that he headed a stable military government in Pakistan, Pres-
ident Ayub Khan was able to clinch the deal on Indus waters once the
World Bank persuaded America and Britain, along with Australia and
New Zealand, to finance the construction of canals and storage facilities
in India to transfer water from the eastern Indian rivers to West Pakistan.
Ayub Khan proposed Karachi as the site for the formal signing of
the accord by Nehru and him. Nehru concurred. On September 19, 1960,
more than one hundred thousand people greeted Nehru at the Karachi
airport. The ten-mile route from the airport to the Presidential House was
lined by crowds shouting, “Nehru zindabad” (Urdu: Long live Nehru), at
the slow moving motorcade led by Nehru and Ayub Khan in an open car.
There was a ceremonial signing of the Indus Waters treaty at the Pres-
ident’s Office. In the evening, after a reception attended by a thousand
invited guests on the spacious, manicured lawns of the Presidential House,
Nehru hailed the treaty as “memorable” because “in spite of the problem
and harassing delays, success has come at last.” He described it as “a sym-
bol of unity and cooperation between two neighboring countries.”38
The successful solution to this critical economic conundrum encour-
aged Ayub Khan to try to resolve the pivotal political issue of Kashmir. To
discuss the thorny dispute in a salubrious climate, Ayub Khan flew Nehru
to the Presidential Lodge in the hill station of Murree on September 21.
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424808673

But their one-on-one talks proved sterile.

Six months later, on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of
Government conference in London, Ayub Khan chatted with Rajeshwar
Dayal, his friend of prepartition days who later served as India’s high
commissioner in Karachi. “Woh mujhe hiqarat ki nazar se dekhta hain”
(Urdu: He looks at me with contempt), he told Dayal, referring to Nehru
and their meeting in Murree. The Pakistani president added that being
the head of a large state, he should not have been treated that way. “Ayub
Khan revealed that when he tried to open a conversation about Kashmir,
Nehru simply stared out of the window at the scenery and ‘shut up like

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

a clam.’”39 By then Nehru had made it a standard practice to turn his

gaze to open space or stare at his feet when any foreign leader mentioned
Kashmir in their conversation.
As an intellectual who had authored Glimpses of World History—a
thousand-page tome written during his imprisonment in 1931–1933—
without reference to any library as well as The Discovery of India, penned
in five months during his incarceration from August 1942 to June 1945,
Nehru was disdainful of leaders of lesser knowledge. In his public life
he had dealt mainly with lawyer-politicians, often trained in Britain. Of
the five Pakistani prime ministers Nehru met or corresponded with, all
except one was a lawyer or an Oxbridge graduate, or both. Though Ayub
Khan had a distinguished career in his own right, he did not fall into any
of these categories.
Born into the household of Mirdad Khan, an ethnic Pashtun non-
commissioned officer of the British Indian Army, in a village near
Haripur in NWFP, Ayub Khan had the distinction of being the first
nonwhite cadet at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, England.
He graduated as a second lieutenant and joined the British Indian Army.
During World War II he was promoted to colonel. In 1947, when he
opted for the Pakistan army, he was the tenth ranking senior officer. Fur-
ther promotions made him the chief of army staff four years later. A bluff,
broad-shouldered man with a clipped mustache, he was a contrast to the
slight figure of Nehru.
While unable to mask effectively his disdain for Ayub Khan, Nehru
summarized his talk with him in Murree in fifteen paragraphs penned
on September 21, 1960. “He [Ayub Khan] spoke at some length on this
subject [of Kashmir] and laid stress on as speedy a solution as possible,”
noted Nehru. “In dealing with Kashmir we had to take a realistic view of
the situation. Not to do so would land us in greater difficulties. It would be
most unfortunate for us to try to take a step which might create numerous
upsets and emotional upheavals.”40 Nehru was a master of obfuscation
when it suited him.
In his memoirs, Friends Not Masters, published in 1967, Ayub Khan
referred to the Murree meeting and Kashmir. “Mr Nehru finally asked
what, accepting the fact that there was need for peace between the two
countries and also that the room for maneuver for settlement of the Kash-
mir dispute was limited, I thought should be our first step,” wrote Ayub
Khan. “I told him that this would depend on the objective we had be-
fore us. Once the objective was determined, an organization could be

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 GROWING APART

established to work out the method. Mr Nehru said that he foresaw se-
rious political opposition in his country. He mentioned that Indian pub-
lic opinion had reacted violently to Chinese ‘occupation’ of [the] ‘Indian
territory.’”41
Having used the external factor of the US-Pakistan Mutual Security
Pact as his excuse to renege on the holding of a plebiscite in Kashmir
earlier, Nehru now shifted his argument to the domestic scene. In essence,
he had come to subscribe to the idea of turning the cease-fire line into a
de facto partition of Kashmir, which he first mentioned to his Pakistani
counterpart, Bogra, in May 1955. This was unacceptable to Pakistan be-
cause it would have legitimized Delhi’s control of the Vale of Kashmir, the
coveted prize in the increasingly bitter struggle.
By then China had become an integral factor in the Indo-Pakistan
equation because of its occupation of a part of Jammu and Kashmir, as
alleged by Delhi. Unsurprisingly, therefore, at the Murree meeting, Nehru
raised the issue of Pakistan’s boundary with China. Ayub Khan recalled:

He asked me whether we had approached the Chinese to demarcate the

border and I informed him of the position. He wanted me to show him
the map on which we were basing our claim and wanted to know exactly
the area to which our claim extended. I told him quite frankly that we had
no intention of claiming any area which we did not honestly believe to be
covered by the actual line of control as determined by our experts. We might
ask for certain areas beyond the line of control to provide facilities for the
local population. . . . As soon as he went back to India, he started criticizing
us for having approached the Chinese to demarcate the border. He men-
tioned the map I had shown him and said that we did not even know where
the border was and that we were acting in a childish manner. That was Mr
Nehru’s style, he quite forgot the spirit in which we had discussed the matter
and used the whole thing as a debating point.42

It was this sort of diplomacy that had brought relations between India
and China to a breaking point within six years and that would lead to a
war between them in the autumn of 1962.

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 8

Nehru’s “Forward Policy”

A Step Too Far

In earlier centuries, given the inaccessibility of desolate tracts in remote

high mountains along their common borders, the dispute between British
India and China centered on the zone or tract rather than the line in their
eastern and western sectors. Notably, the North-East Frontier Agency in
British India was originally called the North-East Frontier Tract.
The modern-day boundary is the end result of a process that starts
with delimitation—defining the boundary in writing, in treaties or
agreements—and then proceeds to delineation, sketching the boundary
in maps after joint boundary surveys. The final stage, called “demarcation,”
establishes the boundary line on the ground with pillars, chains, or other
markers. By this criterion, China’s southern border lacked line boundaries
not only with India (and later Pakistan as well) but also Burma (renamed
Myanmar) and Nepal.

TIBET, A BUFFER BETWEEN CHINA AND BRITISH INDIA

In the wake of the fall of the Qing Dynasty in China in early 1912, the
claim of Tibet, ruled by the Dalai Lama, to be an independent entity
clashed with the 1904 treaty it had signed with London following its
defeat by the British Indian Army. That treaty ceded Tibet’s foreign re-
lations and trade rights to Britain, and entitled it to an indemnity of Rs
2.5 million.
In 1913, British India’s foreign secretary, Sir Henry McMahon—a
tall, slim man with a long, lean face embellished with a mustache—
conferred with the Chinese plenipotentiary Chen Ivan and Tibetan

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 NEHRU’S “FORWARD POLICY ”

Lonchen Shatra in Simla (later Shimla) to discuss Tibet’s new status.

Their final Simla Convention document of July 3, 1914, referred to a
small-scale map. It showed lines separating China from “Inner Tibet”—
roughly today’s Tibet Autonomous Region—administered by the Dalai
Lama government under the “suzerainty” of China and separating “In-
ner Tibet” from “Outer Tibet.” This map lacked an initial or signature of
Chen.1 After Beijing had repudiated the first draft of the Simla Conven-
tion on April 28, McMahon and Shatra attached a note denying China
any privileges under the agreement and signed it as a bilateral accord.
The McMahon Line ran 550 miles east from the northeastern border of
Bhutan along the Himalayas, across the great bend in the Brahmaputra
River, then southeast to Burma.
In 1935, Olaf Caroe, deputy secretary of British India’s Foreign and
Political Department, discovered the documents of the Simla Convention
while dealing with the case of a Briton’s illegal entry into Tibet through
the Tawang tract. He convinced his superiors to include the McMahon
Line on official maps, which had not been the case so far.
Seven years later, to withstand the Japanese offensive during World
War II, the Assam government undertook a number of forward policy
measures to tighten its hold on the semiautonomous North-East Frontier
Agency (NEFA), covering 23,165 square miles. In 1945 it extended its
administrative control over that part of the Tawang tract that lay south
of the Se-La Mountain Pass. The subsequent Assam Rifles contingent
posted at Dirang Dzong expelled the Tibetan tax collectors from the
territory but left the Tibetan authorities in control of the area north of the
Se-La Mountain Pass, which contained the town of Tawang with its four-
centuries-old Buddhist monastery.
As the successor of the British Empire in India, Nehru’s government
inherited these privileges. When the long-running Chinese civil war
ended with the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in
October 1949, this necessitated a fresh treaty between Delhi and Beijing
on Tibet.
In Delhi a Tibetan delegation met the Chinese ambassador, General
Yuan Zhongxian, on September 16, 1950. Yuan passed on his govern-
ment’s proposal that in return for Tibet agreeing to be part of China,
and letting Beijing handle its defense and foreign relations and trade,
China would respect its internal autonomy and social system under the
Dalai Lama. The government of Tenzin Gyasto, the eighteen-year-old
fourteenth Dalai Lama, in Lhasa rejected the offer. As a consequence, the

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Chinese troops of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) entered Tibet in

October and defeated its army in Chamdo.
Protracted negotiations followed. On May 23, 1951, the Tibetan del-
egation in Beijing signed a Seventeen-Point Agreement with the Chinese
government, accepting China’s rule in Tibet, including the posting of the
PLA there.2
The turmoil in Tibet provided the background against which Major
Ralengnao Khathing led an Assam Rifles column to Tawang in February
1951 and took control of the remainder of the Tawang tract from the
Tibetans. That signaled the end of Tibet’s historic control of the area.3 At
that time the Chinese government was too preoccupied with getting the
Dalai Lama to accept the reduced status of Tibet to protest India’s seizure
of the territory north of the Se-La Pass.
On the western sector of the Sino-Indian border, the southern part
of the PRC’s Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Region—later, Xinjiang Au-
tonomous Region—abuts the Ladakh province of Jammu and Kashmir.
There the Aksai Chin region became a bone of contention between India
and China. The 1931 volume of the annual Aichison’s Treaties, published by
the government in Delhi, stated that “the northern as well as the eastern
boundary of the Kashmir State is still undefined.”4 The Survey of India
maps published in the 1920s and 1930s showed wide blank spaces be-
tween Kashmir and Xinjiang and between Kashmir and Tibet.5 In 1945,
guided by Olaf Caroe, promoted to foreign secretary of India, new Survey
of India maps marked the Aksai Chin as “Boundary Undefined.” That was
what the Nehru government inherited from the British.
But on March 24, 1953, Nehru decided to establish, unilaterally, a
nonnegotiable line for the 2,015-mile Sino-Indian border along the Hi-
malayas, including the Aksai Chin area in the Ladakh province of Jammu
and Kashmir, which was at the center of poisoned relations between India
and Pakistan. “It was a fateful decision,” noted A. G. Noorani, an Indian
commentator, in his book India-China Boundary Problem, 1846–1947:
History and Diplomacy. “Old maps were burnt. One former Foreign Sec-
retary told this writer how, as a junior official, he himself was obliged to
participate in this fatuous exercise.”6
While negotiating a fresh treaty with China on India’s relations with
Tibet—ostensibly in good faith—Nehru followed the strategy he had
dictated earlier to N. Raghavan, the Indian ambassador in Beijing. “Our
attitude to the Chinese Government should always be a combination
of friendliness and firmness,” he stated in his secret memorandum to

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Raghavan on December 10, 1952. “If we show weakness, advantage will

be taken of this immediately. This applies to any development that might
take place or in reference to our frontier problems between Tibet and
Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and [the] rest of India. In regard to this
entire frontier we have to maintain an attitude of firmness. Indeed there
is nothing to discuss here and we have made that previously clear to the
Chinese Government.”7
Nehru practiced what he preached. Soon afterward, at his initiative,
the agents of the Intelligence Bureau started helping in every possible way
Gyalo Thendup, the anticommunist brother of the Dalai Lama, and other
Tibetan refugees, then living in and around Kalimpong on the border of
India and Sikkim.8

SUBVERSION IN THE SHADOW OF

PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE

On April 29, 1954, India signed an agreement with China on “Trade and
Intercourse Between the Tibet Region of China and India,” which, in its
preamble, included the famous Panchsheel (Sanskrit: “five virtues”), the
Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: “Mutual respect for each other’s
territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual nonaggression; mutual non-
interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit;
and peaceful coexistence.”9 India gave up the extraterritorial rights and
privileges in Tibet it had inherited from the British Indian government,
and recognized Tibet as an integral part of China.
But that did not stop Nehru from playing the Machiavellian. A week
before the suave, fifty-six-year-old Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was to
visit Delhi on June 25—when he would be greeted by adoring crowds
shouting “Hindi Cheeni Bhai Bhai ” (Hindi: Indians, Chinese, Brothers,
Brothers)—Nehru addressed a note on Tibet and China to the three top
bureaucrats at the Foreign Ministry. “No country can ultimately rely upon
the permanent goodwill or bona fides of another country, even though
they might be in close friendship with each other,” he wrote on June 18.

It is conceivable that the Western Atlantic alliance might not function as

it was intended to and there might be ill-will between the countries con-
cerned. It is not inconceivable that China and the Soviet Union may not
continue to be as friendly as they are now. Certainly it is conceivable that

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

our relations with China might worsen, although there is no immediate

likelihood of that. . . . If we come to an agreement with China in regard to
Tibet, that is not a permanent guarantee, but that itself is one major step
to help us in the present and in the foreseeable future in various ways. . . .
Of course, both the Soviet Union and China are expansive. They are
expansive for evils other than communism, although communism may be
made a tool for the purpose. Chinese expansionism has been evident during
various periods of Asian history for a thousand years or so. We are perhaps
facing a new period of such expansionism. Let us consider that and fashion
our policy to prevent it coming in the way of our interests or other interests
that we consider important.10

During five apparently cordial sessions over three days, Nehru and
Zhou discussed the situation in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Mid-
dle East, and other subjects. Nehru did not raise the boundary issue with
his Chinese counterpart.
A week after these talks, Nehru sent a long, secret memorandum to
his most senior mandarins at the Foreign Ministry. It contained three
operative paragraphs, 7 to 9. All old maps should be replaced with new
ones, which should no longer show “any un-demarcated territory.” The
subsequent frontier “should be considered a firm and definite one which is
not open to discussion with anybody.” To consolidate that position on the
ground, “it is necessary that the system of check posts should be spread
along this entire frontier. More especially, we should have check posts in
such places as might be considered disputed areas,” such as Demchok and
Tsang Chokla, “considered by the Chinese as disputed territories.”11
On the first day of Nehru’s twelve-day return visit to China starting
on October 19, more than a million people lined the twelve-mile route
from the airport to the Forbidden City in Beijing to greet him riding an
open car along with Zhou. Besides his sessions with Zhou, Nehru had two
friendly meetings with Mao Zedong, chairman (chief of state) of China,
on October 19–20. “Between India and China there is no tension, there is
no psychological war,” stated Mao. “We do not spread psychological war
among the people.” Nehru agreed, having declared earlier that “peace is an
absolute necessity.”12 Neither these paramount leaders nor anybody else
present at these sessions would have imagined then that India and China
would go to war eight years later to the day.
Despite Nehru’s cordial exchange of views with Mao, his government
soon published maps on which the legend “boundary undefined” in the

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Western (Kashmir) sector was dropped in favor of a firm continuous line

to show India’s frontier.
Delhi’s clandestine backing of Tibetan refugees continued as before.
“Regarding the spirit of resistance in Tibet, the Prime Minister [Nehru]
was of the view (after the 1954 agreement with China) that even if these
refugees helped their brethren inside Tibet, the government of India
would not take any notice and, unless they compromised themselves too
openly, no Chinese protest would be entertained,” wrote B. N. Mullik,
director of the Intelligence Bureau, in his memoirs.13 India resorted to
supplying arms secretly to the Tibetan rebels. This was a clear violation
of mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs enshrined in the
doctrine of Panchsheel, which India had ostensibly adopted along with
China.
By 1956, knowingly or unwittingly, secret agents of America and Tai-
wan, operating mainly from Kalimpong, were engaged in the same activity
as their counterparts from India and the Soviet Union—recruiting and
arming Tibetan émigrés to organize a separatist rebellion in Tibet against
Beijing, with the Khampa tribes in eastern Tibet providing the initial
thrust. The subversion strategy progressed as planned. The rebellion, which
started modestly in the east in 1956–1957, spread to the west.
On August 21, 1958, Nehru protested against China’s “cartographic
aggression,” which showed parts of India as Chinese territory. In his reply
on December 14, Zhou wrote, “These maps were doubtless reproductions
of old maps, but it [the PRC] had not yet undertaken a survey of [the]
Chinese boundary nor consulted the countries, and pending such surveys
and consultations, it would not make changes in the boundary on its
own.”14 Zhou’s statement applied as much to India as it did to Burma
and Nepal.
Replying on the same day, Nehru quoted from the records of their
discussions in 1954 and 1956 in which Zhou had “proposed” to recognize
the McMahon Line. “I wish to point out that the Sino-Indian boundary
has never been formally delimited,” shot back Zhou on January 23, 1959.

Historically no treaty or agreement on the Sino-Indian boundary has ever

been concluded between the Chinese Central Government and the Indian
Government. So far as the actual situation is concerned, there are certain
differences between the two sides over the border question. . . . The latest
case concerns an area in the southern part of China’s Sinkiang-Uighur
Autonomous region, which has always been under Chinese jurisdiction.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Patrol duties have continually been carried out in the area by the border
guards of the Chinese government. And the Sinkiang-Tibet Highway built
by our country in 1956 runs through that area. Yet recently the Indian gov-
ernment claimed that the area was in its territory. All this shows that border
disputes do exist between China and India.15

By December 1958 the anticommunist partisans had become active

in western Tibet. In early March 1959 an estimated twenty thousand
Tibetan guerrillas engaged PLA troops in the northeastern and southern
environs of Lhasa. As the Chinese commanders prepared to shell the Da-
lai Lama’s palace and the surrounding administration complex on March
15–16, the Dalai Lama prepared to escape along with an entourage of
twenty aides. They did so on March 17. In the three days of fighting be-
tween the Tibetan rebels and the Chinese army in Lhasa, an estimated
two thousand people died.16
After trekking for fifteen days, the Dalai Lama and his aides crossed
into NEFA. Within days, Nehru granted asylum to the Dalai Lama and
his companions. “We have no desire whatever to interfere in Tibet, but
at the same time we have every sympathy for the people of Tibet, and we
are greatly distressed at their helpless plight,” he told the Lok Sabha, the
lower house of the Indian parliament.17
At his press conference on April 18 in the Assamese city of Tezpur,
the Dalai Lama repudiated the Seventeen-Point Agreement between Ti-
bet and China signed in May 1951. By so doing he stoked the hostility of
the Chinese government toward him and, by implication, soured its rela-
tions with Nehru.18 Consequently, the controversy over the Sino-Indian
border sharpened. When China’s ambassador Pan Tsue-li warned Nehru
of India’s possible two-front estrangement (with Pakistan and China) in
May 1959, Nehru rebuffed him.

EARLY SKIRMISHES

As friction escalated between the two Asian giants, an armed clash oc-
curred between their troops on August 25, 1959. Following the arrest of
one of their comrades, a squad of Indian soldiers at Longju crossed the
McMahon Line and fired at the Chinese guards stationed at the Tibetan
village of Migyitun for several hours.19 In retaliation, the Chinese killed
some Indian troops. This incident received massive publicity in India, with

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Nehru stoking popular sentiment by infusing the clash with “national

pride . . . self-respect . . . and . . . people’s passions.”20 The upside for
Nehru was that his peroration earned China censure not only by the West
but also by the Soviet Union.
On October 21 the western sector flared up. That day India’s Central
Reserve Police Force lost ten policemen when it challenged an incursion
by Chinese border guards in Aksai Chin.21 This territory, described by
Nehru as “a barren, uninhabited region without a vestige of grass, and
17,000 feet high,” had no strategic value for India, and it had left the area
unpatrolled.
In the larger diplomatic arena, though unhappy at the increasing
warmth between Delhi and Moscow, the United States continued to give
India economic aid, including food grains under Public Law 480 of 1954.
That legislation allowed Washington to sell agricultural commodities at a
discount and accept the bulk of payments in the recipient country’s cur-
rency. In India’s case, it reimbursed 80 percent of the amount to Delhi in
grants and loans for development projects, using the remainder to main-
tain its embassy and consulates in the country. Washington wished to see
India win the economic race against communist China and illustrate the
superiority of Western-style democracy to communism for the benefit of
the other Afro-Asian nations.
China emerged as the chief villain for both America and the Soviet
Union when it refused to subscribe to the concept of “peaceful coexis-
tence” between socialism and capitalism—as agreed to by US president
Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at their
meeting in Camp David, Maryland, in October 1959. Two months later
Eisenhower received a rousing reception on the streets of Delhi against
the background of rising tensions between India and China.
To resolve the border dispute peacefully, Zhou spent almost a week in
Delhi in April 1960. In the first of his meetings with Nehru he presented
his case in six points, the most important being number 4.
“Since we are going to have friendly negotiations, neither side should
put forward claims to an area which is no longer under its administrative
control,” it stated. “For example, we made no claim in the eastern sector
to areas south of the McMahon Line, but India made such claims in the
western sector. It is difficult to accept such claims and the best thing is
that both sides do not make such territorial claims.” He suggested that
each side should keep to the line of actual control in all sectors, eastern,
western, and middle. Nehru disagreed. “Our accepting things as they are

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

would mean that basically there is no dispute and the question ends there;
that we are unable to do,” he argued. He proposed a radical alternative.
“We should take each sector of the border and convince the other side of
what it believes to be right.”22
Such an approach in international diplomacy is unheard of. Instead,
the two sides examine the differences that exist in their respective po-
sitions and then try to reduce the gaps until they reach a point of con-
currence. In this case, each had its vital, nonnegotiable interest securely
under its control. India held fast to the McMahon Line, while China
had built the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway passing through Aksai Chin in
Ladakh in 1957.
Recalling his last meeting with Nehru on April 25, 1960, Zhou told
the Soviet ambassador in Beijing on October 8, 1962, that Nehru rejected
out of hand all his proposals. “We suggested that bilateral armed forces
respectively retreat for 20 km on the borders and stop the patrols to escape
conflicts. They did not accept the suggestion. Later, we unilaterally with-
drew for 20 km and did not appoint troops to patrol in the area in order
to evade conflicts and help negotiations develop smoothly. However, India
perhaps had a wrong sense that we were showing our weakness and [we]
feared conflicts. . . . India is taking advantage that we withdrew for 20
km and did not assign patrols, and has invaded as well as set up posts.”23
It was this stalemate that led Nehru to raise the subject of Pakistan’s
boundary with China with President Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub
Khan in September 1960. But instead of learning from the Pakistani lead-
er’s successful handling of the issue with Beijing, Nehru mocked him by
saying that the Pakistanis “were acting in a childish manner.”24
In his conflict with China, Nehru found himself being cosseted by
both Moscow and Washington. On the eve of the US presidential elec-
tions in early November 1960, the Democrat candidate Senator John F.
Kennedy described India as representing “a great area for affirmative ac-
tion by the Free World” in his interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS
News. “India started from about the same place that China did. The Chi-
nese Communists have been moving ahead the last 10 years. India . . . has
been making some progress, but if India does not succeed with her 450
million people, if she can’t make freedom work, then people around the
world are going to determine, particularly in the underdeveloped world,
that the only way they can develop their resources is through the Com-
munist system.”25

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 NEHRU’S “FORWARD POLICY ”

NEHRU’S CLENCHED FIST: FORWARD POLICY

By July 1961 the Chinese had advanced 70 miles west of their Xinjiang-
Tibet Highway passing through Aksai Chin, thus occupying 12,700
square miles of India’s claimed territory. Nehru’s resolve to implement his
country’s territorial claims in the eastern and western sectors had turned
the frontier areas into conflict tracts, resulting in periodic clashes.
On November 2, 1961, a high-level meeting of Indian officials,
chaired by Nehru, adopted the “Forward Policy” on the Sino-Indian bor-
der issue. That is, Delhi decided to establish forward military posts north
of the McMahon Line in the eastern sector and behind the Chinese
posts in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh. It planned to set up five new
all-weather posts of eighty to a hundred soldiers each behind nine existing
forward Chinese posts in Ladakh. These outposts were to be located stra-
tegically to sever the supply lines of the targeted Chinese posts and starve
their personnel with the aim of seizing these posts. From there Indian
patrols planned to probe the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway.26
From November 5 to 19, Nehru was away, touring America, Mexico,
and Britain. He started his itinerary with a visit to the United States,
where he was warmly welcomed by President Kennedy in Newport,
Rhode Island, where he maintained a family mansion.
On his return home, Nehru presented his Forward Policy on the Chi-
nese border issue to the Lok Sabha. “They [the Chinese] are still in areas
which they occupied [in Ladakh] . . . but progressively the situation has
been changing from the military point of view and from other points of
view in our favor,” he told the chamber on November 28. “We shall con-
tinue to take steps to build up these things so that ultimately we may be in
a position to take action to recover such territory as is [now] in their pos-
session.” In other words, Nehru publicly declared his intention to achieve
his aim by force. He seemed to rest his strategy on the hypothesis that an
armed conflict between India and China would escalate into a world war.
His thinking was dangerously flawed. Astonishingly, he was unfamiliar
with Henry Kissinger’s groundbreaking book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign
Policy published in 1958. In it Kissinger argued that, given the “balance of
terror” between nuclear-armed America and the Soviet Union—with its
scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction—it was incumbent on Wash-
ington to develop the doctrine of limited wars. “Is it imaginable that a war
between India and China will remain confined to these two countries?”
Nehru asked rhetorically while addressing the Rajya Sabha (Hindi: States’

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Council), the upper house of Parliament, on December 6. “It will be world

war and nothing but a world war.”27
In Beijing, Chairman Mao concluded that since India was rejecting
his government’s repeated reiteration of a policy of peaceful coexistence,
it should be given a taste of “armed coexistence.” When peaceful means
deployed by China had failed to bring about a reversal in Delhi’s For-
ward Policy, Mao ordered that the PLA must “undertake a long period of
armed coexistence.”28
On June 26, 1962, during the clandestine talks between the ambas-
sadors of the United States and China in Warsaw, Poland, the American
envoy received instructions to secretly assure his Chinese counterpart that
Washington would not support any attempt by the Nationalist govern-
ment (of the Republic of China) based in Taiwan to invade the main-
land.29 This allowed PLA generals to move some troops posted along the
coastline to the Sino-Indian border. They added two divisions to the six
already posted in Tibet to fight the local rebels.
Along the disputed border the Dhola post had been held by the In-
dians since June. It lay opposite the Thagla Ridge north of the McMahon
Line at its western extremity. On September 8 sixty Chinese soldiers ap-
peared at the Thagla Ridge opposite this post with orders to use threats
to induce the Indians’ withdrawal without engaging into a fight. Briefed
by government officials, the Indian media inflated the size of the Chinese
contingent by a factor of ten, to six hundred.
Nehru, then attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government
conference in London, told the media that the British Indian Army had
instructions to “free” India’s territory under Chinese occupation. On Sep-
tember 11 it was decided to give permission to all forward posts and pa-
trols to fire on any armed Chinese who entered India’s claimed territory.
Overall, India had established sixty forward posts, forty-three of them
north of the McMahon Line, and occupied four thousand square miles of
Chinese territory. Its eastern command upgraded this order on September
20 to “engage” any Chinese patrols within range of their weapons. Th is
radical step was tantamount to a declaration of war.
On October 3 China sent its final diplomatic warning coupled with
a plea for immediate, unconditional negotiations. Nehru rejected the of-
fer. Before leaving for a trip to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on October 12,
he told the media he had ordered the armed forces to clear the Chinese
from NEFA. Excepting the Communist Party of India (CPI), he had the
unanimous and raucous backing of the opposition as well as the press.

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 NEHRU’S “FORWARD POLICY ”

On the ground, however, Nehru’s lordly order resulted in two lightly

armed and poorly clothed and shod India battalions posted in the plains
marching through mud, mountains, and rains at an altitude of thirteen
thousand feet to accomplish the mission. All the same, Nehru’s declara-
tion was unambiguous. “We don’t want a war with India,” said Zhou. “But
Nehru has closed all roads. This leaves us only with war.”30
Addressing the meeting of the Politburo of the Communist Party
of China on October 18, Chairman Mao said, “Now that Nehru is de-
termined to fight us, we have no way out but to keep him company. As
the saying goes, ‘from an exchange of blows, friendship grows.’ Maybe
we have to counter-fight them before we can have a stable border and
a peaceful settlement of the boundary question. However, our counter-
attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of
India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means.”31
At the other end of the globe, October 18, 1962, marked the begin-
ning of the thirteen-day-long crisis between the White House and the
Kremlin on the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.

NEHRU BATTLES MAO;

KENNEDY CHALLENGES KHRUSHCHEV

On October 20, 1962, under cover of ear-splitting mortar fire, two heavily
equipped Chinese divisions, armed with medium machine guns, launched
simultaneous offensives in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line. In a
rerun of their fight in the Korean War (1950–1953) against the Amer-
ican and South Korean troops, they attacked in waves. In NEFA they
advanced on the Chumbi Valley between Sikkim and Bhutan, and further
east to Tawang. Outnumbering the Indians by five to one, they quickly
captured twenty of their outposts in NEFA and eight in Ladakh.
Geography coupled with their military engagement in Tibet favored
the Chinese. They approached the battle fronts from the fairly flat Tibetan
plateau, which was conducive to road building and troop movement. They
had also been fighting the armed rebels in Tibet since the mid-1950s
and were used to combat in mountains. (India’s troops with high-altitude
fighting experience were posted in Kashmir along the border with Paki-
stan.) By contrast, Indian soldiers had to ascend very steep hills covered
with thick vegetation in wet weather. Their outmoded .303 rifles were no
match for the Chinese troops’ automatic weapons.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

During the war, Zhou and Nehru corresponded daily. On October 24

Zhou offered a cease-fire package. In principle, each side should withdraw
twelve miles from the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and disengage, he
proposed. If India agreed to this, then China would withdraw its frontier
guards in the Eastern Sector north of the LAC and disengage. Zhou
offered to visit Delhi to seek a friendly settlement of the dispute. “What
is the Line of Actual Control?” retorted Nehru. He rejected Zhou’s pro-
posal.32 The next day the Chinese occupied Tawang and stopped there.
Nehru sent off frantic appeals for military assistance to the leaders
of America, Britain, and the Soviet Union. John Galbraith, the gangling,
gaunt-faced US ambassador in Delhi, and Sir Paul Gore-Booth, the short,
plump high commissioner of the United Kingdom—nicknamed Laurel
and Hardy by the diplomatic corps—got frantically busy. In his memoirs,
Ambassador’s Journal, Galbraith described the Indian leader on October 28
as “frail, brittle and seemed small and old. He was obviously desperately
tired.”33 Washington and London rushed vital arms and ammunition to
India by gigantic transport aircraft, to Pakistan’s distress.
What concerned Kennedy and British prime minister Harold
Macmillan—not to mention Nehru—was Pakistan opening a new
front against India in Kashmir. “The Pakistanis continue to make pro-
Chinese noises, and three Indian divisions are being kept along the Paki-
stani border,” noted Galbraith in his memoirs. “This upset the Indians.”34
His counterpart in Pakistan, Walter McConaughy, intervened, urging the
Pakistani foreign minister Muhammad Ali Bogra that his country should
not do anything to embarrass India.
Unsurprisingly, President Ayub Khan spied a golden opportunity to
squeeze Nehru on the Kashmir issue. He told McConaughy that Paki-
stani neutrality in the Sino-Indian War could be assured only by Delhi’s
concessions on Kashmir. The unmistakable inference was that an Indian
refusal would induct Pakistan into the war, thus forcing India to fight on
two fronts. “My concern was about equally divided between helping the
Indians against the Chinese and keeping peace between the Indians and
the Pakistanis,” wrote Galbraith. “The latter had grievances against the
Indians which they considered, not without reason, to have substance. The
nightmare of a combined attack by Pakistan and China, with the possibil-
ity of defeat, collapse and even anarchy in India, was much on my mind.”35
Later, when McConaughy was instructed to approach Ayub Khan
to assure Nehru that “they wouldn’t do anything to embarrass the In-
dians in their time of trouble,” the Pakistani president preferred a letter

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to that effect from Kennedy.36 He received one soon after. At the same
time Washington urged Nehru to provide Pakistan with data on Indian
troop movements in Kashmir and send a friendly message to Ayub Khan.
He complied.37 Only then did Ayub Khan finally give the assurance that
Nehru sought anxiously.
As for the more ominous superpower confrontation, to the relief of the
world at large, Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved their eyeball-to-eyeball
nuclear confrontation on October 29. The Kremlin agreed to withdraw its
missiles from Cuba in exchange for the White House removing its Jupiter
intermediate-range ballistic missiles from Turkey. Nehru sent congratu-
latory letters to Kennedy and Khrushchev, hoping that they would both
now pay greater attention to pulling India out of the quagmire it had
fallen into.
In Delhi, while a record 165 members participated in the parliamen-
tary debate on the war from November 8 to 15, patriotic fervor gripped
the nation. In the four leading Indian cities young men lined up at army
recruitment centers. In normal times these offices were open only twice
a week, and most volunteers failed the physical test. Now the lowering of
the strict physical requirements induced by the national emergency drew
multitudes of casual laborers, factory hands, and jobless graduates, who
were attracted by the prospect of assured food and accommodation, not
to mention a worthwhile purpose to their wayward existence that would
come with a military uniform.
The Chinese broke the lull on the battlefield on November 15 by as-
saulting Walong at the easternmost point of the McMahon Line. The In-
dian regiments retreated in disarray, many of their ranks getting mowed
down by the enemy and others throwing away their arms and fleeing. The
dazed Indian commanders could not decide where to make their last stand.
Finally, they settled for the fourteen-thousand-foot-high Se-La Moun-
tain Pass, fifteen miles south of Tawang. But their ranks failed to hold
Tawang. This compelled their officers to order a withdrawal toward Bomdi
La, ninety miles inside NEFA. The relentless advance of the Chinese con-
tinued, with Bomdi La being their latest prize. Panic gripped the adjoining
Assam province. Its large Tezpur settlement turned into a ghost town.
Consternation spread to Delhi and struck Nehru. “Late that night
[November 20, 1962] Nehru made an urgent, open appeal for the inter-
vention of the United States with bomber and fighter squadrons to go
into action against the Chinese,” stated Neville Maxwell, a British jour-
nalist and author. “This appeal was detailed, even specifying the number of

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squadrons required—fifteen.”38 Nehru’s strategy was to bomb the supply

lines of the Chinese as well as their gasoline dumps, with the warplanes of
the US Seventh Fleet stationed in the Bay of Bengal to provide air cover
for the major cities of India. The Indian embassy in Washington received
this message at nine pm local time on November 19, after President Ken-
nedy had retired for the day. “So you couldn’t last out even two weeks,”
mocked Kennedy’s special assistant. “Churchill fought the war without
American weapons for two years.”39
Suddenly the crisis passed. At midnight on November 20, having es-
tablished its superiority in weaponry, strategy, communications, logistics,
and planning, China declared a unilateral cease-fire, and added that after
their withdrawal the Chinese frontier guards would be “far behind their
positions prior to September 8, 1962.” Beijing’s decision was in line with
what Mao had told the Politburo on October 18: “However, our counter-
attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of
India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means.”40
India accepted the cease-fire without saying so explicitly. On November 22
the Chinese pulled back to the north of the McMahon Line and in La-
dakh to the positions they held before the war.
Overall, this was a limited war between Asia’s mega-nations. Neither
side deployed its air force. China lost only 722 troops. And India’s loss of
3,100 soldiers included 1,700 who went missing—that is, froze to death
in snow drifts or collapsed in wet forests.
India’s defeat, illustrated by the humiliating disproportion in its
battlefield fatalities, was implicitly dramatized in the Bollywood movie
Haqeeqat (Hindi: Reality). During the Sino-Indian war in Ladakh, an In-
dian platoon, considered dead, is rescued by the locals. When it is ordered
to retreat from its post, surrounded by the Chinese, an Indian captain and
his Ladakhi girlfriend hold the enemy at bay to facilitate the platoon’s
safe withdrawal. In the process, they die. But the retreating troops find
themselves heavily outnumbered and get killed to the last man. The movie
was meant to highlight the patriotic fervor that filled Indian soldiers. It
was released in 1964 after the death of Nehru in May.41

NEHRU’S OBSTINACY ON KASHMIR

Within a month of the end of the Sino-Indian War, Kennedy and Mac-
millan agreed to provide Delhi with $120 million worth of emergency

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 NEHRU’S “FORWARD POLICY ”

military aid. To fulfill the US-UK obligation to Ayub Khan for staying his
hand during the Sino-Indian conflict, US special envoy Averell Harriman
and British foreign minister Duncan Sandys urged Nehru to enter into
talks with Pakistan.
At first Nehru refused to include Kashmir, but later he relented. On
November 30 he and Ayub Khan issued a joint statement that effort must
be made to resolve outstanding differences between the two countries on
“Kashmir and other related matters.” But characteristically Nehru told the
Lok Sabha the next day that to upset the present arrangements regarding
Kashmir would be harmful to future Indo-Pakistan relations.42
The Indian delegation led by Foreign Minister Swaran Singh met
its Pakistani counterpart led by Muhammad Ali Bogra in Rawalpindi in
mid-December, with the resident US and British envoys monitoring the
talks by staying in the same building. The two sides decided to hold a sec-
ond round in Delhi in late January 1963. By then Bogra would be dead,
and Zulfikar (aka Zulfi) Ali Bhutto would succeed him as Pakistan’s for-
eign minister. The talks in Delhi led nowhere. Bhutto suggested third-party
mediation to Galbraith and Gore-Booth. Nehru rejected this promptly.
On the eve of the next round in Karachi on February 8, 1963, Ayub
Khan in his interview with an American reporter repeated his statement
of March 22, 1961: Pakistan was open to a solution other than a plebi-
scite in Kashmir, but such a proposal should come from India.43 The latest
session between the two delegations ended with a joint communiqué that
referred to “various aspects relevant to the settlement of the Kashmir
problem.”
On March 2, 1963, following two years of negotiations, the Ayub
Khan government signed a border demarcation treaty with China that in-
volved Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Unlike India, Pakistan renounced
previous claims based on obsolete British India maps. China reciprocated
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424809425

by ceding 750 square miles of the territory it had been administering.

Beijing acquired legitimacy over its control of the Khunjerab Pass in the
Karakoram mountain range on the northern border of Pakistan’s federally
administered Gilgit-Baltistan. This mountain pass was of vital, strategic
importance to the China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
When India objected to the Pakistan-China treaty, Bhutto asserted
that his country had not ceded any territory to China. Responding to the
pressure of Galbraith and Gore-Booth, the Indian and Pakistani delega-
tions kept up the ritual of talking to each other. The Kennedy adminis-
tration intervened directly. It referred Nehru to the growing demand by

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

the US Congress to tie its military aid to India to the resolution of the
Kashmir dispute. Two more sessions followed in April and May. Unsur-
prisingly, nothing happened.
Despite this lack of progress, after their meeting at Macmillan’s coun-
try house in Sussex, Kennedy and Macmillan decided to give India an
Anglo-American air umbrella to familiarize the Indian air force with
supersonic fighter bombers and draft plans to assist the bolstering of In-
dia’s defenses against the threat of a renewed Chinese attack. The Penta-
gon agreed to modernize some mountain army divisions of India.44 The
tightening of these defense ties alarmed Pakistani leaders, who could do
no more than lodge written protests.
The Washington-London military aid enabled India to double its
army divisions to twenty-two and expand its air force and navy.45
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped India raise a secret
Special Frontier Force (SFF) composed of dissident Tibetans under the
command of Brigadier Sujan Singh Uban to harass the Chinese troops in
Tibet.46 The SFF was renamed Establishment 22 (so called because Uban
was the commander of 22 Mountain Regiment during World War II),
located next to the headquarters of the Defense Ministry in Delhi.
The Anglo-American bounty to Delhi left Ayub Khan and the fiery
Bhutto fuming. The goodwill Kennedy had generated among Pakistanis
by welcoming Ayub Khan with grand gestures evaporated. In July 1961
Kennedy had honored the Pakistani president with a ticker-tape parade
on New York’s Fifth Avenue and a state dinner at Washington’s Mount
Vernon. In September 1962 the US president hosted him at his family
mansion in Rhode Island and at his farm in Middleburg, Virginia.
But bolstered by the generous US-UK military aid to India, Nehru
put the Kashmir question on the backburner, leaving Ayub Khan to wring
his hands in frustration.
On the other hand, defeat at the hands of the Chinese left Nehru a
shattered man. His health suffered. In the summer and autumn of 1963
he spent considerable time in the salubrious climate of Kashmir to repair
his failing physical and mental powers.

THE PROPHET’S MISSING HAIR: A TURNING POINT

The people in the troubled state were transfixed by the “Kashmir Conspir-
acy” case involving Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah and twenty-three others

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 NEHRU’S “FORWARD POLICY ”

accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Initiated in 1958, the

case dragged on for years, against the background of the return to power
of Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad’s team. As a result of a glaringly rigged
election in February–March 1962, his National Conference garnered 70
of the 75 Assembly seats. In September the special magistrate trying the
accused transferred the case to a higher court.
Over the years, the corruption and tyranny of Muhammad’s regime,
mitigated somewhat by a generous food subsidy and rapid expansion in
educational facilities funded by Delhi, had become unbearable. In Oc-
tober 1963, under the guise of implementing a plan to reinvigorate the
Congress Party and its allies (which included the National Conference),
Nehru got several chief ministers, including Muhammad, to resign and
take up party work.
His successor, Khwaja Shamsuddin, had hardly settled in his job when
the Kashmir Valley was rocked by massive antigovernment demonstra-
tions that followed the disappearance of a hair of Prophet Muhammad’s
beard from Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine on December 26. The missing
hair provided a trigger for popular disaffection, which had been building
up since Shaikh Abdullah’s arrest a decade earlier, to burst into the open
like a volcanic eruption. Protestors took to the streets on a massive scale
in the Vale of Kashmir. This shook a fast-aging, perpetually tired Nehru.
Until then, thanks to the complicit press’s grossly biased reporting
on Kashmir, Indians in general had been complacent about the situa-
tion there. Most of them associated their northernmost state with im-
ages of snow-capped mountains, gushing cold streams, and cypress and
poplar trees, which provided an idyllic background to the duets sung by
a heart-broken hero and the love of his life—stunningly shot in such
Bollywood movies as Kashmir Ki Kali (Hindi: Kali of Kashmir) and Mere
Sanam (Hindi: My Love). Cinema, which arrived in the subcontinent in
1913, when only one in sixteen Indians was literate, had become a vital
tool to mold popular perceptions and culture. As for radio broadcasts,
the popular medium for news, these were controlled by the Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting. State-run television news would start in
Bombay and Amritsar only a decade later.
Though the missing relic in Srinagar was recovered on January 4, 1964,
popular agitation did not subside even after Shamsuddin stepped down in
favor of the older, more experienced Ghulam Muhammad Sadiq almost
two months later. He and Nehru decided to withdraw the “Kashmir Con-
spiracy” case against Abdullah in April and released him and the others.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Abdullah was invited to Delhi by Nehru as a personal guest and

lodged in his official residence. The two discussed the Kashmir problem.
During a cabinet session, attended by Abdullah, Nehru told fellow minis-
ters that he wanted to resolve the Kashmir issue during his lifetime. In the
course of his meeting with Pakistan’s high commissioner in Delhi, Abdul-
lah received an invitation from Bhutto to visit Pakistan’s capital. Nehru
recommended acceptance. After consulting several other Indian leaders
outside of Delhi, Abdullah returned to Nehru’s residence on May 20.
Abdullah and his party boarded the special plane sent by Ayub Khan
on May 23. Eleven years of incarceration by the Indian government had
transformed Abdullah from a traitor to Islam and Kashmiri Muslims in
the eyes of Pakistanis into a fearless champion of Kashmiris. He received
a hero’s reception in Rawalpindi.
On May 25, a Friday, he addressed a rally of almost two hundred
thousand people, presided over by his lifelong rival, Chowdhury Mu-
hammad Abbas of the Muslim Conference.47 The next day, during his
long session with the Pakistani president, Abdullah broached the idea of
a quadrangular confederation of the subcontinent, India–West Pakistan–
Kashmir–East Pakistan, which had earlier interested Nehru. After this
meeting, he announced that Ayub Khan would hold talks with Nehru in
Delhi in mid-June to resolve the Kashmir dispute.
On May 27, as Abdullah was on his way in an official convoy to Mu-
zaffarbad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, news came that following a stroke,
Nehru had died in the early afternoon of a heart attack. When Abdullah
heard the news, he broke down and sobbed. Nehru’s death killed any
chance of India’s amicable settlement with Pakistan on Kashmir.
At the open-air cremation of Nehru’s corpse on the banks of the Jamuna
(aka Yamuna) in Delhi, Abdullah leapt on the platform and, crying unasham-
edly, threw flowers onto the funeral pyre. Later, in his autobiography Aatish-e
Chinar (Urdu: Flames of the Chinar), Abdullah would sum up his rocky re-
lationship with Nehru: “Pandit Nehru’s love for Kashmir was more like love
for a beautiful woman whom he wanted to possess and that he had come
to regard me as a rival in love—for the possession of this beautiful valley.”48

NEHRU’S LACKLUSTER SUCCESSOR

Lal Bahadur Shastri, who succeeded Nehru, had neither the charisma nor
the popularity needed to win the approval of Parliament for an agree-

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 NEHRU’S “FORWARD POLICY ”

ment with Pakistan, which would have inevitably involved some territorial
concessions to Pakistan and/or letting Kashmiris exercise their right of
self-determination for the state as a whole or by region. In polar contrast
to the aristocratic background of handsome Nehru, a child of the fabu-
lously rich lawyer Motilal Nehru and his wife, Swaruprani Thussu, the
diminutive, jug-eared Shastri, mild-mannered and soft-spoken, was born
into the household of a schoolteacher who died when he was a year old.
He grew up as a staunch member of the Congress Party and served in
Nehru’s cabinets from 1952 onward, his latest ministry being home affairs.
Realizing the dramatically altered political scene, Shaikh Abdullah
openly called for a plebiscite, something he had not done before. This had
an unsettling effect on Sadiq, who had simultaneously to cope with Mu-
hammad’s maneuvers in the State Assembly against his recently formed
cabinet. He was therefore driven to rely even more heavily on Delhi than
Muhammad to stay in power. He actively cooperated with the Shastri gov-
ernment to integrate Kashmir further into the Indian Union.
On December 21, the president of India acquired powers, hitherto de-
nied him, to take over Kashmir’s administration if he felt that the consti-
tutional machinery had broken down. Three weeks later it was announced
that the National Conference would be dissolved and that the Congress
Party would establish a branch in Kashmir. The opposition declared Jan-
uary 15 Protest Day, when Shaikh Abdullah demanded a plebiscite to
decide the state’s future.
The next month, accompanied by his wife, Akbar Jahan, and a senior
deputy, Abdullah went on a hajj—a pilgrimage to Mecca—with plans to
visit a few other Arab countries as well as Britain and France. In Algiers
he had an unscheduled meeting with Zhou Enlai. According to his mem-
oir, Flames of the Chinar, they discussed China’s agreement with Pakistan
over the northern frontier of Gilgit. Zhou said, “At present, Gilgit is un-
der the control of Pakistan, and therefore we entered into an agreement
stipulating that the agreement shall remain valid only as long as Gilgit is
under the control of Pakistan.” Abdullah revealed that he sent a summary
of his conversation with Zhou to the Indian ambassador to China.49 But
the news of Zhou’s invitation to Abdullah to visit China disconcerted the
Shastri government.
In March, while Abdullah was abroad, the legislature, guided by
Sadiq, amended Kashmir’s constitution to alter the title of head of state
from Sardar-i-riyasat (Urdu: president of province) to governor, and
Wazire Azam (Urdu: prime minister) to chief minister, thus removing

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

the constitutional distinction between Kashmir and other Indian states.

In short, the leading features of the “special relationship” that had ex-
isted all along between Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian Union were
annulled.50
In April Abdullah published an essay in the prestigious, New York–
based Foreign Affairs journal in which he argued that India, Pakistan, and
Kashmiris should devise a solution that would grant Kashmiris “the sub-
stance of their demand for self-determination but with honor and fairness
to both Pakistan and India.”51 He thus put India and Pakistan on a par.

OPERATION DESERT HAWK: A DRY RUN

The moves by the Sadiq-Shastri duo whipped up anti-India sentiment in

Pakistan, leading to armed clashes between the two neighbors in the Rann
(Desert) of Kutch along the Arabian Sea. Measuring about 2,900 square
miles of sparsely inhabited marshland, originally part of the princely state
of Kutch, its upland islets were used as pasture plots. It was one of the few
un-demarcated tracts between Pakistan and India, each of which main-
tained a few armed police posts on scattered islets.
On April 9, 1965, the Pakistani army captured an Indian police post
near the Kanjarkot fort and claimed all of the Rann of Kutch. Delhi
deployed its army in the area to recover the lost posts. In turn, on April
24, Pakistan mounted Operation Desert Hawk by deploying an infantry
division and two armored regiments equipped with superior US-supplied
Patton tanks and field guns. Four inches of steel armor plating on the
forty-six-ton Patton made it immune to all fire except at a very close
range.52 Pakistan captured four more posts and claimed the entire Kan-
jarkot tract. Given their poor logistics and inferior military hardware, the
Indians had no option but to withdraw after offering token resistance.
To contain the fighting between two Commonwealth members, British
prime minister Harold Wilson intervened. A temporary truce followed
at the end of April.
But the Kashmiri background to this crisis worsened in May, when
Abdullah returned home. He was arrested and interned in the hill station
of Ootacamund, two thousand miles from Kashmir. The anti-India feeling
that had been bubbling in the Kashmir Valley during March and April
boiled over. Streets filled with huge protest demonstrations. These were
crushed with a heavy hand.

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 NEHRU’S “FORWARD POLICY ”

The truce in the Rann of Kutch broke down. Hostilities resumed on

June 15 on the eve of the weeklong Commonwealth Heads of Govern-
ment conference in London. Once again Wilson intervened. A formal
cease-fire was signed on June 30. Later the border issue was referred to a
three-member arbitration committee.53
The purpose of Pakistan’s Operation Desert Hawk was threefold: to
assess India’s military preparedness, to draw its troops away from Punjab
and Kashmir, and to determine the extent of Washington’s seriousness
about enforcing its ban on the use of its superior military hardware, in-
cluding F4 jet fighters, in a war with India. Despite Delhi’s repeated pro-
tests, no effective action was taken by the Lyndon Johnson administration
to inhibit Pakistanis’ use of US-made weaponry.
Field Marshal Ayub Khan was buoyed by his victory in the armed
sparring he had with India in the Rann of Kutch. An inkling of his up-
beat mood was provided by Lakshmi Kant Jha, the principal secretary to
Shastri, who was present when the two South Asian leaders met on the
sidelines of the Commonwealth conference in London. “You know, your
chaps tried to commit aggression on our territory, our chaps gave them
a few knocks and they began to flee,” Ayub Khan reportedly said. “Mr
President, do you think if I had to attack Pakistan, I would choose a ter-
rain where we have no logistic support and you have all the advantages?”
asked Shastri. “Do you think I would make such a mistake or any of my
generals would allow me to make that mistake?”54
Little did Shastri realize that in the previous month Ayub Khan had
scrutinized a military presentation on Operation Gibraltar and that at his
behest an assault on Akhnoor in India-held Kashmir was included in the
subsequently code-named Operation Grand Slam. Following that, Ayub
Khan approved Operation Gibraltar. Soon after, however, he had second
thoughts about executing the grand plan. The hawks within his cabinet,
led by Bhutto, pounced on this and put it about that the president did not
want to disturb the status quo because that would jeopardize the freshly
acquired riches of his family. That forced Ayub Khan’s hand. At the end
of July, he addressed the force commanders of Operation Gibraltar as a
preamble to the actual launch.55

179
 9

Shastri’s Tallest Order

Pakistan’s Nightmare Comes Alive

Operation Gibraltar1 grew out of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s memorandum to

President Muhammad Ayub Khan in early May 1965. In it he warned
that as a consequence of the ramped-up Western military assistance to
India, the balance of power in South Asia was tilting rapidly in Delhi’s
favor. He recommended “a bold and courageous” move in Kashmir to
create “greater possibility for a negotiated settlement.”2 The end purpose
of the complex Operation Gibraltar was to enable the Pakistani military
to capture territory in Kashmir while making it appear that it was the
Kashmiri people who had finally mounted an armed rebellion to end
the unbearably oppressive rule of India.

OPERATIONS GIBRALTAR
AND GRAND SLAM

Devised conceptually by the Kashmir Cell of the Ayub Khan regime, it

was passed on to Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik, the Murree-
based commander of the Twelfth Infantry Division. Along with the
Azad Kashmir Armed Force, this division guarded the cease-fire line in
Kashmir. The strategy was to have a sizable force of trained guerrillas
and saboteurs infiltrate India-held Kashmir to carry out sabotage to
destabilize the state government and spark an anti-India rebellion by
Kashmiris.
If it failed to achieve the desired aim, then the complementary Oper-
ation Grand Slam was to be launched by the Pakistani military. It envis-
aged a rapid strike by armored and infantry units from the southern tip

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 SHASTRI’S TALLEST ORDER

of the cease-fire line to Akhnoor, a town along the Pathankot-Jammu-

Srinagar highway. The capture of Akhnoor would sever the critical supply
line for the bottled-up Indian forces in the Vale of Kashmir, providing
Pakistan with several options, one or more of which could be exploited.
Major General Malik, a tall, hefty, mustached man with receding gray
hair, worked with Brigadier General Riaz Hussain, director-general of the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, to recruit volunteers for a
new force, Mujahid Companies. Armed and trained as guerrillas and sab-
oteurs, it was to be led by Pakistani officers. Malik formed six task forces,
each five hundred strong, and gave them names of outstanding Islamic
generals of the past. Each contingent consisted of Azad Kashmir troops
and Mujahedin irregular volunteers, all in civilian clothes. Their tasks were
to blow up bridges, cut communication lines, raid supply dumps, and
attack military units as a prelude to an armed uprising scheduled for Au-
gust 9, 1965. That day would coincide with the twelfth anniversary of the
first arrest of Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah and was chosen by Plebiscite
Front leaders to protest his latest incarceration.
According to this plan, Mujahideen ranks were scheduled to cross
the cease-fire line in small groups between August 1 and 5, and assem-
ble at prearranged places to set up camps as a preamble to infiltrating
the Kashmir Valley at many points during the following three days. This
phase would be facilitated by Pakistani troops firing along the truce line
to distract their Indian adversaries.
The envisaged capture of Srinagar airport and radio station by the
Ghaznavi Task Force on August 9 would set the scene for the declaration
of the establishment of a Revolutionary Council, which would proclaim
the liberation of Jammu and Kashmir.
In practice, however, on August 5 a shepherd boy informed the police
of the presence of strangers, wearing green salwar kameez in the border
town of Tanmarg, twenty-four miles from Srinagar, who offered bribes for
information. He led the police to the base camp of the Salahuddin Task
Force. The same day a local man in Mendhar, sixty miles from Srinagar,
informed the nearby army brigade headquarters of a few foreigners who
sought intelligence from him. But it was not until August 8 that the army
troops arrested two commanders of the infiltrators near Narain Nag, five
miles from Srinagar, that they learned about Pakistan’s plan.3
By then, however, the Ghaznavi Task Force had managed to reach
a suburb of Srinagar. Gunfights soon broke out in the capital. Taken by
surprise, the Kashmiri authorities urged Delhi to declare martial law in

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

the valley. But the Lal Bahadur Shastri government refrained from doing
so. The sabotage and shootings by the armed infiltrators in Srinagar con-
tinued until August 12–13. “The streets in Srinagar were deserted,” noted
Lieutenant General Harbaksh Singh, the commanding officer of India’s
Western Command. “There were visible signs of anxiety and tension on
the faces of the residents gaping through the windows.”4
All India Radio broadcast the confessions of the two captured offi-
cers outlining Pakistan’s extensive plan.5 The Indian government protested
through diplomatic channels. Pakistan replied that Kashmir was a dis-
puted territory and violent disturbances there could not be attributed to
it. On the other hand, as preplanned, Pakistan’s state-run radio broadcast
on August 9 that a rebellion had broken out in India-occupied Kashmir.
It added that, according to the Voice of Kashmir radio station, a Revolu-
tionary Council had assumed full power over the state.
In Delhi, the chief of army staff (COAS) General Joyanto Nath
Chaudhuri informed the Emergency Committee of the Cabinet that
though the infiltrators were being apprehended, further sabotage could
still be carried out by those at large. Indeed shoot-outs and subversive
activities in Indian Kashmir continued until August 13.
On that day, Shastri authorized the army to cross the cease-fire line to
destroy the infiltrators’ bases. If regular Pakistani troops intervened, then
the army would be free to retaliate at any suitable place of its choice, he
added. In his August 15 Independence Day speech from the ramparts of
the Red Fort in Delhi, he declared that the “resort to the sword will be
met with the sword.”6 His valiant words helped portray him as a resolute
leader. That day the Indian soldiers crossed the cease-fire line in the east-
ern Kargil region.
India’s far more ambitious objective was to cut off Pakistan’s main
infiltration route into the Kashmir Valley. It passed through the 8,652-
foot-high Haji Pir Pass on the western Pir Panjal mountain range three
miles inside Azad Kashmir. The operation required meticulous planning
and execution over several days. On August 24 the Indians prepared to
capture the Haji Pir Pass.
That day, Major General Malik sought permission of the Rawalpindi-
based general headquarters to launch the preplanned Operation Grand
Slam. The director of military operations, Brigadier Gul Hassan, passed
on the request to the COAS, General Muhammad Musa Khan. When
nothing happened, Hassan reminded the COAS the next day. The COAS
needed to get the permission of President Field Marshall Muhammad

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 SHASTRI’S TALLEST ORDER

Ayub Khan, who was then vacationing in the picturesque Swat Valley two
hundred miles away. So Musa Khan dispatched Foreign Minister Bhutto
to Swat. Pakistan was on the verge of an all-out war, but the COAS, a Bal-
uch by ethnicity, was unwilling to make decisions while the Pashtun exec-
utive president was on vacation. On August 29 Malik received the green
light. By then the Indians had captured the Haji Pir Pass and bolstered
their forces by adding three infantry units and an artillery regiment in
that sector. Following a further thirty-six-hour delay at the headquarters,
the launch of Operation Grand Slam started at five am on September 1.

AYUB KHAN’S MIDSTREAM SOMERSAULT

When Malik advanced the Twelfth Infantry Division, he had a six-

to-one advantage over the Indians in armor, with his Patton tanks being
hugely superior to the enemy’s lesser (American) Shermans and (French)
AMX-13s. He enjoyed a similar advantage in artillery. His infantry was
twice the size of the Indians’.7 It was no surprise, then, that before the
day was over, the Pakistanis had captured all their targets. Outnumbered
and outgunned, the Indians suffered heavy losses. They withdrew rapidly,
while the strategic Akhnoor remained lightly defended by four infantry
battalions and a squadron of tanks.
At this point an inexplicable change of command occurred in Pa-
kistan. General Musa Khan arrived at the theater of operations in a
helicopter and transferred the command of the Twelfth Division from
Malik, a Punjabi, to Major General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, then
commander of the Seventh Infantry Division. A burly, double-chinned,
bushy-browed, slothful Yahya Khan was, like Ayub Khan, an ethnic Pash-
tun. Malik was asked to leave with Musa Khan in his helicopter.
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424809489

Yahya Khan altered Malik’s strategy and thus lost more time. Malik
had planned on bypassing strongly defended Indian positions and sub-
ordinating everything to capturing the bridge over the Chenab River at
Akhnoor with the least possible delay. But Yahya Khan opted for a differ-
ent route. He crossed the Tawi River and went straight into Troti, thereby
losing crucial hours.
Why did Ayub Khan change horses midstream? He was overconfident
of the glorious victory that Operation Grand Slam would deliver and wanted
the kudos to go to his fellow Pashtun, Yahya Kahn, rather than Malik, who
had masterminded the interlinked operations Gibraltar and Grand Slam.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Ayub Khan’s egregiously unprofessional decision allowed India to

shore up its defenses of Akhnoor. Its military high command deployed
warplanes to blunt the attack at a time when the enemy was about ten
miles from Akhnoor. The air strikes destroyed a number of Pakistani Pat-
tons and slowed the advance of the rest. In response, the Pakistani planes
targeted India’s air bases not only in Kashmir but also in Punjab.
On September 3 the UN secretary-general U Thant conveyed to the
Security Council the gist of the report he had received from the head of
the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP).
There had been a series of cease-fire line violations in Kashmir from the
Pakistani side by armed men in civilian clothes for “the purpose of armed
action on the Indian side.”8 Three days later the Council passed a reso-
lution authorizing the secretary-general to strengthen the UNMOGIP
and inform it on the situation in the area. U Thant dashed to the capitals
of the warring nations.
On the battlefield, the Indian generals concluded that the Pakistani
tank advance could not be halted by air strikes alone. So the Emergency
Committee of the Cabinet pondered the question: Should we attack Paki-
stani soil across the international border to compel its military high com-
mand to redeploy its forces away from the Kashmir front? The ultimate
decision lay with Shastri. He said, “Go!”

THE SHORTEST LEADER’S TALLEST ORDER

On September 6, when the Pakistan Army was only three miles from
Akhnoor, the Indians opened a new front by attacking the Lahore and
Sialkot sectors inside Pakistan. This compelled headquarters in Rawal-
pindi to rush its men and weaponry from the Kashmir front to blunt the
Indian incursion toward Lahore, only fifteen miles from the border. For all
practical purposes that move marked the end of Operation Grand Slam.
“The [Indian] Army could never forget the tallest order from the shortest
man,” remarked Lieutenant General Harbaksh Singh later.9
Actually, Shastri had made a more critical, but super-secret, decision
in November 1964 by giving the go-ahead to India’s nuclear weapons
program—a fact that became known only a decade later. This was Shastri’s
response to the successful testing of an atomic bomb by China near Lop
Nor, Kansu, in the previous month. That groundbreaking event in China
had been the result of Mao Zedong’s order to accelerate his country’s

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nuclear arms program in light of the military and diplomatic backing

that both Washington and Moscow accorded Delhi during the Sino-
Indian War.
On the Pakistani side, addressing his compatriots on September 7,
Ayub Khan said, “[The earlier] Indian aggression in Kashmir was only
a preparation for an attack on Pakistan. Indian rulers were never recon-
ciled to the establishment of an independent Pakistan where the Muslims
could build a homeland of their own. . . . But their defeat was imminent
because the 100 million people of Pakistan whose hearts beat with the
sound of ‘La ilaha illallah, Muhammad ur rasul Allah’ [‘There is no god but
Allah, and Muhammad is messenger of Allah’] will not rest till India’s
guns are silenced.”10
In the diplomatic arena, as soon as the Indians penetrated the Indo-
Pakistan frontier, Ayub Khan and Bhutto appealed to Washington to
honor the 1959 Pakistan-US Cooperation Agreement to assist their
country in resisting Indian aggression. President Lyndon Johnson’s ad-
ministration pointed out that the concord referred to armed aggression
from any country “controlled by international communism” and that In-
dia did not belong to that category.11 Johnson suspended military aid
to both Delhi and Rawalpindi. That hurt Pakistan, solely dependent on
Washington, more than India. (Britain followed suit.) Pakistan’s appeal
to the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) headquarters in
Bangkok also failed because it was not a victim of communist aggression.

PATRIOTIC SURGE IN WARRING NATIONS

In Pakistan, patriotic emotion gripped the nation—from Karachi to La-

hore to Dacca, with people attending huge rallies in support of the army.
“Every Pakistani wanted to contribute,” recalled Mahmood Shaam, then
a reporter with the Lahore-based daily Nawa-e-Waqt (Urdu: New Times).

Poets wrote nationalist poetry. The radio became the medium of the masses.
Television was accessible only in Lahore. Popular singer Malika-e-Tarnoom
(Queen of Melody) Nur Jahan went to the Lahore television station, re-
questing them to allow her to sing for Pakistan. . . . Outside the Lahore
radio station a post box was kept in which people would submit patriotic
poetry. . . . A poem I wrote for the Pakistan Air Force became very popular:
Yeh hawa ke rahion / Yeh badalon ke sathion / Harfan shan Mujahideen / Apni

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jaan pe khel kar / Tum bane salamati (Oh guides of the air / Oh companions
of clouds / You glorious Mujahedin/Playing with your own life / You be-
come robust). Rulers and opposition were united. . . . It was the first time
we gave blood for our borders. From 1947 to 1965 . . . we were struggling
to become a nation. But during the 1965 war all of us were one: Pakistanis.
Hostility and enmity against India solidified.12

For the Pakistani public, this was the first full-scale war with India,
the 1947–1948 conflict in Kashmir having been a minor affair and con-
fined to that princely state. This time the antagonists deployed two-thirds
of their total tank arsenals (Pakistan, 756; India, 620). What followed
were some of the most intense armored battles since the end of World
War II, often in sugarcane fields along the Punjab border. To boost mo-
rale, the public was bombarded with stories of victories on the battlefield
embellished with heroism of individual soldiers and their units.13
The battle around the small town of Khem Karan, a few miles from
the international border inside Indian Punjab, gripped popular atten-
tion on both sides. The Pakistani armor and infantry had seized it on
September 7. The Indians resolved to retake it against heavy odds. They
could marshal only three armored regiments equipped with a mishmash
of inferior tanks against Pakistan’s six armored regiments driving versatile
Pattons. But they compensated for their disadvantage in hardware with
superior tactics, surprising the enemy force and encircling it.
Their field commander, Major General Gurbaksh Singh, arrayed the
tanks in a U-formation in unharvested sugarcane fields outside the vil-
lage of Asal Uttar during the night of September 9–10. Then he flooded
the surrounding area. The next morning the advancing Pakistani armor
divisions got trapped within the enemy’s horseshoe formation and found
it hard to turn around because of the marshy terrain. The Indian gun-
ners opened fire from their camouflaged locations only when the Pa-
kistani tanks came close, thereby managing to penetrate the Pattons.
By the time the fierce battle was over, India had lost thirty-two tanks
while destroying or capturing ninety-seven of Pakistan’s tanks, including
seventy-two Pattons.14 “So many tanks lay destroyed, lying in the bat-
tlefield like toys,” wrote Lieutenant General Harbakhsh Singh in his
memoir In the Line of Duty.15
On the opposing side, Pakistanis were regaled with their army’s
capture of Khem Karan on September 7. “We were also taken to Khem
Karan,” recalled Mahmood Shaam four decades later. “We felt proud to

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 SHASTRI’S TALLEST ORDER

see the battleground where we won. Even Time magazine reported that
‘despite claims from both sides the awkward fact is Khem Karan is un-
der Pakistan administration.’”16 What followed next—a debacle—was
censured.
While censuring such news as enemy warplanes bombing targets
in Peshawar and Dacca, Radio Pakistan announced raids on the famed
Chandni Chowk shopping area of Delhi—a mood-enhancing tonic for
Pakistanis. “When I went to Rawalpindi in January 1966 to cover a min-
isterial conference between India and Pakistan, Pakistani journalists asked
me how badly Chandni Chowk . . . [had] been damaged by bombs,”
wrote Kuldip Nayar in his book India: The Critical Years. “My reply that
not a single bomb had been dropped in Delhi was greeted with derisive
laughter.”17
Equally, Indian journalists were in a triumphalist mode. At the daily
press briefings in Delhi, the most frequent questions were: “Has Lahore
airport fallen? Is Lahore radio station under our control?”18 The reality
was that though India’s tanks had reached Batapur near the Allama Iqbal
international airport—halfway between the international border and the
city center of Lahore, twenty miles from the Wagah border post—causing
an exodus, its generals had no intention of seizing the city of one million.
It would have involved hand-to-hand fighting and later burdened the
occupying army with the taxing tasks of maintaining law and order and
feeding the people.
Overall, a comforting belief had taken hold in Pakistan that the war
was going well and that Hindu India was paying a punishing price for
its unprovoked attack on their hallowed territory. The popular perception
clashed with reality on the ground, as noted by general headquarters in
Rawalpindi. By the third week of hostilities, it became evident to Field
Marshal Ayub Khan and his close aides that the army’s supply of bombs,
bullets, fuel, and food was dangerously low, and that no military assistance
by a foreign power was in the offing.

DIPLOMATS AT WORK

Following the rebuffs from the United States and SEATO, Pakistan ruled
out approaching Moscow, given its close ties with Delhi. On his part,
however, in early April 1965, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin had wel-
comed Ayub Khan and Bhutto during their eight-day tour of the Soviet

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Union in a move to counterbalance the influence America and China

enjoyed in Pakistan. The Kremlin then hosted Shastri on a weeklong trip
in mid-May to highlight the Indo-Soviet friendship forged by Jawa-
harlal Nehru.
In the war, China resolutely backed Pakistan. It warned Delhi against
any Indian incursion into Pakistan’s territory. And when that happened,
it condemned India’s move. In its message to the Shastri government in
Delhi on September 16, it stated that it would go on supporting Pakistan
in “its just struggle” as long as Indian aggression against it continued.
Facing a dire situation on the battlefield, on the night of Septem-
ber 19–20, Ayub Khan and Bhutto flew from Peshawar to Beijing for a
clandestine meeting with top Chinese leaders. Mao Zedong coupled his
earlier promise of assistance with advice that Ayub Khan should prepare
contingency plans to withdraw his army to the hills and fight a long guer-
rilla war against India.19 Such counsel washed over the Sandhurst-trained
Ayub Khan and the Berkeley-educated lawyer Bhutto. In practice, all Bei-
jing did was to threaten to open a second front against India.
In the leading world capitals there was considerable apprehension that
any direct Chinese involvement in the conflict would draw other powers
into the conflict. Western ambassadors therefore kept pressing Pakistan
not to encourage China to go beyond rhetorical statements. Equally they
pressured India not to attack East Pakistan, which would have drawn
Beijing into the bilateral war.
After his shuttle diplomacy in South Asia, U Thant reported to the
UN Security Council on September 16 that each of the warring countries
had expressed its desire to cease hostilities under certain conditions that
were unacceptable to the other side. Among the few suggestions he made
to the Council was a request to the leaders of the sparring nations to
meet in a mutually friendly country to discuss ending the present conflict
and other outstanding differences. On September 18 Kosygin addressed
letters to Ayub Khan and Shastri to meet in Tashkent in Soviet Uzbeki-
stan or any other Soviet city for negotiations on the Kashmir issue, and
offered to attend the bilateral meeting if so wished by both sides. Shastri
accepted the suggestion on September 22 and informed the parliament.
Ayub Khan prevaricated, replying a week later that such a meeting would
not be fruitful “at present.”20
Meanwhile, at the Security Council the United States and the Soviet
Union worked together to draft a resolution. As a result, Resolution 211

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 SHASTRI’S TALLEST ORDER

secured a swift and unanimous passage on September 20.21 It called for a

cease-fire at 0700 hours GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) on September
22, 1965, negotiations to settle the Kashmir dispute, and a subsequent
withdrawal of “all armed personnel” to the positions held before August 5.
India accepted the resolution on September 21. Addressing the Security
Council on September 22, Bhutto described the resolution as unsatisfac-
tory but accepted it for the sake of international peace. The guns fell si-
lent at 0330 hours on September 23, Indian Standard Time (IST)—2200
hours GMT on September 22.
Unsurprisingly, the claims made by Delhi and Rawalpindi regard-
ing their losses and gains were out of sync. According to Pakistan, 8,200
Indians were killed or captured, and 110 of India’s aircraft and 500 of
its tanks were destroyed or seized. Herbert Feldman, an academic spe-
cialist on Pakistan, put India’s losses as follows: fatalities, 4,000 to 6,000;
tanks, about 300; and aircraft, 50. The statistics for Pakistan were 3,000
to 5,000 dead and losses of 250 tanks and 50 planes.22 Delhi admitted a
loss of 75 aircraft, which chimed with neutral observers’ figure of 60 to
76. But their estimate of India losing 150 to 190 tanks was well below
Feldman’s. Whereas Delhi claimed that 5,260 Pakistanis were killed or
captured, the neutral commentators settled for 3,800. And their estimate
of Pakistan losing 200–300 tanks was in line with Feldman’s 250. India’s
claim of destroying 43 to 73 Pakistani aircraft was way above the neutral
observers’ 20.
According to David Van Praagh, a Canadian academic, India gained
710 square miles of Pakistan, including a third of the total in Azad Kash-
mir. By contrast, Pakistan acquired 210 square miles of the Indian soil, all
except 19 square miles being in Kashmir.23 Pakistan’s gain in the Indian
Punjab was restricted to the environs of Khem Karan.24
What was the end result of the war? This question is best answered
by stating the primary objective of each protagonist. The aim of Pakistan,
the instigator, was to change the status quo in Kashmir by force. It failed
to do so. India’s objective was merely to frustrate its adversary’s goal. It
succeeded. In a way, Delhi won by not losing. In stark contrast, Rawal-
pindi gained nothing from a war it initiated. Indeed, catastrophic results
came to pass in domestic politics. This armed conflict set in motion trends
that culminated in the downfall of Ayub Khan’s regime, followed by the
breakup of Pakistan, with its eastern wing seceding to form the sovereign
state of Bangladesh.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

WHEN THE GUNS FELL SILENT

Most Pakistanis could not figure out why their generals had signed a
cease-fire when they were vaunting glowing victories on the battlefield.
The credibility of Ayub Khan’s government suffered a precipitous fall from
which it never recovered, even though the president addressed several
gatherings rationalizing his decision.
His defensive posture contrasted sharply with Bhutto’s. “Pakistan will
fight, fight for a thousand years,” he declared at a press conference in Oc-
tober. “If India builds the [atom] bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go
hungry, but we will get one of our own. We have no alternative . . . bomb
for bomb.”25 Bhutto’s statement was a signal to India that Pakistan was
aware of its clandestine nuclear weapons program. He had garnered that
information from Munir Ahmad Khan, a senior technician at the eight-
year-old International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN watchdog, during
Bhutto’s visit to Vienna earlier in 1965. Later, during Bhutto’s presidency
in 1972 Ahmad Khan would be appointed head of the Pakistan Atomic
Energy Commission.
During the three-week conflict with India, East Pakistanis realized
to their consternation that their province was woefully short of troops to
assure their security. Whereas the military consumed 60 percent of the na-
tion’s budget, only 7 percent of its ranks came from East Pakistan, which
accounted for 54 percent of the country’s population.
In India there was disgruntlement among its soldiers, who would have
preferred to keep on destroying Pakistan’s armor. After flamboyantly pos-
ing for cameras on top of a captured Patton tank, Shastri addressed the
troops at the garrison border town of Ferozepur. He explained that he
agreed to a truce because of pressure from America, on which India was
dependent for food and economic aid.26 This would become abundantly
clear later in the year, when a steep drop in US economic aid forced Delhi
to liberalize its restrictions on foreign trade and devalue its currency by a
staggering 57.5 percent.27
After the cease-fire no progress was made on the belligerents’ with-
drawal to their positions of August 5 as required by Resolution 211. This
situation required mediation by a great power. Kosygin repeated his earlier
proposal for an Indo-Pakistan summit in Tashkent in his letters on No-
vember 21. Shastri responded positively. In Rawalpindi, the wily Bhutto
finagled an immediate invitation for a state visit by the Kremlin as a
means to pressure the United States before the scheduled December 10

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Ayub Khan–Johnson meeting in Washington. Ayub Khan and the presi-

dent dashed to Moscow on November 23, and two days later Ayub Khan
accepted Kosygin’s proposal.

SOVIETS’ SUCCESS AS PEACEMAKERS

On January 4, 1966, the Tashkent Conference at the grand municipal

hall opened with an address by Kosygin, a sixty-two-year-old leader with
deep-set eyes and sparse graying hair. Besides officials from India, Paki-
stan, and the Soviet Union, his audience included three hundred repre-
sentatives of the international media.
The Indian delegation, headed by Shastri, wanted the restoration of
the prewar cease-fire line, except the mountain passes its army had seized
in the Haji Pir, Poonch-Uri, and Kargil regions, and the signing of a no-
war pact with Pakistan. Its counterparty, which included the pugnacious
Bhutto, had no intention of ceding the mountain passes, which were the
main infiltration points into India-held Kashmir, or entering into a no-
war agreement.28
When the Indian side insisted on a no-war pact, the Pakistanis re-
sponded that they would agree only if there were a built-in mechanism
to discuss resolving the Kashmir issue. Reiterating that Kashmir was an
integral part of their country, the Indians refused. A stalemate ensued.
In his private talks with Shastri, Kosygin told him that if India refused
to withdraw fully from the captured territories completely, as demanded
by Resolution 211, the Kremlin would not use its veto against possible
UN sanctions against Delhi. That softened up Shastri. At the same time
Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko convinced the Pakistani dele-
gates that it was futile to try to achieve gains at the negotiating table that
they had failed to obtain on the battlefield.29
As the last throw of the dice, on the morning of January 9 Kosygin
took Ayub Khan on an unscheduled tour of the vast warplanes man-
ufacturing plant in Tashkent, aware that Washington had cut off sup-
plies of military hardware to Pakistan. Ayub Khan, a lifelong soldier, was
impressed—all the more as he was bombarded by Kosygin with jaw-
dropping statistics of the number of tanks and warplanes the Soviet
Union produced annually. A bond grew between the two leaders. Ko-
sygin adroitly interweaved his narrative with his viewpoint that, lack-
ing resources, developing countries like Pakistan and India should avoid

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resolving their differences through use of force. Ayub Khan got the mes-
sage.30 In the evening the nine-point draft of the Tashkent Declaration
was finalized.31
“They [The prime minister of India and the president of Pakistan] re-
affirm their obligation under the UN Charter not to have recourse to force
and to settle their disputes through peaceful means,” read Article 1 of
the Tashkent Declaration, signed on January 10, 1966. “They considered
that the interests of peace in their region . . . were not served by the con-
tinuance of tension. . . . It was against this background that Jammu and
Kashmir was discussed, and each of the sides set forth its respective posi-
tion.” Two other articles specified a February 25 deadline for the armed
personnel of the two countries to be withdrawn to the positions they had
held prior to August 5, and “both sides shall observe the cease-fire terms
on the cease-fire line.” The last article stated that “both sides will continue
meetings at the highest and at other levels on matters of direct concern
to both countries. Both sides have recognized the need to set up joint
Indian-Pakistan bodies, which will report to their Governments in order
to decide what further steps should be taken.”32 A day earlier, answering
a question by Bhutto, Kosygin replied, “Jammu and Kashmir is disputed
and naturally you have a right to bring this up under Article 9.”33
The absence of a reference to a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir
seemed to satisfy the Indian delegates. “The Indians were jubilant and
smiling,” wrote Air Martial Asghar Khan, a member of the Pakistani
delegation. “Tashkent Declaration was for Pakistan a statement of sur-
render. The Indians were all over the room shaking any hand that they
could grasp. It was as if India had defeated Pakistan in hockey at the
Olympics.”34
Khan was unaware that the head of the Indian delegation, Shastri,
was hardly in a buoyant mood. His consultations first with Kosygin on
the text of the declaration and then with his foreign and defense minis-
ters to judge how the joint communiqué would be received in India had
dragged on until three am on January 10. His sleep was brief—too brief
for his ailing heart.

DEATH IN THE LINE OF DUTY

During the morning of January 10 Shastri held a series of meetings with

his ministers and senior bureaucrats as well as Soviet officials to fine-tune

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the declaration, and also work on his speech. He signed the historic doc-
ument in the afternoon. Then, turning immediately to the accompanying
Indian press corps, he said: “I am in your hands; if you write favorably,
the country will accept it.”35 In the evening he attended the farewell party
given by the Soviet hosts.
The journalists accompanying Shastri retired to their rooms in a hotel
located some distance from the dacha where Shastri and his party were
lodged. “‘Your Prime Minister is dying’”: that was what Kuldip Nayar,
part of the Indian press team in Tashkent, heard the Russian female con-
cierge saying as she tried waking up the journalists on her floor. Nayar and
the Indian press attaché rushed to Shastri’s dacha by taxi. “At the dacha,
we met Kosygin, a picture of grief,” wrote Nayar. “He could not speak and
only lifted his hands to indicate that Shastri was no more.”36
After the farewell reception, Shastri had reached his dacha at about
ten pm. “Shastri told [his personal servant] Ram Nath to bring him his
food which came from Ambassador [T. N.] Kaul’s house, prepared by
his cook, Jan Mohammed,” continued Nayar. “He ate very little: a dish
of spinach and potatoes and a curry.” Venkat Raman, one of Shastri’s
personal assistants in Delhi, called him to say that the general reaction
to the Tashkent Declaration in the capital had been favorable, except by
opposition leaders, who objected to the withdrawal of Indian troops from
the Haji Pir Pass. Keen to know the reaction of his close family mem-
bers, Shastri phoned to know the opinion of his eldest daughter, Kusam.
She replied in Hindi, “We have not liked it.” Shastri asked, “What about
[your] Amma [Hindi: mother]?” She too had not liked it, came the reply.
This upset Shastri. “If my own family has not liked it, what would outsid-
ers say?” he remarked.
Agitated, he started pacing the room, something he often did while
giving interviews to the press. He drank some milk as a preliminary to
retiring to bed. But he could not sleep, and resumed pacing the room. He
asked for water, which Ram Nath served him from the thermos flask on
the dressing table. Soon after midnight he asked Ram Nath to retire to
his room and rise early for a flight to Kabul.
In another room Shastri’s personal secretary, Jagan Nath Sahai, and
two stenographers finished packing their luggage at 1:20 am. Suddenly
they found the prime minister standing at their door. “Where is the doc-
tor sahib?” he inquired with some effort. Astonishingly, there was no
emergency bell or buzzer in Shastri’s spacious room. Dr. R. N. Chugh was
sleeping at the back of the room. Sahai woke up Chugh. While the doctor

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dressed, Sahai and the stenographers helped Shastri to walk back to his
room. (In retrospect this was a fatal move by someone who had suffered a
severe heart attack, according to Nayar in his book India: The Critical Years.
Shastri had previously survived two mild heart attacks.)
In his room, a racking cough convulsed him. He was given water to
drink and put to bed. After touching his chest, he fell unconscious. Dr.
Chugh arrived, felt his pulse, gave him an injection in the arm, and later
put the syringe needle into his heart. There was no response. He then gave
the dying Shastri mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it failed.
Chugh said to Sahai, “Get the local doctors.” The security guard at the
dacha acted promptly. A Soviet doctor arrived within ten minutes, with
others following. They declared Shastri dead. The exact time of his death
on January 11 was 1:32 am Tashkent time, or 2:02 am IST.
Ayub Khan was informed instantly, and he arrived at Shastri’s dacha
at four am. He looked downcast. “Here is a man of peace who gave his
life for amity between India and Pakistan,” he remarked. Later he would
tell Pakistani reporters that Shastri was one Indian leader with whom
he had hit it off. “Pakistan and India might have solved their differences
had he lived,” he remarked.37 When Aziz Ahmad, the foreign secretary of
Pakistan, called Bhutto to inform him of Shastri’s death, Bhutto was half
asleep and grasped only the word “died.” “Which of the two bastards?” he
asked;38 the other “bastard,” according to him, being Ayub Khan.
Any opposition to the Tashkent Declaration in India died with Shas-
tri. Parliament endorsed it. Indira Gandhi, the forty-nine-year-old min-
ister of information and broadcasting, was installed as prime minister
by Congress Party barons as a stop-gap measure. The sole, but largely
neglected, child of Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru, Indira had grown up
as an insecure and defensive woman. With her long, sharp nose and a
broad forehead, she was a cross between the refined, sinewy features of
her father and the bloated visage of her mother. She fell in love with an
outgoing, articulate Zoroastrian intellectual and Congress Party activ-
ist named Feroze Gandhi. At the age of twenty-five, disregarding the
opposition of her father and Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, she married
Feroze Gandhi according to Hindu rituals. Since Zoroastrianism does
not accept converts, there was no question of Indira adopting the religion
of her husband. Following the breakdown of her marriage after Indian
independence, she ran her father’s household. Using his unchallenged
power and personality, Nehru got her elected president of the Congress

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 SHASTRI’S TALLEST ORDER

Party in 1959. That was how she was parachuted into mainstream Indian
politics. The ruling party’s presidency gave her insight into the weaknesses
of the main political players, an asset she would successfully use later to
outmaneuver those who had earlier privately derided her as a “dumb doll”
(Hindi: goongi guddia).

AYUB KHAN PASSES ON THE RULER’S BATON

The state-controlled press in Pakistan was inhibited from airing the public
letdown about the Tashkent Declaration. Even then popular anger burst
into street demonstrations. The protestors felt that their president had
sold Kashmir to the Hindu babus (Urdu: petty clerks) and warlords and
that he had given away his battlefield gains in the negotiations. Police
gunfire killed two protesting students in Lahore. Angry demonstrators,
marching along the main thoroughfare of Karachi, set ablaze the US In-
formation Service Library.
Referring to the disturbance in his radio broadcast on January 14,
Ayub Khan said, “There may be some amongst us, who will take advan-
tage of your feelings and will try to mislead you.”39 He was referring to
his political adversaries, whose ranks and temper had been bolstered by
Bhutto’s undisguised opposition to the Tashkent Declaration. Indeed
Bhutto resigned as foreign minister fi ve months after the signing of
this declaration, and started planning the birth of a political party of
his own.
However, a more robust opposition was growing in East Pakistan
with material as well as cultural causes. Under Ayub Khan’s presidency,
power became concentrated in the hands of the military, bureaucratic, and
commercial-industrial elites, among whom Bengalis were only marginally
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represented. The war in Kashmir, in which they had minimal interest or

attachment, was thrust on them without consultation. During the sev-
enteen days of its duration, they remained helpless observers. In March
1966, they were shocked to hear Bhutto state, during a National Assembly
debate in Dacca,40 that during the Indo-Pakistan War the government
had confidently assumed that, in the event of an attack on East Pakistan,
China would come to its defense.41 If, in the final analysis, Beijing was re-
sponsible for the defense of East Pakistan, then there was no advantage in
the eastern wing remaining a part of Pakistan. As an independent nation,

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

most Bengalis concluded, they might be able to safeguard it more effec-

tively. These factors swelled the ranks of the Awami League, led by Shaikh
Mujibur Rahman. Its six-point platform, centered around a federal Paki-
stan, envisaged a weak central government, lacking taxation powers and
control over external trade, with its jurisdiction reduced to foreign affairs
and defense.
Looking back, Ayub Khan regretted his decision to go to war with
India. In April he told his cabinet: “I want it understood that never
again will we risk 100 million Pakistanis for 5 million Kashmiris—never
again.”42 But the plunge in his popular standing proved irreversible.
Four months after resigning from the cabinet in June 1966, Bhutto
announced the creed of his forthcoming Pakistan People’s Party (PPP):
“Islam is our Faith; Democracy is out Policy; Socialism is our economy.
All power to the People.” While serving as a cabinet minister for eight
years, he had impressed his colleagues with his extensive knowledge, wit,
and brilliance, and had acquired a base of his own. He expanded it by
coopting leftists in West Pakistan with a sprinkling of communists from
East Pakistan to establish the PPP in Lahore in November 1967. No-
tably, its founding charter referred to “jihad against India” because of its
continued refusal to hold the promised plebiscite in Jammu and Kash-
mir. A prematurely balding man with a sharp nose in a buttery face, he
was charismatic and glib, with a penchant for catchy slogans. His slogan
“Bread, Clothing, and Shelter” for all clicked with the public, as did his
cries of “Down with zamindars [landlords]” and “Equal rights for peas-
ants.” Through seductive demagoguery and awe-inspiring self-confidence,
he rapidly built up popular support for the PPP.
Beginning in the autumn of 1968, opposition to the government,
expressed through demonstrations and strikes, escalated. It became so
acute that in March 1969 Ayub Khan abrogated the constitution he had
unveiled in 1962, reimposed martial law, and resigned. He handed over
power to the COAS, General Yahya Khan.
In August Yahya Khan welcomed US president Richard Nixon in
Lahore. He paid a return state visit to Washington at the end October
1971, when the crisis in East Pakistan became acute, requiring consulta-
tions with Nixon. He followed this up with a meeting with Zhou Enlai
in Beijing on November 14. At home one of his early decisions was to
expand the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate and assign it the
task of gathering political intelligence in East Pakistan.

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THE RISE OF THE ISI AND RAW

The ISI had come a long way from its modest inception in 1948, when
Deputy COAS Major General Robert Cawthorne established it as part
of military intelligence. Two years later he turned it into an independent
agency under his direct command. In the 1950s COAS General Ayub
Khan used the ISI to keep increasingly fractious politicians under sur-
veillance. Its authority grew when he seized power in 1958, and in effect
it became the military’s political arm. Following its intelligence failures
in the Indo-Pakistan War in September 1965, he reorganized it. He set
up a Covert Action Division inside the ISI. Its early assignment was to
assist ethnic minority insurgents operating under such names as the All
Tripura Tiger Force and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland in
northeast India that were demanding independence.
Delhi countered this when, in September 1967, Indira Gandhi es-
tablished a foreign intelligence agency initially as a wing of the main In-
telligence Bureau (IB) with the innocuous title of Research and Analysis
Wing (RAW) but reporting directly to the prime minister’s office. It im-
mediately acquired the assets of the Special Frontier Force, a secret army
set up five years earlier and trained by the CIA to carry out subversive
actions, originally aimed at Chinese troops in Tibet.43
Before establishing the new agency, Indira Gandhi had secured the
assistance of the CIA through President Lyndon Johnson. Since their
White House meeting in March 1966, he had maintained cordial re-
lations with her. He disapproved of the close relationship Pakistan was
developing with China. This opened the way for senior RAW and IB
officials to be trained by the CIA. RAW was made an independent agency
in 1968 under Rameshwar Nath Kao, who had headed the IB’s foreign
intelligence division. Its activities were to be concealed not only from the
public but also from Parliament. To counter the growing intelligence and
military links between Pakistan and China, the prime minister instructed
Kao to cultivate links with Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad,
which also functioned as a department of the prime minister’s secretar-
iat.44 This was at a time when Delhi had no diplomatic relations with Tel
Aviv and took a strongly pro-Palestinian stance in the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict.
When Yahya Khan announced elections for the provincial and na-
tional assemblies in October 1970 on the unprecedented basis of adult

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franchise, he mandated that the national parliament should act as a con-

stituent assembly and adopt a new constitution. Aware of the popularity
of the Awami League, led by Shaikh Rahman, in East Pakistan, Yahya
Khan instructed the ISI chief Brigadier Muhammad Akbar Khan to deny
the Awami League a majority in the elections, and allocated some funds
for the purpose. This project did not get very far.
The ISI had an active rival in East Pakistan: RAW. The Indian agency
devised ways to fund the Awami League because its election manifesto,
demanding a federal constitution with only the center dealing with de-
fense and foreign affairs, suited Delhi. As a result of hurricane and floods
in East Pakistan, elections in the province were postponed for two months.
Later, RAW agents operating in Dacca (later Dhaka) would warn
their handlers in Calcutta of an upcoming army crackdown on the Awami
League in February 1971 irrespective of the election results. They advised
Shaikh Rahman to leave Dacca, but to no avail.45
In the general election held on December 7, the Awami League won
a stunning 288 of the 300 seats in the provincial legislature and 160 out of
162 places allocated to East Pakistan in the National/Constituent Assem-
bly of 300. Earlier, in West Pakistan, Bhutto’s PPP had gained 81 of 132
National Assembly seats and 144 of the 300 in the Provincial Assembly.
The voter turnout was 63 percent. When on December 17 Shaikh Rahman
reiterated his six-point demand for a loose federation of Pakistan, Bhutto
rejected the proposal and declared that no constitution could be framed or
government run from the center without his party’s cooperation.46
The tenuous geographical linkage between the two wings of Pakistan
was highlighted when, in the aftermath of Kashmiri militants hijacking
an Indian aircraft headed to Lahore and blowing it up in January 1971,
India banned Pakistan’s flights over its air space. This compelled the Paki-
stani authorities to reroute air traffic between the two wings via Colombo,
Sri Lanka—an expensive, time-consuming alternative.
In its assessment of Pakistan, RAW painted an alarming picture of its
military capabilities—which were duly reproduced in the Indian media—
quantifying its troops and weaponry, and concluding that Islamabad had
achieved “a good state of military preparedness for any confrontation with
India.” It judged “the potential threat” of an attack on India “quite real,
particularly in view of the Sino-Pakistan collusion.” Besides, it added,
the constitutional crisis in East Pakistan might encourage the generals to
undertake a diversionary adventure, to begin, as in August 1965, with “an
infiltration campaign in Jammu and Kashmir.”47

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 SHASTRI’S TALLEST ORDER

The opening of the National/Constituent Assembly in Dacca on

March 3 was postponed indefinitely by Yahya Khan when Bhutto threat-
ened a general strike in West Pakistan if the Assembly met as scheduled.
On March 2 Shaikh Rahman called a five-day general strike in East
Pakistan. It was followed by a campaign of noncooperation by the Awami
League. Yahya Khan settled for the inaugural of the National/Constituent
Assembly on March 25.
On March 7 Shaikh Rahman declared that the Awami League would
attend the National/Constituent Assembly only if martial law was im-
mediately revoked and power transferred to the elected members of the
Provincial Assembly. That day, Yahya Khan appointed the mustached,
unsmiling, leathery faced General Muhammad Tikka Khan as military
governor of East Pakistan. He then ordered the airlifting of troops from
West Pakistan to Dacca, albeit in civilian clothes, to shore up the thirty-
thousand-strong force, of which eighteen thousand were Bengalis, most
of whom would defect or be disarmed. Once that was accomplished, he
flew to Dacca on March 15 to work out a compromise between Shaikh
Rahman and Bhutto. Five days later, when he announced a plan to intro-
duce an interim constitution that would end martial law on March 20,
Bhutto rejected it.
Behind the scenes, Yahya Khan and Tikka Khan finalized plans for
a military takeover in East Pakistan to overcome the resistance offered
by the Bengalis of the East Bengal Regiments, East Pakistan Rifles, and
police as well as nationalist students and other civilians. On March 23
Shaikh Rahman issued a “declaration of emancipation” for East Paki-
stan. And when, as anticipated, the final round of talks between him,
Yahya Khan, and Bhutto broke down at ten pm on March 25, Tikka Khan
mounted Operation Searchlight to crush the popular upsurge. He sent the
sixty-five-thousand-strong army to accomplish the atrocious task.
He outlawed the Awami League, flew the arrested Shaikh Rahman
to West Pakistan to be tried for treason, expelled foreign journalists from
East Pakistan, and imposed censorship.48 This was the opening phase of
violent turbulence that culminated in the ground war between Islamabad
and Delhi in East Pakistan eight months later.

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 10

Indira Gandhi Slays

the Two-Nation Theory

The run-up to the Indo-Pakistan war in East Pakistan in 1971 went

through three phases: March to May, June to September, and October to
November 21. These were determined as much by political-diplomatic de-
velopments as by the weather in the eastern part of the subcontinent. The
end of monsoon—June to September—is a preamble to the harvest sea-
son, spanning October and early November. The transportation of crops to
urban centers clogs up the railways, which are needed for mass transport
of heavy military hardware from garrison towns to the front lines.
It was left to India’s chief of army staff (COAS) General Sam Hor-
musji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw to explain the linkage between har-
vesting a seasonal crop and preparing the army for war. A slim, blimpish
Zoroastrian with a walrus mustache, Manekshaw also pointed out that
with the approaching winter closing the mountain passes in the Himala-
yas, Chinese leaders would be inhibited from intervening in the fight on
the side of Pakistan. The cabinet agreed.
The buildup to this armed conflict—called the Bangladesh War or
Bangladesh Liberation War—and its duration witnessed complex diplo-
matic maneuvering—unrivaled in history since World War II. Besides In-
dia and Pakistan, it involved the United States, the Soviet Union, and the
People’s Republic of China (henceforth China). Following the expulsion
of the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) from the United Nations, China
acquired a permanent seat on the UN Security Council on October 25,
1971. This was a consequence of the clandestine trip to Beijing on July

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 INDIRA GANDHI SLAYS THE TWO-NATION THEORY

10–11 by US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, primarily to

discuss the fate of Taiwan.

OVERARCHING AIM OF THE “BUTCHER OF BENGAL”

General Tikka Khan mounted Operation Searchlight on March 25, 1971,

to decimate intellectuals, the wellspring of Bengali nationalism, as a pre-
lude to a more ruthless goal. According to Anthony Mascarenhas, an
assistant editor of the Karachi-based Morning News, the official policy
consisted of three elements. “One: the Bengalis have proved themselves
unreliable and must be ruled by West Pakistanis,” he reported in mid-
June. “Two: the Bengalis will have to be re-educated along proper Islamic
lines. The Islamization of the masses—this is the official jargon—is in-
tended to eliminate secessionist tendencies and provide a strong religious
bond with West Pakistan. Three: when the Hindus have been eliminated
by death and fight, their property will be used as a golden carrot to win
over the underprivileged Muslim middle-class.”1 Though Hindus were
only one-seventh of East Pakistan’s population of seventy-five million,
they disproportionately owned far more property.
Pakistani troops singled out the university in Dacca as well as Hindu
neighborhoods for their attacks. On March 31 the Indian parliament
passed a resolution in support of the “people of Bengal.” In Delhi, open
interference in the internal affairs of Pakistan went hand in hand with
feverish activity by Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) agents operating
in Calcutta. They played a central role in helping the Awami League lead-
ers who had escaped the army’s dragnet establish a government-in-exile
in Calcutta on April 17.
Calling itself the provisional government of Bangladesh, with
Shaikh Mujibur Rahman as its president, it soon formalized the as-
sorted groups of armed resistors to the regime inside East Pakistan
under the generic term of Mukti Bahini (Bengali: Liberation Army).
Placed under the command of (Retired) Colonel Muhammad Ataullah
Gani Osmani, the Mukti Bahini was organized, funded, armed, and
trained by the Indian government. In its secret correspondence it started
describing the events in East Pakistan as the “struggle for Bangladesh
[Bengali: Bengali Nation].”
Like the regime in Islamabad, China viewed the Indian move with
ill-concealed concern. “The Chinese Government holds that what is

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happening in Pakistan at present is purely an internal affair of Pakistan

which can only be settled by the Pakistani people themselves and brooks
no foreign interference whatsoever,” wrote Chinese premier Zhou Enlai
to President Yahya Khan on April 21. “Your Excellency may rest assured
that should the Indian expansionists dare to launch aggression against
Pakistan, the Chinese government and people will, as always, support the
Pakistan Government and people in their just struggle to safeguard state
sovereignty and national independence.”2
On April 7 the bright-eyed, oval-faced, clean-shaven Lieutenant
General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, a veteran of several battles since
World War II, was dispatched to Dacca to assist General Tikka Khan.
With that, the uprising in East Pakistan intensified—and so did India’s
involvement, covert and overt.
On Niazi’s advice, Tikka Khan coopted the Islamist Jamaat-e Islami
(Urdu: Islamic Society), popular among Urdu-speaking Bihari Muslim
immigrants. Its leaders declared a jihad against the Bengali liberation
forces and their Indian backers. This chimed with Islamabad’s claims,
widely publicized in the media, that the Awami League had close ties
with Bengali Hindus and that they were part of “an Indo-Zionist plot
[hatched] against Islamic Pakistan.”3 The latter statement had a nugget
of truth in it, as later revelations would show.
Jamaat-e Islami’s student wing joined the military government’s move
in May to set up two paramilitary counterinsurgency units. This arrange-
ment was formalized by Tikka Khan under the East Pakistan Razakar
Ordinance on June 1. It stipulated the creation of a trained, voluntary
force to act as auxiliaries to the regular army.
“A separate Razakars Directorate was established,” wrote Niazi in his
memoirs Betrayal of East Pakistan.

