Praveen Davar 
Jammu and Kashmir was one of the three princely states (the other two being Hyderabad and Junagadh) that did not accede to India by August 15, 1947, when the British paramountcy lapsed. While the power was transferred to the people in British India, the rulers of the 565 princely states had been given the option to join either of the two dominions – India or Pakistan.
To force Hari Singh, the Maharaja of J&K, to accede to Pakistan, a tribal invasion was engineered by it in the Kashmir valley in October 1947. As the Pakistan army-backed tribals reached the outskirts of Srinagar, the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession on October 26, 1947 and asked the Indian government to rescue his state from the invaders.
Writes Maroof Raza in his book Wars and no Peace: “When the news of this invasion coupled with the urgent appeal of Hari Singh for military assistance reached Delhi both Mountbatten and Nehru reacted with considerable speed to save what was left of Kashmir.”
Also read: Nehru and Kashmir: After SC’s Article 370 Order, BJP Attempts to Distort History Again
This is corroborated by M.J. Akbar in his book Nehru:The Making of India. Akbar writes,”Fortunately, the Prime Minister understood what was happening as soon as he got the news and he wasted not a minute to his response. As it turned out if Nehru has dithered even for a couple of hours, Srinagar would have fallen, and all would have been lost. Later, Nehru himself wrote to his sister Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, then Ambassador in Moscow: ‘If we had dithered and delayed by a day, Srinagar would have been a smoking gun. We got there in the nick of time.'”
Between October 27 and November 8, 1947, several Indian military reinforcements managed to reverse the tide of the battle for the Valley. The raiders were soon in total retreat as the Indian Army entered Baramulla via Srinagar. It is now an accepted view that the onset of the winter snow prevented any decisive operations from taking the momentum of the Indian Army up to Muzaffarabad.
Pashtun warriors from different tribes on their way to Kashmir and Gilgit during Indo-Pakistan war of 1947-48. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Pakistan Army.
On December 20, 1947, the Indian government decided to take the matter to the United Nations against Pakistan’s involvement in the tribal invasion of the Valley. Mountbatten had initiated this idea, and this was to be done under Article 35 of the UN’s Charter. After repeated attempts failed to get a reluctant Jinnah to talk on the subject of Kashmir, Nehru and Patel were forced to establish India’s bonafides over Kashmir in the UN. Their decision was backed by the Cabinet which, besides Rajendra Prasad, included non-Congress stalwarts such as B.R. Ambedkar, Baldev Singh and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. After the onset of summer fighting resumed with both sides seeking to consolidate and expand their footprint in all three regions of the state: Kashmir, Jammu, and Ladakh.
It was eventually on August 13, 1948, that the Security Council passed its three-part Basic Resolution:
(a) It called for a ceasefire.
(b) It asked Pakistan, as the aggressor, to withdraw all its forces regular or irregular (from Jammu and Kashmir). The resolution accepted that India could retain part of her troops in Kashmir.
(c) It called for a plebiscite, stating that the future status of Jammu and Kashmir shall be determined in accordance with the will of the people.
This final part of the UN Security Council Resolution on a plebiscite was NOT binding unless the first two parts of the Resolution were implemented, which are a ceasefire and the total withdrawal of Pakistani forces.
A ceasefire was eventually accepted by the Pakistan Army once it realised it could not pull off a military victory over Kashmir.
Though the Security Council called for a ceasefire in August 1948, Nehru, an ethnic Kashmiri, who knew the state’s topography like the back of his hand, allowed the Army to continue operations as long as it was advantageous to do so. By the end of November 1948, the Indian Defence Forces captured Dras, Batalik, and Kargil, thus securing the route to Ladakh. Simultaneously, they took Mendhar and linked up with the Poonch garrison lifting the year-long siege. India accepted the ceasefire only after the Army had completely secured Ladakh and Rajouri-Poonch sector. Balraj Puri, a well-known journalist who covered the Kashmir operations, has recorded for posterity:
A major cause for the success of the Army in clearing the Kashmir Valley of the raiders was the people and the terrain. The advance could not be maintained with the same ease beyond the Valley, where both the people and terrain were inhospitable. The martial communities of the area which were ethnically and politically closer would have put up stiff resistance. The switch from the role of liberator in the Valley to that of conqueror would have changed the character of the Indian Army. The military and political cost of attempting to conquer the area from Mirpur to Gilgit and Baltistan and retain it within India would have been prohibitive for India at that stage, apart from the fact that it would have lost us much international goodwill.
This argument, according to Raza, “should put to rest all the strategic speculation often indulged in by most Indians as to why the Indian Army did not initiate an operational drive beyond the Cease-Fire Line”. There were other reasons too: tremendous shortage of ammunition, fuel, transport, and other logistics problems. Hence both taking the J&K dispute to the UN in January 1949 was the right decision in the prevailing circumstances of the time. It is easy to be wiser by hindsight. Even so, there was no better option when the infant country was facing many other serious problems – rehabilitation of millions of refugees, acute food shortage, deplorable state of the inherited economy, etc.
In his extremely well-researched book, based on declassified papers, Kashmir, 1947, Prem Shankar Jha, a former editor of Hindustan Times, writes: “Nehru’s seemingly incomprehensible behaviour stemmed from the fact that he was trying to keep not just the ruler, but the people of Kashmir with India. Everything that Nehru did, especially his willingness to treat the accession as provisional, was geared to this purpose. Indeed, nowhere were Nehru’s qualities of statesmanship more evident. Nehru’s willingness to accept a ceasefire while a third of Kashmir was still in Pakistan’s hands was born out of the same type of farsighted calculation… an awareness, honed by his own Kashmiri origins… of the ethnic and religious dissimilarity of Kashmir Valley from the Muslims of Poonch, Mirpur, Muzzafarabad and Gilgit.. once the raiders had been cleared from the Valley, the largely Hindu and Sikh town of Poonch safeguarded, and the road to Buddhist Ladakh cleared at Kargil, Nehru was no longer keen to pursue the war… With the Sheikh opting for India, there was little likelihood of the state as a whole voting to join Pakistan. But if Pakistan did not vacate ‘Azad Kashmir’ this would be a blessing in disguise, for the parts that would not have become reconciled to becoming a part of India were the ones that it had cut away … Nehru’s vision was therefore sound.”
Sharing this vision were his cabinet colleagues Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Jagjivan Ram, Ambedkar, Baldev Singh, and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee.
The same cabinet also later endorsed the introduction of Article 370. A journalist of repute, now in the ruling party, wrote a decade before he switched sides: “Article 370 was viewed then as a victory for Indian unity, and not as a problem, as is being made out by the heirs of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee.” Unfortunately, in the India of today, it is Asatyamev Jayate (triumph of falsehood).
Praveen Davar is a writer, an ex-army officer, a columnist, and the author of Freedom Struggle and Beyond.