Archival truths

My college guru and Foreign Service colleague, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, erstwhile ambassador to China and later to the European Union, timed to perfection the release of his War and Diplomacy in Kashmir 1947-48 (Sage, Rs 440). Nothing could have made for better preparation to receive Tony Blair than this instructive return to Britain’s Kashmir policy half a century ago in circumstances which bear a disturbing resemblance to what we are faced with today.

Then it was ‘‘raiders’’, now it is ‘‘terrorists’’; then it was ‘‘informal war’’, now it is ‘‘proxy war’’. ‘‘Cross-border terrorism’’ is a 21st century phrase (which alone explains why the Vajpayee team failed to invoke it in the Lahore Declaration of the last year of the last millennium), but Jawaharlal Nehru was complaining of the ‘‘bases and nerve centres’’ of the tribal irregulars in Pakistan back in October-November 1947. What saves Dasgupta’s story from being a twice-told tale is that he tells it from a new angle: the British perspective, as evidenced by the voluminous documentation released under Britain’s thirty-year rule. We no longer have to conjecture what the Brits were up to. Thanks to Dasgupta, we can now readily access their motivations, intent and purpose in the words of the principal British actors themselves. A perusal of this is instructive to guard in the New Year against Britons bearing gifts.

Dasgupta begins with the British chiefs of staff assessment in July 1947 which stressed that ‘‘the area of Pakistan is strategically the most important in the continent of India (sic)’’. As was shown in the war on bin Laden, the western view then is the western view now. Any expectation that this strategic interest will be over-ridden in favour of a judicious determination of the sources of terrorism would be as unrealistic in 2002 as it was 55 years ago. Which is why the western language of 1947 sounds so familiar when we hear it again in ‘‘the first war of the millennium’’.

As Pak-based ‘‘guerrillas’’ (which is what they called ‘‘terrorists’’ then) mowed through Kashmir and menaced Srinagar itself, Prime Minister Attlee cabled Nehru, ‘‘I beg of you not to let your answer’’ to the J&K Maharajah’s appeal for assistance ‘‘take the form of armed intervention’’. And matching this counsel of restraint on India, he appealed to the Pakistani prime minister to ‘‘use your influence with any such who have already entered Kashmir to return home’’. Half a century later, Tony Blair paraphrases his predecessor to urge restraint on India while gently prodding Musharraf to ‘‘use his influence’’ with the Jaish-e-Mohammed to persuade ‘‘any such’’ of their agents as might have holed themselves up in Kashmir ‘‘to return home’’. And Musharraf lends ear to this appeal with all the sincerity and earnestness which Jinnah displayed in ’47.

Within the overall view that Pakistan, not India, was the cornerstone of western military strategy in South Asia to protect their critical life-line to oil in West Asia and contain the Soviet Union in Central Asia, two key imperatives of an immediate nature directed the course of British policy in 1947. One was that ‘‘the accession of Kashmir is the heaviest blow yet sustained by Pakistan in its struggle for existence’’. The phrase is not picked from Musharraf’s latest speech but the October 1947 despatch to Whitehall from the British high commissioner in Karachi. It carried the day then in determining the British line that ending Pak-sponsored raids into Kashmir could not be divorced from a mutually accepted settlement between India and Pakistan of their dispute over Kashmir.

Dasgupta succinctly sums up the debate in the UN Security Council in January 1948 on the Indian complaint of Pakistani aggression: ‘‘The Western Group backed Pakistan on three crucial issues: that Pakistan could take no effective action to stop the invaders until a formula was found for a solution of the Kashmir problem acceptable to her; that the Abdullah government would have to be replaced; and that the United Nations must not only observe the plebiscite but actually hold it under its authority.’’ In Tony Blair’s view in 2002, as in Clement Attlee’s view in 1947, the point is not the termination of Pakistani aggression (then through raiders, now through terrorists) but a settlement which satisfies Pakistan so that they need not any more despatch raiders or terrorists, as the case may be, across their borders into India since they have got what they want already.

The other imperative was Palestine. The UN partitioned Palestine in November 1947. The British were anxious that their scuttle receive the backing of Muslim opinion in West Asia. Dasgupta quotes the UK Foreign Office memo to Attlee: ‘‘The Foreign Secretary has expressed anxiety lest we should appear to be siding with India. With the situation as critical as it is in Palestine, Mr Bevin feels that we must be very careful to guard against the danger of aligning the whole of Islam against us.’’ Doubtless 30 years from now, we will discover similar nonsense in the briefing papers received by Tony Blair before he set out on his New Year foray to our troubled subcontinent.

The UK and the West generally continue to refract the issue of terrorism in Kashmir through the prism of their extraneous interests in West Asia and Central Asia. This is, of course, no longer focussed on the Great Game of containing Russia but accessing the greatest reserves of natural gas in the world — Central Asia generally and Turkmenistan in particular. Afghanistan is the first transit country on the route. Pakistan is the second. India is not needed. Which is why the ‘‘global war on terrorism’’ has co-opted the principal source of terrorism as its principal ally.

Jaswant Singh prides himself on buying at least one book a month. In his role as the NDA hen laying all its eggs in the western basket, perhaps he should be induced to encash a few of his frequent flyer miles on buying Dasgupta’s little offering. He may learn the truth of his fellow home minister’s view that in fighting terrorism we are all on our own. Tony Blair has been given a polite hearing — and kissed goodbye. To rely on him and his masters in Washington to terminate Pakistani terrorism in India would be to do the greatest disservice to our vital national interests.

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