Two separate wings called Al Badr and Al Shams were recognized. Well
educated and properly motivated students from schools and madrassas were
put in Al Badr wing, where they were trained to undertake “Specialized
Operations” while the remainder were grouped together under Al Shams
which was responsible for the protection of bridges, vital points and other
areas. The Razakars were mostly employed in areas where army elements
were around to control and utilize them. . . . This force was useful where
available, particularly in the areas where the rightist parties were in strength
and had sufficient local influence.4

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 INDIRA GANDHI SLAYS THE TWO-NATION THEORY

Al Shams also supplied logistics and intelligence to the army. Its members
often patrolled Bengali nationalist strongholds in jeeps, arrested suspects
at random, and took them to local torture centers.
This strategy was implemented after the army’s first round of violence
had overpowered the local nationalist forces, consisting of militant civilians
and Bengali army deserters (described as “miscreants” by the authorities),
in major cities by mid-May. To inform the outside world of its success, the
government in Islamabad selected eight journalists, including Mascarenhas
of the Morning News, for a ten-day guided tour of East Pakistan.5
On their return home in early June, seven of these journalists pro-
duced pro-government reports, which were published after military cen-
sors had cleared them. Mascarenhas, a square-faced, mustached man with
soulful eyes behind his glasses, stalled. “He told me that if he couldn’t
write the story of what he’d seen he’d never be able to write another word
again,” his wife, Yvonne, would reveal later. He told her that if he wrote
what he had seen he would be shot. Pretending that his London-based
sister, Ann, was seriously ill, he flew to London. There he met Harold Ev-
ans, editor of the Sunday Times. Even the earlier exposure to the outrages
committed in East Pakistan had not prepared Evans to hear what he did
from Mascarenhas. The Pakistani journalist told Evans that “what the
Army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale,” and that
he had been an eyewitness to a huge, systematic killing spree, and had
heard army officers describe the killings as a “final solution.” Tikka Khan,
the architect of Operation Searchlight, would acquire the sobriquet of the
“Butcher of Bengal.”
But Evans could run this spine-chilling account only after the eyewit-
ness’s wife and five children had left Pakistan. Once that was accomplished
through a ruse, and the Mascarenhas family had arrived in London on
June 12, the Sunday Times ran a three-page report by Mascarenhas the
next day under the headline “GENOCIDE.” “I have witnessed the bru-
tality of ‘kill and burn missions’ as the army units, after clearing out the
rebels, pursued the pogrom in the towns and villages,” he reported. “I have
seen whole villages devastated by ‘punitive action.’ And in the officers’
mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and hon-
orable men proudly chewed over the day’s kill. ‘How many did you get?’
The answers are seared in my memory.”6
The sensational, meticulously recorded, firsthand account by a long-
established Pakistani journalist was quoted worldwide. It played a vital

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role in turning international opinion against the military junta in Islam-

abad. According to Evans, Indian premier Indira Gandhi told him that
the article had shocked her so deeply it had set her “on a campaign of
personal diplomacy in the European capitals and Moscow to prepare the
ground for India’s armed intervention.”7
In stark contrast, this distressing reportage left topmost American
officials unmoved. The stance of President Nixon was aptly encapsulated
in his scribbled note on a memorandum from Kissinger on April 28,
1971, in which the latter suggested that the future of East Pakistan was
“greater autonomy, and perhaps eventual independence”: “To all hands,
don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.” Nixon was unaffected by the letter
Indira Gandhi sent him in May about “the carnage in East Bengal” and
the flood of refugees burdening India. Th e declassified transcripts of
the White House tapes released in June 2005 contained the following
snippet of conversation between Nixon and Kissinger on May 26, 1971:

KISSINGER: They are the most aggressive goddamn people around there.
NIXON: The Indians?
KISSINGER: Yeah.
NIXON: Sure.8

On June 22 the New York Times ran a report by Ted Szulc, headlined
“US Military Goods Sent to Pakistan Despite the Ban.” It revealed that
to circumvent the Congressional ban on arms to Pakistan since the Sep-
tember 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, the Nixon administration was shipping
weapons to Pakistan via Iran and Turkey.
At that time Kissinger and Nixon were pursuing a plan for Kissinger to
visit Beijing secretly to exploit the virtual breakdown in Beijing-Moscow
relations. The deterioration started with a series of border clashes between
the communist neighbors, originating in March 1969, and escalated in
October with a military alert by Beijing following a failed meeting be-
tween Zhou and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin in September. The num-
ber of Soviet divisions deployed along the Chinese border rose to thirty
in 1970 amid rumors that the Kremlin was planning a surgical strike on
the Chinese nuclear testing site in Xinjiang.9
As the military buildup by both sides continued in 1971, Nixon and
Kissinger saw an opportunity for the United States to seek rapproche-
ment with China, using Pakistan as a courier, to reinforce its leverage over
its primary adversary, the Soviet Union.

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 INDIRA GANDHI SLAYS THE TWO-NATION THEORY

WARMING UP PHASE

On June 28 Yahya Khan announced plans for the drafting of a new con-
stitution, proposing that the task should be completed in four months. A
month later he claimed that normality had returned to the eastern wing.
His assertion clashed with the fact that the first India-trained, 110-strong
Bengali guerrilla unit managed to infiltrate East Pakistan to reach its
central town of Madaripur in July.10 It destroyed tea gardens, riverboats,
and railway tracks—acts that tied down Pakistani troops, undermined
local industry, and destroyed communications between Dacca and two
important provincial cities.11
The concerned governments tried diplomacy to grapple with the
deepening crisis. In his meeting with his Soviet counterpart, Andrei
Gromyko, in Moscow in June, India’s foreign minister, Swaran Singh, re-
marked that China was the only country to give “all out, full, unequivocal
support” to the military regime in Islamabad. “The Chinese are against
everything the USSR stands for,” said Gromyko. “Any cause we support
invites their opposition, and anything which we consider unworthy of our
support secures their support.”12
The two ministers discussed a treaty initially suggested by Gromyko’s
ministry to Durga Prasad Dhar, the Indian ambassador in Moscow, to
act as “a strong deterrent to force Pakistan and China to abandon any
idea of military adventure.” This led to Singh meeting Premier Kosygin,
who endorsed the proposal. Following an exchange of drafts, the Indo-
Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, valid for twenty
years, was finalized. It was signed on August 9 in New Delhi by Singh
and Gromyko.13
“Each of the High Contracting Parties” to the treaty declared that
it would maintain “regular contact with each other on major interna-
tional problems affecting the interests of both the states,” that “it shall
not enter into or participate in any military alliance directed against the
other Party,” and that “in the event of either Party being subjected to an
attack or a threat thereof, the High Contracting Parties shall immedi-
ately enter into mutual consultations in order to remove such threat and
to take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security
of their countries.”14
This historic document was inked a month after Kissinger’s clan-
destine visit to Beijing, where he met Zhou Enlai. “In our opinion, if
India continues on its present course in disregard of world opinion,

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

it will continue to go on recklessly,” Zhou told him. “We, however,

support the stand of Pakistan. This is known to the world. If they [the
Indians] are bent on provoking such a situation, then we cannot sit idly
by.” Kissinger told Zhou that Washington’s sympathies also lay with
Pakistan.15
Nixon’s perception of the Indian diplomats as “slippery, treacherous
people” was enhanced when he learned of the Indo-Soviet Treaty. He
viewed it as an undisguised collusion between Delhi and Moscow—and
an extension of Soviet power in South Asia. During the latter half of
August, Nixon told a meeting of the Washington Special Action Group
(WSAG), formed to discuss the South Asia crisis, that while the Paki-
stanis were “straightforward” if sometimes “extremely stupid,” the “Indi-
ans are more devious, sometimes so smart that we fall for their line.” He
stressed that “the US must not—cannot—allow India to use the refugees
as a pretext to break up Pakistan.”16
The unending flow of refugees from East Pakistan—the figure touch-
ing six million by August, with three-quarters of them Hindu—surviving
in ramshackle camps in West Bengal and surrounding states, was creat-
ing an unsustainable burden on Delhi’s resources. On the other hand,
these camps became an abundant source of volunteers keen to be trained
as guerrillas.
In the formation of the Mukti Bahini, RAW cooperated with the In-
dian Army. By acquiring the nine-year-old Establishment 22 (aka Special
Frontier Force) as its armed wing, it had gained experience in training
volunteers as guerrillas and saboteurs. A liaison between it and the army
was maintained through the military advisor to RAW’s director and the
Military Intelligence Advisory Group. By then, RAW had developed
sophisticated signals intelligence and photo-reconnaissance capabilities,
thanks to CIA assistance.
At the conclave of the Bengali officers held in Calcutta from July 11
to 17 under the joint aegis of the Indian Army and RAW, East Pakistan
was divided into eleven sectors. The Liberation Force was separated into
regular troops and guerrillas supported by intelligence volunteers. The
guerrillas’ tasks were to raid and ambush military targets, sabotage fac-
tories and power plants, and disrupt communications systems. They were
also taught how to compel the Pakistani forces to scatter in small units,
thus making them vulnerable to lethal attacks.17

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 INDIRA GANDHI SLAYS THE TWO-NATION THEORY

POSTMONSOON PERIOD

By September, India was processing twenty thousand guerrillas a month

in ten camps, with eight Indian soldiers appointed to coach a hundred
volunteers each.18 As monsoon rains tapered off, infiltration by Mukti
Bahini guerrillas rose steeply.
On the other side, intent on showing that normalcy had returned to
East Pakistan, Yahya Khan declared a general amnesty in early September
and replaced Tikka Khan with a moderate politician, Abdul Malik, as
governor. Tikka Khan was reassigned to lead the Multan-based Corps II
in West Pakistan. Lieutenant General Niazi succeeded Tikka Khan as the
commander of the Eastern Command.
On the diplomatic front, after signing a friendship treaty with Delhi,
the Kremlin did not alter its earlier stance on East Pakistan. In pursuance
of its policy to befriend Pakistan after the 1966 Tashkent Conference, it
had started supplying arms to Islamabad. Now it maintained that the con-
flict in East Pakistan was an “internal problem” of the Islamabad regime.
To persuade the Kremlin to alter its policy, Indira Gandhi flew to
Moscow in late September. There she reiterated her argument that the
nonstop flow of refugees from East Pakistan was severely straining the
limited resources of her government. Because of the wretched living con-
ditions in the camps people were dying in droves, she added. The sub-
sequent Indo-Soviet communiqué referred to the need for all necessary
measures to stop and reverse the refugee exodus, now touching eight
million.19
From mid-October, the Indian troops started using artillery fire to
give cover to Mukti Bahini infiltrators. To their disappointment, these
partisans were rarely able to hold their ground when the Pakistan Army
counterattacked. As a result, the Indians’ shelling along the India–East
Pakistan frontier became more intense, and the size of the infiltration by
Mukti Bahini ranks swelled.
India Gandhi’s diplomatic drive continued, with a focus on highlight-
ing the ongoing flow of refugees from East Pakistan. Her three-week tour
of the capitals of Western Europe and North America ended in Wash-
ington on November 4.
She was welcomed by Nixon with full military honors on the South
Lawn at the White House. During their meeting Nixon made a case
for avoiding a new war and offered to fix a time limit for Yahya Khan to

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

reach a political settlement in East Pakistan. Emulating the response of

her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, to the mention of the Kashmir dispute by a
foreign leader, Indira Gandhi listened “with aloof indifference,” according
to Kissinger, who was present. By refraining from making any comment
on Nixon’s presentation, she successfully created an invisible yet impene-
trable wall between her and Nixon. On his part, the American president
said next to nothing about the millions of refugees who had sought haven
in India.
After Gandhi’s departure from the White House on November 5,
Nixon reviewed her visit with Kissinger. “We really slobbered over the old
witch,” said Nixon according to the documents declassified by the State
Department in June 2005. (This was apparently a reference to the praise
he showered on her when in his welcoming speech he said that Indira
Gandhi had “the unique distinction, through the parliamentary system of
India that more people have voted for her leadership than for any leader
in the whole history of the world.”20) “The Indians are bastards anyway,”
remarked Kissinger. “They are starting a war there.” He added, “While
she was a bitch, we got what we wanted too. She will not be able to go
home and say that the United States didn’t give her a warm reception and
therefore in despair she’s got to go to war.”21
By a strange coincidence, on November 5 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in
Beijing as head of a Pakistani delegation to seek China’s backing. But the
Chinese leaders avoided making a firm commitment to side with Pakistan
militarily. Five days later, Nixon instructed Kissinger to ask the Chinese
to move some troops toward the Indian frontier. “Threaten to move forces
or move them, Henry, that’s what they must do now.” Kissinger conveyed
the message to Huang Hua, China’s freshly appointed ambassador to the
United Nations.22
Beijing had to take into account the eight mountain divisions that In-
dia had deployed along the Indo-Tibetan border. Nonetheless, it amassed
soldiers on India’s frontier. Delhi threatened to bomb the Lop Nor nu-
clear facility in Xinjiang, so Beijing redeployed its troops. 23 To balance
that move, it decided to shore up West Pakistan’s defense capabilities. It
was aided in this enterprise by the existence of the five-year-old Kara-
koram Highway, which traversed the Khunjerab Pass. Each day one hun-
dred trucks, carrying civilian and military goods, arrived in Gilgit from
the Chinese city of Kashgar.
India’s military planners had finessed a strategy that integrated the se-
cret Establishment 22 forces into the fight being waged against Pakistan.

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 INDIRA GANDHI SLAYS THE TWO-NATION THEORY

According to the selective leaks from the classified official history of the
Bangladesh war on its fortieth anniversary, by early November 1971 about
51,000 Mukti Bahini fighters were active in East Pakistan. By operating
mainly along the frontier with India, they had succeeded in drawing the
Pakistani troops forward to the India border, thereby easing the way for
regular Indian soldiers’ eventual thrust to Dacca.24 As it was, during
November units of regular Indian soldiers resorted to conducting over-
night guerrilla actions inside East Pakistan and then withdrawing across
the frontier.

GROUND WAR IN EAST PAKISTAN

On the night of November 21, discontinuing their earlier practice of re-

turning to Indian soil after pinprick attacks in East Pakistan, India’s forces
stayed put. Two days later Yahya Khan declared a state of emergency in all
of Pakistan and called on Pakistanis to prepare for war with India. By No-
vember 25 several Indian Army divisions had attacked key border regions
of East Pakistan, using armor and artillery fire. To divert Pakistani soldiers
from major population centers, RAW’s director, Rameshwar Kao, pressed
into action the CIA-trained dissident Tibetans. Armed with hastily im-
ported Bulgarian assault rifles and US-made carbines, and commanded
by Brigadier Sujan Singh Uban, they poured into the Chittagong Hill
tracts, inhabited by East Asian tribes. They tied down Pakistani troops in
low-grade border skirmishes.25
Niazi had sixty-five thousand troops under his command. He faced
Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the commanding officer of In-
dia’s Eastern Command in Calcutta, with nearly four times as many sol-
diers. This compelled Niazi to adopt a defensive strategy. He withdrew
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his forces from scattered border pickets and assembled them in fortified
defensive positions at major urban centers in the interior. “The whole
nation is proud of you and you have their full support,” read the message
he received from General Abdul Hamid Khan, chief of staff, on Novem-
ber 30. That day the military high command in Rawalpindi decided to
launch Operation Chengiz Khan (Genghis Khan) on the western front
of India on December 2, later postponed by twenty-four hours, without
informing Niazi.26
At 5:40 pm on Friday, December 3, Pakistan bombed eleven In-
dian airfields near its western frontier and mounted artillery attacks on

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India-held Kashmir. When Indira Gandhi was informed of this move,

she remarked, “Thank God, they have attacked us.”27 This meant that
India would not be accused of aggression, since its eleven-day-old mili-
tary moves in East Pakistan were considered by outsiders as part of the
nationalist Bengalis’ ongoing clandestine armed struggle. At midnight
Indira Gandhi declared war on Pakistan.

HOT WAR, FRENZIED DIPLOMACY

On December 4, India launched an integrated ground, sea, and air inva-

sion of East Pakistan of such might that it won the moniker of a “blitz-
krieg without tanks.” Accompanied by Mukti Bahini fighters, Indian
troops penetrated the East Pakistani frontier at five points and advanced
on Dacca from the north, east, and west. Niazi’s forces tried to slow down
the enemy’s advance by blowing up bridges. Aided by Mukti Bahini guer-
rillas already inside East Pakistan, the invading forces cut off communi-
cations between the capital and other important cities. And by capturing
vital railheads they immobilized the defenders. The Indians responded to
Pakistan’s air and ground assaults on their soil with attacks on targets in
West Pakistan.
The third Indo-Pakistan war unleashed a diplomatic frenzy. At the
UN Security Council, George Herbert Walker Bush, the American am-
bassador to the United Nations, introduced a resolution calling for an
immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of armed forces by India and Pa-
kistan. It was vetoed by the Soviet Union. The CIA chief, Richard Helms,
told Nixon that while Gandhi hoped China would not intervene from
the north, the Kremlin had warned her that the Chinese were still able to
“rattle the sword” in the Ladakh region of Kashmir.
On December 6 India recognized the Calcutta-based provisional
government of Bangladesh. Yahya Khan responded by forming a civilian
administration with Nurul Amin, a Bengali from East Pakistan, as prime
minister and Bhutto as deputy prime minister and foreign minister.
By December 9, the Indians had blunted Pakistan’s offensive on their
western front and destroyed its oil storage tanks in Karachi.
On December 10 Kissinger met Huang at the United Nations. “If the
People’s Republic were to consider the situation on the Indian subcon-
tinent a threat to its security, and if it took measures to protect its secu-
rity, the US would oppose efforts of others to interfere with the People’s

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Republic,” he told Huang. “We are not recommending any particular steps;
we are simply informing you about the actions of others. The movement of
our naval force is still east of the Straits of Malacca and will not become
obvious until Sunday evening [December 12] when they cross the Straits.”
Kissinger then offered Washington’s assessment of the military situation
on the subcontinent. “The Pakistani Army in the East has been destroyed,”
he said. “The Pakistani Army in the West will run out of what we call
POL—gas and oil—in another two or three weeks, two weeks probably,
because the oil storage capacity in Karachi has been destroyed. We think
that the immediate objective must be to prevent an attack on the West Pa-
kistan Army by India. We are afraid that if nothing is done to stop it, East
Pakistan will become a Bhutan and West Pakistan will become a Nepal.
And India with Soviet help would be free to turn its energies elsewhere.”28
Both Washington and Beijing feared that India’s invasion of West
Pakistan would lead to Soviet domination of South Asia, a prospect they
were determined to abort. Nixon encouraged China to further increase its
arms shipments to Pakistan.
Bhutto arrived at the United Nations on the evening of December 10
to shore up Pakistan’s case.
What happened on the diplomatic front during the next crucial days
was captured in the message Kissinger sent to Zhou Enlai on December
17. According to Kissinger, on December 12 the United States urged the
Soviet Union through its embassy in Washington to pressure India to end
the war. The next day Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin informed the
White House that the Kremlin was consulting India and would inform
it of the result. “Early Tuesday morning, December 14, the Soviet Union
sent a message which, in addition to some standard Soviet views on the
South Asian situation, relayed firm assurance that the Indian leadership
had no plans of seizing West Pakistan territory or attacking West Pakistan
armed forces.” Later that morning, instructed by Nixon, Deputy Secre-
tary of State General Alexander Haig met Soviet chargé d’affaires Yuli
Vorontsov and told him that the president and Kissinger had found the
Soviet message imprecise on India’s intentions in West Pakistan and
wanted clarification on two points: Did the Soviet note include Azad
Kashmir, and did it involve a return to the exact borders before the out-
break of hostilities? Vorontsov expressed his personal understanding that
this was precisely the Soviet view.
Haig stressed that the United States wanted the Kremlin to move
promptly to halt the fighting and that delays could have the most serious

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impact on US-Soviet relations.29 “Nixon and Kissinger had to rely on

Moscow’s word that India would not attack West Pakistan,” noted Do-
brynin in his memoirs, In Confidence, and added that “the Soviet Union’s
diplomatic intervention helped prevent the military conflict from
spreading.”30
When Henry Kissinger and Prime Minister Zhou met in the Great
Hall in Beijing on June 20, 1972, they reviewed the events of the tu-
multuous days in December. Among the topics discussed was a series
of articles about the “US tilt” toward Pakistan, published in January
1972 by columnist Jack Anderson, based on the classifi ed minutes of
the WSAG.31 In hot pursuit of forging friendly ties with China, Nixon
and Kissinger ignored the rising condemnation and anger of American
commentators at the brutal atrocities committed by the Pakistan Army
in East Pakistan. Tellingly, the early protest of their stance of “See no
evil” had come from the US consulate in Dacca. A telegram headlined
“Dissent from US Policy on East Pakistan,” signed by twenty offi cials
from the consulate and other American development agencies and sent
from Dacca by the consul-general, Archer K. Blood, on April 7, 1971,
referred to “selective genocide” in East Pakistan.32

PM [ZHOU]: They [Pakistanis] were not clear about the situation because
Mr. Bhutto himself was not a military man and Yahya Khan had boasted
about the military situation. So I believe Mr. Bhutto on the 11th [De-
cember] thought that the military situation in Pakistan at that time was
indeed very well.
HK [KISSINGER]: Bhutto arrived in New York on Friday the 10th our
time, 11th your time. . . . You called us in the morning of the 12th and we
were going to the meeting with [French President] Pompidou [in Azores]
so we sent General [Alexander] Haig. But between the time we got the
phone call and picked up the message we didn’t know what it was. And
since Huang Ha had taken a very tough line, not knowing the situation I
thought your message to us was that you were taking military measures.
And since we were going to the Azores before [the meeting with Huang],
we had to give instructions [to Haig]. If your message was, you were taking
military measures our instructions were that if the Soviet Union moved
against you we would move against the Soviet Union.
PM: Why did the newspapers publish what had been discussed step by step in
the Washington Special Actions Group with respect to the East Pakistan
situation?

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 INDIRA GANDHI SLAYS THE TWO-NATION THEORY

HK: Well first, the PM has to understand that the Washington Special [Ac-
tion] Group implements decisions, it does not make decisions. The reason
I had to take such a strong stand in this group was because the vast ma-
jority of our bureaucracy was pro-India and pro-Soviet.
PM: Pro-Soviet?
HK: More Pro-Soviet than Pro-Chinese. I came under the most violent
attack. . . . What happened is that a disloyal member of our bureaucracy
gave these documents to newspapers and they printed them in order to
destroy us and they came very close.
PM: But after reading the records that were published, it seemed to me that
the members of that group came from quite a lot of quarters.
HK: Yes, they were almost unanimously against our policy.
PM: Especially toward India?
HK: They didn’t understand our overall strategy. If they had understood we
were getting ready to take on the Soviet Union then what happened was
mild compared to what would have happened. The reason we moved our
Fleet into the Indian Ocean was not because of India primarily—it was as
pressure on the Soviet Union if the Soviets did what I mentioned before.
PM: And they also closely followed you down into the Indian Ocean.
HK: Yes but what they had we could have taken care of very easily.
PM: What they were trying to do was to create more noise in East Bengal.
They openly passed through the Tsushima straits and then through the
Malacca Straits.
HK: Yes but not with a force that could fight ours.
PM: Yes, but you know they could surface in such a way their support to East
Bengal.
HK: Oh yes, it was used for that purpose. Actually, the Pakistan Army in the
East surrendered five days later [on December 16], so it would have been
too late for you to do anything.
PM: Also Yahya Khan had sent his order in preparation for such a measure
on the 11th or the 12th.33

China’s message to the United States on December 12 apparently

expressed support for an immediate cease-fire. That day, Washington re-
quested the reconvening of the Security Council. While the Council de-
liberated, the military situation for Pakistan deteriorated rapidly.
Within a week of the hostilities, Indian warplanes had grounded the
entire air force of East Pakistan by raiding four major air bases and had
gained almost total control of its air space. By attacking the three main

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ports of East Pakistan, India’s warships severed the escape routes for the
stranded Pakistani troops.
The lightning progress of Delhi’s forces owed much to the success
Indian code breakers had in breaking Pakistan’s military cipher. They
furnished India’s military intelligence with real-time information on the
enemy’s strategic decision making, according to the selective leaks from
India’s classified official history of the 1971 war.34 Among other things,
the Indians’ interception of Pakistan’s military communications aborted
its high command’s decision to evacuate its troops in five vessels disguised
as merchant ships.
On land, the Indian troops advancing along Dacca-Chittagong High-
way were forced to halt twenty miles southeast of Dacca when they en-
countered a broken bridge across the Meghna River. “The Pakistani forces
thought they had cut us off after they blew up a bridge over the Meghna
River,” recalled Lieutenant General Aurora later. “But we took them by
surprise and crossed it at night with the help of the local people. Th at
was the turning point [in the war].”35 With that, on December 13 Dacca
became vulnerable to the invaders’ artillery fire.

NIAZI’S UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER

“You have fought a heroic battle against overwhelming odds,” read the
dispatch to Niazi from general headquarters in Rawalpindi. However,
the message continued, “you have now reached a stage where further
resistance is no longer humanly possible nor will it serve any useful
purpose. . . . You should now take all necessary measures to stop the
fighting and preserve the lives of armed forces personnel, all those from
West Pakistan and all loyal elements.”36
Later, when controversy broke out in Pakistan about the actual
events on those crucial days, some critics accused Niazi of acting uni-
laterally. “I swear on oath that I was given clear-cut orders from Yahya to
surrender, but still I was determined to fight till the end,” Niazi asserted.
“I even sent a message that my decision to fight till the end stands.
However, General Abdul Hamid Khan and Air Chief Marshal Rahim
[Khan] rang me up, ordering me to act on the [headquarters’] signal of
December 14, 1971 because West Pakistan was in danger. It was at this
stage that I was asked to agree on a cease-fire so that the safety of the
troops could be ensured.”37

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On December 15 Niazi approached the American consul-general

in Dacca, who contacted the appropriate authority in Delhi. The next
day Lieutenant-General Aurora, the joint commander of India’s Eastern
Command and the Bangladesh Forces of the Provisional Government of
Bangladesh, flew into Dacca to accept the instrument of surrender signed
by Niazi.
In Delhi, within hours of learning about Niazi’s decision to surrender,
Manekshaw called on Indira Gandhi. He reportedly asked her if the mil-
itary high command had the permission to “finish the job.” This meant
overrunning West Pakistan. She replied that the cabinet would consider
his suggestion.38
She summoned a cabinet meeting. By the time she had briefed her
colleagues about the secret intermediary role the Kremlin had played be-
tween her and Nixon, and that the Kremlin had ruled out even attack-
ing Azad Kashmir, any enthusiasm for Manekshaw’s gung-ho proposal
harbored by some of her ministers vanished. The session ended with a
unanimous decision to declare a unilateral cease-fire on December 17 on
the western front as well. Such level-headed decision making had a par-
allel during the September 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, when the Cabinet
Committee on Security, headed by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri,
voted against attempting to capture Lahore, which would have been de-
fended fiercely.
In Dacca, Aurora met Niazi at the ornate administrative offi ce of
the Ramna Race Course, the former exclusive club of the British offi-
cers stationed in Dacca Cantonment, overlooking the race course and
the surrounding park. It was here that in his historic speech on March 6,
1971, Shaikh Mujibur Rahman had declared: “This time the struggle is
for our freedom.” Now, surrounded by a large group of uniformed officers
and civilian bureaucrats, the bearded Aurora, wearing a starched, striped
turban, countersigned the instrument of surrender signed by clean-shaven
Niazi, sporting a beret.
As the Indian and Pakistan officers emerged from the site of the
signing ceremony, they were greeted by a cheering crowd. Jubilant young
men and boys and girls in colorful clothes held aloft Bangladeshi and
Indian flags as vehicles played loud music. They threaded their way slowly
through the jostling assemblage. Shouts of “Joi Bangla” (Bengali: “Victory
to Bengal”) interspersed with anti-Pakistan and pro-India slogans stirred
the wintry air. Before their eyes the officers witnessed the celebrating
multitude grow exponentially.

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The victorious and the vanquished senior army officers struggled to

reach their jeeps to repair to the officers’ mess in the cantonment. Once
there, while drinking whiskey and soda, they exchanged anecdotes about
their time at the Indian military academy, where they had trained together
before the partition.

COUNTING THE COST

For the moment, they set aside the fate of the 90,370 Pakistani POWs
acquired by the nascent Bangladeshi government but held by the Indian
military. Of these, 56,370 were military personnel, 22,000 paramilitaries
and policemen, and the rest civil servants and their families. The war on
both fronts cost India the lives of 3,850 servicemen and Pakistan 9,000.
Predictably, Pakistan’s claim of destroying 130 Indian warplanes was re-
butted by Delhi, which put the figure at 45. Equally, India’s claimed score
of 94 enemy warplanes was scaled down to 42 by Pakistan. India’s tank
loss of 82 was a fraction of Pakistan’s 226.39
The estimate of the deaths by violence in East Pakistan from March
26 to December 16, 1971, has varied wildly—from twenty-six thousand
to three million. Going by the records of Pakistan’s Eastern Command,
seen by the Hamoodur Rehman Inquiry Commission, the military killed
twenty-six thousand people in action, with the commission noting that
the officers always gave a low count.40 The figure of three million—five
times the estimate for the unparalleled communal butchery in Punjab
during 1947—first mentioned by Shaikh Rahman in his interview with
British TV personality David Frost in January 1972 after his return to
Dacca as a free man is now universally regarded as excessively inflated.41
The statistic given by Indian officials to Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose,
authors of War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangla-
desh, was one hundred thousand.42
In her study of the subject, published as Dead Reckoning: Memories
of the 1971 Bangladesh War, Sarmila Bose, a Bengali-speaking research
scholar at Oxford University, undertook extensive field research. After
selecting the worst of the alleged atrocities, she reconstructed and quan-
tified these by interviewing the participants in Pakistan and Bangladesh—
mainly retired Pakistani officers, the survivors of the brutalities, and their
relatives in Bangladesh, as well as members of the non-Bengali and non-
Muslim minorities. Her case-by-case estimation gave her a total of 50,000

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 INDIRA GANDHI SLAYS THE TWO-NATION THEORY

to 100,000 dead.43 In their analysis of the data from the world health
survey program, covering fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam
to Bosnia, Ziad Obermeyer and fellow researchers mentioned a figure
of 269,000.44
In the excitement over the lightning triumph of the Indian and Ban-
gladeshi forces, however, the statistics of those who perished in East Paki-
stan did not engage popular attention. The appearance of jubilant crowds
in the cities of Bangladesh and West Bengal was a striking contrast to the
angry demonstrations that rippled through the streets of West Pakistani
cities. Such was the thoroughness with which the military junta controlled
the media that the public at large believed that their forces were winning
the war in the East while clobbering the Indians along the border with
West Pakistan.
When exposed to the sights and sounds of Niazi signing the instru-
ment of surrender on TV and radio on December 16, West Pakistanis
went into instant denial. They blamed the battlefield debacle on Yahya
Khan’s heavy drinking and womanizing. That night in a broadcast, Yahya
Khan, his voice slurred with drink, declared bravely that though a battle
had been lost, the war would go on. The next day he accepted Delhi’s
unilateral offer of a cease-fire in West Pakistan.
Senior military officers outside Yahya Khan’s immediate clique
thought that he would accept responsibility for the nation’s humiliating
defeat and that he and the top generals would step down. Instead, on De-
cember 18 he announced he was going to promulgate a new constitution,
while furious demonstrations demanding the regime’s resignation had
erupted all over the country. There was a real danger he might call on the
army to restore order, which would have resulted in civilian bloodshed in
West Pakistan.
To avert such a scenario, several commanders at divisional headquar-
ters outside Rawalpindi jointly issued an ultimatum to Yahya Khan to step
down by eight pm on December 19. That morning their representatives,
Colonels Aleem Afridi and Javed Iqbal, flew to Rawalpindi and repeated
the message to General Gul Hassan, chief of the general staff, in the after-
noon. After high-level consultations, Hassan told them that Yahya Khan
would see them at seven pm. Meanwhile his immediate boss, General
Hamid Khan, tried to shore up support for the president by phoning sev-
eral generals. He drew a blank. Shortly before the deadline of eight pm, a
news broadcast said that President Yahya Khan had decided to hand over
power to the elected representatives of the people.45

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

General Hassan, Air Marshal Rahim Khan, and Pakistan People’s

Party leader G. M. Khar collectively phoned Bhutto—then sitting out the
crisis in Rome, unsure of his fate on his return home—advising him to fly
back to Rawalpindi. On arrival there on December 20, he headed for the
presidential residence. His talk with Yahya Khan lasted a few hours. At
the end of it, the forty-three-year-old wily politician found himself presi-
dent, commander in chief, and chief martial law administrator of Pakistan.
In his rambling address to the nation, Bhutto promised “a new Pa-
kistan” and added that “our brothers in East Pakistan” would have the
support of the rest of Pakistan in “liberating” themselves from “foreign
domination.” He announced the retirement of all the generals in Yahya
Khan’s inner clique, saying that he was doing this “in accord with the
sentiments of the Armed Forces and the younger officers.”46

EUPHORIA IN INDIA

Whereas the people, politicians, and soldiers in West Pakistan sank into
deep depression after their initial shock and disbelief, their counterparts
in India exploded instantly into unbounded joy. After the drubbing their
motherland had received from the Chinese nine years earlier, Indians sa-
vored their victory over Pakistan with relish and special prayers.
The celebratory feeling was palpable in urban streets and markets all
over India. Notwithstanding their secular constitution, and the rededi-
cation of their politicians to secularist values, the predominantly Hindu
Indians tapped into their religious mythology to crown their triumph.
They conferred the sobriquet of Goddess Durga (Sanskrit: “Inaccessible”)
on Indira Gandhi. This went down particularly well with Bengali Hin-
dus, whose colorful worship of Goddess Durga is legendary. According
to Hindu lore, Durga—portrayed as a beautiful woman clad in a colorful
sari, with eight arms carrying different weapons, riding a lion or tiger—is
an outstanding warrior goddess whose energy becomes lethal when she
targets forces of evil. In that role she slays the buffalo-demon Mahisasura.
In the present context, as a clone of Durga, Indira Gandhi decapitated the
evil of the two-nation theory on which Muhammad Ali Jinnah had built
Pakistan with its two far-flung wings.
Now Jinnah’s Pakistan had lost more than half of its population,
as well as its main source of foreign exchange earned by the export of
jute from its eastern wing. Far more importantly, the breakaway of East

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Pakistan undercut the founding doctrine of two nations inhabiting the

Indian subcontinent and upheld the view of Congress Party leaders that
the partition was a pragmatic resolution of its conflict with the Muslim
League rather than an ideological defeat. The secession of East Pakistan
proved that a common religion was not a strong enough glue to hold
together two societies with different languages, cuisines, cultures, and
historical backgrounds. The trumping of religion by ethnic nationalism
was a bitter pill to swallow not only for West Pakistani people and pol-
iticians but also for those in Indian Kashmir who advocated accession
to Pakistan.
West Pakistanis also lamented the fact that for the first time in eight
centuries Hindus had defeated Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. In
mid-December 1971 their independent existence hung in the balance. It
was ultimately saved by Nixon’s strong intervention, the restraining hand
of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and the cool-headed deliberation
of the Indian cabinet.
The third Indo-Pakistan war, fought almost a quarter century after
the traumatic partition of the subcontinent, closed a tumultuous period
in the postindependence history of South Asia. Among other things, it
gave enough confidence to a few moviemakers in India to dwell on the
acute dilemma the Muslims in India had faced on the eve of the partition.

CAP TURED ON CELLULOID

One controversial result was the making of a low-budget movie Garm

Hava (Hindi: Hot Wind) in Hindustani in 1972 under the direction of
Mysore Shrivinas Sathyu. The screenplay, based on an unpublished short
story by Bombay-based Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a leftist Muslim
writer, focused on the postpartition trials and tribulations of Salim Mirza,
owner of a shoe factory in Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, a glittering
example of Islamic architecture.
The bank refuses him an overdraft, and the orders for shoes decline
sharply. When the prospective husband of his daughter, who migrated
to Pakistan after his engagement, returns to marry her, he is arrested as
a suspected spy. That drives Mirza’s daughter to suicide. In despair he,
his wife, and his college-age son leave for the railway station to move
to Pakistan. But their horse-driven carriage is blocked by a flag-waving
procession whose marchers are shouting slogans for communal harmony.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Impetuously, the son jumps off the carriage and joins the demonstrators.
Salim Mirza follows the son, as does his wife.
Astonishingly, the Censor Board concluded that the story was likely
to “instigate communal dissension” and denied the producer a license to
exhibit it. When Sathyu showed the film to many officials and journalists,
they disagreed with the board. Their pressure led the censors to lift the
ban. The movie was a critical and commercial success on its release in
1973. It won a prestigious award for its contribution to “national integra-
tion” and later found its place in the top twenty-five Bollywood movies of
all time according to film critics.47 Yet it had no chance of being shown
in Pakistan because, after the 1965 war, the Indo-Pakistan trade had
virtually ceased.
Whereas their triumph in the Bangladesh War boosted the confi-
dence of the people of India, the Pakistani Army’s disgraceful surrender
left the nation shell-shocked. The Herculean task of restoring its collapsed
morale fell on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

220
 11

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

The Savior of West Pakistan

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto achieved supreme power in a country with a disgraced

military, shattered government, and bewildered and demoralized public.
Born into the household of a feudal lord, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, in Lar-
kana, Sindh, he went along at the age of fourteen with an arranged mar-
riage to his cousin Amira, but only after receiving a cricket bat as a gift.
Five years later he enrolled at the University of California and graduated
with a degree in political science in 1950. He then studied law at Ox-
ford University. During the next summer break, while in Karachi, he met
and married twenty-two-year-old Nusrat Ispahani, a tall, slender, high-
cheek-boned daughter of Iranian parents who had moved to Karachi from
Bombay, where Nusrat had received higher education. The young couple
then departed for Oxford. After acquiring a law degree from Oxford Uni-
versity, Bhutto was called to Lincoln’s Inn, London. He was twenty-five
and the father of a daughter named Benazir (Urdu/Sindhi: Peerless).
On his return to Karachi he practiced as a barrister and taught law at
Sindh Muslim Law College. Three years later he was appointed a mem-
ber of Pakistan’s delegation to the United Nations. In that capacity he
addressed the Conference on the Freedom of the Seas.
After his military coup in 1958, General Muhammad Ayub Khan
appointed Bhutto minister of water and power. He advised Ayub Khan on
the Indus Waters Treaty with India, which was signed in September 1960.
The military ruler then promoted him to minister of commerce. His real
opportunity came when, at age thirty-five, he took charge of the foreign
ministry after the death of Muhammad Ali Bogra in January 1963. By
the time he quit Ayub Khan’s government in mid-1966, he had been a
cabinet minister for eight years. That had enabled him to acquire a base

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

in the political-bureaucratic landscape of Pakistan. His founding of the

Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and its rapid rise have been narrated earlier
(see Chapter 9).1
Intent on becoming the prime minister, even though the PPP was
way behind the Awami League led by Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, Bhutto
played the spoiler. Knowingly or inadvertently, he was instrumental in the
breakup of Pakistan. Yet neither he nor the people and political and mil-
itary leaders, traumatized by a military defeat and the loss of the eastern
wing, were in a frame of mind to rake up the recent past.
On December 22, 1971, he transferred Shaikh Rahman from solitary
confinement to house arrest at a government guest house near Rawal-
pindi, where he was still deprived of news. A few days later, Bhutto visited
the Bengali leader to inform him of his supreme office. He tried to extract
a promise from Rahman that Bangladesh and Pakistan would maintain
some links. Shaikh Rahman refused.2
Pressure from assorted foreign leaders, including President Richard
Nixon, mounted for the release of Shaikh Rahman. To divert popular
attention away from the fate of the much-loathed Bengali icon, Bhutto
issued a series of ordinances, including one on January 1, 1972, to na-
tionalize ten basic industries. Five days later he coupled his decision to
place Yahya Khan under house arrest with the release of Shaikh Rahman,
who was put on a plane to London. He appointed an inquiry commission
under Justice Hamoodur Rahman into Pakistan’s military defeat in East
Pakistan. These actions of Bhutto resulted in Washington resuming its aid
to Pakistan in February.
Bhutto rushed to pursue his pet project of arming Pakistan with an atom
bomb. On January 20, 1972, he convened a secret meeting of the officials
of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and other scientists
under a canvas awning in the spacious garden of a feudal lord friend in Mul-
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424809783

tan, Punjab. He delivered an inspiring speech in which he referred to fate

placing him in a position from which he could lead Pakistani into a nuclear
arms race. “Can you give it [the bomb] to me?” he asked. When the senior
scientists hemmed and hawed, Bhutto turned to the younger ones, who in-
cluded Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Munir Ahmad Khan. Mahmood
rose to his feet. “Yes, it would be possible,” he said. “But how long would it
take?” inquired an insistent Bhutto. “Maybe, five years.” Bhutto held up three
fingers. “I want it in three.”3 Ironically, it would be Bhutto’s bête noire, India,
that would detonate a nuclear device before his deadline.
In February he traveled to London.

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 ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO

BACK CHANNELS TO A TORTUOUS SUMMIT

During that visit Bhutto told former British prime minister Sir Alec
Douglas-Home, a fellow alumnus of Christ Church (College), Oxford,
that he wanted to start a new page in the prickly Indo-Pakistani relations.
This would require a summit with Indira Gandhi. As victor of the recent
war, she could afford to be magnanimous and invite him for talks.
When Gandhi was told that Bhutto was in a chastened and real-
istic mode, back channels were set up. Bhutto used Mazhar Ali Khan,
then editor of the prestigious daily Dawn and a former member of the
(banned) Pakistan Communist Party, to contact one of his prepartition
fellow travelers from the Communist Party of India (CPI). He chose
Sajjad Zaheer, based in Delhi. They met in London in the third week
of March to settle the agenda. Khan confirmed to Zaheer that Bhutto
wanted to forget the past, and added that it was in India’s interest to help
him consolidate power—otherwise the generals and religious right would
coalesce and overthrow him. (Indeed, this would happen five years later.)
Zaheer passed on the gist of his talk to a fellow traveler of the past, Par-
meshwar Narayan Haksar, now a close aide to Gandhi.
They agreed to hold a summit in Shimla (previously, Simla), capital
of Himachal Pradesh, in late June 1972. The overarching purpose was to
forge a set of principles to guide relations between India and post-1971
Pakistan.
President Bhutto, dressed in a well-cut white, double-breasted cotton
suit was greeted by Prime Minister Gandhi, wearing a bright-colored sari
with a very broad border in the salubrious weather of Shimla. Bhutto had
arrived with a large delegation, which included the bedazzled nineteen-
year-old Benazir, then a student of Radcliffe College. She and her father
stayed at the state governor’s guest house. Gandhi had gone out of her
way to visit the house and, after ordering fresh furniture, had supervised
its arrangement before the summit on June 28.
M. K. Kaw, a senior civil servant, was charged with looking after
Benazir Bhutto. He was assisted by Veena Datta, an officer of the Indian
Foreign Service. He and his colleague had to improvise to keep Benazir
occupied while her father conducted high diplomacy. “Veena helped me
keep Benazir in a good mood,” wrote Kaw in his memoir, An Outsider
Everywhere: Revelations by an Insider, after his retirement.
Benazir’s first priority turned out to be to watch the recently released
Bollywood movie Pakeezah (Urdu: Pure), which, given the virtual absence

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of Indo-Pakistan trade, could not be exhibited in Pakistan. There were

no DVDs or VHS tapes in those days. Benazir’s choice underscored the
addiction to movies among Pakistanis and Indians irrespective of gender,
class, or religion. Pakeezah is the story of a Mughal court courtesan, well
versed in dance, music, and social etiquette, played by Meena Kumari, a
Muslim film star whose life would end in tragedy. A special showing was
arranged for Benazir at the local Ritz Cinema. “There were only three of
us in the cinema hall: Benazir, Veena and myself,” wrote Kaw. “Benazir
enjoyed the film immensely.”4 It was Benazir’s love for movies that fifteen
years later would lead to her marriage to Asif Ali Zardari, whose father,
Hakim Ali, owned Bambino Cinema in Karachi—one of the few that
showed foreign films and was therefore frequented by her.
However, in Shimla now, the real-life drama was between Benazir’s
father, Zulfikar Ali, leader of a vanquished nation, and Indira Gandhi, the
victor. She had risen to supreme power at home by exploiting the weak-
nesses of her detractors in the ruling Congress Party who had initially
nicknamed her goongi guddia (dumb doll) because of her lack of articu-
lation. In marked contrast, Bhutto was a soaring orator in public and an
entertaining raconteur in private. A lawyerly approach to negotiations had
become second nature to him. Gandhi, on the other hand, never finished
her study of modern history at Somerville College in Oxford. Both of
them were strong-headed, though, and monopolized power once they
reached the apex. They felt offended at the merest slight. They nursed
grudges and delighted in trouncing their adversaries. In order to beat her
political enemies and counter their evil intentions, Gandhi was known to
sponsor outlandish religious rites conducted by self-styled Hindu gurus.
She regularly consulted astrologers and holy men.
On the positive side, while conducting day-to-day administration,
both maintained a long-term strategic vision beneficial to their nations.
Bhutto’s self-regard was unbounded. “My name and my reputation
are safe in the custody of the people and in the heart of history,” he wrote
at the end of a chapter in one of his books.5 Statements such as these
led Gandhi to describe him as “unbalanced.” Intensely emotional, he was
given to theatrical gestures, such as tearing up his speech at the UN Se-
curity Council on hearing of the Pakistani Army’s surrender to India on
December 16, 1971. In stark contrast, Gandhi was remarkably serene in
crisis; she displayed this serenity to much acclaim during the run-up to
the Bangladesh War.

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 ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO

At the Shimla summit her primary aim was to bring the Kashmir
dispute to an official closure. Given Bhutto’s weak bargaining position, her
chances of success were high. Intense and tortuous negotiations between
the two delegations reached a dead end when Gandhi insisted on includ-
ing “the final solution of the Kashmir problem” in the joint communi-
qué. Bhutto disagreed. He wanted the Kashmir issue listed as an ongoing
dispute that remained to be settled. Earlier, the two sides had agreed on
converting the 1949 UN cease-fire line into the Line of Control (LoC).
To save the summit from failure, Bhutto and Gandhi held a one-on-one
meeting on the evening of July 2.
There are conflicting reports of what transpired during that session.
One version has it that Bhutto, using all his lawyerly logic and immense
charm, convinced Gandhi that after the disastrous loss of East Pakistan
in the recent war, if he were to abandon Pakistan’s claims to Kashmir
in peace, he would be booted out by the military. According to another
account, the Bhutto-Gandhi bargaining boiled down to converting the
present LoC into an international border. Bhutto reportedly agreed ver-
bally. “Is this the understanding on which to proceed?” Gandhi asked.
“Absolutely,” Bhutto is said to have replied. “Aap mujh par bharosa kee jiye
[You should trust me].”6
In the end a compromise on Kashmir ensued. The agreed-on doc-
ument said that “in Jammu and Kashmir, the Line of Control resulting
from the ceasefire of December 17, 1971, shall be respected by both sides
without prejudice to the recognized position of either side. Neither side
shall seek to alter it unilaterally, irrespective of mutual differences and
legal interpretations.” Also, both sides undertook “to refrain from threat
or the use of force in violation of this Line.” The final draft included In-
dia’s wording that the two countries would settle all their differences “by
peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by other peaceful means
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424809801

mutually agreed upon.” This ruled out third-party mediation. Article VI

of the agreement listed a final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir “as one
of the outstanding questions awaiting settlement.”7
The Shimla Agreement laid down the principles to govern future re-
lations between India and Pakistan as well as steps to normalize them.
Though it is dated July 2, 1972, the accord was signed at 12:40 am on July
3, 1972. Since then the cease-fire has largely held, except during the 1999
Kargil armed confrontation. And bilateralism has become the defining
feature of Indo-Pakistan relations, with no quarter given to third-party

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

mediation or arbitration. Overall, the 1972 Shimla Accord has been the
basis of all subsequent Indo-Pakistan talks.

POST-SHIMLA AGREEMENT

Following detailed negotiations to determine the line of demarcation in

Kashmir, India and Pakistan completed the mutual withdrawal of their
troops on December 20, 1972. They exchanged POWs resulting from
their hostilities along India’s western frontier. And Delhi returned over
five thousand square miles of West Pakistani territory to Islamabad.
The Shimla Agreement did not refer to the 90,370 Pakistani POWs.
They were under the jurisdiction of Bangladesh but held inside India
because of the insufficient financial and administrative resources of the
newly established sovereign state, which was not recognized by Pakistan.
Repatriation of these POWs was a high priority for Bhutto. But he
could recognize Bangladesh only after the introduction of a new Pakistani
constitution, which took into account the reduced area of the country.
It was the National Assembly that had the authority to prepare a fresh
constitution. The PPP enjoyed a comfortable majority there. Guided by
Bhutto, the committee charged with drafting the constitution got to work.
In return for cooperating with the PPP on this task, the ruling Na-
tional Awami Party (NAP) in Baluchistan demanded greater autonomy.
Bhutto refused to envisage any reduction in his powers. The simmering
civil unrest intensified. In February 1973 he dismissed the NAP govern-
ment and dissolved the provincial assembly. The protests in Baluchistan
turned violent. Bhutto dispatched the army to crush the insurgency and
maintain order. This assignment restored the morale of the military, badly
shaken by its debacle in East Pakistan. Its emboldened generals called for
an expansion of the ranks, which Bhutto granted enthusiastically, hoping
thus to reinforce his popularity among the twelve corps commanders. On
the other hand, Bhutto unwittingly eased the army’s path toward resum-
ing its earlier centrality in running the country.
Under Bhutto, the Pakistani military’s traditional doctrine that India
was enemy number one remained intact. It was politically expedient for
him to promote the idea of Pakistan facing a foe. This provided a strong
incentive for the populations of the four Pakistani provinces to subordi-
nate their linguistic, subnational loyalty to the overarching patriotism of
Pakistan sharing borders with a powerful adversary.

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 ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO

Released of its linkage with the subcontinent’s eastern zone, post-

1971 Pakistan started looking westward to the Persian Gulf region, in-
cluding Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. The dramatic prosperity
of the Gulf monarchies stemming from the quadrupling of oil prices in
1973–1974 created an unprecedented demand for the Muslim workers
of Pakistan. That in turn strengthened religious sentiment in their native
land and pushed Indian and Pakistani societies further apart.
Pakistan’s new constitution, finished in March 1973, described Islam
as the country’s official religion, thus highlighting Bhutto’s commitment
to the doctrine of Islamic socialism. (As it was, with the loss of a substan-
tial Hindu population in East Pakistan, the proportion of Hindus in the
rest of Pakistan had declined sharply to a tiny 2 percent.) It stipulated
parliamentary government. A provision barred any change in the consti-
tution, which was unveiled on August 14, 1973. With that Bhutto became
the prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
By then Bangladesh had its first general election under its own con-
stitution and returned Shaikh Mujibur Rahman as prime minister.
In February 1974 the Islamic Conference Organization in Lahore
provided an opportunity to reconcile two leading Muslim nations, Paki-
stan and Bangladesh. A special delegation flew to Dhaka (the renamed
Dacca) and returned to Lahore, along with Shaikh Rahman. The Paki-
stani parliament then authorized Bhutto to recognize Bangladesh. After
doing so, he traveled to Bangladesh and laid a wreath at its war memorial
at Savar Upazila, fifteen miles northwest of Dhaka—a gesture warmly
appreciated by Bangladeshis but controversial in Pakistan.
Once India had signed a supplementary agreement with Pakistan, the
repatriation of the Pakistani POWs followed. With this event, Bhutto
could rightly claim that he had wiped off the last vestige of humiliation
suffered by the pre-1971 Pakistan.
Bhutto quietly moved toward converting the LoC in Kashmir into
an international border in 1974. He incorporated the Northern Areas
into Pakistan. And his government assumed direct authority to adminis-
ter Azad Kashmir, which was tantamount to Pakistan incorporating the
territory—something Delhi had done earlier in the case of India-held
Kashmir.
Meanwhile, in India, Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, then under
house arrest in Delhi, was ruminating on the 1971 Bangladesh War. He
concluded that it was better to end the politics of confrontation, which
had the potential of causing further breakups in Pakistan and India. “Our

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quarrel with the Government of India is not about accession but about the
quantum of autonomy,” he said in February 1972. He was released later in
the year. Protracted talks between the appointed personal representatives
of Abdullah and Gandhi led to the signing of the Kashmir Accord in
November 1974. “The State of Jammu and Kashmir which is a constituent
unit of the Union of India, shall, in its relation with the Union, continue
to be governed by Article 370 of the Constitution of India, ” read the
accord.8 In the end, Abdullah settled for genuine self-rule in the state by
a government elected in free and fair elections. He became the chief min-
ister of Kashmir in February 1975 after disbanding the Plebiscite Front
and reviving the moribund National Conference.
These developments signaled a lowering of Indo-Pakistan tensions on
the Kashmir problem. But there was no progress on any of the subjects
listed in Article III of the Shimla Agreement on normalization of rela-
tions: establishing greater communications through all available means,
promoting travel facilities, resuming trade and economic cooperation, and
making exchanges in science and culture.

INDIA’S PEACEFUL “SMILING BUDDHA”

In any case, Bhutto and Gandhi got distracted by turmoil on the domestic
political scene. Bhutto faced insurgency in Baluchistan. And the quadru-
pling of oil prices in late 1973 and early 1974 spiked inflation in India,
whose foreign reserves fell dangerously low because of the hard currency
payments it had to make for oil imports. Nonviolent mass protest gath-
ered momentum, and Gandhi’s Congress Party was blamed for corruption
and misrule.
To divert popular attention, Gandhi authorized an underground ex-
plosion of “a peaceful nuclear device”—code-named Smiling Buddha—at
the Pokhran military firing range, located between the Rajasthani cities
of Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, on May 18, 1974. Its yield was put at twelve
kilotons. The official statement said that further experiments would be
conducted to perfect “nuclear devices,” adding that it was all “for peaceful
purposes.”9
This detonation was the climax of a process initiated by the research
of Homi J. Bhabha, an Indian nuclear physicist, in 1944 at the Tata In-
stitute of Fundamental Research in Bombay. He lobbied officials and
leading politicians in Delhi to sponsor nuclear research. Among those

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 ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO

who agreed with him was Jawaharlal Nehru. “I have no doubt India will
develop its scientific researches and I hope Indian scientists will use the
atomic force for constructive purposes,” Nehru said in June 1946. “But if
India is threatened, she will inevitably try to defend herself by all means
at her disposal.”10 As the prime minister, Nehru set up the Indian Atomic
Energy Commission in 1948 under Bhabha. Six years later the Bhabha
Atomic Research Center in Trombay, a suburb of Bombay, purchased a
research reactor code-named CIRUS (Canadian-Indian Reactor, US) us-
ing heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States.11 It went
critical only in July 1960. After China’s defeat of India in the October
1962 war, Bhabha publicly called for developing nuclear weapons as a
means of deterring potential Chinese aggression. His proposal got the of-
ficial green light after Beijing tested its atomic bomb two years later, when
Lal Bahadur Shastri was prime minister.12 The nuclear test at Pokhran
used plutonium derived from the reprocessed spent fuel from the CIRUS
reactor. The nuclear program had so far cost India $1 billion, with its cur-
rent annual budget running at $140 million.13 However, it would be only
in 1980 that India would be able to put its nuclear weapon into service.
Unsurprisingly, the government in Islamabad did not accept Delhi’s
pronouncement of peaceful intentions. At a press conference, Bhutto de-
clared that Pakistan would not be threatened by India’s “nuclear black-
mail.” Returning to the same subject three weeks later, he claimed that
India’s nuclear program was designed to intimidate Pakistan and establish
“hegemony in the subcontinent” and that Pakistan would develop a nu-
clear program in response to India’s nuclear test.14
The Pokhran explosion marked the start of a nuclear arms race be-
tween the two traditional rivals, with Bhutto—having secured financial
assistance for his nuclear enterprise from a few oil-rich Arab states, in-
cluding Libya under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi—coining the catchy
term “Islamic atom bomb.” He argued that the possession of a nuclear
weapon by Christian, Jewish, and Hindu countries had highlighted the
deficiency of a Muslim nation in this regard. In his argument there was
apparently no place for China, ruled by the atheistic Communist Party of
China, but that mortal flaw in his argument did not bother him.
To burnish his Islamic credentials at home, Bhutto rejected the Ah-
madi minority’s pleas in 1974 that they were Muslim, and declared them
non-Muslim.15 He did so to placate the ulema (religious scholars). He had
often felt susceptible to the Islamist groups’ attacks on him for being a son
of a Hindu mother, Lakhi Bai. They willfully overlooked her conversion

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to Islam and name change to Khurshid before marrying Sir Shah Nawaz
Bhutto. Nor did they take note of the fact the founder of Pakistan, Mu-
hammad Ali Jinnah, had married a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam.
As a symbol of socialism, Bhutto started wearing a cap worn by Mao
Zedong as well as an open-collar Mao jacket. Crucially, he nationalized all
banks and insurance companies and seventy other industrial enterprises,
including some medium-sized factories, thus breaking the power of the
top twenty-two families who dominated Pakistan’s nonfarm economy.
Simultaneously, his program to expand the military continued. De-
spite the loss of more than half of its citizens following East Pakistan’s
secession, Pakistan expanded its armed forces from 370,000 in 1971 to
502,000 in 1975.16 As a result of a series of Sino-Pakistan agreements
signed by the Bhutto government, China became the main supplier of
military hardware to Pakistan. Ties between the two became stronger
and extended to the nuclear industry following Bhutto’s visit to Beijing
as leader of the high-level Pakistani military and scientific delegation in
June 1976. China agreed to revive the nuclear reactor in Karachi origi-
nally sold by Canada in 1965. More importantly, it contracted to supply
Pakistan uranium hexafluoride, UF6—commonly called “yellow cake”—a
compound used as feedstock in the uranium enrichment process that pro-
duces fuel for nuclear reactors and weapons.17
In July 1976 work started on the Engineering Research Laboratory
(renamed Kahuta Research Laboratory in 1983), code-named Project 706,
in Kahuta, a village twenty-five miles southeast of Rawalpindi, the twin
city of Islamabad. Bhutto placed it under the joint authority of Lieutenant
General Zahid Ali Akbar of the Army Corps of Engineers and Abdul
Qadeer Khan, a nuclear scientist, who had convinced Bhutto to pursue a
uranium enrichment path, instead of plutonium (which India had done),
to build an atom bomb. Bhutto gave Qadeer Khan the deadline of seven
years to assemble one. The scientist would meet that challenge, thanks to
the active assistance of China.
Born in the central Indian city of Bhopal, Qadeer Khan was sixteen
when his parents migrated to Pakistan. After graduating in physical met-
allurgy from Karachi University, this oval-faced Pakistani with an intense
gaze, a clipped mustache, and raven black hair pursued further studies in
West Berlin; Delft, Holland; and Leuven, Belgium, between 1962 and
1971. He obtained undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in metallurgy
and engineering. In between, he married Hendrina Donkers, a Dutch
woman, and they had two daughters. This pointed to his acquiring Dutch

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 ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO

citizenship. In March 1972 he got a job with an engineering company,

Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (acronym in Dutch: FDO), in
Amsterdam as a metallurgist.
Qadeer Khan’s fluency in English, Dutch, and German proved a great
asset to FDO when it got a subcontract to develop a better version of cen-
trifuges for enriching uranium from URENCO,18 a consortium of Britain,
Holland, and West Germany formed in 1970 to manufacture centrifuges
to produce enriched uranium for use in power plants and nuclear weap-
ons. He thus got free access to the design and manufacturing of centri-
fuges and the suppliers of various parts and materials. His declaration to
his employers that he intended to take up Dutch citizenship eased his way
to getting security clearance.
Enraged by the explosion of the “Smiling Buddha” by India, he ad-
dressed a letter to Bhutto in which he explained that he had gained exper-
tise in centrifuge-based uranium enrichment technologies at URENCO’s
laboratory in Almelo, Holland. On his arrival in Karachi with his family
in December 1974, he was whisked off to Islamabad. He explained to
Bhutto that producing fuel for one atom bomb through uranium en-
richment would cost a paltry $60,000. Bhutto was convinced. Once Pa-
kistan’s uranium enrichment program got going in early 1975, Qadeer
Khan started channeling secret technical information from URENCO
to Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, head of Project 706. With the 1976
Chinese agreement to supply yellow cake to Pakistan, Bhutto’s dream
started to turn into reality.
“We were on the threshold of full nuclear capability when I left the
government to come to this death cell,” wrote Bhutto in his memoirs, If
I Am Assassinated, published posthumously in late 1979. “We know that
Israel and South Africa have full nuclear capability. The Christian, Jewish
and Hindu civilizations have this capability. The Communist powers also
possess it. Only the Islamic civilization was without it, but that situation
is about to change.”19

DOMESTIC SETBACKS FOR BHUTTO-GANDHI DUO

In India, any feel-good sentiment among its nationals, sparked by the

nuclear device explosion in May 1974, soon vanished as continued high
inflation and scarcity of essential goods showed no sign of abating. In
Gujarat the protest movement initiated by university students spread so

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

quickly that it caused the downfall of Gandhi’s Congress Party ministry

there. By the end of the year, all opposition parties except the CPI ral-
lied around Jaya Prakash Narayan, a nonparty personality of high, un-
blemished caliber. Its demands now included eradication of corruption in
politics and government bureaucracy and an overhaul of the inequitable
electoral system corrupted by the Congress Party. In the midst of this
turbulence, in June 1975, a court invalidated Gandhi’s parliamentary seat
won on the corrupt practice of using government facilities and resources
during her 1971 election campaign. Instead of stepping down, she had
the president, Fakhuruddin Ali Ahmad, declare an emergency. She started
ruling by decree.
In Pakistan, Bhutto turned nationalization into a political tool and
extended it to all wheat-milling, rice-husking, and cotton-ginning units
in 1976 to enfeeble his opponents. His autocratic manner alienated many
left-wingers and others who had joined the PPP in droves at its birth.
On the eve of the general elections in March 1977, all opposition fac-
tions and disempowered interest groups coalesced to form the nine-party
Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), covering both religious and secular
elements, to challenge the PPP.
This caused consternation in PPP circles. It led to vote rigging, car-
ried out by the all-powerful district commissioners in rural areas, to an
undetermined extent. The electoral officials declared the PPP had won
155 of 200 seats—76 percent of the total, up from 58 percent in the pre-
vious general election in 1970—with the PNA getting only 36. Bhutto’s
opponents cried foul. Massive protest demonstrations led by the Islamic
parties within the PNA followed. Bhutto responded with martial law and
gunfire by army troops.
When these methods proved ineffective, he made concessions to the
religious camp. He announced that Islamic Sharia law would be enforced
within six months. He banned alcohol and gambling and closed night
clubs. He declared Friday, the holy day in Islam, as the weekly off-day
instead of the traditional Sunday.
Bhutto’s compromises failed to satisfy the opposition. That provided
General Muhammad Zia ul Haq with a rationale to stage his Operation
Fair Play at four am on July 5, 1977. He overthrew the civilian govern-
ment and imposed martial law. He placed Bhutto under house arrest in
the hill station of Murree. Zia’s operation code-name implied that he
wanted to disengage the hostile camps and conduct a fresh election, but
that never happened.

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 ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO

In Delhi, on the other hand, Gandhi, assured of the electoral success

of her Congress Party by the Intelligence Bureau (IB), ordered a general
election in January 1977. The IB proved disastrously wrong. The Janata
Alliance, a coalition of the main opposition parties, trounced the Congress
Alliance, led by Gandhi, by 345 to 189 seats. Morarji Desai, a former
conservative Congress leader, became the prime minister. A long-time
adversary of Gandhi, he attempted to move as far away from his predeces-
sor’s foreign policy as he could. To balance Gandhi’s strong pro-Soviet tilt,
he tried to improve ties with China, with his foreign minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee visiting Beijing in February 1979. Desai went on to formalize
the decade-long covert cooperation between RAW and Israel’s Mossad.
At the same time he reiterated India’s peaceful intentions toward Pakistan.
Zia ul Haq reneged on his promise to hold a National Assembly
election because the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief told him that
based on the information collected by his agents, the PPP would win a
free and fair contest. Ironically, it was on the recommendation of General
Ghulam Jilani Khan, the ISI head, that Bhutto had promoted Lieutenant
General Zia ul Haq to chief of army staff in March 1976 above the heads
of four more senior generals. Also, given Zia ul Haq’s well-known pious-
ness and lack of interest in politics, Bhutto had concluded that he could
count on the unfailing loyalty of a general whose religiosity would add a
pro-Islamic hue to his political persona.
When General Ayub Khan had seized power in 1958, the standing
of politicians had collapsed, and the once-powerful Muslim League had
splintered into squabbling factions. By contrast Zia ul Haq had over-
thrown Bhutto, who for all his faults had mesmerized a very substantial
part of the public and whose PPP, built from scratch, had acquired fairly
deep roots in society. He therefore faced a daunting challenge: to dispel
the Bhutto magic and smash the PPP.

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 12

Islamist Zia ul Haq,

Builder of the A-Bomb

As personalities, Muhammad Zia ul Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto stood

poles apart. Zia ul Haq came from a modest home in the East Punjab
city of Jalandhar, his very religious father, Muhammad Akbar Ali, being a
junior clerk in the British Indian Army in Delhi. Born in 1924, he grad-
uated from the city’s prestigious St. Stephen’s College1 and then joined a
cavalry regiment of the army. In 1947 he opted for the Pakistani military.
He rose through the ranks but did not cease to be reverential to those who
were socially superior to him. He remained strictly religious. “Drinking,
gambling, dancing and music were the way the officers spent their free
time,” he recollected. “I said prayers, instead. Initially, I was treated with
some amusement—sometimes with contempt—but my seniors and my
peers decided to leave me alone after some time.”2 As a colonel in 1962,
he underwent two years’ training at the US Army Command and General
Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Here too he stayed away from
drinking and dancing. During the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War he was a tank
commander. And as Brigadier Zia ul Haq, he trained soldiers in Jordan
from 1967 to 1970. He was promoted to major general in 1973 and put
in charge of the First Armored Division in Multan.
Two years later he rose to lieutenant general and took command of the
Second Strike Corps, also based in Multan. He invited Premier Bhutto to
his base and asked him to hit a target. The egotistical Bhutto scored with
the first shot, much to his surprise and satisfaction. Turning on his obse-
quiousness to the fullest, Zia ul Haq exuded his loyalty to Bhutto, who no-
ticed how meticulous the general was in offering his daily Islamic prayers.

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

Now, in July 1977, having toppled his benefactor and assumed su-
preme power as the chief martial law administrator, Zia ul Haq called
himself “a soldier of Allah.” He projected himself as a moderator, promis-
ing a free and fair election in ninety days, with both the Pakistan People’s
Party (PPP) and the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) contesting. He
released Bhutto on July 28.
Among those who accepted his word at face value was India’s Minis-
try of External Affairs (MEA). “He [General Zia] has categorically stated
on several occasions that takeover was necessary to prevent civil war, his
prime objective being to supervise political solution,” said Foreign Sec-
retary J. S. Mehta, the highest bureaucrat in the ministry, in his cable to
all of India’s foreign missions, according to declassified documents. “His
90-day plan makes it incumbent on him to arrange polls in October. All
public indications so far suggest that he means what he says.”3
This was not to be. Bhutto’s rallies proved hugely popular, and he
capped his domestic activities with a tour of friendly Arab countries.
Knowing Bhutto’s record of punishing his enemies, Zia ul Haq calculated
that after his expected electoral victory, Bhutto would wreak vengeance.
Therefore he rearrested him on September 3 because of his alleged in-
volvement in the murder of Muhammad Khan Kasuri, a Punjabi poli-
tician who, because of his differences with Bhutto, had quit the PPP in
1974. Bhutto would be found guilty and hanged in April 1979.

ZIA’S ARTFUL DECEP TION

India’s ambassador in Islamabad,4 however, continued to present Zia ul

Haq in a favorable light. “Gen Zia ul Haq is said to be devout but not a
fanatic and is professional in outlook,” wrote Mehta, the former foreign
secretary of the MEA in Delhi. The Pakistan-Afghanistan division of the
MEA agreed. “The concessions to Islamic Sharia Law and Nizam-i-Mustafa
[Urdu: Rule of Prophet Muhammad] are doubtless meant to neutralize
any serious opposition to the unconstitutional takeover of government by
the armed forces, but not necessarily an indication of ambition to con-
tinue in power. It also incidentally gains for the regime the support of
orthodox political elements.”5
In reality, Zia ul Haq started monopolizing power once the Supreme
Court had invoked the “doctrine of necessity” in October to legitimize the
coup. It also allowed him to suspend the 1973 constitution. As the chief

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martial law administrator, he presented a provisional constitution that

authorized him to amend the 1973 document at will. But he pursued
Bhutto’s project of building an atom bomb with much greater vigor while
keeping Project 706 under wraps, with the innocuous sounding Engineer-
ing Research Laboratory (ERL) stealthily enriching uranium.
To get an inkling of what transpired inside the ERL, India’s Research
and Analysis (RAW) agents collected discarded hair from nearby barber
shops and sent them to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay,
for analysis. It found traces of uranium in the hair, indicating uranium
enriching activity at the ERL.6
A past master in speaking with a forked tongue, Zia ul Haq responded
warmly to friendly overtures by Indian premier Moraji Desai. They main-
tained direct contact through periodic telephone conversations until mid-
1979, when, following a split in the ruling Janata Alliance, Desai had to
step down. In early 1978, according to Bahukutumbi Raman, former head
of RAW’s Counter-Terrorism Division, in an unguarded moment Desai
told Zia ul Haq that he was well aware of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons
program.7 Predictably, Zia ul Haq denied any contraband activity. Paki-
stan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) went into overdrive to winkle out
all foreign spies and their agents from the ERL area.
Zia ul Haq was well aware of Washington’s policy of discouraging non-
nuclear states to acquire nuclear arms. In 1976, US senator Stuart Syming-
ton’s Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 specified ending
aid to any country that imported uranium enrichment technology. The fol-
lowing year Senator John Glenn’s Amendment to the Foreign Assistance
Act stipulated the termination of aid to any country that imported repro-
cessing technology, which is used to recover fissionable plutonium from
irradiated nuclear fuel for nuclear weapons.8 The US Congress passed the
Nonproliferation Act in March 1978. It barred any country from receiving
American assistance if it tested a nuclear weapon, and imposed sanctions
against a state that attempted to acquire unauthorized nuclear technology.
While acknowledging the construction of a uranium enriching facil-
ity, Zia ul Haq said that it would be used solely for generating electricity
and declared that no Pakistani government could compromise on the
nuclear issue under American pressure. In his meeting with Cyrus Vance,
US secretary of state, in October 1978, Pakistan’s foreign minister Agha
Shahi said, “You don’t have to be a nuclear weapons expert to understand
the strategic importance of having one. The value lies in its possession,
and not in its use.”9

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

In geopolitical terms, however, what caused a major shift in Indo-

Pakistan relations was the coup by Marxist military officers against Af-
ghan president Muhammad Daoud Khan on April 27, 1978. Daoud Khan
was killed in the fighting at the presidential palace, and his official posi-
tions of president and prime minister went to Nur Muhammad Taraki.
The military leaders renamed the country the Democratic Republic of
Afghanistan. The coup turned Afghanistan into a frontline state in the
Cold War between the White House and the Kremlin.
This was a second seismic change in five years in Afghanistan. In July
1973 Prime Minister General Daoud Khan had overthrown his cousin
King Muhammad Zahir Shah and declared Afghanistan a republic. To
consolidate his power he revived the issue of Pashtunistan, an indepen-
dent state to be carved out of parts of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier
Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA).
His officers started training twelve thousand irredentist Pashtun and Bal-
uch volunteers to harass Pakistan’s army. In return, Bhutto sponsored an
anti-Daoud Khan coup, fronted by the Afghan Islamist leader Gulbud-
din Hekmatyar, in July 1975. It failed. But Bhutto allowed Peshawar, the
capital of NWFP, to become a base of Afghan Islamist groups. Mediation
by the shah of Iran eased Islamabad-Kabul tensions by 1977. But nor-
malization of relations between the two neighbors was disrupted by the
subsequent Marxist military officers’ coup.

RIPPLES OF THE MARXIST COUP IN KABUL

The Marxist takeover in Kabul alarmed the administration of US presi-

dent Jimmy Carter (in office 1977–1981). It hastened to resume devel-
opment aid to Islamabad that it had stopped earlier. Washington’s ban
on the sale of US weapons and parts to Pakistan after the 1965 Indo-
Pakistan War remained in place until 1975, when it was lifted by Presi-
dent Gerald Ford.
On the other side, the Kremlin dispatched its military advisers to
Kabul. At the same time Alexander Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador in
Kabul, advised President Taraki in June to initiate dialogue with his Pa-
kistani counterpart to resolve their mutual differences.10
Taraki invited Zia ul Haq to Kabul. Instead, they met in Paghman,
sixteen miles from the capital, on September 9.11 Their starkly opposing
ideologies came into sharp focus. Taraki proudly informed his interlocutor

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

that his regime had given land to eleven million Afghans. Zia ul Haq
remarked that all property belonged to Allah and human beings were no
more than His custodians. “All land belongs to the tiller,” retorted Taraki.12
Desai and other Indian politicians would have agreed with Taraki’s
statement. They had carried out land reform in India, albeit in fits and
starts. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Delhi’s historically close ties with Kabul
were unaffected by the political upheavals. The Taraki regime’s signing of
a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Moscow in December 1978
followed India’s example in August 1973.
By then the government of President Zia ul Haq had provided Af-
ghanistan’s Islamist insurgents, called mujahedin (Arabic: those who wage
jihad), with covert training bases—an enterprise in which the CIA par-
ticipated actively under its Operation Cyclone.
At home, on December 2, 1978, the Islamabad government an-
nounced that the Islamic law concerning theft (cutting off of hands),
drinking (seventy-four lashes), and adultery (death by stoning) would be
enforced from the birthday of Prophet Muhammad the following year.
Pakistan’s lurch toward Islamization went unremarked by the Carter
White House. Finding itself deprived of its strategic alliance with Iran
after the overthrow of its staunch ally Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah
by the rabidly anti-American Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in February
1979, the United States tightened its links with Zia ul Haq’s military
regime.
It decided to upgrade its backing for the Afghan mujahedin by au-
thorizing the CIA to start supplying them with weapons. Initially the
CIA armed them with Soviet-made arms partly from its own stores built
up during the previous regional conflicts and partly by procuring them
from Egypt, a one-time ally of Moscow. This enabled the mujahedin to
claim that they had secured these firearms by attacking the armories of
the government.
In Kabul the Marxist regime split into two factions, leading to the
killing of Taraki and the rise of Hafizullah Amin as president in Septem-
ber 1979. He in turn was toppled by Babrak Karmal in December. Karmal
invited Soviet troops to help him stabilize the political situation. They
arrived on Christmas Day. Overnight this transformed Zia ul Haq from a
despicable dictator to an unblemished ally in the US-led global campaign
against Soviet communism.
Delhi and Islamabad reacted differently to the events in Afghanistan.
Indian diplomats recommended negotiations between the contending

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

Afghan parties. In stark contrast, Zia ul Haq presented Moscow’s move

as “a push towards the warm waters of the Arabian Sea,” implying that
Pakistan would be the next target of the Soviet Union’s aggressive expan-
sion. Carter readily accepted his interpretation.
The Cold War between the White House and the Kremlin intensi-
fied. But the Carter administration realized that killing Soviet troops in
Afghanistan with CIA-supplied arms would be very provocative and raise
the prospect of direct Moscow-Washington confrontation. Therefore it
decided to work through a proxy—Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) directorate—to be able to exercise “plausible deniability.” Out of
this emerged the Washington-Islamabad-Riyadh alliance, whereby the
United States, the overall coordinator, became the sole supplier of weap-
ons, bought with American and Saudi cash, to be channeled exclusively
through Pakistan. In this scheme, the ISI acquired a pivotal role.
It then operated from a drab, unmarked red-brick building behind
high stone walls on Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy in Islamabad. About one
hundred military officers maintained an internal and external intelli-
gence network of thousands of agents and freelance spies. Like the rest
of the military, ISI officers and agents underwent religious education,
as mandated by Zia ul Haq. Equally compulsory became the offering of
prayer by soldiers led by officers.
With the new, ambitious assignment in Afghanistan and a vastly in-
creased budget, the ISI would expand its staff and agents, engaging Paki-
stanis fluent in Persian and Pushtu as well as thousands of Afghans with
promises of money and domicile for their families in Pakistan. That would
push the total number of ISI employees, full- and part-time, to almost
one hundred thousand by early 1988.13 Zia mandated that the ISI col-
lect foreign and domestic intelligence; coordinate intelligence functions
of the three military services; conduct surveillance over foreigners, the
media, politically active Pakistanis, diplomats of other countries based in
Pakistan, and Pakistani diplomats serving abroad; intercept and monitor
communications; and conduct covert offensive operations.
While relations between Islamabad and Moscow turned frosty, the
Delhi-Moscow embrace became warmer. In May 1980, Indian officials
signed contracts for the purchase of MIG-25 aircraft, attack boats, and
advanced T-72 tanks, to be produced later in India.
In June 1980 Zia ul Haq set up Sharia courts at the high court level in
the provinces and the appellate Sharia bench at the Supreme Court level.
They were authorized to decide whether a particular law was Islamic or

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

not.14 These official measures were buttressed by the promotion of Islam

through mosques and the media. A review of all textbooks was under-
taken and the ones regarded as un-Islamic were removed.
As a consequence, the social, cultural, and ideological distance be-
tween rapidly Islamizing Pakistani and secular Indian societies grew wider
than before.

ZIA’S CAT-AND-MOUSE GAME ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS

By late 1978, the Carter administration had solid evidence of Pakistan’s

uranium enrichment program at the ERL in Kahuta. It broached the
subject with Islamabad. Dissatisfied with the response he received, Carter
cut off economic and military assistance, except food aid, to Pakistan in
April 1979 under the Symington Amendment. He reiterated that the aid
would be resumed only if he certified that Pakistan would not develop or
acquire nuclear arms or assist other nations to do so.15
Relations between Islamabad and Washington remained stalemated
when Indira Gandhi was returned to power on January 14, 1980—within
a few weeks of Soviet troops arriving in Afghanistan. She was keen to dis-
suade Zia ul Haq from approaching the Carter administration to restore
military and economic aid to his country because of the Soviet military
presence in Afghanistan. In April she dispatched Swaran Singh, former
foreign minister, as her special envoy to Islamabad to reassure Zia ul Haq
that her government would not take advantage if he decided to move
his troops away from the Indian border to the Afghan frontier. But by
the time the back channel contacts between the two leaders built up to
schedule a visit to Islamabad by the Indian foreign minister Pamulapartu
Venkata Narasimha Rao in March 1981, the political scene in Washing-
ton had altered—to the detriment of Gandhi.
Republican Ronald Reagan (in office 1981–1989) moved into the
White House in January 1981. His description of the Soviet Union as
the “evil empire” would become his signature. It was with this reprehen-
sible regime that the Gandhi government had signed a major agreement
to boost India’s energy sector and to double bilateral trade between 1981
and 1986 during the December 1980 visit of the Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev to Delhi.
While Reagan lacked Carter’s intelligence, he was a superb communi-
cator, having spent many years as a tall, robustly built actor in Hollywood.

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

His persuasive manner helped him to overcome congressional resistance

to his policies. Alexander Haig, his secretary of state from January 1981
to July 1982, described Pakistan’s nuclear program as “a private matter.”
All he wanted was that it should not detonate an atom bomb, thus emu-
lating the example of Israel, which had refrained from testing its nuclear
weapons first acquired in 1966.
The Reagan administration worked with Congress to give Pakistan a
five-year waiver of the Symington Amendment because of its role in fun-
neling US aid to the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In May 1981, the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee reversed its previous stance and sanctioned
$3.2 billion aid to Islamabad over the next six years, divided equally be-
tween civilian and military assistance. The White House argued that sup-
plying Pakistan with modern US weaponry would reduce the chance of
its pursuing the nuclear option. In reality, nothing of the sort happened.
Islamabad forged ahead on both armament fronts, conventional and un-
conventional. The Senate adopted its committee’s bill in December 1981.16
Reagan appointed William Casey as CIA director. A bald, corpu-
lent man with a rubbery face and oversize spectacles, he had started his
working life with the CIA’s predecessor, Office of Strategic Surveys, and
established himself as an unconventional operator, callous and combative
in equal measure. Now, personal rapport quickly developed between him,
ISI director Lieutenant General Abdur Rahman Khan, and Prince Turki
bin Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence. The Afghan insurgency picked up.
Since the United States did not want to create a paper trail of money
transactions, which would give Moscow evidence of its involvement in
Afghan affairs (thus raising the specter of a regional conflict with in-
ternational potential), all money dealings were in cash. This gave ample
opportunities to the ISI to siphon off foreign funds and funnel them into
the nuclear program.
As 1982 unrolled, Pakistan received from China the complete de-
sign of a twenty-five-kiloton nuclear bomb and sufficient weapons-grade
uranium for two bombs. Beijing went on to provide Islamabad with the
design of one of its warheads.17 Little wonder that Islamabad-Moscow
relations turned bitter. In his speech at the banquet in honor of the vis-
iting Indira Gandhi on September 20, 1982, Brezhnev publicly advised
India against accepting Zia ul Haq’s offer of a no-war pact. Behind closed
doors, he explained to Gandhi that after inking a no-war pact with India,
the Pakistani leader would shift the bulk of his troops from the Indian
border to the one with Afghanistan and threaten the Kremlin-backed

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regime in Kabul. Gandhi took his advice. She made a counterproposal for
a peace and friendship treaty, which failed to interest Zia ul Haq.
During her talks at the Kremlin, Gandhi privately advised a pullout of
Soviet troops from Afghanistan. But her counsel was spurned.18 By then
India’s defense industry was tied so closely to its Soviet counterpart that
she lacked any cards to play in her dealings with the Kremlin.
As a result of India’s continued cordial relations with the Marxist
regime, links between RAW and the Afghan intelligence agency, KHAD,
run by the Ministry of State Security, became tighter. Both worked closely
with the KGB, the Soviet Union’s main security and intelligence agency.
Among other things, the KGB and KHAD supplied vital information to
RAW on the activities of Sikh separatists in Pakistan’s tribal region.
In the state of Punjab, formed in 1966, Sikhs were 60 percent of its
fifteen million inhabitants, the rest being almost wholly Hindu. Mili-
tants in the Sikh community had resorted to violence from October 1981
in their demand for Khalistan—the homeland for Sikhs—sandwiched
between Pakistan and India. Sikh separatists argued that their commu-
nity was the victim of discrimination by Hindus. However, the founder
of Sikhism, Guru Nanak (1469–1539), was born a Hindu, and his faith
emerged out of his attempt to reform Hinduism by getting rid of its caste
system. Since the inception of Sikhism, relations between Hindus and
Sikhs had been cordial, with Sikhs celebrating such Hindu festivals as
Divali (Hindi: festival of light). Interfaith marriages were tolerated by
both communities. Now, by resorting to attacking Hindus in Punjab, the
advocates of Khalistan created tension between Sikhs and Hindus. Cru-
cially, their demand for a homeland on the basis of religion, the seed that
had flowered into Pakistan, struck at the very foundation of India’s secular
constitution. It was ruled out of hand by the authorities in Delhi.
This subject was therefore off the agenda during the hour-long meet-
ing Gandhi had with Zia ul Haq on November 1, 1982, when he stopped
in New Delhi on his way to Malaysia. They decided to authorize their
foreign ministers to proceed with talks leading to the establishment of the
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).19

FIVE PLAYERS IN SOUTH ASIA’S NUCLEAR GAME

Behind the scenes, Gandhi fretted about Zia ul Haq’s clandestine drive to
build an atom bomb by using weapons-grade uranium, and she considered

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

ways of terminating his scheme. She knew that Israeli warplanes had de-
stroyed the French-equipped Osirak nuclear reactor under construction
eighteen miles south of Baghdad on June 7, 1981. The daring, surprising
raid by Israel inspired her to initiate a project in the autumn code-named
Osirak Contingency under Air Marshall Dilbagh Singh, chief of air staff.
The Indian Air Force’s planes practiced low-level fl ying runs with
two-thousand-pound bombs. But neutralizing the strong air defenses of
the Kahuta facility, including surface-to-air missiles, proved too great a
challenge for India’s military. But because of the links between RAW and
Mossad, it did not take long for Israel to offer its expertise in jamming
advanced communications systems at Kahuta. Its move was in line with its
policy of blocking any Muslim nation from possessing nuclear weapons.
Thus in 1982 Israel became the fifth player in South Asia’s nuclear
game—after India, Pakistan, China, and America. Their alignments were
full of contradictions. India forged a daring plan against Pakistan with
Israel, a country with which it lacked full diplomatic links. Though com-
mitted by law to the doctrine of nonproliferation of nuclear arms, the
Reagan White House chose to turn a blind eye to the ongoing assis-
tance that Beijing, a nonsignatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT), was giving to Islamabad in its nuclear weapons program. Israel,
the long-established staunch ally of the United States in the Cold War,
now arrayed itself against Pakistan at a time when that country had be-
come the key element in Washington’s campaign to defeat the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan.
In marked contrast, China remained singularly consistent in its
strategy to offset India’s hegemony in South Asia by aiding Pakistan to
overcome its inherent weakness compared to its mighty neighbor in con-
ventional weapons and armed personnel. By eagerly assisting Pakistan to
construct a nuclear weapon, Beijing aimed to raise it to parity with India
in defense matters, thus frustrating India’s ambition to become a hege-
monic power in South Asia.
Delhi accepted the assistance of Israel’s hawkish defense minister, Ariel
Sharon. By the end of 1982, a joint Indo-Israeli plan was hatched to raid
Pakistan’s Kahuta nuclear facility. Indian military officers traveled to Tel
Aviv clandestinely in February 1983 to purchase electronic equipment to
jam Kahuta’s air defenses. Tellingly, on February 23, 1983, Gandhi accused
Pakistan of “covertly attempting to make nuclear weapons,” and three days
later Raja Ramanna, head of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, revealed
that India too was developing a uranium-enriching facility.20

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Bizarrely, this was the backdrop to the cordial meeting between

Gandhi and Zia ul Haq on the sidelines of the Seventh Nonaligned
Movement from March 7 to 12, 1983, in Delhi. They signed an agreement
on normalizing relations by setting up the Joint Indo-Pakistan Commis-
sion, with subcommissions for trade, economics, information, and travel.
During 1983, China helped Pakistan with triggering devices for an
atom bomb. These were either conventional charges or electronic trigging
circuits. The Pakistani experts, led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, started con-
ducting cold tests in a tunnel in the Chagai Hills of northwest Baluchistan
to perfect a triggering device. Success came only at the end of more than
twenty trials. That was the final step to assembling an atom bomb. They
did so by the end of the year. At that point the Engineering Research
Laboratory was officially renamed the Kahuta Research Laboratory.
In Washington a (later) declassified US government assessment in
1983 concluded that “there is unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is ac-
tively pursuing a nuclear weapons development program. . . . We believe
the ultimate application of the enriched uranium produced at Kahuta is
clearly nuclear weapons.”21
Yet no action was taken against Pakistan. The Reagan White House
had equated hurting Pakistan by imposing sanctions on it with aiding the
Kremlin. So when faced with the choice of expelling the Soviets from
Afghanistan by all possible means or stopping Islamabad from building
an atom bomb, it opted for hemorrhaging the “evil empire.” It was so
unwaveringly committed to this policy that it deployed underhand tactics
to squash the irrefutable evidence that State Department officials would
periodically furnish to show Islamabad inexorably racing to produce a
nuclear weapon.
The Indo-Israeli plan to raid the Kahuta facility did not remain secret
for long from the ISI. In the autumn of 1983 its chief Lieutenant Gen-
eral, Rahman Khan, sent a message to his counterpart in RAW, Nowsher
F. Suntook. This led to a meeting between Munir Ahmad Khan, head
of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and Ramanna in
a Vienna hotel. Ahmad Khan warned Ramanna that if India alone, or
in collusion with Israel, attacked Kahuta, Pakistan would hit India’s nu-
clear facility in Trombay on the outskirts of Mumbai, with horrific con-
sequences for millions of that mega-city’s residents.22 Faced with such a
scenario, Gandhi hesitated.
Meanwhile, the links between RAW and Mossad had grown so tight
that Mossad equipped RAW’s two Boeing 707s belonging to its Aviation

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

Research Center with specialist equipment to gather signals intelligence.23

It was against this background that in late 1983 Sharon offered to carry
out the raid from Jamnagar in Gujarat by entering Pakistan beneath the
radar and following the mountains in Kashmir to reach Kahuta. It was
then that, with the connivance of the Reagan White House, the CIA
station chief in Islamabad reportedly tipped off Zia ul Haq about Sha-
ron’s proposal to Gandhi, hoping to de-escalate the dangerous tit-for-tat
between India and Pakistan.24
Zia ul Haq acted. At his behest, Qadeer Khan gave long interviews
to two leading local newspapers in January and February 1984. His core
message was that “Pakistan could build the bomb if it needed to. And if
Kahuta is destroyed, more than one such plant can be rebuilt.” To leave
nothing to chance, Pakistan’s ambassador in Delhi told India’s External
Affairs Ministry that his country would rain fire in retaliation for an at-
tack on Kahuta.25 Zia ul Haq’s aim was twofold: to show that Pakistan’s
nuclear program was unstoppable in order to gain international accep-
tance, and to warn Gandhi that Pakistan was ready to strike back if she
decided to raid Kahuta. He succeeded. In March Gandhi revoked her
earlier go-ahead to Sharon.
The year 1984 was the pivotal one for Pakistan’s nuclear program. Af-
ter receiving an atom bomb assembled in Kahuta in January, the Chinese
detonated it successfully at their test site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang province
in March.26 This led to discreet jubilation among top officials in Islamabad
and Kahuta. Having thus acquired parity with India in defense, Pakistani
leaders were now equipped to challenge India’s claim to regional hege-
mony. This super-secret event at Lop Nor, however, would reach the CIA
and RAW two years later, and others much later. Meanwhile, Zia ul Haq,
a master in dissimulation, would only admit that his country had acquired
a very modest uranium enrichment capability for peaceful purposes.
In late 1984, Qadeer Khan said he was ready for a hot test in Balu-
chistan, but Zia ul Haq ruled it out. He did not wish to embarrass the
Reagan administration, which had been overly generous to his govern-
ment and had repeatedly overlooked its transgressions in its nuclear arms
program.
Zia ul Haq had another major reason to be cautious. In April 1984
the US Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee had adopted a restrictive
provision, proposed by Larry Pressler and two other senators, to tie the
continuation of economic assistance and military sales to Islamabad.
The president needed to certify that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

explosive device, and to add that fresh aid to it would reduce significantly
the risk that it would possess such a weapon. It was not until August 1985
that this provision, called the Pressler Amendment, was attached to the
Foreign Assistance Act, covering fiscal 1985–1986. In the House of Rep-
resentatives, Stephen Solarz’s amendment stipulated a ban on all military
and economic aid to those nonnuclear nations that illegally procured or
tried to procure nuclear-related materials from America.
But there was an overriding opt-out provision that applied to all
such amendments. The US president was authorized to waive these if
he thought it was in the national interest to do so. Reagan did not use
that option, though. Instead, while incontrovertible evidence from sev-
eral sources piled up, showing Pakistan’s unflinching drive to produce an
atom bomb, year after year Reagan certified to the contrary. He did so to
keep the US military and economic aid flowing into Pakistan while its
government boosted the destructive power of the mujahedin insurgents
in Afghanistan.

SOF T BELLIES OF INDIA AND PAKISTAN

Reagan’s unqualified backing and the deadly effectiveness of the Afghan

mujahedin’s insurgency emboldened Zia ul Haq to implement his pet pol-
icy of pinpricks against India to weaken it. This meant providing material
aid to any irredentist movement that arose there. The violent agitation of
militant Sikhs for an independent Khalistan was one such. It gathered
steam in the early 1980s. With many Sikh immigrants in Britain and
North America backing the movement, it became comparatively easy for
the ISI to contact their leaders.
At home, Zia ul Haq’s rule came under pressure in early 1983. The
PPP-led coalition of ten parties, called the Movement for the Restoration
of Democracy (MRD), demanded elections and restoration of the 1973
constitution by August 14, Independence Day, on pain of starting a non-
violent campaign against the military dictatorship.
Zia ul Haq failed to heed the call, describing the MRD as a tool
of India. His allegation gained traction when Indira Gandhi endorsed
the movement in a comment in the lower house of India’s parliament.
Because the MRD was particularly strong in Sindh, the traditional bas-
tion of the PPP, the military government charged that the MRD had
the agenda of securing the secession of Sindh from Pakistan in protest

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

of the Punjabi-dominated administration in Islamabad. Sindhi villagers

dismissed the official propaganda. They backed the MRD’s campaign so
staunchly that Zia ul Haq dispatched three army divisions to quell it. The
army arrested fifteen thousand people and killed sixty to two hundred
protestors.27
In early October Gandhi inaugurated the World Sindhi Conference,
a human rights advocacy organization registered in Welwyn Garden City,
United Kingdom, in New Delhi. “We are for democracy and shall ever be
so,” she declared. “We have to oppose injustice everywhere. We want that
there should be democracy everywhere, and there is nothing bad or im-
proper in saying so.” The conference passed a resolution for the immediate
withdrawal of troops from Sindh and the restoration of constitutional
rights of the people. All India Radio started broadcasting in Sindhi, which
had been added to the list of recognized languages in the constitution in
1967 but never accorded the status of radio broadcasts before. When the
news of these developments was conveyed to the Sindhi nationalist leader
Ghulam Murtaza Syed, he was overjoyed.28
Zia ul Haq latched on to these events. On October 22 he asserted
that the MRD was working in league with a foreign power: “As soon as
the MRD began agitating, a foreign power, as agreed before, came out in
its support.” There was no second-guessing as to who this “foreign power”
was. Referring to Indians, he said, “They are not really reconciled to the
existence of Pakistan.”29 This was the age-old refrain that still remained
potent in Pakistan. On his part, in 1984, the Pakistani leader instructed
ISI officers to establish contacts with the representatives of the Jammu
and Kashmir Jamaat-e Islami ( JeI) and the secular-nationalist Jammu and
Kashmir Liberation Front ( JKLF).

SIKH INSURGENCY CLAIMS INDIRA GANDHI

In the Sikh-majority Punjab, a peaceful campaign for a larger share of ir-

rigation water for the state in August 1982 was repressed by the Congress
ministry. It arrested thirty thousand protesting Sikhs, and police shoot-
ings killed more than one hundred, in less than three months. During
the run-up to the Asian Games in Delhi, held from November 19 to
December 4, all Sikhs from Punjab traveling to Delhi were searched as a
precaution against terrorist attacks during the event. Sikhs felt humiliated
and alienated from the Hindu community. This swelled the ranks of the

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

thirty-five-year-old firebrand religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

His inordinately long, raven-black beard and deep blue turban made him
stand out in a crowd.30
Along with several hundred armed acolytes of his, Bhindranwale
planted himself in the Golden Temple—offi cially called Harmandir
Sahib—a complex of forty-two buildings, many of them glittering shrines.
They felt safe there because, as a rule, security forces did not enter places
of religious worship. In his interviews with foreign TV channels, Bhin-
dranwale called for the establishment of an independent state of Sikhs to
be called Khalistan. He gained the backing of many affluent Sikhs settled
in Britain and North America. Their donations enabled the Bhindranwale
camp to arm themselves with Pakistan-made rifles smuggled across the
150-mile-long Punjab border.
Bhindranwale threatened his Sikh opponents. In a sensational act,
his partisans killed police deputy inspector general Avtar Singh Atwal in
April 1983. The security situation deteriorated. Following the murder of
six Hindu bus passengers in October, the Gandhi government in Delhi
declared a state of emergency and imposed central rule. But there was
no letup in violence. During the first five months of 1984, it claimed
298 victims in Punjab and spread to the contiguous Haryana and its
neighbor, Delhi.
Gandhi decided to launch a military assault to gain control of the
Golden Temple, which had become the bastion of Bhindranwale and his
six hundred armed followers. As a preamble to the attack by army troops
and armed policemen—code-named Blue Star—a thirty-six-hour curfew
in Punjab on June 3 brought all movement to a standstill. Strict censor-
ship of news was imposed while seven army divisions were deployed in the
state. Security forces, equipped with heavy artillery, tanks, and armored
personnel carriers, stormed the Golden Temple on the night of June 5.
They gained full control by the morning of June 7 after fierce fighting with
the heavily armed insurgents, who had been arrayed in strategic positions
in more than forty buildings of the complex by a retired Sikh general.
The official fatality statistics of 136 security personnel and 357 in-
surgents and other civilians were widely believed to be unreliable. The
number of suspected terrorists was put at 1,592. And there was a reference
to 1,600 “missing” people. Bhindranwale was killed.31 Unofficial estimates
of the dead ranged between 1,500 and 5,000. The Chicago Tribune on June
12 published a figure of 2,000. Military helicopters reported marches on
Amritsar by tens of thousands of Sikhs in defiance of the emergency.

