On the eve of Gandhi Jayanti one cannot but dwell on how pained the Mahatma would have been at the aggravated bitterness in relations between India and Pakistan since the Uri massacre. One also recalls that in September 1944, Gandhi defied everyone to meet Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Bombay. Some believe that the only outcome of the Gandhi-Jinnah talks was to increase Jinnah’s stature and indicate parity between The Congress and the Muslim League. For Gandhi, it was an attempt at harmony when the outlook seemed most threatening.
So it is again in a different – but no less dangerous – sense. That only further underlines the imperative of looking for solutions, and highlights the relevance of the federal prescription that a British journalist called Arthur Moore, who was editor of The Statesman, proposed. As Moore warned, “Pakistan canal disputes, boundary disputes, displaced persons disputes — all these may be solved; trade between the two countries may be developed; but there will never be satisfactory relations between India and Pakistan till the Kashmir issue is amicably settled.” Hence his plea for a triangular confederation.
Gandhi approved of the notion. So did Jawaharlal Nehru. But then as now, politicians committed to exercising power, fanatics whose loyalty is to religion, and a public driven by passion rather than geopolitical reason refused to consider anything so rational. If our TV anchors and news casters shaped policy, India and Pakistan would have been at war by now. Since both are nuclear armed nations, war might have meant devastation if not utter destruction. Military analysts call for “deniable” raids and “strategic strikes.” Some army senior officers recommend India should train guerrilla fighters as the answer to Muslim fedayeen and send them to wreak havoc in Balochistan.
Some Pakistanis say India is already doing so, in fact, has been doing so for years not only in Balochistan but also in the notional Pakhtoonistan. Pakistan is mortally afraid India will attempt another Bangladesh. Indians argue that if it could be done in Bangladesh, it can be done again. That this is the only way of curbing Pakistani terrorism. Even civilian commentators think Narendra Modi should emulate George W. Bush Jr’s retaliation to Nine-Eleven.
The possibilities are many but all fraught with danger. Bush carried the punishment campaign into enemy territory and added to our political vocabulary that ominous phrase “regime change.” His policy also ensured enduring havoc for Afghanistan and Iraq. Breaking Pakistan up into Balochistan, Pakhtoonistan and other such units would only compound our security worries in the west. They would be weak and vulnerable states, victims of constant power struggles in which the ultra-fanatical Islamic State would gain ascendancy. Deniable raids and strategic strikes would all invite counter reprisal, possibly even from China. India has many restive minorities, and not only in the north-east, whose discontent has been exploited in the past, and can be exploited again.
The dramatis personae changes but the play and plot remains the same. It was with these considerations in mind that Nehru confessed to Selig Harrison of the Washington Post, “Confederation remains our ultimate goal.” He said it off the record but Harrison published the scoop and there was immediate outcry from the Pakistanis who accused India of hegemonic ambitions. That was in 1962, 14 years after Moore spoke to Gandhi about his plan for Kashmir to “be treated as an equal third party” in “a federated Commonwealth state, with common foreign affairs, common defence, and such finance as concerned these subjects, but all three to be separate self-governing states.” While aware that premature publicity would raise Pakistani hackles, Nehru thought a federal link would mean a negation of the two-nation theory which he had always found repugnant. It would satisfy Jammu and Kashmir’s aspiration for being recognised as a separate identity. It might also provide an answer to East Bengal’s growing irredentist feelings.
Nehru may even have sent Sheikh Abdullah to Pakistan in May 1964 as his unofficial emissary to broach these ideas. This was in the wake of the Hazratbal incident (a hair of the Prophet Mohammed had disappeared from the shrine in Srinagar on 27 December 1963) and the vicious pogrom against Hindus in what was then East Pakistan. Field Marshal Ayub Khan, who had earlier warned he would not be responsible for the reaction in Pakistan to the Hazratbal incident, was later to claim that he rejected Abdullah’s proposed confederal arrangements among India, Pakistan and Kashmir. He saw it as a ruse for Indian domination. In any case, Nehru’s death on May 27 put an end to both the visit and the negotiations. A shattered Abdullah flew back to New Delhi for the prime minister’s cremation.
Arthur Moore was convinced federation was the only way out for the subcontinent. He was an Ulsterman who had come to India in 1922 to report for the Times, London, joined The Statesman as an assistant editor in 1924, and became editor in 1932 after Bengali nationalists made two attempts on the life of his predecessor, Sir Alfred Watson. Moore also represented the Bengal European constituency in the Indian legislative assembly from 1927 to 1933 when he became a friend and admirer of Motilal Nehru, also a legislator, so that he called his essay on Jawaharlal in A Study of Nehru, an anthology that Rafiq Zakaria edited in 1959, “My Friend’s Son”. Moore remained editor until Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, pressured the owners of The Statesman to sack him in 1942.
He had been converted to the one-world theory in the l930s and proposed self-government for India in an article in the Manchester Guardian in October 1938 titled “A Federal British Commonwealth”. The British authorities were not pleased when Moore reprinted the article, which was a plea for India to be granted dominion status, in The Statesman. It also urged the immediate federation of transport and communications under a single command with the warning, “We must federate or perish.”
After independence, Moore applied the federal principle to practical politics, and argued that the Kashmir problem, which he saw as “the great test for Nehru’s statesmanship”, might lend itself to a tripartite solution. Gandhi “was much interested” in his views and asked him to get Nehru’s opinion. Moore was about to do so when tragedy struck – the Mahatma was assassinated. It was no time to worry a grieving Nehru with solutions for Kashmir, but when Moore could raise the matter, Nehru didn’t dismiss it with a “No.” He replied that “the time is not yet.”
Now, too, the time looks like being not yet. But the time has to be created. Kashmir is the great test for Modi’s, as it was for Nehru’s, statesmanship. It demands an imaginative far-reaching vision as well as courage and administrative ability. The signs may not seem propitious for such a venture but as has been said, the hour before dawn is the darkest of the night.
