March 23, 2008

Leave a way of escape to a surrounded enemy, and do not press a desperate enemy too hard, such is the art of employing troops.

Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter 6

Pakistan came into existence on 14 August 1947, in an orgy of bloodshed which engulfed the subcontinent. Over a million people perished and millions were displaced. The majority of those who suffered were Muslims. The extremist communal Hindu organisations like the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) had, over the years, organised and prepared for the opportunity to target the Muslim minority areas. The Congress watched with detached satisfaction as RSS thugs did the dirty work of attacking the pockets of Muslim communities all over northern India. Mohandas Gandhi made all the right noises against communal violence, but Lord Wavell had the right measures of the man, calling him ‘an unscrupulous old hypocrite’, who ‘would shrink from no violence and bloodletting to achieve his ends’. Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah fought a legal battle for Pakistan and, being a lawyer of the highest calibre, won his case and created Pakistan as a haven for Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. And he did it without injecting any violence into his agenda. However, there were severe Muslim reactions to the atrocities committed by Hindu mobs, but by and large the violence was confined to major urban areas which were predominantly Muslim. The worst hit were the Muslim communities of Eastern Punjab, living in areas which had fallen to India, where Sikhs went on the rampage, releasing an agepentantiMuslim hatred that erupted in a frenzy of murder and rapine.

It was tragic, and the blame can be squarely placed on the viceroy, Lord Mountbatten. A man with a distinctly mediocre naval career behind him, who had sunk his warship through sheer incompetence, it was blatant favouritism attributed to his close link to the British monarchy which had made him supreme commander of forces in the South-East Asia theatre of operation. A highly opinionated person who had no time for reflecting on the complexities of the prevailing situation in India, he and his wife, Lady Edwina, came under the influence of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who established an unusually pervasive control over the viceregal couple. The result was the very unfair division of the Punjab in the demarcation of the border between India and Pakistan. The districts of Firozpur and Gurdaspur were allocated to India on very disputable grounds. Both were important areas because Firozpur was a major cantonment with an extremely well stocked arsenal for the Northern Command, and Gurdaspur District gave India access to the Muslimstate of Jammu and Kashmir.

Alastair Lamb, in his masterwork Incomplete Partition, has thoroughly probed the process of the partitioning of the Punjab, minutely analysing each link in the chain of events. His general assessment reveals the kernel of truth:

There has been an enormous amount of controversy over the Radcliffe Punjab Award in that it appeared to depart from the principle of the integrity of contiguous Muslim majority Districts by giving India three out of the four Tehsils (subdistricts) of the Muslim majority Gurdaspur District .... In that conventional wisdom had it then, and subsequently, that the key to access from India to the State of Jammu and Kashmir lay through the Gurdaspur District ... this particular decision has been interpreted by many commentators as evidence of a plot by Radcliffe, probably aided and abetted by Mountbatten, to guarantee that at the end of the day the State of Jammu and Kashmir went to India.

The Gurdaspur affair was the genesis of the Indo-conflict over the State of Jammu and Kashmir, and it remains, till the writing of this history, the core issue in the ongoing India-Pakistan antagonism.
 

* * * * *
 

The State of Jammu and Kashmir came into existence through the Treaty of Amritsar (1846), made between the British and Raja Gulab Singh, a Dogra Prince and grandee of the Sikh Durbar. He had played a very subtle dual role in the Anglo-Sikh conflict, for which he was rewarded by the British selling him the Vale of Kashmir for Rs7,500,000. The Treaty of Amritsar stood:

... on a different footing from other treaties with Indian States. The territories of which the Maharajah was recognised as ruler were handed to him in independent possession. While the supremacy of the British Government was acknowledged there was no argument on the part of the Company to guarantee the internal security of the State ... merely binding the British authorities to give aid to Maharajah Gulab Singh in protecting his territories from external aggressions.

Jammu and Kashmir was essentially created as a frontier/buffer state between the Punjab and adjacent Central Asia and Tibet.