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

More seriously, some 4,000 Sikh soldiers in garrison towns of Punjab de-
fected, killed their officers, and marched on Amritsar. They were stopped
by armed policemen, and many lost their lives.32
In two subsequent military operations, code-named Shop and
Woodrose, security forces raided rural Punjab to capture suspected ex-
tremists and scan the countryside. This dragnet campaign forced nearly
three thousand young Sikhs to cross into Pakistan. They were arrested as
aliens entering the country without proper documents.33 In its “White
Paper on the Punjab Agitation,” published on July 10, 1984, the Indira
Gandhi government referred to Pakistan’s involvement in backing the
Khalistan movement, which was directed against India’s strength, unity,
and secularism.34
The Indian military’s ferocious assault on their most sacred shrine
traumatized Sikhs all over India. They viewed this onslaught as an attack
on their religion and identity. There were reports of Sikh civil servants
and army officers resigning in protest and others, including the famous
writer-columnist Khushwant Singh, returning their official honors.
In their eyes, Indira Gandhi became evil incarnate. On the morning
of October 31, 1984, as she passed a wicket gate between the garden of
her official residence and her office to give an interview to Irish TV, she
paid the ultimate price. Her assassins were none other than her Sikh
bodyguards, twenty-five-year-old subinspector Beant Singh and twenty-
one-year-old constable Satwant Singh Bhakar. Beant Singh aimed three
shots from his .38-caliber revolver into Gandhi’s chest and abdomen. As
she fell to the ground, Bhakar pumped all thirty rounds from his subma-
chine gun into her bleeding body.
They threw their weapons on the ground and were immediately appre-
hended by the commandos and taken to the guardhouse. Indira Gandhi
was dead on arrival at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. In
the evening her forty-year-old son, Rajiv, a junior member of the lower
house of Parliament, was sworn in as prime minister. Three days of official
mourning followed.
During that time an anti-Sikh pogrom in greater Delhi and else-
where was carried out by organized gangs. By the time the mob fury
had spent itself, between six thousand and eight thousand Sikhs were
killed—stabbed, burned, or beaten to death. More than one hundred Sikh
temples were set alight, and thousands of shops and homes were pillaged.
Altogether Sikhs lost property worth Rs 300 million ($6 million).35 To
save his life, Khushwant Singh, who opposed the Khalistan movement,

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sought refuge in the Swedish embassy. “I felt a refugee in my own coun-

try,” he moaned.36
With Indira Gandhi’s demise, India lost a politician who during her
fifteen years of premiership had proved to be a strong leader, although her
decision to impose a state emergency in 1975–1977 was wrongheaded and
authoritarian. In her handling of domestic politics she was manipulative
and vengeful—traits that, in the final analysis, lay at the root of the rise of
Sikh irredentism. It was she who had bolstered an upstart Bhindranwale
to rival an established Sikh leader she disagreed with. Later Bhindran-
wale morphed into a Frankenstein and turned against her.
In Pakistan, the government declared three days of mourning. Zia ul
Haq rushed to Delhi to attend the cremation of Gandhi on the banks of
the Yamuna River.
In the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, RAW secured the ser-
vices of a senior officer of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Beth,
to tighten up its prime minister’s security system. Indo-Israeli links tight-
ened during her successor’s rule, much to the apprehension of Pakistani
leaders.

UNTUTORED RAJIV AND DUPLICITOUS ZIA

In the wake of the assassination of his mother, a wave of popular sympa-

thy favored Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress Party in the parliamentary election
that followed. It garnered 404 of the 515 seats at stake.37 This was a truly
remarkable achievement for the tall, robustly built, moon-faced Rajiv, who
had entered politics reluctantly in 1981 after the death of his younger,
politicized brother, Sanjay, in a flying accident. Though he studied en-
gineering at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1962 to 1965, he did not
graduate. He met and dated Antonia Edvige Albina Maino, an Italian,
who had come to Cambridge to learn English and worked as a part-time
waitress. On his return to India in 1966, Rajiv trained as a pilot and joined
the state-owned Indian Airlines. Two years later he married twenty-
one-year-old Maino according to Hindu rites in Delhi. She changed her
name to Sonia. After the birth of their two children, Rahul and Priyanka,
the couple settled down to a humdrum domestic life, with Rajiv showing
no interest in politics.
Thus India came to be ruled by a public figure lacking experience in
politics, administration, diplomacy, or strategy. Personable and sincere in

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

his utterances, he was bereft of the guile of a politician, an attribute Zia

ul Haq, though trained as a soldier, possessed in spades. The two leaders
met in Moscow on March 13, 1985, during the funeral of Soviet leader
Konstantin Chernenko. Whereas Gandhi was still struggling to find equi-
librium in his exacting job, the Pakistani president was sure-footed.
By holding a “party-less” general election to the National Assembly,
Zia ul Haq had pacified his critics in the United States. And by a sleight
of constitutional hand he had acquired the power to appoint one of the
elected members of this Assembly as the prime minister. He picked Mu-
hammad Khan Junejo for the post. US financial assistance, which had
been running at $60 million annually since 1981, shot up to $300 million
a year in 1985.38 The sly Pakistani general went along with Gandhi’s pro-
posal to try to establish good relations between their countries.
Their bilateral summit took place in mid-December 1985. After his
overnight stay at the sprawling Indian president’s estate, Rashtrapati Bha-
van, in Delhi, Zia ul Haq conferred with his host in the Yellow Room,
used earlier by Lord Mountbatten for his high-level talks with the leaders
of British India. Their one-on-one meeting lasted two hours.
“The most important aspect [of our meeting] is that we have decided
not to attack each other’s nuclear facilities,” Zia ul Haq declared at the
joint press conference. Gandhi described the agreement as “a fi rst step
in establishing confidence.” India then had three nuclear reactors, five
smaller research reactors, and three major nuclear power plants with two
more under construction. Pakistan had a nuclear power plant, a research
reactor, and one uranium enrichment facility. Neither nation had signed
the 1968 NPT. Both claimed their nuclear programs were for peaceful
purposes. Gandhi expressed his doubts about the peaceful nature of Paki-
stan’s nuclear program diplomatically. “We have not reached an agreement
on the nature of nuclear programs.” he said.39
The two leaders instructed their defense secretaries to meet to discuss
recent border clashes on the inhospitable twenty-thousand-foot-high
Siachen Glacier, measuring one thousand square miles, in a region of
Kashmir where the frontier had not been clearly defined. The glacier had
been captured by the Indians in April 1984. In addition, they announced,
the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan would meet in the third
week of January 1986 to reopen talks on Delhi’s proposal for a peace and
friendship treaty and Islamabad’s offer of a no-war pact.
Zia ul Haq said the Indian premier had repeated his accusation that
his county was sheltering, training, and arming Sikh terrorists from Indian

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Punjab. “Pakistan is totally against all kinds of terrorism,” he declared.

In turn he referred to his complaint of cross-border subversion by India.
“We have agreed that we will look into this problem in a more detailed
manner,” he said, without elaborating.40
Once the emergency was lifted in Punjab and state elections held in
September 1985, the exclusively Sikh Akali Dal party emerged victorious.
A modicum of normalcy returned to Punjab. But the Rajiv Gandhi gov-
ernment’s failure to fulfill its promise to transfer Chandigarh—the joint
capital of Punjab and Haryana—to Punjab by the end of January 1986
led to the revival of Sikh extremism.

INDIA’S OPERATION BRASSTACKS

On January 26, 1986, the militant Sikhs who had gathered in the Golden
Temple backed the resolution proposed by the leaders of the All India
Sikh Students Federation and the late Bhindranwale’s Damdami Tak-
sal, a fundamentalist sect within Sikhism, favoring the establishment of
Khalistan. But it was only three months later that the troops of the border
security force and the “Black Cat” commandos of the National Security
Guards41 were sent into the Golden Temple by the Akali Dal chief minis-
ter Surjit Singh Barnala to flush out the armed militants. Their Operation
Black Thunder I resulted in the capture of three hundred armed militants
and caches of firearms originating in Pakistan’s tribal belt, where the pro-
duction of small arms flourished.
While publicly complaining about Pakistan’s role in igniting Sikh ir-
redentism, Rajiv Gandhi instructed RAW to take countermeasures. RAW
set up its Counter Intelligence Team-X and Counter Intelligence Team-J
to target Pakistan and the Khalistani groups respectively. These clandes-
tine units of RAW used cross-border traffickers to ship weapons and cash
across the long, porous Indo-Pakistan frontier, just as the ISI had been
doing in the opposite direction.
In Afghanistan, the CIA shipped 150 shoulder-held, US-made
Stinger surface-to-air (SAM) missiles to the ISI for the Afghan mu-
jahedin in the spring of 1996, followed by three hundred British-made
Blowpipe missiles in the summer. The mujahedin started firing them ex-
tensively in the autumn, downing sixty Soviet helicopter gunships by year-
end, thus finding them more effective than the Soviet-designed SAM-7s,
clandestinely procured from Egypt and China by the CIA, which they

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

had used before.42 The blunting of the most effective tool in Moscow’s ar-
mory to decimate the insurgents turned the war in favor of the mujahedin.
In January 1987 the Moscow-backed Afghan government declared a
unilateral cease-fire for six months, which was to be followed by a unilat-
eral withdrawal of six thousand Soviet troops in August.
Among other things, this further raised the spirits of Zia ul Haq,
who was savoring good tidings from Washington. Disregarding the solid
evidence that US intelligence services had provided President Reagan
about the 1984 explosion of a Pakistani-produced nuclear bomb, he issued
a certification of “no atom bomb made by Pakistan” in October 1986 to
clear the way for generous economic and military aid. His decision put
Rajiv Gandhi in a spin.
The next month Gandhi gave the go-ahead to his assertive chief of
army staff (COAS) Lieutenant General Krishnaswamy Sundararajan, of-
ten called Sundarji (in command February 1985–May 1988), to stage
the war game code-named Brasstacks he had conceived in July. It was
designed to test the scholar-soldier’s innovative concept of combining
mechanization, mobility, and air support, using computers for operating
tanks and running command centers, as well as electronic warfare equip-
ment that had been installed in the past few years. Along with the chief
of naval staff, Radhakrishna Hariram Tahiliani, he had submitted a draft
of the nuclear weapons doctrine to the defense minister in 1985.
Operation Brasstacks involved mobilizing nearly three-quarters of
the Indian army in Rajasthan bordering Sindh, where irredentist Sindhi
nationalism was gaining momentum, and putting them on high alert. It
was the largest war game ever seen on the subcontinent, involving 1,300
tanks, 1,000-plus armored vehicles, and 400,000 troops barely thirty miles
from the Pakistani frontier. It was the model for a full-scale invasion and
revived the long-held fear of Pakistani leaders of their country being an-
nihilated by India.
The mobilization of the Indian military, involving nine army divisions
and five independent armored brigades, in western Rajasthan gave “the
assembled forces the capability to launch a piercing strike into Pakistan to
cut off northern Pakistan from the southern part,” according to Abdul Sat-
tar, then Pakistan’s foreign secretary. “Contrary to an existing understand-
ing, the Indian army chief did not inform his Pakistani counterpart of the
location, schedule and scale of the exercise. . . . Three wars, chronic ten-
sions rooted in unresolved disputes, inadequate or unreliable intelligence,
and deep-rooted mutual suspicions fuelled worst-case assumptions.”43

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As Pakistan’s COAS, General Zia ul Haq extended his army’s winter

exercises in Punjab and then in December mobilized the Fifth Corps in
Karachi as well as the Southern Air Command while deploying mech-
anized divisions and artillery along the Indian border. The Indians per-
ceived his moves north of the Sutlej River and west of the Ravi River in
Sialkot district as part of a pincer to squeeze Indian Punjab, where the
Sikh insurgency had revived.
The crisis deepened in January 1987, with Delhi calling Pakistan’s
moves “provocative.” In return Islamabad pointed its finger at the massive
Indian military buildup in Rajasthan, not far from its frontier. The mood
at the annual Army Day Parade in Delhi on January 15 was bullish. The
tension between the two neighbors became explosive three days later. That
night Pakistani foreign minister Zain Noorani conveyed President Zia
ul Haq’s personal message to the Indian ambassador, S. K. Singh: in the
event of a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by
India, Pakistan was “capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on it.”44
This, however, did not dissuade Sunderarajan from ordering the airlifting
of troops into Indian Punjab.
In Islamabad top Pakistani officials met in an emergency session
on January 20. The next day Prime Minister Junejo telephoned Ra-
jiv Gandhi and proposed defusing the crisis. After consulting the four
other members of the Cabinet Committee on Security, Gandhi agreed.
As a result, the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan met in Delhi
on January 31. They signed an agreement on February 4 to deactivate
forward air bases and then withdraw ground troops from frontline po-
sitions in stages.

ZIA UL HAQ’S HIGH-WIRE ACT

That there was a menace lurking behind Zia ul Haq’s claim—“capable

of inflicting unacceptable damage” on India—would become clear some
weeks later. Known to only a select few, Zia ul Haq was engaged in a high-
wire act. His overarching aim was to dissuade the Indians from starting a
conventional war with a nuclear-armed Pakistan without providing evi-
dence that contradicted President Reagan’s assertion that Islamabad was
not pursuing a nuclear weapons agenda.
At his behest, Qadeer Khan gave an interview to Indian journalist
Kuldip Nayar on January 28, 1987, in Islamabad. “We have it [an atom

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

bomb,] and we have enriched uranium,” he said. “Weaponized the thing.

Put it all together.” Nayar said, “If you have tested, it would be a tremen-
dous warning for India.” Qadeer Khan stared at the interviewer coldly.
“Mr Nayar, if you drive us to the wall, we will use the bomb,” Qadeer
Khan said. “You did it to us in East Bengal. We won’t waste time with
conventional weapons. We will come straight out with it.”45
Nayar sent his scoop to the London-based weekly newspaper Ob-
server, whose editor, Donald Trelford, withheld publication for four weeks
while he tried to get the story authenticated by different sources. During
the hiatus, the content of the interview leaked.
To lower tensions, Rajiv Gandhi hit on the idea of using the upcom-
ing cricket test match between India and Pakistan in the Reliance World
Cup Cricket tournament in Rajasthan’s capital of Jaipur. He invited Zia
ul Haq to witness the second day’s play in the five-day match on February
22, 1987, as part of the “Cricket for Peace” diplomacy. Cricket is extremely
popular in India and Pakistan, with test matches attracting up to three
hundred million television viewers. On such occasions, streets and bazaars
in both countries are deserted as most people sit glued to their TVs—
or their radios before the arrival of television. Predictably, the Pakistani
leader accepted Gandhi’s invitation.
But, sitting next to his host, Gandhi, at the cricket ground, Zia ul Haq
reportedly said, “If your forces cross our border by an inch, we are going
to annihilate your cities,” indicating that if necessary, his military would
not hesitate to use atom bombs first to defend Pakistan.46 In a pro forma
statement, Pakistan denied the statement attributed to its president.
After a long wait, on March 1, 1987, the Observer splashed the story:
“Pakistan Has the A-Bomb.” It quoted Khan: “What the CIA has been
saying about the atom bomb is correct. They told us Pakistan could never
produce the bomb and they doubted my capabilities, but they now know
we have it.”47
The story, published around the globe, embarrassed Zia ul Haq. He
launched a vigorous damage limitation eff ort. Qadeer Khan claimed
he had been tricked by Nayar, who had quoted him out of context. In the
Pakistani media, Nayar was pilloried as “a scummy RAW agent.” Zia ul
Haq asserted that “Pakistan has neither the desire, nor the intention, nor
the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.”48 Following the Observer rev-
elation, the Indian government stated that the disclosure was “forcing us
to review our option.” It was a meaningless statement, as India had been
manufacturing atom bombs since 1980.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Despite the controversy and the news headlines, the public diplomacy
of mending fences by the protagonists remained on track. On March
2 the two foreign secretaries, meeting in Islamabad, agreed to a phased
troop withdrawal to peacetime positions. Two days later the Indian de-
fense ministry arranged a guided tour of the front line in Rajasthan for
local and foreign journalists as well as military attachés, including the one
from Pakistan. “This is not a third-world army,” a Western diplomat told
the New York Times correspondent Steven R. Weisman. “This is a modern
army, fully competent for any mission, easily as good as the Chinese, the
Koreans or the French.” India’s superiority in conventional warfare “might
be motivating Pakistan to turn to nuclear weapons as a deterrent,” accord-
ing to some analysts.49 This was an understatement.
In reality, a bomb built by Pakistanis had been tested in China in early
1984, and three years later Pakistan was all geared up to assemble one at
home. From March 1988 it became commonplace in the Indian media to
say that the Pakistanis were “within a turn of a screwdriver” of assembling
an atom bomb.

PROXY WARS ON TRACK

While the overtly conducted war games and diplomacy ended satisfac-
torily, the proxy war by India and Pakistan through RAW and the ISI
intensified in 1987. In Afghanistan KHAD and the KGB increased their
training and arming of the Baluchi nationalists for subversive activities in
Baluchistan. The separatists’ aim of establishing an independent Baluch-
istan would have meant reducing Pakistan by a hefty 43 percent and was
therefore resisted bitterly by the government in Islamabad. As part of the
KHAD-RAW-KGB triad, RAW’s Counter Intelligence Team-X became
an active participant in stoking subversion in Pakistan. It coordinated its
activities with KHAD. The result was a low-level but steady campaign of
bombings in Karachi, Lahore, and Multan. According to the US State
Department, more than half of the 835 terrorist incidents worldwide in
1987 were in Pakistan.50
Indian Punjab remained on the boil. In Amritsar, militants had
started creeping into the Golden Temple from the summer of 1986. Their
takeover was complete in June 1987, when Darshan Singh Ragi, the
Sikhs’ supreme leader opposed to violence, was forced to flee the shrine
because of serious threats to his life. Th is was a signal for the Delhi

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

government to impose central rule in Punjab. (It would continue until

February 1992.)
To ensure that the proxy war did not escalate to the extent that it
made hot war inevitable, Zia ul Haq conceived the idea of a clandestine
meeting between the heads of the ISI and RAW. But he needed an oblig-
ing but influential intermediary with extraordinary finesse to achieve this
aim. During his military assignment in Jordan, he had cultivated a friend-
ship with Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal, whose Cambridge-educated,
Pakistani wife, Sarvath Ikramullah, was born in Kolkata and was a niece
of Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former Pakistani premier. Hassan
bin Talal agreed to act as go-between. He succeeded in contacting Rajiv
Gandhi’s office.
With the authorization of their respective leaders, Lieutenant General
Hamid Gul, director general of the ISI (in office March 1987–October
1989), and RAW chief A. K. Verma met in Amman to discuss their mu-
tual problems. In exchange for the phased handing over of the nearly three
thousand militant Sikhs who had crossed into Pakistan, Verma promised
to de-escalate the bombing campaign in Pakistani cities in stages.51 They
met again in the Swiss town of Interlaken, this time focusing on the India-
occupied Siachen Glacier in Kashmir, but made no progress.
In Indian Punjab, operating from the safety of the Golden Temple,
the armed militants of the Bhindranwale Tiger Force and the Khalistan
Commando Force of the Pakistan-based Paramjit Singh Panjwar52 would
go out to murder prominent Punjabi politicians, police, and army officers,
as well as suspected informers and innocent Hindus. Equally, the security
forces carried out extrajudicial killings, attributing them to fake “encoun-
ters.” The photographs of these Sikh “martyrs” adorned the walls of many
buildings in the Golden Temple complex.53
Militant Sikhs operated in an environment in which Sikh and Hindu
communities were alienated. With the terrorists increasingly carrying
deadly AK-47 assault rifles, smuggled from Pakistan from May 1987
onward, armed policemen, lacking this weapon, found themselves at a
crippling disadvantage. Since a section of Sikh police officers sympathized
with the Khalistan cause, there were instances when underarmed Sikh
policemen fled when encountering extremists. The morale of the law en-
forcement agencies plummeted.54
Terrorism by Sikh militants intensified, claiming 173 victims, many
of them Sikhs suspected as police informers, in January 1988, including
30 extremists. “Today, young Sikh militants with AK-47 assault rifles,

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

shotguns and handguns of all kinds roam the [Golden Temple] complex
at will, often carrying their weapons under blankets and robes,” reported
Marc Kaufman of the Philadelphia Inquirer in February 1988. “Scores of
militants—many of whom proudly say that large rewards have been of-
fered for their capture—now live in small rooms that ring the Holy Pool,
the most sacred area of the complex.”55
In a nine-day operation in May 1988, code-named Black Thunder II,
India’s security forces, commanded by Punjab’s director general of police,
imposed a strict blockade of the Golden Temple complex and then moved
in with blazing guns. In the resulting firefight forty-one militants were
killed. Nearly two hundred Sikh extremists surrendered.
The authorities claimed that interrogations of arrested militants re-
vealed that many of them had been trained in camps inside Pakistan and
that sophisticated firearms and ammunition had been smuggled across the
Pakistani border. “Pakistan is perhaps the largest supporter of terrorism
on the globe,” said Rajiv Gandhi at a press conference in New York after
addressing the special UN session on disarmament on June 13, 1988. “We
have given [the Pakistanis] a detailed list of training camps, of people who
are carrying out the training, the type of training that has been carried
out in the camps,” he added, demanding that Islamabad stop the aid. “We
have given them maps of where the camps are located.”56
As before, Zia ul Haq denied the charge and condemned terrorism.
He was in an upbeat mood. Good tidings reached him from Afghani-
stan. Following the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s agreement with
the UN special envoy in February 1988, the first phase of Soviet pullout
from Afghanistan was completed in April. Also, his strategy of weakening
Delhi’s grip over Kashmir in stages, conceived in early 1987 and conveyed
to the leaders of the Jammu and Kashmir JeI, had gained traction. What
had so far been viewed by India and Pakistan as a territorial dispute was
now placed into a wider ideological context of Islamism by Zia ul Haq.
Ironically, some months later, Zia ul Haq would become a victim of
terrorism in Pakistan.

A CRATE OF EXPLODING MANGOES

On August 17, 1988, Pak-One, a C-130 Hercules turbo-prop trans-

port plane, equipped with a sealed, air-conditioned capsule and carry-
ing a four-man crew and twenty-seven passengers, crashed at 3:52 pm,

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

eighteen miles from the Bahawalpur airport. Besides Zia ul Haq, the dead
included Pakistan’s chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Abdur Rah-
man Khan; US ambassador Arnold Raphel, head of the US military aid
mission to Pakistan; General Herbert M. Wassom; and a dozen other Pa-
kistani generals. After lurching up and down in the sky, Pak-One plunged
into the soil with such force that its propellers churned the ground for
several feet. It then exploded, the crash igniting twenty thousand pounds
of fuel, which burned for hours. The plane was on its return journey to
Islamabad after top Pakistani and American officials had finished wit-
nessing the performance of the newly supplied US M1 Abrams tank at
the firing range of Tamewali, which was located several miles from the
Bahawalpur airport.
Pak-One was seen off by Lieutenant General Mirza Aslam Beg, the
vice COAS, at the Bahawalpur airport. He boarded a smaller turbojet
to take him to the Dhamial Army Aviation Airbase in Rawalpindi. On
his way to his destination, his pilot overheard a helicopter pilot telling
the control tower about the crash. He diverted his turbojet to the site,
saw the blazing wreckage on the ground, and resumed his journey. After
arriving at the Dhamial Airbase, General Beg rushed to the general head-
quarters of the army and assumed the rank of the COAS.
On hearing the news, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, chair of the Senate since
1985 and a confidante of Zia ul Haq, drove to army headquarters, well
aware that a provision in the constitution entitled him to become the act-
ing president in case of a power vacuum. Once he had bonded with Gen-
eral Beg, he assumed the presidency. That evening, as army units moved
swiftly to cordon off official residences, government buildings, television
stations, and other strategic locations in Islamabad, Ishaq Khan addressed
the nation on television. He declared ten days of official mourning.
In Delhi the government announced three days of mourning. Indian
president Ramaswamy Venkataraman attended Zia ul Haq’s funeral on
August 19. And Rajiv Gandhi cancelled the celebration of his birthday
on the twentieth.
Three major published documents have dealt with the possible per-
petrator of this terrorist act. The official board of inquiry, assisted by six
US Air Force experts, submitted its report in November 1988. Edward
Jay Epstein, an American journalist, investigated the case and published
his account in the September 1989 edition of Vanity Fair.
Finally, the findings of Barbara Crossette, former South Asia corre-
spondent of the New York Times, appeared in the fall 2005 issue of the

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

World Policy Journal. Her star interviewee was Bahawalpur-based General

Mahmud Ali Durrani, who was in charge of the tank field tests at the
testing site of Tamewali. (The US-made M1 tank designed for desert
warfare failed the field trial chiefly because its filters got choked by the
local dust, which was a mixture of sand and clay, according to Durrani.)
After arriving in Pak-One at the Bahawalpur air port, Zia ul Haq had
flown to Tamewali and conferred with Durrani, who presented Zia ul
Haq with two crates of mangoes, a local specialty. The president took the
crates in his helicopter on his return flight to the Bahawalpur airport to
be transferred to Pak-One. These mangoes were checked, one by one, by
security, according to Durrani. “I believe some mangoes were also loaded
at Bahawalpur which were presented [to Zia ul Haq] by the local military
and civilian leadership,” he told Crossette. He had no control over those
mangoes or other baggage put on the plane.57
Pakistan’s board of inquiry ruled out mechanical failure mentioned by
Lockheed, the manufacturer of the plane. It concluded that “the accident
was most probably caused through the perpetuation of a criminal act or
sabotage.” It added that the explosives found in the wreckage and “the use
of ultra-sophisticated techniques” indicated “involvement of a specialist
organization well versed with carrying out such tasks and possessing the
means and abilities for its execution.”58
Epstein’s inquiry established that President Zia ul Haq’s security staff
had gone through the standard procedure for his safety. Pak-One had
done the 310-mile flight to and from Bahawalpur the day before. The
pilot, Wing Commander Mashood Hassan, had been chosen by Zia ul
Haq himself and cleared by air force intelligence. A Cessna security plane
did the final check of the area and gave the all clear before Pak-One was
allowed to take off. Once the wreckage was sifted and samples of soil
taken, the recovered parts of the victims’ bodies were sent in body bags to
the Bahawalpur Military Hospital on the night of August 17 and stored
there for autopsies by a team of Pakistani and American pathologists.
The following afternoon, however, the hospital authorities were or-
dered to return the bags to the coffins for immediate burial. The key ev-
idence of what happened, particularly to the pilot and copilot, thus got
buried.59 Durrani explained to Crossette that all the victims were reduced
to bits of charred flesh and that they could be identified only by clothing
or stray pieces of identification. Zia ul Haq was nothing more than his
jawbone. The Pakistani authorities lacked the technical expertise to deal
with that sort of contingency.60

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 ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ, BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

An analysis of the chemicals in the wreckage by the laboratory of the

Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco in Washington found traces of
pentaerythritol tertranitrate (PNET), a high explosive used by saboteurs
as a detonator, and antimony sulfide used in fuses to set off a device. By
using these chemicals, Epstein explained, “Pakistan ordinance experts re-
constructed a low-level explosive detonator which could have been used to
burst a flask the size of a soda can which probably contained an odorless
poison gas [most likely VX] that incapacitated the pilots.”61
Murtaza Bhutto, the elder son of Zulfikar who had led the Al
Zulfikar group in Kabul but later moved to Damascus, had the self-
confessed motivation. He had admitted that the guerilla group had tried
to assassinate Zia ul Haq on five previous occasions. Once in 1982 a mis-
sile it fired had narrowly missed hitting Pak-One.62
The Al Zulfikar group, Epstein claims, took credit for the Pak-One
explosion in a call to the BBC, but the Damascus-based Murtaza re-
trieved it once it became public that the US ambassador had been killed.63
Zia ul Haq’s son Ijaz ul Haq told Crossette in mid-1989 that he was
“101 percent sure” that Murtaza Bhutto was involved.64 But he failed
to provide any evidence. His unsubstantiated claim ran counter to what
Fatima Bhutto, daughter of Murtaza, had to say in her memoir. “Officially,
Al Zulfikar, inactive in the years since [Murtaza’s] brother Shahnawaz’s
murder [in 1985], was disbanded,” she noted. “I know my father would
have loved knowing that AZO [Al Zulfikar Organization] was among the
many groups whose names popped up in regard to General Zia’s plane
crash, but their symbolic resistance to the dictator’s tyranny had ended.”65
The KGB working with KHAD had the reach and the expertise. The
State Department blamed KHAD for many terrorist attacks in Pakistani
cities in 1987 and 1988. In a few cases, Radio Kabul even announced the
bombings before they occurred.66
Israel’s Mossad too was highly motivated. Israel had repeated its ear-
lier offer of a joint attack on the Kahuta nuclear facility to Rajiv Gandhi
in 1987. He had declined it. Mossad had bombed, blackmailed, and
threatened many European suppliers to the Kahuta Research Labora-
tory because Zia ul Haq had promised to share nuclear bomb technology
with other Muslim nations. Among those who suspected the involvement
of Mossad was Washington’s ambassador to India, John Gunther Dean.
Later, in his interview with Crossette, he went on to qualify his statement
by saying Israel could have been part of a multinational plot involving
India and the Soviet KGB.67

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RAW’s involvement in the crash was less likely, since Indian leaders
were unsure who would succeed Zia ul Haq. The accusing finger at the
CIA seemed unconvincing, since the US ambassador was scheduled to ac-
company the Pakistani president. And that schedule, finalized on August
13, according to Durrani,68 was known to the CIA.
But none of the above would have had the means to abort the chances
of a postmortem of the pilots. “Any foreign intelligence service or even
Murtaza [Bhutto] might have had the motive and even the means to
bring down Pak-One but they would not have had the ability to stop
planned autopsies at a military hospital in Pakistan, stifle interrogations
or, for that matter, keep the FBI out of the picture,” concluded Epstein.
“Nor would they have much of a reason for making the whole thing seem
like an accident rather than an assassination. Only elements inside Paki-
stan would have an obvious motive for making the death of Zia, Rahman
and 28 others look like something more legitimate than a coup d’état.”69
As for the means deployed, the most plausible explanation seems to be
that the mango crate loaded directly at the Bahawalpur airport, which by
design or accident went unchecked, contained a canister of nerve gas with
a timer, which, when dispersed by the plane’s air-conditioning system,
killed both pilots, sending the plane out of control.
At least that possibility inspired Mohammed Hanif, a London-based
journalist and a former Pakistan Air Force pilot, to title his novel on the
subject as A Case of Exploding Mangoes, published two decades after the
event. His satirical work of imagination attacked militarism, false piety,
and overregulation of personal life—as epitomized by Zia ul Haq.70

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Rajiv-Benazir Rapport—Cut Short

On hearing of the air crash near Bahawalpur, Benazir Bhutto privately

rejoiced at Muhammad Zia ul Haq’s violent death as just retribution for
having her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, hanged on trumped-up charges.
In public, though, she described the incendiary event as an “act of di-
vine intervention.” Pressured by the Ronald Reagan administration, Zia
ul Haq had allowed her to return to Pakistan in 1986 from her self-exile
in London.
Born into the household of a super-rich feudal lord in Larkana, Sindh,
Benazir was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Murree and
Karachi, and then, at age sixteen, sent to study politics at Radcliffe Col-
lege. In the absence of a chauffeur-driven car at home, she had to walk to
her classes for the first time in her life. By the time she traveled to Shimla
along with her president father, “Pinky”—as she was nicknamed—was a
Westernized teenager who dressed in clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue and
led the life of a doted-on daughter of an affluent foreign leader.
Following her graduation from Harvard in 1973, she enrolled at Ox-
ford University for further studies. She drove around in a yellow two-
seater MG. Her famed parties were liberally lubricated with alcohol, and
she loved to dance. “Her Oxford lifestyle was almost a parody of the rich
Islamic girl released from the constraints of a rigid Muslim home,” re-
called a male contemporary of hers in Oxford. “When she stood for the
presidency of the Oxford Union, she skillfully used the rumors about her
un-Islamic activities. . . . At the same time she rallied the feminists with
the suggestion that she would be held back by the male chauvinists and
reactionaries—even though they were the kind of men with whom she

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enjoyed her leisure time.”1 Endowed with fair skin and high cheekbones
in an oval face, the svelte Bhutto had an appealing persona. Yet at her first
attempt at the Union presidency she ended up in third place. But after
graduating in 1976 with a second in politics, philosophy, and economics,
she stood again while pursuing studies in international law and diplomacy
at St. Catharine’s College, aiming to join Pakistan’s diplomatic service.
She won, becoming the first Asian woman to hold the presidency in the
Union’s history.
Soon after her return home in 1977, her prime minster father was
removed from office in a military coup. A few months after his hanging in
April 1979, she and her mother, Nusrat Begum, then chair of the Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP), were charged with offenses under martial law. She
spent much of the next five years in solitary confinement in dingy prison
cells or under house arrest—with a brief respite in 1982 to undergo an ear
operation in London. She went into self-exile in January 1984, taking up
residence in a London apartment.
On her return to Lahore on April 10, 1986, she was greeted by two
million people. She married Asif Ali Zardari in December 1987, thus
overcoming the popular prejudice against older, unmarried women in
Pakistan.
Once Acting President Ghulam Ishaq Khan had announced the elec-
tion for the National Assembly on November 16, she and Nusrat Begum
Bhutto started campaigning furiously for the PPP.
On the opposite side, the triad of Ishaq Khan, Chief of Army Staff
(COAS) General Mirza Aslam Beg, and the Islamist chief of the Inter-
Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, resolved to
stop the PPP bandwagon. They sponsored the forming of a coalition of
conservative and Islamist parties as the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (Urdu:
Islamic Democratic Alliance; IJI), headed by Muhammad Nawaz Sharif.
Gul coached IJI candidates to stress that Western-educated Benazir
Bhutto, being a close friend of America, was a security risk for Pakistan’s
nuclear program. In its leaflets IJI questioned if a woman could become
the prime minister of an Islamic state. Posters titled “Villains in Ban-
gles” showed faces of Benazir and Nusrat superimposed on the photos of
models riding cycles in swimsuits. The photo of Nusrat Bhutto dancing
with President Gerald Ford during the Bhuttos’ visit to Washington in
1975, discovered by Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmed of the ISI, was exploited to
the hilt.

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 RAJIV-BENAZIR RAPPORT—CUT SHORT

FROM PARTY GIRL TO PRIME MINISTER

Yet of the 207 contested seats in the National Assembly on November

16, the PPP scored 94, far ahead of the IJI’s 56. Benazir Bhutto won
because of being the daughter of the PPP founder, Zulfi kar Ali, who
was accorded the captivating honorific of Shaheed (Urdu: Martyr), and
because the bulk of Pakistanis, who followed the tolerant Sufi version of
Islam, yearned to be freed from the puritanical Islamic rigidity imposed
on them by dictator Muhammad Zia ul Haq.
Despite emerging as the leader of the largest group in the National
Assembly, it was not until December 1 that Ishaq Khan called on her to
form the government. He did so only after he had her accept his con-
ditions conveyed to her by an intermediary: stay away from the nuclear
issue; retain Zia ul Haq’s foreign minister, Shahzada Yaqub Khan; and
respect the army.
Benazir Bhutto led a coalition government that included the recently
formed Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (Urdu: Migrant National Movement;
MQM), a party of Urdu-speaking Muslim immigrants from India. At
the age of thirty-five, she became the first executive prime minister of a
Muslim country. She also headed the defense and finance ministries.
Within a month of Bhutto assuming office, Rajiv Gandhi, accom-
panied by Sonia and their two children, arrived in Islamabad to attend
the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
(SAARC) from December 29 to 31. As SAARC hostess Bhutto invited
Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi to dinner, attended by Asif Ali Zardari and Nus-
rat Begum.
Since all the diners were nonvegetarian, the dishes they consumed did
not deviate from the regular fare at the Pakistani couple’s dinner table.
They shared the cuisine of the northern Indian subcontinent. Equally,
the wardrobes of Benazir and Sonia had much in common, with Benazir
having more pairs of salwar kameez than saris and blouses, and Sonia the
other way around. The division of the subcontinent’s northern zone had
left intact the common cuisine, dress, and language.
Recalling the dinner, Rajiv later told his close aides that while Benazir
seemed nervous about the possibility of the ISI having bugged the dining
room, Zardari was uninhibited in his conversation.2 Zardari would have
been even more relaxed if Rajiv had contrived to move the conversation
to Bollywood movies, telling him and Benazir about the up-and-coming

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Bollywood actors Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, and Shah Rukh Khan3—
all born in 1965, the year of the Second Indo-Pakistan War. After all, it
was movies and a movie theater that had brought Benazir and Asif Ali
together. The Bambino Cinema in Karachi, owned by Asif Ali’s father,
Hakim Ali, was remarkable on two counts. Its flashing blue neon sign
with an image of a woman dancer with gyrating hips glowed all night. Its
staple fare was foreign films, patronized among others by Benazir, an afi-
cionado of foreign movies. And it was at this theater that Asif Ali Zardari
had first set his eyes on his future wife.
In terms of social hierarchy, Hakim Ali Zardari, who besides the cin-
ema and the floors above it owned a modest house in rural Sindh, was way
below the celebrated Bhutto family. But in a society in which brides were
always five to ten years younger than grooms, Asif Ali opted to marry a
woman two years his senior in order to boost his social status.
During their one-on-one meeting with Rajiv the next day, Benazir
Bhutto promised to choke off Pakistan’s aid to Sikh separatists. In a 2007
interview, she said, “Does anyone remember that it was I who kept my
promise to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi when we met and he appealed to
me for help in tackling the Sikhs? Has India forgotten December 1988?
Have they forgotten the results of that meeting and how I helped curb
the Sikh militancy?” In return, Rajiv Gandhi promised to withdraw In-
dian troops from the disputed Siachen Glacier, a commitment he later
moved forward to a period after the 1989 general election, which he lost.4
Benazir Bhutto reportedly handed over a dossier of names containing
the covert identities of Pakistan’s agents among radical Sikhs who were
masterminding the Sikh insurgency. That aided RAW enormously in
tracking down the Sikh terrorists and destroying their network—a process
that lasted nearly five years.
On December 31, 1988, Bhutto and Gandhi formalized the informal
understanding between Zia ul Haq and Gandhi from three years earlier
about nuclear sites, and signed the “Agreement on Prohibition of Attack
Against Nuclear Installations and Facilities.” It went into effect on Janu-
ary 27, 1991, and has held ever since.
Another accord between the two neighbors that has remained in force
since 1960 is the World Bank–brokered Indus Waters Treaty (see Chapter
7, p. 155). The treaty is monitored by the Permanent Indus Commission,
with a commissioner appointed by each country. Despite several crises and
wars, the two sides continued to exchange pertinent data and maintain a
cooperative spirit—elements starkly missing from their stances on Kashmir.

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RAJIV-BENAZIR RAPPORT FADES

The Gandhis and Bhutto-Zardari met again in Paris on the bicentenary

of the French Revolution on July 14, 1989. Here British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher subconsciously fell into the role of a nanny, chaper-
oning her two subcontinental wards, who seemed to get along famously.
On his return journey Rajiv Gandhi stopped in Moscow for a meeting
with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and then flew to Islamabad to be
received as a state guest on July 16 at the Chaklala airport. “Bedecked
like a bride, the Chaklala overflows with people,” reported Madhu Jain in
India Today magazine. “The Gandhis greet Benazir and husband Zardari
like long lost friends—though it’s not been quite 24 hours since they last
met in Paris.” At the state banquet, Rajiv Gandhi said, “When an Indian
and a Pakistani meet as human beings in a human encounter there is an
instant mutual recognition, an embrace that transcends the passing pas-
sions of politics. . . . Why must we go round to meet each other? Why
can’t we meet in each other’s hearths and homes?”5
Bhutto had broached the subject of working out a trade agreement.
But in their joint communiqué issued on July 17 she and Gandhi merely
expressed their desire to work toward a comprehensive settlement to re-
duce the chances of conflict and the use of force. It turned out to be a pro
forma statement that changed little on the ground.
By early 1989 the image of Rajiv Gandhi as Mr. Clean was tarnished
because of the scandal surrounding his government’s $1.3 billion deal
for 410 field howitzers from the Swedish company A B Bofors in March
1986. He did what US Republican president Richard Nixon had done
when the illegal break-in of the Democratic Party offices in Washing-
ton’s Watergate apartments came to light in 1974: devise an elaborate
cover-up plan to sustain the myth that the Bofors payments were not
commissions paid to acquire the much-coveted contract. His ploy failed.
In October, a month before the general election, the prestigious Hindu
published the facsimile of the secret part of the report by the Swedish
National Audit Bureau, which concluded that the Bofors payments were
“entirely proven commission payments to [the receiving] companies’ ac-
counts in Switzerland in relation to the Bofors FH-77 deal.”6 That was
the smoking gun that destroyed Gandhi’s credibility and led to the elec-
toral defeat of the Congress Party by the National Front, an unwieldy
alliance of opposition parties. One of these was led by Vishwanath Pratap
Singh, who became prime minister.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

In Pakistan Benazir Bhutto narrowly survived a no-confidence motion

in the National Assembly in October 1989. She had proved to be an abys-
mal administrator. She faced charges of corruption leveled not just at her
cabinet colleagues generally but specifically at Asif Ali Zardari, appointed
minister for investments. He soon earned the nickname of “Mr. 10
Percent”—that being the percentage he allegedly charged for government
contracts, which was paid to his father.

KASHMIR OVERSHADOWS ALL

Islamabad’s relations with Delhi turned frosty because of events in In-

dian Kashmir. By placing the Kashmir issue into a wider ideological
context of Islamism, Zia ul Haq had provided an opportunity for non-
state jihadist organizations to wade into the dispute. Among others the
Lashkar-e Taiba (Urdu: Army of the Righteous; LeT), the armed wing
of the charity organization of the Jamaat-e Islami (Urdu: Islamic Society;
JeI), supported by the ISI, became an active player in the ongoing Kash-
mir drama. The conditions seemed ripe for it in Delhi-controlled Kashmir.
On India’s Republic Day, January 26, 1989, Kashmiris went on a protest
strike. During that year, one third of all working days were lost because
of strikes. This warmed the cockles of Pakistani leaders’ hearts. For many
years their efforts to foment strikes in Indian Kashmir had failed. Now
they loudly welcomed the Kashmiris’ nonviolent protest, which they had
mounted on their own.
Between early 1988 and late 1989 many young Kashmiri Muslims
crossed over to Pakistan-held Kashmir to receive military training. It was
provided by the armed wing of the Jammu and Kashmir JeI, popularly
known as Hizb ul Mujahideen (Arabic: Party of Mujahedin), as well as
the LeT—and other organizations associated with the ISI. These included
the secular, nationalist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. On their
return home with arms and ammunition, they trained others clandestinely.
Kashmiri militants went on the offensive. The number of bomb blasts
and assassinations increased in 1989. So too did the intimidation of
pro-India National Conference activists, with the aim of forcing them
into retirement and bringing about the collapse of the political process.
In January 1990, V. P. Singh’s administration appointed Jagmohan as gov-
ernor of Kashmir and imposed direct rule, which would continue until

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 RAJIV-BENAZIR RAPPORT—CUT SHORT

October 1996—a record. Given Jagmohan’s anti-Muslim bias, Delhi

made a colossal mistake. Kashmiri Muslims’ alienation from India wid-
ened and deepened.
Benazir Bhutto’s government protested volubly but in vain. Her do-
mestic problems were multiplying, and she proved unequal to the daunt-
ing task. On August 6, 1990, President Ishaq Khan dismissed her cabinet
on account of corruption, incompetence, and failure to maintain law and
order in Sindh, as well as the use of official machinery to promote partisan
interests. He dissolved the National Assembly and the Provincial Assem-
blies in Sindh and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and declared
an emergency, citing external aggression and internal disturbance. Bhutto
denounced his action as “illegal and unconstitutional”—to no effect.
Gandhi and Bhutto, the two rising stars in the subcontinent, met
the same fate. But the manner of their fall illustrated a sharp contrast in
the political cultures of the neighboring countries. In India it was voters
who refused to give Gandhi a fresh mandate once irrefutable evidence
of his involvement in the Bofors graft was established by the prestigious
daily the Hindu.7 In Pakistan it was the decision of the president, who,
acting at the behest of top military leaders, sealed Bhutto’s fate with-
out providing evidence of the charges of misrule he laid against her. The
president had been given this power by the eighth amendment to the
constitution, passed by the bicameral parliament in November 1985. This
provision had turned Pakistan’s parliamentary system into a semipresi-
dential one, thereby making Pakistan stand apart from India in political
administration.
In the National Assembly election that followed in October 1990, the
ISI, headed by Lieutenant General Asad Durrani, intervened directly. It
once more brought together nine chiefly right-wing parties, led by Nawaz
Sharif ’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), under the banner of the IJI.
It also channeled funds to Nawaz Sharif through Mehran Bank to finance
the IJI’s election campaign, a clandestine action that would come to light
twelve years later in a case filed by Asghar Khan, a former air marshal of
Pakistan, in the Supreme Court.8 The IJI and its ally, the MQM, trounced
the PPP-led People’s Democratic Alliance, whose strength plunged to 44
versus the IJI’s 106 and the MQM’s 15. Nawaz Sharif, a Lahore-based
industrialist, became the country’s thirteenth prime minister.
A rotund, balding man with a pudgy face, the forty-one-year-old
Nawaz Sharif was a protégé of Zia ul Haq. After the 1985 nonparty

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

elections, urged by Washington but boycotted by the PPP, Zia ul Haq

appointed him finance minister of Punjab and then promoted him to
chief minister. Now, on becoming the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who
had made liberating Kashmir an important and emotional theme in the
election campaign, backed his mentor’s strategy of subversion in Indian
Kashmir.
Pakistan’s formal contacts with India at the highest level, however,
continued. Meeting on the margins of the SAARC summit in Male, the
capital of the Maldives, in November 1990, Sharif and Indian prime min-
ister Chandra Shekhar decided to set up an additional hotline between
them, the earlier one dating back to 1972. They also agreed to resume
foreign-secretary-level talks between their republics.
Around that time Indian intelligence sources claimed that some ten
thousand Kashmiri Muslims had gone to Pakistan for arms training and
that there were forty-six safe houses in Pakistan-held Kashmir, where
militants were trained how to handle weapons and explosives. In its
1991 report on global terrorism, the US State Department referred to
credible reports of Islamabad’s support for Kashmiri militant groups,
involving military training and supplies of arms and ammunition. By
then the ISI was busily aiding Pakistani and other foreign militants,
including veterans of the anti-Moscow jihad in Afghanistan, to infiltrate
Indian Kashmir.
This raised the prospect of Washington naming Pakistan as a state
that sponsors terrorism. US law mandated strict sanctions on such a
country, including restrictions on bilateral commerce and vetoing of fi-
nancial assistance by the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank. In his letter to Sharif in May 1992 American secretary of state
James Baker referred to the reliable information he had received regard-
ing the ISI and others continuing to provide material aid to terrorist
groups, added that “US law requires that an onerous package of sanc-
tions apply to those states found to be supporting acts of international
terrorism.”9
After discussing this missive with his top officials, Sharif decided to
channel aid to Kashmiri separatists exclusively through “private channels”
consisting of such organizations as JeI and its subsidiary, LeT. In his re-
sponse to Baker, he offered the assurance that any clandestine assistance
by his government to anti-India militants would cease forthwith.10 Such
duplicity would become the norm in Islamabad’s relations with Washing-
ton in the coming decades.

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 RAJIV-BENAZIR RAPPORT—CUT SHORT

DEMOLITION OF A HISTORIC MOSQUE IN INDIA

On May 21, 1991, during the election campaign for the lower house of
Parliament, Rajiv Gandhi’s motorcade headed to a rally for a local party
candidate, Maradadam Chandrashekhar, in Sriperumbudur, a town twenty-
five miles southwest of Chennai. Carnival lights twinkled around the
open-air gathering of several thousand people, mostly men, in a meadow.
Men were dressed in sarongs and sport shirts, and women in cheap, col-
orful saris. Security was nonexistent, with knots of people milling around
the platform, albeit calmly, even though Rajiv Gandhi was late by two
hours that evening.
Gandhi, who had been talking to two foreign correspondents sitting
in the back of his modest India-made Ambassador car during his ride,
sought quick advice from Chandrashekhar about the subject he should
cover in his speech. “Village development” was her crisp reply. Gandhi’s
car stopped twenty-five yards from the dais. He got out, followed by the
other occupants of his car. As he walked toward the short stairs to the
platform, a young woman—later identified as Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a
Sri Lankan Tamil militant—garlanded him. She then stooped to touch
his feet as a sign of respect and pressed the button of her suicide belt con-
taining RDX explosive and thousands of tiny steel balls.
“As Mrs Gopal [of the Gulf News, Dubai] and I followed [Gandhi]
there was a sudden burst of what sounded like firecrackers and then a
large boom, an explosion and a cloud of smoke that scattered people all
around,” reported Barbara Crossette in the New York Times. “It was over
in a matter of seconds.”11 It was 10:10 pm. Gandhi was dead, and so were
fourteen others. All that survived of his body were his head and his feet,
shod in expensive running shoes. Rajaratnam was part of a conspiracy.12
Gandhi had earned fanatical hatred of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE) by dispatching an Indian peacekeeping force into Sri
Lanka in 1987 to assist the Colombo government in squashing LTTE
insurgents fighting for an independent Tamil state. His mother, Indira
Gandhi, lost her life battling Sikh irredentists at home, while he ended up
sacrificing his own in the cause of averting the partition of India’s small
neighbor in the Arabian Sea. His scant remains were cremated on the
banks of the Jamuna (aka Yamuna) River in Delhi.
The privilege of leading the Congress Party fell on P. V. Narasimha
Rao, a seventy-year-old, lackluster, diminutive lawyer and a party veteran
from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. His party’s 244 seats were

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18 short of bare majority. This compelled him to rope in small groups to

be able to govern. He succeeded.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the
United States emerged triumphant in the Cold War. The world became
unipolar, with America as the sole superpower. With the counterpull of
the Kremlin gone, the friendship between Delhi and Washington became
warmer, much to the discomfort of Islamabad.
Continuing the past practice of using regional and international gath-
erings to hold bilateral talks with the Pakistani leader, Narasimha Rao had
three meetings with Nawaz Sharif between October 1991 and September
1992. During that period the 120-strong opposition Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party (Hindi: Indian People’s Party; BJP) took advantage
of the weakness of Narasimha Rao’s government.
The BJP had raised its popularity substantially by recycling the narra-
tive of the marauding Muslim tribes of the past butchering native Hindus
of the Indian subcontinent. It then targeted the mosque built by Emperor
Babur in 1527 in the northern town of Ayodhya, claiming that it stood
at the site of an ancient temple built at the birthplace of Lord Rama.
The fact that there was no evidence about the existence of King Rama of
Ayodhya in recorded history did not matter a jot to the BJP leadership.
It launched its campaign just as the armed insurgency by separatist
Muslims in Kashmir, aided by foreign jihadists, was intensifying. The jihad-
ists equated assisting Kashmiri Muslims to achieve self-determination by
expelling Indian troops from their state with their earlier, successful guer-
rilla actions against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The BJP’s campaign took
off. In other words, insurgency in Kashmir helped spark Hindu revivalism.
Before obtaining official permission to hold a rally in front of the
Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992, the nationalist Hindu organizers
assured the Supreme Court that the mosque would not be touched. Yet
on that day, nearly two hundred thousand Hindu militants, working in ca-
hoots with BJP leaders, stormed the barricades erected around the mosque.
Armed with pickaxes, ropes, and sledgehammers, some four thousand
demonstrators demolished the historic structure within four hours. The
Narasimha Rao government’s later decision to block off the site and heav-
ily increase security around it was a classic example of shutting the stable
door after the horse had bolted. Indian Muslims felt stunned and enraged
in equal measure. When they protested in the streets in various cities of
India, they were attacked by militant Hindus. The subsequent rioting left
more than two thousand people, mostly Muslims, dead.

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Pakistan promised to appeal to the United Nations to pressure India

to protect the rights of Muslims. Sharif ’s call for a nationwide strike on
December 8 was observed universally. Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto
outdid him by blaming the tragedy on his flawed foreign policy, claiming
that such an event would not have occurred if she had been in power.13
She had realized that there was political capital to be made by adopting
a hard line toward India.
For three days Muslim mobs in Pakistan went on a rampage, shout-
ing “Death to Hinduism” and “Crush India.” In Karachi they attacked
five Hindu temples and hurled rocks at and set ablaze twenty-five tem-
ples in towns across Sindh, where 85 percent of Pakistan’s 1.5 million
Hindus lived.14
The demolition of the Babri mosque put India at a disadvantage in
the international arena, although the ransacking of the Indian consul-
general’s house in Karachi brought Pakistan a notch or two down from
its moral high ground.
Far more significantly, Pakistan had to deal with the prospect of being
added to the list of states supporting terrorism maintained by the United
States. Such a prospect sharpened after a bomb exploded in the basement
of the World Trade Center in New York on February 26, 1993. The hand
of terrorists based in Pakistan was suspected. A nervous Nawaz Sharif dis-
patched his foreign secretary, Akram Zaki, to Washington in early April
to reassure the State Department that he would curb extremists at home.
The ISI drastically reduced direct support for Kashmiri militants but con-
tinued it indirectly, through the JeI and the LeT.
On April 18 President Ishaq Khan sacked Nawaz Sharif for alleged
maladministration, corruption, graft, and nepotism. Sharif challenged
this decision in the Supreme Court. Stalemate ensued. COAS General
Wahid Kakar intervened. He compelled both of them to resign in July.
Ishaq Khan was succeeded by Wasim Sajjad, chair of the Senate, as acting
president.

REELECTED BHUTTO PLAYS HARDBALL WITH INDIA

In the October 1993 parliamentary election, Benazir Bhutto’s PPP

emerged as the largest group but fell short of a majority by 23 seats. So
she ended up heading an unwieldy coalition, which included the Islamist
Jamiat Ulema-e Islam (Urdu: Association of Islamic Religious Scholars;

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JUeI), led by Fazlur Rahman. Along with the JeI, the JUeI had been a
leading participant in the Afghan jihad.
Spurred by Rahman, Bhutto gave the green light to Lieutenant Gen-
eral Pervez Musharraf, then director general of military operations, to
dispatch ten thousand new jihadists to Indian Kashmir. Under her watch,
Islamabad’s annual budget for the insurgency in India-held Kashmir
spiked to $100 million.15
In a candid interview with the Delhi-based Tehelka magazine after
Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007, Retired Lieutenant
General Gul said, “She was rather protective of the jihadis in the past.
Benazir was never soft on the Kashmir issue, let me tell you that. I served
as the ISI director-general under her [December 1988 to October 1989].
The Taliban emerged during her second tenure in office and captured
Kabul when she was the prime minister. Her interior minister [General
Naseerullah Babar] used to patronize them openly.”16
She ruled out a meeting with her Indian counterpart, Narasimha Rao,
until Delhi ended its brutish violations of human rights in Kashmir. This
was not in the cards.
Actually, behind the scenes, to get even with Islamabad, the Indian
RAW’s Counter Intelligence Team-X (CIT-X) and Counter Intelligence
Team-J (CIT-J) worked furiously to subvert Pakistan and eliminate the
Khalistani groups respectively. The aim of the CIT-X Team was to ex-
ploit the ethnic fault lines in Pakistan—between Sindhis and the Urdu-
speaking immigrants, called Muhajirin, in Sindh, between nationalist
Baluchis and the Punjabi-dominated federal government, and between
irredentist Pushtuns in the NWFP and Islamabad. Widely published
reports in Pakistan alleged that between 1983 and 1993, as many as
thirty-five thousand RAW agents entered Pakistan: twelve thousand in
Sindh, ten thousand in Punjab, eight thousand in the NWFP, and five
thousand in Baluchistan.17
As for the CIT-J Team, it had helped undermine the Sikh insur-
gency in Punjab sufficiently to let the Delhi government end its direct
rule and return the state to democratic rule in February 1992. Following
the election, the Congress Party’s Beant Singh became the chief minister.
Remnants of Sikh militancy continued, however, for another year or so.
During the decade-long violence, more than twenty thousand people lost
their lives in Punjab.18
Across the border, it became standard practice in Islamabad to blame
RAW for all ethnic and intersectarian conflicts. Relations between

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 RAJIV-BENAZIR RAPPORT—CUT SHORT

majority Sunnis and minority Shias became strained during the Islamiza-
tion process unleashed by Zia ul Haq because of different interpretations
of Islamic jurisprudence by their respective religious scholars. The situa-
tion worsened when funds from Saudi Arabia, home of the puritanical
Wahhabi subsect of Sunni Islam, turned extremist Sunni organizations in
Pakistan murderously anti-Shia. That in turn led Shia radicals to hit back.
In 1994, the violence between sects and between radical Sindhi national-
ists and militant Muhajirin in the country’s largest city, Karachi, claimed
eight hundred lives. Unable to reduce the bloodshed, the Bhutto govern-
ment resorted to blaming RAW. It closed down the Indian consulate in
the city. But there was no letup in Sunni-Shia bloodletting.
In Kashmir, the appointment of K. V. Krishna Rao, former COAS
with counterinsurgency experience in the rebellious northeast of India,
as governor in 1993 led to the infiltration of militant factions by RAW
agents. The strategy was to cause splits in militant organizations. As part of
its Operation Chanakya, RAW also sponsored the founding of fake rad-
ical groups with names almost akin to the existing genuine ones, thereby
confusing ordinary Kashmiris. Thus RAW and the ISI came to confront
each other directly in India-administered Kashmir. RAW gained the up-
per hand. By 1996, whereas the estimate of Indian security forces was put
at 210,000 to 600,000, the figure for the militants declined sharply to
6,000 from a peak of 20,000 to 25,000.19

INDIA’S ABOMINABLE RECORD ON TORTURE

India had achieved this outcome by beefing up its security forces in Kash-
mir and violating human rights on an industrial scale.
By the summer of 1990, a pattern had become established. Armed in-
surgents’ assaults on specific targets, resulting in reprisals by security forces
with arrests and cordon-and-search operations to flush out guerrillas and
discover arms and ammunition, lead to Kashmiris heeding the militants’
calls for shutdowns.
The Delhi parliament passed the Armed Forces ( Jammu and Kash-
mir) Special Powers Act 1990 (AFJKSP) in July. It authorized the state
government to declare Jammu and Kashmir or part of it as a “disturbed
area,” where the AFJKSP Act applied. It allowed an armed forces officer
to shoot any person who was acting in contravention of “any law” or was
in possession of deadly weapons, to arrest without a warrant anyone who

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was suspected of having committed any offense, and to enter and search
any premise to make such arrests. This law gave military officers legal
immunity for their actions.20 It was carte blanche for security forces to do
what they wished without worrying about accountability. Thereafter they
carried out arbitrary arrests, torture, rape of women and men, extrajudicial
killings, and arson to crush the raging insurgency.21 By mid-1991 Indian
military and paramilitary personnel totaled 150,000. The estimates of the
armed militants ranged widely, from 10,000 to 40,000.
The list of those who were tortured or killed in extrajudicial execu-
tions by the Indian security forces grew by the week. Torturing suspects
became routine. “They took you out to the lawn outside the building,” a
torture victim, “Ansar,” told the Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer, years
later, after getting assurance that his real name would not be used. “You
were asked to remove all your clothes, even your underwear. They tied you
to a long wooden ladder and placed it near a ditch filled with kerosene oil
and red chili powder. They raised the ladder like a seesaw and pushed your
head into the ditch. It could go on for an hour, half an hour, depending on
their mood.” Other times the torturers would tie the fully clothed suspect
to a ladder, tie his long pants near the ankles, and insert mice inside his
pants. “Or they burnt your arms and legs with cigarette butts and kerosene
stoves used for welding,” Ansar continued. “They burn your flesh till you
speak.” He rolled up his right sleeve above the elbow to show an uneven
dark brown patch of flesh.22
The brutal ways of the Indian security forces in Kashmir were widely
and prominently reported in Pakistan, ruled by a democratically elected
government after Zia ul Haq’s death in 1988. Equally, the switch from
dictatorship to democracy made no difference in Islamabad’s policy on
Kashmir, implemented in essence by the ISI. In November 1995 the BBC
aired a documentary showing evidence of the JeI’s support in Azad Kash-
mir camps, where fighters, openly expressing their intent to wage jihad
in Indian Kashmir, were being trained.23 This was a clear violation of the
1972 Shimla Agreement between India and Pakistan.
While Delhi refused to state the total strength of its security forces
in Kashmir, it publicized the amount of weapons its security forces and
Kashmiri police had seized between 1989 and 1995: 13,450 AK-47
Kalashnikovs, 1,682 rockets, 750 rocket launchers, and 735 general-
purpose machine guns. With better intelligence they retrieved 590 bombs
in 1995—almost twice the figure for 1994. As for fatalities, the unofficial
estimate of forty thousand during the period 1988–1995 was three times

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 RAJIV-BENAZIR RAPPORT—CUT SHORT

the official figure. The London-based Amnesty International mentioned

seventeen thousand, plus several thousand unaccounted deaths.24 Of these
almost half were believed to be militants.
This was the backdrop to elections in Kashmir in September and
October 1996. On the eve of the election, Prime Minister Haradanahalli
Doddegowda Deve Gowda unveiled a hefty package of financial aid of
Rs 3.52 billion ($100 million) to improve infrastructure and wrote off
outstanding loans of up to Rs. 50,000 ($1,400) per person—a flagrant
example of electoral bribing.25
Reversing his previous stance, the late Shaikh Muhammad Abdul-
lah’s son, Farooq Abdullah, head of the National Conference, decided to
contest the elections. “People like to see azadi [independence] but they
don’t see the consequences of that azadi,” he said. “We are landlocked with
powerful neighbors of China and Pakistan. If we get independence and
India quits, I am sure Pakistan will march in overnight and take over.”26 It
was better to take the plunge and see how best to alter the situation, rather
than let the situation stagnate with no public involvement, he argued. In
marked contrast, leaders of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference
(APHC) stuck to their stance of a boycott of the vote held under the
Indian constitution.
In the face of dire threats by the militants, the candidates sought
and secured bulletproof vehicles and security personnel as bodyguards.
Very few people voted voluntarily in the Kashmir Valley. Many more were
pressed to go to the polling booths by the security forces, who warned
citizens of “consequences” if they failed to show indelible ink on their
index fingers, used at the polling stations, in the evening. Unsurprisingly,
the National Conference won 59 seats out of 87. Abdullah became chief
minister.

THE SIMMERING NUCLEAR ISSUE

In her interview with British TV personality David Frost in November

1994, Benazir Bhutto said, “We have neither detonated nor have we got
nuclear weapons. Being a responsible state and a state committed to non-
proliferation, we in Pakistan, through five successive governments, have
taken a policy decision to follow a peaceful nuclear program.”27 It was true
that the military leaders kept the nitty-gritty of the nuclear project from
Bhutto, but she was well briefed about the nature of the overall program

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

and had traveled to North Korea a year earlier to facilitate the purchase
of missiles suitable for delivering nuclear warheads.
During her visit to Washington in April 1995 to meet President Bill
Clinton, she pressed him to alter the Pressler Amendment to the US
foreign aid program. She argued that while it was “a veto in the hands of
India, a tool and a club in the hands of those who stood against America
and with the Soviet Union for 50 years,” it rewarded “Indian intransi-
gence” and punished “Pakistani loyalty and friendship” with America. At
her press conference she offered “to go anywhere, at any time” to sign the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if her Indian counterpart did the same.
“I will joyfully agree to a treaty to ban nuclear weapons in South Asia, to
create a missile-free zone in South Asia, to stop the production of fissile
material in South Asia, as long as the only proven nuclear power on the
subcontinent adheres to the same treaties.”28
Her spirited performance in Washington made no mark on her in-
creasingly vocal critics at home. The law and order situation in Karachi re-
mained dire. It provided sufficient rationale to President Farooq Leghari,
a PPP stalwart, to dismiss her government in November 1996, citing such
grounds as maladministration, nepotism, and corruption.
Six months earlier the government in Delhi had changed too, but
through the ballot, not by the fiat of the president. The general election in
India had resulted in a hung parliament. There were two prime ministers
belonging to different constituents of the United Front in as many years.
By the time Inder Kumar Gujral became prime minister in Delhi in
April 1997, his counterpart in Islamabad was Nawaz Sharif, leader of the
PML-N. Sharif had romped to success with a historic two-thirds majority
in the National Assembly.
Born in the West Punjab town of Jhelum in British India, Gujral was
a graduate of Forman Christian College, Lahore. A tall, lean, balding man
with a graying goatee and oversized spectacles, he was a contrast to the
rotund Sharif. As fellow Punjabis equally fluent in Urdu, however, they
clicked the moment they met on the margins of the SAARC summit in
Male in May 1997.
Unlike Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto in 1988, they were sea-
soned politicians. They decided to reactivate the hotline and form working
groups on several contentious issues. Crucially, Sharif agreed to adopt “an
integrated approach” to resolving mutual differences, instead of focusing
on Kashmir. During their interaction Gujral accepted Pakistan’s position
that Kashmir was a dispute that would require resolution. But according

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 RAJIV-BENAZIR RAPPORT—CUT SHORT

to Mushahid Hussain, the information minister of Pakistan, this was

made public only “on June 23, 1997 when an Agreement was announced
between the Foreign Secretaries on the establishment of joint working
groups on outstanding issues between India and Pakistan with a separate
working group on Kashmir. This was the first time in 50 years that India
had agreed to this.”29
With the Sikh emergency in Punjab over, Gujral ordered the disband-
ing of RAW’s CIT-J. In Kashmir, the combined strategies of RAW and
Governor Krishna Rao had reduced the size of the insurgents to a fraction
of their peak of twenty to twenty-five thousand. With Farooq Abdullah
installed as the elected chief minister in Srinagar, Gujral saw no reason to
maintain RAW’s CIT-X, mandated to subvert Pakistan, as a quid pro quo
for stoking insurgency in Indian Kashmir. He disbanded it.
Following talks between their foreign secretaries in June 1997, India
and Pakistan agreed to form joint working groups on eight subjects: Peace
and Security, Jammu and Kashmir, Siachin Glacier, Wullar Barrage, Sir
Creek, Terrorism, Commerce, and Promotion of friendly exchanges in
various fields. But a week later Gujral ruled out a joint working group on
Kashmir, which for Pakistan was “the core issue.”30
In early September 1997 Sharif declared that “Pakistan’s nuclear ca-
pability is now an established fact. Whatever we have, we have a right to
keep it.”31 There was no prize for guessing what this “capability” was.
Sharif and Gujral met on the margins of the UN General Assembly in
New York in late September and on the sidelines of the Commonwealth
Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh a month later. But they
failed to end the stalemate on the significance of the Kashmir dispute.
Gujral’s minority government fell in December. And following the
next parliamentary election in February 1998, the BJP-led thirteen-party
National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won a slim majority.

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 14

Gate-Crashing the Nuclear Club

The 286 seats won by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the
latest parliamentary election gave it a majority of only 13. As leader of
the 182-strong Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) within the NDA, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee became the prime minister on March 19, 1998. His immediate
task was to consolidate the loyalty of the remaining twelve NDA constit-
uents. This, he realized, was best done by raising the popular standing of
his freshly formed government with a dramatic decision—something that
would capture the nation’s imagination and raise its self-confidence. That
led him to order nuclear explosions within three weeks of taking office.

VAJPAYEE’S LONG-NURTURED NUCLEAR DREAM

To seasoned observers, though, this move by the seventy-three-year-old

Vajpayee fitted his political persona to a tee. The white-haired Hindu
nationalist politician—a broad-shouldered man with chubby cheeks in a
jowly face—had been a proponent of nuclearization of India ever since
China tested its atom bomb in 1964. Back then, he was a junior member
of parliament representing the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (Hindi: Indian Peo-
ple’s Union; BJS), an exclusively Hindu party.
Born into the Brahminical household of Krishna Bihari Vajpayee, a
schoolteacher in the central Indian city of Gwaliar, Atal Bihari grew up as
a devout Hindu. At the age of seventeen he attended the officers’ training
camp of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu chauvinist
organization modeled after the Italian Fascist Party.

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 GATE-CRASHING THE NUCLEAR CLUB

Its members met daily, wearing a uniform of a white shirt, baggy

khaki half-pants, and belt; they drilled, played games, and attended ses-
sions of political discussion and indoctrination.1 After obtaining a mas-
ter’s degree in political science from Kanpur University, a public university
in Uttar Pradesh, he became a full-time worker for the RSS in 1947. To
devote himself fully to the RSS, he spurned the idea of marrying his col-
lege female friend Raj Kumari. He emerged as the only prime minister
of India who was a lifelong bachelor, although by no means celibate. A
teetotaler in public, he was rumored to drink on the sly.
While working for the RSS, he edited a Hindi magazine promoting
Hindu revivalism until 1951, when the RSS set up the BJS as its po-
litical arm. As an MP, he proved an effective speaker in Hindi. On the
death of Deen Dayal Upadhaya, a BJS cofounder, in 1968, he was elected
the party’s president. The BJS developed as an opponent of the Congress
Party, decrying its perceived pampering of Muslims. During the national
emergency, imposed by Indira Gandhi in mid-1975, Vajpayee and other
BJS leaders were jailed. Their eighteen-month incarceration gave them the
aura of political martyrdom. Their participation in the cabinet of Prime
Minister Morarji Desai, leader of the Janata Alliance an anti-Congress
coalition that included the BJS and won the 1977 general election, en-
hanced their popular standing. Vajpayee served as foreign minister.
After the breakup of the Janata Party, the BJS transformed itself into
the BJP and opened its membership to non-Hindus. In practice, however,
its RSS-rooted anti-Muslim ideology remained intact. The BJP became
the political face of the Rama Janam Bhoomi Mandir movement, initi-
ated by the RSS, to build a temple to Lord Rama at the site of the Babri
Mosque in Ayodhya. Musing on the demolition of the Babri Mosque in
December 1992 by a clandestinely organized four-thousand-strong group
of militant Hindus, Vajpayee wrote: “Now, I think, the Hindu society has
been regenerated which was the prime task of the RSS. Earlier, Hindus
used to bend before an invasion but not now. . . . So much change must
have come with the new-found self-assertion.”2
In its campaign manifesto for the general election in April and May
1996, the BJP referred to India exercising “the option to induct nuclear
weapons” and declared that “India should become an openly nuclear power
to garner the respect on the world stage that India deserved.”3 As leader
of the largest group in Parliament (187 seats), Vajpayee was invited to
form a government on May 16 with the proviso of securing the MPs’ vote
of confidence within two weeks. He immediately ordered nuclear tests.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Three nuclear devices were rushed to the Pokhran Military Firing Range
in Rajasthan, ninety-three miles from the Pakistani border, and placed in
the test shafts. On May 28 Vajpayee concluded that he lacked majority
support in Parliament and resigned. But before doing so, he rescinded his
authorization for the nuclear explosions.

INDIAN CONSENSUS ON NUKES

Actually, what Vajpayee did was nothing more than complete the process
inaugurated by Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, with his order to upgrade the nu-
clear testing site in Pokhran, first used in 1974, to make it suitable for a
detonation on short notice. In 1995, his successor, P. V. Narasimha Rao,
decided to conduct an underground test on a nuclear device. Preparations
built to a climax in early December. The telltale signs were recorded by
four powerful US spy satellites.
On December 15 the New York Times quoted unnamed officials of
the Clinton administration that Washington had recorded activity at the
Pokhran test site in recent weeks. Instructed by the State Department,
the US ambassador to India, Frank Wisner, showed satellite photographs
to top Indian officials to dissuade them from testing. In a telephone call,
Clinton urged Narasimha Rao to abandon the plan. Rao assured Clinton
that India would not act “irresponsibly”—nothing more. On December 18
the Indian government declared that it would not succumb to external
pressure. The next day Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee denied that
any nuclear tests had been planned. In the end, Narasimha Rao aban-
doned the project but instructed nuclear scientists to be ready for tests
within a month of receiving an executive order.4
Two subsequent prime ministers, H. D. Deve Gowda and Inder Ku-
mar Gujral, continued this state of readiness. According to Gujral, “the
nuclear file was on our table all the time.”5 With the exception of the two
communist factions, all major political parties favored acquiring nuclear
weapons. The reason was contained in a much-quoted Gujral-Clinton
exchange on September 22, 1997, on the margins of the UN General
Assembly session in New York, as recounted by the Indian leader. He told
Clinton about an ancient saying from the subcontinent that holds that an
Indian is blessed with a third eye. “I told President Clinton that when my
third eye looks at the door of the UN Security Council chamber it sees a
little sign that says ‘Only those with economic power or nuclear weapons

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 GATE-CRASHING THE NUCLEAR CLUB

are allowed.’” Having grabbed Clinton’s attention, Gujral added, “It is very
difficult [for India] to achieve economic wealth.”6 The moral was that in
the absence of India becoming a heavy-weight economy, its only way to
getting a permanent seat at the UN Security Council was to become a
state with nuclear arms. It is chastening to recall that it was this logic that
drove Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to urge his Pakistani scientists at a top-secret
gathering in Multan a quarter century earlier to build the bomb within
three years.7
After its denouement with the United States in December 1995, In-
dia changed the pattern of work at the Pokhran site radically to escape the
all-seeing eyes of American spy satellites.
The army’s Fifty-Eighth Engineer Regiment resorted to operating
mostly at night and returned its equipment to its original location at the
end of the work shift to make it seem that it had been stationary all along.
Its personnel wore civilian clothes. Members of the regiment as well as
civilians dug shafts under camouflage netting, and the excavated sand was
made to look like natural dunes. The cables for sensors were covered with
sand and concealed under vegetation. Those who were hired to work at
the site traveled to destinations other than Pokhran and were then picked
up by the army’s vehicles. At the end of their shift the workers left the
site in twos or threes.
To hoodwink Washington’s National Security Agency (NSA), which
was monitoring telephone conversations, the army devised a code. When
the Delhi-based Defence Research and Development Organization
(DRDO), charged with implementing the project, asked an officer man-
ning the operations room in Pokhran, “Has the store arrived?” followed
by “Is Sierra serving whisky in the canteen yet?,” his decoded messages
were: “Have the scientists started working on the nuclear devices?” and
“Have the nuclear devices been lowered in the special chamber in the
shaft codenamed Whiskey?”8
“Today, at 15.45 hours, India conducted three underground nuclear
tests in the Pokhran range,” Vajpayee told journalists at a hastily assem-
bled press conference on May 11, 1998. “The tests conducted today were
with a fission device, a low yield device and a thermonuclear [aka fusion]
device. These were contained explosions like the experiment conducted in
May 1974. I warmly congratulate the scientists and engineers who have
carried out these successful tests.”9 Then, under the same code name of
Operation Shakti (Hindi: Power), the DRDO conducted two more tests
of smaller, subkiloton yield on May 13.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Indian officials claimed that the tests were a matter of national se-
curity, a precaution against Pakistan’s nuclear development, and a deter-
rent to China’s rising military might. As a nonsignatory to the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), India did not violate any international
treaty. Predictably, Islamabad immediately condemned the tests.
The objective of the Indian tests was threefold: to test the newly built
fusion (aka hydrogen) bomb with a yield of forty kilotons (kT); to check
the effectiveness of a fifteen-year-old fission bomb with a yield of twelve
kT; and to determine whether or not the three freshly assembled tactical
weapons with a yield of less than one kT would produce a chain reaction
when activated. All fission bombs were plutonium based. As evidence of
successful tests, the Indian government would release pictures of the five
sites, each one a 160-foot-deep shaft, on May 17.
These tests caught Washington by surprise, with many red faces at
the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, just across the Poto-
mac River. CIA director George J. Tenet immediately appointed Admiral
David Jeremiah, a former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to lead a
ten-day investigation into the intelligence community’s failure to detect
preparations for the tests at Pokhran.10
In marked contrast, Indian officials were elated at having fooled the
all-knowing CIA. At the popular level the BJP and the RSS were quick to
demonstrate their fervent support for Vajpayee’s bold decision by holding
public rallies and demonstrations. They were not alone. “It was a matter
of national pride that the country’s scientists had once again proved that
they were second to none in the area of high technology, adding that they
had all along turned every denial into an opportunity to make India a
reckonable power in spheres of space and technology,” noted the influen-
tial Hindustan Times in its editorial on May 13.11 To make the point, the
Vajpayee government declared May 11 National Technology Day.
Summarizing his wide-scale survey of the reactions in India to the tests,
Thomas Blom Hansen, an American academic, noted that “the response
from newspapers seemed even more positive, opinion polls indicated
overwhelming support to the decision, and the BJP could now appear on
the domestic scene in its much-desired role as the most resolute defender
of India’s national pride and its national interest.”12
In the area of party politics, however, opinion was divided. The oppo-
sition Congress Party spokesman, Salman Khurshid, attributed Vajpayee’s
decision to the political consideration of consolidating the BJP’s influence
by rallying strong nationwide pro-nuclear sentiment. Eager to make his

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point, Khurshid conveniently overlooked the fact that the Congress pre-
mier Narasimha Rao was on the verge of presiding over nuclear tests in
December 1995. Communist MPs argued that Vajpayee’s unsheathing of
the nuclear sword would lead to Pakistan doing the same, which it did.
The subsequent nuclear arms race between two of the poorest countries in
the world would retard their economic development, they argued.
In Washington Clinton swiftly invoked the 1994 Nuclear Prolifera-
tion Prevention Act. He blocked all aid, banned loans by American banks
and export of products with military use such as computers, and curbed
military technology exports to India. His decision covered $500 million
of pending US loans or loan guarantees to Delhi.

INDIA, 5; PAKISTAN, 6

Clinton then turned his attention to dissuading Pakistani premier Mu-

hammad Nawaz Sharif from following Vajpayee’s example. Given the dire
straits of his country’s economy, Sharif was vulnerable to economic sanc-
tions by Washington, which would have extended to the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Karachi’s stock exchange
reacted nervously to the Indian tests, losing a record one-third of its value.
Sharif was compelled to dither while Clinton kept up pressure in tele-
phone calls, even from the British city of Birmingham, where he had gone
to attend the G8 Summit from May 15 to 17.
But once the Islamist parties in Pakistan mobilized tens of thousands
of their supporters on the streets on May 15, Sharif found it hard to sit
on the fence. As if the raucous demand of the Islamist camp were not
enough, Benazir Bhutto weighed in. On May 18 she vowed to “take to the
streets” at the head of mass demonstrations in a bid to force Sharif from
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office if he did not authorize nuclear tests.13

Little did Bhutto know that following the decision a day earlier by
the Defense Committee of the Cabinet to conduct nuclear tests, Sharif
had conveyed his order to Ishfaq Ahmed, sixty-eight-year-old chair of the
Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), in crisp Urdu: “Dhamaka
kar do” (“Conduct the explosions”).14 The bespectacled, jug-eared Ahmed,
endowed with high cheekbones and long, snow-white hair, assured Sharif
that all would be ready for testing in ten days.
The detonations were mainly to occur in a 0.62-mile-long, 9-foot-
diameter, steel-covered tunnel bored into the granite Koh Kambaran

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Mountain in the Ras Koh range in Chagai district of Baluchistan, thirty

miles from the Iranian border. Constructed in the form of a fishhook by
the PAEC in 1980, it was a PAEC asset. Its fishhook form ensured that
following an explosion, the mountain would move outward and the tunnel
would collapse and seal the entrance. It was capable of withstanding an
explosion of twenty kilotons, the same magnitude as the one dropped on
Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.
Taking this into account and the fact that the PAEC had conducted
more cold tests on nuclear weapons than the Kahuta-based Khan Re-
search Laboratories (KRL), the government had opted for the PAEC.15
At an earlier, expanded meeting called by the government, the nuclear sci-
entist Abdul Qadeer Khan had argued that given the KRL’s record as the
first to enrich uranium and design its own atom bomb and conduct cold
tests on its own, it should be given the opportunity to carry out Pakistan’s
first nuclear tests. But his plea fell on deaf ears. He complained to Chief of
Army Staff (COAS) General Jehangir Karamat. The COAS called Sharif.
As a result, Sharif decided that KRL personnel should be involved in pre-
paring the test sites as well as be present at the time of testing.
On May 19 two teams of 140 PAEC scientists, engineers, and techni-
cians were flown from Islamabad and other locations to Turbat airport in
Baluchistan on their way to the test site in the Koh Kambaran Mountains.
It took five days to assemble the five nuclear devices containing weapons-
grade, highly enriched uranium. The PAEC’s Samar Mubarakmand su-
pervised the assembly personally, checking and rechecking each device,
while trudging through the stuffy tunnel five times. Then diagnostic cables
were laid through the tunnel to the telemetry station, which communi-
cated with the command post six miles away. Next, a complete simulated
test was carried out by radio link.
It was now May 25.
Unlike the latter-day Pokhran military firing range in India, the test
site in Pakistan was an open book for the US spy satellites, which were fo-
cused on their target day and night. On May 25 an American intelligence
official said, “At this point, they could conduct a nuclear test at any time.”
The CIA kept Clinton informed on an hourly basis.
By the time the tunnel was sealed with six thousand bags of cement, it
was the afternoon of May 26. Once the cement had dried within twenty-
four hours, the engineers declared that the site was ready. This was con-
veyed to Sharif via the military’s general headquarters (GHQ ). All told,

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various official agencies of Pakistan had performed a gargantuan task with

admirable speed, coordination, and calm confidence.
In Washington officials predicted the testing occurring “within hours.”
On the night of May 27 (Islamabad time), Clinton made the last of his
four calls to Sharif. According to his spokesman Mike McCurry, it was
a “very intense” twenty-five-minute conversation in which Clinton im-
plored Sharif not to conduct a test.16 It proved futile.
Recalling the intense pressure he was subjected to during that crisis
twelve years later, Sharif revealed that Clinton offered as much as $5 billion
of aid to Pakistan in return for abstinence from testing nuclear weapons.
But, added Sharif, it was more important for him to implement the na-
tional will, which demanded those tests.17 Another version of that crucial
telephone conversation is that Sharif sought explicit US security guaran-
tees, which Clinton was unable or unwilling to offer.18 Most likely, both
points were discussed.
As if this were not enough, India and Israel cropped up in Pakistan’s
unfolding drama. On May 27, the Indian Army’s Signals Intelligence Di-
rectorate intercepted a coded telegram alerting the Pakistan High Com-
mission in New Delhi that Pakistan had “credible information” that India
was all set to mount a predawn attack on its nuclear installations.19
And as Pakistan prepared to test its nuclear devices, its military spot-
ted US-made F16s in the surrounding airspace. It was aware that Israel
used two-seater F16s, equipped with advanced reconnaissance equip-
ment, which at forty-five thousand feet could take pictures of objects
many miles away. It feared that this was part of an Indian-Israeli plan to
launch a preemptive strike at its test site in Baluchistan. It alerted both the
United States and the United Nations. They in turn contacted the Israeli
government immediately, which assured then that it had no such plan.20
Pakistan was not reassured. Its president, Muhammad Rafiq Tarar, would
suspend the constitution and declare a state of emergency as a result of
threats of unspecified “external aggression” soon after Sharif ’s TV speech.
“Today, we have settled a score and have carried out five successful
nuclear tests,” announced Sharif at 15:00 GMT on May 28 on Pakistani
TV. His declaration received the jubilant applause usually reserved for a
batsman who has smashed the ball over the boundary by cheering crowds
at cricket matches.
Elaborating his dramatic statement later at a press conference, Sharif
said, “Pakistan today successfully conducted five nuclear tests. The results

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were as expected. There was no release of radioactivity. I congratulate all

Pakistani scientists, engineers and technicians for their dedicated team
work and expertise in mastering complex and advanced technologies. The
entire nation takes justifiable pride in the accomplishments of the Paki-
stan Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories
and all affiliated organizations.” Blaming “the present Indian leadership’s
reckless actions,” he added that “our decision to exercise the nuclear op-
tion has been taken in the interest of national self-defense . . . to deter
aggression, whether nuclear or conventional.”21
There was instant jubilation in the streets. Karachi, for instance, was
paralyzed by traffic jams as tens of thousands headed for the city center
to join the festivities. In Lahore crowds burned effigies of Vajpayee while
chanting slogans in praise of Sharif, Karamat, and Qadeer Khan.22
Those attending Friday prayers heard sermons thanking Allah for
making Pakistan the first Muslim nation to acquire nuclear weapons. The
Islamist parties were euphoric about the successful testing of the Islamic
atom bomb—a term coined by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, their bête noire—for
two reasons. It gave Pakistan parity with India in defense that it lacked
when facing its bigger and more powerful neighbor in conventional terms.
Second, mastering the production and testing of such a weapon was a tri-
umph of the marriage between Islam and modern technology. What they
overlooked was the fact that Pakistan had assembled a uranium-based
atom bomb by pilfering parts and materials from Western sources and
obtaining the design from the atheist government of the communist Peo-
ple’s Republic of China.
Gohar Ayub Khan, a hawkish foreign minister close to the gener-
als, was decidedly bullish, brimming with newborn confidence. “We have
nuclear weapons, we are a nuclear power,” he declared. “We have an ad-
vanced missile program,” he added, warning that Pakistan had acquired
the capacity to retaliate “with vengeance and devastating effect” against
Indian attacks.23
After half a century of uncertainty about the continued existence of
Pakistan because of the hostility of the militarily mightier India, its lead-
ers now possessed an effective deterrent against any attempt by Delhi to
break up their republic or absorb it.
Moreover, intent on beating India in the numbers game, Sharif or-
dered a further test, code-named Chagai II, on May 30 at Kharan, a flat
desert valley ninety-five miles southwest of the Ras Koh Range. The site
was an L-shaped shaft three hundred feet deep and then seven hundred

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feet long horizontally, and the device was plutonium-based. The offi-
cially announced yield of eighteen to twenty kT was disputed by inde-
pendent assessors, with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists coming up with
the figure of two kT. Equally exaggerated were the statistics about the
cumulative total of the five devices detonated earlier under the code-
name of Chagai I. Pakistan’s claimed figure of forty to forty-five kT stood
in sharp contrast to the estimate of eight to fifteen kT by the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists.24
Scientists make a distinction between a nuclear weapon test and an
explosion. According to them, India had conducted three nuclear tests,
including the one in 1974. In May 1998 at Pokhran there were two tests:
one involving two simultaneous blasts and the other three synchronized
explosions.25 By the same token, Pakistan’s five simultaneous explosions at
Chagai Hills counted as the first test, with the next single blast at Kharan
as the second. So the final test score was: India, 3; Pakistan, 2.
While ordinary Pakistanis were in a celebratory mood on May 29, the
affluent among them fell into deep depression. The Sharif administration
issued an emergency order, freezing $11.5 billion in private foreign cur-
rency deposits in Pakistani banks and suspending the licenses of foreign
exchange dealers. Fearing a rush to withdraw foreign currencies in view
of the impending economic sanctions, the government acted instantly,
nervously aware that its central bank had only $1.6 billion in foreign ex-
change reserves. At $32 billion, Pakistan’s foreign debts were a whopping
64 percent of its GDP. It announced a 50 percent cut in all expenditures
except development projects.26
The only foreign leader Sharif shared his top-secret decision to con-
duct atomic tests with was Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, the
de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. In appreciation of this gesture, Abdul-
lah offered to supply Pakistan fifty thousand barrels of oil per day, about
one-seventh of its total consumption, for an indefinite period and on
deferred payment terms. This helped to relieve to a certain extent the ill
effects of the sanctions by the United States and the European Union.27
Saudi Arabia was one of the two countries that congratulated Pakistan
for taking the “bold decision,” the other being the United Arab Emirates.
Domestically, the political upside for Sharif was a dramatic turn-
around in his popularity, from a slow, irreversible decline to a meteoric
surge. Vajpayee too gained in the esteem of the public, which saw him as a
staunch upholder of India’s security. This uptick in their popular standing
made the two leaders amenable to cease saber rattling and mend fences.

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POSTBLAST THAW

They did so by sticking to the long-established practice of meeting on the

margins of the annual South Asian Association for Regional Coopera-
tion summit. In July 1998, it was hosted by Sri Lanka. News of this event
encouraged Clinton to consider easing sanctions against the two South
Asian neighbors.
More substantial progress was made during the cordial parley between
Sharif and Vajpayee in New York on the sidelines of the UN General As-
sembly session on September 23. Sharif stated that in a nuclear weapons
environment neither side could even contemplate the use of force.28 They
decided to revive dialogue between their respective foreign secretaries on
the eight outstanding issues and to break new ground: resume bus service
between Delhi and Lahore to encourage people-to-people contact. This in
turn led Clinton to withdraw his opposition to the IMF loan to Pakistan.
Welcome though the news from Washington was to Sharif, it was
not enough to reverse the economic downturn in Pakistan, which had
deepened in the aftermath of sanctions by Washington and other Western
capitals. Among those suffering were the military’s corporate interests.
COAS Karamat lamented the deteriorating internal situation and pro-
posed the formation of the National Security Council, including military
leaders, to institutionalize decision-making.
Sharif interpreted this as an attempt to curtail the constitutional
rights of the prime minister. He challenged Karamat either to take over
the administration or resign. Unlike Sharif, Karamat was not confronta-
tional. So he stepped down in July 1998, three months before his sched-
uled retirement date.
Sharif promoted General Pervez Musharraf. A square-faced, be-
spectacled man of medium height with a neatly trimmed mustache, he
was third in seniority among the three-star generals. Sharif figured that
Urdu-speaking Musharraf, a native of Delhi, leading the predominantly
Punjabi-Pushtuns corps commanders, would lack the clout to pressure
a civilian government led by a Punjabi. This would turn out to be a fatal
assumption.
As for Islamabad-Delhi relations, during their meetings in October
and November, foreign secretaries Krishnan Raghunath and Shamshad
Ahmad made progress on procedural matters as a step toward institu-
tional contacts. Starting mid-December they focused on drafting a mu-
tually agreed-on document to be presented to their respective premiers.

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In an interview published on February 3, 1999, Sharif said, “Why

can’t we talk directly? Why do we have to go on approaching each other
via Bhatinda [a Punjabi metaphor for circuitous approach]?” He added
that if Vajpayee responded positively, he would be more than willing
to “take the initiative” to invite him to Pakistan.29 Vajpayee responded
positively. And Sharif invited him to Lahore on the inaugural fourteen-
hour Delhi-Lahore bus journey on February 20, 1999. Vajpayee boarded
the bus.

BUS DIPLOMACY

That afternoon, Sharif rolled out the red carpet for Vajpayee at the Wagah
border crossing, fifteen miles from Lahore, in the full glare of interna-
tional media. He was accompanied by senior cabinet ministers as well
as Information Minister Mushahid Hussain, who was designated liaison
minister-in-waiting with Vajpayee—but not the defense chiefs. They had
declined Sharif ’s invitation to join him at Wagah, arguing that they did
not wish to be seen in public welcoming the leader of “an enemy nation.”
After inspecting a guard of honor, Vajpayee and Sharif boarded a helicop-
ter. It flew them to where the Indian premier was to stay overnight—the
palatial, opulent Governor’s House in Lahore, decorated with crystalline
chandeliers in many rooms, in the midst of eighty acres of immaculately
tended lawns.
“When the helicopter landed on the lawns of the Governor’s House
he [Vajpayee] was received by the three Service Chiefs led by the Chief
of the Army Staff, General Pervez Musharraf, who saluted him and ex-
tended his hand,” Hussain revealed later in an interview with Frontline, an
Indian magazine. “So did the Air Chief Marshal, Pervez Mahdi Qureshi,
and Admiral Fazi Bukhari, Chief of the Navy Staff. Then we all went in-
side the drawing room . . . for a tête-à-tête over tea. They [Service Chiefs]
returned to Islamabad because [Foreign Minister] Sartaj Aziz was hosting
the same night a banquet for the visiting Chinese Defense Minister, and
the three Service Chiefs had to be there.”30
According to Hussain, “When the formal talks began between Mr.
Vajpayee and Mr. Sharif, Mr. Sharif began by smilingly thanking Mr. Vaj-
payee, saying ‘You provided us an opportunity for becoming a nuclear
power, because had you not gone nuclear, we would not have probably
tested. So, it was India’s tests, India’s initiative on becoming a nuclear power

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by coming out of the closet that forced Pakistan to respond in kind.’ . . .

Mr. Vajpayee merely smiled faintly at that.”31
Sharif went out of his way to ensure that Vajpayee did not encounter
hostile crowds in the city. To abort the chance of their removal, the wel-
come banners for Vajpayee were displayed along the main thoroughfare,
the Mall, only late at night on February 19. Whereas the mainstream po-
litical parties, including Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), welcomed
the visit, the Jamaat-e Islami ( JeI) called a general strike in Lahore on
February 20. It was noteworthy that it was at the behest of Major Gen-
eral Ehsan ul Haq, the director-general of Military Intelligence, that JeI
leader Qazi Hussein Ahmad had given the call for protest. And it was at
his house in Rawalpindi that Ahmad hid to avoid arrest32 while hundreds
of his followers were detained. This provided evidence of linkage between
the intelligence agencies of the military and the Islamist groups. The ori-
gins of this unholy alliance went back to the rule of General Muhammad
Zia ul Haq, who resorted to using Islamist organizations and their armed
wings first against the Marxist regime in Kabul and then against Delhi
in the Indian Kashmir.
Several ambassadors invited to the state banquet for Vajpayee at the
historic Lahore Fort were blocked by the protesting demonstrators.
To leave nothing to chance, the next morning a helicopter flew Vaj-
payee and his party to the lawns of the Iqbal Park, the site of the Minar-e
Pakistan, barely two miles from the Governor’s House. A fluted, tapering
column of white marble, two hundred feet high, it rose from a marble cu-
pola resting on a high platform—the result of eight years of expert work-
manship in the 1960s—ringed by fluttering green-and-white national
flags. This was the site where, on March 23, 1940, the All India Muslim
League passed its resolution for a homeland for the Muslims of India.
Accompanied by his adopted daughter, Namita, Vajpayee read the
printed legend, which stated in part: “This session of the Muslim League
emphatically reiterates that the scheme of federation embodied in the
Government of India Act, 1935, is totally unsuitable and unworkable in
the peculiar conditions of this country and is altogether unacceptable to
Muslim India.” In the visitors’ book Vajpayee expressed “the deep desire
for lasting peace and friendship’” that the people of India nursed toward
Pakistan. “A stable, secure and prosperous Pakistan is in India’s interest.
Let no one in Pakistan be in doubt. India sincerely wishes Pakistan well.”33
Vajpayee’s highly symbolic visit to the Minar-e Pakistan was meant
to reassure Pakistanis that even Hindu nationalists in India no longer

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questioned Pakistan’s right to exist. This was a preamble to the signing

of the Lahore Declaration by the two prime ministers. It stated that the
possession of nuclear weapons by both nations required additional respon-
sibility to avoid conflict and promote confidence-building measures. To
avoid accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, the signatories
agreed to give each other advance notice of ballistic missile flight tests and
accidental or unexplained use of nuclear arms in order to stave off nuclear
conflict. They also agreed to discuss their nuclear doctrines and related
security issues.34 After the signing ceremony, Sharif hoped that “Pakistan
and India will be able to live as the United States and Canada.”35
At the civic reception given by the city’s mayor, Khwaja Ihsan Ahmed,
the Indian prime minister said in Hindustani, “There has been enough of
enmity. Now we must forge friendship. Achieving friendship will require
difficult decisions. For the sake of friendship we have to talk about Kash-
mir.”36 These words were music to his listeners. Consequently, his trip was
covered in glowing terms by the Pakistani media.
Across the border, too, politicians and the press welcomed the easing
of bilateral tensions that had intensified in the wake of the nuclear tests.
Had a Congress prime minister undertaken such a trip and held out an
olive branch to Pakistan, he or she would have been mauled by the BJP
for being “soft” on the unfriendly neighbor. It was left to India’s foreign
minister, Jaswant Singh, a BJP leader, to encapsulate the significance of
Vajpayee’s historic visit. He averred, rightly, that “like Richard Nixon’s visit
to China [in 1972], it was a kind of gesture that only a leader with strong
conservative credentials could get away with.”37
President Clinton was quick to commend Vajpayee and Sharif for
“demonstrating courage and leadership by coming together and address-
ing difficult issues that have long divided their countries.”38 What he
did not know was that during the last of their three meetings, held on
a one-on-one basis after the signing of the Lahore Declaration, the two
premiers secretly agreed to open a backchannel to devise a mutually sat-
isfactory formula on Kashmir, also agreeable to Kashmiris.
On February 28, Sharif used the hotline to inform Vajpayee that he was
ready to receive his nominee, Rishi Kumar Mishra—a sixty-seven-year-
old founding chair of the Observer Research Foundation, a Delhi-based
think-tank—in Islamabad to talk to his principal secretary, Anwar Zahid,
on Kashmir. Mishra and Zahid met on March 3.
But a week later Zahid was dead. Sharif replaced him with Niaz Ah-
mad Naik, a former foreign secretary. During his five-day stay in Delhi

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toward the end of March, Naik and Mishra hammered out a four-point
set of guidelines. One of these points required Vajpayee and Sharif to re-
frain from asserting their official positions—India’s insistence that there is
nothing to discuss about Kashmir, a settled issue, and Pakistan’s reference
to the UN Security Council Resolution 47. They also decided to resolve
the Kashmir dispute before the advent of the new millennium.
Unknown to them and their principals, however, Pakistan’s military
brass had other ideas.

STAB IN THE BACK

While overt and covert diplomacy was in train to resolve the bitter Kash-
mir dispute, the Pakistan Army’s top generals had secretly embarked on a
plan to break the status quo in Kashmir in Islamabad’s favor. The initiative
seemed to have come from Lieutenant General Muhammad Aziz Khan,
chief of the general staff, distinguished by his elegantly trimmed, salt-
and-pepper beard and a fixed, middle-distance gaze, in charge of oper-
ations and intelligence. As leader of the Sudhan clan dominant in the
Poonch district of Pakistani-held Kashmir, he was emotionally interested
in loosening Delhi’s grip over 48 percent of Kashmir.
During and after the anti-Soviet jihad, Aziz Khan had supervised
the establishment of training camps for the radical Harkat ul Ansar—
renamed Harkat ul Mujahedin after being listed as a terrorist organization
by Washington in 1997. It was committed to securing all of Kashmir for
Pakistan. His idea was adopted immediately by General Musharraf, who
turned it into his brainchild. Keen to keep it super-secret, he did not even
share it with his friend Air Marshal Qureshi, chief of air staff.
Musharraf ’s coteries focused on capturing the Kargil region in the
east-central part of India-held Kashmir as a means of diverting Indian
troops from the western front abutting Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
The plan was code-named Operation Badr. Th e sole highway linking
Srinagar with Leh, the regional capital of Ladakh, passed through the
Kargil region lying close to the Line of Control (LoC). Here jagged
peaks soared to 16,500 feet, and average winter temperatures dropped
to an incredible –60º Celsius (–76º Fahrenheit). Such harsh conditions
had led India and Pakistan to reach an understanding in the mid-1970s
to leave their pickets unmanned in the area from mid-September to
mid-April.

