THE LONGEST AUGUST 9781568587349-text.indd i 12/8/14 11:24 AM Dilip Hiro ALSO BY 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) 9781568587349-text.indd ii 12/8/14 11:24 AM THE L O N G E S T A U G U S T The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan DILIP HIRO New York 9781568587349-text.indd iii 12/8/14 11:24 AM Copyright © 2015 by Dilip Hiro Published by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group 116 East 16th Street, 8th Floor New York, NY 10003 Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address the Perseus Books Group, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107. Books published by Nation Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected]. Typeset in 11.5 point Adobe Caslon Pro by the Perseus Books Group 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 9781568587349-text.indd iv 12/8/14 11:24 AM Contents Maps vii Preface xi Introduction 1 1 Th e Modish Dresser Meets the Mahatma 9 2 Gandhi’s Original Sin: Injecting Religion into Politics 27 3 Th e Two-Nation Th eory: A Preamble to Partition 51 4 A Rising Tide of Violence 75 5 Born in Blood 91 6 Th e 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 Th eory 200 11 Zulfi kar Ali Bhutto: Th e 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 9781568587349-text.indd v 12/10/14 3:30 PM Preface Th e fi rst 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. Th e 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 affi l- iation. In the case of Ireland, it was diff erent 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-fi fth 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. Th ey left behind their immovable properties and most of the movable goods. Th e respective governments confi scated 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 9781568587349-text.indd xi 12/8/14 11:24 AM PREFACE partition. Th is 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. Th e 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-fi ve miles southeast of central Bombay. Th ese 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. Th ere was no hope or wish to return to what had become the “other” country. Th at door remained shut. Th e story of my personal journey from serving as a qualifi ed 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-fi fth of humanity. In the introduction I explain that the sixty-fi ve-year-old Kashmir dis- pute has its roots in the tensions between Hindus and Muslims dating xii 9781568587349-text.indd xii 12/8/14 11:24 AM PREFACE back eight centuries. Th e subjugation of the Indian subcontinent by Brit- ain after 1807 gave rise to Indian nationalism within a century. Th e aim of the anti-imperialist movement that rose sharply after World War I was open to two diff erent interpretations. One was to end Britain’s imperial rule and transform enslaved India into a sovereign state. Th e 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. Th e 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. Th is 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. Th e Khilafat leaders backed the noncooperation campaign Gandhi launched in 1920. Its sudden suspension by Gandhi disappointed and bewildered them. Th e 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 offi cial permission. In the face of Gandhi’s spiraling fame, Jinnah moved his legal practice to London. Th is 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 Th eory. Th ough 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 offi cials toward the beliefs and mores of Muslims. Th e 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 9781568587349-text.indd xiii 12/8/14 11:24 AM PREFACE tensions turned into violence. Th e 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.” Th e next chapter outlines the fi ght 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. Th e issue was referred to the United Nations, but it would prove insoluble for many decades. Th e two neighboring countries developed diff erently. Democracy based on a multiparty system and universal suff rage 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 eff orts 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-fi re and withdrew its forces to prewar posi- tions. Th is armed confl ict created a bond between China and Pakistan that has endured ever since. Th is is the essence of Chapter 8. Th e succeeding chapter recounts the war that Pakistan started in India- held Kashmir in September 1965. Th e three-week hostilities failed to deliver what Pakistan had hoped: the destruction of the status quo in xiv 9781568587349-text.indd xiv 12/8/14 11:24 AM