The imposition of Gulab Singh on the Vale of Kashmir was resented by the local Muslims. As a result he followed a very harsh policy of consolidating his hold over his newly acquired possession, which did not endear him and his Dogras to the predominantly Muslim population. He was a shrewd man, and to ensure his despotic control he employed large numbers of Afghans, or Pathans, as mercenaries. The Afghans had earlier been in possession of Kashmir, till they were dispossessed by the Sikhs, and the Kashmiris had joyfully accepted the change because the Afghans had been very cruel and unjust rulers, whose avarice had also known no bounds. On the Kashmiri psyche, the image of the Afghan has been imprinted as the embodiment of barbarism at its worst.

The later Dogra rulers of Kashmir were relatively benign, and the last Maharajah, Hari Singh, was prone to gather Muslims advisers and friends around him. But this did not stop Sheikh Abdullah, a valley Kashmiri, from starting a political movement against Dogra rule in 1931 with the slogan: ‘Quit Kashmir’. He also declared the Treaty of 1846 illegal. The political unrest in Kashmir was predominantly a Kashmiri movement. Sheikh Abdullah’s party, the Kashmir National Conference included two types of Kashmiris, the inhabitants of the valley who were the true Kashmiris (Muslims and Hindus), with a distinct language and culture, and those who lived on the western slopes of the Pir Panjal Range and north of the River Chenab.

The latter belonged basically to the same martial racial stocks of the Punjab that provided British India with its best troops. It was not long before the party was divided on linguistic and ethnic lines. Sheikh Abdullah’s drift towards the Indian National Congress began well before the schism, while the splinter group immediately identified itself with the Muslim League in the Punjab and called itself the Muslim Conference. The latter became vehemently procausing the Sheikh to react by aligning his party more closely to the Congress.

In 1947 Kashmir was a deeply divided and disturbed area. In the western district of Poona the locals, known as Sudhans, had rebelled against the Maharajah for different reasons. Poonch was the jagir (fief) of a cousin of Maharajah Hari Singh, and after the death of the incumbent Raja, Hari Singh annexed it in 1940. The British sat back and watched him do it, although the jagir was protected by a treaty. But here was a situation which had a subtle catch which escaped the Maharajah’s notice:

Unlike the Muslims of the vale ... the men of Poonch were by tradition soldiers .... Over 20,000 of them served in the Indian Army in World War I. In World War II, the number was far higher; at its end at least 60,000 exservicemen returned to the Jagir. Their reaction to the political changes in Poonch was definitely negative .... With the approach of Transfer of Power, however, the Poonch problem became ever more acute. There were areas of remote countryside ... the Jammu and Kashmir equivalent of the unadministered tracts along the NorthWest Frontier of British India. On the eve of the British departure, in June 1947, refusal to accept the Maharaja’s authority spread to the more densely populated regions.

In the second week of October, Nehru requested the Maharajah of Patiala to send his Sikh troops to Jammu and Kashmir and crush the incipient Muslim revolt in the western and southwestern parts of the state. By this time the Patiala state forces had been amalgamated into the Indian Army. India had insidiously moved troops into Kashmir with a genocidal mission. This alarmed the Muslim Conference and made the Muslims of Poonch and Mirpur react frantically to the new peril facing their respective communities. Pakistan at that stage had no regular troops available, as they were still scattered all over South and South East Asia, and still in the process of repatriation.

The Muslim League in the Punjab, in the meantime, was reacting to the call for succour from the Muslim Conference, as the genocide of the Muslims rose to a crescendo. The Muslim League acted, but the manner in which the assistance was to be given to the Kashmiri liberation fighters was totally lacking in secrecy and subtlety. This was legitimate assistance to the beleaguered Muslims of an adjoining princely state who were fighting for their lives and honour. Jammu city was cleansed of its Muslim population; terrible atrocities were committed by the RSS and freelancing Dogra thugs. The only option available to the Muslim League was to find volunteers. There were many available in western Kashmir and the Punjab, all demobilised, combat-experienced soldiers. What they lacked were weapons. The corollary was to find armed men, and these were plentiful in the transbelt. So the idea of inviting Pushtun tribal lashkars gestated in the minds of the Pakistani and Kashmiri politicians. Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was against the whole enterprise: ‘I took Pakistan through constitutional means and I will not tolerate anything unconstitutional’ was the principle of the father of the nation. However, it was Qayyum Khan, Chief Minister of NWFP, and the ‘Young Turks’ of the Muslim League who launched the invasion of the state. According to General Wajahat, it was on this occasion, after the cabinet decision at Lahore not to commit the Pakistan Army in Kashmir, that a senior Muslim Leaguer remarked, ‘Sir, we missed the bus’, upon which the Quaid immediately snapped, ‘No, sir, we got in the wrong bus’, a frequently misquoted remark.