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In early spring 1999 Pakistan violated this informal agreement. Under

cover of heavy artillery and mortar fire, Aziz Khan launched Operation
Badr. He airlifted one thousand troops of the Northern Light Infantry
into the Dras sector of Kargil and provided them with the logistical sup-
port of a further four thousand. They in turn recruited several hundred
local volunteers, described as mujahedin, to perform logistical tasks. Later,
the combat forces would increase to five thousand. They succeeded in
occupying 132 Indian posts along the seventy-five-mile frontline, which
had a depth of five to ten miles, covering three hundred square miles.
Their tactical aim was to dominate the Indians’ supply line to the Siachen
Glacier and force them to withdraw from there.
In early May the returning Indian soldiers found Pakistanis occupy-
ing mountaintops overlooking the Kargil highway. The discovery came
within weeks of the fall of the Vajpayee government on April 17, follow-
ing its failure to win a vote of confidence in the lower house of Parliament
by a single ballot. When the opposition failed to assemble a majority in
the house, President Kicheri Raman Narayanan dissolved Parliament on
April 26 and appointed Vajpayee caretaker prime minister. With fresh
elections scheduled for September (after monsoons), Vajpayee found it
politically profitable to take a tough line with Pakistan.
Delhi protested Islamabad’s action in Kargil. But Pakistan claimed
that it was the local Kashmiri freedom fighters—the mujahedin—who
had occupied Kargil. On May 22 India launched air strikes at the enemy-
occupied territory as part of its Operation Vijay (Hindi: Victory). But
aerial bombing amid jagged peaks was only partly effective.
India then bolstered its infantry in the battle zone by moving troops
from the Kashmir Valley—not the western front line, as Musharraf and
his senior commanders had anticipated—to expel the Pakistanis from
the occupied posts. The reported exclusion of Air Chief Qureshi from
the original planning seemed to be the reason for his refusal to deploy
warplanes or lend them to Musharraf, thus tying Musharraf ’s hands.39
During the seven-week war, Vajpayee and Sharif made repeated use of
their hotline. And as early as June 3, President Clinton wrote to the two
premiers to act with restraint. Pakistan’s foreign minister Sartaj Aziz ar-
rived in Delhi on June 11 with a plan to de-escalate the conflict by finding
a way of seeking safe passage for the Kashmiri mujahedin.
Unluckily for Pakistan, that day India released intercepts of the tele-
phone conversation between Musharraf, then visiting Beijing, and Aziz
Khan in Rawalpindi. By so doing, Delhi demolished Pakistan’s repeated

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assertions of noninvolvement in the occupation of Kargil. The origins of

this intelligence coup have been open to speculation. The claim of India’s
Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) to have recorded the intercepts is
suspect. It is most likely that Washington’s lavishly funded NSA, working
with the CIA, intercepted all of Aziz Khan’s conversations and passed on
the relevant ones with Musharraf to India’s RAW as instructed by the
White House. Clinton was keen to see the conflict end.40
Having indisputably established the Pakistani Army’s occupation of
Kargil, Vajpayee said in his third telephone conversation with Sharif on
June 13: “You withdraw your troops and then we are prepared for talks.”
The next day Vajpayee received a call from Clinton advising him against
escalating the conflict by opening a new front in Kashmir. On June 15
Clinton telephoned Sharif urging him to withdraw his forces from Kargil.
He found Sharif ’s response unsatisfactory.
Sharif was caught between a rock and a hard place. The senior generals
had kept him in the dark, as he claimed later repeatedly. Amid much spec-
ulation on the subject, it could be deduced that they presented the plan to
him long after mounting the offensive. It happened only on May 17—a
fact confirmed by the presenter, Lieutenant General Jamshaid Gulzar
Kiani, who described the briefing as “perfunctory.”41 With the two armies
engaged in a hot war, Sharif was faced with a fait accompli. He could not
disengage himself from the ongoing armed conflict, thereby highlighting
his humiliating lack of control over the military high command.
To add to his woes, Sharif lost out to Vajpayee on the diplomatic
front. The Indian leader won the backing not only of America but also of
China, which called for the withdrawal of forces to prewar positions along
the LoC and settling Indo-Pakistan border issues peacefully. Both Sharif
and Vajpayee maintained ongoing contact with Clinton, but it paid better
dividends to Vajpayee than Sharif.
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At Vajpayee’s behest, Clinton lobbied the G8 Summit—a meeting of

a group of eight industrialized nations—in Cologne, Germany, on June
19 to take a stand on the Kargil War. Its communiqué issued the next
day stated: “We regard any military action to change the status quo [in
Kashmir] as irresponsible. We therefore call for an immediate end to these
actions [and] restoration of the Line of Control.”42 Predictably, Vajpayee
welcomed the G8 statement, and Sharif and his generals did not.
As the strain between Delhi and Islamabad intensified, Clinton dis-
patched General Anthony Zinni, commander in chief at US Central
Command, and Gibson Lanpher, deputy assistant secretary of state, to

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Islamabad on June 22. While India declared that it would not be the
first to use nuclear weapons, Pakistan’s information minister Hussain, ap-
pearing on the BBC World’s HARDtalk program on June 23, refused to
give the same guarantee, describing the idea of a nuclear war as “too far
fetched.”43
On the ground, the Indian forces, using Swedish-made Bofors
self-propelling artillery guns and laser-guided aerial bombs, were making
headway, rising up the heights steadily to make a final assault to wrest the
peaks from the enemy. An insider view of Pakistan’s position was provided
fourteen years later in Yeh Khamoshi Kahan Tak? (Urdu: How Long This
Silence?), a book by (Retired) Lieutenant General Shahid Aziz, then head
of the analysis wing of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He wrote that the
Pakistani troops were told by their commanders that no serious response
would come from the Indians. “But it did—wave after wave, supported by
massive air bursting artillery and repeated air attacks,” he noted. “Cut off
and forsaken, our posts started collapsing one after the other, though the
[commanding] general publicly denied it.”44 As the lead military planner,
Musharraf took a decisive first step in Kargil, but, fatally, he had no exit
strategy—an unforgivable failing.
Sharif feared that, faced with an imminent defeat, Musharraf would
open new fronts in Kashmir, resulting in robust responses from Delhi,
which would escalate to a full-fledged war with India—a disastrous sce-
nario he felt compelled to avoid. As for Musharraf, having considered the
worst scenario in the case of an all-out war with India, he started prepar-
ing for the deployment of the nuclear option—without even bothering to
inform Sharif. He seemed unaware that he could not mask the activity he
had unleashed at Sargodha Air Force Base where nuclear-tipped missiles
were stored, from Washington’s spy satellites.
The White House was monitoring the battle between the nuclear-
armed neighbors closely. Just as India prepared to launch a three-pronged
offensive to capture the mountaintops in Kargil on July 2, a nervous Sharif
telephoned Clinton appealing for “American intervention immediately to
stop the fighting and to resolve the Kashmir issue.” Clinton was equivocal.
So Sharif used his Saudi card. He made an urgent call to Prince Ban-
dar, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States since 1983, to help.
Bandar intervened on behalf of Sharif, who made yet another call to the
White House.45
In Washington, Clinton had been alarmed to read the intercepts of
satellite overheads obtained by the NSA showing that Musharraf had

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ordered the unveiling of nuclear-tipped missiles at Sargodha Air Force Base

for possible use in a wider war with India, most likely without the knowl-
edge of Nawaz Sharif.46 This was confirmed by Bruce Riedel, then senior
director at the National Security Council and special assistant to Clinton
on South Asia, in a policy paper he presented almost three years later.47
Eager to prevent a nuclear holocaust in South Asia, Clinton sum-
moned Sharif and Vajpayee to Washington for talks. Mentioning previous
commitments, Vajpayee declined, aware that a tripartite meeting in the
United States on Kargil would compromise the long-held Indian position
that Kashmir was a bilateral, not an international, issue. He had his eye
fixed unflinchingly on the general election in September.
At Rawalpindi’s Chaklala airport, Sharif was seen off by Musharraf,
implying that the prime minister’s mission had the backing of the mil-
itary. TV viewers had no idea that Sharif was traveling to Washington
with his family. When they arrived at Dulles Airport on July 3, they were
picked up by Prince Bandar. On his way to the prince’s electronically
guarded, sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Washington, Sharif re-
portedly told his host that he was worried about his life and that he had
brought his family along because he was not sure whether he would be
the prime minister by the end of his mission.

FOURTH OF JULY 1999 AT BLAIR HOUSE

LIKE NONE BEFORE

“Gentlemen, thank you very much for gracing our Independence Day.”
This is how Clinton, straining to smile, greeted Sharif and his team at
Blair House, the presidential guest house, on July 4, 1999.48 Neither Clin-
ton nor any of his team, which included National Security Advisor Sandy
Berger and Bruce Riedel, was pleased by having had to tackle urgently a
war-and-peace issue in South Asia on the most celebrated secular holiday
in the American calendar.
Progress was slow because the counterparty—Vajpayee—was miss-
ing. Without his say-so, a cease-fire—the ultimate objective of the Blair
House meeting—could not be achieved. So fax machines were put to
work. As the draft of a joint communiqué by Clinton and Sharif went
through several stages, heavy fax traffic ensued between Blair House and
the Indian prime minister’s office.
As Riedel noted:

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The Prime Minister [Sharif ] told Clinton that he wanted desperately to find
a solution that would allow Pakistan to withdraw with some cover. Without
something to point to, Sharif warned ominously, the fundamentalists in
Pakistan would move against him and this meeting would be his last with
Clinton. . . . Clinton asked Sharif if he knew how advanced the threat of
nuclear war really was? Did Sharif know his military was preparing their
nuclear tipped missiles? Sharif seemed taken aback and said only that India
was probably doing the same. The President reminded Sharif how close the
US and the Soviet Union had come to nuclear war in 1962 over Cuba. Did
Sharif realize that if even one bomb was dropped . . . Sharif finished his
[Clinton’s] sentence and said it would be a catastrophe.

(This warranted a pause for everyone in the room to digest the ghastly
consequences.)

The President was getting angry. He told Sharif that he had asked repeatedly
for Pakistani help to bring Osama bin Laden to justice from Afghanistan.
Sharif had promised often to do so but had done nothing. Instead the ISI
worked with bin Laden and the Taliban to foment terrorism. [Clinton’s]
draft statement would also mention Pakistan’s role in supporting terrorists
in Afghanistan and India. Was that what Sharif wanted, Clinton asked? Did
Sharif order the Pakistani nuclear missile force to prepare for action? Did he
realize how crazy that was? You’ve put me in the middle today, set the US
up to fail and I won’t let it happen. Pakistan is messing with nuclear war.49

During the session, as the drafting of the communiqué inched for-

ward with continued inputs from Delhi, Sharif whispered to Clinton,
“They will get me, Mr President.” Clinton was unmoved. “Yours is a rogue
army,” he rejoined. “Keep them under civilian oversight.” To which came
a quick response from Sharif: “It is not the army. It is [a] few dirty eggs.
They will meddle to cover up the Kargil debacle.”50 These “dirty eggs”
were the so-called Dirty Five: Musharraf; Aziz Khan; Lieutenant General
Mahmood Ahmed, a broad-shouldered man with a walrus mustache who
commanded the Tenth Corps in Rawalpindi; and Aziz Khan’s immediate
subordinates, Lieutenant General Aziz, director-general (DG) of Opera-
tions, and Major General Ehsan ul Haq, DG of Military Intelligence (MI).
The negotiating teams broke for lunch and rest. While Clinton stayed
at Blair House, Sharif went to his hotel. That gave Clinton a chance to
have a proper conversation with Vajpayee over the phone.51

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When the two principals met again, Clinton placed a statement on

the table. Sharif left the room to consult his advisers. He agreed to his
troops’ withdrawal to the LoC. “The mood changed in a nanosecond,”
recalled Riedel. “Clinton told Sharif that they had tested their personal
relationship hard that day but they had reached the right ending.”52 Later
they posed for photographs at the White House.
The Clinton-Sharif statement said that steps would be taken to re-
store the unspecified LoC, thus facilitating a cease-fire that would follow
as a preamble to the resumption of bilateral talks as the best forum to
resolve all Indo-Pakistan disputes. Sharif parted with Clinton saying he
felt he had done “the right thing for Pakistan and the world,” but he was
not certain “the Army would see it that way.”53 His hunch would prove
prescient, leading to his overthrow three months later.
There was of course no mention of the secret deal struck between
Clinton and Sharif during their separate one-on-one parley after the
formal talks. Clinton agreed to ease US economic sanctions against Is-
lamabad and recommend to the IMF not to withhold its next loan to Pa-
kistan. In return, Sharif promised to actively cooperate with Washington
in apprehending bin Laden.54
On his return home, Sharif announced the Pakistan Army’s with-
drawal from Kargil while justifying Operation Badr, which, he argued,
had drawn the attention of the international community to the Kash-
mir dispute. The pullback started on July 11, when the cease-fire became
effective. Three days later Vajpayee declared Operation Vijay a success.
The Kargil Way war consumed the lives of 527 Indian soldiers (versus
Pakistan’s claim of 1,600) and 450 Pakistani troops (versus India’s claim
of 700). The loss of one Indian aircraft was puny.
All along Vajpayee was fixated on the general election, when he
wanted to present himself as a resolute leader committed to having peace-
ful relations but only on India’s terms. In the final analysis, Pakistan’s
withdrawal to the LoC was achieved through the intervention of a US
president. But Vajpayee and his defense and foreign ministers attributed it
exclusively to Delhi’s strong military response to the occupation of Kargil,
combined with secret diplomacy conducted through the confidantes of
the two prime ministers. Breaking with protocol, Vajpayee revealed that
on June 27 he had told Sharif ’s emissary Naik in Delhi that “unless Pa-
kistani forces leave Kargil, no discussions on any matter can take place.”55
These tactics ramped up the electoral chances of the BJP-led NDA.

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A SPATE OF POPULAR WAR DRAMAS IN INDIA

In India, the public perception of the latest fight with Pakistan was formed
differently from the earlier armed conflicts. In the past it was shaped ex-
clusively by the broadcasting media run by the Ministry of Information
and Broadcasting. But following the Supreme Court’s ruling ending the
state monopoly in broadcasting in 1995, this changed. The subsequent
competition between several private Indian radio and TV channels, spe-
cializing in news and comment, led to the sensationalizing of war news.
As a consequence, Vajpayee’s announcement of Operation Vijay defeating
Pakistan’s Operation Badr received thunderous coverage.
The situation in Pakistan was starkly different. With its monopoly over
the broadcasting media, the government controlled the news about the
Kargil upheaval, attributing the fighting there to the mujahedin of Kash-
mir, who had taken up arms. But given the arrival of satellite and cable
television in their country, Pakistanis had the option of seeking news from
non-Pakistani sources. Their choices covered not only the BBC and All
India Radio but also privately run Indian TV channels. Besides the accu-
racy (or otherwise) of the reports from the frontline, their presentation was
far more engaging than the staid fare being offered by the state-controlled
electronic media of Pakistan. With the complicity of Pakistani forces in
Kargil becoming public knowledge, and Sharif agreeing to military with-
drawal to the LoC, the credibility of Pakistan’s media fell steeply.
Commenting on the media coverage of the Kargil War a decade later,
Major General Muhammad Azam Asif lamented the fact that the Paki-
stani media gave up without putting up a fight against enemy media in-
vasion. The Indian media created war hysteria using cricketers, film actors,
and popular personalities to boost the morale of their troops. “Pakistan
decided to withdraw due to low morale of troop’s heavy causalities and
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424810310

mounting international pressure,” he added. “It [Pakistani media] lacked

offensive posture and well coordinated and planned themes to raise the
morale of the troops or to shield them against Indian propaganda.”56
In India, the Kargil conflict led to a spate of songs, documentaries,
movies, and stage dramas. Within months of the war’s end, the fi ve-
year-old, Mumbai-based, foursome rock band Pentagram released India’s
first exclusive-to-Internet song, “The Price of Bullets,” about the conflict.
It featured famous Muslim poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar. Sahara TV
aired a series, titled Mission Fateh: Real Stories of Kargil Heroes, chronicling
the Indian Army’s missions in a triumphalist mode.

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In February 2002, Mumbai was the venue of Fifty Day War, a 15 mil-
lion rupees ($330,000) gigantic theatrical production with one hundred
performers, about the Kargil conflict. It was presented in a six-hundred-
seat outdoor theatre-in-the round, with seats that revolved 360 degrees
around the action of the play. Directed by Aamir Raza Husain, the play
featured vast sets along with brilliant lighting, thundering sound, and
the smell of gunpowder produced by actual explosions, and recreated the
frontlines of the Kargil war in three dimensions—an extraordinary feat in
the history of theater. “The play tries to break the conventional paradigms
of time and space by transposing audiences from one set to another,” Hu-
sain told the Financial Express.57
As before, Bollywood producers tried to capitalize on India’s success-
ful military venture. In 2003, LoC Kargil, a four-hour-long Bollywood
film, recreating many events of the war, set another record.
Unlike earlier war movies, which were in essence recruitment tools
for the Indian Army, the fictionalized account of the Kargil conflict, as
depicted in the expensively produced Vaishya (Hindi: Aim), released on
the fifth anniversary of the Kargil War, broke new ground. Its protagonist
was a wayward young man, Karan Shergill—played by superstar Hrithik
Roshan—who realizes that the aim of his life is to join the army and re-
take a post captured by Pakistan-backed Kashmiri freedom fighters in the
strategic heights of the Indian Kashmir. “All this is quite well done, with-
out the usual excessive jingoism,” noted Ihsan Aslam, a Cambridge-based
Pakistani historian, after seeing the movie. “There is, of course, a certain
feel-good factor for the Indian viewers, but the Pakistanis don’t come out
entirely bad. . . . The latter part of the film has a very newsy feel because of
[the lead female] Priety Zinta’s role as a TV war reporter. The war scenes,
all shot in the dark, are realistic as is the depiction of death and injury.”58
The script was written by the renowned Javed Akhtar and directed by his
son, Farhan. It was a box office hit, making a profit of almost $1 million,
a colossal sum in India.
There was nothing comparative produced in Pakistan. All that hap-
pened was that the actor-director-producer Abdul Rauf Khalid devoted
the last of the twenty-seven episodes in the state-run Pakistan TV’s Laag
(Urdu: Roaming) series (1998–2000), centered on the trials and tribula-
tions of the Kashmiris living in India-held Kashmir, to the Kargil War.59
This was partly because, unlike in India, there was no unanimity in Pakistan
about the end result of the Kargil War. Far more importantly, that conflict
heralded a new chapter in the rocky history of democracy in Pakistan.

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THE SHARIF-MUSHARRAF BATTLE

While Sharif was on his way back home on July 5, 1999, after several
hours of tense talks with Clinton, Musharraf expressed his disapproval of
“the surrender” by Sharif in his comments to leading newspapers. What
had been gained on the military front had been lost on the political front,
he claimed, without providing incontestable evidence to that effect.
Overall, though, Sharif ’s agreement to withdraw the Pakistani forces
from Kargil without consulting the military high command angered the
generals. He thus violated the cardinal principle guiding Pakistan since
the deaths of its founding figures—Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat
Ali Khan—that the ultimate authority for forming and implementing
national security policies lay exclusively with the corps commanders. This
paved the way for his downfall. In the words of an unnamed high military
officer, “Sharif brought disgrace to the Pakistani army by bowing down
before the US administration for an abrupt pullout from Kargil. In the
aftermath of the Kargil crisis we went through almost a revolt in the army
as the rank and file thought that the government had betrayed them.”60
In a way this was a repeat of what had happened after the 1971
Bangladesh War. The only difference was that whereas the Pakistani
commander in East Pakistan signed the surrender document in the Indian-
occupied Dacca, this time the DGs of Military Operations of the two
sides signed the cease-fire agreement at the Attari border post in Indian
Punjab.
Sharif could do little to counter the prevailing feeling in the army
ranks that he had let them down. And his promise to Clinton to pressure
the Taliban, whose government in Kabul had been recognized by Paki-
stan, had not gone down well with Musharraf and other generals.
On August 7, 1999, huge bombs exploding at the US embassies in
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killed 227 people. Washington blamed bin
Laden, then living in Kandahar, Afghanistan, as the mastermind. On the
night of August 8 two planeloads of teams from the CIA’s Special Activ-
ities Division arrived in Peshawar and Quetta to infiltrate Afghanistan,
with the help of ISI agents, to capture bin Laden. But when Al Jazeera
leaked the story on television, the project was aborted.
On August 20 Clinton ordered strikes at six terrorist training camps
in Afghanistan, a landlocked country. Executing that order from the
Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea required firing cruise
missile through Pakistani airspace. Since bin Laden was not present at

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any of these venues, the strikes missed their prime target. Washington’s
action upset Sharif. “Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told President Clinton
that the unilateral US action constituted violation of the sovereignty and
territorial integrity of independent states,” said an official Pakistani state-
ment. “This attack has caused anguish and indignation in Pakistan.”61 The
casualties caused by the American attack on a training camp near Khost
included members of the ISI-backed Harkat ul Mujahedin, a militant
Kashmiri group. This evidence of the ISI’s indirect links with Al Qaida
deeply embarrassed Sharif.62
To placate Clinton, for whom capturing or killing bin Laden was top
priority, Sharif dispatched ISI chief Lieutenant General Ziauddin Butt
to Washington in early October 1999 to coordinate the next move to
seize the Al Qaida chief. And to contradict the rumors of a falling-out
between him and Musharraf, on September 30 he confi rmed the re-
maining two years of Musharraf ’s term as the COAS and also appointed
him the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, amid much
fanfare. This was meant to signify a truce between the two protagonists.
Sharif capped this by inviting Musharraf and his wife, Sehba, to din-
ner, where the prime minister’s father, Muhammad Sharif, welcomed
Musharraf as “my third son,” his second son being Shahbaz, the chief
minister of Punjab.
Several earlier narratives of the run-up to the October 12 coup have
to be revised in light of the revelations made by the coplotter Lieutenant
General Aziz in his book published in October 2013. According to Aziz,
during the last days of September Musharraf chaired meetings at the
Army House in Rawalpindi to decide the right moment to oust Sharif ’s
government in order to preempt the prime minister’s anticipated move to
replace the general as the COAS. The pivotal role was played by the MI’s
Ehsan ul Haq, who provided Musharraf and others close to him with up-
to-date information on Sharif ’s plans.
It was vital for the two rivals to show that it was “business as usual.”
But before departing for Colombo to attend the October 9 celebrations of
the fiftieth anniversary of the Sri Lankan Army, he told Lieutenant Gen-
erals Aziz Khan, Mehmood Ahmed, and Aziz: “All three of you would
be individually authorized to issue orders for the removal of the gov-
ernment. I hold you three responsible for this [to act and remove the
government].”63 As the DG for Military Operations, Aziz issued written
orders to the commander of the Rawalpindi-based Brigade 111 to be
ready for the critical operation.

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Musharraf ’s return flight from Colombo by the Pakistan International

Airline (PIA) got delayed—twice. In Islamabad, Sharif realized that his
words and deeds were being monitored by the military’s intelligence appa-
ratus. Therefore, accompanied by one of his sons and Lieutenant General
Butt dressed in civilian clothes, he flew to Abu Dhabi on October 10
to confer with Butt in an espionage-free environment. After a courtesy
call on the UAE ruler, Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, followed by
the fine-tuning of Butt’s rise to the COAS, Sharif ’s team returned home
the same day. This vital information was conveyed to Musharraf in Co-
lombo by Ehsan ul Haq.

DRAMA IN THE AIR

As finalized in Abu Dhabi, Sharif prepared to announce the promotion

of Butt as the COAS on October 12. Just as the PIA flight, carrying two
hundred passengers including Musharraf took off at three pm (Pakistan
time) from Colombo for Karachi, Sharif appointed Butt as the COAS at
the prime minister’s official residence in Islamabad in a fitting ceremony.
This was aired on the sole state-run Pakistan TV.
But at the GHQ in Rawalpindi, twelve miles from the capital, Lieu-
tenant General Aziz Khan, chief of the general staff, denied Butt the con-
trol of GHQ. Spiked at this level, Butt’s orders could not go further down
the chain of command. This was coupled with the refusal of Lieutenant
General Mahmood Ahmed, commander of the Rawalpindi-based Tenth
Corps, to accept Butt’s authority.
Around four pm Sharif ’s office announced that General Musharraf
had retired. An hour later soldiers from the 111 Brigade of the Tenth
Corps rushed to Islamabad in trucks. Arriving there, they started pouring
out onto the streets. Watched by curious onlookers, they seized the state
television station and switched off the signal.
This compelled Butt and Sharif to stop the airborne Musharraf from
reaching Karachi. They were unaware that at the GHQ in Rawalpindi,
Aziz Khan had phoned Lieutenant General Muzaffar Usmani, com-
mander of the Fifth Corps in Karachi, to ensure Musharraf ’s safe return to
the city. The PIA flight from Colombo approached Karachi airport around
six thirty pm, but air traffic control refused permission for the plane to land.
High drama followed. Sharif ordered air traffic controllers to redirect
the flight to the airport in Nawabshah, southern Sindh, where Sharif had

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dispatched his own plane and a security team to arrest Musharraf. Inside
the PIA aircraft, Musharraf entered the cockpit. He instructed the pilot to
keep circling the Karachi airport while he personally urged the air traffic
controllers to let the plane land.
They refused—until the control tower was seized by troops of the
Fifth Corps. By the time Musharraf touched down on Pakistani soil, it
was 7:47 pm, with the now stationary PIA airliner having only seven
minutes of fuel left. He was instantly whisked away by officers of the
Fifth Corps.64
In Islamabad, soldiers of the 111 Brigade disarmed the security force
at Sharif ’s official residence. Soon Lieutenant General Ahmed arrived
and asked Sharif to resign or rescind his order promoting Butt. Sharif
refused both options. He was then escorted out by soldiers and detained at
a government guest house near the airport. By now the troops controlled
all TV stations, administrative offices, and the power and communications
infrastructure throughout the country. They placed the entire cabinet un-
der guard and cut international telephone lines.
At 10:15 pm the military restored television broadcasts. Minutes later
an announcement running across the bottom of the screen announced
the dismissal of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Musharraf ’s prerecorded
message to the nation at 2:50 am on October 13 cited Sharif ’s attempts
to divide the army as one of the chief reasons for the coup. “This is not
martial law, only another path towards democracy,” he added. “The armed
forces have no intention to stay in charge any longer than is absolutely
necessary to pave the way for true democracy to flourish in Pakistan.”65
This was the fourth power grab by the military in Pakistan’s fifty-two-
year history. It was triggered by its involvement in the Muslim separatist
insurgency in India-held Kashmir and the fate of bin Laden. It high-
lighted the fact that the military was the final arbiter of power in Pakistan.
There were historical, ethnic, and socioeconomic reasons for this state of
affairs. The armed conflict over Kashmir came within a few months of the
birth of the new country. That accorded the military the highest priority.
Most of the ranks and officers of the army have come from Punjab, which
accounts for 55 percent of the national population. The resulting eth-
nic homogeneity imparts the military extra strength. In a predominantly
agrarian, largely illiterate or subliterate society, the army stands out as a
paragon of discipline and order. And unlike all other institutions, it has
remained almost free of corruption. As a consequence, it is held in high
esteem by the public at large.

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By a strange coincidence, it was on October 13, 1999, that Vajpayee

was sworn in as prime minister. As leader of the 303-strong NDA, he en-
joyed a comfortable majority in the 545-seat lower house of Parliament.66
The contrast between India and Pakistan could not have been starker.

MUSHARRAF, THE “CHIEF EXECUTIVE”

Two days later Musharraf declared an emergency, suspended the con-

stitution, and assumed supreme power as the chief executive. He closed
down the prime minister’s secretariat while leaving in place the incumbent
Muhammad Rafiq Tarar as president. On October 17, during his second
nationwide TV address, he announced the formation of a seven-member
military-civilian council under his chairmanship.
Washington was quick to condemn the coup and urged a return to de-
mocracy. The reaction in Delhi, however, was mixed. “He is the man who
attacked us in Kargil,” said Jyotindra Nath Dixit, former foreign secretary
and advisor to the National Security Council. “We should be much more
alert about General Musharraf.” Having just taken the oath of office, Vaj-
payee was diplomatic. “We are willing to talk to any regime in Pakistan,”
he told reporters. “It is for Pakistan to create a climate for resumption
of dialogue between the two countries.” Unsurprisingly, the response of
pro-Pakistan Kashmiris was euphoric. “It is good to see military rule in
Pakistan but the step was delayed,” said a spokesman of the Hizb ul Mu-
jahedin. “It should have come earlier at the time of the Kashmir [Kargil]
war when Nawaz Sharif betrayed us.”67
Following the Kargil debacle, the separatist Hizb ul Mujahedin and
Harkat ul Mujahedin stepped up their attacks on the security forces in In-
dian Kashmir. Harkat ul Mujahedin hit the headlines in the international
media when five of its militants, armed with pistols, knives, and hand
grenades, hijacked an Indian Airlines (aka Air India) aircraft flying from
Katmandu to New Delhi on the morning of December 24. After refusals
by several airports in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Oman, and the United Arab
Emirates, the plane landed at the Kandahar airport in the early hours of
Christmas Day with 155 passengers and crew.
The hijackers demanded the release of thirty-six Kashmiri prisoners
and a £125 million ransom. After refusing to deal with them, the Vajpayee
government entered into staggered negotiations through the Taliban au-
thorities in Kabul. As days passed, the passengers, crew, and hijackers

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cooped up inside the plane kept warm in the freezing temperature of an

Afghan winter by the power generated by the plane’s engines. The Indians
managed to bring down the hijackers’ demand to just three names from
the top of their list.
By the time they arrived at the Kabul airport, accompanied by the
Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh, it was December 31. The released
men included Maulana Masoud Azhar, a Pakistani cleric whose brother,
Muhammad Ibrahim, was one of the hijackers. Azhar had gone to Indian
Kashmir to conciliate the two feuding factions of Harkat ul Ansar (later
renamed Harkat ul Mujahedin) and was imprisoned. One of the remain-
ing two freed men was Ahmad Umar Shaikh, a Pakistan-based British
national involved with the separatist movement committed to separating
Kashmir from India. At Kandahar airport, the gun-toting hijackers along
with the released militants boarded a van provided by the Taliban, whose
government refused them asylum. It let the van cross the Afghan-Pakistan
border, with its passengers disembarking in Pakistan to shelter in safe
houses briefly before going underground.
Within days, Maulana Azhar surfaced in Karachi. Surrounded by
bodyguards in camouflage-colored clothes and brandishing automatic
rifles, he delivered an incendiary speech to ten thousand supporters as-
sembled in front of a central Karachi mosque. “I have come back and I will
not rest in peace until Kashmir is liberated,” he declared.68 The Musharraf
government had stated earlier that the hijackers would be arrested if they
stepped into Pakistan. But there was no effort to detain Azhar or stop him
from addressing a rally.
This hijack drama, the longest in the world to date, pushed Indo-
Pakistan relations to their lowest ebb in peace times at the turn of the
century.

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 15

General Musharraf
Buckles Under US Pressure

The strengthening alliance of Musharraf-ruled Pakistan with the Taliban

government in Afghanistan caused grave concern in Washington. Pres-
ident Bill Clinton was also well aware of Musharraf ’s masterminding of
the military campaign in the Kargil region of the Indian Kashmir and his
reckless preparation for a nuclear attack on India. The general had then
capped his dangerously surreptitious actions with toppling the democrat-
ically elected government of Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif.
Though Pakistan’s withdrawal to the Line of Control (LoC) in Kash-
mir was completed by the end of July 1999, the deaths of India’s security
personnel caused by the insurgents in Indian Kashmir more than doubled
from the previous year’s figure, to 425 in 1999. The loss of life among the
armed militants, however, was almost three times as much.1 The long, tor-
tuous cease-fire line passing through assorted terrains had proved immune
to being sealed thoroughly by India, which was at the receiving end of the
violence committed by young Kashmiris who, after crossing the LoC, had
received training and arms in Pakistani Kashmir.
It was this state of affairs that led Clinton to call the LoC arguably
“the most dangerous place in the world today”2 as he prepared for a week-
long trip to Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan in mid-March 2000.

FIVE DAYS IN INDIA, FIVE HOURS IN PAKISTAN

After a brief visit to Dhaka, Clinton arrived in Delhi on March 20 and

spent five days in the country, touring Agra to see the Taj Mahal, the pink
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city of Jaipur, the village of Nayala, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. His time
in India equaled the combined total spent earlier by three US presidents:
Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. Wherever he
went, he witnessed Clinton-mania, which pleased not only him but also
his daughter, Chelsea, and his mother-in-law, Dorothy Rodham, who ac-
companied him.
At the end of a series of meetings with top Indian officials and a
speech to the joint session of Parliament, he signed agreements on com-
merce and science and technology while acknowledging India’s potential
as an information technology superpower. Along with Indian premier
Atal Bihari Vajpayee he issued a statement spelling out a new “vision”
for Indo-American ties. He spoke of institutionalizing mutual dialogue
up to the highest level and continuing talks on the nuclear issue. At the
joint press conference, Vajpayee said, “We have a problem of cross-border
terrorism, but there is no threat of war.” During his visit to Nayala, ten
miles from Jaipur, Clinton got a glimpse of democracy at work at the
village level in India when he talked to elected representatives, some of
them women in colorful Rajasthani dresses. The overall result of Clinton’s
extended sojourn in India was to raise the level of Delhi-Washington
engagement to a higher level, particularly when compared to Islamabad-
Washington ties.3
This became dramatically evident within hours of Clinton’s depar-
ture for Islamabad. Arriving at the Mumbai airport on the morning
of March 25, he walked toward the Presidential Air Force One C-17,
giving the impression of planning to board this plane. He paused briefly
to bid farewell to Richard Celeste, the US ambassador to India. But
then he did not make the expected move. Air Force One left the air-
port without Clinton, who, unknown to onlookers, had sneaked into
the adjoining small, unmarked Gulfstream III, which took off a little
while later.
Clinton played this hide-and-seek game at the insistence of his Secret
Service. Its chief had warned him that Pakistan’s security forces were so
thoroughly penetrated by terrorists that extremist groups, possibly Al Qa-
ida, would be privy to his travel route from their sympathizers within the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate and would attempt to shoot
down the presidential plane.
The Secret Service’s ruse did not stop at the safe arrival of the Clinton-
bearing Gulfstream III at Islamabad’s Chaklala airport. On its way to the

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office of Pakistani president Muhammad Rafiq Tarar, Clinton’s motorcade

stopped near an underpass, where he changed cars.4 To leave nothing to
chance, the Pakistani government emptied out the center of its capital on
the eve of his arrival. It was in the midst of this fortified ghost town that
Clinton addressed Pakistanis on TV, a precondition for his visit, which
would last all of five hours.
“Now we are in the dawn of a new century, and a new and changing
world has come into view,” Clinton began. “Clearly, the absence of democ-
racy makes it harder for people to move ahead. . . . Democracy cannot
develop if it is constantly uprooted before it has a chance to firmly take
hold. . . . The answer to flawed democracy is not to end democracy, but to
improve it.” Clinton then turned to terrorism. “We [Americans and Pa-
kistanis] have both suffered enough to know that no grievance, no cause,
no system of beliefs can ever justify the deliberate killing of innocents,” he
stated. “Those who bomb bus stations, target embassies or kill those who
uphold the law are not heroes. They are our common enemies, for their
aim is to exploit painful problems, not to resolve them.” Next he focused
on the region. “For India and Pakistan this must be a time of restraint, for
respect for the Line of Control, and renewed lines of communication,” he
said. “There is no military solution to Kashmir. International sympathy,
support and intervention cannot be won by provoking a bigger, bloodier
conflict. On the contrary; sympathy and support will be lost. And no mat-
ter how great the grievance, it is wrong to support attacks against civilians
across the Line of Control.” As for the United States, “We cannot and will
not mediate or resolve the dispute in Kashmir. Only you and India can do
that, through dialogue.”5
To emphasize his strong disapproval of Musharraf ’s military role, he
ensured that his handshake of the dictator was not recorded by cam-
eras. During his one-on-one meeting with Musharraf he raised the issues
of terrorism and a road map for democracy in Pakistan but found him
non-committal.
Then, to the surprise of Clinton and many others, the Supreme
Court of Pakistan stepped in to dictate its own road map. In mid-May
the twelve-member bench unanimously coupled its justification of the
coup on the grounds of corruption, maladministration, and the falter-
ing economy with an instruction to Chief Executive Musharraf to hold
elections within three years from the date of the coup—that is, October
12, 2002.6

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DELHI-WASHINGTON BONDING
SOF TENS MUSHARRAF

During his state visit to Washington in mid-September Vajpayee warmed

up relations between the largest and the most powerful democracies of the
globe. He addressed a joint session of Congress. The next day he was re-
ceived by Clinton with full state honors on the South Lawn of the White
House. In his talk with his host he did not veer from his previous stances on
terrorism (“India was a victim of cross-frontier terrorism from Pakistan”), re-
viving the Lahore Declaration process (“It was up to Pakistan to stop aiding
Kashmiri insurgents as a precondition for reconciliation”), and the nuclear
agenda (“India had no attention of subscribing to the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty which the US Senate had rejected in 1999”). “I took the bus to
Lahore, but the bus went to Kargil,” repeated Vajpayee at every opportunity.7
In his public utterances, Clinton was relentless in his praise of In-
dia. He was more eloquent about the virtues of Mohandas Gandhi than
Vajpayee was when the latter unveiled a bronze image of the seminaked,
striding Mahatma, armed with a long walking stick, on the triangular
island along Massachusetts Avenue across the road from the Indian em-
bassy. Mahatma Gandhi thus became the first South Asian personage to
be so honored in the American capital.
The convergence between India and the United States went be-
yond geopolitics. The service India’s software companies provided to
US corporations to immunize their computer systems from crashing on
January 1, 2000, opened a new chapter in the Indo-American commercial-
industrial arena. And the 6.5 percent expansion in India’s GDP in fiscal
1999 showed the country breaking out of its traditional growth band of
3 to 5 percent. This encouraged US companies to invest in India.
Critics who argued that Vajpayee’s visit to Washington at the very
end of the Clinton administration was badly timed missed the point that
the burgeoning economic links between the two nations were unrelated
to the tenure of an American president.
Among those who fretted about the ever-tightening concord between
Delhi and Washington was Musharraf. By establishing the National Ac-
countability Bureau, headed by Lieutenant General Syed Mohammad
Amjad, Musharraf had cracked down hard on corruption. That won him
much popular acclaim and helped him consolidate his power. He was now
ready for a meeting with the Indian prime minister. His chance would
have come if the biennial meeting of the South Asian Association for

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Regional Cooperation (SAARC) had taken place in 2000. Because of

Vajpayee’s refusal (expressed privately) to share the SAARC platform
with dictator Musharraf, the biennial conference was postponed.
It was only in mid-March 2001 that an opening appeared for
Musharraf because of the South Asia visit by UN secretary-general Kofi
Annan. After meeting Musharraf and his foreign minister, Abdul Sattar,
in Islamabad on March 11, Annan explained to journalists that since UN
resolutions on Kashmir were not passed under the self-enforcing Chap-
ter 7 of the UN Charter, these needed the cooperation of the concerned
parties for their implementation. He urged Pakistan and India to start a
fresh dialogue on Kashmir.8
On arriving in Delhi four days later, Annan said, “You and Pakistan
have too much in shared heritage by way of history, as well as family and
cultural ties, not to resolve your differences. . . . It is time to begin healing
the wounds.” Following his meeting with Vajpayee, he stressed the need
for Indo-Pakistan dialogue on the dispute over Kashmir.9
Since the Vajpayee-Sharif summit had been held in Pakistan, it was
the Indian leader’s turn to invite his Pakistani counterpart to India. They
agreed on a three-day visit starting July 15.

FLEXIBLE MUSHARRAF MEETS INFLEXIBLE VAJPAYEE

A few weeks before the summit, Pakistan’s president Tarar resigned in

favor of Chief Executive Musharraf. That was why President Musharraf
arrived at the Delhi airport in civilian dress to be welcomed by his Indian
counterpart, K. R. Narayanan. For the fifty-eight-year-old Musharraf, to
return to the city of his birth after fifty-four years was an intensely moving
experience. When he visited his ancestral home in the Daryaganj neigh-
borhood, called Nehra Wali Haveli, he had a tearful reunion with an old
servant who remembered him as a little boy.
Musharraf became the first Pakistani leader to pay homage to Ma-
hatma Gandhi. After laying a wreath at the site containing the Mahatma’s
ashes, he and his chubby, short-haired wife, Sehba, elegantly dressed in an
embroidered purple salwar kameez, showered rose petals at the memorial—
an honoring ritual common among Pakistanis and North Indians. “Never
has the requirement of his ideals been so severely felt than today, espe-
cially in the context of India-Pakistan relations,” he wrote in the visitors’
book. “May his soul rest in peace.”10

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Musharraf did his best to live down his reputation as the mastermind
of the failed Kargil campaign in Kashmir. He repeatedly asserted that his
government accepted the Shimla and Lahore Declarations. “We must not
allow the past to dictate the future” became his refrain in the way “I took
the bus to Lahore, but the bus went to Kargil” had become Vajpayee’s in
Washington.
Pakistan’s high commissioner in Delhi, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, invited
leaders of the major political parties of India as well as Kashmir, including
the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), to a reception at
his residence in the evening. Ignoring his hosts’ advice, Musharraf held a
closed-door meeting with APHC leaders. But, to his credit, in the several
statements he made off and on the record, he never mentioned APHC
or the UN resolutions on Kashmir. In the hour-long informal tête-à-tête
he had with invited Indian journalists, academics, and former diplomats
before the reception, he came across as an unpretentious, affable man—
and a professional staff officer who spoke clearly, being largely unfamiliar
with the diplomatic niceties and obfuscations. “My English is not very
good,” he remarked at one point. “So if India has problems with the
phrase ‘Kashmir dispute,’ let us just call it an ‘issue’ or a ‘problem.’” On
the contentious subject of whether or not “Kashmir is the core issue,” he
said, “Let us find another word, another adjective. What I mean is that
this is the [only] issue on which we have fought wars.”11
In short, Musharraf was being flexible, whereas earlier in the day in his
meetings with Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna
Advani and Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh he had been presented with
a list of cross-frontier acts of terrorism.
The next day the scene shifted to Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, the
gem of the Indo-Islamic architecture and a shining symbol of the apogee
of Mughal power in the Indian subcontinent. The two sessions of talks
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424810389

were described by the host’s spokesperson as “very constructive.” The fol-

lowing day was spent on finding common ground and preparing a version
acceptable to both sides. But after a delay of nine hours, in which several
draft proposals were exchanged, the two delegations failed to produce a
document that Vajpayee and Musharraf were willing to sign.
The Agra summit ended in smoke. Its failure set it apart from the
ones in Shimla (1972) and Lahore (1999), but there was another major
difference: the coverage by the media. In 1972 the Indian government
monopolized broadcasting. It was the same with Pakistan in 1999. Two

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years later in Agra, thanks to the proliferation of privately owned broad-

casting companies in India, there was a massive presence of invasive elec-
tronic media with a battery of TV cameras and roving commentators at
work throughout the day and well into the night. Given the cutthroat
competition in the industry, the newsreaders and field reporters tried
frantically to engender exciting headlines for each successive half-hour
news bulletin with the endless—and often meaningless—lead of “Break-
ing News.” In this cornucopia of exposure, Pakistanis got an ample chance
to express their viewpoint on Indian TV channels eager to feed their
viewers with something unfamiliar. The Pakistanis marshaled competent
spokespersons. In the absence of studio editing, they offered coherent
arguments—a refreshing change for Indian viewers.
After the event, there was much debate as to who was responsible for
the failure of the summit. As often happens in long-running disputes,
cause and effect get mixed up. The Indians’ fixation on cross-border
terrorism paralleled the Pakistanis’ insistence on treating Kashmir as the
core problem. Keen on quashing terrorism by all means, India’s top offi-
cials missed the logical point that terrorism stemmed from the fact that
because of Delhi’s obduracy the Kashmir dispute had remained unre-
solved for sixty-odd years. It followed that cross-frontier terrorism and the
unresolved Kashmir problem could not be treated on par. The cause had
to precede the result. This plain logic was unacceptable to BJP ministers.
The BJP had been in the forefront of forging strong ties with Israel,
which had won Delhi’s diplomatic recognition in 1992. During his visit to
Israel in June 2000, the BJP home minister Advani had said, “Defeating
the designs of our neighbor [Pakistan] who has unleashed cross-border
terrorism, illegal infiltration, and border management are concerns that
have brought me to Israel.”12
His trip prepared the ground for India’s purchase of Israel’s surveil-
lance equipment, including thermal sensors and night-vision devices, for
use mainly in Kashmir. Later a team of senior Israeli counterterrorism
officials toured Indian Kashmir and other areas of endemic antigovern-
ment violence. According to the August 14, 2001, issue of the United
Kingdom–based Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor, Israel had posted
“several teams” in the Kashmir Valley to train Indian counterinsurgency
personnel.13
The next month’s shattering attacks on the World Trade Center
(WTC) in New York and the Pentagon in Washington strengthened the
hands of BJP leaders in Delhi at the expense of Musharraf.

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9/11: A GEOPOLITICAL EARTHQUAKE

The sensational crashing of three passenger aircrafts into two World Trade
Center skyscrapers and the Pentagon, along with the failed but fatal hi-
jacking of a fourth plane, on September 11, 2001, led to almost three
thousand deaths. It was the most lethal assault from a foreign source the
United States had suffered on its mainland. “The deliberate and deadly
attacks that were carried out against our country yesterday were more than
acts of terror,” said President George W. Bush on September 12. “They
were acts of war.”14 He immediately formed a war cabinet.
Among Afghanistan’s neighbors, Pakistan mattered most to the
United States. Indeed, it was the key state. In the absence of land bases
in an adjoining country sharing long borders—which Pakistan did—the
Pentagon’s options would be severely limited. That in turn would diminish
the prospect of a short, successful campaign, which, given the very real
prospect of inflaming Muslim opinion worldwide, was essential.
As it happened, on September 11 the ISI head, Lieutenant General
Mahmood Ahmed, was having a business breakfast with Congressman
Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham—respective chairs of the House
and Senate Intelligence Committees—when the airplanes struck the tow-
ers. Ahmed assured his interlocutors that, when pressured, Taliban leader
Mullah Muhammad Omar would hand over Osama bin Laden to the
United States.
Goss and Graham were dubious about Ahmed’s loyalties. They knew
that he had refused to cooperate with an earlier CIA plan to subvert the
Taliban by bribing local commanders to desert.15
The next day, accompanied by Maheela Lodhi, Pakistan’s ambassador
to the United States, Ahmed found himself facing Richard Armitage,
deputy secretary of state, in the latter’s office. According to Lodhi, “The
two of them were very tense. Armitage started out by saying, ‘This is a
grave moment. History begins today for the United States. We are ask-
ing all our friends—you’re not the only country we’re speaking to—we’re
asking people whether they’re with us or against us.’”16 He then handed
Ahmed a list of official demands. Washington’s wish list—later published
in The 9/11 Commission Report—read:

1. Stop Al Qaida operatives at its border and end all logistical support for
bin Laden. 2. Give the United States blanket overflight and landing rights
for all necessary military and intelligence operations. 3. Provide territorial

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access to US and allied military intelligence and other personnel to conduct

operations against Al Qaida. 4. Provide the United States with intelligence
information. 5. Continue to publicly condemn the terrorist attacks. 6. Cut
off all shipments of fuel to the Taliban and stop recruits from going to
Afghanistan. 7. If the evidence implicated bin Laden and Al Qaida, and
the Taliban continued to harbor them, to break relations with the Taliban
government.17

Armitage’s document was actually a follow-up to the urgent phone

calls that the Bush White House had made earlier to Musharraf, who
had agreed to come on board. In his television address on September 13,
Musharraf said, “I wish to assure President Bush and the US government
of our fullest cooperation in the fight against terrorism.” He immediately
froze the assets of the Taliban regime in the State Bank of Pakistan as
well as the accounts being used by various Pakistani organizations to fund
the Taliban.18
Musharraf ’s swift and sudden abandoning of his erstwhile policy of
sustaining and aiding the Taliban while professing to have scant influence
over them was a severe blow to the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Ka-
bul. Since its inception, Pakistan had been not only the chief provider of
military supplies, fuel, and food to the Taliban’s armed forces, but also the
sole supplier of officers to act as its military planners. It had allowed sixty
thousand students, mainly from madrassas (religious schools), to partici-
pate in many Taliban offensives at one time or another.19
Having received Washington’s list of demands, Musharraf called a
meeting of a dozen top military commanders at the general headquarters
in Rawalpindi on September 15. The atmosphere was somber. Musharraf
outlined his proposal to support America fully in its imminent war against
the Taliban and bin Laden–led Al Qaida. He explained that failure to
opt for the United States would not only result in Washington cutting
off its economic funding, including loans from the International Mone-
tary Fund, but most likely make Pakistan its potential target for punish-
ment. He was challenged by Lieutenant General Ahmed, who led the
opposition, consisting of Musharraf ’s other coconspirators in the 1999
coup—General Muhammad Aziz Khan and Lieutenant General Mu-
zaffar Hussein Usmani—as well as General Jamshaid Gulzar Kiani, now
commander of the powerful Tenth Corps in Rawalpindi. “Let the US do
its [own] dirty work,” remarked Ahmed. “Its enemies are our friends.”20
Musharraf then argued that this was a strategic opportunity to manipulate

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the situation for Pakistan’s benefit, just as General Muhammad Zia ul

Haq had done in 1979. Among other things that alliance had shored up
Pakistan’s cash-strapped treasury: “We should offer up help and, mark
my words, we will receive a clean bill of health.”21 In subsequent years
Pakistan would be upgraded to a non-NATO ally (in 2004), which en-
titled it to purchase advanced US military hardware, and would receive a
total of $10 billion in economic and military assistance for participating
in Washington’s counterterrorism campaign. But, at this pivotal, highly
charged meeting, the dissenters remained unconvinced.
In desperation, Musharraf played his strongest card. He revealed that
on September 13 Delhi had offered the use of Indian soil for US mili-
tary strikes against Afghanistan—a decision kept secret by the Vajpayee
government so as not to inflame Muslim opinion in India.22 Because of a
lack of common borders with Afghanistan, India’s offer could not match
Pakistan’s. All the same, for the Islamist Pakistani generals, more anti-
India than pro-Taliban, such a prospect was taboo. Reluctantly, they went
along with Musharraf.
Indeed, in his TV address to the nation on September 19 to justify
his U-turn on the Taliban and lining up solidly with Washington, he
played up the Indian angle. “They [Indians] have readily offered all their
bases, facilities, and logistic support to the United States.” He said. “They
want the United States . . . to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. They also
want our strategic assets—nuclear and missiles—and our Kashmir cause
to be harmed.”23

PAKISTAN’S DIRE ECONOMY

At $38 billion, Pakistan’s foreign borrowings were half of its GDP. Ser-
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424810413

vicing these and domestic loans consumed 65 percent of government rev-

enue. Another 25 percent of its annual treasure was spent by the military.
Islamabad’s foreign reserves at $1.7 billion were barely enough to pay
for essential imports for two months. Therefore the bilateral talks con-
ducted behind closed doors were focused on working out the modalities
of a graduated deal, with economic concessions to Islamabad moving up
gradually—from the lifting of US sanctions imposed because of Paki-
stan’s nuclear tests to easier rescheduling of foreign loans, more bilateral
and multilateral credits, and better access to the American market for
Pakistani goods in exchange for Islamabad implementing US demands,

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culminating in the dismissal or retirement of the pro-Taliban, Islamist

generals.24 In return, Musharraf extracted a promise from Washington
that it would not promote the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which had
been supported by Russia, Iran, and India—a pledge the United States
would break with impunity.25
On the other side of the international border, once Delhi backed
Bush’s campaign in Afghanistan, the United States restored its military
ties with India, which had been suspended after the 1998 nuclear tests.
Though Musharraf airily dismissed the opposition to his alliance with
America as representing no more than 15 percent of the population, a
later Gallup Poll would show 62 percent against Pakistan joining the
US-led global coalition.26
Having done the deal with the Bush administration, Musharraf tried
to persuade Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden to the United States.
During their eight-hour meeting in Kandahar, the Pakistani military
delegates, led by Lieutenant General Ahmed, warned Omar that if his
government did not turn over bin Laden to Washington, he would face
an attack by the US-led coalition. He remained obdurate.
The Pentagon’s relentless air campaign started on October 7 and
ended on November 14, with Kabul falling to the Northern Alliance, led
by Ahmad Shah Masoud, in the wake of the Taliban’s overnight flight
from the capital. Reneging on its pledge to Musharraf, the Bush admin-
istration had actively bolstered the Northern Alliance, whose original
backers included India.
By contrast, Musharraf delivered on his most secret promises to the
United States about the hard-line Islamist generals in the military’s high
command a day after he had extended his own term as president indef-
initely, “in the larger interests of the country,” on October 7. He forced
Lieutenant General Ahmed to resign. India claimed a secret role in the
downfall of Ahmed.
Lieutenant General Ehsan ul Haq, who replaced Ahmed as ISI chief,
was expected to purge those ISI officers who had helped the Taliban in the
past. Musharraf removed General Kiani from the command of the Tenth
Corps and appointed him adjutant general, the chief military administra-
tive officer—a desk job. He “promoted” Aziz Khan to a largely ceremonial
position of chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, with no direct
command of troops. By so doing he weakened the hand of the ambitious
Islamist vice COAS Lieutenant General Muzaffar Hussein Usmani. In
protest, Usmani resigned. His job went to a moderate, Lieutenant General

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Muhammad Yusaf Khan. These moves by Musharraf satisfied the Bush

administration while making his refurbished top team line up fully behind
him, conceptually and strategically.

INDIA’S ELEVATED MORAL GROUND

Meanwhile, a daring terrorist attack on the Kashmir State Assembly

in Srinagar on October 1 highlighted India’s condition as a victim of
cross-frontier terrorism. A suicide attacker drove a hijacked government
jeep loaded with explosives to the main entrance of the Assembly complex
and exploded it. In the mayhem that followed, two militants in police uni-
form slipped into the main Assembly building, firing their weapons and
throwing hand grenades at security forces. At the end of a several-hour
gun battle, interspersed with grenade explosions, thirty-eight people were
dead. The Pakistan-based Jaish-e Muhammad (Urdu: Army of Muham-
mad; JeM), founded by Maulana Masoud Azhar in March 2000, claimed
responsibility for the lethal assault and named Wajahat Hussein, a Paki-
stani national, as the suicide bomber.27
The storming of the legislature in Srinagar proved to be a precursor
of something far more sensational in which JeM was involved. On De-
cember 13, five gunmen in commando uniforms went past the perimeter
entrance gate to the mammoth, circular Parliament House in Delhi—
built on a high platform with chambers for both houses of the central
legislature—in a white car, carrying bulky bags filled with grenades, Ka-
lashnikov rifles, and explosives, with a red flashing beacon on the roof,
used typically by members of Parliament.
The vehicle crossed gate number 1, a sandstone portico. Fortuitously,
the driveway was blocked by the motorcade of Vice President Krishna
Kant, presiding official of Parliament’s upper house, ready for a swift de-
parture. When the driver of the gunmen’s car tried to bypass the motor-
cade, he crashed into the vice president’s car. The five attackers scrambled.
As they rushed up the steps firing, they wounded an unarmed sentry
guarding the huge carved door. Despite his injury, he managed to close
the door and raise the alarm on his walkie-talkie. Swiftly the other eleven
entrances to the building were shut. The ensuing gun battle between the
attackers and security personnel on the steps of the Parliament House
lasted half an hour. In the end, all the assailants lay dead, as did eight

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security guards. The terrorists had planned on massacring many of the

eight hundred–odd Indian MPs, with their focus on the front benches of
the Lower House, occupied by cabinet ministers.
It transpired later that, aside from the car accident and the ensuing
mayhem, the terrorists’ plan had gone awry as a result of the quintes-
sentially Delhi experience of sudden power cuts. Electricity failure that
morning deprived Muhammad Afzal (aka Afzal Guru)—a Kashmiri
Muslim, arrested later as the suspected sixth coplotter—of his task: to
sit at home to watch all-news television and inform the terrorist team by
mobile phone of the arrival of cabinet ministers, including Vajpayee.
So Afzal did not know that the Lower House had adjourned five
minutes after opening (because of the noisy protest by the opposition over
a Defense Ministry scam of paying excessive sums for soldiers’ coffins)
and that Vajpayee had therefore decided to stay at his official residence.
When Afzal informed the terrorists’ leader in the car of his failure to ac-
cess the twenty-four-hour television news, the latter got angry and went
ahead with the assault.
Later that day Vajpayee chaired an emergency meeting of the five-
strong Cabinet Committee on Security comprising defense, home, for-
eign, and finance ministers. The government described the event as “an
attack on not just the symbol, but the seat, of Indian democracy and on
the sovereignty of the Indian people.” This daredevil raid stirred the peo-
ple, politicians, and the media into a fury.
The US embassy called it “an outrageous act of terrorism” and “a brutal
assault on the heart of Indian democracy.”28 The next morning, US am-
bassador Robert Blackwill, a bearlike man with a jowly visage who, as a
history professor specialized in the study of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,
attended the memorial service at Parliament House for those who had
fallen in the line of duty. Facing a battery of TV cameras after the somber
service, Blackwill declared: “The United States and India are as one in this
outrage. The tragic event that occurred yesterday and that was perpetrated
by terrorists was no different in its objective from the terror attacks in the
United States on September 11th.”29
Delhi blamed the Pakistan-based JeM and Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) for
the audacious assault. It accused the LeT’s Hafiz Muhammad Saeed of
being the mastermind. It called on Musharraf to outlaw the two organi-
zations and freeze their assets. Pakistan condemned the attack, but, claim-
ing that it had never allowed its soil to be used for terrorism, it rejected

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India’s demand. Protesting Islamabad’s foot-dragging, India reduced its

diplomatic staff in Pakistan and unilaterally suspended the bilateral rail
and bus links.
Official circles in Pakistan had a radically different take on the Parlia-
ment House assault. During his meeting with the visiting undersecretary
of the US Army, Les Brownlee, on December 24, Vice COAS General
Yusaf Khan said that he suspected India’s manipulation in this attack. He
was expressing a unanimously shared view in Islamabad that it was Delhi’s
policy to use its intelligence agencies to stage-manage terrorist assaults
periodically to impress the international community.30
In sharp contrast to Islamabad’s laid-back attitude toward the JeM
and LeT, the United States went on to ban the two groups, which, ac-
cording to later White House briefings to American reporters, had been
responsible for 70 percent of the recent attacks in Indian Kashmir.31

OPERATION PARAKRAM

Following a full cabinet meeting, Vajpayee ordered the Defense Ministry

to mobilize all three wings of the military for an offensive war. It did so
on December 20 under the code-name of Operation Parakram (Sanskrit:
Valor). The Indian Air Force was ready to strike at training camps inside
Pakistan-held Kashmir. But mobilization of half a million army troops
under COAS General Sundararajan Padmanabhan could not be achieved
as rapidly as the government wished. In line with common practice in
the modern military, only a part of the Indian army was organized as a
strike force.
Delhi’s overarching strategy was directed at both Islamabad and
Washington; it was well aware that, as the aggrieved party, it held the
high moral ground. While the Bush administration, committed to eradi-
cating terrorism worldwide, had no option but to side with India, it could
not afford to get too tough on Musharraf. He had played a pivotal role in
the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and his continued
cooperation was essential in destroying the remnants of the Taliban and
Al Qaida.
At the same time, the Bush White House could not deflect the ar-
gument Delhi offered. India equated Pakistan’s support for the LeT and
the JeM, along with its earlier backing for the Taliban, with the ISI’s
Kashmir and Afghan cells, which had been the primary engines behind

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these jihadist entities. It reasoned that Islamabad could not wage war on
terrorism on its western frontier (Afghanistan) while supporting it on its
eastern border (Kashmir).
Specifically, India demanded that Pakistan hand over twenty wanted
terrorists living within its boundaries, six of them being its citizens. The list
included Muhammad Ibrahim Azhar, one of the hijackers of the Indian
Airlines plane two years earlier. In the absence of an extradition treaty
between the two nations, Islamabad refused to do so. It called on Delhi to
give it the evidence against the Pakistani nationals for further action.
By early January 2002, India had mobilized some five hundred thou-
sand soldiers and three armored divisions along its 1,875-mile-border
with Pakistan, including Kashmir. It placed its navy and air force on high
alert and moved its nuclear-capable missiles closer to the border. In re-
sponse, Pakistan’s Yusaf Khan did the same. His orders resulted in the
mobilization of over three hundred thousand Pakistani soldiers. This was
the largest buildup on the subcontinent since the 1971 war.32
What particularly worried Washington was Yusaf Khan’s decision to
redeploy seventy thousand army troops, constituting the Pentagon’s “an-
vil,” to capture bin Laden on the run from his hideout in Afghanistan into
the tribal belt along the Afghan-Pakistan border to the LoC in Kashmir.
Despite the deepening crisis, on January 1, 2002, India and Pakistan
exchanged lists of nuclear installations and facilities under the terms of
a confidence-building agreement designed to ensure that such sites were
not attacked during any conflict. “For the eleventh consecutive year, India
and Pakistan today, through diplomatic channels, simultaneously at New
Delhi and Islamabad, exchanged lists of nuclear installations and facili-
ties covered under the Agreement on the Prohibition of Attack Against
Nuclear Installations and Facilities between India and Pakistan,” read the
press release by the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi.33
This was all the more remarkable in view of the authoritative report in
the New Yorker by prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh
on November 5 that India, working with the United States and Israel,
was planning preemptive strikes to prevent nuclear weapons falling into
the hands of fundamentalist generals. On his part, fearful of US strikes,
Musharraf had started moving critical nuclear components within forty-
eight hours of the 9/11 attacks to six new locations, away from air bases,
the Pentagon’s most likely targets.34
Given the crucial need to maintain Islamabad as an active member of
Bush’s coalition to wage “war on terror,” Washington could not afford to

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pressure Musharraf publicly to rein in the anti-India terrorist organiza-

tions in his country.
Privately, though, no diplomatic effort was spared. The United States
was provided a window of opportunity by the foresighted decision of
General Padmanabhan. He and his planners believed that Pakistan had
an interest in escalating conventional warfare to a nuclear flashpoint as
soon as possible. In a newspaper interview after his retirement a year later,
Padmanabhan revealed that in order to avoid creating Pakistan’s desired
situation, it was essential to have Indian forces in place who could rap-
idly secure war objectives. “When December 13 [the Parliament House
attack] happened, my strike formations were at peace locations. At that
point, I did not have the capability to mobilize large forces to go across
[the border].”35
According to Armitage, his boss, US secretary of state Colin Powell,
a retired, four-star general born in New York to Jamaican immigrant par-
ents, in his repeated “general-to-general” telephone conversations urged
Musharraf to take visible steps to end his military’s support for jihadists
in Kashmir. Powell appealed to Jaswant Singh, his counterpart in Delhi:
“Please don’t undermine our war in Afghanistan.”36 This would have hap-
pened as a result of Pakistan moving its troops from the Afghan border
to the Indian frontier.
Responding to the Indian demand to see the evidence that
Musharraf was dismantling the infrastructure supporting cross-border
terrorism, his aides told the New York Times on January 2, 2002, that he
had ordered the dissolution of the ISI section assisting pro-Pakistan
armed groups in Indian Kashmir. They added that in future Islamabad
would limit its support for the Kashmiri freedom struggle to the groups
rooted in the territory and rely on Kashmiris to conduct their armed
struggle on their own while getting only moral and political backing
from Pakistan.37
Despite the deepening crisis, Vajpayee and Musharraf decided to at-
tend the eleventh SAARC summit in Katmandu on January 5–6, 2002.
Toward the end of his speech, to the surprise of all, Musharraf turned to
Vajpayee and said, “As I step down from this podium, I extend a genuine
and sincere hand of friendship to Prime Minister Vajpayee. Together we
must commence the journey for peace, harmony and progress in South
Asia.” As he moved toward the Indian leader, the latter extended his
hand to Musharraf—to the thunderous applause of the assembly. In re-
turn, at the end of his speech, Vajpayee said, “I have shaken his hand

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in your presence. Now President Musharraf must follow this gesture by

not permitting any activity in Pakistan or any territory it controls today
which enables terrorists to perpetrate mindless violence in India.” Earlier
Musharraf pointed out that Pakistan had joined the international coa-
lition against terrorism. But he added that the antiterrorism campaign
must also identify and examine the causes that breed terrorism, driving
people to violent desperation: “We cannot address only the symptoms
and leave the malaise aside.” He also argued that a distinction should
be made between acts of resistance and freedom struggles and acts of
terrorism.38 As a start, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan held a
bilateral meeting in Katmandu.
Returning to Delhi, Vajpayee found his cabinet ministers in two minds
about an attack on Pakistan. Their attention turned to the upcoming visit
of the hawkish home minister Advani to Washington, ostensibly to dis-
cuss “ways to give effect to our common resolve to defeat terrorism deci-
sively and speedily.” During his meeting with Powell, he was shown the
early draft of the speech Musharraf was scheduled to deliver on television
in a few days. He compared the document against his set of demands for
Musharraf: categorical renunciation of terrorism, closing of jihadist train-
ing camps and ending assistance to terrorist, stopping infiltration of men
and materiel into Indian Kashmir, and handing over twenty Pakistan-
based terrorists. He discovered that Musharraf was conceding the first
three of his demands.
Advani’s high point came when Bush dropped by during his meeting
with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice at the White House
on January 10. He had a brief conversation with Bush. At the subsequent
press conference Advani referred to Bush’s statement expecting Musharraf
to abandon terror (as was clear from the draft of his forthcoming speech
that Bush had read) and said that he felt reassured.39 No doubt Advani
telephoned Vajpayee and briefed him on Musharraf ’s impending address
to the nation.
On the other hand, in a rare press conference on January 11, General
Padmanabhan referred to Pakistani leaders, stating that “they will use nu-
clear weapons first should the necessity arise.” Alluding to Musharraf, he
added that “if he is man enough—correction—mad enough . . . he can use
it.” But “should a nuclear weapon be used against India, Indian forces, our
assets at sea, economic, human or other targets, the perpetrators of that
outrage shall be punished so severely that their continuation thereafter in
any form or fray will be doubtful.”40

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MUSHARRAF BITES THE BULLET

Compared to Padamnabhan’s words, the hour-long TV address by

Musharraf on January 12 was a long sermon of peace and goodwill. “Pa-
kistan rejects and condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations,”
he declared. “Pakistan will not allow its territory to be used for any terrorist
activity anywhere in the world. . . . No organization will be allowed to
indulge in terrorism in the name of Kashmir.” He then added that Paki-
stan would not surrender its claim to Kashmir. “Kashmir is in our blood.
No Pakistani can afford to sever links with Kashmir. We will continue to
extend our moral, political and diplomatic support to Kashmiris.”41 He
banned five extremist organizations, including the LeT and the JeM. While
maintaining his backing for self-determination for Kashmiris—the princi-
ple that, when applied to the Muslims in British India, had resulted in the
creation of Pakistan—Musharraf disengaged Kashmir from the pan-Islamist
movement, as was done first by Zia ul Haq and then by bin Laden.
Washington welcomed Musharraf ’s speech. After brief equivocation,
Delhi responded positively. It noted approvingly his closure of 390 offices
of the banned organizations and the detention of about three thousand of
their activists under the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, which
authorized the police to detain a suspect for thirty days without charge.
In the end, none was charged, and by March they were all released. The
proscribed extremist organizations resurfaced under different names.
Equally, there was no change of heart on the part of India’s policy
makers. They remained wedded to their simplistic strategy: crush ter-
rorism through brute force. The link between cross-border terrorism and
widespread Kashmiri alienation from India, which transformed into lo-
cal hospitality to “guest” militants from Pakistan-held Kashmir, escaped
them. Though aware that a purely military solution to terrorism was not
possible, they plowed on with that strategy.
The Bush administration remained equally committed to maintaining
a delicate balance in its relations with Islamabad and Delhi. It made sure
not to express publicly its shock at discovering that most of the litera-
ture on guerrilla training that the Pentagon and the CIA seized at fifty
sites in post-Taliban Afghanistan pertained to the training of jihadists
for liberating Kashmir under the supervision of Musharraf as Pakistan’s
director general of Military Operations.42 Powell persisted in pursuing
the two neighbors to pull back from the brink of war. He succeeded, but
the resulting thaw proved transient.

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 16

Nuclear-Armed Twins,
Eyeball-to-Eyeball

The Indo-Pakistan thaw ended on May 14, 2002. On that day three armed
Kashmiri militants in Indian army fatigues boarded a bus at Vijaypur in
the Jammu region destined for Jammu city. Just before the army camp at
Kaluchak, they stopped the vehicle and sprayed it with gunfire, leaving
seven people dead. Then they entered the army residential camp and killed
thirty more by lobbing hand grenades and firing their automatic weapons,
before they were shot dead. This daring attack on a military facility roiled
the Indian government as never before.

EYEBALL-TO-EYEBALL

On May 19 the Indian chief of army staff (COAS), General Sundararajan

Padmanabhan, centralized command of the paramilitary forces, including
the Border Security Force, posted along the international frontier, and the
Central Reserve Police Force. That same day the Indian Navy took oper-
ational control of the coast guard. All Indian merchant ships were placed
“on alert” and directed to file daily location reports to the navy. Soon after,
the navy redeployed its warships from their eastern fleet home base in
Vishakapatnam to the Arabian Sea, closer to Pakistan. Delhi’s strategic
aim was to assert total control of the sea and deny movement to Pakistani
ships and submarines.
On May 22 Indian premier Atal Bihari Vajpayee asserted that the
time for a “decisive fight” had come and that India needed to be ready for

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

sacrifices while reassuring his fellow citizens that it would be a fight to

victory.1 He ordered the air force to hit training camps inside Pakistan-
held Kashmir. He was told that the military lacked enough laser-guided
bombs and night-vision pods to accomplish the task. His government
approached the United States for fresh supplies. But President George
W. Bush, anxious to cool the dangerous upsurge in the already fervid
Delhi-Islamabad relations, refused to oblige. Vajpayee then turned to
Israel, which agreed. But it was June 5 by the time these munitions and
night-vision pods arrived in three C-130J Hercules transporters at Del-
hi’s Palam airport, along with Amos Yaron, the director-general of Israel’s
defense ministry.2
Alarmed by Delhi’s military moves, Bush publicly called on Pakistani
president General Pervez Musharraf on May 25 to stop infiltration into
Indian Kashmir. He resorted to public diplomacy after the brush-off that
Colonel David Smith, the US Army attaché in Islamabad, repeatedly
received from Pakistan’s generals. They would often tell him: “We are the
only ones that you can rely on to get these guys in Afghanistan—you can’t
do it without our help, and we’re helping you in every way we can. You’re
putting tremendous pressure on us, and you’re doing nothing on the In-
dian side.”3 Bush’s tactic worked. He got an assurance from Musharraf
that the militants’ infiltration into Indian Kashmir had ceased. The White
House passed on the message to Delhi. Two days later Musharraf re-
peated his promise to curb jihadist organizations. But Vajpayee’s cabinet
had lost trust in his word.
By the end of the month, Padmanabhan had moved eight of the ten
strike divisions of the army to jumping-off points near the border. The
Twenty-First Strike Force had advanced toward Akhnoor in the Jammu
region and set up a forward command post. Each of the Fourteenth, Fif-
teenth, and Sixteenth Corps stationed in Kashmir was reinforced with
additional armored and infantry brigades to be able to switch from a
defensive posture to an offensive one. While maintaining nine divisions
in a holding formation, Musharraf and Vice COAS General Muhammad
Yusaf Khan moved an attack force of armored and motorized infantry
divisions into combat readiness positions. They redeployed two infantry
divisions based in Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province to
the eastern borders. They augmented the Kashmir front by deploying two
brigades of the Rawalpindi-based Tenth Corps. Equally, they reinforced
the troops along the Indian border in Punjab and Sindh.4

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 NUCLEAR-ARMED TWINS, EYEBALL-TO-EYEBALL

ANGLO-AMERICAN EXODUS: AN EFFECTIVE DAMPER

Washington feared that India’s impending cross-border attacks on the

extremists’ training camps in Pakistani Kashmiri would escalate to an
exchange of nuclear missiles by the warring neighbors. Its fears were jus-
tified. The leaders of these sparring nations lacked reliable, comprehensive
knowledge of each other’s nuclear doctrine—that is, under what circum-
stances the highest official would unleash atom bombs. Soon after the
attack on India’s Parliament House in December 2001, John McLaugh-
lin, the deputy director of the CIA, informed Bush’s War Cabinet that
intelligence analysts believed that given the confusion among decision
makers in Delhi and Islamabad as to when and how a conventional war
could escalate to nuclear confrontation, there was a serious risk of the first
nuclear strike since August 1945.5
The statements made so far by Indian and Pakistani leaders did not
add up to a coherent, comprehensive nuclear doctrine. “We have formally
announced a policy of Non-First-Use,” Vajpayee said in December 1998.
“We are also not going to enter into an arms race with any country. Ours
will be a minimum credible deterrent, which will safeguard India’s secu-
rity, the security of one-sixth of humanity, now and into the future.”6 This
was in contrast to the stance taken by Pakistan during the May–July 1999
Kargil War, when its spokesmen refused to give the same guarantee.7
On August 17, 1999, the National Security Advisory Board on Indian
Nuclear Doctrine, appointed by Vajpayee, issued a draft doctrine. “The fun-
damental purpose of Indian nuclear weapons is to deter the use and threat
of use of nuclear weapons by any State or entity against India and its forces,”
it stated. “India will not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but will re-
spond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.” The comprehensive
document covered nuclear forces, credibility and survivability, command
and control, and security and safety.8 But in his interview to the Hindu on
November 29, foreign minister Jaswant Singh said that it was “not a policy
document” of the government because the advisory board’s authority was le-
gally nebulous. All the same, he went on to explain that “minimum credible
deterrence” mentioned in it was a question of “adequacy,” not numbers. He
described the concept as “dynamic,” which was “firmly rooted in strategic
environment, technical imperatives and national security needs.”9
On his part, Musharraf tried to project a moderate stance on nuclear
arms. “Pakistan, unlike India, does not have any pretensions to regional or

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

global power status,” he said in May 2000. Three months earlier he had es-
tablished the Strategic Plan Division in the National Command Author-
ity and appointed Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai its director-general.
Kidwai became the official spokesman on Islamabad’s nuclear policy. In
October 2001 he outlined its nuclear doctrine with the preamble that “It
is well known that Pakistan does not have a ‘No First Use Policy.’” Nuclear
weapons were aimed solely at India, he declared. In case that deterrence
failed, they would be used if India attacked Pakistan and conquered a
large part of its territory (spatial threshold); or it destroyed a large part of
either its land or air forces (military threshold); or it proceeded to stran-
gle Pakistan economically (economic threshold); or it pushed Pakistan
into political destabilization or created a large-scale internal subversion
(domestic destabilization threshold).10 Among these scenarios, the most
likely was the spatial threshold. This situation was open to wide-ranging
speculation, and the uncertainty caused as much anxiety in Delhi as it did
in Washington.
A report by Washington’s Defense Intelligence Agency in early May
2000 estimated that in the worst-case scenario, an Indo-Pakistan nuclear
war could result in eight to twelve million fatalities initially, followed by
many more millions later from radiation poisoning.11 Alarmed by this
scenario, the United States and Britain advised around sixty thousand
Americans and twenty thousand Britons, including many thousands of
business executives, to start leaving India beginning on May 31. Most
diplomats and their families departed for home. The American embassy
and the British high commission in Islamabad gave the same advice to
their nationals in Pakistan.
The prospect of Delhi being hit by a Pakistani atom bomb was con-
sidered so plausible that the aides of US ambassador Robert Blackwill
investigated building a hardened bunker in the embassy compound to
survive a nuclear strike. But when they realized that those in the bun-
ker would be killed by the eff ects of the nuclear blast, they abandoned
the idea.12
As Vajpayee flew to Almaty, Kazakhstan, on June 3 to attend the first
summit Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures
in Asia, the Defense Ministry in Delhi said, “India does not believe in
the use of nuclear weapons.” That day, answering questions by reporters
in Almaty on whether he would rule out the first use of nuclear arms,
Musharraf said that “the possession of nuclear weapons by any state im-
plies that they will be used under some circumstances.” He failed to spell

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out these circumstances. At the summit, exchanging stony stares across a

table, Vajpayee and Musharraf angrily blamed each other for five-and-a-
half decades of conflict between their countries. “Nuclear powers should
not use nuclear blackmail,” remarked Vajpayee stiffly. Concerted efforts
by Russian president Vladimir Putin and Kazakh president Nursultan
Nazarbayev to bring about a meeting between the feuding protagonists
failed, with the Indian leader insisting that Pakistan had to end its spon-
sorship of cross-border terrorism first.13
The acute gravity of the crisis was summed up by White House press
secretary Ari Fleischer. “Progress is going to be measured day by day,” he
said on June 5. “In a tense situation, lack of war is the goal. Reduction of
tension is the goal. And while it remains tense, it remains delicate. War
is not inevitable.”14
That day the United States and Britain urged their citizens to leave
India and Pakistan immediately. The raised travel alert came in the wake
of Islamabad rejecting Delhi’s offer of joint border patrols in Kashmir.
Stock markets in India and Pakistan fell precipitately. That shook the two
governments, more so the one in Delhi. The pro-business, center-right
cabinet led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wanted very much to pro-
pel the country beyond the sluggish GDP expansion rates of the past. The
abrupt loss of Western confidence in the improving health of the Indian
economy gave Vajpayee pause.
Later, Brajesh Mishra, a Vajpayee loyalist who served as the national
security adviser, put a spin on the premier’s retreat from starting an armed
conflict with Pakistan: “We almost went [to war] in May 2002, but Prime
Minister Vajpayee, when he faced the final step, concluded that, at the end
of a long political career, he wanted to be remembered as a man of peace.”
For many Pakistani senior commanders, Vajpayee’s decision offered cast-
iron evidence that nuclear deterrence works. “Suppose Pakistan had been
non-nuclear in 2002,” a Pakistani general told Steve Coll of the New
Yorker. “There might have been a war.”15
On June 6, Jaswant Singh said that his country would not use nuclear
weapons first, whereas Musharraf reiterated that he would not renounce
Pakistan’s right to use nuclear weapons first. For India and other nations,
the crucial unknown was the spatial threshold that would trigger Paki-
stan’s activation of its atom bombs. Many defense experts surmised it
would be the impending loss of Lahore, only fifteen miles from the In-
dian border. Others put the red line for the spatial threshold at Pakistan’s
sprawling Indus River basin.

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

BACK FROM THE NUCLEAR BRINK

On June 15 Delhi accepted Musharraf ’s public pledge to end militant

infiltration into India. It did so after the intercepts by its intelligence
agencies showed that the Rawalpindi-based army general headquarters
had ordered the Tenth Corps commander to stop infiltration across the
Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. There were confirmed reports of the
Musharraf government closing some militant training camps in Pakistan-
held Kashmir. In return, India ordered its warships to sail away from the
Pakistani shoreline and started reducing the presence of its army troops
along its international border with Pakistan. On June 26 Washington
officially announced that the high tension of late May and early June had
subsided.16
Since then, no threat of armed conflict on such a grand scale has emerged
again, even though the underlying causes of the 2001–2002 eyeball-
to-eyeball confrontation—jihadist terrorism, abiding mutual distrust, and
an ill-defined system of mutual nuclear deterrence—remain in place.
Those who put a positive spin on this frightening episode argued that
the 2001–2002 war scare was a rerun of the three-week Cuban missile
crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962.
Just as in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis period, the two super-
powers ground nuclear deterrence into a mix of military restraint, diplo-
matic patience, and negotiations about underlying differences, so too did
the nuclear-armed India and Pakistan after the Kaluchak crisis. In other
words, Indian leaders learned to react defensively, by nonmilitary means,
when faced with continuing jihadist terrorist strikes.
There was a major difference between the events in October 1962 and
May–June 2002. In the earlier case President John F. Kennedy negotiated
directly by a hotline with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. But in
the confrontation between the nuclear-armed Delhi and Islamabad, the
negotiations between the rivals were channeled through Washington.
The United States enjoyed the goodwill of both—albeit for diverse rea-
sons. Pakistan was an almost indispensable member of Bush’s coalition to
defeat global terror, which stemmed from Afghanistan and the tribal belt
along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, whereas India was a long-time victim
of terrorism. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in early May India and America
carried out a weeklong joint naval exercise code-named Exercise Malabar in
the Arabian Sea off the southern seaport of Kochi, far away from Pakistan.17

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 NUCLEAR-ARMED TWINS, EYEBALL-TO-EYEBALL

In the Bush team, Colin Powell played the lead role in defusing the
near-combustible relations between the two leading South Asian na-
tions. This became clear when at his press conference in Delhi on July 28
he referred to his third trip to the city in ten months. “I take note that
the situation has improved considerably over the past month,” he said.
“We have been able on the US side, to return our families who had tem-
porarily moved back and we have also been able to change our alert levels
or caution levels to a point where we are now hopeful that more American
tourists will return to India and more businessmen and women will come
and find ways to enhance trade between the United States and India.”
At the same time he noted that both armies remained mobilized. “So we
look to India to take further de-escalatory actions as Pakistan makes good
on its pledges to permanently cease support for infiltration.” However, he
conceded that though the infiltration had declined, it had not ended.18
In his subsequent meeting with Musharraf in Islamabad, Powell found
him “more positive” about his commitment to ending all infiltration. But
when he raised the closing of the camps training terrorists, Musharraf ’s re-
sponse was “they will be dealt with in due course.” Powell expressed Wash-
ington’s inability to independently verify the state of infiltration. And yet
America’s role remained pivotal. “It took US intervention for Pakistan to
leave Kargil,” said an unnamed State Department official in Washington.
“And don’t forget, Musharraf ’s pledge [to end cross-border terrorism] was
made to the US and not to India. So we have to guarantee it.”19
However, India’s leaders were realistic enough to realize that it was in
Pakistan’s interest to create fear in India-held Kashmir during the run-up
to the elections from September 19 to October 9. As before, the secession-
ists in Kashmir were opposed to the exercise. Infiltrations from Pakistan
continued. As a result, during the electoral campaign, over eight hundred
militants, civilians, election candidates, and security personnel were killed.
Despite the allegations of vote rigging and low turnout of 43 percent,
the election produced an astonishing result. The Delhi-loyalist National
Conference was reduced to 28 seats, followed by the Congress Party at
20. The newly launched People’s Democratic Party (PDP) of Mufti Mu-
hammad Sayeed—calling on India to have “an unconditional dialogue”
with Kashmiris to end the long-running crisis—won 16 seats, and the
People’s Democratic Forum (PDF), opposed to the National Conference,
7. The coalition of the Congress and the PDP, backed by the PDF, formed
the government in mid-October, turning the National Conference into

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

the opposition for the first time.20 This invested the coalition government
with some legitimacy among Kashmiris.
Two days later Delhi announced that it would withdraw troops from
its international border with Pakistan. Islamabad reciprocated. On the eve
of the first anniversary of the December 13, 2001, attack on the Parlia-
ment House, the Vajpayee government decided to end the high-alert state
of its military. Pakistan followed suit.
Th e yearlong mobilization of its armed forces cost India Rs 75
billion ($1.63 billion), including Rs 10 billion ($0.21 billion) for de-
ploying and redeploying the navy, coast guard, and air force. It was
an important contributory factor to produce the low GDP growth of
4.3 percent in fiscal 2002. The corresponding buildup of the Pakistani
forces consumed $1.4 billion, a much higher percentage of its budget
than India’s.21
This nail-biting episode taught India’s politicians and military a les-
son to make certain basic changes to the composition and equipment
of its land forces to cope with similar challenges in the future. After
Padmanabhan’s retirement at the end of 2002, his successor, General
Nirmal Chandar Vij, implemented an ambitious modernization of the
ground troops with new weapons systems, enabling each corps a limited
offensive capability of its own. And the reequipment of the special forces
augmented their ability to operate behind enemy lines for a consider-
able time.22 These changes were to be incorporated into a new armed
forces doctrine that the Vajpayee government instructed military leaders
to formulate.
Meanwhile, on January 4, 2003, India’s Cabinet Committee on Se-
curity summarized the nuclear doctrine. While reiterating the “No First
Use” of nuclear weapons, it said that “nuclear retaliation to a first strike [by
the enemy] will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.”
In the case of “a major attack against India, or Indian forces anywhere,
by biological or chemical weapons, India will retain the option of retal-
iating with nuclear weapons.” It stated that the Nuclear Command Au-
thority (NCA) comprised a Political Council and an Executive Council.
The Political Council, chaired by the prime minister, was the only body
to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The function of the Executive
Council, headed by the national security advisor, was to provide inputs
for decision making by the NCA and implement the orders given to it by
the Political Council.23

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 NUCLEAR-ARMED TWINS, EYEBALL-TO-EYEBALL

POLITICIZED MUSHARRAF TURNS PRAGMATIC

A succession of major Indo-Pakistan dramas in Kargil (May–July 1999),

the hijacking of the Indian airliner by Pakistan-based jihadists (December
1999), and the terrorist attack on the Parliament House in Delhi (De-
cember 2001) were covered widely and engagingly by privately owned
Indian electronic media. Over time these TV channels had garnered a
large audience among Pakistanis with access to satellite and cable tele-
vision and bored by the bland, sanitized fare offered by the state-owned
Pakistan television, PTV. Given tens of thousands of cable operators, it
was impossible for the Musharraf government to enforce its ban on ac-
cessing Indian TV channels.
To counter the inexorably growing input of the Indian media in
molding public opinion in Pakistan, Musharraf decided to liberalize the
electronic media while making sure to set the political agenda and regu-
late private outlets on the sensitive subject of national security. On Janu-
ary 16, 2002, his government established the Pakistan Electronic Media
Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) to license privately owned radio and
TV stations.
Pakistanis with subscriptions to cable or satellite services were al-
ready receiving two private channels in Urdu. These were ARY, set up
by Pakistani businessman Abdul Razzak Yaqoob in Dubai in 1997, and
Geo TV,24 run by the Karachi-based Independent Media Corporation,
broadcasting from Dubai and London.25
The Geo TV channel, established in Karachi in May 2002, did its test
transmission on Independence Day, August 14. Its regular transmission
started on October 1, nine days ahead of the general election held by the
Musharraf government as ordered by the Supreme Court. It broke new
ground by airing debates between candidates and giving ample time to
opposition parties—in contrast to state-run television. Geo TV would
astonish its viewers by announcing election results hours before PTV.
Over the years, however, the fiercely competing Urdu language channels
tried to outdo one another in their biased reporting and analysis of India
as well as America, perceived to be empathizing with its rival because of
the shared feeling of being a victim of extremist Islamist terrorism.
Musharraf had prepared well for the electoral contest. Following his
instructions, the loyalist Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief, Lieu-
tenant General Ehsan ul Haq, set out to create a pro-Musharraf party. His

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

starting point was to cause a serious split in the Pakistan Muslim League
(Nawaz Sharif )—PML (N). The defectors were then led to coalesce with
pro-Musharraf groups and independents. The end result was the birth of
the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-i-Azam)—PML (Q)—on July 20,
2002. Its leader was Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a bland Baluchi tribal chief.
In exchange for the Islamist camp’s backing of Musharraf to remain the
COAS while serving as president, he encouraged the formation of a six-
party coalition of six Islamist parties, called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal
(Urdu: United Council of Action; MMA).
On September 1 the authorities allowed the election campaign to
start with a ban on street rallies and use of loudspeakers. Besides the PML
(Q), those who entered the race included the PML (N), the Pakistan Peo-
ple’s Party (PPP), and the MMA. For the PML (Q), the campaign did
not go as well as the Musharraf government had wanted. It became ner-
vous. “Pakistani journalists are of two categories,” said Lieutenant General
Javed Ashraf Qazi, the minister of communications and a former head
of the ISI. “The left-wing, liberal journalist can be bought by India for
two bottles of whisky while the right-wing journalists are patriotic. The
job of the ‘purchased’ journalist is to pick up disinformation published
in India and print it in Pakistan as his own investigative work.”26 India
came in handy as the ultimate malevolent player in denying Musharraf
unfettered power.
The official figure of 40 percent voter participation was far above the
generally agreed 25 percent.27 In the 342-strong National Assembly, the
PML (Q) garnered 103 seats, the PPP 80, the MMA 59, with the rest go-
ing to small factions and independents.28 The entry of the Islamist MMA,
which demanded the application of the Sharia Islamic canon and ran a
vigorously anti-American campaign, into the political mainstream was
a new development. This worried Washington as much as Delhi. In its
election campaign the MMA attributed the 9/11 attacks to the machi-
nations of the CIA and the Israeli foreign espionage agency Mossad, and
equated “war on terrorism” with “war on Islam.” Intriguingly, Musharraf
had turned a blind eye to the MMA’s violation of the ban on street meet-
ings and loudspeakers.
It took Musharraf ’s military overseers nearly six weeks to cobble to-
gether a coalition of 170 members with Jamali as the prime minister. He
reiterated continued good relations with Washington while bemoaning
the fact that Delhi had not responded positively to Islamabad’s off ers
of talks.

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 NUCLEAR-ARMED TWINS, EYEBALL-TO-EYEBALL

This was as well. The Vajpayee government had noted that within a
year of their proscription in January 2002, the five extremist Pakistani or-
ganizations were back in business under different names. Lashkar-e Taiba
(LeT) reemerged as the Pasban-e Ahl-e Hadith and Jaish-e-Muhammad
as Al Furqan. Moreover, the shadowy ISI paid substantial sums to such
jihadist leaders as Hafiz Muhammad Saeed of the LeT and Maulana
Masoud Azhar of the JeM to persuade them to keep a low profi le for
an unspecified period.29 With many of their cadres released from prison
within months, there was only a minor dip in the activities of these and
other jihadist factions.
All this was very much part of the Pakistani military’s unchanging doc-
trine: India is the foremost enemy of Pakistan. So it is incumbent on Islam-
abad to balance Delhi’s superiority in conventional defense by following a
dual strategy: build up Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and encourage periodic
terrorist acts against targets in India as well as the Delhi-friendly govern-
ment in Kabul. To offset any advantage that India might gain in Afghan-
istan after the ultimate withdrawal of the US-led NATO forces from that
country, Islamabad must sustain and bolster the Afghan Taliban as its proxy.
The downside of this two-track strategy was that Pakistan remained
a very risky country for Western corporate investment, which its frag-
ile economy needed desperately. This realization started to seep into the
Musharraf administration as the standing of its finance minister since
the coup, Shaukat Aziz, a former Citibank executive, started to rise. With
that, a glimmer of normalization of Indo-Pakistan relations appeared. In
May 2003 the two neighbors restored full diplomatic ties after a break of
eighteen months.
Feeling the economic pain of maintaining its forces across the LoC
on high alert, Pakistan saw salvation in easing tensions in Kashmir. In
his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York on September 24,
Musharraf invited India to join Pakistan in “a sustained dialogue” aimed
at resolving the Kashmir issue. Musharraf proposed that both countries
should announce a cessation of violence in Kashmir, involving “reciprocal
obligations and restraints on Indian forces and on the Kashmiri freedom
fighters,” he proposed.30 Vajpayee let Musharraf ’s offer lapse.
Two months later, however, India and Pakistan agreed to a compre-
hensive cease-fire, covering the international border and Kashmir. This
coincided with the start of the Eid al Fitr, which marks the end of the
Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan. And on December 1 the two
neighbors restored air links that had been cut off two years earlier.

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Meanwhile, Musharraf ’s active involvement in Washington’s cam-

paign against Al Qaida and the Taliban had led him to deploy large forces
in the semiautonomous Federally Administered Tribal Agencies along the
Afghan-Pakistan border. This had alienated the traditional tribal leaders,
some of whom were reportedly harboring the deputy leader of Al Qaida,
Ayman Zawahiri, and Taliban’s Mullah Muhammad Omar. In turn, Al
Qaida leadership made Musharraf their number one target. Its first at-
tempt to kill him in Karachi in April 2003 failed.
On December 14, Musharraf narrowly escaped a well-planned assas-
sination attempt, when five bombs exploded under a bridge in Rawalpindi
soon after his black Mercedes had passed over it. “When I came back
from my tour of Sindh and as I was going home [in Islamabad] from
Chaklala [airbase near Rawalpindi] and we crossed the Ammar Chowk
Bridge, there was an explosion just half a minute or one minute after we
crossed,” he told PTV. “I felt the explosion in my car. That is all that I
know, except of course that it was certainly a terrorist act and certainly
it was me who was targeted.”31 He was saved by a CIA-supplied radio-
jamming device to block all wireless communications within a radius of
650 feet fitted into his car. That blocked the use of a remote-controlled
device to detonate the explosives while his car was on the bridge.
But that was not the end. A second attempt to kill him came on
Christmas Day at 1:20 pm. Two suicide bombers in cars targeted him just
650 feet from the site of an earlier attempt on his life. In a TV speech
Musharraf, visibly shaken, referred to one suicide bomber driving out of a
gas station toward his car and a policeman attempting to stop him when
a bomb exploded. “We increased the speed but another bomb exploded at
another petrol pump a few yards ahead of the first explosion,” he contin-
ued. He assured his audience that these blasts had given “new strength”
to his resolve to eliminate terrorists and extremists from the country.32
It transpired later that these attacks were masterminded by Al Qaida’s
Amjad Farooqi and Abu Faraj al Libbi. Farooqi, who was also involved
in sheltering 9/11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, would be killed by
Pakistani security forces during a raid in 2004. And al Libbi would end
up in American custody.33
Between these two survivals, on December 17 Musharraf said his
government was prepared to drop its long-standing demands for the im-
plementation of UN resolutions on Kashmir in order to end the fifty-
six-year-old dispute. This required both sides to be flexible, he added.34

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 NUCLEAR-ARMED TWINS, EYEBALL-TO-EYEBALL

Predictably, this was welcomed by Kashmir’s chief minister Mufti

Sayeed. And it was savaged by the leader of the separatist All Parties
Hurriyat Conference, Maulavi Abbas Ansari, who said that Pakistan had
no right to drop the vital issue for which the UN had conferred the right
of self-determination to the people of Kashmir.35
In Islamabad, backed by Finance Minister Aziz, Musharraf had con-
vinced his military high command that only by pursuing a peace process
with India could Pakistan achieve political stability and badly needed
economic expansion by attracting foreign investment.

BACK TO DIALOGUE

This was the background over which Vajpayee rolled into Islamabad,
whose administrative heart had been turned into a fortress, to attend the
twelfth South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit from
January 4 to 6, 2004.
On January 5 he paid a “courtesy call” on Musharraf. It lasted an hour.
The following day the two leaders issued a joint statement stating that
their foreign secretaries would meet the following month to kick-start the
stalled Indo-Pakistan talks on all outstanding issues. At the subsequent
press conference, Musharraf referred to the key linkages in the joint com-
muniqué: the continuation of the normalization process, the start of a
dialogue that included Kashmir, and Pakistan’s commitment to preventing
the use of its territory by terrorist groups. He was effusive in his praise for
Vajpayee. “I would like to give total credit to his vision, to his statesman-
ship, which contributed so significantly towards settlement, for coming to
this joint statement,” he said. To be even-handed he stated that “I would
like to commend the flexibility of the negotiators on both sides.”36
Vajpayee, who as foreign minister had inaugurated the Indian chan-
cery in Islamabad in 1979, laid the foundation stone for its extension over
a ten-acre site. “A quarter of a century has passed in a jiffy, and every year
has thrown up new questions for which new answers are being sought,”
he said. “Our dialogue with Pakistan must continue and we must strive
together to find solutions by understanding each other’s concerns and
difficulties.”37
In practical terms what mattered far more were the “significant meet-
ings” that his national security adviser, Mishra, had with high Pakistani

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officials, away from the prying eyes of the media. The most important
was his talk with ISI chief Lieutenant General Haq. Instructed by their
principals, they agreed to revive a back channel on Kashmir that Vajpayee
had established with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif five years earlier.38
After their talks in Islamabad, Shashank and Riaz Khokar, respective
foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan, announced on February 18 the
modalities and timeframe for discussing all subjects included in the com-
posite dialogue. They agreed to meet in May and June for talks on peace
and security, including confidence-building measures, and Jammu and
Kashmir. Negotiations on the Siachen Glacier, Wullar Barrage, Sir Creek,
terrorism and drug trafficking, economic and commercial cooperation,
and promotion of friendly exchanges in various fields were scheduled
for July.
But before these meetings could be held, there was a change of gov-
ernment in Delhi. In the general election held between April 20 and May
10, the center-right, BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (134 seats)
lost to the Congress Party–led United Progressive Alliance (226 seats). As
a result, Congress leader Manmohan Singh, a seventy-two-year-old Sikh
and economist turned politician, with a well-groomed, salt-and-pepper
beard and a trademark sky-blue turban, became the prime minister.
On the eve of the vote, however, India’s military high command,
charged with refining the concept of surgical destruction of targets inside
Pakistan, finalized its new strategy of blitzkrieg, called “Cold Start.”
The Cold Start doctrine envisioned the formation of eight division-
size Integrated Battle Groups (IBGs), each consisting of infantry, artil-
lery, armor, and air support, which were able to operate independently on
the battlefield. In the case of terrorist attack from or by a Pakistan-based
group, the IBGs would rapidly penetrate Pakistan at unexpected points
and advance no more than thirty miles beyond the border, disrupting the
command and control networks of its military while staying away from
the locations likely to trigger nuclear retaliation. The overall aim was to
launch a conventional strike swiftly but to inflict only limited damage in
order to deny Pakistan justification for a nuclear response.39
The effectiveness of this strategy was based on the dodgy assump-
tion that the thirty-odd-mile penetration by India would not lead the
Pakistani high command to launch nuclear attacks on Indian targets.
In any case, the existence of this plan was sufficient to keep alive the
fear and loathing of India by Pakistan’s people and their civilian and
military leaders.

340
 17

Manmohan Singh’s
Changing Interlocutors

The return of the secular, center-left Congress Party as the leader of the
United Progressive Alliance, headed by Manmohan Singh, augured well for
ending the Kashmir deadlock. To further the objectives of the February 1999
Lahore Declaration, foreign and defense secretaries of India and Pakistan
met in mid-June 2004 to discuss nuclear crisis management, strategic stabil-
ity, and risk reduction. Both neighbors decided to continue their moratorium
on nuclear weapons testing, which had been maintained since June 1998.
A preliminary understanding reached in mid-2001, requiring both
countries to give advanced notification of missile tests, had failed to graduate
to a formal concord because of the December 2001 terrorist attack on India’s
Parliament House. During the latest session the two sides agreed to stay
with the original undertaking. Further progress was inhibited for two main
reasons: India and Pakistan had only limited command and control struc-
tures in place, and neither possessed the technology to recall a nuclear-tipped
missile fired by mistake. Meanwhile, in a far simpler context, they decided
to install a new telephone hotline between the most senior officials in Delhi
and Islamabad and upgrade the existing secure hotline between their senior
military commanders to alert each other to potential nuclear risks.1

MANMOHAN SINGH–MUSHARRAF RAPPORT

The two subsequent rounds of talks between the Indian and Pakistani
foreign ministers—Kunwar Natwar Singh and Khurshid Mahmood

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Kasuri—in Delhi and Islamabad in July and early September 2004 paved
the way for a one-on-one session between Prime Minister Singh and
President General Pervez Musharraf at the United Nations in New York
on September 24. After their parley Singh declared that any proposal
to resolve the Kashmir dispute would be acceptable so long as it was
not based on religious division or the altering of India’s boundaries. Re-
markably, the first condition reflected the view of Congress Party leaders
before independence. And the second condition was the reiteration of the
position Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had publicly adopted in 1955.2
Unknown to the rest of the world, Singh and Musharraf agreed to
encourage the secret talks that had been initiated between their respective
national security advisers—Tariq Aziz and Jyotindra Nath Dixit—with a
mandate to hammer out a detailed document on Kashmir. Aziz and Dixit
started meeting secretly in hotels in Dubai, London, and Bangkok almost
every other month.
In October the Singh government allowed a group of Pakistani journal-
ists to visit Indian Kashmir. To their astonishment, they were free to inter-
view anybody they wished. In June 2005 Delhi would permit a delegation
of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference to travel to Pakistani-
administered Kashmir.
On October 25, in an informal address at a breaking-the-fast dinner
during Ramadan, Musharraf invited debate on the alternatives to the
plebiscite in Kashmir. He saw the need for it because Pakistan was unpre-
pared to accept India’s proposal to transform the Line of Control (LoC)
into the international border, and India saw no need for a plebiscite as
envisaged by UN Security Council Resolution 47 in April 1948. He ar-
gued that Jammu and Kashmir consisted of seven regions with different
languages and sects, with two—Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas—
being with Pakistan and five with India.3 He proposed that the linguis-
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tic, ethnic, religious, geographic, political, and other aspects of these re-
gions be reviewed to find a peaceful solution to the Kashmir problem.4
A tidal wave of protest rose in Pakistan. Musharraf back-pedaled. He
explained that his statement was not a substitute for the official position
about holding a plebiscite, which—in reality—he had abandoned almost
a year earlier.
However, Musharraf ’s public retraction did not derail Aziz’s clan-
destine talks with Dixit. Following the death of Dixit in January 2005,
his job went to Satinder Lambah, India’s former high commissioner in
Pakistan.

