Kashmir - Hostage to Nehru’s Romance

 Dr. S. M. Rahman

            The Indian Held Kashmir has had no respite and has literally ‘borne the slings and arrows, of outrageous misfortune’, as its cherished love for freedom has systematically been annihilated eversince 1846, when the British, the proverbial traders sold out the entire territory of Kashmir to a Hindu Raja for a very paltry sum of money. The legitimate aspiration for freedom was ruthlessly crushed by the Hindu ruler, in 1932 and the fate of atrocities throughout the period of Raja’s occupation is much too sordid and painful to recount. When India won freedom in 1947, the Indian forces forcibly occupied through a contrived document of annexation on the part of Hindu Raja as revealed by a British historian, Alistair Lamb. Nehru, violating all norms of international propriety and conduct, flouted the UN resolutions, which explicitly granted the Kashmiris the right to concede either to India or Pakistan through a plebiscite. Nehru made a solemn promise:

[We] have no desire to impose our will on Kashmir … Our assurance [is] that we shall withdraw our forces from Kashmir … And leave the decision regarding the future of this state to the people …through the democratic method of free and impartial plebiscite under the auspices of the United Nation. The pledge we have given not only to the people of Kashmir but also to the world. We will not, can not back out of it.” (26 Oct 1948 and subsequently repeated many times).

            The question is why did he renege on the promise he made to the Kashmiris and to the entire world? No logical explanation has ever been given. Perhaps, there was no conscious justification. Despite being very liberal, Nehru was proud of being born to a Brahmin woman of Kashmir. The mother fixation (what Freudians term Oedipus Complex) was perhaps at the root of his reluctance to part with Kashmir, symbolically representative of his mother. How could it become part of Pakistan – a Muslim country? His obduracy, despite the advice of his mentor. Mahatma Gandhi to honour his pledge for holding the plebiscite, was due to the unconscious motivational determinant, perhaps Nehru himself was not conscious of. To me, it appears that only psychoanalytic explanation appears to be plausible, why Nehru defied his own commitments.

             Nehru, was undoubtedly a very sound politician and a very gifted individual. However, he had a marked weakness for attractive women, as revealed by John Mathai in his book Reminiscences of Nehru Era. Mathai was of Indian civil Service (ICS) and served as Private Secretary to Nehru. He reveals that: there was intense love affair with Lady Mount batten and they would exchange letters very frequently, which incidentally used to be numbered. Mathai narrates that he stole one letter, for which there was a great commotion in the PM’s house. Reading the contents of the letter, Mathai says that these reflected typical adolescent like infatuation for each other. The romance was a source of great embarrassment for Indira Gandhi, who used to seek Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s help in persuading her father to be little discreet about their relationship. Apart from Lady Mountbatten, Nehru  had an affair with an attractive Sanskrit scholar (a jogan). When she conceived out of the illicit relations, she requested that Nehru should marry her, which was declined because that could affect his political career. When a son was born he was kept in a Christian Missionary Boarding School. The son (who must be very grown up by now) never knew who was his real father. Besides, there is also a mention of love relationship with Mrs. Naidu’s daughter, whom Nehru got appointed as the Governor of Bengal. It is revealed that he used to keep her portrait in his bed room, which Indira Gandhi would often remove, which caused some tension between the father and the daughter.

             Khalid Hasan, a gifted writer mentions about Amrita Sher Gil, (Friday Times, May 4-10, 2007), who lived and died in Lahore in 1941. Apart from being beautiful, she was a good painter as well. Once she was asked why she did not paint a portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru? She replied, “because he is too good looking.” The lady came in contact with Nehru when he visited Lahore to address a public meeting. “Although,” says Khalid Hasan, “Nehru and Amrita met no more than three times, but they exchanged letters.” Unfortunately, many of Nehru’s letters were burnt by Amrita’s father, when she had gone to Budapest to marry her cousin. Her mother was Hungarian and father a Sikh landlord from Punjab. She was not happy over the burning episode of the letters. She wrote to her father: “I had left them behind not because I thought them dangerous witness to my evil past but because I did not wish to  increase my already heavy luggage. However, I suppose I have to resign myself to a bleak old age unrelieved of the entertainment that the perusal of old love letters would have afforded it.”

             Love relationship with charming women had an abiding influence on Nehru’s life, notwithstanding some of the political decisions, he made. About the partition of India, some new revelations have out in a book titled ‘The Last Darbar’, by Shashi Joshi, based on Moutbatten’s archive. According to the book written by Joshi, “British Intelligence had advised British Secretary of State as early as 1939 to partition India. Mountbatten had a great desire to become the Viceroy of India, and he had expressed this desire two or three times to his wife Lady Mountbatten, who was the grand-daughter of Sir Ernest Cassels, personal banker of King Edward the Seventh. Sir Ernest was very influential person and he got Lord Mountbatten appointed as Viceroy. The partition of India took place under “Operation Scuttle”. (Ranjinder Puri’s article in outlook India, reproduced in Nation, Feb 5, 2007). The farcical handling of Kashmir, Junagadh, Hyderabad and other princely states come out quite vividly in the book.

             In view of the special relationship of Nehru and Lady Mountbatten, one feels compelled to think that the last minute alterations made in the Radcliffe Award, and Gurdaspur becoming part of India, thus causing great injustice to the cause of Kashmir as a route was provided to India to intervene. Nehru’s hold over Mountbatten, was very obvious. According to the writer: “The popular belief is that Mountbatten guided Nehru but from the remarks in the book it would seem that he himself often took key decisions only after clearance from Nehru.: Quaid-i-Azam knew of this relationship and hence he did not accept the idea of Mountbatten also becoming Governor General of Pakistan. It would have been preposterous.

             When the trouble had erupted in Kashmir, and there was a sort of ceasefire, Shaikh Abdullah told Mountbatten, “I have been thinking Lord Mountbatten about the suggestion you made to me, when I had dinner with you in October that Kashmir should stand independent but have close relations with India and Pakistan. Do you still think independence is feasible.” Mountbaten’s reply was “I am afraid true independence is not feasible. But I am trying to expand the Joint Defence Council and through it Kashmir can be dealt with as a state acceding to both dominions rather than to only one.”

             Is not one hearing the reverberation of the same formula of the Kashmir solution, which was masterminded in collusion with Nehru and Mountbatten? Why than sixty years of pain and anguish to the Kashmiris?