The concept in itself was practical and sound, but what spoiled everything was the cavalier style in which it was organised. On the night of 21/22 October 1947, large bands crossed over into the State of Jammu and Kashmir, but they were not the exaggerated figures cited by the Indian authorities. The Maharajah of Kashmir had still not formally opted for accession either way — he was hoping to obtain independent status like that of Nepal and Bhutan for his state.
 

* * * * *

Planning for the forcible liberation of Kashmir was a strategic compulsion, but it had to be concealed from the British officers of the Pakistan Army. An eyewitness account by Major General Akbar Khan, who had been secretly coopted at the preparatory stage, is a shocking disclosure of the ineptness of the Muslim League and Muslim Conference politicos:

.... I was called to Lahore for a conference with the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr Liaquat Ali Khan ... the conference with the Prime Minister was attended, among others, by the Finance Minister (Ghulam Mohammad,

later Governor General), Mian Iftikharuddin, Zaman Kiani, Khurshid Anwar, Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan and myself. I expected that here the actual course of action would be discussed in detail as certain essential decisions needed to be taken ... operational details and their pros and cons were not discussed .... In the atmosphere of cheerfulness and confidence that prevailed, it did not seem right for me to strike too serious a note by drawing attention to even such elementary matters as the need for ammunition and other means of communication for exercising control. The unpleasant truth, as I now see it, was that there was complete ignorance about the business of anything in the nature of military operations.

Actually, strapped of military strength and funds, Pakistan was in no position to challenge the Dogra and Sikh troops wreaking havoc in Jammu. Muslim refugees were pouring into Sialkot District. The only solution was to find volunteers, and the Pushtun tribes were the only body of armed strength available to counter the surreptitious Indian intervention in Kashmir.

The plan for liberating Kashmir had already been worked out by Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan, who had served as an officer in Skinner’s Horse during the Eriterian Campaign, before adopting a political career in the hallowed steps of his illustrious father, the late Sir Sikander Hayat Khan. It was a simple enough plan: Sardar Shaukat would be the overall supremo of the whole enterprise, while the most important Murree-Kohala-Srinagar axis would be the responsibility of a pseudo-soldier Mr Khurshid Anwar (of Kashmiri extraction), a commander of the Muslim League National Guards. The operations across the Punjab border in the south, (Gujrat-Akhnur axis) would be conducted by M.Z. Kiani, a former INA officer who had served in senior staff appointments under the Japanese during the war in Burma. He was a Ghakkar, belonging to a district adjacent to Kashmir. The entire exercise from the very beginning reeked of distrust and intrigue, as revealed by General Akbar:

Upon coming out of the conference room, Khurshid Anwar took me aside that he was not going to accept any orders from Shaukat Hayat Khan. I did my best to persuade him to realise that without complete cooperation there would be chaos .... He was not convinced. I was just wondering what to do ... when Shaukat Hayat Khan also came and told me that he had absolutely no confidence in Khurshid Anwar. In this mutual lack of confidence, I suggested that he should immediately see the Prime Minister .... But he said Khurshid Anwar was the choice of the authorities concerned and nothing could be done about it at this stage.

