Daily Times

Pakistan’s path to freedom was crammed with blood, terror, rape, and plunder. In 1947, millions of peaceable people abandoned their hearths and homes and fled India to migrate Pakistan in pursuit of free, safe, and secure lifestyle.

The last Viceroy of British India, Lord Mountbatten, had a cynical role in ramping up migrants’ miseries. At the time of partition of India in 1947, he had pledged to make sure that “there is no bloodshed and riot” during the transition of government to India and Pakistan.

But Mountbatten viciously failed to keep his promise and demonstrated sheer incompetence in preventing communal disturbances, violence, and killings. As a result, about one million humans were killed while the world also witnessed arguably the largest mass migration of history.

Women were the prime victims of the partition of India. Tens of thousands of the abducted women went through relentless mental and physical ferocities after they were forcibly held as permanent hostages, captives, and forced wives in the “other” country. However, rapes of Muslim women were roughly double than those of Hindu and Sikh women.

Mountbatten manifested a great bias towards India and against Pakistan. He crooked the rules in a way that preferred India and pressurised Sir Cyril Radcliffe to alter the boundary in India’s favour. Radcliffe was the chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission that was responsible for the demarcation of British India into India and Pakistan on religion lines.

Mountbatten manifested a great bias towards India and against Pakistan

While British India was alienated into two independent dominion states – India and Pakistan – based on two-nation theory (Hindu and Muslim), the princely state of J&K remained a relic discord between the two South Asian rivals of the subcontinent.

At the time of division, Mountbatten deliberately kept mum about 1846’s Treaty of Amritsar, which entitled Gulab Singh to rule J&K, and was scrapped through Article 7 of the Independence Act. The Act was passed by the British parliament on July 18, 1947, and subscribed the creation of India and Pakistan. It also rescinded the suzerainty of His Majesty over British India and its princely states including J&K, all treaties, agreements, obligations, and grants.

So it was Mountbatten’s perfidious insolence that piled up convoluted rumpuses between India and Pakistan on J&K and pressed the historians to reproach British imperialism for independence, which was accompanied by a bloody partition and communal violence amid Hindus and Muslims.

As it was mutually agreed among all sides that the Muslim-majority regions would be assigned to Pakistan, the geopolitical location of J&K and the fact that it was largely Muslim populated necessitated the state’s ruler Maharaja Hari Singh to enjoin the territory with Pakistan. But Indian took control of the J&K militarily and averred that the Hindu monarch has signed an Instrument of Accession with New Delhi.

The Instrument is alleged to have signed on October 26, 1947, and Indian forces began to intervene in J&K on the morning of October 27, 1947. Historian Alastair Lamb argues that the date of signing the accession agreement is false as the Maharaja was travelling by road from Srinagar to Jammu on October 26, 1947. So it wasn’t possible for him to sign the Instrument while he was escaping to save his life.

Lab further maintained that the earliest possible time of signing the documents by Maharaja of J&K was in the afternoon of October 27, 1947, after the overt Indian intervention in the state. “Falsification of such a fundamental element as the date of signature, however, once established, can only cast grave doubt over the validity of the document as a whole,” Lamb clinched.

Even if such an agreement was signed between Maharaja and the Indian emissaries, the divisive contract clarified that J&K would retain autonomy in all matters except defence, foreign affairs and communications. The contract also did not bind the state to Indian constitution and stipulated that the ruler’s decision to accede to India must be ratified by the people of J&K through a referendum/plebiscite, which never took place.

Mountbatten’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, said he had “legendary capacity for self-deception” and he “was a man who preferred falsehood to truth.”

Ziegler also panned the Instrument that had handwritten corrections and ended with the last sentence “in haste and with kind regards.” This speaks volubly about the state of Maharaja’s mind and authenticates that the instrument was extracted under coercion and duress so should be invalid in the court of law. While no UN resolution incorporates India’s view that Maharaja had acceded to India, the accession instrument stands stolen.

Although New Delhi had incorporated Article 370 in its constitution (despite not being in practice), it did not fit comfortably at all with the “authoritarian Indian administration(s).” On August 5, the fascistic BJP regime eventually abrogated Article 370 (and Article 35A) and striped the semiautonomous status of J&K.

The writer works in a private organisation, “Market & Business Analysts” and writes on geopolitical issues and regional conflicts