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 MANMOHAN SINGH’S CHANGING INTERLOCUTORS

On March 10, 2005, Singh informed the lower house of Parliament

that he had invited Musharraf to Delhi to watch a cricket match the
following month. “I must say that nothing brings the people of our sub-
continent together than our love for cricket and Bollywood cinema,” he
said.5 Singh was referring to the One Day International (ODI) between
India and Pakistan on April 17. Musharraf agreed.
After the ODI at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium in Delhi on April 17,
Singh declared that that the “peace process [between India and Pakistan]
can no longer be reversed.” Musharraf outlined the agreed-on guidelines
for the process: “India’s insistence that no boundaries can be redrawn;
Pakistan’s refusal to accept the Line of Control; and the two countries’
agreement that borders must become less important.” In pursuit of the
last option, he referred to the bus service that had been started between
Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, capital of Azad Kashmir, ten days earlier.
Following his parley with Singh, the two of them agreed to increase the
frequency of the bus service and also let trucks ply the route in order to
boost trade. The news was warmly welcomed by Kashmiri families on
both sides of the LoC.6
On October 8, a 7.6 Richter scale earthquake, with its epicenter near
Muzaffarabad, wreaked havoc in the region. It killed as many as seventy-nine
thousand people, including at least three thousand in Indian Kashmir, and
rendered two million homeless. Following an appeal by the Azad Kash-
mir government for cooperation with India to improve relief, Musharraf
agreed to open the LoC temporarily. India reciprocated. This was the
first instance of Delhi and Islamabad cooperating actively in disputed
Kashmir.
In an unprecedented move, the Pugwash Conferences on Science
and World Affairs, based in Pugwash in Nova Scotia, Canada, sponsored
a seminar, “Prospects for Self-Governance in Jammu and Kashmir, and
Present Status of Cooperation and Communications Across the LOC,” in
Islamabad in March 2006. It was attended by serving and former officials
of Azad Kashmir and several leading Pakistani journalists, as well as offi-
cials of assorted political parties and organizations from Indian Kashmir.
Inaugurating the seminar, Musharraf proposed step-by-step demil-
itarization combined with self-governance as a practical solution to the
Kashmir dispute. This, he argued, would make the LoC irrelevant—and with
it any redrawing of borders. Demilitarization would be a huge confidence-
building measure and, by providing relief to Kashmiris, would help un-
dercut support for militants.7 His proposal failed to get off the ground

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

primarily because the policy makers in Delhi figured that the reduction of
security forces in Indian Kashmir would allow the separatists to broaden
their popular base.
In any case, Singh knew as well as Musharraf that hard-knuckle
bargaining was going on in the secret meetings between Lambah and
Aziz in five-star hotels far from Kashmir.
In his book In the Line of Fire: A Memoir, published in September
2006, Musharraf formalized his ideas into a four-point program. One,
identify the regions of Kashmir that need resolution. Two, demilitarize
the identified region or regions and curb all militant aspects of the strug-
gle for freedom. Three, introduce self-governance in the identified region
or regions. Four, most importantly, have a joint management mechanism
with Pakistani, Indian, and Kashmiri members to oversee self-governance
and deal with residual subjects common to all identified regions as well
as those beyond the scope of self-governance. Describing this plan as
“purely personal,” he recognized the need for selling it to the public by all
the involved parties.8
By late autumn of 2006 the Aziz-Lambah negotiations had inched
forward to the point at which Musharraf felt it was time to test popular
opinion. In his interview with Delhi-based NDTV in early December
2006, he outlined a four-point plan. One, Pakistan would give up its claim
to Indian-administered Kashmir if people from both regions had freedom
of movement through open borders. Two, neither part of Kashmir could
become independent, but both could have a measure of autonomy. Three,
there would be phased withdrawal of troops from both sides of the LoC.
Four, a “joint mechanism,” consisting of representatives from India, Pa-
kistan, and Kashmir, would be formed to supervise the issues affecting
people on both sides, such as water rights.9

MUSHARRAF’S DOWNFALL

In the final analysis, on the Kashmir issue what mattered most at the
official level in Islamabad was the opinion of the top generals, including
Lieutenant General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, then director-general of the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate. Since Musharraf continued
to be the chief of army staff (COAS), it was tricky for his subordinate
commanders to disagree with him even in private.

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 MANMOHAN SINGH’S CHANGING INTERLOCUTORS

So when the secret document between Aziz and Lambah was finessed
by early 2007, Musharraf presented it formally to his twelve corps com-
manders, including his vice COAS, General Muhammad Yusaf Khan, and
Foreign Minister Kasuri, for review.10
Soon after, the attention of the Pakistani elite turned to the spat be-
tween Musharraf and the independent-minded chief justice, Iftikhar Mu-
hammad Chaudhry. When Musharraf suspended Chaudhry as the chief
justice on March 9, the latter challenged his order in the Supreme Court.
Popular protest broke out in the streets in which the major opposition
parties of Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan People’s Party; PPP) and Muham-
mad Nawaz Sharif (Pakistan Muslim League–N; PML-N) joined hands.
On July 20, ten of the thirteen judges ruled that Chaudhry should be
reinstated. When Musharraf refused to do so, the protest intensified. At
the same time, following the military’s July 10–11 storming of the Red
Mosque complex, a bastion of jihadists in Islamabad, Islamist terrorists
began a violent backlash.11 In desperation, Musharraf declared an emer-
gency on November 3, soon after winning the most votes in the provin-
cial and national legislatures in a controversial presidential election. He
suspended the constitution and Parliament, and placed all judges under
house arrest. But any protection he achieved by this ploy would prove
temporary.
In Delhi, though profoundly interested in devising a peaceful solution
to the long-running Kashmir dispute, the Indian interlocutors had to
ponder three major unknowns. Did Musharraf have the generals on board
on this vitally important issue, which had played a central role in raising
the prestige and budget of the military since the birth of Pakistan? What
was the likelihood of Musharraf being overthrown by his military high
command, as had happened to General Ayub Khan in 1969? What were
the chances of the post-Musharraf regime, military or civilian, abiding by
the provisional deal struck with Delhi by Musharraf ?
The answer to the first question came on November 28, 2007. On that
day Musharraf was compelled to resign as the COAS on constitutional
grounds before being sworn in for a second term as civilian president.
(On the eve of his resignation as the COAS, Musharraf promoted Kayani
to that post.) The answer to the second poser came on August 18, 2008.
The poor performance of his Pakistan Muslim League–Q in the gen-
eral election in February 2008 was a barometer of Musharraf ’s rapidly
declining popularity. With the PPP’s Yusuf Raza Gilani becoming the

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

prime minister, he had a powerful political adversary to contend with. By

resigning as president on August 18 he spared himself the ignominy of
impeachment by the National Assembly, which was dominated by two
anti-Musharraf parties in the aftermath of the general election in Febru-
ary. As stipulated in the constitution, the Speaker of the Senate, Muham-
mad Mian Soomro, became the acting president.

PAKISTANI JIHADISTS STRIKE BACK

The slow but definite movement toward a peaceful resolution of the Kash-
mir dispute unsettled the jihadist organizations in Pakistan, particularly
the Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) and the Harkat al Jihad Islami (Arabic: Move-
ment for Islamic Jihad; HuJI). Though formally banned in 2002, the LeT
had continued to exist under the guise of an Islamic charity. The LeT’s
Indian cohorts succeeded in carrying out three bombings in Delhi, killing
sixty-one people, in October 2005. Such an audacious terrorist attack in
the Indian capital foreshadowed yet another period of soured relations
between India and Pakistan.
Finding that Musharraf had resolved not to let Pakistan-based jihad-
ist groups export terror to India, LeT and HuJI leaders decided to sponsor
a self-sufficient Indian jihadist organization. They achieved their objective
by coopting young Indian Muslims with expertise in extortion, ransom,
and bank robbery. Such gangs existed in Mumbai and Kolkata. Also, with
Dubai, populated largely by South Asians, emerging as a thriving financial
center and entrepôt, the earlier, tenuous links between organized crime in
Pakistan and India, involved partly with money laundering, strengthened.
The end result was the establishment of the Indian Mujahedin (IM) in
2005. IM terrorists targeted markets and movie theaters, as well as Hindu
temples, to maximize fatalities. They resorted to sending highly provoc-
ative emails containing abusive comments on Hindus and Hinduism to
intensify Hindu-Muslim tensions.
Sixteen synchronized bomb blasts on July 26, 2008, in Ahmedabad
killed thirty-eight people. Five minutes before the explosions, the IM
emailed a fourteen-page document, signed by “Al Arabi Guru al Hindi,”
to the media. It contained several verses from the Quran along with an
English translation. “O Hindus! O disbelieving faithless Indians!” ran the
text. “Haven’t you still realized that the falsehood of your 33 crore [330
million] dirty mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute

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 MANMOHAN SINGH’S CHANGING INTERLOCUTORS

idols are not at all going to save your necks, Insha Allah [God willing],
from being slaughtered?”12 This was a reference to the Hindu myth that
there are 330 million gods and goddesses; Islam forbids worship of idols,
icons, or images. The IM’s bombing campaign would reach a peak in Sep-
tember 2008, two months before the LeT-sponsored terrorist attacks,
planned in association with an ISI officer, in Mumbai on November 26.
In Pakistan LeT leaders found their cadres defecting to join such
organizations as Al Qaida with an agenda for global jihad. This caused
concern among the top officials of not only the LeT but also the ISI. Fo-
cused on destabilizing Indian Kashmir, the ISI leadership did not want
the Kashmiri-based groups integrating with the wider jihad-based factions,
thereby weakening its Kashmir campaign.13 That was how the aims of the
LeT and the ISI converged. Mounting a gigantic operation against India
was expected to enhance the radical image of the LeT and stem the out-
flow from its ranks.
The LeT-ISI plan was unaffected by the new civilian coalition gov-
ernment in Islamabad in April 2008. The PPP had emerged as the largest
group in the National Assembly after a general election in which Asif
Ali Zardari rode the sympathy wave generated by the assassination of his
wife, Benazir Bhutto, by militant jihadists. Zardari succeeded Musharraf
as president.
LeT leaders realized that in their ranks they had one Pakistani-American
whose dedication to the cause was equaled by the training he had re-
ceived at LeT camps. He was Daood Sayed Gilani, born in 1960 in
Washington to Sayed Salim Gilani, a Pakistani diplomat, and Serrill
Headley, a Pennsylvania-born secretary at the Pakistani embassy.
After his education at an elite military school near Islamabad, Gilani
went to live with his divorced mother in Philadelphia to help her run a
bar. He carried two passports, one American and the other Pakistani. His
drug smuggling took him to Pakistan and led to his arrests, first in 1987
and then in 1998, when he became an undercover agent for the US Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA). Soon after 9/11, the DEA sent
him to Pakistan, even though it had been informed of his pro-Islamist
views. In December 2001, attracted by the LeT’s banner advertisement at
a mosque in Lahore where he prayed, he joined the organization. Between
2002 and 2005 he received training in small arms and countersurveillance
at the camps run by the LeT. He was intent on participating actively in
jihad and awaited a move by LeT leaders. When that failed to materialize,
he set out for the Pakistan-Afghan border on his own and crossed into

347
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

tribal territory without an official permit for entry. He was arrested by an

ISI officer.
Once Gilani established his LeT bona fides, the officer handed him
over to “Major Iqbal” (aka Mazhar Iqbal) of the ISI in Lahore. Major
Iqbal became his minder. Taking his advice, Gilani changed his name to
David Coleman Headley in 2006 during his stay in the United States.
Through one of his LeT trainers, Abdur Rahman Hashim (aka Pasha),
a retired officer of the Sixth Baluch Regiment, Headley established con-
tact with Ilyas Kashmiri, who was linked to Al Qaida. The ISI gave him
$25,000 to open a US visa facilitation office in Mumbai as a front. After
scouting for targets in the city, he handed over flash drives to the LeT
and the ISI. He went through the images with Zaki ur Rahman Lakhvi,
the LeT’s military operations chief. In 2007 Headley made six trips to
Mumbai, two of them with his Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, when they
stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. In September 2007 his LeT minder
instructed him to focus on that hotel.
In April 2008 Headley hired boats to scout landing sites and passed
on GPS coordinates to the LeT high command. Major Iqbal, working as
the LeT’s planner, supervised the model of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel
and arranged the communications system for the attack. Between June
and August 2008, the LeT high command upgraded the operation from
an assault on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, with the two or three attackers
escaping, to a mission involving several targets and the operatives’ role
changed to suicide bombers. These were to be the attacks by the fidayeen
(Arabic: self-sacrificing volunteers), with the overarching aim of high-
lighting the suffering of the Kashmiri Muslims under the Indian yoke as
a step toward liberating them.
Ten LeT recruits, selected from a group of twenty-five, were then
indoctrinated for this holy task by Lakhvi. (After being proscribed in
January 2002, the LeT functioned under its political arm, the Jamaat
ud Dawa.) Among them was Muhammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, a short,
chubby, baby-faced man of twenty-one, from Faridkot village near Deep-
alpur in eastern Punjab. During his trip to Rawalpindi, he had joined
the LeT in December 2007 and ended up at the organization’s base
camp near Lahore. His subsequent training was at a camp near Muzaf-
farabad in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. It included learning Hindi.
During the visit to Faridkot in May 2008, he sought the blessing of his
mother after telling her that he was going to engage in jihad to liberate
Kashmir.14

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 MANMOHAN SINGH’S CHANGING INTERLOCUTORS

In October 2008 the LeT fidayeen were ensconced in a safe house in

Azizabad near Karachi airport, where they were taught how to navigate
an inflatable boat. Their first foray by boat from Karachi failed because
of choppy waters. It was their second attempt that succeeded and made a
spectacular mark in the history of global terrorism.

THE MOST DOCUMENTED SIXTY HOURS EVER

Dressed in navy-blue T-shirts and jeans, and armed with revolvers, AK-
47 assault rifles, ammunition, hand grenades, explosives, mobile and satel-
lite phones, and dried fruit, the LeT attackers left Karachi on an inflatable
dinghy on a 310-mile voyage to Mumbai. During their journey, once past
the Indian port of Porbandar, they seized an Indian fishing trawler, MV
Kuber. After killing its crew of four, they forced the captain, Amar Singh
Solanki, to sail to Mumbai, the commercial capital of India. As they
neared their destination, they murdered Solanki.
Guided by the GPS coordinates on their “old used Garmin set,”15
they landed safely at the Gateway of India in South Mumbai on a rub-
ber dinghy. It was eight pm on November 26. Their main targets were
the Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus (CSRT)—popularly called
VT, the acronym for Victoria Terminus named after Queen Victoria—
the landmark Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Oberoi-Trident Hotel, and
the Nariman House, a Jewish community center. LeT planners wanted
to hit the commercial elite of India staying at the most prestigious hotels
of Mumbai and the visiting Israelis using the Nariman House, and create
mass panic and confusion by slaughtering ordinary Indians at a busy rail-
way terminus. They had instructed their charges to familiarize themselves
with the locations of their targets by using Google Earth maps.
At the crowded passenger hall of the CSRT, while Kasab sprayed
his submachine gun, his companion, the twenty-five-year-old Abu Dera
Ismail Khan, threw hand grenades. They killed 58 people, including 22
Muslims, and injured 104 in fifteen minutes. They then hijacked a car
and went on a shooting spree. When they encountered a police barricade
near the beach, they tried to turn around. In the subsequent gun battle,
Khan was killed, and Kasab was apprehended alive. This proved to be an
invaluable asset for the Indian authorities. Eager to save his life and limb,
Kasab readily provided vital information, including the fate of the fishing
trawler, which proved authentic.

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Armed with the layouts of their respective targets, the remaining eight
terrorists split up, with four assaulting the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in
Apollo Bunder with its 560 rooms and 44 suites. Once there, they fired
their AK-47s in marble hallways and broke down doors, mowing down
those hiding behind them. The remainder of the terrorist gang headed for
the luxury Oberoi-Trident Hotel and the Nariman House. According to
radio transmissions picked up by Indian intelligence, the terrorists were
told by their handlers based in the LeT office in Karachi that the lives of
Jews were worth fifty times those of non-Jews.16
The gunmen were directed by their handlers from inside Pakistan
via mobile phones and Voice over Internet Protocol. “Infl ict maximum
damage,” a controller in Pakistan urged the attackers at the Oberoi-
Trident Hotel. “Keep fighting. Don’t be taken alive.”17 As the Indian
intelligence agents managed to listen and record the conversations be-
tween the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan, they realized that
the attackers were monitoring broadcasts by Indian and foreign televi-
sion channels and garnering vital information. So the Indian authorities
blocked the TV feeds to the Taj Mahal and Oberoi-Trident Hotels. But
that still left their handlers in Karachi free to monitor telecast news and
inform the gunmen.
Taken by surprise, the state and central governments stumbled badly
before mobilizing the local police, the National Security Guard (NSG),
and Marine commandos, as well as the Rapid Action Force troops. By the
morning of November 27, the NSG secured the Nariman House and
the Oberoi-Trident Hotel.
After a briefing to the media by Home Minister Shivraj Patil at eleven
am on November 27, describing the attacks as “very disturbing,” there was
no official announcement until a TV broadcast by Prime Minister Singh
at seven thirty pm, which had been originally scheduled for four thirty pm.
The delay of three hours ratcheted up public anxiety; people were eager
to know how the authorities were reacting to the events being telecast
by droves of Indian and foreign TV channels. Singh was measured in his
address, which lacked a strong message and failed to reassure the people
that their government was in control of the situation.
As it was, ending the siege of the Taj Mahal Hotel, where the ter-
rorists had resorted to lining up the guests to single out the Americans
and Israelis as their quarry, proved far more arduous. The captors, stunned
by the opulence of the luxury hotel, bracketed the suffering of Kashmiri
Muslims with that of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel. Yelling at

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his frightened captives, a terrorist yelled, “Did you know that a Zionist
general [Avi Mizrahi] visited Kashmir two months ago?”18
The prime minister rushed to Mumbai on November 28 and spent the
day presiding over a meeting of top state officials and visiting the injured
in hospitals.
At the Taj Mahal Hotel, a denouement was reached when the attack-
ers set off six explosions—one in the lobby, two in the elevators, and three
in the restaurant. This led to the NSG mounting its Operation Black Tor-
nado to flush out the attackers. They all ended up dead, either as victims
of the security forces’ fire or as suicides. The extraordinarily savage episode
ended at eight am on November 29.
Blood tests on the terrorists showed they had taken cocaine and LSD
to help them sustain their energy and stay awake for two-and-a-half days.
Police claimed to have found syringes at the scenes of the carnage.
By the time the sixty-hour outrage ended, 166 people, including 28
foreigners, including 6 Americans, were killed. Of the 293 injured, all but
37 were Indian. The military-style terrorist attack in Mumbai became
known as 26/11 in India.
An unprecedented feature of 26/11 was the widespread use of so-
cial networks to communicate information about the violent act being
televised nonstop. It became the most well-documented terrorist attack
to date. In diplomatic terms, it wiped out the trust and confidence the
two neighbors had built up in stages since 2004. Indo-Pakistan relations
became inextricably tied to the progress made by Pakistan to bring the
perpetrators of the 26/11 attack to justice.

DELHI-ISLAMABAD RELATIONS IN DEEP FREEZE

The bloody Mumbai saga set off a cascade of diplomatic activity, with tele-
phone lines between Delhi, Washington, and Islamabad buzzing, and US
secretary of state Condoleezza Rice acting as the key player. The frantic
conversations between the top officials in these capitals resulted in crossed
wires and confusion, which raised the prospect of a hot war between the
nuclear-armed neighbors.
Acting on the cumulative evidence provided by Kasab and intercepts
of the conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Kara-
chi, Singh called his Pakistani counterpart, Gilani, on November 28. He
suggested the dispatch of ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja

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Pasha to Delhi to see India’s evidence of the LeT’s links with the ter-
rorists. Gilani agreed. But when he approached Pasha’s superior, COAS
General Kayani, and President Zardari, they overruled sending the ISI
director-general to Delhi. A compromise followed. Gilani settled for dis-
patching a lesser representative of the ISI instead.
Islamabad maintained that the LeT had nothing to do with the
Mumbai outrage, which the Pakistani media, briefed by officials, at-
tributed to Bangladeshi and Indian criminals. When the Indian authori-
ties revealed that the arrested suspect was a son of Amir Shahban Kasab
from Faridkot, the Islamabad government insisted that such a person did
not exist in Pakistan. In stark contrast, investigative journalist Saeed Shah
traveled to Faridkot to try to track down Ajmal Amir Kasab’s family.19
Shah then consulted the electoral rolls for Faridkot and found the names
and national identity card numbers of Kasab Senior and his wife, Noor
Illahi. Several other reporters followed his lead. On the night of Decem-
ber 3 the Kasab couple would disappear mysteriously.
On November 29 Singh chaired a meeting of the military high
command and intelligence chiefs. Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi Major
strongly advocated surgical strikes at the terrorist training camps in Paki-
stani Kashmir. The prime minister promised to discuss this option at the
next meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security, which tilted toward
hitting the camps. Armed with a clandestine report on this high-level
debate, the CIA station chief in Delhi concluded that India was about to
attack Pakistan. He instantly reported this to the CIA director, General
Michael Hayden, who conveyed this information to President George
W. Bush.
The previous day, India’s foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, and his
Pakistani counterpart, Mukhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who hap-
pened to be in Delhi during the Mumbai attacks, had a heated telephone
conversation. After stating that “all options” were open to India to avenge
the Mumbai carnage, Mukherjee added that “they [Pakistanis] were leav-
ing us no choice but to go to war.”20 Qureshi interpreted Mukherjee’s
words as a warning of an upcoming war and informed Prime Minister
Gilani.
In Washington, a White House aide anxiously called Rice to inform
her that “the Pakistanis say that the Indians have warned them that they’ve
decided to go to war.” Surprised, she said, “What?” and added, “That isn’t
what they’re telling me. In my many conversations with the Indians over
the [past] two days, they’d emphasized their desire to defuse the situation

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and their need for the Pakistanis to do something to show that they ac-
cepted responsibility for tracking down the terrorists.” She then asked
the operations center at the State Department to get Mukherjee on the
phone. It failed to contact him. “I called back again,” Rice continued. “No
response. By now the international phone lines were buzzing with the
news. The Pakistanis were calling everyone—the Saudis, the Emiratis,
the Chinese. Finally Mukherjee called back. I told him what I’d heard.”
He explained that Qureshi had taken his stern words over the phone “the
wrong way.” At the State Department, Rice received frantic calls from
the US ambassadors in New Delhi and Islamabad. “Ambassador (David)
Mulford’s [in Delhi] message was stark. ‘There is war fever here. I don’t
know if the Prime Minister can hold out. Everyone knows that the terror-
ists came from Pakistan.’” She then talked to Ambassador Anne Patterson
in Islamabad. “Her message was just as clear. ‘They have their heads in the
sand,’ she said.” This version appeared in Rice’s book No High Honor: A
Memoir of My Years in Washington.21
These developments were enough to set the alarm bells ringing in
Washington. On November 30 (the next day) Bush instructed Rice to
rush to South Asia.
Rice arrived in Delhi on December 3. In her meetings with top offi-
cials, she conveyed the condolences of the US administration to the In-
dian government and people. With Rice standing by his side, Mukherjee
told reporters that undoubtedly the terrorists who struck Mumbai came
from Pakistan and that they were coordinated there. “The government
of India is determined to act decisively to protect its territorial integrity
and the right of our citizens to a peaceful life with all the means at our
disposal,” he added.22 “Pakistan needs to act with urgency and with re-
solve and cooperate fully and transparently [with India],” said Rice. “The
response of the Pakistan government should be one of cooperation and
action. That is what we expect and we have been sending that message.”23
In Islamabad Rice conferred with the highest civilian and military
leaders. “The Pakistanis were at once terrified and in the same breathe
dismissive of the Indian claims,” she noted in her memoirs. “President
Zardari emphasized his desire to avoid war but couldn’t bring himself to
acknowledge Pakistan’s likely role in the attacks.” Having listened to a
long explanation by Prime Minister Gilani that those who had launched
the Mumbai attacks had nothing to do with Pakistan, Rice said, “Mr
Prime Minister . . . either you’re lying to me or your people are lying
to you. I then went on to tell him what we—the United States—knew

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about the origins of the attack. I didn’t accuse Pakistan’s government of

involvement; that wasn’t the point. But rogues within the security services
might have aided the terrorists. It was time to admit that and to investi-
gate more seriously.” In her book she mentioned that General Kayani was
“the one person who, even if he couldn’t admit responsibility, understood
that Pakistan would have to give an accounting of what had happened.”24
Rice’s comparatively mild statement issued at the Chaklala Airbase
before her departure from Islamabad was at odds with the report pub-
lished by the Karachi-based Dawn. In her talks with Pakistani officials
she referred to “irrefutable evidence” of the involvement of elements in
Pakistan in the Mumbai attacks and that Pakistan needed to act urgently
and effectively to avert a strong international response.25
In her interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN on December 7, Rice
summed up her conclusion thus: “I don’t think that there is compelling
evidence of involvement of Pakistani officials. But I do think that Paki-
stan has a responsibility to act, and it doesn’t matter that they’re non-state
actors.”26
President Zardari had taken to using the term “nonstate actors” to
deny any complicity by the Pakistani state. But that did not exempt Is-
lamabad from investigating the hard facts supplied by Delhi. By contrast,
Prime Minister Singh claimed solid evidence of a Pakistani connection
and warned that India would not tolerate use of the territories of its
neighbors to mount attacks on his country and that there would be a
“cost” to it.
Hot on Rice’s heels, Senator John McCain, the unsuccessful Republi-
can presidential candidate, arrived in Delhi. He met Singh and then flew
to Islamabad on December 5 to confer with Gilani. At an informal lunch
with senior journalists and politicians in Lahore, he informed his audience
that “a visibly angry” Singh had told him that they had enough evidence
of the involvement of former ISI officers in the planning and execution
of the Mumbai attacks, and if the Pakistani government failed to act
swiftly to arrest the people involved, India would be left with no option
but to conduct aerial operations against select targets in Pakistan. “Th e
democratic government of India is under pressure and it will be a matter
of days after they have given the evidence to Pakistan [that they decide] to
use the option of force if Islamabad fails to act against the terrorists,” said
McCain, according to Ejaz Haider, a senior editor at the Daily Times, who
attended the lunch. “We were angry after 9/11. This is India’s 9/11. We
cannot tell India not to act when that is what we did, asking the Taliban

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to hand over Osama bin Laden to avoid a war and waging one when they
refused to do so.”27

PAKISTAN BENDS—IN STAGES

The joint Washington-Delhi pressure worked. On December 7, Pakistani

troops raided the LeT base at Shawai Nullah near Muzaffarabad, the
capital of the Pakistan-controlled Azad Kashmir. They arrested twenty
LeT activists as well as Lakhvi, the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai
attacks, and Zarrar Shah, another LeT leader.28 Simultaneously, Islam-
abad declared that even surgical strikes against suspected terrorist training
camps in Pakistani Kashmir would be considered an attack on Pakistan’s
sovereignty and that it would retaliate with “all its might.”
On December 10 the UN Security Council designated the Jamaat ud
Dawa ( JuD), the front organization for the LeT, a terrorist faction. And
the Council’s Al Qaida and Taliban sanctions committee declared that
Lakhvi, Muhammad Hafiz Saeed, and two other leaders of the LeT were
terrorists subject to sanctions. Pakistan placed Saeed under house arrest
under the Maintenance of Public Order law, which allowed the authorities
to detain temporarily those who were deemed likely to create disorder. That
and Islamabad’s statement that it would ban the JuD were welcomed
by Delhi.29
To deprive India of a rationale to carry out a surgical strike on the
headquarters of the LeT/JuD at Murdike, twenty miles north of Lahore,
the Pakistani government pressured LeT/JuD management to let an In-
dian reporter of the Delhi-based magazine Tehelka, Harinder Baweja, visit
the premises in mid-December. She was given a guided tour of the edu-
cational complex, attended by very few people because of the Eid festival
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424810725

break, with the JuD spokesman, Abdullah Muntazir, insisting that the
JuD was a charitable organization. On further questioning, he conceded
that “we used to provide logistical help to the Lashkar [LeT], collect
funds for them and look after their publicity,” and added that “they must
have bought weapons with the money we gave them.”30
But these gestures were not enough for India to end its week-old
state of war readiness for its air force and navy. However, its decision not
to mobilize its ground forces remained unchanged. “Pakistan has one of
the best armies of the world,” declared Gilani on his arrival in Multan,
the base of one of Pakistan’s corps. “The nation should not be worried. . . .

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Pakistan is a responsible state. Being a nuclear power, we are cautious in

reaction.” Islamabad put its naval forces on alert in response to the re-
deployment of India’s warships. Equally, its air force confirmed reports of
“increased vigilance” on its part.31
Though limping along during its last days, the Bush administration
strongly advised the quarrelling neighbors to cool it. Its counsel fell
on receptive ears. “We are not planning any military action,” said the
Indian defense minister, Arackaparambil Kurien Antony, on December
16. “At the same time, unless Pakistan takes actions against those terrorists
who are operating in their soil against India, and also against all those
who are behind this Mumbai terrorist attack, things will not be normal.”32
Mukherjee qualified Antony’s statement a week later. He explained
that India had not ruled out military operations against terrorists in Pa-
kistan if its government failed to curb those based on its own soil. “If you
ask about military conflict, nobody will say about it in the media. [But]
we have kept our options open.”33
On December 16 Islamabad placed its air force on high alert and
conducted aerial surveillance of all its sensitive sites likely to be targeted
by India. It also mobilized its ground troops along the LoC and the inter-
national border to protect vital points. To Washington’s distress, it moved
a fifth of its troops deployed in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghan
border to its frontier with India. In response, Delhi redeployed its sol-
diers along the Pakistani border. This led Washington to resort to public
diplomacy and urged increased cooperation between the sparring nations
in investigating the Mumbai attacks, which India squarely blamed on
Pakistan-based militants.34
“I propose to India to de-activate forward air bases,” said Qureshi
on December 30. “I also propose to India to re-locate its ground forces
to peace time positions. These measures will reduce tension and we will
move forward in a positive way.” Mukherjee referred to the Indian ar-
my’s statement that its movements were part of its “normal winter ex-
ercise.” As for his own stance, he said, “From day one I am saying this
is not an India-Pakistan issue. This is an attack perpetrated by elements
emanating from the land of Pakistan, and Pakistan government should
take action.”35
Defying overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Islamabad had dis-
owned the Pakistani nationality of Ajmal Amir Kasab for weeks. Then on
January 7 it conceded that he was a Pakistani national and went on to file
a case against him. This pacified Indians to some extent.

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A week later India’s COAS, General Deepak Kapoor, said that he

considered war “the last resort.” In response Gilani argued that with In-
dia and Pakistan being nuclear powers, there was no possibility of war
between them. He explained to his compatriots that Indian leaders were
issuing strong statements to satisfy outraged public opinion at home.36
Though the two neighbors once again avoided hot war, the process of
normalization of relations went into a deep freeze following the Mumbai
outrage. For several weeks they communicated with each other on differ-
ent wavelengths. At the root of this noncommunication was Pakistan’s
outright denial of any involvement even by nonstate agents operating
on its soil. Its leaders feared that if they conceded any link between their
country and the Mumbai attacks in the emotionally charged atmosphere
prevailing at the UN Security Council after 26/11, the Council would im-
pose sanctions on Pakistan. So they dragged their feet to let passions cool.
They took ten long weeks to even confirm Kasab’s Pakistani nationality.
But by sticking to the denial mode for so long, Pakistani officials
stoked tensions between Delhi and Islamabad; they kept their respective
air forces and navies on high alert. India went on complaining bitterly that
Pakistan was not doing enough to arrest those behind the attacks, despite
the voluminous evidence it had received from India.
The situation suddenly eased on February 12, 2009. “Some part of the
conspiracy [to mount the Mumbai attacks] has taken place in Pakistan,”
conceded Pakistani’s interior minister, Rehman Malik. He added that
eight suspects from the banned LeT had been detained. “We have lodged
an FIR [first information report by police] into the case.”37
Even though disappointed that the suspects’ list did not include Hafiz
Muhammad Saeed, the cofounder of the LeT, the Indians were gratified
that finally they had succeeded in getting the Pakistanis on the same page
with them. Malik had owned up to only “part” of the conspiracy relating
to Pakistan, chiefly to validate Islamabad’s claim that the plotters had the
active cooperation of some Indian Muslims, who among other things had
secured SIM cards for the terrorists’ mobile phones.

A GLACIAL THAW

By the time the Pakistani authorities brought the case for trial, it was
April. The next month the Congress Party–led coalition in Delhi led by
Manmohan Singh was reelected. On June 24 Singh met President Zardari

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on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in

Yekaterinburg, Russia. They decided to overcome the factors holding up
the “composite dialogue” between their countries.
On the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Sharm-el-
Sheikh, Egypt, Singh met Gilani on July 16. “Prime Minister Gilani
assured that Pakistan will do everything in its power in this regard [of
combating terrorism],” read their joint communiqué. “He said that Paki-
stan had provided an updated status dossier on the investigations of the
Mumbai attacks and had sought additional information/evidence.” After
stating that “the two countries will share real time, credible and actionable
information on any future terrorist threats,” the communiqué added that
“Prime Minister Gilani mentioned that Pakistan has some information
on threats in Baluchistan and other areas.” Lastly, both leaders recognized
that “action on terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue
process and these should not be bracketed. Prime Minister Singh said
that India was ready to discuss all issues with Pakistan, including all out-
standing issues.”38
Different interpretations of the statement followed. In Islamabad, the
de-linking of action on terrorism from the composite dialogue was hailed
as a diplomatic victory for Pakistan, eager to sidestep the fallout from the
Mumbai episode. Also, the Pakistani media interpreted the mere mention
of Baluchistan in the joint communiqué as evidence of India’s clandes-
tine assistance to Baluchi insurgents battling Islamabad in their quest for
independence.
In Delhi, Singh was taken to task by the opposition Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP). Decrying the joint communiqué as “surrender” by India, and
fulminating at the reference to Baluchistan in the document, it staged
a walkout from Parliament. In reply, Singh argued on July 30 that de-
linking the composite dialogue from action by Pakistan against terror-
ism strengthened India’s commitment, and that “meaningful process of
engagement cannot move forward unless and until Pakistan takes mea-
sures to control terrorism.” He added, “When I spoke to Prime Minister
Gilani about terrorism from Pakistan, he mentioned to me that many
Pakistanis thought that India meddled in Baluchistan. I told him that
we have no interest in destabilizing Pakistan. . . . If Pakistan has any
evidence . . . we are willing to look at it because we have nothing to hide.”
Rounding off his argument, he said, “Unless we want to go to war with
Pakistan, dialogue is the only way out but we should do so on the basis
of trust but verify.”39

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The diametrically opposite interpretations of the Singh-Gilani state-

ment by the politicians and press of India and Pakistan illustrated the
wide chasm that persisted between their respective popular perceptions.
All the same, in August, Delhi provided further evidence on the in-
volvement of Saeed in the 26/11 outrage. In response, following their
meeting in New York during the UN General Assembly session in Sep-
tember, Qureshi assured the Indian foreign minister Somanahalli Mal-
laiah Krishna of “doing everything” to bring to justice the perpetrators of
the Mumbai attacks.
Both Delhi and Islamabad were pressured by President Barack
Obama’s administration to resume the peace process. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton considered reconciliation between India and Pakistan es-
sential to achieving Washington’s overarching aim of turning war-ravaged
Afghanistan into a stable, democratic political entity. Despite opposition
at home, Singh bit the bullet and initiated talks at the highest bureaucratic
level of foreign secretary. Pakistani officials gloated that “India had been
brought to its knees.” In return, India threatened to cancel the talks if
Islamabad did not cease “grandstanding.”
And yet the differences in perception persisted. Whereas Delhi in-
sisted that these were to be “talks about talks,” with one item on the
agenda—terrorism—the Pakistanis said they wanted to discuss several
issues, including Kashmir.40
India’s Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart, Salman Bashir,
held a four-hour session in New Delhi on February 25, 2010. Bashir
stressed that Pakistan was a victim, not a sponsor, of terrorism. More
than five thousand Pakistanis had been killed and nearly thirteen thou-
sand injured in terrorist attacks there since 2008. He accused India of
supporting “militants and terrorists” in Afghanistan, which endangered
the security of Pakistan.41
On her part, Rao presented Bashir with three dossiers on fifty senior
Islamist militants based in Pakistan and urged greater efforts by Islam-
abad to hunt for the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attacks. She
expressed her frustration that the LeT’s Saeed was a free man. In early
June 2009 the Lahore High Court had declared his detention unconsti-
tutional and ordered his release. A month later the Pakistani government
appealed this decision. It lost. On October 12 the Lahore High Court
quashed all cases against Saeed and set him free. The court also ruled
that the JuD was not a banned organization and could work freely in
Pakistan.42

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Following the well-worn pattern, the leaders of India and Pakistan

used a summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooper-
ation (SAARC) to meet informally on the sidelines. At this regional
conference in Thimphu, Bhutan, at the end of April, Singh had an hour-
long, one-on-one conversation with Gilani. No joint statement ensued,
but it was reliably learned that they decided that their foreign ministers
should work out the ‘‘methodology’’ to carry forward the composite di-
alogue process.43
Pakistan listed its steps to curb the activities of the banned JuD. “We
have frozen 16 bank accounts of Jamaat ud Dawa, blocked six websites,
cancelled all arms licenses issued to the outfit, detained 71 activists, placed
the names of 64 activists on the Exit Control List, put over 63 madrassas
of the JuD under government control and confiscated all its publications
and papers,” said Interior Minister Malik in early May. The government
had also appealed to the Supreme Court over the release of Saeed and
awaited its verdict.44 On May 26 the Supreme Court dismissed the pros-
ecutor’s case and upheld the lower court’s decision to release Saeed.
In June India’s home minister Palaniappian Chidambaram met Ma-
lik in Islamabad on the margins of the SAARC interior ministers’ meet-
ing. While providing further leads on the Mumbai attacks, he expressed
his dissatisfaction at the glacial pace of the trial of the seven suspects
by an antiterrorism court in Rawalpindi. He noted that on May 9 the
defense lawyers filed an application in which they argued that the gov-
ernment was resorting to various tactics to delay the trial. They referred
to its application to the Indian authorities seeking access to Kasab. It
was bound to be rejected because on May 6 Kasab had been found guilty
of eighty-six charges and given capital punishment. According to the
Article 403 of Pakistan’s Code of Criminal Procedure and Article 13 of
its constitution, a person once convicted or acquitted cannot be tried for
the same offense again.45
At the end of a twenty-five-minute telephone conversation between
him and Krishna on how to narrow the “trust deficit,” the Pakistani for-
eign minister Qureshi invited Krishna to Islamabad. But any goodwill
created so far evaporated following a revelation by India’s home secretary,
Gopal Krishna Pillai, on the eve of Krishna’s departure on July 14. It was
based on the full confession made by David Coleman Headley in May
2010 as part of his plea bargain to be spared capital punishment after his
arrest in Chicago in October 2009. In June he spent thirty-four hours
talking to Indian investigators in the presence of FBI agents. Pillai said

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 MANMOHAN SINGH’S CHANGING INTERLOCUTORS

that fresh evidence provided by Headley showed that the ISI and Saeed
played a “much more significant” role in planning and executing the 26/11
terrorist attack than was known before.46 (In October India released a
109-page summary of David Coleman Headley’s confession.)
Though Krishna went through his scheduled meetings, including the
one with Qureshi—joined by Interior Minister Malik, who summarily
dismissed Headley as “an unreliable witness”—the chance of any dimi-
nution in mutual trust deficit had practically vanished. At the joint press
conference Krishna looked on stony-faced as Qureshi said that besides
terrorism the two delegations had discussed Kashmir, Sir Creek, and Si-
achen Glacier. He complimented this by mentioning Pakistan’s assurance
that it would seriously follow up the leads given to it earlier by Chidam-
baram.47 From Delhi’s perspective, however, the latest development was
nothing more than the continuation of “talks about talks.”
Pakistan decided to call India’s bluff that no composite dialogue
would be resumed until and unless there was a substantive delivery on
26/11 and cross-border terrorism. All it had to do was to spin out the trial
of the seven suspects, which started in April 2009 and went through four
changes of judge. The ploy worked. The Indian government concluded
that it could not just continue “nonengagement,” and that it needed to
engage with Pakistan in the hope that it would yield the result that refusal
to talk did not. It put that policy into practice at the foreign secretaries’
meeting in Thimphu on February 6, 2011.
However, discernible movement did not occur until March 27. On
that day Singh invited Gilani to witness the India-Pakistan World Cup
semifinal cricket match in Mohali, a small town in Punjab a few miles
from the Pakistan border, on March 30. Gilani agreed. And in a major
confidence-building gesture, his government decided to let Indian inves-
tigators travel to Pakistan to probe the Mumbai attacks.
On March 30 security was tight in Mohali. Indian army helicopters
and antiaircraft guns imposed a no-fly zone over the Mohali stadium to
ward off any potential attack by militants. Singh and Gilani spent eight
hours watching a cricket match. The broad “agenda,” according to Rao,
was to “understand each other better, resolve outstanding issues and at
the core of the dialogue . . . normalize relations.”48 India won, scoring 260
runs for 9 wickets, with Pakistan all out at 231.
A new round of talks ensued between foreign secretaries. On June 24,
at long last, Pakistan agreed to include nonstate actors and safe havens for
terrorists as part of the terrorist infrastructure to be addressed.49

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A quid pro quo followed. After deliberations with his new Pakistani
counterpart, Hina Rabbani Khar, on July 27 in New Delhi, Krishna im-
plicitly acknowledged participating in a “composite dialogue” with Pa-
kistan. Their joint communiqué expressed satisfaction at the holding of
meetings on counterterrorism (including progress on the Mumbai trials)
and narcotics control, as well as such other issues as economic coopera-
tion, Siachen Glacier, and above all the Kashmir dispute. They settled for
continued discussions, in a purposeful manner, with a view to finding a
peaceful solution by narrowing divergences and building convergences.
They agreed on measures to liberalize cross-LoC trade and travel.50
This was the first substantial foreign ministers’ meeting after the No-
vember 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. And they were right to define it
as a foundation for a “new era” in bilateral links.

SIGNS OF BUDDING GOODWILL

A dramatic illustration of the improved relations came on October 23.

An Indian military helicopter with a colonel and two majors on board
lost its bearings in bad weather and strayed twelve miles into Pakistani
Kashmir from its base in the India-controlled region. The mishap had the
potential of spiraling into a major spat requiring high-level political in-
tervention. Instead, Pakistan’s military escorted the intruding aircraft after
ordering it to land, questioned the crew politely, and discovered nothing
more than the standard engineering equipment aboard. This information
was conveyed to the highest military authority in Islamabad. It activated
the hotline to Delhi. As a result, the Indian crew was released, and their
helicopter was refueled. Within five hours it was back at its base.51
A week later Islamabad announced its intention to normalize com-
mercial ties with India by extending it most-favored-nation status
(MFN)—meaning that it was ready to give India a trade advantage by
offering low tariffs—by January 1, 2013, thus reciprocating Delhi’s gesture
dating back to 1996. This was a major concession by Islamabad—up to
that point it had insisted that improvement in trade relations and people-
to-people contacts should come only after an amicable resolution of the
Kashmir dispute.
With relations thawing slightly, Singh and Gilani had an hour-long
meeting on the margins of the SAARC summit in Addu City, Maldives,
on November 10. They discussed terrorism, trade, and the divided territory

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of Kashmir. “The time has come to write a new chapter in the history of
our relationship,” Singh said, standing beside Gilani at a joint press con-
ference. Foreign Minister Khar was realistic. “We have many, many long
miles to move ahead still,” she said.52
During her visit to Delhi on April 3, 2012, US undersecretary of
state Wendy Sherman told the Indians that Washington had placed a
$10 million bounty on the capture of Saeed for his alleged role in the
2008 Mumbai attacks.53 Only three other extremists, including Taliban
leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, carried such a staggering figure with
their seizure.
A defiant Saeed held a press conference in a hotel just across the street
from the headquarters of Pakistan’s Army in Rawalpindi—a symbolic ges-
ture suggesting that his close ties with the ISI remained intact. “I am liv-
ing my life in the open and the US can contact me whenever they want.”
The Americans knew where he was, he added. “This is a laughable, absurd
announcement. . . . Here I am in front of everyone, not hiding in a cave.”54
During a heated debate in the National Assembly on the subject,
Gilani warned that the American reward was a “negative message” and
would “further widen the trust deficit” between Washington and Islam-
abad. He described Saeed as “a domestic matter.” Opposition MPs called
the award “mind boggling” and “ridiculous.” Outside Parliament, right-
wing lawyers in Lahore pointed out that courts in Pakistan had cleared
him of all charges.55
The media in Pakistan and India were abuzz with the implications
of the bounty on Saeed, as President Zardari prepared for a private pil-
grimage to the shrine of the Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in
Ajmer, Rajasthan, on April 8. He had planned this trip much earlier to
fulfill a mannat,56 or vow, he had made during his long incarceration on
corruption charges. He was invited to lunch in Delhi by Premier Singh,
and accepted.
On the eve of his departure for India, he chatted with reporters.
“My stance on Saeed is not different from that of my government,” he
told them. “My visit to India is of a religious nature and I do not think
Manmohan Singh will make me sit [and discuss only] this issue.” 57
Indian officials tried to downplay the luncheon reception for Zardari,
at which the wide-ranging cuisine included the Kashmiri delicacy of
Goshtaba, meatballs in curd-based curry. But the significance of the
first visit by the Pakistani president to India in seven years was hard to
underestimate.

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Further news of a warming of relations came on April 13. On that day

the trade ministers of India and Pakistan inaugurated an enlarged border
commercial terminal at Wagah with a capacity to handle six hundred
trucks a day. This was done to help bolster bilateral trade, which had risen
to $2.6 billion a year, up from $300 million in 2004. Simultaneously, India
decided to lift its ban on foreign direct investment by Pakistan.58
Singh and Zardari met again on the margins of the Non-Aligned
Movement summit in Tehran on August 30, 2012. “We have covered
a lot of ground but we still have to go a long way,” remarked Zardari at
the joint press conference. He added that Pakistan was keenly looking
forward to a visit by Premier Singh, born in the Pakistani Punjab village
of Gah, which in his view was “long overdue.” But the Indian leader was
coy, covering himself in the diplomatic language of traveling to Islamabad
at the “appropriate time.” Briefing the Indian media, his foreign secretary,
Ranjan Mathai, said: “Prime Minister Singh pressed for an expeditious
conclusion of the 26/11 trial and said action taken in this sphere would
be a major confidence building measure.” It would help to bridge the trust
deficit and build public support for the kind of relationship India would
like to see between the two nations, he added.59
In short, Delhi’s bottom line had not changed. There would be no
“business as usual” until and unless Pakistan brought to justice the perpe-
trators of the Mumbai attack.
On the eve of his departure for Islamabad for the third round of high-
level talks on September 8, Krishna stressed the same point in an exclusive
interview to the Press Trust of India. Given the numerous adjournments
of the case, the Indians’ patience was running thin. A frustrated Singh
referred to “increased attempts by militants to cross the LoC.” In other
words, India continued to treat terrorism as the number one item on the
agenda. All the same, the two governments signed a new visa regime.
Among other changes, the agreement exempted travelers over sixty-five,
children under twelve, and businessmen from reporting to the police
during their travels.60
On the other hand, yielding to the pressure of the Islamist groups
and the farm lobby, the Pakistani government failed to keep its promise
of granting India MFN status by December 31, 2012. And the New Year
started with a sudden rise in tension in Kashmir. Minor incidents across
the LoC were commonplace; they did not threaten the cease-fire signed
in November 2003. The eighty-odd instances of minor technical viola-
tions by both sides in 2012 were considered routine.

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In the violence that erupted during January 6–8 near Mendhar, 140
miles north of Jammu, the killing of one Pakistani soldier by the Indians
allegedly in retaliation for the Pakistanis’ cease-fire violations led to the
further killing of two Indian troops. One of them, Lance Naik Hem-
raj, was beheaded by a cross-border raiding party. “After this barbaric act
there cannot be business as usual with Pakistan,” declared Singh. “What
happened at the LoC is unacceptable; those who are responsible should
be brought to book.” In reply Pakistan’s foreign minister Khar said, “We
have ordered an independent investigation, but we are offering more, let
a third party investigate the issue.” India did not take up her off er. “It
[the beheading] was stage-managed and pre-planned,” claimed the Indian
COAS, General Bikram Singh. “India reserves its right to retaliate at the
time and place of its choice. The important thing now is to ensure that
morale among commanders in Kashmir remains high.”61
Following this saber rattling, however, India’s director general of
Military Operations, Lieutenant General Vinod Bhatia, conferred with
his Pakistani counterpart. They reached an understanding to lower the
temperature.
Soon after, popular attention in South Asia turned to the impending
general election in Pakistan. To ensure a level playing field, Mir Hazar
Khan Khoso, a retired judge, was sworn in as the caretaker prime minister
on March 25, 2013.

THE RETURN OF NAWAZ SHARIF

In the National Assembly poll held on May 11, the Pakistan Muslim
League (N), led by Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, a pro-business conserva-
tive, won 166 seats, reducing the incumbent PPP to a fraction of its previ-
ous size. With 18 independent members of the National Assembly joining
the PML (N), Sharif secured a comfortable majority in the 374-strong
chamber. Having survived all criminal convictions (subsequently over-
turned), six months in jail during the dictatorship of Musharraf, and seven
years of exile in Saudi Arabia—where, given a government loan, he set up
a steel plant—and Britain, he was back at the helm at home.
Singh congratulated him and his party on their “emphatic victory,”
hoping to work with him to chart “a new course for the relationship”
between their countries. Surprisingly, the BJP president, Rajnath Singh,
followed Prime Minister Singh’s example. “Mr. Sharif ’s statements on

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rebuilding relations with India are a positive sign,” he remarked. Referring

to Sharif ’s statement “to pick up the pieces of 1999 peace process,” he
added that “keeping in view our past experiences with Pakistan, the BJP
views Mr. Sharif ’s statements with cautious optimism.”62
Sharif was sworn in as prime minister on June 5, after he had secured
a record 244 votes in the National Assembly. He set another record by
becoming the first prime minister in his country’s sixty-five-year history
to take over from an elected government that served a full five-year term,
an unprecedented achievement. “The democratic transition of government
in Pakistan is a welcome development,” noted the BJP leader.63
Such bonhomie did not last long, thanks to the tit-for-tat violence
that erupted again at the LoC at the end of July. Indian soldiers killed
four men from Pakistani Kashmir, alleging that they were infi ltrators.
This claim ran contrary to the fact that among them they had only one
assault rifle and no grenades or communications equipment. Islamabad
contended that they were local peasants who in the process of picking
herbs had strayed close to the LoC when they were abducted by the
Indians.
These killings set off a fresh round of bloodletting. Some analysts be-
lieved that such attacks were deliberately orchestrated by elements within
the Indian and Pakistani forces opposed to rapprochement between their
governments.
Accusations and counteraccusations were hurled when India said five
of its soldiers guarding the LoC were killed on the night of August 6. On
August 7 hundreds of Indian Youth Congress activists staged a violent
protest near the Pakistani high commission in Delhi. There were anti-
Pakistan demonstrations in other major Indian cities. Noting the street
uproar, Defense Minister Antony told Parliament that “specialist troops of
the Pakistan army were involved in this attack,” thus directly implicating
the government. “We all know that nothing happens from the Pakistani
side of the Pakistan Line of Control without support, assistance, facilita-
tion and often, direct involvement of the Pakistan army.”64
In Islamabad, addressing government officials, Sharif expressed “his
sadness over the recent incidents,” and added, “It is incumbent upon the
leadership of both sides not to allow the situation to drift and to take steps
to improve the atmosphere.”65 Later that month, in his interview with
David Blair and David Munk of the Daily Telegraph of London, Sharif
said, “We didn’t have any India-bashing slogans in the elections. There
have been such slogans in the past—10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years

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ago—but not now. In fact, I very clearly spoke about good relations with
India even before the elections were happening.”66
Sharif kept up this theme when he addressed the UN General As-
sembly on September 27. “We stand ready to re-engage with India in a
substantive and purposeful dialogue,” he declared. “We can build on the
Lahore Accord signed in 1999, which contained a road map for the reso-
lution of our differences through peaceful negotiations. I am committed to
working for a peaceful and economically prosperous region. This is what
our people want and this is what I have long aspired for.”67
By contrast, the following day Manmohan Singh lashed out at Pa-
kistan in his address to the Assembly: “State-sponsored cross-border
terrorism is of particular concern to India, also on account of the fact that
the epicenter of terrorism in our region is located in our neighborhood
in Pakistan.” Expressing his willingness to peacefully resolve all issues,
including Kashmir, with Pakistan, he said, “However, for progress to be
made, it is imperative that the territory of Pakistan and the areas under its
control are not utilized for aiding and abetting terrorism directed against
India. It is equally important that the terrorist machinery that draws its
sustenance from Pakistan be shut down.”68
All the same, as agreed before, Singh and Sharif had an hour-long
meeting over breakfast at a New York Hotel on September 29. Militants’
attacks on a police station and an army base in Indian Kashmir on Sep-
tember 26, resulting in thirteen deaths, were designed to derail the prime
ministers’ meeting but failed in their political objective. The leaders agreed
that they needed to stop the recent spate of attacks in the Kashmir region
in order for peace talks to advance. They instructed their senior military
commanders to find a way to shore up the LoC.69
Two days earlier, Singh had had a luncheon meeting with Presi-
dent Obama at the White House. “They reaffirmed their commitment
to eliminating terrorist safe havens and infrastructure, and disrupt-
ing terrorist networks including Al Qaida and Lashkar-e Taiba,” read
their joint communiqué. “The Leaders called for Pakistan to work to-
ward bringing the perpetrators of November 2008 Mumbai attacks to
justice.”70
Despite repeated urgings by Delhi to speed up the trial of the sus-
pects involved in the Mumbai attacks, the case in the antiterrorism court
of Judge Malik Muhammad Akram in Islamabad had moved at a snail’s
pace for a variety of reasons, technical and others. In May 21013 the
chief prosecutor, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, was gunned down by suspected

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militants in Islamabad, where the case had been transferred from Rawal-
pindi, whose Adiala jail held the suspects.
In February 2014, Sartaj Aziz, advisor to Sharif on national security
and foreign affairs, assured India’s foreign minister, Salman Khurshid, that
a verdict was likely in a couple of months.71 His prediction proved grossly
optimistic. On March 3 in an attack on a district court in Islamabad, ter-
rorists killed twelve people, including two judges. The latest judge on the
case, Atiqur Rehman, demanded deployment of commandos for his secu-
rity. When the government refused, he stopped his weekly trips to Adiala
jail. The case came to a virtual halt. So far the court had cross-examined
only thirty-two of the sixty prosecution witnesses.72
In the final analysis the 2008 Mumbai carnage was linked to the un-
resolved Indo-Pakistani dispute about Kashmir, which was grounded in
the partition of the subcontinent. But there was another rivalry between
the twin states that originated with the division: Afghanistan. As long as
Britain ruled the Indian subcontinent as part of its empire, Afghanistan
served as a buffer between its most prized colony and Russia, governed
first by the czars and then by the Bolsheviks. The partition of British India
wrought a radical geopolitical change.

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Competing for Kabul

The historic link between the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan dates
to the reign of Emperor Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur. A man of mid-
dle stature, stout, fleshy faced, with a scanty beard, Babur founded the
Mughal Empire in the subcontinent in 1526. Before capturing the Delhi
Sultanate he had ruled the Domain of Kabul—today’s eastern and south-
ern Afghanistan—for twenty-one years. And honoring his wish, his suc-
cessor in Agra transported his corpse to Kabul for burial a decade after
his death in 1530. His enclosed tomb sits at the top of a hill transformed
into a walled and terraced garden, called Bagh-e Babur, which is now a
popular picnic site.
This shared history shattered with the partition of British India, with
Pakistan sharing its western frontier with Afghanistan. The birth of Paki-
stan revived an old dispute about the Durand Line, which in 1893 defined
the border between British India and Afghanistan, with all the passes of
the Suleiman Mountains placed under British jurisdiction. It argued that
Pakistan was not a successor state to Britain but a new state carved out
of British India. Therefore whatever treaty rights issued from the Durand
Agreement expired. Pakistan’s governor-general Muhammad Ali Jinnah
rejected this argument summarily.
The other contending issue was the movement for creating inde-
pendent Pashtunistan out of parts of North-West Frontier Province
(later Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Federally Administered Tribal Agen-
cies (FATA), forming one-fifth of West Pakistan. Kabul supported this
campaign, which Pakistan derided as “an Afghan stunt.” Afghanistan’s

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animus toward Pakistan was so strong that it cast the only negative vote
on the newborn state’s admission to the United Nations on September
30, 1947.1
Noting the discontent among the Pashtun tribes along the Afghan-
Pakistan border, who had enjoyed semiautonomous status under the Brit-
ish, Jinnah conducted talks with their leaders to work out a new modus
vivendi. These failed. Tensions remained high. In June 1949 Pakistan’s
planes attacked an Afghan village. Though the government apologized,
periodic border incidents continued.
Animosity toward Pakistan led Afghanistan and India to sign a Treaty
of Friendship in January 1950. It alluded to “the ancient ties which have
existed between the two countries for centuries.” Indian scholars familiar
with the Arthashastra (Sanskrit: literally, text on wealth), a manual on
statecraft by Chankaya Kautilya around 300 bce, approvingly quoted his
axiom: “A ruler with contiguous territory is a rival. The ruler next to the
adjoining is to be deemed a friend.”
In modern times, however, governing a landlocked country sharing a
long frontier with Pakistan limited the area of maneuver for Afghan king
Muhammad Zahir Shah. Geography trumped international politics. The
Afghan government signed the Transit Trade Agreement with Pakistan
in late 1950. It won Afghanistan the right to import duty-free goods
through Karachi.
After founding the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)
with Thailand and the Philippines in September 1954, Pakistan succeeded
in getting SEATO to endorse the Durand Line. This angered Kabul. In
March 1955 it cautioned the Pakistani government not to include the
Pashtun area into the proposed single unit of West Pakistan. Its warning
was ignored.
Six years later, after the Pakistani army carried out a major offensive
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in its turbulent tribal belt, Afghanistan protested. On August 22 Pakistan

shut its consulates in Afghanistan and demanded that Kabul should do
the same. It refused. Pakistan closed its border with Afghanistan and cut
diplomatic links with it.
The loss of its concomitant commercial ties with Pakistan compelled
Afghanistan to strengthen its trade links with the Soviet Union, three of
whose constituents—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan—abutted
Afghanistan. This persuaded Pakistan to restore its ties with its western
neighbor. Their reconciliation happened in May 1963. In 1965 they signed
a fresh Transit Trade Agreement, which restored the situation before the

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latest spat. Nonetheless, Kabul-Moscow trade would expand to the extent

that by the mid-1970s Afghanistan’s commerce with the Soviet Union
would account for nearly half of its foreign trade.

AFGHANISTAN LOOMS LARGE IN POST-1971 PAKISTAN

The loss of the eastern wing of Pakistan traumatized the leaders in Islam-
abad. They vowed to protect the remaining wing with utmost vigilance
from the malevolent designs of India, whose military planners no longer
had to have a strategy for combating Pakistan on two fronts. With the
generals in Delhi now free to focus on a single front, it became incumbent
on their Pakistani rivals to ensure active cooperation of Kabul in case of
war with Delhi. The long, porous Afghan-Pakistan border offered an es-
cape route for Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders as well as its troops
and war materiel. Having a friendly government in Afghanistan, ruled by
royals since 1747, became an absolute necessity.
But, unexpectedly, the situation in Kabul underwent a sea change. In
July 1973 Prime Minister General Muhammad Daoud Khan overthrew
his cousin Zahir Shah and declared Afghanistan a republic. To consol-
idate his power he revived the issue of Pashtunistan with Pakistan. His
officers started training twelve thousand irredentist Pashtun and Baluch
volunteers to harass Pakistan’s army. In return, Pakistani prime minister
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto sponsored an unsuccessful anti–Daoud Khan coup
in July 1975. Mediation by Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran eased
tensions by 1977. But normal relations between Kabul and Islamabad
were disrupted in April 1978, when Marxist military officers mounted a
coup against Daoud Khan, who was assassinated. They renamed the coun-
try the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).
During these tumultuous events, India was a bystander. It recognized
the DRA, whereas Pakistan did not. Following the Kremlin’s military
intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, Delhi continued to have
cordial relations with the government in Kabul. Indeed, given its 1971
Friendship and Cooperation Treaty with Moscow, it increased its stake
in Afghanistan. It cooperated with Kabul in industrial, irrigation, and
hydroelectric projects. In the mid-1980s it emerged as the single largest
donor to Afghanistan.2 In 1988, for instance, India-based WAPCOS Ltd
(Water and Power Consultancy Services) started to reconstruct the Salma
Dam on the Hari River in Herat province.

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Contrary was the case with Pakistan. It became the frontline state in
Washington’s drive to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. After the with-
drawal of Soviet troops in February 1989, to the chagrin of Islamabad,
the government of the leftist Muhammad Najibullah in Kabul did not
fall. India stood by Najibullah until he was killed by the victorious Isla-
mist mujahedin in April 1992. It was to Delhi that he had dispatched his
family on the eve of the fall of his regime. And it was his failure to catch
a flight to the Indian capital at the last minute that led to his mutilation
and murder at the hands of the mujahedin.
During the civil war that erupted in Afghanistan along ethnic lines
after the spring of 1992, Pakistan played an active role in conciliating
the warring parties. Its efforts failed. It therefore decided to back a new
faction, called the Taliban, beginning in 1994. With its active economic
and military assistance, the Taliban started to gain control of Afghanistan
gradually. It captured Kabul on September 26, 1996. On the eve of its
triumphant storming of the Afghan capital, India closed its embassy. In
marked contrast, jubilant Pakistan prepared to open its embassy in Kabul.
Islamabad worked hard to gain the Taliban regime diplomatic rec-
ognition. The next five years marked the zenith of its influence in Af-
ghanistan, with the Taliban controlling 95 percent of the country. Yet
the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar refused to ac-
cept the Durand Line, arguing that “between the [Islamic] Umma [world
community] there could be no borders.”3
In sharp contrast, India backed the Northern Alliance (NA), led by
Ahmad Shah Masoud, an ethnic Tajik, which was formed to oppose the
Taliban by all means. Controlling a tiny area in northern Afghanistan,
it maintained its headquarters in the town of Khwaja Bahuddin with a
secure base in the adjoining Tajikistan.
Russian and Iran were the other two major backers of the NA. Though
the Kremlin supplied heavy weapons and helicopters to the NA through
Tajikistan, it respected the NA’s opposition to allowing the presence of
Russians among its militiamen, who had spent years fighting the Soviets
in Afghanistan.
That created an opening for the Indians, who had been using Soviet-
made military hardware for decades. India dispatched technicians to re-
pair and maintain the NA’s Soviet-made weapons. It also provided the
NA with arms and other war materiel as well as military advisers. Its
Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) intelligence agency sought the per-
mission of Tajikistan to use Ayni Air Base near its capital, Dushanbe,

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and Farkhor Air Base, eighty-one miles southeast of Dushanbe, to ferry

military equipment to the NA; service its tanks, helicopters, and artillery
guns; and collect intelligence. It succeeded, but only after Moscow inter-
vened on its behalf.4
Over the years the Indian armed forces gradually upgraded the Ayni
and Farkhor Air Bases, and set up a secret field hospital at Farkhor to
treat the NA’s fighters. The hospital received its most prominent patient,
Masoud, on September 9, 2001, when he was ferried in by helicopter with
shrapnel lodged deep into his brain. At the NA headquarters in Khwaja
Bahuddin, he had been taping a TV interview with two Moroccans,
Karim Taizani and Bakem Bakkali, posing as journalists with Belgian
passports, when Bakkali triggered explosives attached to the videotape as
well as to Taizani’s body. He died instantly while Bakkali was killed by
Masoud’s bodyguards. Masoud breathed his last at the Indian-run field
hospital a few hours after his arrival.5
Two days later came the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York
and Washington. These outrages orchestrated by Al Qaida leader Osama
bin Laden from Afghanistan led President Bush to declare a global
“war on terror.” India backed the campaign. Pakistani president Pervez
Musharraf prevaricated. But facing the prospect of Pakistan being brack-
eted with the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, he cut his ties with the Taliban
and cooperated with the United States. Later events would show, however,
that Musharraf ’s U-turn on the Taliban was in essence a temporary ad-
justment to regain Washington’s trust and support.6
Following the eight-week-long US-led Operation Enduring Free-
dom, launched on October 7, 2001, which overthrew the Taliban regime,
Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, was named Afghanistan’s interim pres-
ident by an International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany,
on December 5.

POST-TALIBAN AFGHANISTAN

The fourth son of Abdul Ahad Karzai, a politician and leader of the
Popalzai tribe, Hamid graduated from high school in Kabul in 1976 at
the age of nineteen. He was then accepted as an exchange student by the
Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla, India. He obtained his master’s
degree in International Relations and Political Science in 1983.7 During
his seven years in India, he acquired fluency in Urdu/Hindi and became

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addicted to North Indian cuisine and Bollywood movies. Three decades

later, during an interview with a British historian, he was reported to be
moved “almost to tears” while recalling “the sound of monsoon rain hit-
ting the tin roof of his student lodgings [in Shimla] and the sight of the
beautiful cloud formations drifting before his windows.”8
He then traveled to Pakistan and joined the mujahedin fighters re-
sisting the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. In 1985, he trav-
eled to Lille, France, to attend a three-month journalism course. When
he returned to Peshawar, he served as deputy director of the political
office of the National Liberation Front of Afghanistan, a traditional,
pro-monarchist religious body, led by Professor Sibghatullah Mujadidi.
When the mujahedin government was established in Kabul in 1992,
Karzai was appointed deputy foreign minister. Two years later, when the
civil war between the various mujahedin groups started, he resigned from
his post and began to work actively for convening a national Loya Jirga
(Pashto: Grand Council). In August 1999, his father, who had been orga-
nizing anti-Taliban resistance from his base in Quetta, was assassinated by
Taliban agents and their Pakistani backers. He then took over the leader-
ship of the Popalzai tribe and organized its affairs from a refugee camp in
Pakistan. At the time of the Pentagon’s war on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan,
he was inside the country trying to bolster anti-Taliban resistance.
On December 22, 2001, both India and Pakistan sent their foreign
ministers to Kabul to witness the handover of power by President Burha-
nuddin Rabbani, a Tajik leader of the NA, to Karzai. The next day India’s
foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, reopened the Indian embassy in Kabul
and announced that the Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-e
Sharif, and Herat would reopen in “the next few months.”9 These missions
were meant to help build contacts with local leaders, facilitate trade and
investment, and acquire better understanding of regional developments.
Also, the state-run Air India assisted the Karzai government in returning
the ailing Ariana Afghan Airlines to a healthy state by donating a few
aircraft and helping it relaunch its international service suspended during
Taliban rule.
Pakistan reopened its embassy in Kabul a month later. It and India
each pledged $100 million in aid to Afghanistan at a January 2002 donors’
conference. But given its earlier experience in developing Afghanistan’s
infrastructure, India soon outpaced Pakistan in this race. Much to Islam-
abad’s frustration, an Indian company won the contract to build a road
from the border town of Spin Boldak to Kandahar.

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Violating its promise to President Musharraf not to deal with the NA,
the Bush administration oversaw the NA’s cooption in the administration
of Karzai, much to the delight of Delhi.
With seven-eighths of the UN-sponsored Loya Jirga delegates voting
for Karzai in June 2002, he had his interim presidency confirmed. The In-
dians were joyous to see an Indophile like Karzai confirmed as president.
He envisaged India, a stable, comparatively well-developed democracy, as
an ideal partner for his underdeveloped, struggling country. His twenty-
nine-strong cabinet maintained the status quo, with General Muham-
mad Qasim Fahim, a Tajik, as defense minister and other Tajiks retaining
among others foreign, interior, and intelligence ministries. The job of the
National Directorate of Security (NDS) chief went to Muhammad Arif
Serwari, the NA’s erstwhile chief intelligence official.
As in the past, he maintained a suspicious eye on Pakistan and its in-
telligence network in Afghanistan. He looked benignly on India, allowing
it to set up its own intelligence network. RAW agents cooperated actively
with NSD operators to monitor pro-Pakistan and pro-Taliban elements.

THE KICKING CONJOINED TWINS

The Taliban announced its rebirth dramatically a week before the fi rst
anniversary of 9/11—a bomb explosion in Kabul, which caused fifteen
fatalities, and an assassination attempt on Karzai during his visit to
Kandahar.10 While the Pentagon trumpeted its swift victory in Iraq
during March and April 2003, the Taliban staged guerrilla assaults in
the southern provinces of Helmand and Zabul adjoining Pakistan—the
Taliban’s prime source of volunteers, cash, and arms, and the site of
several training camps.
During his visit to America in the last week of June 2003, Musharraf
was received by Bush at Camp David, indicating that he was being treated
as “a close friend” of the US president. When questioned by reporters
about cross-border attacks on Afghanistan from Pakistan, he replied that
the writ of Karzai did not run beyond the edges of Kabul. This remark
angered Karzai. On July 7 he accused Musharraf of interference in Af-
ghanistan’s domestic affairs.
At the same time reports circulated in Kabul that Pakistani forces
had intruded sixteen miles into Nangarhar province along their common
border. This led to protests in Kabul outside the Pakistani embassy the

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next day. A well-organized mob, armed with sticks, stones, and sledge
hammers vandalized the mission while the staff locked themselves in the
basement. Pakistan closed its embassy in Kabul as well as its consulate in
Jalalabad.11
Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American serving as the special US
presidential envoy for Afghanistan, intervened to cool passions. Karzai
apologized for the damage done to the Pakistani mission and agreed to
compensation. The representatives of the United States, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan together decided to send a joint team to investigate reports of
border clashes between Pakistani and Afghan forces. Pakistan reopened
the embassy on July 23. On the source of the extremists’ cross-border
attacks on Afghanistan, however, Khalilzad was unequivocal: “We know
the Taliban are planning [attacks] in Quetta.”12
During the diplomatic spat, Karzai stressed the vital importance of
Pakistan to his country. “We are like conjoined twins, and like such twins
sometimes we cannot stop kicking each other,” he said in his interview
with Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author. Regretfully, Kar-
zai realized that the “brotherly feeling” between him and Musharraf was
evaporating. “We have one page where there is a tremendous desire for
friendship and the need for each other. But there is the other page of the
consequences if intervention continues. . . . Afghans will have no choice
but to stand up and stop it.”13
In a move designed to put both Karzai and India, governed by Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on the defensive, on July 27 Islamabad
expressed its “deep concerns” about Delhi’s activities along the Pakistan-
Afghan border. It alleged that the Indian consulates had “less to do with
humanitarian aid and more to do with India’s top-secret intelligence
agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.” A hand-grenade assault on
India’s Jalalabad consulate on September 1 drew the attention of the in-
ternational media. In a subsequent report for the Boston-based Christian
Science Monitor, filed from Jalalabad, Scott Baldauf summarized Paki-
stan’s claims. It held the Indian consulates responsible for printing fake
Pakistani currency and orchestrating acts of sabotage and terrorism on
Pakistani territory. It accused Delhi of establishing networks of “terrorist
training camps” inside Afghanistan—at the military base of Qushila Jadid,
north of Kabul; near Gereshk in Helmand province; in the Panjshir Valley
northeast of the capital; and at Kahak and Hassan Killies in the Nimruz
province. During his visit to Jalalabad, however, Baldauf found the con-
sulate “swamped with delegations of Indian diplomats and businessmen

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who were snapping up many of the lucrative projects to rebuild the roads
and infrastructure of Afghanistan.”14
Having maintained for a long time that the Baluchistan Liberation
Army was a fiction, Chief Minister Jam Muhammad Yousaf announced
in mid-August 2004 that India’s RAW was running forty terrorist camps
in the province.15 As the Baluch insurgency, led by Sardar Akbar Bugti,
intensified, it became routine for the Pakistani media to refer to the in-
volvement of the Indian consulates in Afghanistan and claim that ev-
idence had been found. But it was never made public. Th e insurgency
reached a peak in the summer of 2006.

KARZAI’S FIRST TERM AS PRESIDENT

In the October 2004 election held under the new constitution, Karzai
was elected president by 55 percent of the ballots on a voter turnout of an
impressive 73 percent. His vice presidents were Fahim, a Tajik, and Karim
Khalili, a Shia Hazara.
During the two-day visit to Kabul in August 2005, Indian prime min-
ister Manmohan Singh led a foundation-stone-laying ceremony for the
Afghan parliament complex, which was to be financed by Delhi. It was to
be built opposite the ruinously damaged Dar ul Aman royal palace on the
outskirts of the capital. Singh hoped the seed of democracy in Afghani-
stan would grow into a robust tree. As a result of the inordinate delays in
starting the construction, the original cost of Rs 3 billion ($60 million)
would balloon to Rs 7.1 billion ($140 million) in eight years.
Such a gesture—graphically highlighting India’s generosity toward
Afghanistan while underscoring its commitment to democracy—caused
heartburn among Pakistani policy makers, then facing rising insurgency
in Baluchistan as well as FATA. In March 2006, when Pakistan’s troops
encountered considerable resistance to their offensive against militants
in North and South Waziristan Agencies, an unnamed official in Islam-
abad claimed that Pakistan had collected “all required information about
the involvement of India in fomenting unrest in North and South Wa-
ziristan.” He alleged that “the Indian consulates in Southern Afghanistan
have been supplying money as well as arms and ammunition to the mili-
tants that has added to the trouble and violence in the tribal belt.”16
In his interview with Delhi-based Outlook magazine in April 2006,
Mushahid Hussain Sayed (aka, Mushahid Hussain), chair of the Pakistan

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Senate’s foreign relations committee, claimed that RAW had established

training camps in Afghanistan in collaboration with the NA’s remnants.
“Approximately 600 Baluch tribal dissidents are getting specialized train-
ing to handle explosives, engineer bomb blasts, and use sophisticated
weapons in these camps.” He added that “the Indian consulates in Kan-
dahar and Jalalabad and their embassy in Kabul are used for clandestine
activities inside Pakistan in general and the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas and Baluchistan in particular.” According to Sayed, “Indian diplo-
matic and RAW officials have significant ingress in the Afghan ministry
of tribal affairs, and they are exploiting it to conduct covert activities.
Indian agents are instrumental in arranging meetings of tribal elders and
Afghans with dual nationalities with Indian consulate officials in Jalal-
abad, and assisting them in spotting and recruiting suitable tribal elders
from Jalalabad and Pakistan’s North and South Waziristan Agencies for
covert activities.” He added that “meetings of tribal elders are arranged by
the Afghan intelligence agency [Riyast-i-Amniyat-i-Milli] at the behest
of those RAW officials who serve in different diplomatic offices of India
in Afghanistan. Indian agents are carrying out clandestine activities in the
border areas of Khost and in Pakistan’s tribal areas of Miranshah with
the active support of Afghan Border Security Force officials.”17
Years later a former Indian consul general in Kandahar “privately” ad-
mitted to a Delhi-based interviewer that “he had met with Baluchi leaders
at his consulate there” while claiming that his ambassador gave him “strict
instructions not to aid them in any way against Pakistan.” He “hinted”
that “RAW personnel were present among the staff at the Kandahar and
Jalalabad consulates.”18
The truth was hard to determine. What really mattered was the extent
and intensity of the insurgent operations sponsored by India. These could
be rationalized as Delhi’s quid pro quo to Islamabad’s involvement in
stoking the separatist movement in Indian Kashmir, even though RAW’s
activities never rivaled those of the ISI in India-held Kashmir. On the
other hand, just as Pakistan condemned India periodically for its egre-
gious human rights violations in Kashmir, Delhi expressed concern at the
fighting in Baluchistan and recommended dialogue. Overall, it is fair to
say that even without the subversive activities of RAW, Islamabad would
have encountered security problems in its tribal belt and Baluchistan, both
of which had a long history.
By attributing the violent anti-Pakistan activities in FATA to India
working in cahoots with Afghanistan, Islamabad motivated its forces

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during its later offensives against the militant jihadists in FATA. They
were made to believe that in the final analysis their campaign in FATA
was against their number one enemy, India, which has been the unchang-
ing doctrine of the Pakistani military.
As the Afghan Taliban regrouped, and insurgency gathered momen-
tum especially in southern Afghanistan in early 2006, relations between
Karzai and Musharraf turned testy. To defuse the situation the Afghan
president met his Pakistani counterpart in Islamabad in mid-February.
Among other things he handed his interlocutor a list of Afghan Taliban
militants allegedly living in Pakistan, including their leader, Mullah Omar.
When no action followed, Kabul leaked the list to the media. Musharraf
would later claim that “much of the information was old and useless.”
On his part, Musharraf complained of an anti-Pakistan conspiracy
hatched by the defense and intelligence agencies of Afghanistan run by
ethnic Tajiks—Fahim and Serwari respectively—one-time stalwarts of
the pro-Delhi NA. “[Karzai] better set that right,” he said.19 His hector-
ing angered Karzai, who regarded it as open interference in Afghanistan’s
internal affairs.
During Bush’s brief visits to Kabul, Delhi, and Islamabad in early
March, the strained Afghan-Pakistan relations were discussed. An un-
named senior Pakistani official close to Musharraf told Agence France-
Presse: “We have provided sufficient evidence to President Bush what
certain Afghan officials are doing to fund and supply arms to militants in
Pakistan. . . . One Afghan commander in Jalalabad is sending arms into
Pakistani areas, for example. As a result our soldiers are dying and their
soldiers are dying too.”20
Jalalabad figured as prominently in Pakistan’s accusations against the
Karzai regime as it did in the case of the Singh government in Delhi.
Meanwhile, resurgence of the Taliban led to intense fighting in the
southern Afghan provinces of Kandahar and Helmand. Suicide bomb-
ings exacted heavy losses among British and Canadian forces operating
under the aegis of the US-led NATO. By the summer of 2006, NATO
intelligence had obtained irrefutable evidence of the ISI’s alliance with
the Afghan insurgents, covering recruitment, training, and arming and
dispatching of partisans as well as overseeing their leadership.
By contrast, in his interview with Fareed Zakaria, editor of News-
week International, on September 19, Musharraf claimed that Mullah
Omar was in Kandahar and therefore “the center of gravity of this [Tal-
iban] movement is in Afghanistan.” Two days later, in his interview with

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Zakaria, Karzai retorted: “Mullah Omar is for sure in Quetta in Pakistan. . . .

We have even given him [Musharraf ] the GPS numbers of his house—of
Mullah Omar’s house, and the telephone numbers . . . when we had a
nasty meeting that day [in February] and subsequent to that as well.”21
Bush invited Karzai and Musharraf to a working dinner at the White
House on September 27, 2006, at which he hoped to help the feuding duo
turn the page. When Karzai complained bitterly about Pakistan’s policy of
harboring the Afghan Taliban, Musharraf accused him of basing his al-
legations on “outdated” intelligence and kowtowing to India. Despite the
many billions the US treasury had poured into Afghanistan since 2002,
and the $5.5 billion given to the Pakistani army to assist the Pentagon’s
operations in Afghanistan, the American president failed abysmally to
reconcile his quarrelling chief guests.

DURAND LINE DISPUTE—CONTINUED

The ill-defined Afghan–Pakistan border continued to be a running source

of tension and periodic skirmishes. For instance, during an armed con-
frontation in September 2005 precipitated by the posting of a Pakistan
flag inside Afghanistan, 120 Afghan soldiers gathered on the border in
Khost province. They threatened to attack Pakistani soldiers if the latter
did not abandon a disputed checkpoint. It required intervention by an
American officer to calm the disputants.22
In May 2007 Afghan troops assaulted Pakistan’s military outposts,
which they claimed were illegally built on their soil, and killed eight Paki-
stani soldiers. In response Pakistan’s artillery fire on targets in Afghanistan
led to seven deaths among the Afghan forces.
Almost a year later 150 paramilitaries from Pakistan’s Frontier Corps
crossed into Afghanistan near Khost and exchanged fire with Afghan
border guards. Later that day two separate groups of Afghan soldiers, each
30 strong, retaliated by targeting Pakistani border posts. The firefights
ended only when the tribal elders from both sides met at the frontier and
resolved the dispute.23
In mid-May there was a three-day exchange of fire between Afghan
and Pakistani troops in the Aryub Zazai district of Afghanistan’s Paktia
province. It left seven Pakistanis and eight Afghans dead. The clash was
triggered by the demolition of Afghan security checkpoints by Pakistanis,
who wanted to build their own posts.24

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This was a spillover from the disturbed conditions in FATA. Afghan-

Pakistan tensions inflamed to the point at which Karzai warned Islam-
abad that if it did not repress the jihadists in FATA, he would dispatch
Afghan troops into Pakistan to accomplish the task.

DEADLY ATTACK ON INDIAN EMBASSY IN KABUL

The lethal car bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7,
2008, set a new low in Indo-Pakistan and Afghan-Pakistan relations. It
killed 58 people, including the Indian defense attaché Brigadier Ravi Datt
Mehta and Indian foreign service officer V. Venkateswara Rao, and in-
jured more than 140. The suicide bomber struck just as the embassy’s main
gate was opened to let in a car carrying Mehta and Rao.
“The sophistication of this attack and the kind of material that was
used in it, the specific targeting, everything has the hallmarks of a par-
ticular intelligence agency that has conducted similar terrorist acts inside
Afghanistan in the past,” said Karzai’s spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada.
“We have sufficient evidence to say that.”25 This was a thinly disguised ref-
erence to the ISI. Hamidzada thus implicitly rejected the Taliban’s claim
that it had carried out the terror attack. Karzai waded in. “The killings of
people in Afghanistan, the destruction of bridges in Afghanistan . . . are
carried out by Pakistan’s intelligence and Pakistan’s military departments,”
he asserted.26
A few weeks later India pointed its finger at the ISI for its role in
the blasting of its embassy. Its spokesman referred to the analysis of the
explosives used in the terrorist act by forensic experts of the NATO-led
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. ISAF had
concluded that these originated from the Pakistan Ordnance Factories
(POF) in the northern Pakistani garrison city of Wah.27
In their report for the New York Times of August 1, 2008, Mark Maz-
zetti and Eric Schmitt said that US intelligence agencies had concluded
that ISI personnel helped plan the bombing of India’s embassy. This was
based on intercepted communications between ISI officers and militants,
belonging to the North Waziristan–based, Al Qaida–affiliated Jalaluddin
Haqqani network, which caused the massive bomb blast.28 The conclusion of
US intelligence agencies dovetailed with the findings of Afghanistan’s NSD.
Further details and evidence became available when Carlotta Gall, a
senior reporter with the New York Times, published her book The Wrong

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Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 in March 2014. “The embassy

bombing was no operation by rogue ISI agents acting on their own. It
was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani
intelligence,” she noted. “American and Afghan surveillance intercepted
phone calls from ISI officials in Pakistan and heard them planning the
attack with the militants in Kabul in the days leading up to the bomb-
ing,” she added. “At the time, intelligence officials monitoring the calls
did not know what was being planned, but the involvement of a high-
level official in promoting a terrorist attack was clear.” But, she continued,
“The evidence was so damning that the Bush administration dispatched
the deputy chief of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, to Islamabad to remon-
strate with the Pakistanis.” However, the bomber struck before Kappes
reached Pakistan. “Investigators found the bomber’s cell phone in the
wreckage of his exploded car. They tracked down his collaborator in Ka-
bul, the man who had provided the logistics for the attack. That facilitator,
an Afghan, had been in direct contact with Pakistan by telephone. The
number he had called belonged to a high-level ISI offi cial in Pesha-
war. The official had sufficient seniority that he reported directly to ISI
headquarters in Islamabad.”
The ultimate purpose of the operation transcended damaging Indian
interests. “The [overarching] aim was to make the cost too high for every-
one to continue backing the Karzai government,” Gall concluded. “The
ISI wanted them all to go home.” As the authorities in Kabul investigated
the attack, they became convinced that the “ISI was working with Al Qa-
ida, the Taliban, the Haqqanis, and Pakistani groups such as Lashkar-e
Taiba, which was behind most of the attacks on Indian targets.”29
After this outrage, India advised Karzai to set up a foreign intelligence
agency, just as it had done in 1968. He agreed. The subsequent Research
and Analysis Milli Afghanistan (RAMA), formed with the active assis-
tance of RAW, started functioning a year later. Rama is the name of a
Hindu god. That provided enough ammunition to Pakistani commenta-
tors to attribute evil designs to the newly established Afghan agency, the
principal one being to destabilize their country.
As in the past, the summit of the South Asian Association for Re-
gional Cooperation, held in Colombo on August 2, 2008, provided a
chance for the prime ministers of India and Pakistan to confer with each
other. Singh broached the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul with
his counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, who promised to investigate but later
asked Singh to provide “concrete evidence.”30

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Meanwhile, much to the chagrin of Islamabad, Kabul’s economic

relations with Delhi blossomed. Protected by the three-hundred-strong
contingent of the Indo-Tibetan Border Force, the Indian Army’s Roads
Organization completed the building of the 150-mile Zaranj-Delaram
Road, which linked with the Kushka-Herat-Kandahar Highway, by the
end of 2008. It did so in the face of assaults by the Taliban. Indian en-
gineers built digitized telecommunications networks in eleven Afghan
provinces. And one thousand Afghan students were offered scholarships
to Indian universities annually.31 Emulating its earlier practice, India
channeled its development aid for mutually agreed-on wells, schools, and
health clinics into the Afghan government’s budget.32 This procedure was
dramatically different from the one followed by the United States and its
allies, who paid the civilian contractors directly or the approved local and
foreign nongovernmental organizations.

KARZAI’S CHANGING PAKISTANI INTERLOCUTORS

Facing impeachment for violating the constitution by the six-month-old

democratically elected coalition government in Islamabad, Musharraf
resigned as president on August 18, 2008. While the Indian cabinet
withheld comment, Karzai hoped Musharraf ’s departure would boost
democracy in both countries.
The Afghan president called Prime Minster Yusuf Raza Gilani “a
good man” with “the right intentions.” He welcomed General Ashfaq
Parvaz Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief, during the latter’s visit to the US
Air Force base at Bagram on August 19. “Afghanistan cannot achieve
peace or prosperity without friendly relations with Pakistan,” he told
Kayani. Speaking to Aryn Baker of Time, Karzai said, “I hope [Kayani]
recognizes that what they are doing [in terms of supporting militancy
in Afghanistan] is causing immense damage to Pakistan itself. Someone
has to recognize this need for change and for a modern relationship with
Afghanistan, a civilized relationship. I hope it will occur.”33
Karzai’s hope was unfulfilled. Kayani was committed to upholding the
Pakistani military’s doctrine that India is its number one enemy and that
makes it mandatory for Pakistan to acquire strategic depth in case of an
Indian invasion by securing unrivaled influence in Kabul. Karzai, on the
other hand, was scathing about both the concept of strategic depth and
the means being deployed by Islamabad to achieve it. “If Pakistan is using

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radicalism as a tool of policy for strategic depth in Afghanistan, well, I

wish to tell them that it won’t work,” Karzai averred.34
Once Asif Ali Zardari was elected president by the provincial and
federal lawmakers in September 2008, a civilian democratic system was
fully in place in Islamabad as the final arbiter of power—in theory. In real-
ity, though, as before, real power in national security affairs rested with the
military. Zardari had neither the intelligence nor the charisma of his wife,
Benazir Bhutto, nor the political cunning of Muhammad Nawaz Sharif.
However, he held moderate views about both Afghanistan and India.
He met Karzai in Ankara on December 5 at the initiative of Turkey’s
president Abdullah Gul. At the end of the trilateral summit, Karzai said
that relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan had improved extremely
well since the election of Zardari as president. Both of them discussed
fresh ways of curbing Islamist extremists and pledged stronger coopera-
tion against terrorism. “The foreign ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan
are now working together and developing joint strategy against Al Qaida
and other terrorist groups [operating in our border regions],” stated their
joint communiqué.35
As a follow-up, Karzai and Zardari met again in Ankara, hosted by
Gul, on April 1, 2009, to boost military cooperation against militant Isla-
mists. But civilian control over the military was lacking in Pakistan. This
became crystal clear in May 2009, when Zardari transferred the ISI from
the military to the interior ministry. General Kayani rejected the order.
Within hours, Zardari backtracked.
The change in Islamabad’s official stance on the Karzai government
had no impact on Afghans’ popular perception of Pakistan. According to
the February 2009 opinion poll by the Kabul-based Afghan Centre for
Socio-Economic and Opinion Research for the BBC, ABC News, and
ARD (Germany), 91 percent had somewhat or very unfavorable view of
Pakistan. The corresponding figure for India was 21 percent, with 74 per-
cent having a somewhat or very favorable view of that country.36 Part of
the reason was the popularity of Bollywood movies and Indian TV soap
operas shown widely on Afghan TV channels often dubbed in Dari, the
state language of Afghanistan.
Unsurprisingly, Zardari had failed to convince the Obama administra-
tion that Pakistan’s security services had ceased their traditional backing
for the militant groups fighting NATO and local forces in Afghanistan.
The second terror assault on the Indian embassy in Kabul on October
8, 2009, showed that not much had changed. A massive bomb carried in a

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sport utility vehicle killed seventeen police officers and civilians, wounded
seventy-six people, and destroyed vehicles and buildings. The explosion
was heard across the capital, as shock waves shattered windows and a huge
plume of brown smoke rose hundreds of feet. But because after the July
2008 attack, India had fortified its embassy with high blast walls, heavy
steel gates, and a more circuitous entrance, the mission building was un-
scathed. As in the case of the earlier terror assault, the Taliban claimed
responsibility. And as before, this turned out to be a feint. The finger was
pointed at the ISI with the telephone intercepts recorded by Washington’s
National Security Agency providing the evidence.37

KARZAI’S SECOND TERM OF OFFICE

In the August 20, 2009, presidential election, marred by wide-scale fraud,

the all-Afghan Independent Election Commission (IEC) declared Karzai
the winner with 54.7 percent of the vote. Facing a flood of complaints, the
IEC audited the results thoroughly. In mid-October it awarded Karzai
49.67 percent of the ballots, a shade below the 50 percent plus one vote
required for the win. But the second round was called off on November
2, when his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out. Karzai was victor by
default. He took his oath of office on November 19.
While US-led NATO forces were engaged in fighting Taliban in-
surgents and training rapidly expanding Afghan troops and policemen—
called Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF)—their political masters
had to devise and implement an exit strategy. This was the main purpose
of the International Conference on Afghanistan in London on January
28, 2010.“We must reach out to all of our countrymen, especially our
disenchanted brothers, who are not part of Al Qaida, or other terrorist
networks, who accept the Afghan constitution,” said Karzai. He agreed to
establish a “national council for peace, reconciliation and reintegration,”
and reinvigorate peace overtures to senior Taliban leaders with the help of
Saudi king Abdullah. Washington backed his move. “The starting premise
is you don’t make peace with your friends,” said US secretary of state Hil-
lary Clinton. “You have to be able to engage with your enemies.”38
The 2009 BBC/ABC News/ARD opinion poll showed that 64 percent
of Afghans favored talks with the Taliban.39 Though India attended the
London conference, the prospect of the Karzai government, encouraged by
the United States, negotiating with the Taliban worried its policy makers.

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There was no love lost between India and the Taliban. Fresh evidence
of the Taliban’s hostility toward Delhi came on February 26, 2010, with
a terrorist attack on an Indian target in Kabul. This time it was the Arya
Guesthouse, home to Indian doctors, near the luxury Safi Landmark Ho-
tel in central Kabul. It was demolished by Taliban bombers equipped with
suicide vests and automatic rifles. The occupants of the guest house were
army doctors. But respecting Islamabad’s touchiness about Delhi pro-
viding Afghanistan with military assistance, all army doctors and nurses
working at the Indira Gandhi Child Health Institute were dispatched to
Kabul, unarmed and in civilian dress. Nine Indian physicians perished in
the attack, and many more were injured.
The assault started at six thirty am, when a car bomb exploded outside
the target. The powerful blast razed the building. Then a suicide bomber
detonated his vest of explosives outside the crumbling structure. Among
the survivors was Dr. Subodh Sanjivpaul. He locked himself in his bath-
room for three hours. “When I was coming out, I found two or three dead
bodies,” he said at the military hospital in Kabul. “When firing was going
on the first car bomb exploded and the roof fell on my head.”40 Karzai
went out of his way to condemn the terror attack and thank India for the
assistance it was offering his republic.
Yet at the same time, Karzai tried to lure Taliban leaders to the nego-
tiating table, an enterprise that had Islamabad’s enthusiastic backing. On
the eve of his meeting with General Kayani and the ISI director-general
Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha on June 28 in Kabul, Karzai
sacked his NSD chief, Amrullah Saleh. Like his predecessor Serwari, he
was an unashamedly pro-India Tajik and was viewed by the Taliban and
the ISI as their most vocal antagonist.41 Kayani and Shuja reportedly
urged Karzai to give the Taliban a place in a future political settlement.
Delhi immediately conveyed its unease at a possible Taliban power-sharing
deal, which among other things would block civilian aid and investment
by India.42
Given the zero-sum relationship between the major South Asian na-
tions regarding Afghanistan, a diplomatic setback for Delhi was an auto-
matic gain for Islamabad, which wanted to see the peace process advance in
Afghanistan but only under its tutelage. The latest development also high-
lighted the fact that when it came to reconciling the Kabul government
with Taliban insurgents, India had no role to play except to raise objections.
The high officials in Delhi were also irritated when in the ongoing
negotiations between Afghanistan and Pakistan to update their 1965

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Transit Trade Agreement, India’s interests were overlooked. Islamabad

agreed to Kabul’s request to allow Afghan trucks to proceed to the Indian
border at Wagah as well as to the ports of Karachi and Gwadar. This was
incorporated in the Memorandum of Understanding that Pakistan and
Afghanistan signed in July 2010. In marked contrast, Islamabad summar-
ily rejected Delhi’s proposal to let Indian trucks drive through its territory
to deliver goods in Afghanistan. Pakistan was Afghanistan’s leading ex-
port partner and second most important import partner after the United
States. Intent on maintaining its current commercial hegemony over Af-
ghanistan, it wanted to rule out India as a competitor.
Afghanistan’s transit trade through Pakistan was also a lucrative
source of revenue for the Karachi port, through which most of Afghan-
istan’s external trade passed, and for Pakistani road transport companies,
many of which were owned by the army. Furthermore, Pakistani officials
feared that if they allowed direct Afghan-India commerce through
their country, the Afghans might start using the Mumbai port for part of
their foreign trade, thereby curtailing Pakistan’s revenue.
In November 2010, Afghanistan and Pakistan formed a joint cham-
ber of commerce to expand trade. Official commerce between Afghani-
stan and Pakistan commerce had been rising steadily, from $830 million
in 2006 to $2.5 billion in 2012. The informal trade, including smuggling,
in that year amounted to $2 billion.43
Denied the use of Pakistani territory for its commerce with Afghani-
stan, the Indians resorted to making greater use of Iran as a route to trade
with Afghanistan. As a result of the 2003 Indo-Afghan Preferential Trade
Agreement, which reduced customs duty on a range of goods, bilateral
trade increased to $600 million in 2011.44
In the political arena, to Delhi’s relief, rapprochement between Karzai
and Kayani fell apart after about a year for reasons beyond their control.
The Obama administration had been increasingly using drone attacks to
carry out targeted killings of jihadist militants in Pakistan. On May 2,
2011, US troops, acting unilaterally, killed Osama bin Laden in the Paki-
stani city of Abbottabad. Though Washington had allocated $20 billion in
aid to Pakistan since 9/11,45 it could not rely on its government to coop-
erate in strict secrecy in the capture or assassination of the Al Qaida chief.
The Pentagon’s operation enraged the Afghan Taliban as well as the
four-year-old Pakistani Taliban. The latter vowed to avenge bin Laden’s
murder by escalating violence in the Afghan-Pakistan tribal belt and east-
ern Afghanistan. Also, before withdrawing from bordering provinces of

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Afghanistan to let local forces deal with security, US-led NATO com-
manders encouraged Afghan soldiers to attack Pakistani border posts. As
a result, cross-border shelling increased sharply.
On June 26, Karzai claimed that Pakistan had fired 470 rockets into
two eastern Afghan provinces, evacuated by NATO troops, over the past
three weeks, killing thirty-six people. He held Islamabad responsible for
this bombardment even if regular Pakistani soldiers were not involved.46
The Pakistan military’s artillery backing for the Afghan Taliban’s op-
erations illustrated partly a lack of civilian control over the armed forces
in Islamabad and partly Pakistan’s continued double-dealing with the
United States regarding the Afghan Taliban.
As a consequence, the Afghan-Pakistan border region remained un-
stable. On September 25 Kabul claimed that more than 340 rockets had
been fired over four days from Pakistan. Two weeks later Pakistan’s se-
curity forces claimed that they had killed thirty Afghan militants when
a group of two hundred insurgents from Afghanistan crossed the border
into Pakistan.47
Following the September 20, 2011, suicide bombing in Kabul, which
killed former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Tajik head of
the High Peace Council (HPC), the Karzai government accused the ISI
of involvement. In its view, Islamabad resorted to this tactic when it real-
ized that it was being excluded by the HPC while pursuing peacemaking
with the Taliban. By so doing, Pakistan underscored its control over the
reconciliation process and its assertion of a key role in any talks on ending
violence as well as its ability to sabotage the peace negotiations when it
was sidelined.