General Akbar did not have to be a clairvoyant when he concluded, after this unpleasant exchange, that with both the protagonists at loggerheads, and setting out on a venture which had to be kept secret from the British: ‘Thus, from the start there existed the serious danger that the whole scheme would lack effective control, and this was a very disturbing thought.’ It appears that Mr Jinnah was totally unaware of the option of using the tribal lashkars. It has recently been disclosed by Khalid Hassan, the prominent journalist, who comes from an eminent family of Kashmir and whose brother the late K.H. Khurshid, a former President of Azad Kashmir, had been a close confidante of Mr Jinnah, that

What happened in Gilgit was unrelated to what we know as the Poonch uprising. Nor did it have anything to do with the entry of tribesmen into the State, a reckless and fatal act that sealed the fate of Kashmir in India’s favour. The Quaid-i-Azam knew nothing about the tribal incursion, it should be added.
 

A History of Warfare
 

Regimental histories are a drab affair. They are of little interest except for regimental personnel and military historians. Colonel M.Y. Effendi’s saga of the Punjab Cavalry makes a delightful and refreshing exception to the rule. In his Preface to the book Gen K.M. Arif views it as a ‘balanced brew’ of the regiment’s long history (1849 to date).

The enormous weight of research, documentation and supportive references undertaken bears upon the readability of the book, making it as absorbing and gripping as a chronicle of adventure or a thriller – but without a thriller’s inevitable absurdities. The dignity of sober history is jealously guarded and scrupulously protected by painstaking research drawn upon solid data.

Within the restricted parameters of a regimental history, the book offers a fairly succinct account of the Second Afghan War (1879-80); the First (1914-1918) and Second (1939-1945) World Wars. The Mesopotamian campaign in the First, and the North African and the Burma campaigns in the Second World War are analysed in fairly good detail.

Back home the Kashmir war (1947-1949), the 1965 and 1971 wars, and the operational role of the 11 cavalry (FF) in each come in for much critical comment. Raised as an irregular force (comprising 1 and 3 Punjab cavalry) in 1849, the regiment was embodied into the Indian Army in 1921 as Prince Albert Victor’s Own (PAVO) Cavalry. In 1956, after Pakistan became a republic, PAVO was renamed 11 Cavalry (FF). Irregular forces were raised to range the rugged frontier regions of the North-West. ‘Half in and half out of difficulty somewhere along the mountainous line’, Kipling said.

It is worth being reminded that the British conquered their Indian empire with Indian troops. In every campaign only a small British contingent would form the nucleus of a force four times the number of Indian sepoys.

The first Indian commissioned officer (ICO) to join the PAVO was Second Lieutenant H.M. el-Effendi — a vintage cavalry officer who was ‘horsey to his finger tips’. He saw active service in the Western Desert, was captured by the Germans and escaped from his POW camp in Italy to rejoin his loved PAVO.

The year 1938 which saw the beginning of the mechanisation of the Indian cavalry, was both historic and traumatic for its men and officers who were dedicated to their horses. It was a ‘moving moment’ and a ‘sad parting’ for the cavaliers. Unit lines after the departure of the horses presented ‘a very deserted and desolate appearance.’

Just a year later the Second World War — ‘a continuing sequel to the First’ — broke out. The mechanisation of the Indian Cavalry was still in its early stage so it stayed ‘horsed’ in essence and spirit. Only two of its regiments, the DCO (Duke of Connought’s Own) Lancers and the Scinde Horse (14 Prince of Wales’ Own Cavalry) were ‘designated’ for mechanisation.

11 PAVO was engaged in the process of mechanisation since November 1940. On 1 May 1941, the Indian Armoured Corps formally came into existence. Earlier, in December 1940, PAVO received orders for mobilisation and after a ‘flurry of activity’ it ‘safely embarked’ for service overseas by the second week of January 1941.

Col. Effendi gives a phase-by-phase description of the 11 Cavalry through the crucial North African campaign — as a unit of the newly-mechanised Indian cavalry. The regiment not only repulsed ‘half-hearted’ probes by the Italian infantry, but also took a ‘large number’ of prisoners. The war diary dated April 4, 1941, however, ‘nonchalantly’ records that the regiment was not ‘very clear’ about its mission. It ended up under the command of the 4th Indian Division.

The main thrust of the attack by Germany’s 21 Panzer Division came in May 1942 after ‘finishing off’ both the KEO (King Edward’s Own) and PAVO cavalry. Amongst the prisoners taken were captains Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, Hassan el-Effendi and Ashraf Jan. The operational phase of the PAVO in the Western Desert ended in July 1942. In January 1943 the regiment left for India and after an intensive process of reorganisation ‘plunged’ into the eastern theatre of tropical Burma by April 1944.

The theatre commander, General William Slim summed up his operational environment as ‘some of the world’s worst’ afflicted with disease and a most inhospitable climate. The Japanese broad strategic aim was to push through to India to ‘create a great economic empire in Asia’. Even though, the Japanese were defeated in the Imphal-Kohima operation, they continued to fight with undiminished ferocity until Rangoon was captured in May 1945 ending the Japanese threat to India. 11 Cavalry moved to Rangoon (Burma) under orders of 20 Indian Infantry Division under the command of Major Gen Douglas Gracey, the future first C-in-C of the Pakistan Army.

The Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945 ‘triggered off’ the Indonesian resistance movement against the ‘hated’ Dutch. Early in November the 11 PAVO Cavalry arrived in Batavia (Jakarta) and after several months of active soldiering returned to India in May 1946 and was stationed at Bolarum (Secunderabad) in Hyderabad, Deccan.

By early 1947, India’s partition into two states looked inevitable. The Indian Army was to be divided on a ‘three-to-one basis’. Out of 18 cavalry regiments of the British Indian Army Armoured Corps, six including 11 PAVO Cavalry were allocated to Pakistan. Major Masud Khan took over command from the British commandant Lt. Eccles. Captain Hafeez ur Rahman and Yaqub Khan were the other two officers.

The regiment had hardly landed in Rawalpindi when it found itself operationally engaged in the opening phase of the Kashmir war under the command of Lt. Col. Masud Khan, its first Pakistani commanding officer (CO) with his hand-picked second-in-command Major Mohammad Nawaz Khan.

The ‘surreptitious’ Kashmir war turned out to be a baffling mixture of multiple mutually conflicting command and haphazard planning by individuals, each pulling his own weight to win his spurs.

Besides the PAVO spearheading the opening tactical gambit, there were such irregulars as ex-servicemen, elements of the Azad Hind Fauj (Indian National Army- INA) tribal lashkars without a central command and control. ‘General’ M.Z. Kiyani (ex-INA) retired Major Khurshid Anwar, retired Major Shaukat Hayat Khan (a provincial minister) and Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan not to speak of the Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, each had a hand in making a mockery of the war. The redoubtable brigadier (later Maj Gen) Akbar Khan ‘a hapless observer of fiasco of the tribal lashkar’ was shocked at the light heartedness he met at a high-level conference in Lahore about the course and conduct of the war. Certain victory was being taken for granted; Akbar Khan left the conference a much frustrated war.

As for the British officers with Pakistan they ‘kept watching the proceedings from the wings.’ Lt Gen Gracey, acting C-in-C, kept his Indian counterpart, Gen Lockhart, posted with the course of the tribal invasion. Lockhart, for one reason or another, would not pass the vital information to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — much to his obvious annoyance. He would not wait to summon Lockhart and tell ‘him to put in his papers’.

The ‘covert’ war followed its bumpy, haphazard cause until ceasefire on January 1, 1949. The author’s account of the 1965 and 1971 wars except for forays into essential principals of war, remains focused on his role of 11 Cavalry (FF) mainly in the Sialkot and Chaamb sectors. It makes a sad reading on our inept conduct of the two generals on the whole.
 

Excerpted with permission from
Punjab Cavalry: Evolution, role, organisation, and tactical doctrine 11 Cavalry (Frontier Force) 1949-1971
By M.Y. Effendi
Oxford University Press, Karachi
ISBN 978-0-19-547203-5
324pp. Rs595

Col (retd) M.Y. Effendi writes research papers on military history, Central Asia and Afghanistan