KABUL’S STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP WITH DELHI

On October 4, 2011, Karzai and Indian prime minister Singh signed the
Agreement on Strategic Partnership between India and the Islamic Re-
public of Afghanistan. It was the first pact of its kind that Kabul signed
after its treaty with the Soviet Union in 1979. Significantly, this document
referred to the 1950 Treaty of Friendship between the two countries and
stated that it was “not directed against any other State or group of States.”
Under its “Political and Security Cooperation” provision, India agreed to
“assist, as mutually determined, in the training, equipping and capacity
building programs for Afghan National Security Forces.” The bulk of the

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agreement covered cooperation in trade and economic development. The

strategic partnership was to be supervised by a Partnership Council, co-
chaired by the foreign ministers of the two countries.48
At the joint press conference Singh said that violence in Afghanistan
was undermining security in South Asia and that India would “stand by
Afghanistan” when foreign troops withdrew from the country by De-
cember 2014. He pointedly made no reference to Delhi’s commitment to
increase its training of Afghan security forces, including the police.49 The
next day Karzai explained that the accord simply made official the years of
close ties between India and Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government, with
Delhi providing a significant amount of civilian aid to Kabul since 2002.
Pakistan responded in a convoluted fashion. Stressing that this was
“no time for point scoring, playing politics or grandstanding,” its Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman added, “At this defining stage when challenges
have multiplied, as have the opportunities, it is our expectation that every-
one, especially those in position of authority in Afghanistan, will demon-
strate requisite maturity and responsibility.” By contrast, Talat Masood, a
retired Pakistani general and a frequent commentator on national security,
was direct. Alluding to Pakistan’s long-held perception that “it is being
encircled by India from both the eastern and western borders,” he said
that “the agreement will heighten Pakistan’s insecurities.” The influen-
tial Dawn newspaper expressed concern that the pact could lead to “ill-
advised efforts to ramp up Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan.”50
Islamabad’s fear was enhanced when the Coulsdon-based IHS Jane’s
Defence Weekly published the details of India’s promised military assis-
tance provided by its Delhi correspondent Rahul Bedi on November
29. The plan was to fly twenty to thirty thousand Afghan recruits over
the next three years for training in regimental centers in the north and
east of India. The most promising troops would receive further training
at the army’s Counter Insurgency Jungle Warfare School in the north-
eastern state of Mizoram. The Afghan trainees would be equipped with
assault rifles and other small arms, with the possibility of transferring
rocket launchers, light artillery, and retrofi tted Soviet T-55 tanks to
them later.51
The figure of twenty to thirty thousand Afghan trainees turned out to
be wildly inflated. During Karzai’s visit to India in December 2013, the
two governments announced that India would raise the number of ANSF
trainees each year to one thousand, with the focus of the training being on
counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations.52

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Around the same time, the Karzai government decided to allocate

three of the four iron ore blocks, containing 1.8 billion tons of iron, in
central Afghanistan to the Afghan Iron and Steel Consortium of Indian
companies, led by the state-owned Steel Authority of India Limited. The
deal required an investment of $10.3 billion, the largest in the war-torn
country so far.53 But two years later, unable to raise capital on favorable
terms and facing increased security risks, the consortium considered slash-
ing its initial outlay to $1.5 billion.54
To balance his pro-India bias, Karzai suggested a Strategic Partner-
ship Agreement (SPA) with Pakistan during the Afghanistan-Pakistan-
Britain summit chaired by British prime minister David Cameron on
September 27, 2012, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session
in New York. This was warmly welcomed by President Zardari. On his
return to Kabul, however, Karzai came up with a precondition. Pakistan,
he said, must stop “the export of terrorism, suicide bombers, interference
and all the other things which result in killing and disturbing the Af-
ghan people’s tranquility and [is] destabilizing Afghanistan.”55 This un-
expected move by Karzai slowed progress toward an SPA between the
two neighbors.
All the same, in November, Afghanistan’s HPC leaked its document
“Afghan Peace Process Roadmap to 2015” to Pakistan’s high officials. It
envisaged direct talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban
in early 2013, with a Saudi city as the preferred venue, and a truce soon
thereafter, followed by arrangements for the insurgents to be reintegrated
and their leaders given a share of power. It seemed more a wish list than
a realistic plan.
However, what stood out was its acknowledgment of the centrality of
Pakistan in the peace process, a point the Karzai government had been
reluctant to concede so far. This was enough to alarm India. Its national
security advisor, Shiv Shankar Menon, referred to the red lines agreed
on by the London Conference on Afghanistan in January 2010, which
required the Taliban to cut all links with Al Qaida and other terrorist
organizations and respect the values and ideals enshrined in Afghanistan’s
constitution, including women’s rights.56
In any case, despite repeated promises to conclude the envisaged SPA
by a certain date, nothing definite materialized because of the trust defi-
cit between the neighbors. Nor was there any discernible progress in the
peace process with the insurgents. Given the exit date of December 2014
for foreign forces, Taliban leaders saw no need to negotiate with Karzai,

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whom they routinely described as a puppet of America. Lack of progress

in these areas suited Delhi.

KARZAI THE JUGGLER

As NATO forces’ withdrawal date approached, Karzai urged Delhi to

step up its assistance to bolster security within the framework of the 2011
Indo-Afghan SPA. During his visit to India from May 20 to 22, 2013, his
twelfth since assuming office, he submitted his wish list to boost the secu-
rity and counterterrorism capability of Afghanistan. It included a supply
of attack helicopters, rocket launchers, light and heavy artillery, retrofitted
Soviet T-55 tanks, and transport aircraft.
The Indian government needed to mull over Karzai’s request, taking
into account the electoral victory of Nawaz Sharif ’s party in Pakistan.
Sharif ’s return to power in Islamabad augured well for an improvement
in Indo-Pakistan relations, with a positive impact on the Afghan situ-
ation. Equipping Kabul with heavy weaponry was likely to be seen as
provocative by Islamabad. Therefore the Singh government prevaricated,
claiming that it needed the Kremlin’s permission before transferring its
Soviet-era arms to Afghanistan. There was also concern in Delhi that
the successor to Karzai after the 2014 presidential election would be less
pro-India than Karzai.
Back-channel efforts to bring the Karzai government and the Taliban
leadership to the negotiating table in Doha collapsed in June 2013, when
the Taliban called its newly opened office in the Qatari capital the Embassy
of the Emirate of Afghanistan, flaunting the Taliban flag. Karzai was livid.
As before, Karzai walked a tightrope, intent on showing that Afghan-
istan’s relations with India were not at the expense of Pakistan’s. During
his one-day trip to Islamabad on August 25 to confer with Nawaz Sharif,
his session went so well that he extended his stay by a day. Sharif added
$115 million to Pakistan’s aid to Kabul, pushing the total to $500 mil-
lion. At a joint press conference Karzai said that he wanted the Pakistani
government to play a mediating role with the Taliban, with whom it had
“a high degree of influence.” In return, Sharif repeated Pakistan’s mantra
that the Afghan peace and reconciliation process must be “Afghan-owned
and Afghan-led.”57
Responding to Karzai’s request that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a
moderate deputy of Mullah Omar who had been arrested in Karachi in

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February 2010, be released, Sharif did so the next month. But there was
no change in the Taliban’s official policy of refusing to confer with the
Karzai government.
The Taliban’s violent activities included sabotaging the fruits of India’s
$2 billion sanctioned civilian aid, of which 70 percent would be allocated by
the end of 2013. The comparative statistic for Pakistan’s $500 million was
only 40 percent. Moreover, Islamabad had failed to construct a road, college,
or health clinic that could be a visible example of its openhandedness.58
At the same time, in the absence of proper auditing and monitoring,
the end result was far from the rosy picture painted by Indian officials. For
instance, a visit by a Reuters reporter to the village of Achin in southeast
Afghanistan found “a gaping hole in the roof of [an India-funded] school,
cracked walls and broken desks and chairs.” Its headmaster was surprised
that records in Kabul showed that the school was completed.59
It was worth noting that as of June 2011, India had not launched any
major initiatives for the previous two to three years. And the Indian-built
Zaranj-Delaram Road, passing through the Taliban-dominated Nimroz
province, had become pockmarked by the craters created by the impro-
vised explosive devices (IEDs) detonated by the Taliban.60 The ambitious
four-year, $300 million Salma Dam project in Herat, initiated in 2006,
remained unfinished in mid-2013 because of the repeated attacks on
construction workers with IEDs and because of budget overruns. When
commissioned, the dam will irrigate seventy-five thousand acres of land
in Herat and generate forty-five megawatts of electricity.61
Overall, competition between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan cov-
ered not only geopolitics and commerce but also soft power.

SOF T POWER COMPETITION: ONE-SIDED

In the field of soft power, India was miles ahead of its rival Pakistan. This
was most obvious in television. Starting with Tolo TV (Dari: Sunrise),
which went on air in October 2004, commercial TV flourished in Af-
ghanistan, where under the Taliban rule it had been outlawed. Tolo pro-
vided a large variety of shows. Among these, Indian soap operas, dubbed
in Dari, with an episode aired daily often during prime time, when the
power supply was reliable, proved popular. By early 2008 Tolo was broad-
casting three Indian soap operas daily, with some rival channels showing
six, attracted by their low cost and addictive appeal.

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Of the Indian television dramas on Tolo, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu
Thi (Hindi: Mother-in-Law Was Once Daughter-in-Law)—popularly
known as Tulsi, the first name of the daughter-in-law Tulsi Viran—was
hugely popular. Its audience of ten million in a country of thirty million
was a record. Afghans became so hooked on the drama that almost all ac-
tivities ceased in the country for half an hour beginning at eight thirty pm.
“It’s like an addiction,” said the twenty-three-year-old policeman Nasrul-
lah Mohammadi.62 The cultural impact on the population was so strong
that, imitating their Indian peers, Afghan teenagers took to touching their
elders’ feet as a sign of respect, a novelty in Afghanistan.
Several factors explained the phenomenon. Overall, Afghans and
Indians shared similar family and cultural norms and traditions. For in-
stance, the archetypical mother-in-law was demanding and oppressive
toward her young, diffident daughter-in-law because that was how she
was treated by her mother-in-law when she was a young wife living in a
joint family. There was total absence of entertainment outside the house,
particularly for women. “People in other countries have others means of
enjoyment and having fun, but we have nothing,” said twenty-three-year-
old Roya Amin, mother of a young daughter, in Kabul, who watched
three Indian TV dramas daily.63 These entertaining episodes also helped
Afghans forget the endless violence and woes in their country.
The same reasoning applied to Bollywood movies. Before the advent
of the Taliban, these films were the staple of local moviegoers for de-
cades. “Our culture is so similar and the best part is that most of us learn
Hindi watching Bollywood movies,” said Afghan actress Vida Samadzai
during her visit to Delhi in 2010. “Even before coming to India, I was
quite fluent in Hindi, 80 percent of my language was just perfect, thanks
to Bollywood movies.”64
At present, although Kabul had some functioning movie theaters, the
Bollywood movies being shown there were pirated because the local dis-
tributors lacked funds. Tickets often cost less than half a US dollar. In
some cases Indian producers sent prints as gifts to Afghan distributors.
The pirated prints were also aired on TV channels.
“I like Indian dance and song very much and I come to cinema at
least once a week to watch Indian movie,” said Abdul Wahid, a twenty-
year-old student and a breadwinner of his family. “Hard study at school
in the morning and boring work in the afternoon to support my family
have sandwiched me. To forget the pain, a rational way is to watch Indian
movies in cinema.”65 There was also a strong vicarious element at work.

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“The larger-than-life representations of the Bollywood heroes, in sharp

contrast to their stark reality, provide them a vicarious opportunity to im-
merse themselves into the grandiose reel life fantasies,” explained Sujeet
Sarkar in his book In Search of a New Afghanistan. “The chart-busting
music is another addictive element.”66
Compared to the number of TV viewers, the movie audience was
miniscule. The unprecedented popularity of Tulsi and other similar In-
dian serials raised concern among Afghan officials and religious lead-
ers. They objected to the shots of Hindu idols and the worship of them,
which clashed with Islam’s strict ban on idol worship, as well as the plung-
ing necklines and bare midriffs, shoulders, and arms of sari-clad Indian
actresses.
In early April 2008 the Ministry of Information and Culture ordered
four TV channels, including Tolo, to take five Indian soap operas off the
air by mid-April. All complied except Tolo. It chose to pixilate the con-
tentious images. Yet that was not enough. In early May the parliament
passed a law banning Tulsi and four other Indian serials. Since then TV
channels have employed censors who pixilate any content that could be
objectionable.
As for Bollywood movies, the official censors ordered cuts before giv-
ing the distributor the license to exhibit the film. This applied to Pakistan
as well, where Bollywood films continued to cast a spell on the public
despite the four-decade-long ban on their (official) import in the wake of
the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War on Kashmir.

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 19

Shared Culture, Rising Commerce

In his quest for a subcontinent homeland for Indian Muslims, Muham-

mad Ali Jinnah had their general welfare uppermost in mind. He had en-
visaged the existing Punjab and Bengal to become part of Pakistan. As for
the bulk of provinces where Muslims were a minority, he imagined that
their safety would be guaranteed by the presence of Hindus and Sikhs
in the two wings of Pakistan. That is, each independent country would
hold the minority community within its frontiers as an effective bargain-
ing chip with the other. That did not happen. As a result of the partition
of Punjab, and the subsequent communal bloodbath perpetrated almost
wholly in villages, its Pakistani part was cleared of Hindus and Sikhs and
its eastern section of Muslims. In the postindependence period, therefore,
there were no Hindu or Sikh families separated by the border. Initially,
any migration of Hindus and Muslims in divided Bengal was limited.
The separation of families occurred in the case of those Muslims in
the minority provinces who chose to migrate to Pakistan, seeking better
economic prospects for themselves and life in an Islamic environment.
Most of this voluntary movement was limited to Delhi, United Province,
and part of Bombay, especially its capital city and the Gujarati-speaking
section of the province. These Muslim migrants were invariably literate
and engaged in commerce or government service. They were the ones who
complained loudly about the creeping restrictions on Indo-Pakistan travel
that followed from the mid-1950s onward.
The province of Sindh, which remained undivided, had a population
of only five million, a quarter of them Hindu. Mainly urban dwellers, they
made their living as traders or professionals, forming a large part of the

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civil service, and had little social intercourse with local Muslims. In the
absence of Hindu peasants, there was no large-scale violence in Sindh.
However, as the number of immigrants from the Muslim minority prov-
inces of India swelled in Karachi and Hyderabad, the second largest city
in Sindh, the authorities let anti-Hindu violence erupt briefly in these
cities. That was enough to result in an orderly exodus of about a million
Hindus over the next few years to different parts of India, from Delhi
in the north to Kolhapur south of Bombay. There was thus no rupture in
the families of Sindhi Hindus.
Any common sharing of cultural values between Hindus and Muslims
was limited to Hindustani movies made in Bombay. (The term “Bolly-
wood” is a much later construct.) Since movie theaters existed only in
large towns and cities, proportionately fewer Muslims visited them than
Hindus.
All the same, such Indian movie stars as Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar
(birth name: Muhammad Yusuf Khan) enjoyed equal fame in Pakistan
and India. Raj Kapoor’s 1951 movie Awara (Hindustani: “Tramp”), in
which he plays the lead role with Nargis, a Muslim, was as much of a hit
in West Pakistan as in India. The healthy rivalry between him and Dilip
Kumar as versatile actors ended in 1960, with Dilip Kumar’s dazzling lead
performance in Mughal-e-Azam (“The Great Mughal”), which broke box
office records on both sides of the border.
The shutters came down after the September 1965 Indo-Pakistan
War. President Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan issued a presiden-
tial order declaring Indian movies, which had been exhibited regularly in
Pakistan up until then, “enemy property.” The Martial Law Order (MLO)
81 issued by Zia ul Haq regarding registration of cinematographic film
decertified all Indian movies released between 1947 and 1981.1 Also Is-
lamabad’s trade protocol prohibited the import of any film whose lan-
guage or actors originated in India or Pakistan.
During his rule, Zia ul Haq made two exceptions: Noor Jehan and
Kashish (Hindi: Attraction). Noor Jehan, a filmic extravaganza based on
the life story of a Mughal empress, was released in India in 1967. Its poor
box office returns bankrupted its actor-producer, Shaikh Mukhtar. Driven
to desperation, he migrated to Pakistan with the prints of all seven movies
he had produced. Over the years his pleas with Pakistani officials to cer-
tify the release of one or more of his productions were ignored—until he
persuaded Zia ul Haq to see Noor Jehan. He liked it. By a cruel irony of
fate, the day the censors gave the green light for its exhibition—May 11,

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 SHARED CULTURE, RISING COMMERCE

1980—Mukhtar died of a heart attack. The movie premiered on May 23

and was a roaring success.
The next break in Pakistan’s blanket ban on Indian films came with
another historical tale, Mughal-e-Azam. Directed by Karimuddin Asif, it
was the tale of Emperor Akbar and the illicit love affair between Crown
Prince Salim (later Emperor Jahangir) and Anarkali, a courtesan. Released
in black and white in 1960, it was by far India’s biggest and grandest epic
movie, with A-list actors and sumptuous sets and costumes. Its revival
came in November 2004, when its digitally colored version, produced by
Shapoorji Mistry, a grandson of the original producer, Shapoorji Pallonji
Mistry, was screened nationwide in India to great acclaim and a strong
box office.
The next month, Akbar Asif, the London-based son of the director
Karimuddin Asif, presented a print of the colored movie to Pakistani
president General Pervez Musharraf as a gift. Musharraf gave permission
for its exhibition in May 2005.2 During the Pakistani president’s London
visit in late 2005, Asif and the producer met him and offered to donate
the box office takings in Pakistan to the survivors of the October 8 earth-
quake in Kashmir.3
Mughal-e-Azam premiered in Lahore on April 22, 2006. “The move
to ensure that Mughal-e-Azam turned out to be the cultural bridge be-
tween India and Pakistan was to fulfill my father’s dream of getting it to
be the first film to get permission to be screened in Pakistan,” said Asif.4
As the first Indian movie to be shown officially in Pakistani movie the-
aters after forty-one years, it acquired an unrivaled status.
A few days later another Bollywood flick, Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love
Story, produced in 2005, opened in Lahore. Musharraf made an exception
because the movie pertained to the Mughal period, and the lead role of
Empress Mumtaz Mahal, in whose memory the world famous monument
was built, was played by Sonya Jehan, a Pakistani actress whose mother
was French.
India’s tourism and culture minister, Ambika Soni, joined the Indian
delegation in Lahore on the opening night. “It is a welcome beginning,”
she said, and she hoped Taj Mahal would pave the way for an eventual
lifting of Pakistan’s ban. Islamabad’s official stance was that screening
Indian movies would be permitted only after all unsettled issues with
India had been resolved. Soni pointed out that Delhi did not impose any
restrictions on Pakistani films and artists performing in India.5 In June
2006, a Statutory Regulatory Order issued by the Pakistani government

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allowed the import and exhibition of Indian and other foreign fi lms
and serials.6
By then, with the advent of VHS tapes and then DVDs from the
mid-1990s, piracy of Indian and other foreign movies had become com-
monplace. At local markets in Pakistan, the DVD trader selling the latest
Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters was a familiar sight. The distrib-
utors in Pakistan also managed to import Indian films by producing doc-
uments that showed that their country of origin as Britain or the United
Arab Emirates (UAE). According to an unofficial estimate in 2006, every
day an estimated fifteen million people in Pakistan watched a Bollywood
movie—10 percent of the population.7
In 2008, the blockbuster Race, a comic thriller and action film set
mostly in Dubai and Durban, gave the Pakistani exhibitors a mouth-
watering taste of box-office success scored by an imported Indian film.
The resulting upsurge in movie attendance figures reversed the downward
trend that had seen the number of movie theaters plunge from 1,300 in
the 1970s to 270, leading to the rise of new multiplexes.8
In his petition to the Lahore High Court in November 2012,
Mubashir Lucman, a TV talk host, challenged the smuggling of Indian
films and their exhibition in Pakistani theaters. He claimed that since June
2006 at least 213 Indian movies had been shown in Pakistan under a false
certificate of origin. The court ordered that the Central Board of Film
Censors should not certify films that lacked proper import documents.9
Though Urdu is the mother tongue of only 5 percent of Pakistanis, it
is the official language of the state and is taught in schools nationwide.
Most Pakistanis are therefore bilingual. Urdu is one of the eighteen of-
ficially recognized languages of India, where Hindi is the primus inter
pares among the native tongues. It is taught in non-Hindi-speaking areas,
except in Tamil Nadu. Spoken Hindi is akin to spoken Urdu, and that
language is often called Hindustani. Bollywood’s screenplays are written
in Hindustani.
“The common man in Pakistan wants entertainment and Indian mov-
ies provide them with a source of getting away from the [mundane] rou-
tines of life,” said Irfan Ashraf, a Pakistani film critic. “Cinema owners in
Pakistan understand this aspect of the political economy of the media and
therefore [most of them] want Indian movies though a few among the
local movie producers, directors would always resist [Indian content].”10
The release of Dhoom 3 (Hindi: Uproar 3), a Bollywood action thriller
with a record budget of $21million, on December 19, 2013, in India, and

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 SHARED CULTURE, RISING COMMERCE

then in Pakistan a week later, introduced a new element in the tangled

tale of the Indian film industry and Pakistan. Written and directed by
Krishna Acharya, the lead was played by the superstar Aamir Khan. On
the first day the movie racked up box office receipts of Rs 20 million from
fifty-six screens in Karachi, beating the record of Rs 11.4 million set by
the Pakistani film Waar (Urdu: The Strike) in the previous month. The
craze in the port city reached such heights that the multiplexes ran Dhoom
3 on all their screens with five shows a day per screen. Nadeem H. Mand-
viwalla, the distributor, was ecstatic. “2013 was a great year for exhibitors
and distributors, and the success of Chambeli, Man Hoon Shahid Afridi
[Urdu: I am Shahid Afridi, cricket’s superstar], Waar, Chennai Express and
Dhoom 3 showed Pakistani and Indian films could co-exist on screen.”11
Actually, such coexistence had officially come to pass. On December
16, Lucman, who had sought a ban on Indian films before a High Court
in Lahore and had the backing of those who feared the decline of the
domestic industry in the face of Bollywood imports, withdrew his petition
following a compromise. He and the Pakistan Cinema Owners’ Asso-
ciation and film distributors signed a Memorandum of Understanding
whereby movie theaters in Pakistan were to be permitted to give equal
screening time to Indian and Pakistani movies.12
This pragmatic attitude in the business community was at odds with
the prevalent view in political and military circles.

TOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

The hard-liners in the political-military establishment fretted about the

insidious influence of Indian films and broadcasting media in shaping
public opinion in Pakistan. Major General Muhammad Asif, in his essay
in the latest edition of Pakistan’s biennial journal Green Book, published
by the General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, for the officer corps, lamented
the fact that because of the lack of credibility in the Pakistani media, many
people turned to All India Radio, the BBC, and Indian satellite channels
for news, particularly during Indo-Pakistan crises.13
The 2010 Green Book, published in 2012, covered information warfare.
In the opening essay, “Treatise on India-backed Psychological Warfare
Against Pakistan,” Brigadier Umar Farooq Durrani stated that India’s
Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) funded many newspapers and even
TV channels, such as Zee TV, which is “considered to be the India’s media

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

headquarters to wage psychological war.” However, according to Durrani,

the most subtle form of psychological warfare “is found in movies where
Muslim and Hindu friendship is screened within the backdrop of melo-
drama. Indian soaps and movies are readily welcomed in most households
in Pakistan. The effect desired to be achieved through this is to undermine
the Two National Theory as being a person[al] obsession of [Muhammad
Ali] Jinnah.” In his foreword to the book, Chief of Army Staff (COAS)
General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani described the essays as providing “an ef-
fective forum for the leadership to reflect on, identify and define the chal-
lenges faced by the Pakistani army and share ways of overcoming them.”14
As for Pakistan’s movie industry—based in Lahore and called Lollywood—
it had recovered from the trough it had hit during the rule of Zia ul Haq.
But it was a minnow compared to Bollywood. With its revenue of $3 bil-
lion in 2011, Bollywood was expected to generate income of $4.5 billion
by 2016.15
Where Pakistanis could console themselves in their competition with
Indians in popular culture was cricket. There the odds favored them.

CRICKET: SPECTACULAR ARENA FOR ONE-UPMANSHIP

One consequence of the partition was greater sports rivalry, which was
spectacularly expressed on the cricket oval. Though Pakistan became a
permanent member of the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 1948,
it acquired test status four years later. In the following six decades, it
played 58 tests with India. It won 11 tests and lost 9, with the rest be-
ing draws.16 On the other hand, the Indians won the ICC’s World Cup
at the Lord’s in London in June 1983, nine years before the Pakistanis,
captained by Imran Khan, did in Melbourne. Starting in October 1978,
the two neighbors’ national squads competed against each other in One
Day International (ODI) in multinational tournaments and Twenty20
contests.17 In 126 such encounters until March 2014, Pakistan won 72
and India 50, with 4 declared draws.18
Pakistan’s first series of test matches with India started in October
1952. Its team lost the first test in Delhi. Then it fought back with verve in
Lucknow, inflicting a humiliating defeat on its host by an inning. Whereas
its performance buoyed the spirits of Pakistanis at home, the Indian spec-
tators at the stadium were so furious that they booed and mocked their
players. By winning the next match, the Indians saved their sports honor.

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But the abuse that was hurled at the Indian cricket squad in Lucknow
left an indelible mark. The message was: there is a lot more at stake than
just cricket. A match between the two national teams was to be treated
as a battle fought on the pitch—a war without the shooting. Indeed, the
term “clash” replaced the normal “match” in the case of India and Pakistan.
This forced the two captains and their squads to follow defensive tactics.
Hence the 1954–1955 test series hosted by Pakistan and the 1960–1961
series by India were draws.
The sports and trade break caused by the Kashmir War in 1965 con-
tinued well past the next armed conflict in 1971. It was only in 1978,
when the heads of government in Delhi and Islamabad—Morarji Desai
and General Zia ul Haq respectively—had not been the direct partici-
pants in the 1971 war, that cricketing ties were restored. In November
1978 the sixteenth Indo-Pakistan test match was played in Faisalabad,
Pakistan. The Indo-Pakistan cricket test series became an annual event.
One-day matches were also played in some tournaments, such as the
short-lived Austral-Asia Cup, which was staged in the United Arab Emir-
ates. Because of their brevity, these games are very exciting. The most mem-
orable one between India and Pakistan was played in Sharjah in 1986 for
the Austral-Asia Cup Final. Pakistan needed 4 runs off the last ball to win.
Javed Miandad, a legendary batsman, hit a 6 when his strike sent the ball
over the boundary marker and into the crowd. Pakistan went into an ecstatic
frenzy while its archrival was shattered. This was Pakistan’s first victory in a
one-day tournament and the consequent depression it caused among Indi-
ans lingered a long time. Indeed, the shock of triumph or defeat was so in-
tense that several people died of heart attacks on both sides of the border.19
The next year Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi broke new ground
by inviting Zia ul Haq to watch a match with him in February 1987 to
defuse the tension caused by India’s Operation Brasstacks war games.
With that, the term “cricket diplomacy” entered the diplomatic lexicon in
South Asia. Later, the worsening of Delhi-Islamabad relations because of
the insurgency in Kashmir ended the countrywide tours by the competing
squads, the forty-fifth test match in Sialkot, Pakistan, in mid-December
1989 being the last during the twelve-year period. It was in a game played
against the Pakistani team in Karachi a month earlier that the sixteen-
year-old Sachin Tendulkar, who would be hailed as the greatest postwar
batsman, made his debut in a test series.
On the one hand test matches aroused partisan passions on both sides
of the Indo-Pakistan border; on the other they enabled people-to-people

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contact. “I remember in the 1989 Test at Lahore, people came from New
Delhi and Amritsar,” recalled Rameez Raja, the chief executive of the
Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). “Likewise when Pakistan played in India,
people from Pakistan went to Chandigarh and other Indian cities.”20
With the Kashmiri separatists’ insurgency gathering pace in the early
1990s and the Indian government using an iron fist to squash it, relations
between Delhi and Islamabad became frosty. The cricket test match series
was suspended.
At the initiative of Sahara India, a business conglomerate, the PCB
and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) signed a five-year
contract in 1995 to play five annual ODIs in Toronto, a neutral venue.
In the three seasons from September 1996 to September 1998, Pakistan
won the tournaments. By then, with cable TV making inroads in India,
more Indians had access to watching cricket played overseas. Betting on
cricket, although illegal, became widespread in both India and Pakistan.
The remaining two ODIs fell by the wayside when, in the wake of the
Kargil War in the spring of 1999, Sahara India ended its sponsorship.21
As for the Indo-Pakistan test matches, on the eve of Indian premier
Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s bus journey from Delhi to Lahore in February
1999, the forty-sixth Indo-Pakistani test match was played in Chennai.
Pakistan won by 12 runs. The return tour of the Indian squad failed to
materialize because of the Kargil War, which resulted in yet another break
in official bilateral cricket links.
On June 8, 1999, while Indian and Pakistani soldiers were fighting
in Kargil, the contest between the cricket teams of the warring nations
in the World Cup tournament in Manchester, England, became the
most watched segment of the tournament. Though Pakistan was beaten
by India, it had done so well in earlier matches that it went on to the
semifinal.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament in
December 2001, Delhi broke off diplomatic ties with Islamabad. Mu-
tual relations, including sports, remained frozen until August 2003. Six
months later, India played the first of its three tests, despite security con-
cerns, and as many ODIs. “Our public has been starving to see India play
in Pakistan for nearly 14 years,” said Raja. “I think eight international
matches would generate huge excitement and interest, while almost every
[sports] centre will also get its due share [of hosting the game].” 22 The
Indians won the series, 2 to 1. By then airing the matches on TV had
become big business. So the pressure on players to win intensified.

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 SHARED CULTURE, RISING COMMERCE

Predictably, the terror attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 rup-

tured Indo-Pakistan cricket ties. In the wake of a terror attack on the
visiting Sri Lankan team in Lahore in March 2009, the ICC cancelled
Pakistan’s cohosting of the 2011 Cricket World Cup. The headquarters
of the organizing committee was shifted from Lahore to Mumbai. With
Pakistan no longer hosting games, eight of the games were played in In-
dia, four in Sri Lanka, and two in Bangladesh. This was a major blow to
Pakistan from which it has yet to recover fully.

A CRICKET BATTLE ON THE PLAINS OF PUNJAB

When the Indian and Pakistani teams found themselves facing each other
in the ICC’s 2011 semifinal in the stadium in Mohali, a satellite town of
Chandigarh, passion rose in both nations—and with it the size of bet-
ting, now running into billions of rupees. An extra element of drama
was added when Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh invited his
Pakistani counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, to watch the daylong battle on
a cricket pitch on March 30.
On the eve of this momentous event, the Mohali stadium was sur-
rounded by contingents of policemen in khaki, antiriot paramilitaries in
blue fatigues, commando units in black overalls, and regular troops in full
battle uniform. They were aided by bomb disposal squads with sniffer
dogs and helicopters in the air. Those entering the stadium went through
a metal detector and were given vigorous pat-downs by security guards.
With only half of the twenty-eight thousand stadium seats available
to the public—the other half reserved for celebrities, diplomats, and of-
ficials from both countries—demand far exceeded supply, with tickets
selling for up to ten times the offi cial price. Those desperate to gain
entrance had started lining up thirty-six hours before the event. Belying
the reports that Indian visas had been given to thousands of Pakistanis,
there was only a trickle crossing the Wagah border post. Most Pakistanis
chose to watch the event live on TV.
In Karachi, the home of the cricket captain Shahid Afridi, the au-
thorities erected giant screens at venues across the city, while car owners
draped their vehicles with the national flag and posters of the players. In
a rare goodwill gesture, prison officials arranged a special screening of
the match for their Indian inmates and provided them with the Indian
tricolor to cheer their side. In Chandigarh, Punjab’s deputy chief minister

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Sukhbir Singh Badal urged residents to open their “hearts and homes to
our brothers from across the border.” They were generous to the Pakistani
visitors, up to a point. “They can come, they can play but they cannot win,”
said an ardent fan of the Indian squad. “This is India’s match.”23
And so it turned out. India won by 29 runs. Three Pakistanis died of
heart attacks caused by the shock of defeat. One of them was fifty-five-
year-old Liaquat Soldier, an actor-writer-director who collapsed while
participating in a TV show in Karachi organized for the much-hyped
match. “The whole nation . . . simply got disappointed,” read the edito-
rial of the Lahore-based Dunya (World) newspaper. “Fans watching live
screening returned to their homes during the last overs of the match.”24
India went on to challenge Sri Lanka in the final, played in Mumbai.
It triumphed, beating its rival by 6 wickets. It became the first country to
win the ICC’s World Cup final on home soil. With a record 67.6 million
people watching the gripping final—most of them poised on the edge
of their seats—it also became one of the most viewed sporting events on
television.

INDIA’S STATUS ON THE RISE

By now there was a mismatch in the international standing of the Indian

and Pakistan teams. This stemmed from the improving quality of India’s
players and the emergence of India as the thriving commercial hub of
international cricket. The realization that failure to play against India was
excluding Pakistan’s squad from the most lucrative hub led the PCB to
urge the BCCI to resume sports links, reiterating its long-held stance that
politics should not interfere with sporting ties. The BCCI invited the
Pakistani team to tour India for three ODIs and two Twenty20s in late
December 2012 and early January 2013.
During its first tour of India in five years, Pakistan came out even in
the Twenty20 series but won the ODI series, 2–1, its first victory since
2005. Its cricketers and media exhibited a true spirit of sportsmanship
when Tendulkar, a cricketing phenomenon, retired from the sport after
nearly a quarter century. Among other things, the Pakistani media cov-
ered Tendulkar’s farewell speech live on November 16, 2013. Newspapers
and cricketers showered praise on the sports icon. Calling him “the most
complete batsman of his age,” the Express Tribune and Daily Times ex-
plained that he had the rare skill of repelling bowling attacks of all sorts

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and tailoring his natural aggression to suit the needs of his team. The
glowing tributes to Tendulkar went on for so long that they annoyed the
leadership of the Pakistani Taliban. In a video message its spokesman
urged Pakistan’s media to stop praising the Indian batsman.25
Such an attitude was alien to the PCB, which was keen to see the
BCCI accept its invitation for a bilateral cricket tour of Pakistan by India,
the last one having been in 2006. The BCCI failed to oblige. Frustration
in the PCB built up. In December 2013 its acting chair, Najam Sethi, an
eminent journalist-businessman, said that Pakistan was more than will-
ing to tour India. “If they are not coming to Pakistan, we are willing to
tour them.” He explained that “India owe us two home series as per the
Future Tour Program, and India-Pakistan series is the most sought after,
millions of people are waiting for it.” But he also pointed out that being
the financial hub and one of the most solicited teams, India had a busy
cricket schedule—a fact that militated against its team playing a long se-
ries with an archrival such as Pakistan.26 In other words, India’s growing
economic clout was becoming a factor in shaping its cricketing relations
with its leading South Asian neighbor.
India achieved an average of 8 percent growth in its economy between
2004 and 2011, whereas Pakistan’s GDP expansion declined from 7.4
percent during that period to 2.8 percent.27 The lower 5 percent increase
in India’s GDP in 2013 was still twice as much as that of its feisty rival.
As it was, the weakness of Pakistan’s economy compared to India’s was
noted at Pakistan’s inception.

UPS AND DOWNS OF BILATERAL TRADE

Taking into account the gross imbalance in the GDPs of India and Pa-
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424811112

kistan in 1947, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff s (GATT)

allowed the new nation to impose restrictions on its trade with India.
GATT’s successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), followed suit
in 1995. That was why when Delhi accorded Pakistan most-favored-nation
(MFN) status—meaning that it was ready to give Pakistan a trade advan-
tage by offering low tariffs—in 1996, the WTO exempted Islamabad from
reciprocating, which is the common practice.
Partition placed the jute-growing area into East Pakistan and the
cotton-growing Sindh into West Pakistan, whereas jute and textile mills
were in West Bengal and Bombay respectively. Therefore 56 percent of

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Pakistan’s exports went to India, whereas only 32 percent of India’s fin-

ished goods exports were destined for the opposite direction. Before 1965,
West Pakistan and India used eleven land routes for bilateral trade: eight
in Punjab and three in Sindh.28 With the prices of commodities rising as a
result of the Korean War (1950–1953), Pakistan had favorable trade with
India. This continued for some years after the end of that conflict. During
1957–1963 bilateral trade balanced out. Later the situation favored Pa-
kistan. In fiscal 1964, for instance, Pakistani goods worth $46 million
were shipped to India, which earned only $27 million for its exports to
Pakistan.29
After the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, bilateral trade ceased. Prior to
the conflict, passenger and freight trains used to run between Jodhpur
in Rajasthan and Karachi. In the aftermath of the armed confl ict, rail
tracks were uprooted between Munabao in Rajasthan and Khokharapar
in Sindh. It was only after four decades—in February 2006—that the
railway stations of Munabao and Khokharapar would be reconnected.30
Travel across the international border virtually ceased after the 1965 war
because even the issuing of single-entry visas by the neighboring countries
became rare. Pakistanis needed a separate visa for each Indian state, and
every time they traveled to a different state they had to report to its police
department. The same procedure applied to Indians visiting Pakistan.
In early 1971, Delhi and Islamabad inked a trade agreement. It fell
apart in December with the outbreak of the Bangladesh War. It was only
in 1975 that the two nations signed a fresh commercial protocol valid
for three years. During this period the bilateral commerce favored India.
Over the next twelve years, the total volume of trade varied between $31
million and $87 million, with Pakistan selling more goods than India.
But as Pakistan raised the number of items on its positive list for im-
ports to eight hundred in 1996 (when India granted it MFN status),
two-way commerce, totaling $241 million, favored India to the tune of
$168 million.31
Later, the size of the cross-border trade became susceptible to what-
ever diplomatic sensitivities prevailed between Delhi and Islamabad. The
bilateral trade during fiscal 1999 shrank by 43 percent from the previous
year’s $319.5 million because of the Kargil War. Conversely, as a conse-
quence of the composite dialogue for peace agreed by Vajpayee and Pa-
kistani President Pervez Musharraf in January 2004 at the South Asian
Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit in Islamabad,
there was a pick-up in bilateral commerce. In fiscal 2004 it rose by 76

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 SHARED CULTURE, RISING COMMERCE

percent from $476 million in the previous year.32 The leaders decided to
reopen closed rail and air routes.
The Wagah-Attari border crossing along the historic Grand Trunk
Road in Punjab was the natural choice. But the implementation came in
stages, with Pakistan being slow to reciprocate, allowing only fourteen
Indian items to be imported by road. In 2005 the two sides signed a pro-
tocol to trade via this frontier post so long as the trucks were unloaded in
the country of origin, with porters carrying the goods across the frontier.

UPGRADING THE WAGAH-ATTARI BORDER CROSSING

It was only on October 1, 2007, that Islamabad and Delhi agreed to

trucks crossing the border and depositing their consignments at the
other country’s customs house, to be reloaded into local vehicles after
inspection. On that day, the mood on India’s Attari side was festive, with
national flags flying amid cheerfully worded banners, and gaily dressed
farmers singing and dancing. Indian Punjab’s chief minister Badal sent
off the first cargo of tomatoes in a decorated truck. By contrast, the
atmosphere on the other side was lukewarm. Disappointingly, Badal’s
counterpart in Pakistani Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, failed to reciprocate
his gesture.33
India’s exports to Pakistan jumped from $547 million in fiscal 2004 to
$1.7 billion three years later. But Pakistani shipments to India stagnated
around $300 million because most of its exports consisted of traditional
textiles, leather products, sports goods, chemicals, and cement.34 In June
2008 the two governments decided to increase the frequency of Delhi-
Lahore freight trains from two to five a week to cope with the steady rise
in commerce.35
Interestingly, contraband trade through smuggling and third-country
routing exceeded legitimate transactions. It was comprised not only of
audio and video cassettes but also India-made machinery and spare parts,
especially for the textile industry, and newsprint, which were bought by
Pakistanis through the (UAE) or Singapore. Given Islamabad’s tenuous
foreign exchange reserves, the government ignored the illicit trade—until
9/11. Then, thanks to Washington’s generous aid to Islamabad for the
latter’s participation in its war on jihadist terrorism, Pakistan’s foreign
exchange reserves expanded nearly sevenfold. With that the need for
third-country imports from India slackened.36

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

The bonhomie between Indian prime minister Singh and Pakistan

president Asif Ali Zardari, displayed at the end of their meeting in New
York in September 2008, augured well for stronger economic ties. The next
month India and Pakistan permitted limited commerce across the Line
of Control in Kashmir on the Uri-Muzaffarabad and Poonch-Rawalakot
trade routes. But the terror attacks in Mumbai reversed the upward trend
in commerce. The bilateral trade in fiscal 2008 fell by $440 million.
Though the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) treaty, specify-
ing reduction of customs duty on all traded goods to zero by 2016 for
SAARC members,37 had become operational on January 1, India and
Pakistan ratified it only in 2009. As a result, Indo-Pakistan commerce
received a boost. In fiscal 2010 two-way commerce increased by a third,
to a little over $2 billion. Yet Pakistan accounted for less than 0.5 percent
of India’s overall trade, and India just over 1 percent of Pakistan’s.38
India urged Pakistan to reciprocate by according it MFN status. But
its government failed to respond positively to Delhi’s call because of
considerable opposition at home. It came mainly from the farm lobby,
fearing competition from Indian agriculture, and textile manufacturers.
Focused primarily on foreign markets, Pakistani mill owners by and large
produced better quality cloth, whereas their Indian counterparts, cater-
ing for the vast domestic market, prioritized cheap, lower-quality tex-
tiles. Pakistani manufacturers were thus vulnerable to imports of India’s
low-priced cloth. Unable to overcome resistance rooted in economics,
combined with opposition from Islamist groups on ideological grounds,
Pakistan’s government dithered.
Nonetheless, hopeful of improved economic relations with Islamabad,
the Indian cabinet decided to build an Integrated Check Point (ICP) at
Attari on a plot of 118 acres in February 2010. Eighteen months later, in
August 2011, it removed Pakistan from the negative list under the Foreign
Exchange Management Act, paving the way for investment from Paki-
stan. In November 2011 Pakistan decided to grant India MFN status in
principle.39

PAKISTAN’S QUALITATIVE SHIF T RAMPS UP TRADE

On March 21, 2012, Pakistan made a major policy shift. So far it had kept
a positive list of goods that could be imported from India. It now replaced
that with a negative list for Indian imports, with all other unspecified

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 SHARED CULTURE, RISING COMMERCE

items allowed entry into the country. By so doing the number of allowable
Indian items leapt from 1,956 to 6,800. This helped Pakistani industrial-
ists, who were now free to import raw materials from India except those
produced domestically.40 Significantly, the 1,209 banned items were in
agriculture, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and automobiles.41
Islamabad’s liberalized protocol was expected to reduce the import
of Indian goods through third countries, such as the UAE, which jacked
up prices. Shipping Indian goods through Dubai was three times more
expensive than transporting them overland to Pakistan. For instance, a
bicycle tire, which had been on Pakistan’s positive list for trade with In-
dia, shot up to 600 Pakistani rupees from the original 250 Indian rupees
(1 Indian Rupee = 1.6 Pakistani Rupee) by the time it reached Pakistan
through Dubai.42
On April 13, 2012, Attari was a beehive of activity. Since it was Bai-
sakhi, a harvest festival coinciding with the New Year of Punjabis, the
mood in the province was festive. That was the day India’s home minister,
P. Chidambaram, chose to inaugurate the Attari ICP, constructed at a cost
of Rs 1,500 million ($30 million) and guarded by the Border Security
Force, part of the home ministry. Pakistan’s ICP at Wagah, built earlier
on nine acres of land, was guarded by the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary
force maintained by the interior ministry.
A structure of yellow and pink stone, the Attari ICP housed state-
of-the-art facilities for security, customs, and immigration requirements
for passenger and cargo traffic by rail and road. Its two-story passenger
terminal resembled an airport terminal, with waiting areas, restaurants,
rest rooms, and duty-free shops. The cargo terminal was constructed like
an office complex, with different areas earmarked for government agen-
cies, cargo handling agents, banks, and so on. Its parking area had space
for five hundred trucks, and its warehouses, including cold storage places,
were meant for receipt, inspection, trans-shipment, and delivery of im-
ported goods. The prominently marked trade and passenger gates across
the dust-blown arches completed the new, efficient arrangement. Such
facilities were expected to reduce dramatically the delay of up to one week
truck drivers had often experienced before.
Dressed in immaculate Tamil dress of white, open-neck shirt and
a long flowing lungi, Chidambaram unveiled the ten-foot-high plaque,
inscribed in Hindi, Punjabi, and English, dedicated to “the nation, and
peace and harmony with Pakistan”—as Badal and his counterpart from
Pakistan, Shahbaz Sharif, and Indian commerce minister Anand Sharma

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

and his Pakistani counterpart, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, clapped enthusi-

astically.43 On the previous day Sharma and Pakistan’s commerce secretary
Zafar Mahmood had inaugurated the Lifestyle Pakistan 2012 exhibition,
displaying fashion textiles, jewelry, and designer furniture in Delhi. India
had reduced the number of items prohibited for import from Pakistan by
a third.
At Attari, speeches by the dignitaries followed. When Fahim ended
his speech with the instantly coined slogan “Pakistan-Hindustan dosti
zindabad ” (Long live the Pakistan-Hindustan friendship), he got an en-
thusiastic response from the audience. Badal demanded that the ICP be
allowed to handle all 6,800 items traded between Karachi and Mumbai,
not just 137, as was the case then.44
Six months later Delhi agreed to curtail its sensitive list, allowed un-
der SAFTA, to 100 items from the present 614 by April 2013, whereby
a SAARC member was allowed to maintain high tariffs. Islamabad con-
sented to phasing out its negative list in December 2012 and cutting its
sensitive list of 950 items to 100 within five years.45
By April 2013, the Indo-Pakistan trade by road though Attari-Wagah
almost doubled. And each day some three hundred people crossed the
border.46 In fiscal 2012 the volume of bilateral commerce reached a record
$2.6 billion. But that was far less than the Indo-Pakistan trade through
third countries, estimated at more than $4 billion.47
The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)–led government in Islamabad
failed to keep its promise to confer MFN status on India by the end of
2012. It justified its failure by pointing out that India did not address its
concerns about nontariff barriers (NTB) erected by Delhi. Actually, India
had argued that its NTBs did not apply exclusively to Pakistan and that
this subject fell within the purview of SAFTA. In any case, Islamabad’s
noncompliance stemmed from the resistance of its automobile and phar-
maceutical industries as well as the farm lobby, and the forthcoming gen-
eral election in May 2013. Since the PPP was accused of being pro-Delhi
by the opposition, its according of MFN on India would have played into
the hands of its rivals.

MOST FAVORED NATION BY ANOTHER TITLE

Following the parliamentary election, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz),

or PML (N), led by Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, formed the government

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 SHARED CULTURE, RISING COMMERCE

in June 2013 after being overthrown in a military coup in October 1999.

In their meeting on January 17, 2014, the commerce ministers of India
and Pakistan—Sharma and Khurram Dastgir Khan respectively—agreed
on a protocol of nondiscriminatory market access on a reciprocal basis,
because in Pakistan the term “most favored nation” had become politically
charged. Islamabad consented to trimming its negative list of trade items
with India while maintaining one hundred items on the sensitive list, on
which an additional tariff was allowed.48
The ministers also decided to keep the Wagah-Attari border crossing
open around the clock instead of twelve hours a day. Islamabad agreed
to allow the import of all products from India at its Wagah ICP. These
changes were expected to divert trade from the complicated sea route to
a simplified one by land. And the declaration of Wagah and Attari as dry
ports set the stage for shipping cargo by container, which would reduce
transportation and handling costs.49
These steps boosted cross-border commerce. One of the main hurdles
to further expansion of trade was the poor infrastructure on the Pakistani
side of the land frontier. Its ICP at Wagah was a fraction of the size of
India’s at Attari.
In addition, bureaucratic and other procedures in Pakistani were far
more arduous than in India. A Pakistani exporter had to deal with the
paramilitary Pakistan Rangers; the military’s National Logistic Cell,
charged with crisis management and logistics emergency; the customs
department; and the Anti-Narcotics Force, with overlapping responsibil-
ities. Pakistan’s railway infrastructure was also in a worse state than India’s.
And with Karachi being the only major Pakistani port so far, transporta-
tion by sea was constrained by limited port facilities, cumbersome customs
procedures, and bureaucratic red tape. In addition, because of currency
restrictions, all payments had to be made in a hard currency.
On the other hand, political opposition to normalization of commer-
cial relations between the two neighbors was on the wane, while lobbying
for it by businesses became more vigorous. In February 2014, Malik Tahir
Javaid, chair of the Pakistan Industrial and Traders Associations Front,
urged the government to allow the import of all those items not manu-
factured in Pakistan to be imported from India.50
Were this to happen, annual bilateral trade could easily reach $10 billion
before the end of the decade. Other estimates put the figure at $20 billion
under “normal” commercial relations between Islamabad and Delhi. After
the Islamabad-Beijing free trade agreement went into effect in July 2007,

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

the bilateral commerce increased more than threefold in six years—from

$4.1 billion in fiscal 2006.51
When the governments in Beijing and Delhi embarked on economic
liberalization in 1991–1992, they decided to set aside their border dis-
putes, which had led to war thirty years back, and tighten commercial
ties. Within a decade, their bilateral trade ballooned from $265 million to
$4.95 billion. During the subsequent decade the growth rate accelerated.
With bilateral commerce amounting to $74.7 billion in fiscal 2012, China
became India’s number one trading partner.52
The moral is that if Pakistan and India were to follow the example
of China and India, they would both gain materially. Thriving commerce
may well bring about the end to the Longest August between the two
neighbors by helping to create mutual prosperity underpinned by contin-
ued peaceful coexistence. This would require putting the Kashmir issue on
the back burner the way Beijing and Delhi did with their border dispute
and focusing on forging strong economic links.

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Overview and Conclusions

India and Pakistan, born as twins in August 1947, are now respectively
the second and the sixth most populous nations on the planet. They also
belong to the exclusive nine-member nuclear arms club. In terms of GDP
estimates based on purchasing power parity, India is number three after
the United States and China. And it has the distinction of being the
world’s largest democracy. These facts underscore the importance of its re-
lations with its neighbor, Pakistan, which also shares borders with China,
Afghanistan, and Iran. Twice, between 1999 and 2002, India and Pakistan
came close to a nuclear confrontation.
The partition of the Indian subcontinent was the culmination of a
process that started when Afghanistan-based Muhammad Ghori, com-
manding an army of Afghans, Arabs, Persians, and Turks, gained control
of the Indus Valley basin in 1188. Four years later he defeated Prithvi Raj
in the Second Battle of Terrain, paving the way for his leading general,
Qutbuddin Aibak, to annex Delhi. Out of this was born the Delhi Sultan-
ate. It lasted until 1526, when it gave way to the Mughal Dynasty, which
ended in 1807. What distinguished the Afghans and Mughals from the
earlier invader-conquerors of the subcontinent was that they were the
followers of Islam. Their beliefs and religious practices clashed with those
of the indigenous Hindus.
The rise of the British Empire on the ashes of the Mughal Dynasty
put both the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority under the com-
mon yoke of a foreign power with its home base in distant Britain, a
Christian country. While the Muslim elite’s loss of power left it sulking,

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 THE LONGEST AUGUST

upper-caste Hindus adjusted readily, switching from learning Persian to

English to help the new rulers administer the subcontinent.
Preeminent among those Muslim aristocrats who accepted the un-
palatable reality was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who urged his coreligionists
to learn English. He also understood the importance of nationalism, a
nineteenth-century construct originating in Europe. According to him,
Muslims in India were a nation, and so were Hindus.
Within a few years of the founding of the Indian National Con-
gress in 1885, calling for an increased role in the government by Indi-
ans, Sir Syed foresaw its modest demand escalating to a campaign to
expel the British from India. “Is it possible that under these circumstances
[of British withdrawal] two nations—the Mohammedans and the Hin-
dus—could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power?” he asked
rhetorically in 1888.1
His argument was flawed. It failed to recognize that universal suffrage
in an independent India would deprive the minority Muslims of being
“equal in power.” This is the point Muhammad Ali Jinnah articulated
four decades later. Alluding to the historical oppression of minorities by
majorities, he demanded legal safeguards for the Muslim minority in his
address to the Congress session in 1928. He pleaded that Muslims, form-
ing a quarter of the population, should be allocated a third of political
power. The overwhelmingly Hindu leadership of the Congress prepared
to concede only 27 percent. This was the first of the landmark events that
led to the division of the subcontinent.

THE CONGRESS PARTY ’S BLUNDERS

The next such event occurred in 1937. After the Muslim League had
won two-thirds of the Muslim seats in the Bombay legislature and two-
fifths in United Provinces’, Jinnah offered the League a partnership with
the Congress. But Vallabhbhai Patel, who controlled the party machine,
demanded the merger of League legislators with the Congress before any
of them could be appointed minister. The haughty behavior of Congress
officials made even neutral Muslim leaders suspicious of their real inten-
tions toward Muslims.
Leaving aside the exceptional case of the small, Muslim-majority
North-West Frontier Province, the Congress won an average of one
Muslim seat in each of the ten provinces. With practically no Muslim

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lawmakers on its benches, the Congress ruled six provinces. This made
non-League Muslim legislators realize that the Congress would exercise
power on the basis of a majority in the general (Hindu) constituencies.
Non–Muslim League leaders started collaborating with the League.
The performance of the Congress ministries provided examples of
insensitivity toward Muslims’ beliefs and feelings. Congregational singing
of “Vande Mataram” (Sanskrit: I bow to Mother) as part of the official
protocol in schools, colleges, and elsewhere was one. According to Rabin-
dranath Tagore, a nationalist poet and philosopher, the core of “Vande
Mataram” was a hymn to the goddess Durga. In Islam, deifying or wor-
shiping anyone or anything other than the One and Only (unseen) God
constitutes idolatry and is forbidden.
The two-year-plus rule of the Congress gave Muslims a foretaste of
what to expect in an independent India. Support for the Muslim League
grew rapidly. In the 1945–1946 elections, it garnered all 30 Muslim places
in the Central Legislative Assembly, securing 87 percent of the Muslim
vote. In the provincial legislatures its size quadrupled to 425 out of 485
Muslim seats.2
By then the League’s resolution asserting that Muslims were “a nation
by any definition,” and that the Muslim-majority areas in the northwest-
ern and eastern zones of India, “should be grouped to constitute Inde-
pendent States in which the constituent units will be autonomous and
sovereign,”3 was six years old.
More significantly, the term “Pakistan” had become irresistibly attrac-
tive to Muslims of all classes and persuasions. Orthodox Muslims envis-
aged a Muslim state run according to the Sharia. Muslim landlords felt
assured of the continuation of the zamindari (landlord) system, which
the Congress had vowed to abolish. Muslim businessmen savored the
prospect of fresh markets in Pakistan free from Hindu competition. Civil
servants foresaw rapid promotion in the fledgling state. These perceptions
among Muslims grew in an environment in which Hindus were much
better off economically than Muslims.
Astonishingly, there was a singular lack of perception among Con-
gress leaders of the economic factors bolstering the League’s appeal. Jawa-
harlal Nehru made passing remarks about peasants, whether Muslim or
Hindu, suffering at the hands of landlords. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi
failed to grasp that it was that section of the Muslim population that felt
it could not compete with Hindus in getting government jobs and in
commerce and industry that backed the League.

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On the political front, what made partition inevitable was Neh-

ru’s boastful declaration on July 8, 1947, about Britain’s Constitutional
Award of May 16. It envisaged united India with a constituent assembly,
elected by existing provincial legislatures, convening briefly in Delhi, and
then dividing into Sections A (Hindu majority), B (Muslim-majority,
northwestern region), and C (Muslim-majority, Bengal-Assam) to frame
a constitution for three subfederations into which federal, independent
India was to be divided. Nehru announced that the Congress had agreed
to participate in the Constituent Assembly and, once convened, the As-
sembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award’s pro-
visions, if it so wished, and that the grouping scheme would most likely
not survive. This led Jinnah to withdraw the League’s acceptance of the
Constitutional Award.
The savage butchery that Muslims and non-Muslims—Hindus and
Sikhs—perpetrated on one another in Punjab left five hundred thousand
to eight hundred thousand people dead and caused the largest mass ex-
odus in history. When communal frenzy gripped Delhi, with Muslims
bearing the brunt, Nehru stuck firmly to his secular beliefs, while Patel
and Rajendra Prasad disapproved of the Indian army protecting Muslim
citizens.
Moreover Patel and his cohorts in Nehru’s government were hell-bent
on strangling Pakistan at birth. Jinnah complained about this to British
prime minister Clement Attlee and vowed that the Dominion of Pakistan
would “never surrender.” Despite his failing health, he helped the incipient
Pakistan, composed of two wings separated by a thousand miles, to find
its infant feet.

JINNAH FAILS TO WOO THE MAHARAJA

While acting as the chief executive of Pakistan, Jinnah dealt directly with
the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan and the princely states. He realized
that failure to persuade the Hindu Maharaja Sir Hari Singh of the pre-
dominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir to accede to Pakistan would be
a severe blow to his two-nation theory. An opponent of Jinnah’s thesis,
the maharaja rebuffed his friendly approaches.
Jinnah then assigned the Kashmir portfolio to Prime Minister Li-
aquat Ali Khan. He complemented his strategy of taking charge of the
Azad Army formed independently by Kashmiri Muslims with a plan to

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secure Srinagar by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas. He

informed Jinnah of the first track but not the second.
When the invasion of the tribal irregulars led to the airlifting of
Indian troops to Srinagar in October 1947, following the maharaja’s
accession to India, Jinnah was distraught. His unease increased when
Pakistan’s commander in chief General Sir Frank Messervy refused to
obey his order to deploy Pakistani troops. Sir Frank argued that imple-
menting Governor-General Jinnah’s order would result in British officers
commanding their respective Indian and Pakistani contingents in a fight
against each other.
Jinnah’s dream of incorporating all of Jammu and Kashmir into Paki-
stan withered, accelerating his physical decline. He died in harness only a
year after the birth of Pakistan.
The outbreak of war with India in Kashmir within months of Paki-
stan’s inception gave its military a primacy it has maintained since then,
monopolizing the drafting and implementation of national security poli-
cies after the assassination of Ali Khan in October 1951. With his death
the nation lost the remaining cofounder of Pakistan. The Muslim League
started to unravel, while differences between the eastern and western
wings sharpened on the status of Bengali, the mother tongue of the ma-
jority of Pakistani citizens. Urdu remained the sole official language. The
ongoing squabbling between politicians led to the seizure of power by
General Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1958.
This highlighted the contrasting development of Pakistan and In-
dia, where two general elections held under a republican constitution and
universal suffrage returned the Congress to power, with Nehru as prime
minister and foreign minister. His policy of nonalignment with the power
blocs contrasted with Pakistan’s alignment with the United States. Pa-
kistan acquired the distinction of being a member of the anticommu-
nist South-East Asia Treaty Organization as well as the Central Treaty
Organization.
As head of a stable military administration in Pakistan, Ayub Khan
was able to reach a deal on the distribution of Indus waters once the
World Bank persuaded the United States and Britain, along with Aus-
tralia and New Zealand, to finance the construction of canals and storage
facilities in India to transfer water from the eastern Indian rivers to West
Pakistan.
Arriving at an enthusiastic reception in the Pakistani capital of Karachi
in September 1960, Nehru cosigned the Indus Waters Treaty with Ayub

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Khan. The successful conclusion to a long-running economic dispute

encouraged Ayub Khan to broach the subject of Kashmir. But when, in
the Presidential Lodge in scenic Murree, he initiated a conversation on
the subject, Nehru turned his eyes away, toward the stunning scenery. He
concluded the session by stating that any change in the status quo would
face serious domestic opposition, and referred to the violent public reac-
tion to China’s occupation of India’s territory.

NEHRU’S TUSSLE WITH CHINA

By then China had become an integral element in the Indo-Pakistan

equation because of its occupation of a part of Kashmir, as alleged by
Delhi. Nehru raised the issue with Ayub Khan of Pakistan’s boundary
with China. He told Nehru that they did not claim any area not cov-
ered by the actual Line of Control, as determined by their experts. On
his return to Delhi, Nehru criticized Pakistan for having approached the
Chinese to demarcate the border.
Nehru was suffused with self-righteousness. This attitude had its mer-
its when it came to sticking to such progressive concepts as secularism
and democracy in India, where he enjoyed unrivaled mass popularity.
But it was ill suited to diplomacy, where give and take is the universally
accepted currency. This became apparent in his dealings with Pakistan
on Kashmir and then with China on the border issue. Some analysts
attributed self-righteousness to Nehru’s Brahminical lineage. Brahmins
had claimed and exercised monopoly over knowledge in the caste-ridden
Hindu society.
To resolve the border dispute through negotiations, China’s premier
Zhou Enlai suggested to Nehru that their troops should retreat for twelve
miles from the border. Nehru rejected the proposal. Nonetheless, China
unilaterally pulled back its soldiers for twelve miles. India interpreted this
as China’s weakness. It occupied 1,540 square miles of Chinese territory
and set up sixty forward posts, forty-three of them north of the McMa-
hon Line in the eastern sector. On September 11, 1962, Delhi permitted
all forward posts and patrols to fire on any armed Chinese who entered
India’s claimed territory. This was tantamount to a declaration of war.
On October 18, Chairman Mao Zedong addressed the Politburo of
the Communist Party of China on this subject. “Now that Nehru is de-
termined to fight us, we have no way out but to keep him company,” he

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said. “However, our counter-attack is only meant to serve a warning to

Nehru and the Government of India that the boundary question cannot
be resolved by military means.”4
The second part of Mao’s statement proved to be the key to under-
stand why at midnight on November 20, having established its superior-
ity in weaponry, strategy, communications, logistics, and planning in the
month-long war, China declared a unilateral cease-fire, and added that
after their withdrawal, the Chinese frontier guards would be far behind
their positions held prior to September 8, 1962.
As wars go, this was a minor affair in which neither side deployed its
air force. But it opened a new chapter in India’s foreign policy and rela-
tions between the United States and the Soviet Union. These superpow-
ers set aside their rivalry and backed India, treating Communist China
as their common foe. This radical realignment affected Indo-Pakistan
relations. The pro-Washington Pakistan was alarmed and angered to see
India being armed heavily by the United States as well as Britain—both
of which had persuaded Ayub Khan not to open a battlefront against
India in Kashmir or elsewhere on its western frontier during the Sino-
Indian War.
Though Nehru went through the motions in his government’s talks
with Pakistan on Kashmir, nothing came of it. He had no intention of
altering his stance that the current cease-fire line in Kashmir should be
turned into an international border. This was unacceptable to Pakistan,
which demanded a plebiscite, as Nehru had agreed initially. Nehru con-
sidered revising his policy on Kashmir only when massive anti-India
demonstrations took place in Srinagar in December 1963.
His release of the Kashmiri leader Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah
from jail in the spring of 1964 and Abdullah’s flight to Rawalpindi to
meet Ayub Khan showed promise. But Nehru died of heart failure in May,
while Abdullah was in Pakistan. With that died the prospect of a satis-
factory resolution of the Kashmir conundrum during Nehru’s lifetime.
Overall Nehru’s inflexible stance on Kashmir for seventeen years had
stoked frustration among Pakistani leaders. When they could no longer
contain it, they tried to change the status quo through force. Given India’s
military superiority, these attempts would fail. The setbacks in Kashmir
altered Pakistan’s history radically, with the 1965 war leading to the se-
cession of East Pakistan, and the 1999 Kargil conflict resulting in the
termination of democracy. The Pakistani leadership also tried to achieve
its aim by using armed infiltrators to destabilize Indian Kashmir. Delhi

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reacted with a ferocious response, using torture and extrajudicial killings

on an industrial scale. After 9/11, however, as a victim of cross-border
terrorism, India gained widespread Western sympathies, which improved
its diplomatic clout.

SECOND INDO-PAKISTAN WAR

In the aftermath of the Sino-Indian War, Anglo-American military aid

to India started tilting the balance of power in South Asia in India’s favor.
Ayub Khan used force to expel India from the 48 percent of Jammu and
Kashmir it occupied.
The strategy he deployed was a repeat of what Ali Khan had done
eighteen years earlier. Under Operation Gibraltar, Pakistan-trained militias
infiltrated Indian Kashmir in August 1965, followed by the involvement
of regular troops invading Indian Kashmir on September 1. The three-
week-long armed conflict, which spread to Pakistani and Indian Punjab,
ended with a UN-brokered cease-fire. The fear of China opening a front
on India’s eastern frontier was an important factor in Delhi accepting
the truce.
There were substantial losses in men and military hardware on both
sides. By frustrating Pakistan’s objective to alter the status quo in Kashmir,
India scored a success. The domestic consequences of Ayub Khan’s failure
were far reaching. During the conflict people in East Pakistan, lightly de-
fended by their troops, were exposed. Their fear and helplessness increased
their alienation from West Pakistan and boosted Bengali nationalism,
which achieved its aim in the form of the sovereign state of Bangladesh,
created out of East Pakistan. The controlled media in Pakistan had made
people believe that their armed military was doing wonderfully well. If
so, why did Ayub Khan accept the UN cease-fire resolution?, most Paki-
stanis wondered aloud. The military dictator’s credibility plunged, paving
the way for his exit in 1969.
But his successor, General Yahya Khan, failed to honor the result of
the general election held October through December 1970 in Pakistan
under universal suffrage, which entitled the Bengali nationalist Awami
League leader Shaikh Mujibur Rahman to premiership. Instead he un-
leashed a reign of terror in East Pakistan.
The subsequent crisis caused by the flight of millions of East Paki-
stanis provided the government of Indira Gandhi with an opportunity.

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 OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSIONS

Through adroit moves in diplomacy, training of guerrillas to undermine

East Pakistan’s government, and superb military tactics, combined with
breaking the Pakistani army’s code, Gandhi brought about the signing of
the surrender document by General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi in Dacca
on December 17, 1971.
The predominantly Hindu Indians tapped into their religious my-
thology to crown their triumph. They conferred the sobriquet of Goddess
Durga (Sanskrit: Inaccessible) on Indira Gandhi. According to Hindu
lore, Durga is a warrior goddess who decapitates the buffalo-demon
Mahisasura. Now Gandhi slew the evil of the two-nation theory on which
Jinnah had built Pakistan with its two far-flung wings.
East Pakistan’s secession proved that a common religion was not a
strong enough glue to hold together two societies with different lan-
guages, dress, and cultures. The trumping of religion by ethnic nationalism
was a bitter pill to swallow, not only for West Pakistanis but also for those
in Indian Kashmir who advocated accession to Pakistan.
The third Indo-Pakistan War closed a tumultuous period in the
postindependence history of South Asia.

POST-1971 PAKISTAN

India now had to deal with a Pakistan that had lost more than half of its
population but was more cohesive racially and religiously, with its Hindu
minority reduced to less than 2 percent. It was ruled by the popularly
elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had built up the Pakistan People’s Party
(PPP) from scratch.
At the summit in Shimla in June 1972, he faced the victorious
Gandhi, whose leading aim was to bring the Kashmir dispute to an of-
ficial close. Bhutto was opposed to this. When their respective delega-
tions reached a deadlock, he had a one-on-one meeting with Gandhi. He
convinced her that after the loss of East Pakistan, if he were to abandon
his country’s claims to Kashmir, he would be thrown out by the military.
Having agreed earlier to convert the 1949 UN cease-fire line into the
LoC, Bhutto seemed willing to let it morph into an international frontier
without a written declaration. On Gandhi’s insistence the final draft com-
mitted both sides to settle all their differences “by peaceful means through
bilateral negotiations or by other peaceful means mutually agreed upon,”
thus ruling out third-party mediation. And it listed a final settlement of

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Jammu and Kashmir “as one of the outstanding questions awaiting set-
tlement.”5 In the subsequent decades, the 1972 Shimla Accord continued
to be the basis of all Indo-Pakistan talks.
But progress on normalizing relations and resuming trade and eco-
nomic cooperation got sidetracked by turmoil in India’s and Pakistan’s
domestic scenes. Bhutto faced insurgency by nationalists in Baluchistan.
In June 1975, a court invalidated Gandhi’s parliamentary seat won on
the corrupt practice of using government facilities and resources during
her 1971 election campaign. Instead of stepping down, she imposed an
emergency and ruled by decree.
In Pakistan, the rigged March 1977 general election gave the PPP
a large majority. The opposition, rallying behind the Pakistan National
Alliance, resorted to massive demonstrations. Army Chief General Mu-
hammad Zia ul Haq intervened by mounting Operation Fair Play on July
5, arrested Bhutto, and promised fair elections within ninety days. That
never happened.
An Islamist to the core, Zia ul Haq clung to power until August
1988, when he was killed, along with twenty-seven others, by an explo-
sion in the transport plane ferrying them near the Bahawalpur airport.
During his rule Pakistani state and society had undergone Islamization
and drifted further away from secular, democratic India.
Any ill will that Zia ul Haq had generated for his military dicta-
torship in the United States evaporated when Soviet troops moved into
Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 to bolster the twenty-month-old
Marxist regime in Kabul. Whereas India had recognized the leftist regime
in Afghanistan, Pakistan had not. When President Jimmy Carter offered
$400 million in aid to Islamabad to shore up armed Islamist resistance to
the Afghan government, Zia ul Haq called it “peanuts”6 and rejected it.
His prospect brightened when Ronald Reagan became US president
in 1981. Washington poured funds and weapons for the Afghan mujahe-
din through Pakistani army’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) directorate.
Reagan persuaded Congress to sanction $3.2 billion aid to Islamabad over
the next six years, arguing that arming Pakistan with modern US weaponry
would reduce the chance of its pursuing the nuclear option. In practice,
Pakistan forged ahead on both armament fronts, conventional and nuclear.
Shaken by India’s detonation of a “nuclear device” in May 1974, Paki-
stan had initiated a clandestine program to catch up with its arch rival in
this regard. Given Beijing’s overarching aim to deprive India of becoming
the hegemonic power in South Asia, it surreptitiously aided Islamabad in

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its nuclear arms program. To this quadrilateral linkage was added another
actor: Israel. Committed to thwarting the nuclear weapons ambition of
any Muslim country, Israel offered to work with Delhi to bomb the Ka-
huta nuclear facility, located twenty miles from Islamabad and run by
Abdul Qadeer Khan. By late 1982, a joint Indo-Israeli plan to raid Ka-
huta was hatched. During their clandestine trip to Tel Aviv in early 1983,
Indian military officers purchased electronic equipment to jam Kahuta’s
air defenses.
On the surface, Gandhi and Zia ul Haq maintained cordial rela-
tions. On the margins of the seventh Non-Aligned Movement summit
in Delhi in March 1983, they agreed to set up the Joint Indo-Pakistan
Commission, with subcommissions for trade, economics, information, and
travel. This double-dealing became an abiding feature of Delhi-Islamabad
relations.
The Indo-Israeli plot against Pakistan did not remain secret from the
ISI for long. In the autumn of 1983 its chief sent a message to its counter-
parts in India’s Research and Analysis Wing foreign intelligence agency.
This brought about a meeting between Munir Ahmad Khan, head of
the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and Raja Ramanna,
head of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, in a Vienna hotel.
Khan warned Ramanna that if India alone, or in collusion with Israel,
attacked Kahuta, Pakistan would hit India’s nuclear facility in Trombay
on the outskirts of Mumbai.7 This compelled Gandhi to hesitate. In addi-
tion, Pakistan’s ambassador in Delhi conveyed the same message to India’s
Ministry of External Affairs.8
This maneuver helped Zia ul Haq achieve his twin objectives of sig-
naling that Islamabad’s nuclear program was unstoppable, thus gain-
ing international acceptance by stealth, and issuing a stern warning to
Gandhi. She revoked her earlier go-ahead to Israel’s hawkish defense
minister Ariel Sharon.
Militant Sikhs’ violent agitation for an independent homeland, called
Khalistan, appealed to Zia ul Haq since it was based on religious grounds.
At his behest, the ISI aided the extremist Sikhs with training and weap-
ons. The activists of the Khalistan movement turned the Sikhs’ holiest
complex, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, into an armed fortress. To de-
stroy this base, Gandhi ordered the storming of the Golden Temple by the
army in June 1984. The military succeeded at the cost of shedding much
blood and alienating the Sikh community nationwide. In retaliation, two
of Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in October.

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She thus became the second Indian leader to fall victim to violence
stemming from religious fanaticism, the earlier example being that of
Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, who was assassinated by a Hindu suprem-
acist for urging the Indian government to meet its financial obligations
to Pakistan.

THE RACE FOR NUCLEAR ARMS

Rajiv Gandhi, the only surviving son of Indira, who succeeded her as
prime minister, was untutored in politics or administration. Nonetheless,
after his meeting with Zia ul Haq in December 1985 in Delhi, they
agreed not to attack each other’s nuclear facilities as a confidence-building
measure. Crucially, though, they disagreed on the nature of their nuclear
programs, both of them professing a peaceful use, a facade that would
crack in 1987.
In December 1986 Gandhi gave a green light to the Indian Army
chief, Lieutenant General Krishnaswamy Sundararajan, to stage the war
game code-named Brasstacks to test his innovative concept of combining
mechanization, mobility, and air support. The operation involved mobi-
lizing nearly three-quarters of the Indian army in Rajasthan and putting
them on high alert. As a model for a full-scale invasion, it revived Paki-
stani leaders’ long-held nightmare that their country would be annihilated
by India.
In retaliation, Zia ul Haq, as army chief, extended the military’s win-
ter exercises in Punjab, mobilized the army in Karachi and the Southern
Air Command, and deployed armored and artillery divisions as part of a
pincer to squeeze Indian Punjab, where the Sikh insurgency had revived.
In an astutely planned maneuver, Qadeer Khan gave an interview to
Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar on January 28, 1987, in Islamabad. If India
pushed Pakistan into a corner, “we will use the bomb,” he told Nayar. “We
won’t waste time with conventional weapons.”9 While Nayar’s scoop was
held up by the London-based Observer, a Sunday newspaper, awaiting
authentication by different sources, the story leaked.
To defuse the festering crisis, Gandhi invited Zia ul Haq to witness
the second day’s play in the five-day cricket match in Jaipur on Febru-
ary 22. He accepted the invitation. Sitting next to Gandhi, he reportedly
whispered that if India’s forces crossed the border, Indian cities would be
“annihilated.” A pro forma denial of the statement by Islamabad followed.

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All the same, from then on the media in India routinely said that Pakistan
was “within a few turns of a screwdriver” of assembling an atom bomb.
In short, after four decades of living in fear of India’s overwhelming
military superiority, Pakistan achieved parity with its rival in nuclear de-
terrence. Nevertheless, it did not lay to rest Pakistani leaders’ fears of India
becoming the unchallenged regional power in South Asia.
Initially, Gandhi and the democratically elected Pakistani prime min-
ister Benazir Bhutto got along well. On the sidelines of the summit of
the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in Is-
lamabad in late December 1988, Bhutto had a meeting with Gandhi. She
pledged to choke off Pakistan’s aid to Sikh separatists. In return, Gandhi
promised to withdraw Indian troops from the contested Siachen Glacier
in Kashmir, which he failed to do because of his party’s defeat in the 1989
general election.
On the last day of 1988 the two leaders signed the “Agreement on Pro-
hibition of Attack against Nuclear Installations and Facilities” to become
effective beginning January 27, 1991. Earlier in 1988, sticking to the prac-
tice of following underhanded policies, common to both rivals, Gandhi had
ordered the upgrading of the nuclear testing site in Pokhran, Rajasthan,
first used in 1974, to make it suitable for detonation on short notice.
Indo-Pakistan relations soured as the separatist insurgency in Kash-
mir intensified from 1989 onward and Delhi resorted to brutish methods
to squash it. Bhutto and her successor, Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, pro-
tested, but to no avail.
Following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991, the leadership
of the Congress Party passed to P. V. Narasimha Rao. During his five years
in office, the international scene changed radically. Th e Soviet Union’s
disintegration in December 1991 signaled US victory in the forty-
five-year-long Cold War.
Delhi strengthened its ties with Washington, which saw no need to
downgrade its historic links with Pakistan.
Once India had established full diplomatic relations with Israel
in 1992, at a time when the Islamist insurgency in Kashmir had risen
sharply, that small but militarily powerful nation with long experience in
tackling terrorism became a factor in determining Delhi’s relations with
Islamabad.
In sum, within half a century of their establishment, India and Paki-
stan found their bilateral relations being forged by multiple factors, involv-
ing the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Israel, and Afghanistan.

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In 1995 Narasimha Rao decided to conduct underground tests on nu-

clear weapons. Preparations built up to a climax in early December. These
were picked up by four powerful American spy satellites. President Bill
Clinton urged him to abandon the plan. He did so, but instructed nuclear
scientists to be ready for tests within a month of receiving an executive
order.10 By radically altering their pattern of work—such as laboring only
at night—at Pokhran, the Indians managed to defeat US spy satellites.
In March 1998, when Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJP) leader Atal Bihari
Vajpayee became prime minister as head of the BJP-led National Demo-
cratic Alliance with a slim majority, he ordered nuclear tests to consolidate
the loyalty of the non-BJP members of the alliance.
On May 11, he announced three underground nuclear tests, including
one involving a thermonuclear device. Two more tests of smaller bombs
followed on May 13. These explosions were received with widespread en-
thusiasm, making Indians feel proud of their scientists and engineers for
their mastery of high technology.
Across the border, prime minister Sharif faced a quandary. Given the
dire state of Pakistan’s economy, he was vulnerable to US sanctions, and
Clinton urged him to refrain from testing a nuclear bomb. But once the
Islamist parties mounted pro–nuclear test demonstrations on May 15,
Sharif had no choice but to fall in line with popular sentiment.
Two days later, he ordered the PAEC chair, Ishfaq Ahmed, to “con-
duct the explosions!”11 These were conducted in the Ras Koh mountain
range in Baluchistan on May 28. “We have settled a score and have carried
out five successful nuclear tests,” he declared on Pakistan TV. To beat
India, he ordered one more test on May 30.

FRIENDLY SIGNS BLOSSOM—BRIEFLY

These explosions boosted both Sharif ’s and Vajpayee’s popular standing,

giving them the confidence to stop flexing their muscles and start mend-
ing fences. At their meeting on the margins of the UN General Assembly
in New York they decided to resume bus service between Delhi and La-
hore to encourage people-to-people contact.
The star passenger on the inaugural bus trip on February 20, 1999,
was Vajpayee. He was received at the Wagah border crossing by Nawaz
Sharif and senior cabinet ministers in the full glare of the international
media. The high point of his stay in Lahore was the laying of a wreath at

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the Minar-e Pakistan, at the site where on March 23, 1940, the All India
Muslim League passed its resolution for a homeland for the Muslims of
India. In the visitors’ book, Vajpayee wrote: “A stable, secure and pros-
perous Pakistan is in India’s interest. Let no one in Pakistan be in doubt.
India sincerely wishes Pakistan well.”12 Coming from a Hindu nationalist
leader, such a statement was received with a full-throated cheer by Paki-
stani politicians and media.
The two prime ministers signed the Lahore Declaration. It stated that
the possession of nuclear weapons by both nations required additional re-
sponsibility to avoid conflict and promote confidence-building measures.
To avoid accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, the signa-
tories agreed to give each other advance notice of ballistic missile flight
tests and accidental or unexplained use of nuclear arms in order to stave
off nuclear conflict. They also agreed to discuss their nuclear doctrines and
related security issues.13
But Sharif ’s hope that Pakistan and India would be able to live as
friendly neighbors like America and Canada would prove wildly optimis-
tic barely three months later.

ON THE BRINK OF A NUCLEAR CLASH, TWICE

Without even informing Sharif, Army Chief Pervez Musharraf violated

the Shimla Agreement by attempting to change the status quo in Kashmir
by using force in the Kargil region. The initial claims of Islamabad that
the fighting there was being done by local Kashmiri mujahedin collapsed
when intercepts of conversations between Musharraf, then visiting Bei-
jing, and the chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Muhammad
Aziz Khan, in Rawalpindi were released by the Indian authorities.
On June 13 Vajpayee told Sharif that only when Pakistan had with-
drawn its troops would he be ready to talk. Clinton intervened. He ad-
vised Vajpayee not to open a new front in Kashmir. Remarkably, China
called for the withdrawal of Pakistan’s forces to the LoC and settling its
border issues with India peacefully.
India declared that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons,
but on June 23 Pakistan’s information minister Mushahid Hussain, ap-
pearing on a BBC program, refused to give the same guarantee.14
On the battlefront, Indians started expelling Pakistanis from their
occupied outposts in Kargil. Facing an imminent defeat, Musharraf would

427
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

most likely open new fronts in Kashmir, Sharif calculated. Th e result-

ing strong response by India would lead to a full-scale war, a calamitous
prospect. In Washington, Clinton fretted when his study of the National
Security Agency’s intercepts of satellite images showed the unveiling of
nuclear-tipped missiles at Sargodha Air Force Base, ordered by Musharraf
for possible use in an outright war with India.
Eager to prevent a nuclear holocaust in South Asia, Clinton sum-
moned Sharif and Vajpayee to Washington. Vajpayee declined, aware
that attending a tripartite meeting on Kargil would violate India’s position
that Kashmir was a bilateral issue.
After tense negotiations on America’s Independence Day, 1999,
Sharif signed a joint statement with Clinton. It specified an agreement
to restore the LoC, thus facilitating a cease-fire, seen as a preamble to the
resumption of bilateral talks to resolve all Indo-Pakistan disputes. Sharif
doubted that his army would see the statement as “the right thing for
Pakistan and the world.”
His hunch proved prescient. He was toppled by Musharraf in Oc-
tober. As in the case of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War in Kashmir, which
led to the overthrow of General Ayub Khan, the Kargil conflict produced
a similar upset, the only difference being the army chief (Yahya Khan)
replacing military president Ayub Khan, and not a popularly elected
politician.
As before with military dictators, once Musharraf had consolidated
his power, he tried to tackle the Kashmir issue. He displayed flexibility
by inviting solutions other than a plebiscite in his talks with Vajpayee in
Agra in July 2001, only to find him and his senior BJP cabinet ministers
insisting on Musharraf stopping cross-border terrorism and illegal infil-
tration into Indian Kashmir.
The 9/11 attacks strengthened the hands of BJP leaders in Delhi at
the expense of Musharraf. The daring terrorist assault on the Parliament
House in Delhi in December raised India’s moral high ground further.
Yet it required relentless pressure by President George W. Bush and the
mobilization of the Indian army to get Musharraf to ban five extremist
organizations in mid-January 2002. While so doing, he agreed to offer
Kashmiris nothing more than “moral, political and diplomatic support.”
As in the past, the resulting thaw in Delhi-Islamabad relations proved
transitory. An audacious terrorist attack on May 14, 2002, on the army
camp at Kaluchak in Kashmir, killing thirty men, women, and children,
roiled Indian leaders as never before.

428
 OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSIONS

Vajpayee authorized the bombing of training camps in Pakistan-held

Kashmir. But the air force lacked enough laser-guided bombs and
night-vision pods to accomplish the task. By the time these arrived from
Israel, it was June 5. In the interim, Army Chief General Sundararajan
Padmanabhan had moved eight of the ten strike divisions of the army to
jumping-off points near the Pakistani border. His Pakistani counterpart,
Musharraf, moved an attack force of armored and motorized infantry
divisions into combat readiness positions.
Alarm bells rang in Washington and London. Th e CIA chief in-
formed Bush’s War Cabinet that his analysts believed that given the con-
fusion among decision makers in Delhi and Islamabad as to when and
how a conventional war could escalate to a nuclear confrontation, there
was a serious risk of the first nuclear strike since World War II.15 Wash-
ington and London advised around sixty thousand Americans and twenty
thousand Britons to start leaving India beginning on May 31.
Stock markets in India and Pakistan plunged. That shook the two
governments, more so the one in Delhi. The pro-business, BJP-led cabinet
wanted to propel India beyond the sluggish GDP growth rates of the past.
The abrupt loss of Western confidence in India’s fast-expanding economy
gave Vajpayee pause.
The threat of an imminent nuclear clash between the neighbors
passed. But the two armies remained battle-ready. Feeling the economic
pain of maintaining its forces across the LoC on high alert, Musharraf
saw merit in pragmatism. On December 17, 2003, he said his govern-
ment was prepared to drop its long-standing demands for a plebiscite on
Kashmir to end the fifty-six-year-old dispute. This required both sides to
be flexible.
The slow process of bilateral talks gathered pace after the return of
the Congress-led government in Delhi in May 2004, under the premier-
ship of Manmohan Singh. Musharraf and Singh set up a backchannel to
resolve the Kashmir conundrum away from the prying eyes of the media.
After many meetings in hotels around the world, their envoys—Tariq
Aziz and Satinder Lambah—agreed on a plan. Musharraf gave an in-
kling of it in his December 2006 interview with Delhi-based NDTV.
Pakistan, controlling more than one-third of Kashmir, would give up its
claim to Indian-administered Kashmir, occupying about half of the origi-
nal princely state,16 if people from both regions had freedom of movement
through open borders. There would be phased withdrawal of troops from
both sides of the LoC.17

429
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

Since this formula did not require a change in the border, it interested
Indian leaders, but they feared that the withdrawal of their army from
their region would allow separatists to thrive. They were also not sure
Musharraf had the consent of senior generals on a subject that was the
defining element in the history of Pakistan’s military. They had to weigh
the chances of Musharraf being elbowed out by the armed forces’ high
command, as it had Ayub Khan. Lastly, would any deal agreed to by the
Musharraf government remain intact in the post-Musharraf era?
On November 28, 2007, Musharraf had to resign as army chief before
being sworn in for a second term as civilian president. And on August
18, 2008, he stepped down as president to spare himself impeachment by
Parliament, which was dominated by anti-Musharraf parties following
the general election in February. With this, the two South Asian rivals lost
yet another opportunity for a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute.
Three months later the sixty-hour siege of luxury hotels in Mumbai
by Pakistani terrorists, recruited to bring about the liberation of Indian
Kashmir, damaged Indo-Pakistan relations gravely. It took two-and-a-half
years for the return of diplomatic conversation between the two capitals.
Initially, India insisted that no progress could be made in normalizing re-
lations until the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack were brought to justice.
Later it relented.

INCREASED TRADE HOLDS PROMISE

As the signatories of the South Asian Free Trade Area treaty, specifying
reduction of customs duty on all traded goods to zero by 2016 for the
eight-member SAARC, India and Pakistani started liberalizing mutual
trade from 2009 onward.
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424811348

But the PPP-led government failed to fulfill its promise to confer

most-favored-nation (MFN) status on India by the end of 2012. Delhi
had accorded MFN status to Pakistan in 1996. However, in March 2012
Islamabad replaced its positive list of goods that could be imported from
India with a negative list. That raised the number of allowable Indian
items by three-and-a-half times, to 6,800.
Following the return of Sharif to power in May 2013, India and Paki-
stan agreed on a nondiscriminatory market access protocol, thus skirting
the term “most favored nation,” which had become politicized in Pakistan.
During the fiscal year ending in April 2013, Indo-Pakistan commerce, at

430
 OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSIONS

$2.6 billion, was way below the $4 billion worth of trade that Indians and
Pakistanis conducted via third countries.
It is worth recalling that after signing the Lahore Declaration in early
1999, Sharif had expressed the hope in Vajpayee’s presence that “Pakistan
and India will be able to live as the United States and Canada.”18 So cor-
dial are the relations between these neighbors in North America that their
1,538-mile-long border is militarily undefended. Sadly, Sharif ’s sentiment
remains just that: a well-meaning thought stemming from infectious
goodwill. All the same, it provides a glimpse of what could be—a notion
of an alternative scenario for the twins of South Asia based on ongoing,
mutual cooperation and benevolence leading to prosperity and peace.
Regretfully, the two neighbors’ pursuit of generally hostile bilateral
policies, rooted in the intractable Kashmir dispute, have diverted scarce
resources from advancing health, education, and social welfare to building
up the military and the concomitant arms industry. With its 74 percent
literacy rate in 2011, India—where education is a fundamental right ac-
cording to its constitution—was way behind its officials’ often repeated
aim of achieving universal literacy.19 In Pakistan, only 21 percent were
literate in 2012.20 This was a dismal statistic for a country capable of man-
ufacturing nuclear arms and engaged in a nuclear arms race with neigh-
boring India.

431
 Epilogue

Following the landslide victory of the National Democratic Alliance—led

by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—in India’s general
election, BJP head Narendra Modi invited the seven other leaders of the
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation to his inauguration as
Indian prime minister on May 26, 2014.
The generals in Islamabad advised Prime Minister Sharif to decline
the invitation. He disregarded their counsel. The generals resented this
because, to them, India remained at the core of Pakistan’s national security
concerns, and that entitled them to have the last word in this arena. De-
termined to underline his supreme authority, on the eve of his departure
for Delhi, Sharif ordered the release of 151 Indian fishermen arrested for
fishing in Pakistani waters as a goodwill gesture.1
On May 27, Sharif had an hour-long one-on-one meeting with Modi,
during which he invited his host to Pakistan. Th eir warm handshake
in front of the cameras seemed to offer a promise of improved Indo-
Pakistan relations. Sharif said that their top diplomats would meet soon
to take their dialogue forward. As pro-business leaders they resolved to
pursue normalization of trade relations. According to Barkha Dutt of
Delhi-based NDTV, “Sharif said this strong mandate frees up leaders
on both sides . . . to actually turn a new page in the history of India and
Pakistan.”2 Sharif was thus referring to the large majority his party had
won in Pakistan’s general election a year earlier.
Responding to Modi’s gift of a shawl for Sharif ’s mother, Shamim
Akhtar, the Pakistani leader presented a white sari for his Indian coun-
terpart’s mother, Heeraben Modi, in early June.
However, as had happened before, violations along the Line of Con-
trol (LoC) in Kashmir increased in the wake of lowered diplomatic

433
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

tensions. Between early June and early August, India identified more than
thirty violations of the LoC, and Pakistan reported fifty-seven violations.3
On August 12, Modi visited Kargil in Kashmir to inaugurate a power
plant. “Pakistan has lost strength to fight conventional war, but continues
to engage in a proxy war through terrorism,” he said. Earlier that day,
while addressing soldiers in the regional capital of Leh, he informed them
that Indian troops were “suffering more casualties from terrorism than
from war.”4
As if Modi’s statements were not enough to dissipate the Indo-Pakistan
goodwill generated in the spring, Sharif faced a challenge to his office
from a street protest in Islamabad that would last several weeks.
Starting on August 14, Pakistan’s independence day, the opposition
leader Imran Khan led a protest march from Lahore to Islamabad, calling
for Sharif ’s resignation on the grounds that his party had rigged votes in
the 2013 general election. Another procession was led by Muhammad
Tahirul Qadri, a cleric whose Pakistan Awami Tehreek (Urdu: People’s
Movement) was a broad alliance of moderate Sunnis and persecuted Shias.
His party had boycotted the parliamentary election the previous year.
Qadri advocated genuine democracy that empowers the underprivileged.
Sharif ordered a cordoning of the administrative heart of the capital
with barbed wire and shipping containers, calling it the Red Zone.
When, on August 19, protestors tore down the barricades and en-
tered the Red Zone, Army Chief General Raheel Sharif called on the
government to negotiate with the protesters. But when the government
appointed a team of politicians to talk to the protest leaders, Khan insisted
that the prime minister must resign first. This was unacceptable to Sharif
as well as all other opposition groups. While the military high command
seemed unwilling to seize power, it was glad to see the Sharif government
weakened.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office had scheduled August 25 as the date
for the arrival of India’s foreign secretary, Sujatha Singh, for talks with her
Pakistani counterpart, Aizaz Chaudhry. Among other things, they were
expected to prepare the agenda for a Modi-Sharif meeting in New York
in late September. But a hitch developed.
According to Islamabad, it had been a “long-standing practice” ahead
of Indo-Pakistan talks for Pakistan’s high commissioner in Delhi to hold
meetings with dissident Kashmiri leaders in order to “facilitate meaning-
ful discussion on the issue of Kashmir.”5

434
 EPILOGUE

When India learned of an upcoming meeting of Shabir Ahmad Shah,

a Kashmiri separatist leader, with the Pakistani high commissioner Abdul
Basit, Foreign Secretary Singh advised Basit to cancel the appointment.
Basit ignored the advice, as instructed by his Foreign Office. Given the
street challenge Sharif faced at the time, he could not afford to be seen to
be “subservient” to India. The Basit-Shah meeting went ahead on August
18. Pakistan’s spokesperson, Tasnim Aslam, argued that Kashmir was a
disputed territory and that Pakistan was a “legitimate stakeholder” in the
Kashmir dispute.6
The Modi government described the Pakistani envoy’s action as in-
terference in India’s domestic affairs. It cancelled the foreign secretaries’
talks. By refusing to overlook Pakistan’s open contacts with the Kashmiri
separatists, as the previous governments had done in order to preserve the
peace process, Modi drew a fresh red line. He thus struck a blow against
the renewed peace efforts he had initiated after his inauguration.
While still facing a crisis created by protests that had paralyzed the
Pakistani capital, Sharif made a move to break the diplomatic stalemate
with Delhi. In early September he sent a box of the choicest Pakistani
mangoes to Modi. He also dispatched mangoes to India’s foreign minister,
Sushma Swaraj, as well as President Pranab Mukherjee and Vice Presi-
dent Hamid Ansari, both of them veteran Congress Party members.7 The
gesture implied an offer of sweetness.
This gesture proved insufficient to revive cordiality. Addressing the
UN General Assembly on September 26, Sharif expressed his disappoint-
ment at the cancellation of the foreign secretary–level talks. “The core
issue of Jammu and Kashmir has to be resolved,” he said. “Th is is the
responsibility of the international community. . . . Pakistan is ready to
work for resolution of this problem through negotiations.” Meanwhile,
he declared, “we cannot draw a veil over the issue of Kashmir, until it
is addressed in accordance with the wishes of the people of Jammu and
Kashmir.”8 Soon after delivering his speech, he returned to Islamabad to
defuse the ongoing political crisis there.
The next day Modi told the General Assembly that, with far more
pressing problems facing South Asia and the world, “raising [the Kashmir
dispute] at the UN won’t resolve bilateral issues.” He added, “We want to
promote friendship with Pakistan too, but we can only talk without the
shadow of terrorism over us.”9
In short, the decades-long Kashmir dispute remained frozen.

435
 THE LONGEST AUGUST

By contrast, a steady improvement in trade and cultural relations

between the two neighbors continued. On September 11, High Com-
missioner Basit, who had been at the core of the cancellation of foreign
secretary–level meetings, inaugurated the Pakistan Lifestyle Exhibition
in New Delhi. It showcased Pakistani products in textiles, marble, and
leather.10 More importantly, two weeks earlier the Automotive Compo-
nent Manufacturers Association of India and the Pakistan Association of
Automotive Parts and Accessories Manufacturers signed a memorandum
of understanding in Lahore to set up testing facilities in Pakistan and
work together on skills development.11
In the cultural field, an important development had occurred in June.
Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited (Zeel) launched a new channel,
Zindagi (Hindi/Urdu: Life) TV, to make some of Pakistan’s best syndi-
cated shows—comedies, one-off TV films, and dramas revolving around
a household of characters—available to TV audiences across India. Zeel’s
executive, Shailja Kejriwal, said that Indians were “deeply curious” about
life in Pakistan. “It is quite startling that post-independence, the Indian
viewer has never actually seen Pakistan visually. Test audiences were sort
of stunned and excited when we revealed these places were in Pakistan
because they felt so familiar to them.”12
The opening up of a vast TV market provided an enormous opportu-
nity for Pakistan’s media business. It was also significant that during his
visit to Delhi in late May, Sharif had a meeting with Subhash Chandra—
chair of the conglomerate Essel Group, which includes Zeel—to discuss
the content of Zindagi TV. Within weeks, Zindagi TV’s Pakistani fare
proved popular, partly because, in the words of an Indian television critic,
“the simple and straight to the point way of telling the stories in these Pa-
kistani serials is a welcome change from the otherwise suffocating, never-
ending Indian shows.”13
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424811383

All in all, therefore, while the Kashmir dispute shows no sign of prog-
ress toward resolution, Indo-Pakistani relations in the realm of commerce
and cultural exchange are on a steady course of improvement.

436
 Notes

INTRODUCTION
1. Jonathan Marcus, “The World’s Most Dangerous Place?,” BBC News, March 23, 2000.
2. Vinay Kumar, “LoC Fencing in Jammu Nearing Completion,” Hindu, February 1, 2004.
3. Athar Parvaiz, “INDIA: Kashmir’s Fence Eats Crops,” IPS News, October 31, 2011, http://www
.ipsnews.net/2011/10/india-kashmirs-fence-eats-crops.
4. Ibid.
5. Dilip Hiro, The Timeline History of India (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), 242.
6. R. Shayan, “Sir Syed Ahmed Khan,” Agnostic Pakistan (blog), December 14, 2008, http://agnostic
pakistan.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/sir-syed-ahmed-khan.html.
7. Ashish Vashi, “Gandhi-Jinnah, Hindu-Muslim: Godhra Created Many Rifts,” DNA India, Feb-
ruary 18, 2012.
8. Meena Menon, “Chronicle of Communal Riots in Bombay Presidency (1893–1945),” Economic
& Political Weekly, November 20, 2010.
9. Cited in Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India–Partition–Independence (New Delhi: Rupa and Company,
2009), 86, citing Mohammed Ali Jinnah—An Ambassador of Unity: His Speeches and Writings, 1912–1917,
with a Biographical Appreciation by Sarojini Naidu (Lahore, Pakistan: Atish Fishan, 1989), 11.
10. Hiro, The Timeline History of India, 249.

CHAP TER 1: THE MODISH DRESSER MEETS THE MAHATMA

1. Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India—Partition—Independence (New Delhi: Rupa and Company, 2009), 68–
69. Watson’s Hotel, built in 1863, survives as Esplanade Mansion near Rajabai Clock Tower in South Bombay.
2. Dilip Hiro, The Timeline History of India (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), 247.
3. Singh, Jinnah, 86.
4. Cited by Tim Leadbeater, Britain and India 1845–1947 (London: Hodder Education, 2008), 38.
5. Cited in Singh, Jinnah, 100–101.
6. “Gurjar Sabha, January 14, 1915, citing The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14, 342,”
Bombay Chronicle, January 15, 1915, posted by Arun, September 9, 2012, http://thepartitionofindia.blog
spot.co.uk/2012/09/gurjar-sabha-january-14-1915-from-cwmg.html.
7. “Mohandes Gandhi Travels to South Africa to Work Under a Year-Long Contract with Dada
Abdulla & Co., an Indian Firm” (April 1893), World History Project, http://worldhistoryproject
.org/1893/4/mohandes-gandhi-travels-to-south-africa-to-work-under-a-year-long-contract-with-dada
-abdulla-co-an-indian-firm.
8. Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: Mentor Books, 1954), 43.
As a pious Hindu, Gandhi believed in the myriad myths of Hinduism, including the one that bathing in
the Ganges, consecrated by Lord Shiva, washed away all sin.
9. This episode was presented as a powerful flashback in the 1983 Academy Award–winning biopic
Gandhi, directed by Sir Richard Attenborough. Today a bronze statue of the semi-clad Mahatma Gandhi,
with his right arm raised in blessing, stands in the city center of Pietermaritzburg.

437
 NOTES

10. Fischer, Gandhi, 25.

11. Cited in ibid., 28.
12. “Bambatha Rebellion 1906,” South African History Online, n.d., http://www.sahistory.org.za
/topic/bambatha-rebellion-1906.
13. Sanskrit: steadying.
14. Fischer, Gandhi, 41.
15. After failing to get Africans to work in mines or on sugar or cotton plantations, British owners
used Indian agents in southern India to recruit rural, lower-caste, Hindu landless laborers on a small,
fixed wage for a five-year contract. The agreement included an option for a further five years’ employment
for the indentured laborer before being repatriated at the employer’s expense. The Indian government
outlawed the indentured laborer contracts in 1916.
16. Sushila Nayar, Mahatma Gandhi, Satyagraha at Work (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1989), 678–679,
684.
17. Cited in Singh, Jinnah, 604.
18. Fischer, Gandhi, 60.
19. Barbara Crossette, “Pakistan’s Father: What Mohammed Ali Jinnah Accomplished, and What
Might Have Been Had He Lived Longer,” New York Times, December 14, 1997.
20. Cited in Fischer, Gandhi, 80.
21. Motihari has the distinction of being the birthplace of Eric Arthur Blair, who acquired the pen
name of George Orwell in 1933.
22. Rajendar Prasad, Satyagraha in Champaran (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1949), 115–116.
23. Fischer, Gandhi, 59.
24. Ashish Vashi, “Gandhi-Jinnah, Hindu-Muslim: Godhra Created Many Rifts,” Daily Bhaskar,
February 18, 2012.
25. Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 57.
26. Singh, Jinnah, 96.
27. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 40.
28. Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 122–124.
29. Mani Bhavan, “Chronology/Time Line, 1915–1932,” 2004, http://www.gandhi-manibhavan
.org/aboutgandhi/chrono_detailedchronology_1915_1932.htm.
30. Perry Anderson, “Gandhi Centre Stage,” London Review of Books, July 5, 2012, 3–11.
31. Singh, Jinnah, 106.
32. Though Brigadier General Reginald Dyer was relieved of his command and shipped to Britain
on sick leave, he was never disciplined. In March 1920 the House of Commons condemned Dyer by 230
votes to 129, but the House of Lords declared by 129 votes to 86 that he had been treated unjustly. He
died in 1927. Thirteen years later, Udham Singh, a Sikh resident of Coventry, England, shot dead Sir
Michael O’Dwyer, who had described Dyer’s massacre as “the correct action,” at the Royal Albert Hall,
London, and was hanged.
33. Cited in Hiro, The Timeline History of India, 251.
34. “Jinnah of Pakistan: Calendar of Events, 1919,” Humsafar.info, n.d., http://www.humsafar
.info/1919.php.

CHAP TER 2: GANDHI’S ORIGINAL SIN

1. Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 72.
2. Ibid., 56.
3. Ibid., 76.
4. Cited in Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India—Partition—Independence (New Delhi: Rupa and Com-
pany, 2009), 124–125.

438
 NOTES

5. Sanjeev Nayyar, “Khilafat Movement,” March 2001, http://www.esamskriti.com/essay-chapters

/Khilafat-Movement-2.aspx.
6. Minault, The Khilafat Movement, 77–78.
7. “Jinnah of Pakistan: Calendar of Events, 1919,” Humsafar.info, n.d., http://www.humsafar
.info/1919.php.
8. Taimoor Gondal, “The Khilafat Movement,” CSS Forum, December 16, 2011, http://www.css
forum.com.pk/386748-post13.html.
9. Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire (London: Haus, 2010), 133.
10. Cited in Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London: Granada, 1982), 66–67.
11. Cited by Dilip Hiro, The Timeline History of India (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), 256.
12. Cited by Perry Anderson, “Gandhi Centre Stage,” London Review of Books, July 5, 2012, 3–11.
13. “‘I regard the Ramayana of Tulasidas as the greatest book in all devotional literature’—Mahatma
Gandhi,” quoted on National Hindu Students Forum UK, Sixth Form, no. 4, December 2010, http://
www.nhsf.org.uk/sixth-form/newsletter/issue4.html.
14. See Chapter 1, p. 22.
15. Dr. Yogendra Yadav, “Cows Protection and Mahatma Gandhi,” Peace & Collaborative
Development Network, July 20, 2012, http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/profiles/blogs/cows
-protection-and-mahatma-gandhi, citing Gandhi’s speech at the opening ceremony of a cow shelter in
Bettiah, North Bihar, on December 8, 1920.
16. Kruthi Gonwar, “Who Gave the Title of Mahatma to Gandhiji?,” New Indian Express, June 26,
2012.
17. Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 314.
18. Ibid., 317.
19. Cited by Anderson, “Gandhi Centre Stage.”
20. Robinson, Separatism, 318.
21. “The Khilafat Movement (1919–1924),” Quaid-e-Azam Mohmmad Ali Jinnah (blog), 2008,
http://m-a-jinnah.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/khilafat-movement-1919-1924.html.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 72.
25. Cited in Singh, Jinnah, 124.
26. Evelyn Roy, “The Crisis in Indian Nationalism,” Labour Monthly (London), February 1922.
27. “Non-Cooperation Movement 1920,” General Knowledge Today, October 25, 2011.
28. Roy, “The Crisis in Indian Nationalism.”
29. Ibid.
30. Equally, despite calls from many to refer to Muhammad Ali Jauhar as “Maulana,” he refused.
Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), 135.
31. Akhila Mol, “Biography of Madan Mohan Malviya,” Preserve Articles, n.d., http://www.preserve
articles.com/201103034355/biography-of-madan-mohan-malviya.html.
32. Cited in Hiro, The Timeline History of India, 255.
33. Cited in Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 252–253.
34. Vinay Lal, “‘Hey Ram’: The Politics of Gandhi’s Last Words,” Humanscape 8, no. 1 ( January
2001), citing Mohandas Gandhi, Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (Ahmedabad:
Navajivan, 1940 [1927]), 371.
35. Cited by Anderson, “Gandhi Centre Stage.”
36. “The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi,” Young India, April 3, 1924, 114.
37. Cited by Anderson, “Gandhi Centre Stage.”
38. Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: Mentor Books, 1954), 72.
39. “Madan Mohan Malaviya: Gaya Presidential Address Hindu Mahasabha 1923,” http://
14.139.41.16/mahamana/images/stories/gaya.pdf.

439
 NOTES

40. Ibid.
41. Cited by Fischer, Gandhi, 78. Gandhi had made this argument as early as October 1917 in a
speech on cow protection in Bettiah, North Bihar. See Yadav, “Cows Protection and Mahatma Gandhi.”
42. Cited in Fischer, Gandhi, 75.
43. Purist Hindus call Hinduism Santan Dharma, Eternal Law.
44. Singh, Jinnah, 119.
45. Fischer, Gandhi, 79.
46. Cited in Yadav, “Cows Protection and Mahatma Gandhi.”
47. Singh, Jinnah, 120.
48. Cited in Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind, 137.
49. Cited by Hiro, The Timeline History of India, 257.
50. Jamil-ud-din Ahmad, Middle Phase of the Muslim Political Movement (Lahore: Publishers
United, 1969), 138–139.
51. Hector Bolitho, Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982), 94–95.
52. Cited in Fischer, Gandhi, 94.
53. Though fifteen in number these were later presented as Jinnah’s Fourteen Points to chime with
the Fourteen Point declaration of US president Woodrow Wilson.
54. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 96–105.
55. Cited in Fischer, Gandhi, 95.
56. Other members of the delegation included Motilal Nehru, Vithalbhai Patel (Speaker of the
Central Legislative Assembly), and Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, a leading constitutional lawyer.
57. Hiro, The Timeline History of India, 258.
58. Cited in Fischer, Gandhi, 96.
59. National Gandhi Museum, “Salt Satyagraha and Dandi March,” n.d., http://www.mkgandhi
.org/articles/salt_satya.htm.
60. Webb Miller, I Found No Peace: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1936), 193–195, 446–447.
61. Ibid., 198–199.
62. William Roger Louis, Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics, and Culture in Britain
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 154.
63. Fischer, Gandhi, 100; Hiro, The Timeline History of India, 257.

CHAP TER 3: THE TWO-NATION THEORY

1. Cited in Stanley Walport, Jinnah of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 122.
2. Cited in Dilip Hiro, The Timeline History of India (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), 258.
3. Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India—Partition—Independence (New Delhi: Rupa and Company, 2009),
182.
4. “Gandhi—A Pictorial Biography: Gandhi-Irwin Pact,” Mahatma Gandhi Website, n.d., http://
www.mkgandhi.org/biography/gndirwin.htm.
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424811410

5. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London: Granada, 1982), 358–359.
6. Sankar Ghose, Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Allied, 1991), 206.
7. Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: Mentor Books, 1954), 151.
8. Ghose, Gandhi, 208.
9. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 20.
10. “Jinnah of Pakistan, Calendar of Events, 1935,” Humsafar.info, n.d., http://www.humsafar
.info/1935.php.
11. Complete text at http://www.mediamonitors.net/nowornever.html or http://en.wikisource.org
/wiki/Now_or_Never;_Are_We_to_Live_or_Perish_Forever%3F.
12. Khursheed Kamal Aziz, Rahmat Ali: A Biography (Lahore: Vanguard, 1987), 85.
13. Jamil-ud-din Ahmad, ed., Some Recent Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah, vol. 1 (Lahore: Ashraf,
1952), 555–557.

440
 NOTES

14. “Gandhi Gives Notice of 21 Days’ Fast,” Barrier Miner (New South Wales, Australia), May 2,
1933, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/48429154.
15. “Central Legislative Assembly Etectorate [sic],” November 10, 1942, Commons and Lords
Hansard: Official Report of Debates at Parliament, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written
_answers/1942/nov/10/central-legislative-assembly-etectorate.
16. Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), 143.
17. For several reasons, elections to the proposed Federal Legislative Assembly and Council of State
were not held.
18. Cited in “Presidential Address by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to the Muslim League, Lucknow,
October 1937,” http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_jinnah_lucknow_1937
.html.
19. See Joseph E. Schwartzberg, ed., A Historical Atlas of South Asia (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1978), 222, reprinted at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/schwartzberg/pager
.html?object=260&view=text.
20. Sir Edward Blunt, “Indian Elections: Congress Policy,” Spectator (London), February 26, 1937.
21. The actual figures were: Bihar 91/152, Bombay 88/175, Central Provinces 71/112, Madres
159/215, Orissa 36/60, and United Provinces 134/228.
22. See Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 428, and “From a Letter of Jawaharlal Nehru to M. A.
Jinnah (6 April 1938),” Nehru-Jinnah Correspondence, Office of the General Secretary of the Indian
National Congress, 1938, http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415485432/43.asp.
23. B. R. Nanda, “The Ghost of a Missed Chance,” Outlook, January 24, 1996.
24. Riaz Hussein, “Revival of Punjab Muslim League: Jinnah-Iqbal Collaboration,” Iqbal Review
28, no. 3 (October 1987).
25. Cited in Singh, Jinnah, 250.
26. Perry Anderson, “Gandhi Centre Stage,” London Review of Books, July 5, 2012, 3–11.
27. Singh, Jinnah, 232.
28. Cited in Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 16.
29. Cited in Singh, Jinnah, 248.
30. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, presidential address to the Muslim League, Lucknow, October 1937,
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_jinnah_lucknow_1937.html.
31. K. Datta and A. Robinson, eds., Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), Letter 314.
32. “From a Letter of Jawaharlal Nehru to M. A. Jinnah (6 April 1938).” These stanzas are:
Mother, I salute thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
bright with orchard gleams,
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Dark fields waving Mother of might,
Mother free.
Glory of moonlight dreams,
Over thy branches and lordly streams,
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother I kiss thy feet,
Speaker sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I salute.
Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands
When the sword flesh out in the seventy million hands
And seventy million voices roar
Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?
With many strengths who art mighty and stored,

441
 NOTES

To thee I call Mother and Lord!

Though who savest, arise and save!
To her I cry who ever her foeman drove
Back from plain and sea
And shook herself free.

33. Azad, meaning “free” in Urdu and Hindi, was Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed’s pen
name.
34. Cited in Hiro, The Timeline History of India, 261.
35. Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, address to Lahore Session of Muslim League, March
1940, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of Pakistan, Islamabad, 1983, http://www
.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_jinnah_lahore_1940.html.
36. Cited in Fischer, Gandhi, 79.
37. Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, 287–288.
38. Warren Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: Complete Correspondence, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 374.
39. Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Harper-
Collins, 1997), 138.
40. Cited in Alan Hayes Marriam, Gandhi vs. Jinnah: The Debate over the Partition of India (Calcutta:
Minerva Associates, 1980 / Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1982), 81.
41. Cited in ibid., 80–81.
42. Hiro, The Timeline History of India, 286.
43. Quit India, 30 April–21 September 1942, vol. 2 in Constitutional Relations Between Britain and
India: The Transfer of Power 1942–7, ed. Nicholas Mansergh (London: HMSO, 1970–1983), 853.
44. Cited in Fischer, Gandhi, 135.
45. Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind, 159.
46. Hector Bolitho, Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982), 146, 147.
47. “India: Simla Conference,” Time, July 9, 1945.
48. In reply to a letter from Maulana Azad, recently elected president of the Congress Party, which
asked for his cooperation in pressing for an expanded central cabinet, Jinnah had sent a telegram on July
12, 1940: “I refuse to discuss with you in correspondence or otherwise. Can’t you realize you are made a
Muslim ‘show boy’ Congress President? If you have self-respect, resign at once” (cited in Gandhi, Under-
standing the Muslim Mind, 155).

CHAP TER 4: A RISING TIDE OF VIOLENCE

1. Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Harper-
Collins, 1997), 210, citing The Post-War Phase: New Moves by the Labour Government, 1 August 1945–22
March 1946, vol. 6 in Constitutional Relations Between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power 1942–7, ed.
Nicholas Mansergh (London: HMSO, 1970–1983), 279–280.
2. Cited in Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications
Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1972–1978), vol. 83, 135.
3. “1946: Naval Ratings Mutiny Shakes the British: Mutiny Suppressed,” Sainik Samachar, January
2009, http://sainiksamachar.nic.in/englisharchives/2009/jan15-09/h25.html.
4. Ibid.
5. Dhananjaya Bhat, “RIN Mutiny Gave a Jolt to the British,” Sunday Tribune (Delhi), February
12, 2006.
6. Arun, “Provincial Elections India 1946,” Wake Up, Smell the Coffee (blog), January 27, 2011,
http://observingliberalpakistan.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/provincial-elections-india-1946.html.
7. Hamadani, “Muslim League 100 Years Old: 1945–1946 Elections,” Naseeb.com, January 1, 2007,
http://www.naseeb.com/journals/muslim-league-100-years-old-1945-1946-elections-135962.
8. Allen Hayes Merriam, Gandhi vs Jinnah: The Debate over the Partition of India (Calcutta: Minerva
Associates, 1980 / Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1982), 91–92.

442
 NOTES

9. Naseer Ahmad Faruqui, “Recollections of Maulana Muhammad Ali: Memories of My Beloved,”

1962 (revised 2011), http://www.ahmadiyya.org/books/m-kabir/mjk4-4.htm.
10. Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), 165.
11. “Parliament of India: Some Facts of Constituent Assembly,” n.d., http://parliamentofindia.nic
.in/ls/debates/facts.htm; “First Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (1947–1954),” HistoryPak.com, Au-
gust 8, 2012, http://historypak.com/first-constituent-assembly-of-pakistan-1947-1954.
12. Cited in Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: Mentor Books,
1954), 157.
13. Cited in ibid., 157–158.
14. Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind, 166.
15. Ibid., 170, citing Jamil-ud-din Ahmad, Creation of Pakistan (Lahore: Publishers United, 1976),
278.
16. Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind, 170.
17. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London: Granada, 1982), 538.
18. Ibid., 542–544.
19. Claude Markovits, “The Calcutta Riots of 1946,” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, July 24,
2008, http://www.massviolence.org/The-Calcutta-Riots-of-1946?artpage=2-5.
20. Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind, 170, citing Durga Das, ed., Sardar Patel’s Correspon-
dence (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, n.d.), vol. 3, 40.
21. The cabinet ministers were Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Chakravarti
Rajagopalachari, Asaf Ali, Sarat Chandra Bose, John Matthai, Baldev Singh (a Sikh), Sir Shafaat Ahmad
Khan, Jagjivan Ram, Ali Zaheer, and Cooverji Hormuji Bhabha (a Parsi).
22. Dennis Kux, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941-1991 (Washington, DC:
National Defense University Press, 1992), 50.
23. Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind, 171, citing Ahmad Jamil-ud-din, ed., Historical Docu-
ments of the Muslim Freedom Movement (Lahore: Publishers United, 1973), 545–546.
24. Fischer, Gandhi, 164.
25. Ibid., 163; Ian Stephens, Pakistan (New York: Praeger, 1963), 111.
26. Cited in Kenton J. Clymer, Quest for Freedom: The United States and India’s Independence (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 266.
27. Cited in French, Liberty or Death, 270.
28. Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (London:
Routledge, 2007), 3.
29. Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 569.
30. Fischer, Gandhi, 167.
31. Wasio Abbasi, “Chronicles of Pakistan: Sindh’s Ethnic Divide and Its History—Part 1,” Rea-
son Before Passion (blog), October 12, 2012, http://wasioabbasi.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/chronicles
-of-pakistan-sindhs-ethnic-divide-and-its-history-part-1.
32. Clymer, Quest for Freedom, 266.
33. In 1943 Mridula Gandhi, born in 1929, was invited from Karachi—where her widowed father,
Jaisukhlal, a nephew of the Mahatma, worked for a shipping company—to Pune to look after the ailing
Kasturbai Gandhi in jail. After Kasturbai’s death she returned to her parental home.
34. Cited by Jad Adams, “Thrill of the Chaste: The Truth About Gandhi’s Sex Life,” Independent
(London), April 7, 2010.
35. Uday Mahurkar, “Mahatma & Manuben,” India Today, June 7, 2013.
36. Cited by Adams, “Thrill of the Chaste.”
37. Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press / London: Haus, 2010), 552.

CHAP TER 5: BORN IN BLOOD

1. Jinnah demanded that imperial Britain dissolve the unitary system in India; and create Pakistan,
composed of the Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest and the northeast, and Hindustan, as

443
 NOTES

separate dominions within the British Commonwealth; and then leave it to them to form a confederation
on an equal basis or sign a treaty as sovereign states. But his time frame of ten years proved unrealistic
when the British government decided to withdraw from India by June 1948.
2. Penderel Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 406.
3. Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: Harper-
Collins, 1997), 334, citing The Mountbatten Viceroyalty, Princes, Partition, and Independence, 8 July–15
August 1947, vol. 12 in Constitutional Relations Between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power 1942–7,
ed. Nicholas Mansergh (London: HMSO, 1970–1983), 214.
4. “Note by Sir E. Jenkins,” April 16, 1947, https://sites.google.com/site/cabinetmissionplan
/punjab-february---march-1947.
5. General Sir Frank Messervy, “Some Remarks on the Disturbances in the Northern Punjab,” in
The Fixing of a Time Limit, 4 November 1946–22 March 1947, vol. 9 in Mansergh, ed., Constitutional Re-
lations Between Britain and India, 898–899.
6. Cited in Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 245–246n1.
7. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London: Granada, 1982), 577.
8. Cited in Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: Mentor Books,
1954), 171.
9. Fischer, Gandhi, 173.
10. French, Liberty or Death, 302.
11. Cited in Fischer, Gandhi, 170.
12. Ian A. Talbot, “Jinnah and the Making of Pakistan,” History Today 34, no. 2 (1984).
13. Transcript of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s speech of June 3, 1947, released by All India Radio,
Delhi, http://omarrquraishi.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/transcript-of-mohammad-ali-jinnahs.html.
14.“The Plan of June 3, 1947,” Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah (blog), 2008, http://m-a-jinnah
.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/plan-of-june-3-1947.html.
15. Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (London:
Simon & Schuster, 2008), 203.
16. Cited by French, Liberty or Death, 306.
17. “Sylhet Referendum 1947,” Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, 2012, http://www
.banglapedia.org/HT/S_0653.htm.
18. Muhammad Iqbal Chawla, “Mountbatten and the NWFP Referendum: Revisited,” Journal of
the Research Society of Pakistan 48, no. 1 (2011).
19. The Congress-dominated cabinet decided to retain the name India, discarding the option of
Hindustan as a counterpoint to Pakistan.
20. The Mountbatten Viceroyalty, Princes, Partition, and Independence, 512.
21. By June 1947, the British troops in India numbered only four thousand.
22. Cited in Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind (New Delhi: Penguin Books,
2000), 175.
23. A. Read and D. Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997), 490.
24. The Mountbatten Viceroyalty, Princes, Partition, and Independence, 475, 709.
25. “Mr. Jinnah’s Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, August 11, 1947,”
http://www.pakistani.org/pakistan/legislation/constituent_address_11aug1947.html.
26. Lionel Baixas, “Thematic Chronology of Mass Violence in Pakistan, 1947–2007: Mass Vio-
lence Related to the State’s Formation,” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, June 27, 2008, http://www
.massviolence.org/Thematic-Chronology-of-Mass-Violence-in-Pakistan-1947-2007.
27. M. J. Akbar, India: The Siege Within (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1985), 146.
28.“On This Day: India Gains Independence from Britain,”Finding Dulcinea, August 15, 2011, http://
www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/July-August-08/On-this-Day--India-Gains-Independence
-from-Britain.html.

444
 NOTES

29. Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 236.

30. Baixas, “Mass Violence Related to the State’s Formation.”
31. But it was only in 1998 that Train to Pakistan was made into a movie.
32. Ramchandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London:
Macmillan, 2007 / New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 15n19.
33. Cited in by Z. H. Zaidi, ed., Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers: Volume I (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994), 459.
34. Times of India, September 10, 1947.
35. The figure of 330,000 comprised 90 percent of the Muslim residents of New Delhi and 60
percent of Old Delhi’s.
36. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Penguin Books / New York: Farrar, Straus and Gi-
roux, 1998), 31.
37. Cited in von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 280.
38. Sankar Ghose, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Bombay: Allied, 1993), 170–171.
39. Ghose, Jawaharlal Nehru, 170–171.
40. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale, 1951), 200–201.
41. Cited in by Zaidi, Quaid-i-Azam, 476.
42. Col. Dr. Dalvinder Singh Grewal, “The Making of Refugees,” SikhNet, February 28, 2013,
http://www.sikhnet.com/news/making-refugees.
43. Cited in Guha, India After Gandhi, 15.
44. Kuldip Nayar, Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2012), 10.
45. Martin Frost, “Frost’s Meditations: Partition of India,” August 2007, http://www.essaysyards
.blogspot.com/2011/06/frosts-meditations.html.
46. Richard Symonds, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1942–
1947 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 116.
47. Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 279.
48. Ibid., 280.

CHAP TER 6: THE INFANT TWINS AT WAR

1. Z. G. Muhammad, “Stories Retold: Of Some Historical Narratives About Kashmir,” Punchline,
March 11, 2013, http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Mar/11/stories-retold-27.asp.
2. The year 1934 saw the launching of the first English-language weekly, the Kashmir Times, a de-
cade after the founding of the Hindi newspaper Ranbir in Jammu.
3. In his autobiography, Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah revealed that his grandfather was a Hindu
named Ragho Ram Kaul.
4. Soon after, the Congress Party set up the All India States People’s Conference to agitate for
democratic representation in the princely states.
5. Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War, rev. ed. (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2003), 41.
6. Jagmohan, My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir, 8th ed. (New Delhi: Allied, 2007), 78.
7. Alarmed by the rising protest against his regime, the maharaja refrained from integrating soldiers
demobilized after World War II into his army.
8. Jagmohan, My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir, 78.
9. Christopher Snedden, “The Forgotten Poonch Uprising of 1947,” Eye on Kashmir 643 (March
2013), http://www.india-seminar.com/2013/643/643_christopher_snedden.htm.
10. Ian Stephens, Pakistan (London: Ernest Benn, 1963), 200.
11. Cited in “Tribal Invasion: An American Reportage,” Kashmir Sentinel, 2012, http://kashmir
sentinel.org/tribal-invasion-an-american-reportage.
12. Cited in Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, 43.
13. Snedden, “The Forgotten Poonch Uprising.”
14. Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, 46.

445
 NOTES

15. Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, 46, citing Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah: Speeches and
Statements, 1947–1948 (Karachi: Government of Pakistan, 1989), 91–92.
16. Alex Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (London:
Simon & Schuster, 2008), 288.
17. Chaudhuri Muhammad Ali, The Emergence of Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press,
1967), 292.
18. Cited in Khalid Hasan, “The Other Khurshid Anwar,” Friday Times (Lahore), February 11,
2005.
19. “27 October 1947,” Truth by KBaig (blog), October 26, 2013, http://www.truthbykbaig.com
/2013/10/27-october-1947-day-when-indian-forces.html.
20. J. C. Aggarwal and S. Agrawal, Modern History of Jammu and Kashmir: Ancient Times to Shimla
Agreement (New Delhi: Concept, 1995), 41–43.
21. India’s commander in chief, General Sir Robert Lockhart, was also subordinate to Field Mar-
shall Sir Claude Achinleck.
22. Cited in “Tribal Invasion.”
23. “Chapter VI: Pacific Settlement of Disputes,” Charter of the United Nations, http://www
.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter6.shtml.
24. Dr. Justice Adrarsh Sein Anand, “Accession of Kashmir—Historical & Legal Perspective,” Su-
preme Court Cases 4, no. 11 (1996), http://www.ebc-india.com/lawyer/articles/96v4a2.htm.
25. John Connell, Auchinleck: A Critical Biography: A Biography of Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchin-
leck, 2nd ed. (London: Cassell, 1959), 920.
26. See Chapter 5, p. 110.
27. Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav, “The Facts of Rs 55 Crores and Mahatma Gandhi,” Peace & Col-
laborative Development Network, September 16, 2012, http://www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org
/profiles/blogs/the-facts-of-55-crores-and-mahatma-gandhi.
28. Dilip Simeon, “Gandhi’s Final Fast,” Akshay Bakaya’s Blog, March 22, 2010, http://www.gandhi
topia.org/profiles/blogs/gandhis-final-fast-by-dilip.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Because the Indian government made its decision during Mahatma Gandhi’s fast, some histori-
ans have wrongly attributed his fasting to the issue of the cash payable to Pakistan.
32. “Gandhi Shot Dead,” Hindu, January 31, 1948.
33. Nathuram Vinayak Godse was convicted as the killer of Mahatma Gandhi and his chief coplot-
ter, Narayan Dattatraya Apte, as the leader of the assassination team. Both received the death penalty and
were hanged at the central jail in Ambala, East Punjab, on November 15, 1949.
34. Responding to the reports of the RSS killing Muslims, Vallabhbhai Patel expressed his favorable
opinion of the RSS on January 8 and added, “You cannot crush an organization by using danda [a stick].”
He considered the reports of its violent activities as “somewhat exaggerated.” Patrick French, Liberty or
Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 359–360.
35. See Chapter 1, p. 11.
36. “Quaid-i-Azam Corner, Jinnah’s Condolence Message on the Death of Gandhi,” Republic of
Rumi, January 30, 1948, http://pakistanspace.tripod.com/archives/jinnah19480130.htm.
37. “Jinnah’s Speech to Sind Bar Association, Karachi,” Dawn (Karachi), January 26, 1948.
38. Jinnah of Pakistan, “Speeches & Statements: Selfless Devotion to Duty,” Humsafar.info, n.d.,
http://www.humsafar.info/480221_sel.php.
39. Muhammad Ali Chaudhri, The Emergence of Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press,
1967), 297.
40. By early April 1948 India had transferred only one-sixth of the share Pakistan was entitled to.
It failed to deliver any of the 249 tanks allocated to Pakistan. Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, The Armed Forces of
Pakistan (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 18.
41. “Resolution 47 (1948),” https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kashun47.htm.
42. Cited in Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 361.

446
 NOTES

43. Hector Bolitho, Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), 223.
44. Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India—Partition—Independence (New Delhi: Rupa and Company, 2009),
470–474, summarizing Dr. Illahi Bux’s description in his book With Quaid-i-Azam During His Last Days.
45. Cited in ibid., 476.

CHAP TER 7: GROWING APART

1. For the text of the story, visit http://www.punjabiportal.com/articles/punjabi-short-stories-saadat
-hassan-manto. On the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Saadat Hassan Manto, an eighteen-minute
film titled Toba Tek Singh, directed by Afia Nathaniel, was shown at the New York Asian American In-
ternational film festival 2005.
2. “The Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Addressed a House Reception, Octo-
ber 13, 1949,” US House of Representatives, http://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/36630
?ret=True.
3. “Liaquat Ali Khan Goes to the US (1950),” Friday Times (Lahore), September 30–October 6, 2011.
4. “Resignation Letter of Jogendra Nath Mandal, 8 October 1950,” http://en.wikisource.org/wiki
/Resignation_letter_of_Jogendra_Nath_Mandal.
5. Ibid.
6. Tridib Santapa Kundu, “The Partition and the Muslim Minorities of West Bengal, 1947–1967,”
Partition Studies (blog), August 23, 2009, http://bengalpartitionstudies.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/partition
-and-muslim-minorities-of-west.html.
7. Though Indo-Pakistan trade resumed in 1951, both the volume and the value of bilateral commerce
declined steadily, with the two neighbors expanding the new foreign commercial ties they had forged.
8. Kundu, “The Partition and the Muslim Minorities of West Bengal.”
9. Shahid Saeed, “Murder at Company Bagh,” Friday Times (Lahore), March 25–31, 2011.
10. “Report of Inquiry Commission on Assassination of Mr. Liaquat Ali Khan,” Keesing’s Record of
World Events 8–9 (August 1952): 12426.
11. Valmiki Choudhary, ed., Dr Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents Vol. 21 (New
Delhi: Allied, 1995), 91.
12. Dilip Hiro, Inside India Today (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976 / New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1977), 211–212.
13. US News & World Report, November 13, 1953, cited by Hamid Hussain, “Tale of a Love Affair
That Never Was: United States-Pakistan Defense Relations,” Defence Journal ( June 2002).
14. Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, Vol. 9: 1952–1954, 13461, cited by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, The
Myth of Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 44–45.
15. Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, Vol. 9: 1952–1954, 13462, cited by Bhutto, The Myth of Inde-
pendence, 45.
16. Bhutto, The Myth of Independence, 44.
17. Dennis Kux, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941–1991 (Washington, DC:
National Defense University Press, 1992), 124–125.
18. SEATO members were Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, United
Kingdom, and the United States.
19. Claire Provost, “Sixty Years of US Aid to Pakistan: Get the Data,” Guardian (London), July 11,
2011.
20. “Telegram from the United States Mission at the United Nations to the Department of
State,” January 10, 1957, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Vol. 8: South Asia, Docu-
ment 40, US Department of State, Office of the Historian, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments
/frus1955-57v08/d40.
21. In his book Glimpses (Lahore: Jang, 1992), Syed Amjad Ali states that H. S. Suhrawardy’s personal
assistant advised the embassy staff of the prime minister’s agreement to the US facility on Pakistan soil.
22. Farooq Hameed Khan, “Badaber to Shamsi,” Nation (Lahore), July 8, 2011.
23. “Summary of US Aid to Pakistan, 1948–2010,” Guardian (London), July 11, 2011.

447
 NOTES

24. Yasmeen Yousif Pardesi, “An Analysis of the Constitutional Crisis in Pakistan (1958–1969),”
Dialogue 7, no. 4 (October–December 2012).
25. Dilip Hiro, A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2013),
271.
26. Yousaf Saraf, “Bogra-Nehru Accord,” Kashmiri Info, October 27, 2006, http://www.kashmiri
.info/Kashmir-Fight-for-Freedom-by-Yousaf-Saraf/bogra-nehru-accord.html.
27. Ibid.; “Bogra-Nehru Negotiations,” Story of Pakistan, June 1, 2003, http://storyofpakistan.com
/bogra-nehru-negotiations.
28. S. Gopal, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, and A. K. Damodaran, eds., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru:
Volume 19 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 322. This letter came to light forty-eight years
after it was penned.
29. Sumanta Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005), 72.
30. Arvind Lavakare, “Forgotten Day in Kashmir’s History,” Rediff News (Mumbai), March 8, 2004,
citing Hindu, February 17, 1954.
31. “Not Even Abdullah,” Spectator (London), January 17, 1958, 6.
32. Jawaharlal Nehru had first visited the USSR along with his father, Motilal, in 1927, when they
attended the tenth anniversary of its founding.
33. Cited in Bose, Kashmir, 71.
34. “Telegram from the United States Mission at the United Nations to the Department of State.”
35. Article 37, “Chapter VI: Pacific Settlement of Disputes,” Charter of the United Nations, http://
legal.un.org/repertory/art37/english/rep_supp2_vol2-art37_e.pdf.
36. Pakistan’s Foreign Policy, 1947–2005: A Concise History (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 57.
37. A. G. Noorani, “Planning Foreign Policy,” Dawn (Karachi), October 3, 2009.
38. Paul M. McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: The United States and the Indian Subcontinent,
1945–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 77–78.
39. Rajeshwar Dayal, A Life of Our Times (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1998), 301, 303.
40. A. G. Noorani, “Lessons of Murree,” Frontline (Chennai), June 19–July 2, 2010.
41. Muhammad Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters: A Political Biography (Berkeley: University of
California Press / Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1967), 124–125.
42. Ibid., 126.

CHAP TER 8: NEHRU’S “FORWARD POLICY ”: A STEP TOO FAR

1. The far more detailed map signed only by Henry McMahon and Lonchen Shatra on March 25,
1914, showed the McMahon Line. On April 28, following the instructions of the Beijing government,
Chen Ivan withdrew his initial from the earlier draft of the Simla Convention. Neither draft identified
present-day Arunachal Pradesh, previously called North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), as “British In-
dia” or something similar.
2. It was only in October 1951 that the Dalai Lama endorsed the pact.
3. “Major Bob Khathing: A Legend,” Assam Rifles, February 29, 2012, http://assamrifles.gov.in
/news_view.aspx?id=1300; Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970 / Har-
mondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972), 66.
4. Sir Charles U. Aichison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and
Neighbouring Countries, Volume XII (New Delhi: Foreign and Political Department of the Government,
1931), 5.
5. Karunakar Gupta, Spotlight on Sino-Indian Frontiers (Calcutta: New Book Centre, 1982), 82.
6. Shastri Ramachandran, “Nehru’s Stubbornness Led to 1962 War with China?,” Times of India,
December 19, 2010.
7. Cited in A. G. Noorani, “Nehru’s China Policy,” Frontline (Chennai), July 22–August 4, 2000.
8. Dilip Hiro, Inside India Today (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976 / New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1977), 248–249.

448
 NOTES

9. Cited by Noorani, “Nehru’s China Policy.”

10. Ravinder Kumar and H. Y. Sharada Prasad, eds., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd series,
vol. 26 (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, Distributed by Oxford University Press, 2000),
477.
11. Cited by Noorani, “Nehru’s China Policy.”
12. Cited in Claude Arpi, “Talks Between Mao and Nehru, October 1954,” http://www.claudearpi
.net/maintenance/uploaded_pics/195410TalksMaoNehru.pdf.
13. B. N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru: The Chinese Betrayal (Bombay: Allied, 1971), 183.
14. Cited in M. L. Sali, India-China Border Dispute: A Case Study of the Eastern Sector (New Delhi:
APH, 1998), 81.
15. A. G. Noorani, “The Truth about 1962,” Hindu, November 30, 2012.
16. “Dalai Lama Escapes to India,” BBC News, March 31, 1959.
17. Cited in Maxwell, India’s China War, 282.
18. Nehru restrained the Dalai Lama from setting up a government in exile. Kuldip Nayar, India:
The Critical Years (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 143.
19. Mark A. Ryan, David M. Finkelstein, and Michael A. McDevitt, Chinese Warfighting: The PLA
Experience Since 1949 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 177.
20. Cited by Noorani, “Nehru’s China Policy.”
21. The Indian government went on to name October 21 Police Commemoration Day.
22. Cited by Noorani, “Nehru’s China Policy.”
23. Ananth Krishnan, “China Files: Crossing the Point of No Return,” Hindu, October 25, 2012.
24. See Chapter 7, p. 157.
25. Washington Post, October 22, 1960, cited in Mike Gravel, The Pentagon Papers: The Defense De-
partment History of United States Decision-Making on Vietnam, vol. 2 (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 799.
26. Noorani, “Nehru’s China Policy,” citing the US Central Intelligence Agency Staff Study for the
Department of Defense, “The Sino-India Border Dispute, from 1950 to 1962,” May 2007.
27. Cited by Noorani, “Nehru’s China Policy.”
28. Neville Maxwell, “China’s India War: How the Chinese Saw the 1962 Conflict,” East Asia
Forum, August 2, 2011.
29. “Nixon’s China Game,” PBS, June 26, 1961, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/china/timeline
/timeline4nf.html.
30. Maxwell, “China’s India War.”
31. Cited by Ye Zhengjia, “Clearing the Atmosphere,” Frontline (Chennai), October 10–23, 1998,
citing Major General Lei Yingfu, My Days as a Military Staff in the Supreme Command (in Chinese)
(Nanchang: Baihuazhou Culture and Arts, 1997), 210.
32. Nayar, India, 172–173.
33. John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 388.
34. Ibid., 383.
35. Ibid., 376.
36. Ibid., 387.
37. Jeff M. Smith, “A Forgotten War in the Himalayas,” Yale Global, September 14, 2012.
38. Maxwell, India’s China War, 448–449.
39. Cited in Nayar, India, 179.
40. See Chapter 7, p. 157.
41. Haqeeqat won the National Film Award for the second best feature film in 1965.
42. Cited by Nayar, India, 190.
43. A. G. Noorani, “Kashmir Resolution: Never Before So Close,” Daily Times (Lahore), June 25,
2008.
44. Later the US gave India an $80 million loan to finance the construction of a nuclear power
station at Tarapur in Bombay province by American corporations, powered by low-enriched uranium
supplied by the US government.

449
 NOTES

45. Harold Gould, The South Asia Story: The First Sixty Years of U.S. Relations with India and Pakistan
(New Delhi: Sage, 2010), 64, 68.
46. Praveen Swami, “India’s Secret War in Bangladesh,” Hindu, December 26, 2011.
47. Yousaf Saraf, “Kashmir Fight for Freedom,” Kashmiri Info, October 27, 2006, http://www
.kashmiri.info/Kashmir-Fight-for-Freedom-by-Yousaf-Saraf/sh-abdullah-in-pakistan.html.
48. Cited by Bal Raj Madhok, Kashmir: The Storm Center of the World (Houston: A. Ghosh, 1992),
citing Aatish-e Chinar (in Urdu) (Srinagar: Ali Muhammad & Sons, 1982).
49. Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War, rev. ed. (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2003), 106.
50. All that made Jammu and Kashmir different from other states of the Indian Union was its red
flag with a plow and three vertical stripes and the ban on non-Kashmiris buying property in the state or
settling there.
51. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, “Kashmir, India and Pakistan,” Foreign Affairs (April 1965).
52. India protested to the United States against the use of these US-supplied arms; Washington
fired off a protest in turn. But nothing changed.
53. In February 1968, the arbitration committee awarded 10 percent of the Rann of Kutch to
Pakistan.
54. Cited in G. M. Hiranandani, “Chapter 3: The 1965 Indo Pakistan War,” in Transition to Tri-
umph, October 15, 1999, http://indiannavy.nic.in/book/1965-indo-pakistan-war.
55. Hiranandani, “The 1965 Indo Pakistan War.”

CHAP TER 9: SHASTRI’S TALLEST ORDER: PAKISTAN’S NIGHTMARE

COMES ALIVE
1. Gibraltar is the Spanish derivative of the Arabic name Jabal Tariq, meaning “Mountain of Tariq,”
an Arab general, who captured it in 711. It thus symbolizes the victory of Muslims over nonbelievers.
2. Cited in Mahmood Shaam, “We Won the 1965 War, Not India,” Rediff India Abroad, September
6, 2005.
3. “Battle of Hajipir Pass 1965,” Pakistan Defence, February 27, 2011, http://defence.pk/threads
/battle-of-hajipir-pass-1965.95263. To maintain the utmost secrecy, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelli-
gence Directorate did not take the pro-Pakistan elements in Kashmir into confidence, thus depriving the
infiltrators of vital intelligence.
4. Cited in Kuldip Nayar, India: The Critical Years (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 214.
5. Cited in G. M. Hiranandani, “Chapter 3: The 1965 Indo Pakistan War,” in Transition to Triumph,
October 15, 1999, http://indiannavy.nic.in/book/1965-indo-pakistan-war.
6. Cited in ibid., quoting P. V. R. Rao, the defense secretary.
7. A. H. Amin, “Grand Slam—A Battle of Lost Opportunities,” Defence Journal (Karachi), Sep-
tember 2000.
8. Cited in Chintamani Mahapatra, “American Activism on the Kashmir Question,” Strategic Anal-
ysis 21, no. 7 (October 1997): 987–997.
9. Cited in Nayar, India, 218.
10. Cited in Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (London: Hurst & Company, 2009), 160.
11. In any case, the term “international communism” lost its monolithic connotation in 1963, when
China started challenging the Soviet occupation of part of its border areas, and the communist neighbors
started beefing up their forces in the disputed frontier regions.
12. Shaam, “We Won the 1965 War.”
13. Later, September 6 was named Defense Day in Pakistan, when homage is paid to the martyrs
of the 1965 conflict at the war memorials built in most cities, with the electronic media airing special
programs and newspapers publishing bulky supplements to remember the war dead.
14. Harshvardhan Pande, “The Battle of Asal Uttar—1965,” Great Indian War Stories (blog), May
14, 2010, http://greatindianwarstories.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/battle-of-asal-uttar-1965.html. Thir-
ty-two tanks, including twenty-eight Pattons, were in working condition.

450
 NOTES

15. Harbakhsh Singh, In the Line of Duty: A Soldier Remembers (Delhi: Lancer, 2000), 253.
16. Shaam, “We Won the 1965 War.”
17. Nayar, India, 237.
18. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London:
Macmillan, 2007 / New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 398.
19. Shaam, “We Won the 1965 War.”
20. George Ginsburgs and Robert M. Slusser, eds., A Calendar of Soviet Treaties: 1958–1973 (Rock-
ville, MD: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1981), 319.
21. Of the Security Council’s eleven members, only one—Jordan—abstained.
22. Herbert Feldman, From Crisis to Crisis: Pakistan, 1962–1969 (Karachi: Oxford University Press,
1972), 146.
23. The breakdown of India’s gain in Pakistan was the following: the Sailkot sector, 180 square miles;
the Lahore sector, 140 square miles; and Sindh, 150 square miles.
24. David Van Praagh, The Greater Game: India’s Race with Destiny and China (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2003), 294.
25. Cited in Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the
Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 18.
26. Nayar, India, 240.
27. The exchange rate of Rs 5 = US$1 changed to Rs 7.576 = US$1. India’s defense spending in
1965–1966 rose sharply, to 24 percent of its total expenditure.
28. Bound by a no-war pact, India might have thought twice before waging a war in East Pakistan
in 1971.
29. Katia Zatu Liverter, “Part 1: Russia as Mediator: Imperial and Soviet Times,” RT Comment,
July 15, 2011.
30. Altaf Gauhar, Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s First Military Ruler (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications,
1993), 386–387.
31. His newly acquired fondness for the Soviet Union led Ayub Khan to ban the showing of the
anti-Russian James Bond movie From Russia with Love.
32. “Official Text of the Tashkent Declaration 1966,” http://www.stimson.org/research-pages
/tashkent-declaration.
33. Cited in Lubna Abid Ali, “Towards the Tashkent Declaration,” South Asian Studies 28, no. 2
(2008).
34. Mohammed Asghar Khan, The First Round, Indo-Pakistan War 1965 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979),
120–121.
35. Nayar, India, 252.
36. Ibid., 250.
37. Ibid., 254.
38. Kuldip Nayar, “The Night Shastri Died and Other Stories,” Outlook (Delhi), July 9, 2012.
39. Cited in Abid Ali, “Towards the Tashkent Declaration.”
40. Whereas Rawalpindi was the executive capital of Pakistan, Dacca was its legislative capital.
41. Siyasi Mubassir, “Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Revisited Part I (1956–1966),” Pakistan Link, February 5,
2005, http://pakistanlink.org/Opinion/2005/Feb05/24/03.htm.
42. A. G. Noorani, “Lyndon Johnson and India,” Frontline (Chennai), May 12–25, 2001.
43. See Chapter 8, p. 174.
44. B. Raman, The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane (New Delhi: Lancer, 2008), 127.
45. Ashok Raina, Inside RAW: The Story of India’s Secret Service (New Delhi: Vikas, 1981), 53–54.
46. “1970 Polls: When Election Results Created a Storm,” Dawn (Karachi), January 8, 2012.
47. Cited in Ramchandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
(London: Macmillan, 2007), 453, quoting a secret report by RAW in January 1971, entitled “Threat of
Military Attack or Infiltration Campaign by Pakistan.”
48. Later Yahya Khan would also jail Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after the latter had criticized him for
mishandling the situation in East Pakistan.

451
 NOTES

CHAP TER 10: INDIRA GANDHI SLAYS THE TWO-NATION THEORY

1. Cited in Vivek Guamste, “The Hindu Genocide That Hindus and the World Forgot,” India
Tribune, 2012.
2. Cited in A. G. Noorani, “The Mystique of Archives,” Hindu, March 1, 2003.
3. Cited in Ramchandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
(London: Macmillan, 2007 / New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 452.
4. A. A. K. Niazi, Betrayal of East Pakistan (New Delhi: Manohar Books, 1998), 78.
5. Born to Christian parents in the Western Indian city of Belgaum, Anthony Mascarenhas gradu-
ated from St. Patrick’s College in Karachi and settled in the city after partition, starting out as a journalist
with the state-owned Associated Press of Pakistan.
6. Cited by Mark Dummett, “Bangladesh War: The Article That Changed History,” BBC News,
December 16, 2011.
7. Dummett, “Bangladesh War.” While working for the Sunday Times in London, Anthony Mascar-
enhas published his book Rape of Bangladesh in 1972.
8. “Nixon’s Dislike of ‘Witch’ Indira,” BBC News, June 29, 2005.
9. “Sino-Soviet Border Clashes,” Global Security, n.d., http://www.globalsecurity.org/military
/world/war/prc-soviet.htm.
10. Praveen Swami, “India’s Secret War in Bangladesh,” Hindu, December 26, 2011.
11. Indian military trainers set up six camps for recruiting and training volunteers as saboteurs. At
one camp, some three thousand young men had to wait up to two months for induction. Claude Arpi,
“1971 War: How the US Tried to Corner India,” Rediff India Abroad, December 26, 2006.
12. Cited in Guha, India After Gandhi, 456.
13. By then, the Soviet Union had become India’s largest supplier of arms while becoming the
biggest single buyer of Indian goods. Dilip Hiro, Inside India Today (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1976 / New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 251.
14. Cited in ibid., 251.
15. Arpi, “1971 War.”
16. Cited in Guha, India After Gandhi, 455.
17. “Mukti Bahini,” Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh, n.d., http://www.bpedia.org
/M_0380.php.
18. Arpi, “1971 War.”
19. Noorani, “The Mystique of Archives.”
20. Richard Nixon, “Remarks of Welcome to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India, November 4,
1971,” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3208.
21. “Nixon’s Dislike of ‘Witch’ Indira.”
22. Arpi, “1971 War.”
23. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret
Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 61.
24. Praveen Swami, “Fighting Pakistan’s ‘Informal War,’” Hindu, July 15, 2008.
25. Praveen Swami, “India’s Secret War in Bangladesh,” Hindu, December 26, 2011.
26. Sarmila Bose, “The Courageous Pak Army Stand on the Eastern Front,” Mianwali Online, n.d.,
http://www.mianwalionline.com/personalities/genniazi/AAKNiazi.shtml#Op-Ed.
27. Blema S. Seinburg, Women in Power: The Personality and Leadership Style of India Gandhi (Mon-
treal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 36.
28. Cited in Noorani, “The Mystique of Archives.”
29. Ibid.
30. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents (New York:
Crown, 1995), 237.
31. Sajit Gandhi, ed., “The Tilt: The US and the South Asian Crisis of 1971,” National Security
Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 79, December 16, 2002, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB
/NSAEBB79/.

452
 NOTES

32. Later this became known as the Blood Telegram. It would be used as the title of a book by Gary
J. Bass in 2013.
33. Ghazala Akbar, “Why the Seventh Fleet Was Sent to the Indian Ocean in 1971,” Pakistan Link,
January 2012, http://pakistanlink.org/Commentary/2012/Jan12/20/01.HTM.
34. Swami, “India’s Secret War.”
35. “Niazi Signed the Instrument of Surrender with General Aurora on December 16, 1971, at
Dacca,” Daily Star (Bangladesh), May 4, 2005.
36. Bose, “The Courageous Pak Army.”
37. “The Rediff Interview: Lt Gen A. A. Khan Niazi,” Rediff News (Mumbai), February 2, 2004.
38. Cited in Tariq Ali, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (New York: Scribner,
2008), 206.
39. Official websites of the Indian and Pakistani defense ministries are www.mod.nic.in and www
.mod.gov.pk, respectively.
40. The Report of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission of Inquiry into the 1971 War (Lahore: Vanguard,
2001), 317, 340.
41. David Frost interview with Shaikh Mujibur Rahman aired on January 18, 1972; see http://
groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/mukto-mona/conversations/topics/5108.
42. Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangla-
desh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 360n24.
43. Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 181.
44. Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray, and Emmanuela Gakidou, “Fifty Years of Violent
War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: Analysis of Data from the World Health Survey Programme,”
British Medical Journal, June 26, 2008.
45. F. B. Ali, “The Coup of 19 December 1971: How General Yahya Was Removed from Power,”
Pakistan Patriots (blog), June 21, 2013, http://pakistanpatriots.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-coup-of
-19-december-1971-how-general-yahya-was-removed-from-power/.
46. Syed Badrul Ahsan, “Pakistan in December 1971,” Daily Star (Bangladesh), December 19, 2012.
47. Tammy Kinsey, “Garam Hawa,” Film Reference, n.d., http://www.filmreference.com/Films
-Fr-Go/Garam-Hawa.html.

CHAP TER 11: ZULFIKAR ALI BHU TTO: THE SAVIOR OF WEST PAKISTAN
1. See p. 196.
2. Syed Badrul Ahsan, “Pakistan in December 1971,” Daily Star (Bangladesh), December 19, 2012.
3. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade
in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 19–20.
4. “When Benazir Bhutto Enjoyed Pakeezah in Shimla,” IANS, May 13, 2012, http://www.ummid
.com/news/2012/May/13.05.2012/benazir_bhutto_in_shimla.htm.
5. Cited in Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War, rev. ed.
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 127.
6. Manish Chand, “40 Years Later, Shimla Accord Haunts India-Pakistan Ties,” South Asia Monitor,
July 1, 2012.
7. “Simla Agreement, July 2, 1972,” http://www.jammu-kashmir.com/documents/simla.html.
8. Ab Qayoom Khan, “Sheikh Abdullah: A Political Sufferer-II,” Kashmir Observer, September 10,
2012.
9. Dilip Hiro, Inside India Today (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976 / New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1977), 254.
10. Cited in Dorothy Norman, ed., The First Sixty Years: Presenting in His Own Words the Develop-
ment of the Political Thought of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Background Against Which It Evolved (London:
Bodley Head, 1965), 186.

453
 NOTES

11. Both suppliers had stipulated that CIRUS was to be used only for peaceful purposes.
12. See Chapter 9, p. 188.
13. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 30.
14. “Nuclear Technology 1970–1974,” Bhutto.org, 2014, http://www.bhutto.org/article21.php.
15. Ahmadis are the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), born in the village of Qa-
dian in Punjab. Their belief that Ahmad is the Messiah in succession to Lord Krishna, Jesus Christ, and
the Prophet Muhammad contradicts mainstream Muslims’ tenet that Muhammad is the last and final
prophet. They formed 2.3 percent of Pakistan’s population.
16. Christina Lamb, Waiting for Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1991), 84.
17. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 62.
18. Apparently, URENCO stands for uranium (UR) enrichment (EN) company (CO). In 2013, it
was the globe’s second largest vendor of nuclear fuel, selling its products to fifty countries.
19. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 60, citing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, If I Am Assassinated (Delhi:
Vikas, 1979), 138.

CHAP TER 12: ISLAMIST ZIA UL HAQ , BUILDER OF THE A-BOMB

1. When Muhammad Zia ul Haq visited his alma mater in Delhi in 1983, he was shown his appli-
cation to the principal for leave. He had misspelled his name as “Zai ul-Haq.” “Glimpses of St. Stephen’s
College,” St. Stephen’s College, http://www.ststephens.edu/archives/history2.htm.
2. Cited in Shahid Javed Burki and Craig Baxter, eds., Pakistan Under The Military: Eleven Years of
Zia Ul-Haq (Boulder: Westview, 1991), 5.
3. Cited in Josy Joseph, “MEA Totally Misread General Zia-ul-Haq’s Intentions After Coup, Show
Declassified Papers,” Times of India, November 7, 2011.
4. Protesting against Britain’s recognition of Bangladesh, Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
withdrew Pakistan from the Commonwealth. Pakistan’s later application for readmission to the Com-
monwealth was accepted in 1988. Among Commonwealth members, diplomatic mission heads are called
high commissioners instead of ambassadors.
5. Cited in Joseph, “MEA Totally Misread General Zia-ul-Haq’s Intentions.”
6. Robert Hutchinson, Weapons of Mass Destruction: The No-Nonsense Guide to Nuclear, Chemical and
Biological Weapons Today (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), 112.
7. B. Raman, Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane (New Delhi: Lancer, 2008), 113.
8. Nuclear reprocessing technology was developed to separate and recover fissionable plutonium
from irradiated nuclear fuel. Initially, reprocessing was used to extract plutonium for producing nuclear
weapons. Later, reprocessed plutonium was alternatively recycled back into MOX nuclear fuel for thermal
reactors.
9. Dilip Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012), 58.
10. Ardeshir Cowasjee, “A Re-Cap of Soviet–Pakistan Relations,” Dawn (Karachi), December 3, 2011.
11. Meeting President Nur Muhammad Taraki in the capital city of Kabul would have implied de
facto recognition of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which Zia ul Haq was unwilling to do.
12. General Khalid Mahmud Arif, Working with Zia: Pakistan Power Politics 1977–1988 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 307.
13. Dilip Hiro, War Without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response (London: Rout-
ledge, 2002), 211.
14. In practice, only the penalties involving lashing were implemented.
15. In June 1980, BBC TV’s documentary Project 706: The Islamic Bomb provided the fullest account
of Pakistan’s uranium enrichment program.
16. A separate arrangement was made for Pakistan’s purchase of forty versatile F-16 fighter aircraft
manufactured in the United States, much to Delhi’s alarm.
17. Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm, 322n23; “Pakistan Nuclear Weapons,” Global Security, n.d., http://
www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/pakistan/nuke.htm.

454
 NOTES

18. V. D. Chopra, ed., Significance of Indo-Russian Relations in the 21st Century (New Delhi: Kalpaz,
2008), 85.
19. William K. Stevens, “Pakistan’s Leader to Confer in India,” New York Times, October 31, 1982.
20. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret
Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 104.
21. “Pakistan Nuclear Weapons—A Chronology,” Federation of American Scientists, June 3, 1998,
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/chron.htm.
22. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 104–105.
23. Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm, 122.
24. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 105–106.
25. Ibid., 106.
26. Ibid., 105; see also “Adrian Levy Interview with Amy Goodman,” Democracy Now!, November
19, 2007.
27. Stephen Zunes, “Pakistan’s Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (1981–1984),”
Nonviolent Conflict, 2009, http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/index.php/movements-and-campaigns
/movements-and-campaigns-summaries?sobi2Task=sobi2Details&sobi2Id=24.
28. Suranjan Das, Kashmir and Sindh: Nation-Building, Ethnicity and Regional Politics in South Asia
(New Delhi: Anthem, 2001), 144.
29. Partha Sarathy Ghosh, Cooperation and Conflict in South Asia (Chennai: Technical Publications,
1989), 42.
30. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was the leader of the Damdami Taksal, a fundamentalist sect within
Sikhism.
31. In one of his speeches Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi admitted to having lost more than 700 sol-
diers in Operation Blue Star. On October 31, 2009, CNN-IBN reported the army losing 365 commandos.
32. Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs, Volume II: 1839–2004, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 364.
33. Marc Kaufman, “India Blames Pakistan in Sikh Conflict,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 19, 1988.
34. Indira Gandhi and P. V. Narasimha Rao, “Debate on the White Paper on the Punjab Agitation,
Monsoon Session of Parliament, 1984: Interventions by Prime Minister and Home Minister,” Ministry
of External Affairs, 1984.
35. Singh, A History of the Sikhs, Volume II, 378.
36. Reginald Massey, “Khushwant Singh Obituary,” Guardian (London), March 20, 2014.
37. The elections in Punjab and Assam, then under emergency, were held almost a year later.
38. According to Milton Beardon of the CIA, by the time the Soviets left Afghanistan in early 1989,
the CIA had spent $6 billion and Saudi Arabia $4 billion. Cited by Stephen Kinzer, “How We Helped
Create the Afghan Crisis,” Boston Globe, March 20, 2009.
39. Stephen R. Wilson, “India and Pakistan Pledge Not to Destroy Each Other’s Nuclear Plants,”
Associated Press, December 17, 1985.
40. Ibid.
41. Because of their black uniforms, the commandos of the National Security Guards were popu-
larly called Black Cats.
42. Hiro, War Without End, 220.
43. Abdul Sattar, Pakistan’s Foreign Policy, 1947–2005: A Concise History (Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 194, 195.
44. J. Bandhopadhyay, The Making of India’s Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Allied, 1991), 272.
45. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 151.
46. Shafik H. Hashmi, “The Nuclear Danger in South Asia,” citing the Atlantic, November 2005, 82,
http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-compulsory-subjects/current-aff airs/3803-nuclear-danger-south-asia
.html.
47. Cited in Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 151. The Observer paid Kuldip Nayar a miserly £350
($500) for his sensational exclusive story.
48. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 152.

455
 NOTES

49. Steven R. Weisman, “On India’s Border, a Huge Mock War,” New York Times, March 5, 1988.
50. Terry Atlas, “Terror Attacks on U.S. Down Sharply in 1987,” Chicago Tribune, January 18, 1988.
51. Ravi Shankar, “Spy Wars,” New Indian Express, May 16, 2012.
52. In December 2006, a court in New York convicted Khalid Awan, a Pakistani national, of pro-
viding money and financial services to the Khalistan Commando Force chief Paramjit Singh Panjwar in
Pakistan. “Pakistani Convicted for Financing Sikh Militant Group,” Rediff News (Mumbai), December
21, 2006.
53. Marc Kaufman, “In the Punjab’s Golden Temple, Sikh Militants Rule Once More,” Philadelphia
Inquirer, February 12, 1988.
54. Anant Mathur, “Secrets of COIN Success: Lessons from the Punjab Campaign,” Faultlines 20
( January 2011).
55. Kaufman, “Punjab’s Golden Temple.”
56. Kaufman, “India Blames Pakistan.”
57. Barbara Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?” World Policy Journal 22, no. 3 (Fall 2005).
58. Cited in Edward Jay Epstein, “Who Killed Zia?,” Vanity Fair, September 1989.
59. Epstein, “Who Killed Zia?”
60. Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?”
61. Epstein, “Who Killed Zia?”
62. Fatima Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010 /
New York: Nation Books, 2010), 281.
63. Cited in Epstein, “Who Killed Zia?”
64. Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?”
65. Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword, 282.
66. Robert D. Kaplan, “How Zia’s Death Helped the US,” New York Times, August 23, 1989.
67. Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?”
68. Ibid.
69. Atul Sethi, “20 Years On, Zia’s Death Still a Mystery,” Times of India, August 17, 2008, citing
Edward Jay Epstein on the twentieth anniversary of Zia ul Haq’s assassination.
70. A Case of Exploding Mangoes was long-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize in Britain in 2008.

CHAP TER 13: RAJIV-BENAZIR RAPPORT—CU T SHORT

1. Cited in “Benazir Bhutto: Oxford Party Girl Cursed by Blood-Soaked Family Dynasty,” Daily
Mail (London), December 28, 2007.
2. G. Parthasarathy, “Rumblings in Pakistan: Zardari Is Indeed on a Slippery Slope,” Tribune
(Chandigarh, India), October 2, 2008.
3. Unlike the bygone years, when Muhammad Yusuf Khan had to change his name to Dilip Kumar,
a Hindu name, to win popular accolade, none of the latter-day Khans had felt the need to do so. This was
a measure of how secularism was taking root in India, with most Indians regarding religion as a strictly
personal matter with no professional or political implication.
4. Meena Gopal, “Benazir Bhutto Riposte: ‘I Kept My Word, Rajiv Didn’t,’” Outlook India, Decem-
ber 31, 2007.
5. Cited in Madhu Jain, “French Leave: Rajiv Gandhi Embarks on Giddy Five-Day Three-Nation
Tour,” India Today, August 15, 1989.
6. “Editorial: The Brothers Hinduja and the Bofors Scandal,” Frontline (Chennai), October 28–
November 10, 2000.
7. The Hindu was edited by Narasimha Ram, a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Jour-
nalism in New York.
8. In 2012 the Supreme Court ruled that Ishaq Khan, General Aslam Beg, and Lieutenant General
Asad Durrani, the ISI chief, had conspired to provide financial assistance to the IJI. See “Asghar Khan
Short Order, Full Text,” Express Tribune (Karachi), October 19, 2012; and Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Be-
tween Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 248.
9. Cited in Haqqani, Pakistan, 294.

456
 NOTES

10. Haqqani, Pakistan, 296.

11. Barbara Crossette, “Assassination in India: A Blast, and Then the Wailing Started,” New York
Times, May 21, 1991.
12. Most of her twenty-six coplotters were sentenced to death by the trial court seven years later.
Upon appeal, in January 2014 the Supreme Court commuted the capital punishment sentences of fifteen
of them to life imprisonment. The next month it did the same in the case of three others. “Rajiv Gandhi
Murder: India Court Suspends Plotters’ Release,” BBC News, February 20, 2014.
13. Shekhar Gupta, “India in the Dock: Babri Masjid Demolition 1992: How the World Reacted,”
India Today, December 5, 2011.
14. “Pakistanis Attack 30 Hindu Temples,” New York Times, December 8, 1992.
15. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret
Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 240.
16. Harinder Baweja, “Get America Out of the Way and We’ll Be OK,” Tehelka, February 2, 2008.
17. “The RAW: Understanding India’s External Intelligence Agency,” Indian Defence Forum, Septem-
ber 29, 2009, http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/defence-strategic-issues/5670-raw-understanding-
indias-external-intelligence-agency.html.
18. Hamish Telford, “Counter-Insurgency in India: Observations from Punjab and Kashmir,” Jour-
nal of Conflict Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2001).
19. Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War, rev. ed. (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2003), 172.
20. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) was first passed in 1958 to cover the “dis-
turbed” areas in northeast India. It still remains in force there.
21. Jason Burke, “Indian Officers Named in Report on Kashmir Abuses,” Guardian (London), De-
cember 6, 2012.
22. Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night (Noida: Random House India, 2009) / Curfewed Night: One
Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland (New York: Scribner, 2010)
/ Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir (London: Harper, 2010), 143.
23. Dilip Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012), 103.
24. Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, 176, 177, 183.
25. Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm, 104.
26. Cited in Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, 194.
27. Levy and Scott-Clark, Deception, 255–256.
28. “Pakistan Against Forces of Extremism: PM,” Dawn (Karachi), April 6, 1995.
29. Cited by A. G. Noorani, “The Truth About the Lahore Summit,” Frontline (Chennai), February
16–March 1, 2002.
30. Ibid.
31. “Pakistan Nuclear Weapons—A Chronology,” Federation of American Scientists, June 3, 1998,
https://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/chron.htm.

CHAP TER 14: GATE-CRASHING THE NUCLEAR CLUB

1. Every year, at a grand ceremony, each recruit of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh made his
donation to the leader of his branch.
2. “‘The Sangh Is My Soul,’ Writes Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the First Swayamsevak Who Became
Prime Minister,” Samvada, December 24, 2012, http://samvada.org/2012/news/the-sangh-is-my-soul
-writes-atal-bihari-vajpayee-the-first-swayamsevak-who-became-pm.
3. Carey Sublette, “India’s Nuclear Weapons Program: The Momentum Builds: 1989–1998,” Nu-
clear Weapon Archive, March 30, 2001, http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/India/IndiaMomentum.html.
4. T. V. Paul, “The Systemic Bases of India’s Challenge to the Global Nuclear Order,” Nonprolifer-
ation Review (Fall 1998).
5. Cited in ibid.
6. Cited in Sublette, “India’s Nuclear Weapons Program.”

457
 NOTES

7. See Chapter 11, p. 222.

8. “Weapons of Peace: How the CIA Was Fooled,” India Today, May 17, 1999.
9. “On This Day, 11 May 1998: India Explodes Nuclear Controversy,” BBC News, 2003.
10. Tim Weiner, “Nuclear Anxiety: The Blunders: US Blundered on Intelligence, Officials Admit,”
New York Times, May 13, 1998.
11. Cited in Reem Siddiqi, “Nuclear Arms in India: A Weapon for Political Gain,” Monitor: Journal
of International Studies 7, no. 1 (Fall 2000).
12. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3. A few opinion polls showed 92 percent favoring
India going nuclear. “India Focus: Strategic Analysis and Forecast,” India Focus: Strategic Analysis and
Forecasts, May 1998, http://www.indiastrategy.com/may98.htm.
13. John F. Burns, “Nuclear Anxiety: The Overview: Pakistan, Answering India, Carries out Nuclear
Test’; Clinton’s Appeal Rejected,” New York Times, May 29, 2013.
14. Rai Muhammad Saleh Azam, “When Mountains Move—The Story of Chagai,” Defence Journal,
June 2000.
15. In a cold test, a nuclear bomb is triggered without the fissile material required to detonate it.
16. Carey Sublette, “Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons Program: 1998: The Year of Testing,” Nuclear
Weapon Archive, September 10, 2001, http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Pakistan/PakTests.html.
17. “US Offered $5 Bn to Refrain from Nuclear Tests: Nawaz Sharif,” Times of India, May 28, 2010.
18. Sublette, “Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons Program.”
19. Raj Chengappa and Zahid Hussain, “Bang for Bang: Pokhran Tests Fallout,” India Today, June
8, 1998.
20. Christopher Walker and Michael Evans, “Pakistan Feared Israeli Raid: Missiles Were Put on
Alert to Counter Strike at Nuclear Sites,” Times (London), June 3, 1998.
21. Cited in Sublette, “Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons Program.”
22. Burns, “Nuclear Anxiety.”
23. John Ward Anderson and Kamran Khan, “Pakistan Declares Intention to Use Arms in Self-
Defense,” Washington Post, May 30, 1998.
24. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ( July 1998): 24.
25. “Arms Control and Proliferation Profile: India,” Arms Control Association, July 2013, http://
www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/indiaprofile.
26. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace, 2005), 248, 247.
27. Farhan Bokhari, Stephen Fidler, and Roula Khalaf, “Saudi Oil Money Joins Forces with Nuclear
Pakistan,” Financial Times, August 5, 2004.
28. Cited in Amjad Abbas Maggsi, “Lahore Declaration February, 1999: A Major Initiative for
Peace in South Asia,” Pakistan Vision 14, no. 1 (2013): 183–201.
29. Amit Baruha, Dateline Islamabad (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007), 119.
30. A. G. Noorani, “The Truth About the Lahore Summit,” Frontline, February 16–March 1, 2002.
31. Ibid.
32. Haqqani, Pakistan, 363n205.
33. Pamela Philipose, “The Symbol of Pakistan,” Indian Express, February 22, 1999.
34. “Lahore Declaration,” http://www.nti.org/treaties-and-regimes/lahore-declaration. The Indian
and Pakistani foreign secretaries had prepared the draft of this agreement a month earlier.
35. Kenneth J. Cooper, “India, Pakistan Kindle Hope for Peace,” Washington Post, February 21, 1999.
36. Philipose, “The Symbol of Pakistan.”
37. Cited in Ranbir Vohra, The Making of India: A Historical Survey (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,
2000), 309.
38. “Clinton Welcomes Meeting Between Vajpayee and Sharif,” press release, February 22, 1999,
http://www.fas.org/news/india/1999/99022301_nlt.htm.
39. After the coup in October 1999, General Pervez Musharraf sacked Air Chief Pervez Mahdi Qureshi.

458
 NOTES

40. Praveen Swami, “Pakistan Revisits the Kargil War,” Hindu, June 21, 2008. See also “The Musharraf
Tapes—II,” Moral Volcano Daily Press (blog), January 11, 2004, https://moralvolcano.wordpress
.com/tag/musharraf; Haqqani, Pakistan, 252.
41. Praveen Swami, “Pakistan Revisits the Kargil War,” Hindu, June 21, 2008; Malik Zahoor Ah-
mad, “The Unsung Hero of Kargil,” News (Karachi), February 20, 2013.
42. “G8 Statement on Regional Issues,” June 20, 1999, http://www.g8.fr/evian/english/navigation
/g8_documents/archives_from_previous_summits/cologne_summit_-_1999/g8_statement_on_regional
_issues.html.
43. “Pakistan Warns of Kashmir War Risk,” BBC News, June 23, 1999.
44. “Pervez Musharraf Claims 1999 Kargil Operation Was a Big Success for Pak Army,” India
Today, February 1, 2013.
45. Rezaul H. Laskar, “Sharif After Kargil: ‘Mr President, Pak Army Will GET Me,’” Rediff News
(Mumbai), February 26, 2013.
46. “Pakistan Warns of Kashmir War Risk.”
47. Bruce Riedel, “American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit at Blair House,” Occasional
Paper No. 17, Fifth Annual Fellows’ Lecture, April 17, 2002, http://media.sas.upenn.edu/casi/docs
/research/papers/Riedel_2002.pdf.
48. Malik Zahoor Ahmad, “The Unsung Hero of Kargil,” News International (Karachi), February
20, 2013.
49. Ibid.
50. Zahoor Ahmad, “The Unsung Hero of Kargil.”
51. A. G. Noorani, “Kargil Diplomacy,” Frontline (Chennai), July 31–August 13, 1999.
52. Riedel, “American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit.”
53. Cited in Graham Bowley and Jane Perlez, “Musharraf Prepares to Drop Army Role,” New York
Times, November 28, 2007.
54. Dilip Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012), 107.
55. Cited in Noorani, “The Truth About the Lahore Summit.”
56. “Pak Army Defeated by Indian Media,” December 15, 2013, http://defence.pk/threads/pak
-army-defeated-by-indian-media.291310. Major General Muhammad Azam Asif ’s essay on the media
was part of the biennial Green Book, published by the Pakistani Army for serving officers; the 2010 edition
focused on information warfare.
57. Rajiv Tikoo, “The Larger Than Life Director,” Financial Express, February 19, 2000.
58. Ihsan Aslam, “Bollywood’s Kargil,” Daily Times (Lahore), June 24, 2004.
59. “Prominent Writer, Actor, Rauf Khalid Dies in Road Accident,” Dawn (Karachi), November
25, 2011.
60. Cited in Dilip Hiro, War Without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2002), 285.
61. Ibid., 277.
62. James Risen and Judith Miller, “Pakistani Intelligence Had Links to Al Qaeda, U.S. Officials
Say,” New York Times, October 29, 2001.
63. Ansar Abbasi, “Musharraf Had Given Authority to Three Generals to Overthrow Nawaz,” News
(Karachi), October 27, 2013.
64. “How the 1999 Pakistan Coup Unfolded,” BBC News, August 23, 2007.
65. Gwen Ifill, “Pakistan After Coup,” PBS Newshour, October 19, 1999; “Transcript of Address to
the Nation in English by the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and Chief of the Army Staff,
General Pervez Musharraf,” Pakistan News Service, October 12, 1999.
66. Of the 545 members, 2 belonging to the Anglo-Indian community are nominated by the pres-
ident of the Republic of India.
67. Sanjoy Majumder, “India Wary of Pakistan Army,” BBC News, October 13, 1999.
68. Zahid Hussain, “Freed Militant Surfaces,” Associated Press, January 5, 2000.

459
 NOTES

CHAP TER 15: GENERAL MUSHARRAF BUCKLES UNDER US PRESSURE

1. “Jammu and Kashmir Backgrounder,” South Asia Terrorism Portal, 2001, http://www.satp.org
/satporgtp/countries/india/states/jandk/backgrounder/index.html.
2. Jonathan Marcus, “Analysis: The World’s Most Dangerous Place?,” BBC News, March 23, 2000.
3. Mike Wooldridge, “Analysis: Clinton’s Disappointments in South Asia,” BBC News, March 26,
2000.
4. Bill Sammon, “Clinton Uses Decoy Flight for Security,” Washington Times, March 26, 2000;
James Risen and Judith Miller, “Pakistani Intelligence Had Links to Al Qaeda, U.S. Officials Say,” New
York Times, October 29, 2001.
5. “Clinton Addresses Pakistani People,” CNN, March 25, 2000.
6. “Pakistan Court Limits Army Rule,” BBC News, May 12, 2000.
7. Sridhar Krishnaswami, “Vajpayee’s American Yatra,” Frontline (Chennai), September 30–October
13, 2000.
8. “Annan’s No to UN Resolution on Kashmir,” Tribune (Chandigarh, India), March 11, 2001.
9. “Activities of Secretary-General in India, 15–18 March 2001,” United Nations, 2001, http://
www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2001/sgt2270R.doc.htm.
10. Aijaz Ahmad, “Of What Went Wrong at Agra,” Frontline (Chennai), July 21–August 3, 2001.
11. Ibid.
12. Rahul Bedi, “The Tel Aviv Connection Grows,” India Together, July 26, 2002, http://www.india
together.org/govt/military/articles/isrlbuy02.htm.
13. Ed Blanche, “Mutual Threat of Islamic Militancy Allies Israel and India,” Jane’s Terrorism and
Security Monitor, August 14, 2001.
14. “Text of Bush’s Act of War Statement,” BBC News, September 12, 2001.
15. Dilip Hiro, War Without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response (London: Rout-
ledge, 2002), 314.
16. Jane Perlez, “A Pakistani Envoy in Britain Defuses Cultural Land Mines,” New York Times,
August 4, 2007.
17. Hiro, War Without End, 314n38.
18. Ibid., 314n36.
19. Ibid., 314n37.
20. Rory McCarthy, “Pakistani Leader’s Attempt to Rein in Militants Is Met with Defiance,”
Guardian (London), May 26, 2002.
21. “Context of September 15, 2001: Head of ISI Argues Pakistan Should Side with Taliban, but
Musharraf Agrees to Help US as Opportunistic Necessity,” History Commons, n.d., http://www.history
commons.org/context.jsp?item=a0901musharrafmeeting.
22. Hiro, War Without End, 315n40.
23. “Musharraf Rallies Pakistan,” BBC News, September 19, 2001.
24. Hiro, War Without End, 315n39.
25. Ibid., 315.
26. Ibid., 316n42.
27. “Militants Attack Kashmir Assembly,” BBC News, October 1, 2001.
28. “Indian Parliament Attack Kills 12,” BBC News, December 13, 2001.
29. Steve Coll, “The Stand-Off: How Jihadi Groups Helped Provoke the Twenty-First Century’s
First Nuclear Crisis,” New Yorker, February 13, 2006.
30. Ibid.
31. Hiro, War Without End, 374n3.
32. “2002—Kashmir Crisis,” Global Security, 2011, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world
/war/kashmir-2002.htm.
33. “International Concern over Danger of Conflict in South Asia,” Disarmament Diplomacy 62
( January–February 2002).
34. Hiro, War Without End, 380; “Pakistan Moves Nuclear Weapons,” Washington Post, November
11, 2001.

460
 NOTES

35. Praveen Swami, “Gen. Padmanabhan Mulls over Lessons of Operation Parakram,” Hindu, Feb-
ruary 6, 2004.
36. Coll, “The Stand-Off.”
37. Cited in Hiro, War Without End, 381.
38. Javed Naqvi, “Musharraf Offers Sustained Talks: Handshake with Vajpayee Charms SAARC,”
Dawn (Karachi), January 6, 2002.
39. Sridhar Krishnaswami, “A Balancing Act,” Frontline (Chennai), January 19–February 1, 2002.
40. Cited in Scott D. Sagan, “The Evolution of India and Pakistan Nuclear Doctrine,” speech to the
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, May 7, 2008, http://belfercenter
.ksg.harvard.edu/files/uploads/Sagan_MTA_Talk_050708.pdf.
41. Hiro, War Without End, 382; Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: How the War Against Islamic
Extremism Is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2008 / New York:
Penguin Books, 2009), 146.
42. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret
Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 323.

CHAP TER 16: NUCLEAR-ARMED TWINS, EYEBALL-TO-EYEBALL

1. “2002—Kashmir Crisis,” Global Security, 2011, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world
/war/kashmir-2002.htm.
2. When India Almost Went to War with Pakistan,” Inside Story (blog), Hindustan Times, Novem-
ber 2, 2011, http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/inside-story/2011/11/02/when-india-went-to-war-with
-pakistan-twice/.
3. Steve Coll, “The Stand-Off: How Jihadi Groups Helped Provoke the Twenty-First Century’s
First Nuclear Crisis,” New Yorker, February 13, 2006.
4. 2002—Kashmir Crisis.”
5. Coll, “The Stand-Off.”
6. Cited in Scott D. Sagan, “The Evolution of India and Pakistan Nuclear Doctrine,” speech to the
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, May 7, 2008, http://belfercenter
.ksg.harvard.edu/files/uploads/Sagan_MTA_Talk_050708.pdf.
7. See Chapter 14, p. 279.
8. “India Draft Nuclear Doctrine,” Disarmament Diplomacy 39 ( July–August 1999).
9. Mark Fitzpatrick, A. I. Nikitin, and Sergey Oznobishchev, eds., Nuclear Doctrines and Strategies:
National Policies and International Security (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2008), 131.
10. Cited in Sagan, “The Evolution of India and Pakistan Nuclear Doctrine.”
11. “Musharraf Refuses to Renounce First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Irish Examiner, June 5, 2002.
12. Coll, “The Stand-Off.”
13. “Leaders Agree on Using Peaceful Means: Putin,” Dawn (Karachi), June 4, 2002; “Musharraf
Refuses to Renounce First Use of Nuclear Weapons.”
14. “Almaty Summit Leads to Creation of Asian Security Organization,” Conference on Interaction
and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, June 4, 2002, http://prosites-kazakhembus.homestead.com
/Special_Report_CICA.html.
15. Coll, “The Stand-Off.”
16. “2002—Kashmir Crisis.”
17. “Joint Indo-US Naval Exercise,” BBC News, May 5, 2002.
18. “Powell Press Conference in New Delhi, July 28, 2002,” http://www.usembassy.it/viewer/article
.asp?article=/file2002_07/alia/A2072601.htm&plaintext=1.
19. Ela Dutt, “Pervez Firm on Ending Infiltration: Powell,” Tribune (Chandigarh, India), August
1, 2002.
20. Dilip Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012), 111.
21. Aditi Phadnis, “Parakram Cost Put at Rs 6,500 Crore,” Rediff News (Mumbai), January 16,
2003.

461
 NOTES

22. Praveen Swami, “Gen. Padmanabhan Mulls over Lessons of Operation Parakram,” Hindu, Feb-
ruary 6, 2004.
23. Prime Minister’s Office, “Cabinet Committee on Security Reviews Progress in Operationaliz-
ing India’s Nuclear Doctrine,” press release, January 4, 2003, http://pib.nic.in/archieve/lreleng/lyr2003
/rjan2003/04012003/r040120033.html.
24. Pronounced jiiyo in Urdu, Geo means “keep living.”
25. Amy Waldman, “Pakistan TV: A New Look at the News,” New York Times, January 25, 2004.
26. Reporters Sans Frontières, “Pakistan—2003 Annual Report,” http://archives.rsf.org/article.php
3?id_article=6480.
27. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace, 2005), 260.
28. Of the 342 National Assembly seat, 271 were contested, with the remainder allocated to differ-
ent groups according to the popularly won places.
29. Haqqani, Pakistan, 306, citing his interview with an ISI official in Islamabad in January 2005.
30. Suman Guha Mozumder, “Not Keen to Meet Vajpayee: Musharraf,” Rediff News (Mumbai),
September 25, 2003.
31. “Near Miss for Musharraf Convoy,” BBC News, December 14, 2003.
32. Salman Masood, “Pakistani Leader Escapes Attempt at Assassination,” New York Times, De-
cember 26, 2003.
33. Bill Roggio, “Assassination Attempt Against Pakistan’s President,” Long War Journal, July 6, 2007.
34. “2002—Kashmir Crisis.”
35. “Chief Minister Hails Musharraf ’s Statement,” Tribune (Chandigarh, India), December 19, 2003.
36. “Musharraf Says History Made Between India and Pakistan,” Daily Jang (Islamabad), January
6, 2004.
37. T. R. Ramachandran, “Need to Understand Each Other’s Concerns, Says PM,” Tribune (Chan-
digarh, India), January 5, 2004.
38. “Did Brajesh Mishra Meet ISI Chief ?,” Tribune (Chandigarh, India), January 6, 2004.
39. Shashank Joshi, “India and the Four Day War,” Royal United Services Institute, April 7, 2010,
http://www.rusi.org/analysis/commentary/ref:C4BBC50E1BAF9C.

CHAP TER 17: MANMOHAN SINGH’S CHANGING INTERLOCU TORS

1. “India and Pakistan Set Up Hotline,” BBC News, June 20, 2004.
2. See Chapter 7, p. 151.
3. The India-administered regions are the Hindu-majority part of Jammu, Muslim-majority Jammu,
Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, Kargil, and Ladakh.
4. Syed Rifaat Hussain, “Pakistan’s Changing Outlook on Kashmir,” South Asian Survey 14, no. 2
(December 2007): 195–205.
5. “PM Invites Musharraf to Watch Cricket,” Rediff News (Mumbai), March 10, 2005.
6. Gautaman Bhaskaran, “India and Pakistan Play Political Cricket,” April 26, 2005, http://www
.gautamanbhaskaran.com/gb/cricketdiplomacy.html.
7. Rifaat Hussain, “Pakistan’s Changing Outlook on Kashmir.”
8. Cited in A. G. Noorani, “A Step Closer to Consensus,” Frontline (Chennai), December 15–30,
2006.
9. Jyoti Malhotra, “Kashmir: Is Solution in Sight?,” BBC News, December 7, 2006.
10. Steve Coll, “The Back Channel,” New Yorker, March 2, 2009.
11. Dilip Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012), 211–212.
12. For the complete text of the email of the Indian Mujahedin’s Ahmedabad blasts, see http://
deshgujarat.com/2008/08/02/full-text-of-indian-muajahideens-ahmedabad-blasts-email.
13. Jason Burke, “Mumbai Spy Says He Worked for Terrorists—Then Briefed Pakistan,” Guardian
(London), October 18, 2010. The ISI also instructed David Coleman Headley to recruit Indian agents to
inform about Indian troop movement and levels.

462
 NOTES

14. For the story of Ajmal Amir Kasab, http://chauhansaab.blogspot.co.uk/2012_11_01_archive

.html; see also “I Am Going Away for Jihad: Kasab Told His Mother in Pak,” Indian Express, December
13, 2008.
15. Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (New York:
Penguin Books, 2013) / The Siege: Three Days of Terror Inside the Taj (London: Viking, 2013), 55.
16. Alastair Gee, “Mumbai Terror Attacks: And Then They Came After the Jews,” Times (London),
November 1, 2009.
17. Lydia Polgreen and Vikas Bajaj, “Suspect Stirs Court by Confessing,” New York Times, July 20, 2009.
18. Hiro, Apocalyptic Realm, 114.
19. Saeed Shah, “Revealed: Home of Mumbai’s Gunman in Pakistan Village,” Guardian (London),
December 7, 2008.
20. “Post-26/11, Pranab Mukherjee’s Words Rattled Pakistan: Condoleezza Rice,” Economic Times,
October 28, 2011.
21. Ibid.
22. “2008—Mumbai Attack 22/11,” Global Security, 2011, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military
/world/war/indo-pak_2008.htm.
23. China Hand, “The Mumbai Paradox,” China Matters (blog), December 4, 2008, http://china
matters.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/mumbai-paradox.html.
24. Post-26/11, Pranab Mukherjee’s Words Rattled Pakistan.”
25. Nirupama Subramanian, “McCain Warns Pakistan of Indian Air Strikes,” Hindu, December 7,
2008.
26.Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer,CNN,December 7,2008,http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS
/12/07/rice.mumbai.
27. Subramanian, “McCain Warns Pakistan of Indian Air Strikes.”
28. Tariq Naqash and Syed Irfan Raza, “Operation Against LeT-Dawa Launched in AJK,” Dawn
(Karachi), December 8, 2008.
29. “UN Bans Jamaat ud Dawa; Declares It a Terror Outfit,” Times of India, December 11, 2008.
30. Harinder Baweja, “Into the Heart of Darkness,” Tehelka, December 20, 2008.
31. “2008—Mumbai Attack 22/11.”
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. “Pakistan Admits India Attack Link,” BBC News, February 12, 2009.
38. “Text of India-Pakistan Joint Statement in Sharm-el-Sheikh Between Manmohan Singh and
Pakistan PM Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani on July 16, 2009,” Islamic Terrorism in India (blog), July 18, 2009,
http://islamicterrorism.wordpress.com/2009/07/18/text-of-india-pakistan-joint-statement-in-sharm-el
-sheikh-between-manmohan-singh-and-pakistan-pm-syed-yusuf-raza-gilani-on-july-16-2009/.
39. Sana Qamar, “Sharm El-Sheikh Meeting: An Analysis,” Reflections 4 (2009).
40. “South Asia Rivals’ Differing Agendas,” BBC News, February 23, 2010.
41. Jason Burke, “India-Pakistan Talks Centre on Terrorism but Fail to Make Progress,” Guardian
(London), February 25, 2010.
42. Ibid.
43. Sachin Parashar, “High-Level Visits in Bid to Restore Full-Scale Dialogue,” Times of India, July
10, 2010.
44. “Pakistan Asks India to Give Access to Kasab,” NDTV/PTI, May 3, 2010, http://www.ndtv
.com/article/world/pakistan-asks-india-to-give-access-to-kasab-20871.
45. “Pak Court Adjourns 26/11 Case to May 22,” Hindu, May 9, 2010.
46. “ISI Behind 26/11, from Start to End: Home Secy,” Indian Express, July 14, 2010.
47. Nissar Ahmad Thakor, “Everything Including Kashmir Discussed: Qureshi,” Greater Kashmir,
July 15, 2010.

463
 NOTES

48. Neeta Lal, “Will Manmohan Singh’s Invitation to His Pakistani Counterpart to Watch an India
vs Pakistan World Cup Tie Help Ties?,” Diplomat, April 1, 2011.
49. “Indo-Pak Ties Not a Profit or Loss Statement: Rao,” IBN Live, July 3, 2011, http://ibnlive
.in.com/news/indopak-ties-not-a-profit-or-loss-statement-rao/164704-3.html.
50. “Text of the Joint Statement by Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar and Indian Minister
of External Affairs S.M. Krishna, New Delhi; 27 July 2011,” http://www.piia.org.pk/images/document
/text-of-the-joint-statement-by-foreign-minister-hina-rabbani-27-july-2011..pdf.
51. Mark Magnier, “Indian Helicopter Strays into Pakistan-Held Part of Kashmir,” Los Angeles
Times, October 24, 2011.
52. “India Pakistan Relations: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Calls for a New Chapter,” Huff-
ington Post, November 10, 2011.
53. Assad Kharal, “US Announces $10 Million Bounty on Hafiz Saeed: Report,” Express Tribune,
April 3, 2012.
54. Stephanie Kennedy, “Pakistan Militant Taunts US over $10m Bounty,” ABC News, April 5,
2012.
55. Salman Masood, “Pakistani Lawmakers Criticize US Reward for Militant Leader,” New York
Times, April 5, 2012.
56. Mannat is a popular practice in Sufism, when a believer vows to visit a shrine of an eminent Sufi
saint or give money or food to the needy if their wish is fulfilled.
57. “Delicacies Await Zardari at Dr Singh’s Lunch, BUT . . . ,” Rediff (Mumbai), April 7, 2012.
58. Annie Banerji, “India to Allow FDI from Pakistan, Open Border Post,” Reuters, April 13, 2012.
59. “Both Leaders Stick to Their Stands,” Dawn (Karachi), August 30, 2012.
60. Salman Masood, “India and Pakistan Sign Visa Agreement, Easing Travel,” New York Times,
September 8, 2012.
61. “From Bashir to Khurshid: Who Said What on the LoC Crisis,” First Post (Mumbai), January
17, 2013.
62. “Statement by BJP President, Shri Rajnath Singh on Mr. Nawaz Sharif ’s Win in Pakistan Polls,”
http://www.bjp.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8732:press—shri-rajnath-singh
-on-mr-nawaz-sharifs-win-in-pakistan-polls&catid=68:press-releases&Itemid=494.
63. Ibid.
64. Jon Boone, “Kashmir Tensions Threaten to Return India and Pakistan to Vitriolic Past,” Guard-
ian (London), August 8, 2013.
65. Ibid.
66. David Blair and David Munk, “If Pakistan Is to Prosper, We Must Stop Bashing India,” Daily
Telegraph (London), August 24, 2013.
67. “Pakistan Committed Against Extremism, but Drones Must Stop: Nawaz at UN,” Express Tribune,
September 27, 2013.
68. Elizabeth Roche, “Manmohan Singh at UN: Pakistan Should Dismantle Terror Machinery,”
Live Mint (Delhi), September 28, 2013.
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424811703

69. “Nawaz, Manmohan Agree to Reduce Kashmir Tensions,” Dawn (Karachi), September 29, 2013.
70. “Joint Statement on Manmohan Singh’s Summit Meeting with President Obama in Washing-
ton,” Hindu, September 27, 2013.
71. “26/11 Mumbai Attacks: Trial Against Pak Suspects Adjourned,” First Post (Mumbai), March
5, 2014.
72. Malik Asad, “Trial of Mumbai Attack Case Suspects Stalled,” Dawn (Karachi), April 4, 2014.

CHAP TER 18: COMPETING FOR KABUL

1. Fazal-ur Rahim Marwat, “The Durand Line Issue,” Frontier Post (Peshawar), October 17, 2003.
2. William Dalrymple, “A Deadly Triangle,” Brookings Institution, June 25, 2013, http://www
.brookings.edu/research/essays/2013/deadly-triangle-afghanistan-pakistan-india-c.
3. Najmuddin A. Shaikh, “What Does Pakistan Want in Afghanistan?,” Express Tribune (Karachi),
December 27, 2011.

464
 NOTES

4. It was only in 2002 that Delhi acknowledged setting up an airbase in Farkhor.

5. Dilip Hiro, War Without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response (London: Rout-
ledge, 2002), 297–298.
6. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace, 2005), 262.
7. Himachal Pradesh University conferred an honorary doctorate on Hamid Karzai in 2002.
8. Dalrymple, “A Deadly Triangle.”
9. “Alongside Its Embassy in Kabul, India Will Open Consulates in Four Afghan Cities,” Pravda,
December 24, 2001.
10. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: How the War Against Islamic Extremism Is Being Lost in
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2008 / New York: Penguin Books, 2009),
143–144.
11. Ahmed Rashid, “Pakistan Closes Its Embassy in Afghanistan amid Escalating Diplomatic Ten-
sion,” RefWorld (UNHCR), July 8, 2003.
12. Ahmed Rashid, “Islamabad’s Lingering Support for Islamic Extremists Threatens Pakistan-
Afghanistan Ties,” RefWorld (UNHCR), July 23, 2003.
13. Ibid.
14. Scott Baldauf, “India-Pakistan Rivalry Reaches into Afghanistan,” Christian Science Monitor,
September 12, 2003.
15.“Image of the Beast,” There Are No Sunglasses (blog),January 9,2010,https://therearenosunglasses
.wordpress.com/2010/01/09.
16. Shaiq Hussain, “Pakistan to Ask India to Rein in Afghan Consulates,” Nation (Islamabad),
March 18, 2006.
17. Mariana Baabar, “RAW Is Training 600 Baluchis in Afghanistan,” Outlook (Delhi), April 24, 2006.
18. Dalrymple, “A Deadly Triangle.”
19. “Pakistan’s Musharraf Slams Afghanistan’s Karzai,” Afghanistan News Center, March 6, 2006.
20. Ibid.
21. “Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai with Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International,”
Council on Foreign Relations, September 21, 2006, http://www.cfr.org/afghanistan/afghanistan-president
-hamid-karzai-rush-transcript-federal-news-service/p11507.
22. “Seven Pakistani Troops Dead as Border Clash Continues,” Nawaaye Afghanistan, May 15, 2008.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. “Embassy Attack in Kabul Highlights Pakistan-India Rivalry,” EurasiaNet, July 8, 2008, http://
www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/pp070208.shtml.
26. Sayed Salahuddin, “Karzai Says Pakistan Behind Indian Embassy Bomb,” Afghan News Bulletin
no. 2105, July 15, 2008.
27. Some of the grenades used in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks were also traced back to the POF
unit in Wah. The grenades were manufactured by POF under license from an Austrian firm.
28. Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, “Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, US Officials Say,” New
York Times, August 1, 2008.
29. “ISI Nailed in Kabul Embassy Outrage: 2008 Bombing Plan WAS Hatched in Pakistan, New
Book Claims,” Mail Today Bureau (Delhi), March 23, 2014; “2008 Indian Embassy Attack in Kabul
Sanctioned by ISI, New Book Claims,” Times of India, March 23, 2014.
30. Kuldip Nayar, “ISI Playing a Dangerous Game with Taliban,” Sunday Times (Delhi), August
17, 2008.
31. Bhashyam Kasturi, “India’s Role in Afghanistan,” State of Pakistan, February 20, 2012, http://
www.stateofpakistan.org/indias-role-in-afghanistan.
32. “India and Pakistan Ramp Up Aid as They Jostle for Influence in Kabul,” Reuters, March 4,
2014.
33. Aryn Baker, “Karzai on Musharraf: Good Riddance,” Time, August 19, 2008.
34. Ibid.

465
 NOTES

35. “Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan to Strengthen Anti-Terrorism Co-op,” Xinhua Net, December
5, 2008.
36. “Afghanistan: National Opinion Poll” for BBC, ABC News, and ARD, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1
/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/05_02_09afghan_poll_2009.pdf.
37. Dalrymple, “A Deadly Triangle.”
38. Julian Borger, “UN in Secret Talks with Taliban,” Guardian (London), January 28, 2010.
39. Afghanistan: National Opinion Poll.
40. “9 Indians Among 17 Dead as Taliban Bombers Attack Kabul,” Times of India, February 26,
2010.
41. Karzai appointed his brother-in-law Ibrahim Spinzada as the new NSD director temporarily,
and replaced him with Rahmatullah Nabil, a Pashtun politician.
42. “Amid Pakistani Moves, Krishna to Attend Kabul Meet,” Thaindian News, July 10, 2010.
43. “Expert Discuss Ways to Promote Pak-Afghan Trade,” Express Tribune (Karachi), August 24,
2013.
44. Larry Hanauer and Peter Chalk, “India’s and Pakistan’s Strategies in Afghanistan: Implications
for the United States and the Region,” Occasional Paper, Center for Asia Pacific Policy, RAND, 2012,
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2012/RAND_OP387.pdf, 16n35.
45. Susan Cornwell, “Factbox: US Has Allocated $20 billion for Pakistan,” Reuters, April 21, 2011.
46. Solomon Moore and Rahim Faiez, “Hamid Karzai: Pakistan Firing Missiles into Afghanistan,”
Huffington Post, June 28, 2011.
47. “30 Afghan Militants Killed After Cross Border Raid,” Express Tribune (Karachi), October 10,
2011.
48. “Text of Agreement on Strategic Partnership between the Republic of India and the Islamic Re-
public of Afghanistan,” October 4, 2011, http://im.rediff.com/news/2011/oct/04indo-afghan-strategic
-agreement.pdf.
49. “Afghanistan and India Sign ‘Strategic Partnership,’” BBC News, October 4, 2011.
50. Sebastian Abbot, “Pakistan Warns Afghanistan After Pact with India,” Associated Press, Oc-
tober 6, 2011.
51. “India Plans to Train 30,000 Afghan Soldiers,” National (Dubai), December 3, 2011, 3; Rahul
Bedi, “India Steps Up Afghan Troop Training,” IHS Jane’s Defence Security Report, November 29, 2011.
52. Richard Weitz, “Afghanistan and India Deepen Strategic Cooperation,” CACI Analyst, January
22, 2014. According to Afghanistan’s ambassador to India, about 350 Afghan army officers receive annual
training in India, with a total of 1,400 trained since 2003.
53. “Indian Consortium Wins $10bn Afghanistan Mines Deal,” BBC News, November 29, 2011.
54. “SAIL-Led Consortium to Cut Spend on Afghan Iron Ore Mine,” Live Mint (Delhi), Novem-
ber 11, 2013.
55. Huma Imtiaz, “New York Summit: Zardari, Karzai and Cameron Discuss Afghan Endgame,”
Express Tribune (Karachi), September 27, 2012; “Accusations of Afghan President Termed ‘Totally Mis-
placed,’” Express Tribune (Karachi), October 9, 2012.
56. Anirban Bhaumik, “India Concerned over Leaked Afghan Peace Road Map,” Taand.com, Janu-
ary 4, 2013, http://www.english.taand.com/index.php?mod=article&cat=articles&article=2280.
57. “Karzai Calls for Pakistan Role in Afghan Peace Process,” BBC News, August 26, 2013.
58. “Afghanistan Aid” (graph), Reuters, March 4, 2014.
59. “India and Pakistan Ramp Up Aid.”
60. Hanauer and Chalk, “India’s and Pakistan’s Strategies in Afghanistan.”
61. “India Vows to Complete Salma Dam Project Within a Year,” Tolo News, August 24, 2013.
62. Aryn Baker, “Afghanistan Unplugs Bollywood’s Siren Song,” Time, May 8, 2008.
63. Alisa Tang and Rahim Faiez, “TV Stations Defy Afghan Government Ban on Indian Soap
Operas,” Associated Press, April 23, 2008.
64. Robin Bansal, “Afghanistan Crazy About Bollywood, but Lacks Official Market,” IANS, April
18, 2010, http://www.bollywood.com/afghanistan-crazy-about-bollywood-lacks-official-market.

466
 NOTES

65. Abdul Haleem, Chen Xin, “Feature: Jobless Young Afghans Find Escape in Bollywood Movies,”
Xinhua Net, June 17, 2012.
66. “Afghanistan and the Popularity of Bollywood Are Inseparable,” Economic Times, June 17, 2012.

CHAP TER 19: SHARED CULTURE, RISING COMMERCE

1. Pending Proceedings Order, Martial Law Order No. 107 (December 30, 1985), http://pakistan
constitutionlaw.com/pending-proceedings-order-martial-law-order-no-107-30th-of-december-1985.
2. Taran Adarsh, “Mughal-e-Azam Censored in Pakistan,” Sify Movies, February 13, 2006, http://
www.sify.com/movies/mughal-e-azam-censored-in-pakistan-news-bollywood-kkfvtdefjcd.html.
3. “Pakistan Clears Bollywood Films,” BBC News, February 8, 2006.
4. “Mughal-e-Azam Releases in Pakistan: Will Others Follow Suit?,” One India News, April 23,
2006.
5. “Taj Film Set for History in Pak,” Telegraph (Kolkata), April 25, 2006.
6. M. Zulqernain, “Pakistani Court Stops Airing of Indian, Foreign Films on TV,” Rediff News
(Mumbai), December 11, 2013.
7. “Mughal-e-Azam Releases in Pakistan.”
8. Ibid.
9. “Ban on Indian Movies,” Dawn (Karachi), December 6, 2012.
10. Palash Ghosh, “Bollywood Boom and ‘Dhoom’: Indian Films Wildly Popular in Pakistan De-
spite ‘Ban’ on Their Exhibition,” International Business Times, January 7, 2014.
11. “Amir Khan’s ‘Dhoom 3’ Breaks Box Office Records in Pakistan,” Indian Express, December 26,
2013.
12. “Pakistan’s Ban on Bollywood Films Withdrawn,” Financial Express, December 17, 2013.
13. “Pak Army Must Acquire a Television Channel,” Siasat Daily (Hyderabad), December 17, 2013.
14. Praveen Swami, “Green Books, Red Herring and LoC War,” Hindu, January 16, 2013.
15. Ghosh, “Bollywood Boom and ‘Dhoom.’”
16. “India vs Pakistan: Cricket History,” NDTV Cricket, December 10, 2012, http://sports.ndtv
.com/india-vs-pakistan-2012/about/200488-india-vs-pakistan-cricket-history.
17. A Twenty20 game, introduced in 2003 in England and Wales, involves two teams; each has a
single innings and bats for a maximum of 20 overs.
18. Statistics from ESPN’s Cricinfo, http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/stats/index.html?class
=2;filter=advanced;opposition=7;orderby=won;team=6;template=results;type=team.
19. Kanishkaa Balachandran, “Going, Going . . . Gone, Following Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s Hero-
ics, Cricinfo Looks Back at Similar One-Day Thrillers,” ESPN Cricinfo, April 10, 2008.
20. “Resumption of India-Pakistan Matches Moves Closer,” ESPN Cricinfo, October 22, 2003.
21. “Sahara India to Sponsor India, Pakistan Matches in Canada,” ESPN, July 15, 1996, http://www
.espncricinfo.com/page2/content/story/72440.html.
22. “Resumption of India-Pakistan Matches Moves Closer.”
23. Sanjoy Majumder, “India-Pakistan Cricket Battle at Mohali Raises Passions,” March 30, 2011.
24. “Heartbreak in Pakistan, Three Die over Defeat,” NDTV, April 1, 2011, http://www.ndtv.com
/article/world/heartbreak-in-pakistan-three-die-over-defeat-95531.
25. “Stop Praising Sachin Tendulkar, Taliban Warn Pakistan Media,” Times of India, November 28,
2013.
26. “Pakistan Ready to Tour India for Cricket Revival: Sethi,” Dawn (Karachi), December 18, 2013.
27. “Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Pakistan,” Kushnirs, n.d., http://kushnirs.org/macro
economics/gdp/gdp_pakistan.html.
28. Mubarak Zeb Khan, “MFN Status for India on the Cards,” Dawn (Karachi), January 26, 2014.
29. MNF Status and Trade Between Pakistan and India, Pakistan Institute of Legislative Develop-
ment and Transparency, January 2012.
30. Vimal Bhatia, “Road Link Likely Between India and Pakistan Soon,” Times of India, September
23, 2012.

467
 NOTES

31. MNF Status and Trade Between Pakistan and India.

32. Ibid.
33. “Tomato-Laden Truck Covers New Ground for India-Pakistan Trade,” DNA India, October
1, 2007.
34. MNF Status and Trade Between Pakistan and India.
35. “Pakistan, India to Increase Frequency of Freight Trains,” Nation (Islamabad), June 20, 2008.
36. B. Raman, “Indo-Pak Economic Ties: Ground Realities,” Observer Research Foundation, No-
vember 26, 2004, http://orfonline.org/cms/sites/orfonline/modules/analysis/AnalysisDetail.html?cmaid
=2252&mmacmaid=197.
37. The eight members of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation in 2007 were
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
38. Mohsin S. Khan, “Improving India-Pakistan Relations Through Trade,” East Asia Forum, April
19, 2010, http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2010/04/19/improving-india-pakistan-relations-through-trade.
39. “India-Pakistan Events,” Reuters, August 4, 2012.
40. “Pakistan Notifies Negative List for Trade with India,” Economic Times, March 21, 2012.
41. “Modi Uses Business the Way Out with Pak,” Siasat Daily (Hyderabad), May 28, 2014.
42. “Pak Trade Barrier Holds Indian Bicycle Industry,” Hindustan Times, April 6, 2014.
43. Sarabjit Pandher, “Attari Integrated Check Post to Open Tomorrow,” Hindu, April 12, 2012.
44. Sarabjit Pandher, “New Liberal Visa Regime with Pakistan Soon: Chidambaram,” Hindu, April
13, 2012.
45. “India to Cut List to 100 from 614 Items,” Nation (Islamabad), October 22, 2012.
46. Nazar Ul Islam, “Trading with the Enemy,” Newsweek, December 17, 2013.
47. “Trade Between India and Pakistan Surges 21% to $2.4 Billion,” Express Tribune, May 14, 2013.
48. “Govt to Curtail Negative List of Trade Items with India,” Express Tribune, January 23, 2014.
49. “India, Pakistan Need to Take Steps to Boost Trade,” Economic Times, January 21, 2014; Zeb
Khan, “MFN Status for India on the Cards.”
50. “Importable Items from India: PIAF Asks Government to Cut Down Negative List,” Business
Recorder, January 2, 2014.
51. Aamir Shafaat Khan, “Trade Deficit with China Up 58pc,” Dawn (Karachi), February 10, 2013.
52. “Economic and Trade Relations between China and India,” Economic and Commercial Section
of the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Mumbai, December 15, 2004, http://bom-
bay2.mofcom.gov.cn/article/bilateralcooperation/inbrief/200412/20041200010319.shtml; “Total Trade,
Country-wise,” Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India, http://commerce.nic.in/eidb
/Default.asp.

CHAP TER 20: OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSIONS

1. R. Shayan, “Sir Syed Ahmed Khan,” Agnostic Pakistan (blog), December 14, 2008, http://agnostic
pakistan.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/sir-syed-ahmed-khan.html.
2. Arun, “Provincial Elections India 1946,” Wake Up, Smell the Coffee (blog), January 27, 2011,
http://observingliberalpakistan.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/provincial-elections-india-1946.html.
3. Cited in Dilip Hiro, The Timeline History of India (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), 261.
4. Cited by Ye Zhengjia, “Clearing the Atmosphere,” Frontline (Chennai), October 10–23, 1998,
citing Major-General Lei Yingfu, My Days as a Military Staff in the Supreme Command (in Chinese)
(Nanchang: Baihuazhou Culture and Arts, 1997), 210.
5. “Simla Agreement, July 2, 1972,” http://www.jammu-kashmir.com/documents/simla.html.
6. Muhammad Zia ul Haq missed the irony of using the term “peanuts”: Jimmy Carter was a peanut
farmer before being elected governor of Georgia in 1970.
7. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade
in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 104–105.
8. Ibid., 106.
9. Ibid., 151.

468
 NOTES

10. T. V. Paul, “The Systemic Bases of India’s Challenge to the Global Nuclear Order,” Nonprolif-
eration Review (Fall 1998).
11. Rai Muhammad Saleh Azam, “When Mountains Move—The Story of Chagai,” Defence Journal
( June 2000).
12. Pamela Philipose, “The Symbol of Pakistan,” Indian Express, February 22, 1999.
13. “Lahore Declaration,” http://www.nti.org/treaties-and-regimes/lahore-declaration. The Indian
and Pakistani foreign secretaries had prepared the draft of this agreement a month earlier.
14. “Pakistan Warns of Kashmir War Risk,” BBC World, June 23, 1999.
15. Steve Coll, “The Stand-Off: How Jihadi Groups Helped Provoke the Twenty-First Century’s
First Nuclear Crisis,” New Yorker, February 13, 2006.
16. The remainder of the pre-1947 Jammu and Kashmir was controlled by China.
17. Jyoti Malhotra, “Kashmir: Is Solution in Sight?,” December 7, 2006, BBC News.
18. Kenneth J. Cooper, “India, Pakistan Kindle Hope for Peace,” Washington Post, February 21, 1999.
19. “Literacy in India,” Census of India 2011, http://www.census2011.co.in/literacy.php.
20. “Pakistan Ranks 180 in Literacy: UNESCO,” Pakistan Today, December 4, 2013.

EPILOGUE
1. Saba Imtiaz, “Fishermen Cross an Imperceptible Line into Enemy Waters,” New York Times,
August 24, 2014. Between 2008 and 2013, India had released 353 Pakistani fishermen.
2. Hilary Whiteman and Harmeet Shah Singh, “India, Pakistan Leaders Meet, Signal Steps to
Rebuild Trust,” CNN, May 27, 2014.
3. Hari Kumar, “Premier Denounces Pakistan for ‘Proxy War,’” New York Times, August 12, 2014.
4. Ibid.; “Narendra Modi Accuses Pakistan of Waging Proxy War in Kashmir,” Guardian (London),
August 12, 2014.
5. Biplob Ghosal, “Geelani Meets Pakistani High Commissioner, Says India’s Decision to Can-
cel Talks ‘Childish,’” Zee Media Bureau, August 19, 2014, http://zeenews.india.com/news/nation
/geelani-meets-pakistani-high-commissioner-says-indias-decision-to-cancel-talks-childish_955441
.html.
6. “Pakistan Says It Is ‘Not Subservient’ to India,” Times of India, August 19, 2014.
7. Sachin Prashar, “Nawaz Sharif Seeks to Sweeten India-Pakistan Ties with Mangoes to Narendra
Modi,” Times of India, September 5, 2014.
8. “Pakistan Can’t Draw Veil over Kashmir Issue: PM,” Daily Times (Lahore), September 27, 2014.
9. Chidanand Rajghatta, “At UN General Assembly, PM Narendra Modi Rebukes Pakistan for Its
Kashmir Obsession,” Times of India, September 27, 2014.
10. “Time for ‘New Beginning’ in Bilateral Ties: Pakistani High Commissioner to India,” Express
Tribune (Karachi), September 11, 2014.
11. Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), “India-Pakistan
Auto Makers Ink Co-operation Agreement, August 27, 2014,” http://indiapakistantrade.org/recent
Developments.html#automakers.
12. Jon Boone and Rupam Jain, “Indians to Get Peek into Daily Lives of Pakistanis with New Soap
Opera Channel,” Guardian (London), June 23, 2014.
13. Nandini Sharma, “Gear Up for Two New Shows on Zindagi,” Business Insider, July 12, 2014.

469
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472
 Index

Aatish-e-Chinar, 176 A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 262

A B Bofor, 267 Acharaya, Krishna, 399
Abbas, Chaudhury Muhammad, 176 Achin, 392
Abbas, Ghulam 112 Addu City, 362
Abbottabad, 118, 119, 387 Advani, Lal Krishna, 314, 315,
ABC News (US), 384, 385 325–326
Abdullah, Farooq, 277, 279 Afghan Mujahedin, 238, 241, 252–253
Abdullah, Shaikh Muhammad, 112, Afghan-Soviet Treaty of Friendship
178, 181, 277 and Cooperation, 238
and Ayub Khan, Muhammad, 176 Afghan Taliban, see Taliban
and Bangladesh War, 227 Afghanistan and Afghans, 4, 5, 299,
and Gandhi, Indira, 228 369, 422
and Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 113, and Britain, 369
116 and Carter, Jimmy, 237, 326
and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 112, 116, and India, 238–239, 359, 371,
151, 176 372–373, 374, 375–376, 377, 378,
and Pakistan, 153, 176, 359 381–382, 383, 384, 385–386, 387,
and plebiscite, 177 390, 391, 392–393, 422
and Singh, Sir Hari, 113, 116, 121 and North Atlantic Treaty
and Zhou Enlai, 177 Organization NATO), 379
as Chief Administrator, 123 and Pakistan, 238, 370–371, 372,
as Chief Minister, 228 374, 375–376, 377, 378, 380–381,
as Prime Minister, 130, 142 384, 386–387, 389, 390, 416, 422
biography and character of, and Russia, 372
112–113 and Soviet Union, 238, 253, 258,
imprisonment of, 143, 150, 153, 178 370–371, 372
trail of, 153, 174–175 and Taliban, 372, 385, 386, 390,
Abdullah, Shiraz, 47 391, 392
Abdullah Abdullah, 385 and United Nations, 375
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz (Saudi and United States, 237, 252, 316,
Crown Prince), 289, 385 326, 359, 372, 375, 376, 383, 385,
Abraham (Prophet), 4 387
Abraham Lincoln (US warship), 303 civil war in, 372
Abu Dhabi, 305 Marxist coup in, 237–238, 368, 371

473
 INDEX

Afridi, Aleem, 217 Al Furqan, 337

Afridi, Shahid, 403 al Libi, Abu Faraj, 338
Afridi tribe, 118 al Nahyan, Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan,
Afzal, Muhammad, 321 305
Aga Khan, 6 Al Qaida, 304, 310, 316, 317, 322,
Agra, 213, 309, 314, 369, 428 338, 348, 363, 373, 382, 384, 385,
Agreement on Prohibition of Attacks 387, 390
Against Nuclear Installations and Al Zulfikar, 261
Facilities (India-Pakistan), 266, Alexander, Albert Victor, 79
323, 425 Algiers, 177
Agreement on Strategic Partnership Ali, Chaudhry Zulfikar, 267
between India and Islamic Ali, Muhammad Akbar, 234
Republic of Afghanistan, Ali, Chaudhri Muhammad, 119, 129,
388–389 147
Ahmad, Aziz, 194 Ali, Asaf, 85, 113, 124
Ahmad, Fakhruddin Ali, 232 Ali, Syed Ajmad, 148
Ahmad, Qazi Hussein, 292 Ali, Choudhry Rahmat, 56–57
Ahmad Khan, Munir, 190, 222, 244, Ali, Shaukat, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 42–43
423 Ali Brothers, 27–28, 29–30, 35, 38
Ahmadis, 229 Ali Khan, Liaquat, 58, 85, 87, 93, 94,
Ahmed, Imtiaz, 264 96, 98, 105, 115, 130, 303
Ahmed, Ishaq, 285 and China, 138
Ahmed, Khwaja Ihsan, 293 and Kashmir, 115, 116, 117, 119,
Ahmed, Mahmood, 299, 304, 305, 122, 123, 124, 133, 142, 416–417
306, 316, 317, 319 and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 132, 133,
Ahmed, Shamshad, 290 138, 139–140
Ahmedabad, 17, 21, 23, 36, 85 and United States, 138
Ahmedabad Mill Owners Association assassination of, 140–141, 417
(AMOA), 21–22 biography and character of, 31–32
Ahmedabad Textile Labor All India Congress Committee
Association, 23 (AICC), 53, 60, 70, 71, 76, 81,
Aichison’s Treaties, 160 88, 97
Aibak, Qutbuddin, 413 All India Cow Protection
Air India, 374 Organization, 42
Ajmer, 363 All India Hindu Mahasabha, see
Akal Fauj, 100 Hindu Mahasabha
Akali Dal, 252 All India Khilafat Conferences, 26, 27,
Akali Party, 79 29, 30
Akbar (Emperor), 397 All India Muslim League, see Muslim
Akbar, Saad, 140–141 League
Akbar, Zahid Ali, 230 All India Sikh Students Federation, 252
Akhnoor, 179, 181, 183, 184, 328 All India Trade Union Congress, 23
Akhtar, Farhan, 302 Allama, Ghulam Ali, 88
Akhtar, Javed, 301, 302 All Parties Conference, 44
Akram, Malik Muhammad, 367 All Parties Hurriyat Conference
Aksai Chin, 154, 160, 165, 167 (APHC), 277, 314, 342, 349

474
 INDEX

All Tripura Tiger Force, 197 Asif, Muhammad Azam, 301

Alling, Paul H., 110 Aslam, Ihsan, 302
Almaty, 330 Assam, 159
Almelo, 231 Associated Press of India, 117
Ambassador’s Journal, 170 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 40
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 54, 67 Atlantic Charter, 69
America and Americans, see United Attari, 303, 403, 409, 410
States Attenborough, Richard, 25, 49, 106
Amjad, Syed Muhammad, 312 Attlee, Clement, 74, 76, 77, 79, 87, 90,
Amin, Hafizullah, 238 91, 94, 110, 113, 125, 416
Amin, Nurul, 139, 210 Atwal, Avtar Singh, 248
Amin, Roya, 393 Auchinleck, Sir Claude, 77, 100, 122,
Amman, 257 125
Amnesty International, 277 Aurora, Jagjit Singh, 209, 214, 215
Amritsar, 24, 25, 26, 40, 248, 249, 256, Australia, 18, 152, 155, 417
423 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 11
Amsterdam, 231 Awami League (Pakistan), 147, 196,
An Outsider Everywhere: Revelations of 198, 199, 201, 202, 222
an Insider, 223 Awara (movie), 396
Anada Math, 64 Axis Powers, 69, 75
Anarkali, 397 Ayni Air Base, 372
Anderson, Jack, 212 Ayodhya, 272, 281
Anglo-Indians, 51 Ayub Khan, Gohar, 288
Ankara, 384 Ayub Khan, Muhammad, 146, 345,
Annan, Kofi, 313 417, 428, 430
“Ansar,” 276 and Abdullah, Shaikh Muhammad,
Ansari, Maulavi Abbas, 339 176
Ansari, Mukhtar Ahmad, 30, 34 and Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 221, 179,
Antony, Arackaparanibil Kurien, 356, 180, 188, 294
366 and China, 188
Anwar, Khurshid, 117–118, 119, and India, 396, 419
129–121 and India-Pakistan War (1965),
ARD (Germany), 384, 385 185, 187, 189–190, 420
Ariana Afghan Airlines, 374 and Inter-Services Intelligence
Armed Forces ( Jammu and Kashmir) (ISI), 197
Special Powers Act (AFJKSP), and Kashmir, 155, 156–157, 170,
275–276 173, 179, 180, 185, 196, 418
Armitage, Richard, 316, 324 and Kennedy, John F., 171, 174
Arthashastra, 370 and Mao Zedong, 188
Arya Samaj, 29, 40, 41 and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 154, 155–
Aryub Zazai, 380 57, 166, 170–171, 176, 417–418
Asian Games, 247 and Operation Desert Hawk, 179
Asiatic Registration Bill, 12, 14, 15 and Operation Gibraltar, 182–183
Asif, Akbar, 397 and Operation Grand Slam, 179, 183
Asif, Irfan, 398 and Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 174, 179,
Asif, Karimuddin, 397 194

475
 INDEX

Ayub Khan, Muhammad (continued) Baluchistan Liberation Army, 377

and Soviet Union, 187–188, Bandar (Saudi Prince), 297, 298
191–192 Bandipora, 3
and Tashkent Declaration, 195 Bangkok, 342
as Chief Martial Law Bangladesh, 189, 217, 222, 227, 420
Administrator, 149 Bangladesh Liberation War, see
as Deputy Prime Minister, 210 Bangladesh War
as President, 149, 153–154, Bangladesh War, 200, 209–214, 217,
155–157, 233 220, 227, 303, 406
biography and character of, 156 Banihal Pass, 119
resignation of, 196, 420 Baradar, Abdul Ghani, 391
Azad, Maulana Abdul Kalam Baramulla, 3, 119, 120, 123
Muhiyuddin Ahmed, 48, 68, 72, Barco, James W., 152
74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 97, 126 Bardoli, 37, 46
Azad Army (Kashmir), 115, 117, 118 Bari, Maulana Abdul, 29
Azad Jammu and Kashmir, see Azad Barisal, 139
Kashmir Barnala, Surjit Singh, 252
Azad Kashmir, 120, 123, 129, 133, Bashir, Salman, 359
142, 180, 189, 211, 215, 227, 268, Batra, R. L., 120
270, 276, 342, 343, 355 Baweja, Harinder, 355
Azhar, Maulana Masoud, 308, 320, BBC, 261, 272, 301, 384, 385, 399
337 Beas River, 98, 154
Azhar, Muhammad Ibrahim, 508, 323 Bedi, Rahul, 389
Aziz, Sartaj, 291, 295, 368 Beg, Mirza Aslam, 259, 264
Aziz, Shahid, 287, 299, 304 Beg, Mirza Afzal, 153
Aziz, Shaukat, 337, 339 Beijing, 147, 162, 188, 196, 200, 204,
Aziz, Tariq, 342, 344, 345, 429 208, 233, 295
Aziz Khan, Muhammad, 294, Bengal, 55, 57, 78, 95–96, 97, 395
295–296, 299, 304, 305, 317, 319, Bengal Tenancy Act, 1885, 19
427 Bengali (language), 147, 417
Azizabad, 348 Berger, Sandy, 298
Besant, Annie, 23, 33
Babri Mosque, 272, 281 Betrayal of East Pakistan, 202
Babur, Zahiruddin Muhammad, 4, Bhabha, Homi J., 228, 229
272, 369 Bhabha Atomic Research Center, 229,
Badaber, 148 423
Badal, Sukhbur Singh, 404, 407, 409, Bhakar, Sarwant Singh, 249
410 Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS), 143, 145,
Bahawalpur, 259, 422 280, 281
Bakem, 373 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 272, 279,
Baker, Aryn, 383 280, 281, 284, 300, 315, 331, 340,
Baker, James, 270 358, 366, 426
Baldauf, Scott, 376 Bhatiya, Vinod, 365
Baltistan, 142 Bhatt, Touseef, 3
Baluchistan and Baluchis, 97, 226, Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh, 248, 250,
228, 256, 274, 286, 358, 377–378 252

476
 INDEX

Bhindranwale Tiger Force, 257 and Pakistan National Alliance, 232

Bhutan, 159 and Pakistan People’s Party, 196,
Bhutto, Amir, 221 198, 421
Bhutto, Benazir, 263–264, 266, 278, 345 and Rahman, Shaikh Mujibur, 198,
and Gandhi, Rajiv, 265, 266, 267, 199, 222
425 and Shimla Agreement, 225,
and general elections, 264–265, 273, 421–422
274 and Soviet Union, 187, 191
and India, 273 and Tashkent Declaration, 195
and Indian Kashmir, 269, 274 and United Nations Security
and Narasimha Rao, Pamulapartu Council, 189, 224
Venkata, 274 and United States, 185, 191
and Nawaz Sharif, Muhammad, and West Pakistan, 220–233
273 and Yahya Khan, Agha
and nuclear program, 277–278, 285 Muhammad, 222
and Sikh militancy, 266, 425 and Zia ul Haq, Muhammad, 233,
and Taliban, 274 234, 235, 263, 422
and United States, 278 biography and character of, 221,
and Zia ul Haq, Muhammad, 263 224, 230
as Prime Minister, 265, 268, 269, hanging of, 235
273–274 military coup against, 232, 235–236
assassination of, 141, 347 Bihar, 86
biography and character of, 221, Bin Laden, Osama, 299, 300, 303,
223–224 304, 306, 316, 317, 319, 323, 326,
Bhutto, Fatima, 261 355, 373, 387
Bhutto, Khurshid, 230 Birkenhead, Lord, 43, 44
Bhutto, Murtaza, 261, 262 Birla, Ghanshyam Das, 107
Bhutto, Nusrat Begum, 221, 264, 265 Birmingham, 285
Bhutto, Sir Shah Nawaz, 221, 230 Blackwill, Robert, 321, 330
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 173, 174, 176, Blaine, John J., 49
192, 211, 218, 230, 265 Blair, David, 366
and Afghanistan, 237, 371 Blitzer, Wolf, 354
and Ahmadis, 229 Blood, Archer K., 212
and Ayub Khan, Muhammad, 221, Board of Control for Cricket in India
179, 180, 188, 294 (BCCI), 402, 404
and Baluchistan, 226, 228 Boer War, 12, 13
and Bangladesh War, 212 Bogra, Muhammad Ali, 144, 146,
and China, 188, 208 149–151, 152, 157, 170, 173, 221
and Gandhi, Indira, 223–225, Bollywood, 396, 400
421–422 Bombay, 6, 8, 9, 10, 17, 36, 76, 85, 134,
and India, 191, 229 221, 228, 310. See also Mumbai
and India-Pakistan War (1965), 190 Bombay Khilafat Committee, 27
and Kashmir, 192, 225, 227, 229, 65 Bomdi La, 171
and Mao Zedong, 188, 230 Bonn, 373
and nuclear program and weapons, Bose, Sarat Chandra, 85
190, 222, 229, 230, 231, 283, 288 Bose, Sarmila, 216

477
 INDEX

Bose, Subash Chandra, 75, 76, 77 Celeste, Richard, 310

Bose, Vimal, 89, 90–91 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
Bosnia, 217 174, 197, 206, 210, 238, 239, 241,
Boston Tea Party, 52 245, 255, 262, 284, 286, 303, 316,
Botha, Louis, 16 326, 329, 336, 338, 356, 382, 429
Bourke-White, Margaret, 123 Central Khilafat Committee, 32, 33,
Brahmaputra River, 159 35, 36
Brezhnev, Leonid, 219, 240, 241 Central Legislative Assembly, 40, 43, 58
Britain and British, 4, 5, 11, 14, 21, 25, Central Treaty Organization
28, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 51, 54, (CENTO), 146, 417
58, 61, 69, 70–71, 74, 79–80, 133, Ceylon, see Sri Lanka
141, 152, 155, 158, 170, 174, 185, Chagai Hills, 286
320, 331, 365, 368, 369, 379, 398, Chagai II, 288
413, 417 Chambeli (movie), 399
Brownlee, Les, 322 Chamberlain, Neville, 67
Buch, M. Yusuf, 119 Chamdo, 160
Budap, 3 Champaran, 18, 19, 23
Buddhism, 32 Champaran Agrarian Law, 23
Bugti, Sardar Akbar, 377 Chandigarh, 252, 402, 403
Bukhari, Fazi, 291 Chandrashekhar, Maradadam, 271
Bulganin, Nikolai, 152 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra, 64
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 289 Chaudhuri, Jayanto Nath, 183
Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Chaudhry, Iftikhar Muhammad, 345
Tobacco (US), 261 Chauri Chaura, 27
Burma, 158, 159, 163 Chelmsford, Lord, 24, 25, 30, 33
Burrow, Sir John, 84 Chen Ivan, 158
Bush, George Herbert Walker, 210, Chenab River, 98, 99, 154, 183
328 Chennai Express (movie), 399
Bush, George W., 3, 316, 317, 322, Cherenenko, Konstantin, 251
323–324, 325, 328, 329, 332, 353, Chhindwara, 28
373, 375, 376, 379, 380 Chicago Tribune, 248
Butt, Ziauddin, 304, 305 Chidambaram, Palaniappian, 360,
Bux, Illahi, 130, 131 361, 409
China and Chinese, 159, 161, 162, 413
ucf|THCtuE549APtte1C/Iue0g==|1424811808

Calcutta, 7, 10, 27, 36, 40, 47, 83–84, and India, 137, 145, 154, 157,
103, 105, 139, 198, 201, 203. See 158–166, 167–172, 188, 201, 208,
also Kolkata 233, 412, 418
Cameron, David, 390 and India-China War, 169–172,
Camp Bonifas, 1 185, 233
Canada, 18, 293, 379, 427, 431 and Kargil War, 296
Cape Colony, 16 and nuclear program and weapons
Caroe, Olaf, 159, 160 of, 184, 208, 229, 245, 280
Carter, Jimmy, 237, 238, 239, 240, and Pakistan, 138, 147–148, 157,
310, 422 170, 173, 195, 197, 201, 205, 206,
Casey, William, 241 230, 231, 241, 243, 244, 296, 312,
Cawthorne, Robert, 197 411–412, 422, 427

478
 INDEX

and Soviet Union, 163, 165, 204 Communalism and communal

and United Nations, 200 violence, 6, 40, 41–43, 84, 85,
and United States, 163, 168, 204, 86–87, 88–89, 91–92, 99–100,
208, 211–213, 293 103, 105, 126, 139, 395, 416
Chishti, Khwaja Moinuddin, 363 Communist parliamentarians (India),
Chishti, Khwaja Qutb-ud-din, 125, 285
126 Communist Party of China, 229
Chitral, 129 Communist Party of East Pakistan, 138
Chittagong, 47 Communist Party of India (CPI), 23,
Chittagong, Hill tract, 209 145, 168, 223, 232
Christian Science Monitor, 376 Comrade (weekly), 27
Christianity and Christians, 5, 53, 55, Conference on the Freedom of the
229, 231 Seas, 221
Chugh, R. N., 193–194 Conference on Interaction and
Chughtai, Ismat, 219 Confidence-Building Measures
Chotani, Muhammad, 27 in Asia, 330
Chuckraborty, P. V., 77 Congress Party
Chundrigar, Ismail Ibrahim, 118 Colonial India, 5, 7, 10, 11, 17, 24,
Churchill, Sir Winston, 52, 69, 70, 71, 25, 28, 30, 34–35, 44, 52, 53, 54,
74, 87, 94, 112, 172 55, 57, 59, 60–61, 64, 67, 70, 73,
Civil and Military Gazette, 115, 117 77–78, 79, 81, 93–94
Clinton, Bill, 2, 278, 282, 297 Independent India, 141, 149, 175,
and India, 285, 310 177, 194–195, 219, 228, 232, 247,
and Kargil War, 295, 296, 297, 250, 267, 271, 274, 284, 333, 340,
298–300 341, 357, 414–415, 429
and Musharraf, Pervez, 311 Congress Working Committee
and Nawaz Sharif, Muhammad, (CWC), 34, 53, 55, 67, 81
285, 286, 287, 297, 298–300, 303, Constitutional Award (1946), 79–80,
304, 427 81, 415, 416
and nuclear tests by India and Cricket, 255
Pakistan, 285, 289 Diplomacy, 255, 343, 361, 491, 403,
and Pakistan, 290, 311, 312 424
and Taliban, 299 Matches: One-day International,
and Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 296, 299, 400, 401; Test, 255, 361, 400,
310, 312, 427–428 401; Twenty20, 400
on Gandhi, Mohandas Council of State, 25
Karamchand, 312 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 70, 79, 81
on Kashmir, 3, 309, 311 Cronkite, Walter, 166
Clinton, Chelsea, 310 Crossette, Barbara, 259–260, 261, 271
Clinton, Hillary, 363, 385 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 169, 171,
CNN, 354 299, 332
Cochin, 76 Cunningham, Sir George, 118, 119
Coll, Steve, 331
Cologne, 296 Dacca, 6, 139, 187, 195, 198, 199, 201,
Colombo, 198, 304, 305, 392 205, 210, 212, 214, 215, 227, 303.
Communal Award (1932), 55 See also Dhaka

479
 INDEX

Dada Abdulla & Company, 11–12 Dharasana, 48, 49

Daily Telegraph, 366 Dhoom 3 (movie), 398, 399
Daily Times, 354, 404 Dixon, Owen, 142
Dalai Lama, 158, 159, 164 Dixit, Jyotindra Nath, 307, 342
Damascus, 261 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 211, 212
Damdani Taksal, 252 Doha, 391
Dandi, 47, 48 Domel, 119
Daoud Khan, Muhammad, 237, 371 Donkers, Hendrina, 230
Dar as Islam, 303 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec, 223
Dari (language), 384, 392 Dras sector, 295
Das, Tulsi, 33 Dubai, 335, 342, 346, 398, 409
Datta, Veena, 223, 224 Dulles, John Foster, 142, 143, 145
Dawn, 72, 84, 223, 354, 389 Dunham, Phyllis, 130, 131
Dayal, Rajeshwar, 155 Dunya, 404
Dead Reckoning: Memories of the Durand Line, 369, 372
Bangladesh War, 215 Durban, 12, 398
Dean, John Gunther, 261 Durga (goddess), 64, 65, 66, 218, 415
Defence Journal (Pakistan), 115 Durrani, Muhammad Ali, 260, 262,
Defence Research and Development 269
Organization (DRDO), 283 Dutt, Batukeshwar, 46
Defense of India (Criminal Law Dyer, Reginald, 24, 25, 31, 33
Amendment) Act, 20, 24 Dykes, D.O., 121
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),
330 East Bengal, 85, 86, 97
Dehlavi, Jamil, 132 East India Company, 4, 19, 55
Delhi, 7, 8, 24, 28, 103, 205, 247, 330, East Pakistan, 97, 109, 139, 140, 188,
333, 363, 372, 395, 396, 400, 413 190, 195, 199, 205, 207, 209, 419,
anti-Sikh pogrom in, 249–250 420, 421
communal violence in, 105–106 estimates of violent deaths in 1971,
terrorist attacks in, 320–322, 324, 216–217
335, 429 East Punjab, 102, 105, 122
Delhi Sultanate, 4, 369, 413 Edward VIII (King), 35–36
Delhi-Lahore Bus Service, 290, 291, Egypt, 107
312 Eisenhower, Dwight, 141–142, 143,
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan 144, 148, 165, 310
(DRA), 37 English (language), 5, 7, 21, 147, 414
Desai, Morarji, 233, 236, 238, 286, Epstein, Edward Jay, 259, 260, 261, 262
401 Evans, Harold, 203, 204
Deve Gowda, Haradanahalli Express Tribune, 404
Doddegowda, 277, 288
Devi, Rani Chib, 111 Fahim, Makhdoom Amin, 440
Devi, Tara, 114 Fahim, Muhammad Qasim, 375, 377,
Devnagri script, 66 379
Dhaipai, 108 Faisalabad, 401
Dhaka, 227, 309 Farooq, Amjad, 338
Dhar, Durga Prasad, 43, 205 Faruqi, Naseer Ahmad, 79

480
 INDEX

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and East Pakistan, 204, 440–421

262, 360 and Kashmir, 225, 228
Federally Administered Tribal and Khalistan movement, 248
Agencies (FATA), 237, 238, 369, and Nixon, Richard, 207–208
377, 378, 379, 381 and nuclear program and weapons,
Faridkot (Pakistan), 343, 352 228
Faridkot (Princely) State, 109 and Pakistan, 241–242, 244, 235,
Farkhor Air Base, 373 246
Feldman, Herbert, 189 and Research and Analysis Wing,
Ferozepur, 100, 107, 109, 190 197
Fifty Day War (Stage play), 302 and Shimla Agreement, 225,
Film and television industry, 134, 175, 421–422
219, 224, 265–266, 302 and Soviet Union, 207, 240, 241
in Afghanistan, 393, 396–399 and United States, 197, 207–208
in India, 384, 396–399 and Zia ul Haq, Muhammad,
in Pakistan, 394, 398–399 241–242, 244, 266, 423
Financial Express, 302 as Goddess Durga, 218
First Gujarat Political Conference, 21 assassination of, 249, 271, 423–424
Fischer, Louis, 54, 82–83 biography and character of,
Flames of Chinar, 176 194–195, 224, 247, 250
Fleischer, Ari, 331 emergency declared by, 232, 281,
Ford, Gerald, 237 422
Foreign Affairs ( Journal), 178 Gandhi, Jaisukhlal, 89
France, 30 Gandhi, Karamchand, 12
Friends Not Masters, 156 Gandhi, Kasturbai, 11, 12, 48, 72
Frontline, 291 Gandhi, Laxmidas, 13
Frost, David, 216, 277 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 8,
10–11, 21, 58, 60, 61, 194, 312,
G8 summits, 285, 296 313, 415
Gaddafi, Muammar, 229 and Ahmedabad textile workers
Gah, 364 strike, 22
Gait, Sir Albert, 20 and Champaran indigo farmers,
Galbraith, John, 170, 173 18–23
Gall, Carlotta, 380–382 and communalism and communal
Gallup Poll (Pakistan), 319 violence, 41, 42–43, 87, 103, 105,
Gandhi (movie), 25, 49, 106, 132 126
Gandhi, Abdullah, 62 and Congress Party, 34–35, 43, 53,
Gandhi, Feroze, 194 57
Gandhi, Harilal, 13, 62 and cow protection, 32, 35, 38, 41
Gandhi, Indira, 250 and Hinduism, 16, 28, 31, 32,
and Abdullah, Shaikh Muhammad, 38–39, 47, 49, 62, 89
228 and Irwin, Lord, 52–53
and Bangladesh War, 210, 215, 224, and Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 11–12,
421 21, 22–23, 25, 33–34, 36–37, 46,
and Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 223–225, 49–50, 61–62, 68, 71, 72–73, 78,
421–422 82–83, 85, 90, 128

481
 INDEX

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand and nuclear program and weapons,

(continued) 251, 266, 282, 424, 425
and Kashmir, 114 and Pakistan, 254, 255, 258, 261,
and Khilafat movement, 29–30, 31, 288
32 and Sikh militancy, 252
and Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 93, and Zia ul Haq, Muhammad,
95, 103 251–252, 255, 259, 266, 401, 424
and Muslim refugees, 107 assassination of, 271
and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 63, 87, biography and character of,
94–95, 127 250–251
and non-cooperation campaign cricket diplomacy by, 255
(1920–1922), 33–38, 40 Gandhi, Priyanka, 250
and non-violent tactics, 15–16, 223 Gandhi, Rahul, 250
and Pakistan, 125 Gandhi, Sanjay, 250
and Patel, Vallabhbhai, 89, 107, 127 Gandhi, Sonia, 250, 265
and Quit India campaign, 71 Garm Hava (movie), 219
and Round Table Conferences, 46, Geo TV, 335
53–55 George V (King), 91, 98
and Rowlatt Act, 24–25 George VI (King), 91, 98
and Salt Tax protest march, 46–47, Gereshk, 376
52 Germany, 7, 11, 67
and sexual abstinence experiments, Ghori, Muhammad, 4, 413
89–90 Gilani, Daood Sayed, 347–348
and Untouchables, 43, 57 Gilani, Syed Salim, 347
assassination of, 126–127, 424 Gilani, Yusuf Raza, 345, 351–352, 353,
biography character of, 12–13, 21, 355, 357, 358–359, 360, 361, 362,
49–50, 78 382, 383, 403
in South Africa, 12–17 Gilgit Agency, 142
on economic development model, Gilgit Wazarat, 111, 114
45, 132 Girdharidas, Mangaldas, 11
on Hindu-Muslim unity, 89, 94–95 Glimpses of World History, 156
on Indian National Army, 76 Godfrey, J. H., 76
on Islam, 62, 82 Godhra, 6, 21
on Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 25, Godse, Nathuram Vinayak, 127
31 Gojra, 108
on partition, 94 Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 10–11, 12,
on religion and politics, 28, 31, 38 16
on Two Nation Theory, 69 Golden Temple, 248, 252, 256, 257,
on World War II, 67–68, 70–71 258, 423
fasting by, 22, 23, 39, 42, 57, 125 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 258, 267
Gandhi, Mridula, 89, 127 Gore-Booth, Sir Paul, 170, 173
Gandhi, Putlibai, 12 Goss, Peter, 316
Gandhi, Rajiv, 269, 278 Government of India Act (1919), 25,
and Bhutto, Benazir, 265, 266, 267, 39
425 Government of India Act (1935), 56,
and Hassan bin Talal, 257 58–59, 94

482
 INDEX

Gracey, Sir Douglas, 43, 129 Hassan, Gul, 182, 217, 218
Graham, Bob, 316 Hassan, Killies, 376
Green Book, 399 Hassan, Mashood, 260
Grewal, Dalvinder Singh, 107 Hassan bin Talal ( Jordanian Prince),
Gromyko, Andrei, 191, 205 348
Gujarati (language), 21 Hayden, Michael, 352
Gujral, Inder Kumar, 278–279, Headley, David Coleman, 348,
282–283 360–361
Gul, Abdullah, 384 Headley, Serrill, 347
Gul, Hamid, 257, 264, 274 Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, 237
Gul, Muhammad Shah, 141 Helmand, 375, 379
Gulmarg, 124 Helms, Richard, 210
Gurdaspur, 99, 116 Hemraj, Naik, 365
Gurez, 3 Herat, 374, 392
Gurjar Sabha, 11, 128 Hersh, Seymour, 323
Gwadar, 387 Heycock, W. B., 20
Gyasto, Tenzin, 159 Hidayatullah, Sir Ghulam Hussein,
79, 87, 88
Haidar, Ejaz, 354 Hind Swaraj, 31
Haig, Alexander, 211, 212, 241 Hindi (language), 65, 393, 398
Hailey, Sir Malcolm, 51 Hindu, 267, 269, 329
Haji Pir Pass, 182, 183, 192, 193 Hindu Mahasabha, 39, 66, 126, 127
Haksar, Parmeshwar Narayan, 223 Hindu Rashtra, 127
Halfway to Freedom, 123 Hinduism and Hindus, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11,
Hamdard, 28 16, 31, 32, 40, 41–43, 51, 55, 65,
Hamdoon Rahman Inquiry 68–69, 91, 101–102, 140, 201,
Commission, 216 206, 219, 227, 229, 231, 242,
Hamid Khan, Abdul, 209, 214, 217 257, 271–281, 346–347, 394,
Hamidzada, Humayun, 381 395–396, 413, 418, 421
Hanif, Muhammad, 262 Hindustan Times, 284
Hansen, Thomas Blom, 284 Hindustani (language), 44, 65, 66,
Haq, Ehsan ul, 292, 299, 304, 305, 134, 396, 398
319, 335 Hizb ul Mujahideen, 268, 307
Haq, Ijaz ul, 261 Hoare, Sir Samuel, 55
Haqeeqat (movie), 172 Home Rule League, 18
Haqqani, Jalaluddin, 381 Huang Hue, 208, 210–211
Hardinge, Lord, 17 Hunter, Lord William, 30, 32, 33
Hari River, 37 Hunza, 142
Harijan, 57, 58, 76, 89 Huq, Abul Kasem Fazlul, 61, 63, 64, 66
Harkat al Jihad Islami (HuJI), 346 Husain, Aamir Reza, 301
Harkat ul Ansar, 294, 308 Hussain, Mushahid, 279, 291, 297,
Harkat ul Mujahedin, 294, 304, 377–378
307–308 Hussain, Riaz, 181
Harriman, Averell, 173 Hussein, Wajahat, 320
Haryana, 248, 252 Hyderabad (India), 98, 310
Hashimi, Abdul Rahman, 348 Hyderabad (Pakistan), 396

483
 INDEX

If I am Assassinated, 231 economy of, 312, 331, 405, 413, 429

Iftikharuddin, Mian, 109, 115, 117 military doctrine of, 334, 340, 355
IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, 389 nuclear doctrine of, 329, 330, 331,
Ikramullah, Sarvath, 257 334, 339, 341, 429
Imam, Sir Ali, 6, 44 nuclear program and weapons of,
Immigration Regulation Act, 16 184, 222, 243, 251, 253, 280,
Imperial Legislative Assembly, 10, 24, 281–285, 289, 291–292, 293, 297,
25 413, 422–423, 426, 427
Imperial Legislative Council, 10 India Councils Act, 6, 7
In Confidence, 212 India Independence Act (1947), 98
In the Line of Duty, 186 India Salt Act, 46
In the Line of Fire: A Memoir, 344 India Today, 267
In Search of a New Afghanistan, 394 India-Administered Kashmir, 269,
India: The Critical Years, 187, 194 274, 278–279, 366
India and Indians, 2, 3, 4, 8, 24, 103, and Research and Analysis Wing,
109 275
and 9/11, 318, 428 and Soviet Union, 152, 227
and Afghanistan, 238–239, 359, constitutions of, 142, 151, 152,
371, 372–373, 374, 375–376, 177–178
377, 378, 380, 381–382, 383, 384, elections in, 142–143, 153, 175,
385–386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 276–277, 333–334
392–393, 422 separatist movement in, 268–269,
and Baluchistan, 358, 377–378 272, 309, 326, 419–420
and China, 137, 145, 154, 157, terrorism in, 320, 322
158–166, 188, 201, 208, 233, 412 torture in, 275–276
and East Pakistan, 209 India-China Boundary Problem,
and Israel, 243, 244, 250, 287, 315, 1846–1947: History and
323, 328, 423, 425 Diplomacy, 160
and Kashmir, 278–279, 326, 366. India-China War, 169–172, 185, 233
See also India-Administered India-Pakistan Trade Relations,
Kashmir 405–412, 430–431
and Pakistan, 125, 126, 127, 128, contraband trade, 407
204, 206, 207, 240, 243, 246, 251, India-Pakistan War (1965), 185, 187,
254, 271, 274–275, 285, 287, 308, 189–190, 420
310, 312, 319, 321–322, 323, 326, India-Pakistan War (1971), see
328, 331, 332, 333, 336, 358, 367 Bangladesh War
and Soviet Union, 152, 153, India-Pakistan War (1999), see Kargil
211–212, 215, 239, 419 War
and Taliban, 307, 383, 385–386 Indian Airlines, 374
and United Nations, 125, 152–153, Indian Airlines plane hijacked,
287 307–308, 323, 335
and United States, 136, 145, 165, See also Air India
170, 174, 185, 190, 205, 206, 229, Indian Atomic Energy Commission,
318, 321, 322, 323, 419, 425 229
broadcasting media in, 314–315, Indian Mujahedin (IM), 346–347
335, 350 Indian Home Rule, 31

484
 INDEX

Indian Kashmir, see India- Ismay, Hastings, 105

Administered Kashmir Ispahani, Nusrat, 221. See also Bhutto,
Indian National Army (INA), 75, 76 Nusrat Begum
Indian National Congress, see Israel and Israelis, 231, 241, 243, 261,
Congress Party 287, 315, 323, 328, 350, 413
Indian Opinion, 14 Israelites, 107
Indian Relief Act, 11, 16 Italian Fascist Party, 280
Indian Youth Congress, 366
Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Jagmohan, 268–269
Cooperation, 205, 206, 363, 371 Jahan, Akbar, 177
Indus River, 98, 154 Jahan, Nur, 185
Indus River basin, 331, 413 Jahangir (Emperor), 397
Indus Waters Treaty, 155, 221, 266 Jainism, 39
Inter-Dominion Accord, 154 Jaipur, 255, 310
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 181, Jaish-e Muhammad ( JeM), 320, 321,
196, 197, 198, 233, 236, 239, 244, 322, 326, 337
246, 247, 252, 256, 257, 265, 268, Jalalabad, 374, 376, 378, 370
269, 270, 271, 275, 276, 297, Jalandhar, 274
299, 304, 310, 319, 335, 337, 340, Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 25, 31, 134
347–348, 351–352, 354, 361, 363, Jamaat-e Islami ( JeI), ( Jammu
378, 379, 381, 382, 384, 386, 388, and Kashmir) 247, 258, 268,
422, 423 (Pakistan), 268, 270, 273, 276,
Interlaken, 257 292
International Atomic Energy Agency, Jamaat ud Dawa ( JuD), 348, 355, 359,
196 360
International Cricket Council (ICC), Jamali, Zafarullah Khan, 336
400 Jamiat Ulema-e Islami ( JUeI),
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 273–274
270, 285, 290, 300, 317 Jammu, 3, 111, 116, 170
Iqbal, Javed, 47 Jammu and Kashmir, see Kashmir
Iqbal, Sir Muhammad, 51, 56, 65 Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front
Iran, 145, 204, 238, 372, 387 ( JKLF), 247, 268
Isaacs, Rufus Daniel, 35 Jammu Region, 99, 111, 143, 250
Ishaq Khan, Ghulam, 259, 264, 265, Jamuna River, 99, 143, 250
269, 273 Jamnagar, 245
Islam, 4, 35, 40, 43, 65, 128, 147, 231, Jamwal, Rajinder Singh, 115, 119,
232, 235, 275, 288, 347, 394, 413, 122, 327
415 Janata Alliance, 233, 236, 281
Islamabad, 231, 239, 254, 259, 265, Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor,
267, 305, 306, 310–311, 339, 343, 315
368, 406 Japan, 69, 70, 72, 159
Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (IJI), 264, Jasaulipatti, 19
265, 269 Jauhar, Muhammad Ali, 27–28, 30,
Islamic atom bomb, 229, 288 34–35, 40, 42, 44, 58
Islamic Conference Organization, 227 Javaid, Malik Tahir, 411
Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 227 Jehan, Sonya, 397

485
 INDEX

Jenkins, Sir Evan, 91, 92, 99, 100–101 and Round Table Conferences, 51,
Jeremiah, David, 284 55, 56
Jewish and Jews, 229, 231, 350 and Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 77
Jha, Lakshmi Kant, 179 and Two Nation theory, 68, 218,
Jhelum River, 98, 133, 154 421
Jinnah (movie), 132 as Governor-General of Pakistan,
Jinnah, Dinah, 37, 54 79, 97, 100, 109, 110, 118
Jinnah, Fatima, 54, 100, 130 as President of Constituent
Jinnah, Maryam, 23, 37, 43, 45 Assembly, 100
Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 7, 8, 11, 13, biography and character of, 9–10,
21, 25, 33, 34, 76, 87, 93, 96, 109, 21, 50, 135
123, 132, 148, 303, 369, 400, 414, Fourteen points of, 45, 51
416 ill-health and death of, 73, 129,
and Abdullah, Shaikh Muhammad, 130–131
113, 116 marriage of, 23–24, 230
and Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam 74, on communal violence, 86, 109
75, 79 on Government of India Act
and Central Legislative Assembly, (1935), 59
40, 58 on Khilafat movement, 29
and Congress ministries, 63, 67 on non-cooperation campaign, 33,
and Congress Party, 10, 17, 44, 45, 40
71, 82, 414 on Pakistan, 57, 96, 97, 395
and Constitutional Award, 80, 81, and Pakistan’s constitution, 128–129
416 on Quit India campaign, 71
and Cripps Plan, 70 on World War II, 67, 72
and Direct Action, 81 residency in London residence, 54,
and Gandhi, Mohandas 56–57
Karamchand, 11–12, 21, 22–23, Jodhpur, 406
25, 33–34, 36–37, 46, 49–50, Johannesburg, 14, 15, 16
61–62, 68, 71, 72–73, 78, 82–83, John Glenn Amendment to Foreign
85, 90, 128 Assistance Act (US), 236
and Home Rule League, 18, 23 Johnson, Lyndon, 179, 185, 191, 197
and Imperial Legislative Assembly, Joint Defense Council of India and
10, 24 Pakistan, 124
and Kashmir, 113, 115–116, 118, Joint Indo-Pakistan Commission
119, 122–123, 129, 130, 133, (1983), 423
416–417 Jordan, 234, 257
and Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 93, Junagarh, 98
94, 95–96 Junejo, Muhammad Khan, 251, 254
and Muslim League, 10, 17, 41, 43,
44, 57, 58, 60, 63–64 kaMancinza, Bambatha, 14
and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 65–66, 83, Kabul, 237, 308, 319, 369, 372, 374,
131–132 375, 381, 386, 388, 393
and Pakistan foreign policy, 110 Kahak, 376
and role of religion in Pakistan, 101, Kahuta, 239, 243, 345, 423
128 Kahuta Research Laboratory, 244, 261

486
 INDEX

Kak, Ram Chandra, 113, 114 Kasuri, Khurshid Mahmood, 341–

Kakar, Wahid, 273 342, 345
Kalimpong, 161, 163 Kasuri, Muhammad Khan, 235
Kallenbach, Hermann, 15 Kathua, 116
Kalshura, 138 Katmandu, 307, 324, 325
Kaluchak, 428 Kaufman, Marc, 258
Kandahar, 303, 307, 308, 319, 374, Kautilya, Chanakya, 379
378, 379 Kaw, M. K., 223, 224
Kanjarkot, 178 Kayani, Ashfaq Parvez, 344, 345, 352,
Kant, Krishna, 320 354, 383, 384, 386, 387, 400
Kao, Rameshwar Nath, 197, 209 Karzai, Abdul Ahad, 373, 374
Kapoor, Deepak, 357 Karzai, Hamid, 375
Kapoor, Raj, 396 and Bush, George W., 380
Kappes, Stephen, 382 and Gilani, Yusuf Raza, 383
Karachi, 8, 47, 76, 100, 102–103, 130, and India, 375, 380, 382, 385, 386,
131, 148, 149, 155, 195, 210, 211, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392
221, 224, 231, 256, 273, 275, 278, and Kayani, Ashfaq Parvez, 383,
288, 395, 306, 335, 348, 387, 396, 387
399, 403, 406, 411 and Musharraf, Pervez, 375, 379
Karakoram Highway, 208 and Nawaz Sharif, 391
Karamat, Jehangir, 286, 288, 290 and Omar, Mullah Muhammad,
Kargil, 2, 191 380
Kargil War, 294–300, 301–302, 313, and Pakistan, 376, 381, 383, 388,
329, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337, 342, 390, 391
402, 406, 419, 427–428 and Singh, Manmohan, 388
Karia, 23 and Taliban, 372, 385, 386, 390,
Karmal, Babrak, 238 391, 392
Kasab, Amir Shahban, 352 as President of Afghanistan, 373,
Kasab, Muhammad Ajmal, Amir, 348, 375, 377, 385
349, 351, 352, 356, 357, 360 biography and character of,
Kasauli, 164 373–374
Kashmir and Kashmiris, 2–3, 4, 98, Kennedy, John F., 166
110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115– and Ayub Khan, Muhammad, 171,
116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 174
122–123, 124, 128, 129, 133, and India, 170, 172
142–143, 150–151, 153, 155, and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 167, 171,
156–157, 170, 173, 175, 176, 173
179, 180, 185, 192, 196, 208, and Soviet Union, 332
225, 227, 229, 268, 277, 294, KGB, 256, 261
295, 311, 314, 315, 324, 326, KHAD, 242, 256, 261
332, 334, 337, 338, 342, 343, Khaksars, 97
344, 361, 362, 364, 366–367, Khalid, Abdul Rauf, 302
397, 412, 416–417, 418, 419, 429 Khalid, Kidwai, 330
Kashmir Ki Kali (movie), 175 Khalili, Karim, 377
Kashmir Times, 117 Khalilzad, Zalmay, 376
Kashmiri, Ilyas, 348 Khalistan Commando Force, 257

487
 INDEX

Khalistan movement, 242, 246, 248, Khan, Rahim, 214, 218

251–252, 254, 257, 258, 423 Khan, Salman, 266
Khan, Aamir, 266, 399 Khan, Shah Nawaz, 75, 76
Khan, Abdul Hamid, see Hamid Khan, Shah Rukh, 266
Khan, 209, 214, 217 Khan, Shahzada Yaqub, 265
Khan, Abdul Jabbar, 118 Khan, Sir Sikandar Hayat, 63, 64
Khan, Abdul Qayyum, 117, 118, 119 Khan, Sir Syed Ahmad, 5, 414
Khan, Abdur Rahman, see Rahman Khan Research Laboratories (KRL),
Khan, Abdur 286
Khan, Abu Dera Ismail, 348 Kiani, Jamshaid Gulzar, 219, 317, 319
Khan, Asghar, 192, 269 Khar, G. M., 218
Khan, Muhammad Daoud, see Daoud Khar, Hina Rabbani, 362, 363, 365
Khan, Muhammad Kharan, 288, 289
Khan, Ghazanfar Ali, 88 Khathing, Ralengnao, 160
Khan, Ghulam Ishaq, see Ishaq Khan, Khem Karan, 109, 186–187, 189
Ghulam Kher, Bal Gangadhar, 61
Khan, Ghulam Jilani, 233 Khilafat Manifesto, 29, 30
Khan, Hakim Ajmal, 36 Khilafat movement, 29–30, 31, 32,
Khan, Imran, 400 33–35, 36
Khan, Khurram Dastgir, 411 Khilnani, Sunil, 106
Khan, Liaquat Ali, see Ali Khan, Khokhar, Riaz, 340
Liaquat Khokharpar, 406
Khan, M. S., 72 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 238
Khan, Mazhar Ali, 109, 223 Khoso, Mir Hazar, 365
Khan, Mirdad, 156 Khost, 304, 378, 380
Khan, Muhammad Musa, see Musa Khunjerab Pass, 173, 208
Khan, Muhammad, 182, 183 Khurshid, Salman, 284–285, 368
Khan, Muhammad Akbar, 115, 117, Khrushchev, Nikita, 152, 165, 171,
128, 198 332
Khan, Muhammad Ayub, see Ayub Khwaja Bahuddin, 372, 373
Khan, Muhammad Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 369
Khan, Sir Muhammad Hamidullah, Kim Jong-Un, 1
85 Kipling, Rudyard, 36, 184
Khan, Muhammad Tikka, see Tikka Kissinger, Henry, 167, 201, 204,
Khan, Muhammad 205–206, 208, 210, 211–213
Khan, Muhammad Yahya Khan, see Kochi, 332
Yahya Khan, Muhammad Kohat, 41–42
Khan, Muhammad Yusaf, see Yusaf Kolhapur, 396
Khan, Muhammad Kolkata, 346
Khan, Muhammad Yusuf, 396 Korean War (1950–1953), 137, 145,
Khan, Munir Ahmad, see Ahmad 149, 406
Khan, Munir Kosygin, Alexei, 187, 189, 190–191,
Khan, Sir Osman Ali, 110 193, 204, 205
Khan, Abdul Qadeer, see Qadeer Kripalani, Jiwatram Bhagwandas, 95
Khan, Abdul Krishak Praja Party, 61
Khan, Raana, 58 Krishna, Lord, 33

488
 INDEX

Krishna, Somanahalli Mallaiah, 359, London, 9, 13, 30, 51, 203, 222, 263,
360, 361, 362, 364 264, 342, 385
Krishna Rao, K. V., 275, 279 Lone, Rashid, 3
Kumar, Dilip, 397 Longju, 164
Kumari, Meena, 224 Lop Nor, 184, 208, 245
Kumari, Raj, 281 Lucknow, 17, 400, 401
Kushka-Herat-Kandahar Highway, Lucknow Pact, 17, 28
383 Lucman, Mubashir, 398, 399
Lyallpur, 107
Laag (television series), 302
Ladakh, 167, 177 MacDonald Ramsay, 45, 52, 53, 54, 55
Ladakh Wazarat, 111 Macmillan, Harold, 170, 172, 174
Laghari, Farooq, 278 Madaripur, 205
Lahore, 99, 134, 184, 185, 187, 195, Madras, 13, 30, 47
196, 215, 227, 256, 263, 264, 288, Mahajan, Mehr Chand, 117, 120, 121,
291, 292, 314, 331, 400, 412, 413 128, 130
Lahore Declaration, 293, 312, 314, Mahal, Mumtaz (Empress), 397
367, 417 Mahisasura, 218, 421
Lakhi Bai, 229 Mahmood, Sultan Bashiruddin, 221,
Lakhvi, Zaki ur Rahman, 348, 355 231
Lakshmi (goddess), 65 Mahmood, Zafar, 410
Lall, Arhur, 152 Mahsud tribe, 118
Lambah, Satinder, 342, 344, 345, 429 Maino, Antonia Eduige Albina, 250.
Lanpher, Gibson, 296 See also Gandhi, Sonia
Larkana, 221, 263 Majid, Caliph Abdul, 40
Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT), 260, 270, 273, Major, Fali Homi, 352
321, 322, 326, 337, 346, 347, “Major Iqbal,” 348
348–350, 352, 355, 367, 382 Makhanji, Kasturbai, 12. See also
League of Nations Supreme Council, Gandhi, Kasturbai
30 Malabar, 39
Lee, Christopher, 132 Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 23, 33, 39,
Leh, 294 66
Leigh-Croft, Sir Fredrick, 9 Malaya, 70
Lhasa, 164 Maldives, 270
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Male, 270
(LTTE), 271 Malik, Akhtar Hussain, 180, 183
Libya, 229 Malik, Rehman, 357, 360, 361
Life, 123 Mamdot, Iftikhar Hussain Khan, 91,
Lille, 374 117
Line of Control (LoC), 2–3, 225, 309, Man Hoon Shahid Afridi (movie), 399
342, 343, 366, 367, 408, 421, 428, Manchester, 54, 402
429 Mandal, Jogindar Nath, 85, 139
Linlithgow, Lord, 58, 67, 69, 71 Mandviwalla, Nadeem, H., 399
LoC Kargil (movie), 302 Manekshaw, Sam Hormusji
Lodhi, Mahila, 316 Jamshedji, 200, 215
Lollywood, 400 Mano Majra, 104

489
 INDEX

Manto, Sadat Hassan, 134–135 Mishra, Lalit, 331, 339

Manto, Safiya, 135 Mishra, Rishi Kumar, 293–294
Mao Zedong, 162, 168, 169, 172, 184, Mission Fateh: Real Stories of Kargil
188, 230, 418–419 Heroes (television series), 301
Markovitz, Claude, 84 Mistry, Shapoorji, 397
Marriam, Alan Hayes, 78 Mistry, Shapoorji Pollanji, 387
Mary (Queen), 55 Mirza, Iskander Ali, 146, 147,
Mascarenhas, Anthony, 201, 202 148–149, 153
Mascarenhas, Yvonne, 202 Mirza, Salim, 219, 220
Masood, Talat, 389 Mizoram, 389
Masoud, Ahmad Shah, 319, 372, 373 Mizrahi, Avi, 351
Mashruwala, Kishorelal, 89 Mohali, 361, 403
Mathai, Ranjan, 364 Mohammad, Khalid Shaikh, 338
Maxwell, Neville, 171 Mohammadans, see Muslims
Mazar-e Sharif, 374 Mohammadi, Nasrullah, 393
Mazzetti, Mark, 381 Montagu, Edwin, 21, 25, 38, 40
McCain, John, 354–355 Mopilas, 39
McConaughy, Walter, 170 Morning News, 201, 203
McCurry, Mike, 287 Moscow, 191, 207, 233, 251, 267
McLaughlin, John, 329 Mossad, 197, 243, 244, 261, 336
McMahon, Sir Henry, 158 Motihari, 19, 20
McMahon Line, 159, 163, 167, 168, Mountbatten, Lady Edwina, 93, 102
172, 418 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 91, 93, 94,
Mecca, 41, 177 95–96, 102, 103, 107, 114, 120,
Medina, 41 121–122, 123, 124, 125, 251
Meghna River, 214 Movement for Restoration of
Mehdi of Pirpur, Muhammad, 67 Democracy (MRD), 246, 247
Mehmet VI (Sultan-Caliph), 26, Mubarakmand, Samar, 286
28–29, 30, 31 Mudi, Sir Francis, 79
Mehran Bank, 269 Mughal Dynasty, 413
Mehrauli, 125 Mughal Empire, 7
Mehta, J. S., 235 Mughal-e Azam (movie), 396, 397
Mehta, Ravi Datt, 381 Mughals, 4, 5
Mendhar, 181, 365 Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (MQM), 165,
Menon, Shiv Shankar, 390 269
Menon, Vapal Pangunni, 94, 98, 120, Muhammad (Prophet), 4, 175
121 Muhammad, Bakshi Ghulam, 116,
Menon Plan, 94, 95, 96 143, 150, 163, 175, 177
Mere Sanam (movie), 175 Muhammad, Ghulam, 110, 146
Messervy, Sir Frank, 92, 122–123, 417 Muhammadan Educational
Mexico, 15 Conference, 5, 6
Miandad, Javed, 401 Mujadidi, Sibghatullah, 374
Miller, Web, 48, 49 Mukherjee, Pranab, 3, 282, 352, 353,
Minar-e Pakistan, 292, 427 354, 356
Miranshahi, 378 Mukhtar, Shaikh, 396–397
Mirpur, 118 Mukti Bahini, 201, 206, 207, 209, 210

490
 INDEX

Mulford, David, 353 resigns as Army Chief, 345

Mullik, B. M., 163 resigns as President, 346, 383, 430
Multan, 40, 92, 234, 236 Muslim Conference ( Jammu and
Mumbai, 407, 410. See also Bombay Kashmir), 112, 113, 115, 153,
Mumbai 2008 Terrorist Attack, 346, 176, 415
347, 348, 349–351, 352–354, 355, Muslim League
356–357, 403, 430 India, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 18, 25, 27, 30,
Munabao, 406 34, 40, 41, 44, 45, 51, 55, 57, 58,
Munir, Muhammad, 141 60, 61, 63–64, 68, 77–79, 83–84,
Munk, David, 366 88, 91, 93–94, 96, 147, 219
Muntazir, Abdullah, 355 Pakistan, 131, 146, 148, 233
Muridke, 355 Muslim League National Guard
Murree, 55, 232, 418 (MNG), 83, 84, 92, 97, 100, 118,
Musa Khan, Muhammad, 182, 183 140
Musharraf, Sehba, 304, 313 Muslims, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 17–18, 26, 28,
Musharraf, Pervez, 320, 347, 397, 430 30, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41–42,
and Bush, George W., 317, 322, 44, 51, 55, 57, 58, 63, 68–69, 70,
323–324, 328, 373, 375, 376, 379, 72, 91, 101–102, 128, 140, 219,
380 272, 292, 318, 391, 395, 415
and Clinton, Bill, 311 Muttahida, Majlis-e Amal (MMA),
and cricket diplomacy, 343 336
and India, 308, 318 Mutual Security Act (US), 137, 138
and Kargil War, 294, 295–296, 297, Muzaffarabad, 118, 119, 124, 133, 176,
298, 299, 313, 332, 338, 342, 343, 348, 408
427–428 Muzaffarpur, 19
and Karzai, Hamid, 375, 379
and Kashmir, 294, 314, 324, 343, Nagar, 142
344, 366–367, 429 Nagasaki, 286
and Nawaz Sharif, Muhammad, Nagpur, 36, 37
290, 298, 304–306, 309, 365, 428 Naidu, Sarojini, 48
and nuclear program and weapons, Naik, Niaz Ahmad, 293–294, 300
297, 298, 302, 307, 309, 323, 325, Nairobi, 393
330–331 Najibullah, Muhammad, 372
and Powell, Colin, 324, 334 Nanak Dev, Guru, 100, 242
and Singh, Manmohan, 342, 343, Nankana Sahib, 100
388, 429 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 9, 10
and Taliban, 209, 318 Narainganj, 181
and Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 291, 307, Narasimha Rao, Pamulapartu Venkata,
313, 314, 324–325, 331, 406, 428 240, 271–272, 274, 282, 285, 426
as Chief Executive of Pakistan, 307, Nawa-i Waqt, 185
312 Narayan, Jaya Prakash, 232
as President, 313, 319 Narayanan, Kicheri Raman, 295, 313
assassination attempts on, 337 Nargis, 396
coup by, 304–306 Naseerullah, Babur, 274
emergency declared by, 345 Natal Indian Congress, 13
on terrorism, 325, 326, 328, 428 Nath, Ram, 193

491
 INDEX

National Agriculturist Party, 60 biography and characters of,

National Awami League, 226 269–270
National Conference ( Jammu and overthrown by a military coup, 306
Kashmir), 112, 143, 153, 175, Nayala, 310
177, 228, 268, 277, 333–334 Nayar, Kuldip, 187, 194, 254–256, 424
National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Nazarbayev, Nur Sultan, 331
279, 280, 300, 340 Nazimuddin, Khwaja, 131, 141
National Democratic Front of NDTV, 429, 344
Bodoland, 197 Nehru, Kamala, 59, 194
National Front, 267 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 38, 46, 47, 59, 62,
National Liberation Front of 63, 66, 72, 94, 95, 100, 107, 127,
Afghanistan, 374 41, 149, 172, 176, 194, 416, 417
National Security Agency (NSA), and Abdullah, Shaikh Muhammad,
148, 283, 296, 297, 385 112, 116, 151, 176
Nationalist Muslim Conference, 75, and Ali Khan, Liaquat, 132, 133,
78, 79 138, 139–140
Nawabshah, 305 and Ayub Khan, Muhammad, 154,
Nawaz Sharif, Muhammad, 264, 269, 155–57, 166, 170–171, 176,
289, 340, 345, 384 417–418
and Bhutto, Benazir, 273 and Bogra, Muhammad Ali,
and Clinton, Bill, 285, 286, 287, 149–151, 157
297, 298–300, 303, 304, 427 and China, 157, 160–172, 418
and Gujral, Inder Kumar, 278 and communal violence and
and India, 270, 273, 288, 391, 430 communalism, 63, 86, 87, 105,
and, Ishaq Khan, Ghulam, 273 106
and Kargil War, 295–300, 303, 307, and Constitutional Award, 81, 416
427–428 and Dalai Lama, 164
and Karzai, Hamid, 391 and Eisenhower, Dwight, 144, 148
and Kashmir, 270, 293–294, 425, and Gandhi, Mohandas
427–428 Karamchand, 63, 87, 94–95, 127
and Lahore Declaration, 293, 312 and Indian National Army, 76
and military High Command, 299, and Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 65–66,
300, 303–306 83, 131–132
and Musharraf, Pervez, 290, 298, and Kashmir, 111, 112, 113, 114,
304–306, 309, 365, 428 116, 120, 121, 122, 123–124, 142,
and Narasimha Rao, Pamulapartu 150–151, 143, 155–156, 173, 175,
Venkata, 272 176, 208, 342
and nuclear program and weapons, and Kennedy, John F., 167, 171, 173
279, 285–289, 426 and Koran War (1950–1953), 145
and Singh, Manmohan, 365, 367 and Mao Zedong, 162, 418–419
and United States, 270, 273 and nuclear program and weapons,
and Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 290, 229
291–292, 295–297, 313, 426– and Princely States, 98
427 and secularism, 106–107, 128, 416
and Zia ul Haq, Muhammad, 270 and Soviet Union, 124, 152, 171,
as Prime Minister, 269, 365, 410 188

492
 INDEX

and Truman, Harry, 136 Noor Jehan (movie), 396

and United States, 85, 144–145, Nooran, 104
171–172 Noorani, A. G., 160
and Vande Matram (song), 65–66 Noorani, Zain, 254
and Zhou Enlai, 169, 170, 418 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
as President of Congress Party, 60, (NATO), 145–146, 379, 381,
80 384, 385, 388, 391
as Vice-President of Executive North Korea and North Koreans,
Council, 85 136–137, 278
biography and character of, 106, North Waziristan, 118, 377, 378
112, 132, 151, 156, 161, 174, 177 North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA),
foreign policy of, 85, 144, 151, 166, 158, 159
417 North-East Frontier Tract, 158
on Government of India Act North-West Frontier Province
(1935), 59 (NWFP), 60, 61, 62, 96, 97, 118,
on Pakistan, 94, 125, 150–151, 155, 237, 269, 274, 369, 414
157 Northern Alliance, 373, 374, 375
on Two Nation theory, 69 Northern Areas (Kashmir), 133, 142,
Nehru, Motilal, 38, 44, 47, 177 227, 392
Nehru Report, 44, 45, 54 Nuclear Club, 280
Nepal, 158, 163 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act
New Delhi, see Delhi (US), 284
New York, 273 Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,
New York Times, 136, 204, 256, 271, 167
282, 324, 381 Nusserwanjee, Jamshed, 45
New Yorker, 323, 331
New Zealand, 18, 155, 41 Obama, Barack, 3, 359, 367, 387
Newcastle (South Africa), 16 Obermeyer, Ziad, 217
Newsweek International, 379 Observer, 255, 424
Niazi, Amir Abdullah Khan, 202, 207, O’Dwyer, Sir Michael Francis, 24
209–210, 214, 215, 217, 421 Omar, Mullah Muhammad, 316, 319,
Nimitz, Chester, 150 338, 363, 372, 379, 380, 391
9/11, 316, 323, 336, 338, 354, 420, 428 One Day International (cricket
Nishtar, Abdur Rab, 86, 95 matches), 400
Nixon, Richard, 196, 202, 206, Operation Badr, 294, 295, 300, 301
207–208, 211, 215, 219, 221, 267, Operation Black Thunder, 252
293, 310 Operation Black Thunder II, 258
No Higher Honors: A Memoir of My Operation Black Tornado, 373
Years in Washington, 353 Operation Blue Star, 248–249
Noakhali, 86 Operation Brasstacks, 253–254, 401,
Non-Aligned Movement summits, 424
244, 358, 364, 423 Operation Chanakaya, 275
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 243, Operation Chengiz Khan, 209
251, 278, 284 Operation Cyclone, 238
Nonproliferation Act (US), 236 Operation Desert Hawk, 252
Noon, Firoz Khan, 147, 148 Operation Enduring Freedom, 373

493
 INDEX

Operation Fair Play, 232, 422 and Clinton, Bill, 289, 290, 311, 312
Operation Gibraltar, 179, 180, 182, and Gandhi, Indira, 241–242, 244,
183, 420 235, 246
Operation Grand Slam, 179, 180, 183, and Gandhi, Mohandas, 125
184 and Gandhi, Rajiv, 254, 255, 258,
Operation Gulmarg, 119, 120 261, 288
Operation Prakaram, 322 and India, 125, 126, 127, 128, 204,
Operation Searchlight, 199, 203 206, 207, 240, 243, 246, 251, 254,
Operation Shakti, 283 271, 274–275, 285, 287, 308, 310,
Operation Shop, 249 312, 319, 321–322, 323, 326, 328,
Operation Vijay, 295, 300 331, 332, 333, 336, 358, 367
Operation Woodrose, 249 and Islam, 128, 147, 201, 227, 232,
Orange Free State, 13 235
Osirak Contingency (India), 243 and Karzai, Hamid, 376, 381, 383,
Osmani, Muhammad Abdullah Gani, 388, 390, 391
201 and Kashmir, 279, 416. See also
Otacamund, 178 Pakistan-Administered Kashmir
Ottoman Empire, 11, 27, 30 and Khalistan movement, 248, 257,
Ottoman Turkey, 7 258
Outalha, Faiza, 348 and Mumbai 2008 Terrorist Attack,
Outlook, 377 352–354
Oxford, 54 and Mutual Defense Assistance
Agreement (1954), 144
Padmanabhan, Sunderarajan, 322, and South-East Asian Treaty
324, 325, 326, 334, 429 Organization (SEATO), 145,
Paghman, 237 152, 185, 187, 370, 417
Pahwa, Madan Lal, 126 and Soviet Union, 132, 190, 191, 192,
Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza, 145, 238, 193, 241
371 and Taliban, 274, 303, 317, 322,
Pakeezah (movie), 223, 224 337, 372, 373, 379, 380, 381
Pakistan (book), 115 and United Nations, 125, 152–153,
Pakistan and Pakistanis, 2, 3, 4, 52, 57, 287
78, 96, 97, 249, 288, 395 and United States, 110, 128, 137,
and Abdullah, Shaikh Muhammad, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 153–154,
153, 176, 359 157, 179, 185, 187, 196, 204, 222,
and Afghanistan, 238, 370–371, 237, 241, 243, 244, 246, 251, 253,
372, 374, 375–376, 377, 378, 270, 272, 278, 287, 307, 309, 310,
380–381, 384, 386–387, 389, 390, 311, 316–318, 326, 332, 336, 363,
416, 422 373, 376, 380, 387, 407, 417, 422,
and Bangladesh, 226, 227 426
and Central Treaty Organization birth of Pakistan, 102–103
(CENTO), 145–146, 149, 417 broadcasting media in, 301, 335, 399
and China, 138, 147–148, 157, 170, constitutions of, 227, 269
173, 195, 197, 201, 205, 206, 230, economy of, 10, 289, 290, 300, 318,
231, 241, 243, 244, 296, 312, 405, 407, 426
411–412, 422, 427 Hindus in, 140, 201, 227, 273, 421

494
 INDEX

military and its doctrine, 143–144, Pandit, Vijay Lakshmi, 124, 136
145–146, 190, 226, 230, 306, 337, Panjshir Valley, 376
340, 355–356, 371, 378–379, Panjwar, Paramjit Singh, 257
383–384, 389, 418 Panmunjom, 1
nuclear doctrine of, 329, 330–331 Pannikar, K. M., 137
nuclear program and weapons of, Parasuram, R. P., 89
140, 222, 230, 236, 241, 244, 245, Parikh, Narhari, 89
251, 285–289, 291–292, 293, 297, Paris, 30, 267
299, 325, 331, 337, 341, 356, 413, Parsis, 11
422–23, 425, 427, 431 Partition Council, 96, 129
origins of terrorist attacks in, 258, Parvaiz, Athar, 3
266, 299, 311, 312, 321–322, 337, Pasha, Ahmed Shuja, 351–352, 386
358, 367 Pashban-e Ahl-e Hadith, 337
victim of terrorist attacks, 256, 258, Pashtunistan, 369, 371
259 Patel, Vallabhbhai, 60–61, 62, 66, 77,
Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, see 84, 89, 95, 96, 120, 121, 125, 127,
Azad Kashmir, Baltistan, and 414, 416
Northern Areas (Kashmir) Pathankot, 116
Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission Patiala, 100
(PAEC), 222, 285–286, 288, 413 Patil, Shivraj, 350
Pakistan Communist Party, 223 Patna, 86
Pakistan Constituent Assembly Patterson, Anne, 353
(1947), 101, 103 Pearl Harbor, 69
Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), 400, Peer, Basharat, 276
404, 405 Pentagram rock band, 301
Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory People’s Democratic Alliance, 269
Authority (PEMRA), 335 People’s Democratic Party, 333–334
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), 196, People’s Republic of China (PRC), see
198, 222, 226, 232, 233, 234, 235, China
246, 262, 264–265, 273, 292, 336, Permanent Settlement Act (1793), 19
345, 347, 410, 422 Persian (language), 5, 7, 239, 414
Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz Persian Gulf, 227
Sharif (PML-N), 269, 278, 336, Peshawar, 112, 148, 187, 188, 237, 303
345, 365, 410 Pethick-Lawrence, Lord, 79, 81
Pakistan Muslim League–Quaid-i- Petit, Sir Dinshaw, 18
Azam (PML-Q), 336, 345 Petit, Rattanbai (Ruttie), 18, 23–24.
Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), See also Jinnah, Maryam
231, 232, 234 Philadelphia Inquirer, 258
Pakistan Times, 109, 116 Philippines, 370
Pakistan-US Cooperation Agreement, Phoenix Settlement, 14, 15
153–154, 185 Pietermaritzburg, 13
Pakistani Taliban, 387, 404 Pillai, Gopal Krishna, 360
Pakka Anna, 108 Pirbhoy, Adamjee, 6
Pan Tsue-li, 164 Plebiscite Front, 153, 181, 228
Panchgani, 85 Pokhran, 228, 229, 282, 283, 286, 289,
Panchsheel, 161, 163 425, 426

495
 INDEX

Poland, 67 Rabbani, Burhanuddin, 374, 388

Poonch, 118, 122, 294, 408 Radcliffe, Sir Cyril, 99, 100
Poonch-Mirpur area, 114, 114, 117 Radhakrishnan, Servpalli, 143
Poonch-Uri, 191 Rafiuddin, Maulavi, 10
Poonja, Jinnahbhai, 9 Raghavan, N., 160–161
Poonja, Mithi Bai, 9, 69 Raghunath, Krishnan, 290
Popalzai tribe, 373, 374 Ragi, Darshan Singh, 256
Porbandar, 12, 349 Rahman, Fazlur, 274
Powell, Colin, 324, 325, 326, 333 Rahman, Hamdoon, 222
Praagh, David van, 189 Rahman, Shaikh Mujibur, 196, 198,
Prasad, Rajendra, 96, 106, 141, 143, 199, 201, 215, 216, 222, 227
416 Rahman Khan, Abdur, 241, 244, 259,
Pressler, Larry, 245 262
Pressler Amendment (US), 246, 278 Raj, Prithvi, 4, 413
Pretoria, 16 Raja, Rameez, 402
Princely States, 51, 53, 59, 79, 87, 98 Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti, 70–71,
Pugwash Conference on Jammu and 72, 84
Kashmir, 343 Rajaratnam, Thenmozhi, 271
Punjab Rajasthan, 253, 254, 256
Colonial India, 55, 88, 95–96, 97, Rajkot, 12
395 Ram, Chhotu, 64
communal holocaust in, 101–102, Ram Raj, 43, 53
104–105, 416 Rama, Lord (Hindu god-king), 16, 43,
Independent India, 242, 247–248, 272, 281, 382
252, 256, 274 Rama Janam Bhoomi Mandir, 281
population exchange in, 107–108, Ramadan (month), 109, 337, 342
109 Raman, Bahukutumbi, 236
Pakistan, 274 Raman, Venkat, 193
Pushtu (language), 239 Ramanna, Raja, 243, 244, 423
Putin, Vladimir, 331 Ramayana, 33
Puzanov, Alexander, 237 Ramganj, 86
Rampur, 27
Qadeer Khan, Abdul, 230–231, 244, Rangoon, 70
245, 254–255, 256, 288, 423, 424 Rann of Kutch, 178
Qazi, Ashraf Jahangir, 314 Rao, Nirupama, 359, 361
Qazi, Javed Ashraf, 356 Rao, Pamulapartu Venkata Narasimha,
Quetta, 97, 130, 303, 374, 376 see Narasimha Rao, Pamulapartu
Quit India campaign (1942), 71, 77 Venkata
Quit Kashmir campaign (1946), 113 Rao, V. Venkateswara, 381
Quran, 42, 346 Raphel, Arnold, 259
Qureshi, Makhdoom Shah Rashid, Ahmed, 376
Mahmood, 352, 353, 356, 360, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
361 88, 126, 127, 280–281, 284
Qureshi, Pervez Mahdi, 291, 294, 295 Rattam, 107, 108
Qureshi, Shuaib, 44 Ravi River, 98, 116, 154
Qushila, Jadid, 376 Rawalakot, 408

496
 INDEX

Rawalpindi, 92, 140, 170, 187, 209, Rowlatt, Sidney, 24

259, 317, 338, 368 Rowlatt Act, 24, 27, 28
Reading, Lord, 35, 38, 46 Royal Indian Navy mutiny (1946),
Reagan, Ronald, 240–241, 243, 244, 76, 77
246, 253, 254, 263, 422 Ruskin, John, 4
Rees, Thomas Pete, 100 Russia, 372
Rehman, Atiq, 368
Reliance World Cup (cricket), 255 Sadiq, Ghulam Muhammad, 116, 175,
Report of the Committee Appointed 177
by the Government of India to Saeed, Hafiz Muhammad, 321, 355,
Investigate the Disturbances in the 357, 359, 360, 361, 363
Punjab etc., 30, 32 Sahai, Jagan Nath, 193, 194
Republic of China (Taiwan), 168, 200 Sahara India, 402
Republican Party (Pakistan), 147, 148 Sahara TV, 301
Research and Analysis Milli Sahgal, Prem, 75
Afghanistan (RAMA), 382 Sajjad, Wasim, 273
Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), Saleh, Amrullah, 386
197, 206, 399 Salim (Prince), 397
and Afghanistan, 372–373, 376, 377 Salt March, 46–49, 50
and assassination of Zia ul Haq, Samadzai, Vida, 293
Muhammad, 262 Sanatan Dharm Sabha, 41
and Awami League, 198 Sandys, Duncan, 173
and Counter Intelligence Team–J Sanjivpaul, Subodh, 386
(CIT–J), 252, 274, 279 Sarabhai, Ambalal, 21–22
and Counter Intelligence Team–X Sargodha Air Force Base, 298, 428
(CIT–X), 252, 256, 274, 279 Sarkar, Sujeet, 394
and East Pakistan, 198, 201 Sarvar Upazila, 227
and Indian Kashmir, 275 Sathyu, Mysore Shrinivas, 219, 220
and Inter-Services Intelligence, 244, Sattar, Abdul, 253
257, 275 Saudi Arabia, 227, 239, 275, 289, 365
and KHAD, 242 Savage, Gerald, 100
and Mossad, 197, 244 Sayed, Mushahid Hussain, see
and Pakistan, 236, 245, 266, Hussain, Mushahid
275–275 Sayeed, Mufti, 339
and Kargil War, 296 Schmitt, Eric, 381
and Shin Beth, 250 Scott, H. L., 113
and Sikh militancy, 266 Se-La Pass, 159, 160, 171
Rice, Condoleezza, 325, 351, 352–354 Seoul, 1
Riedel, Bruce, 298, 300 Serwani, Muhammad Arif, 375, 379
Rodham, Dorothy, 310 Sethi, Najam, 405
Rome, 218 Shaam, Mahmood, 185
Roosevelt, Franklin, D., 69 Shah, A. K., 117
Rose, Leo E., 216 Shah, Sir Sultan Muhammad, 6, 56
Roshan, Hrithik, 302 Shah, Zarrar, 355
Round Table Conferences (London), Shahi, Agha, 236
50, 51, 53 Shaikh, Ahmed Umar, 308

497
 INDEX

Shamsuddin, Khwaja, 175 Simon Commission, 44

Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Sindh, 78, 87–88, 97, 102, 109,
358 246–247, 269, 273, 275, 395–396
Sharif, Muhammad, 304 Sindh Assembly Coalition Party, 48
Sharif, Shahbaz, 304, 407, 409 Sindhi (language), 247
Sharjah, 401 Singapore, 70, 407
Sharma, Anand, 409, 410, 411 Singh, Sir Amar, 111
Sharm-el-Shaikh, 358 Singh, Baldev, 85, 87, 95, 96, 121
Sharon, Ariel, 243, 245, 423 Singh, Beant, 249
Shashank, 340 Singh, Beant (Chief Minister), 274
Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 176 Singh, Bhagat, 46
and Ayub Khan, Muhammad, 179, Singh, Bikram, 365
194 Singh, Bishan, 135
and China, 188 Singh, Dilbagh, 243
and Kashmir, 182, 184, 190, 215 Singh, Gobind, 92
and Kosygin, Alexei, 191 Singh, Gulab, 113
and Operation Desert Hawk, 179 Singh, Gurbaksh, 186
and nuclear program and weapons, Singh, Gurbaksh Dhillon, 75
184, 229 Singh, Harbakhsh, 184
and Soviet Union, 187, 188, Singh, Sir Hari, 110, 111–112,
190–192 119–120, 121, 142, 416
as Prime Minister, 176 Singh, Janak, 114, 117
death of, 192, 193–194 Singh, Jaswant, 10, 62, 293, 308, 314,
biography and character of, 177, 324, 329, 331, 374
182 Singh, Juggat, 104
Shatra, Lonchen, 159 Singh, Karan, 142, 143
Shaw, George Bernard, 13 Singh, Khushwant, 104, 249
Shawai Nullah, 355 Singh, Krishna, 96
Shekhar, Chandra, 270 Singh, Kunwar Natwar, 341
Shergill, Karan, 302 Singh, Mangal, 44
Sherman, Wendy, 363 Singh, Manmohan, 340
Shias, 275 and Afghanistan, 377, 388–389, 391
Shimla, 223, 314, 373 and Gilani, Yusuf Raza, 351,
Shimla Agreement, 225, 226, 228, 358–359, 360, 361, 363, 382, 403
276, 314, 421–422 and Karzai, Hamid, 388
Shin Beth, 250 and Kashmir, 342, 365, 367
Shradhanad, Swami, 29 and Mumbai 2008 Terrorist Attack,
Shukla, Pandit Raj Kumar, 18, 19 350, 351, 352, 354
Siachen Glacier, 2, 251, 257, 266, 279, and Musharraf, Pervez, 342, 343,
295, 340, 361, 362, 425 388, 429
Sialkot, 184, 254, 401 and Nawaz Sharif, Muhammad,
Sikhs, 53, 55, 91–92, 99–100, 111– 365, 367
112, 242, 247–250, 251–252, 254, and Obama, Barack, 367
257–258, 266, 274, 395, 425 and Pakistan, 359, 367
Simla Convention (1913), 159 and Zardari, Asif Ali, 358, 363, 364,
Simon, John, 43, 44 408

498
 INDEX

as Prime Minister, 340, 341, 357 Sri Lanka, 168, 271, 290, 404
biography and character of, 364 Srinagar, 3, 111, 120, 121, 175, 182,
Singh, Partap, 111 294, 320, 343, 416, 417, 419
Singh, Rajnath, 365 Stalin, Joseph, 151
Singh, Ranjit, 92 Stars for Another Sky, 135
Singh, S. K., 254 Statesman, 86
Singh, Swaran, 73, 173, 205, 240 Stephens, Ian, 115
Singh, Tara, 92 Sudhan clan, 294
Singh, Vishwanath Pratap, 267, 268 Sudhir, 108
Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Sufis, 31, 88, 265
Region, 160, 163 Suhrawardy, Hussein Shaheed, 78,
Sino-India War, see India-China War 83–84, 103, 147, 148, 257
Sir Creek, 279, 340, 361 Sunday Times (London), 203
Sisson, Richard, 215 Sunderarajan, Krishnaswamy, 253,
Smith, David, 328 254, 424
Smuts, Jan, 14, 16 Sunnis, 275
Solanki, Amar Singh, 349 Suntook, Nowsher F., 244
Solarz Stephen, 246 Sutlej River, 98, 99, 100, 154
Soldier, Iqbal, 404 Swat Valley, 183
Soni, Ambika, 397 Swatantra, 109
Soomro, Muhammad Mian, 346 Syed, Ghulam Murtaza, 247
South Africa, 11, 16, 18, 231 Sylhet, 97
South Asian Association for Regional Symington, Stuart, 236
Cooperation (SAARC), 242, Symington Amendment (US), 236,
265, 270, 278, 290, 312–313, 324, 240, 241, 231
339, 361, 381, 406, 408, 410, 425 Szulc, Ted, 204
South Asian Free Trade Area
(SAFTA), 408, 410, 430 Tagore, Rabindranath, 32, 65, 66, 415
South Korea and South Koreans, 1, Tahiliani, Hariram Radhakrishna, 253
137 Taiwan, 103, 168, 201
South Waziristan, 118, 377, 378 Taizani, 373
South-East Asia Treaty Organization Taj Mahal, 219, 309, 314
(SEATO), 145, 152, 185, 187, Taj Mahal: The Eternal Love Story
320, 417 (Movie), 397
Soviet Central Asia, 148 Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, 348, 350, 351
Soviet Union, 124, 152, 153, 161, 162, Tajikistan, 370
163, 165, 167, 188–189, 191, 204, Tajiks, 375
205, 207, 422 Taliban, 3, 295, 299, 303, 307–308,
and Afghanistan, 238, 253, 258, 382, 393
370–371, 372 and Afghanistan, 372, 385, 386, 390,
and Bangladesh War, 210 391, 392
and United States, 167, 169, 171, and Al Qaida, 390
188–189, 210–213, 238, 240, 272, and Bhutto, Benazir, 372, 385, 386,
332 390, 391, 392
Special Frontier Force, 174, 197, 206 and Clinton, Bill, 299
Spin Boldak, 374 and India, 307, 383, 385–386

499
 INDEX

Taliban (continued) Tiwana, Sir Khizr Hayat, 79, 88, 91

and Karzai, Hamid, 372, 385, 386, Toba Tek Singh, 135
390, 391, 392 Tolo TV, 392, 393, 394
and Musharraf, Pervez, 209, 318 Tolstoy, Leo, 13
and Pakistan, 274, 303, 317, 322, Tolstoy Farm, 16
337, 372, 373, 379, 380, 381 Toronto, 404
and United States, 317, 322 Train to Pakistan, 104
resurgence of, 375, 379 Transvaal Immigration Restriction
Tamewali, 259, 260 Act, 15, 16
Tanmurg, 124 Transvaal Republic, 13
Taraki, Nur Muhammad, 237–238 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation
Tarar, Muhammad Rafiq, 287, 307, (Afghan-Soviet), 238
316, 313 Treaty of Friendship between India
“Tariq, General,” 115 and Afghanistan (1950), 370,
Taseer, Muhammad Din, 116 388
Tashkent, 188, 190, 191 Treaty of Peace with Japan, 137
Tashkent Declaration, 192, 193, 195 Treaty of Sevres, 33
Tawang, 160, 169, 170, 171, 181 Trelford, Donald, 255
Tawi River, 183 Trombay, 229, 244, 423
Tehelka, 355 Troti, 183
Tel Aviv, 243, 423 Truman, Harry, 136, 137, 138, 141
Tendulkar, Sachin, 401, 404–405 Tulsi (television serial), 3893, 394
Tenet, George J., 284 Turki bin Faisal (Saudi Prince), 241
Tezpur, 164, 171 Turkey, 28, 145, 171, 204
Thagla Ridge, 168 Turkmenistan, 370
Thailand, 145, 370 26/11, 351, 357, 361, 364
Thatcher, Margaret, 267 Two Nation theory, 5, 68, 69, 218, 414
The 9/11 Commission Report, 316 Tyabji, Abbas, 48
The Discovery of India, 156 Tyabji, Badruddin, 10
The Emergence of Pakistan, 119
The Story of My Experiments with U Thant, 184, 188
Truth, 10 Uban, Sujan Singh, 179, 209
The Wrong Enemy: America in Union of South Africa, see South
Afghanistan, 381–382 Africa
Thendup, Gyalo, 161 Unionist Party, 61, 79, 91
Thoreau, Henry David, 13, 15 United Arab Emirates, 289, 398, 401,
Thimayya, K. S., 154 407, 409
Thimpu, 360, 361 United Front (East Pakistan), 146,
Thussu, Swarupram, 177 278
Tibet, 158–162 United Press International, 48
Tikka Khan, Muhammad, 199, 202, United Nations (UN), 1, 124, 150,
207 200, 250, 277, 287, 313, 370,
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 23 375
Time, 136, 187, 383 United Nations Military Observer
Tippera, 86 Group in India and Pakistan
Tiscenka, Vera, 147 (UNMOGIP), 133, 184

500
 INDEX

United Nations Commission on India Upadhaya, Deen Dayal, 281

and Pakistan (UNCIP), 133, 136, Urdu (language), 65, 66, 147, 398, 417
143, 151 URENCO, 231
United Nations Security Council, 1, Uri, 3, 119, 120, 124, 408
124, 129–130, 136–137, 152– US-Pakistan Mutual Security Pact,
153, 184, 188, 200, 210, 282–283, 157
294, 355, 357 Usmani, Muzaffar, 305, 317, 319
United Progressive Alliance (UPA), USSR, see Soviet Union
340, 341 Uzbekistan, 188, 370
United Province, 395
Unto This Last, 14 Vaishya (movie), 302
United States, 15, 21, 55, 152, 155, Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 233, 289, 334,
293, 303, 332, 363, 350 376
and 9/11, 316 and Clinton, Bill, 296, 299, 310,
and Afghanistan, 237, 252, 316, 326, 312, 427–428
359, 372, 375, 376, 383, 385, 387 and Indian Airlines plane hijacked,
and Ali Khan, Liaquat, 138 307–308
and Bhutto, Benazir, 278 and Kargil War, 295–296, 298–301
and Bhutto, Zulfikar, 185, 191 and Kashmir, 293, 337
and China, 163, 168, 204, 208, and Lahore Declaration, 293, 312
211–213, 293 and Musharraf, Pervez, 291, 307,
and Gandhi, Indira, 197, 207–208 313, 314, 324–325, 331, 406, 428
and India, 136, 145, 165, 170, 174, and Nawaz Sharif, Muhammad,
185, 190, 205, 206, 229, 318, 321, 290, 291–292, 295–297, 313,
322, 323, 419, 425 426–427
and Israel, 243 and nuclear doctrine, 329
and Nawaz Sharif, Muhammad, and nuclear program and weapons,
270, 273 280, 281–82, 283, 426
and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 85, 144– and Pakistan, 292, 293, 322–323,
145, 171–172 325, 427, 429
and Pakistan, 110, 128, 137, 143, and terrorist attacks in Delhi,
144, 145, 148, 149, 153–154, 157, 320–322, 324, 335, 429
179, 185, 187, 196, 204, 222, 237, biography and character of,
241, 243, 244, 246, 251, 253, 270, 280–281
272, 278, 287, 307, 309, 310, 311, Vajpayee, Krishna Bihari, 280
316–318, 326, 332, 336, 363, 373, Vajpayee, Namita, 292
376, 380, 387, 407, 417, 422, 426 Vale of Kashmir, 120, 129, 133, 142,
and Soviet Union, 167, 169, 171, 157, 175, 277, 295
188–189, 210–213, 238, 240, 272, Vance, Cyrus, 236
332 Vande Matram (song), 64–66, 415
and Taliban, 317, 322 Vanity Fair, 259
Nonproliferation Act of, 236 Vedic Hinduism, 31, 32
Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Venkataraman, Ramaswamy, 259
Act of, 284 Verma, A. K., 257
Untouchables (Hindu), 43, 53, 54, 55, Victoria (Queen), 349
57 Vienna, 196, 423

501
 INDEX

Vietnam, 217 Xinjiang Autonomous Region, 160,

Vij, Nirmal Chander, 334 173, 204
Vijaypur, 327 Xinjiang-Tibet Highway, 166, 167
Vishakhapatnam, 76, 327
Vohra, Gulab, 62 Yahya Khan, Agha Muhammad, 183,
Voice of Kashmir radio, 182 196, 198, 201, 217, 420, 428
Vorontsov, Yuli, 211 and Ayub Khan, Muhammad, 196,
420
Waar (movie), 399 and Bangladesh War, 209–210, 213,
Wagah, 187, 291, 364, 387, 403, 407, 214, 217
409, 411, 416 and Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 222
Wah, 381 and East Pakistan, 199, 205, 207
Wahhabis, 275 and Nixon, Richard, 196, 202,
Wahid, Abdul, 393 207
Walong, 171 and Operation Grand Slam, 183
War and Secession: Pakistan, India and general election under, 197–198
the Creation of Bangladesh, 216 resignation of, 218
Warsaw, 168 Yaqoob, Abdul Razak, 335
Washington, 1, 85, 138, 196, 207, 261, Yamuna River, see Jamuna River
267, 325 Yaron, Amos, 328
Wassom, Herbert M., 259 Yeh Khamoshi Kahan Tak?, 297
Wavell, Archibald Lord, 71, 72, 73, 79, Yekaterinburg, 358
80, 81, 83, 85, 87 Young India, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42
Weisman, Steven R., 25 Yousaf, Jam Muhammad, 277
Welwyn Garden City, 247 Yuan Zhongxian, 159
West Bengal, 109, 139, 140, 217 Yusaf Khan, Muhammad, 320, 323,
West Pakistan and West Pakistanis, 328, 345
134, 140, 146, 217, 219
West Punjab, 102, 105, 118, 119 Zabul, 375
Weston, D., 19 Zaheer, Sajjad, 223
Willingdon, Lord, 55 Zahid, Anwar, 293
Wilson, Harold, 178 Zahir Shah, Muhammad (King), 237,
Wilson, Woodrow, 21 370, 371
Wisner, Frank, 282 Zakaria, Fareed, 379–380
Wolport, Stanley, 21 Zaki, Akram, 273
World Bank, 154–155, 266, 270, 285, Zardari, Asif Ali, 224, 264, 265, 266,
417 268, 347, 352, 353, 354, 357, 358,
World Policy Journal, 260 363, 364, 384, 390, 408
World Sindhi Conference, 247 Zardari, Hakim Ali, 224, 266
World Trade Center (New York), 273, Zawahiri, Ayman, 228
316 Zee TV, 399
World War I (1914–1918), 7–8, 11, Zhou Enlai, 147–148, 161, 162, 163,
22, 24, 26, 28 165–166, 202, 204, 233, 418
World War II (1939–1945), 67–68, and Abdullah, Shaikh Muhammad,
70–71, 72 177
Wullar Barrage, 279, 340 and Kissinger, Henry, 205–206

502
 INDEX

and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 169, 170, and nuclear program and weapons,
418 236, 240–241, 251–252, 254–
Zia ul Haq, Muhammad, 141, 238, 255, 423, 424, 425
258, 318, 400, 401, 423 and Pakistan People’s Party, 233
and Afghanistan, 237, 238, 239, 258 as Army Chief, 233, 254, 429
and Bhutto, Benazir, 263 assassination of, 258–260, 262, 263,
and Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 233, 234, 276, 422
235, 263, 422 biography and character of,
and Gandhi, Indira, 241–242, 244, 234–235, 251, 262
266, 423 general elections under, 251, 270
and Gandhi, Rajiv, 251–252, 255, Islamization by, 238, 239, 258, 265,
259, 266, 401, 424 268, 275–276, 292
and India, 235, 236, 246, 247, 254, military coup against Bhutto,
396 Zulfikar Ali, 232, 235–236
and Inter-Services Intelligence, Ziarat, 130
239–240, 257 Zinni, Anthony, 296
and Kashmir, 268, 326 Zinta, Priety, 302
and Khalistan movement, 251–252 Zira, 100
and Movement for Restoration of Zoroastrians, 194
Democracy, 246, 247 Zulu rebellion, 12, 14

503