There is an ingrained belief in India to this day that India all but lost her case before the Security Council because the US deliberately subordinated its consideration of the merits of the Kashmir case to the dictates of the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union. In his letter to Attlee dated 11 February 1948, Mountbatten reported that India attributed the UK’s unfriendly stand at the UN to ‘British support for American power policies’. The Belgian Ambassador to India, the Prince de Ligne, also told Nehru that the US stance on Kashmir was determined ‘less on the merits of the dispute than by US global interests in the light of the tensions with the Soviets’. Nehru also told the Permanent Under-Secretary to the Commonwealth Relations Office, Gordon-Walker, that ‘the motives of the United States were to get military and economic concessions in Pakistan’.
A close examination of British documents of the period shows, however, that this was a misapprehension on Nehru’s part, based to some extent on his excessive trust in the British sense of fair play and his personal liking for and trust in Mountbatten. While Cold War considerations did come to dominate the US–India–Pakistan relationship, this happened after the Communist revolution in China and the start of the Korean War had brought the war against communism to Asia. In January to August 1948, the US did indeed not have a personal axe to grind. Its position on the Kashmir issue was, however, shaped with great finesse by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Relations Offices.
The proposal to take the matter to the UN undoubtedly came from Mountbatten. But the circumstances that made him do so are not clear. Even less clear are the circumstances that led Nehru to accept the idea. The only plausible explanation is that at the end of December, although the Valley was under Indian control, the situation was fluid in the rest of the state. As the minutes of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet bear ample witness, Nehru knew perfectly well that Pakistan was behind the incursions and was not likely to vacate Kashmir without a fight.
He may have thought that taking Pakistan to the UN as an aggressor was the best way to forestall the injection of the Pakistani army into Kashmir. At any rate, on 31 December, India went to the Security Council under Article 35 of the Charter alleging that Pakistan was giving aid to tribesmen from the North West Frontier to invade what by then was clearly Indian territory.
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This gave Britain the opening that it had been looking for. On the very same day that India approached the Security Council—in fact within a matter of hours—the UK Commonwealth Relations Office sent the following telegram to its High Commissions in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India and Pakistan:
‘This is an unparaphrased version of a secret cypher message and the text must first be paraphrased if it is essential to communicate it to persons outside the British and United States services’. (emphasis added)
It then went on to state in the most unambiguous terms that the conflict in Kashmir was not, as India claimed, with tribesmen and others incited and armed by Pakistan, but with local insurgents who had rebelled against the Maharaja when he acceded to India, whom the Indian army was attempting to crush.
Apart from its dogged determination to foist an interpretation that it was fully aware was false, this telegram is significant because it reveals how quickly Britain had succeeded in forging a special relationship with the US on the Kashmir question.
Just why Britain was doing this becomes apparent from the contents of a telegram sent by the CRO to its missions in the Commonwealth countries twelve days later:
‘We must be particularly careful to avoid giving Pakistan the impression that we are siding with India against her. In view of the Palestine situation this would carry the risk of aligning the whole of Islam against us’ (emphasis added).
There it was. Under American pressure the British were pulling out of Palestine without making any attempt to prevent the inflow of illegal Jewish immigrants who had been interned during the war in Cyprus, and without attempting to put down Zionist attacks and defend the rights of the Palestinians. But all of its vital interests, including investments in the oil industry, were in Islamic, mostly Arab countries—Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the Trucial States. Supporting Pakistan against India was a quick and cost-free way of dividing the Muslim world and thus protecting these vital interests. Significantly, there was not a single word in this crucial explanation about the Soviet Union or communism. That was a goad it would use in the future to make a sceptical US administration fall in line.
This excerpt has been published with permission from ‘The Origins of a Dispute’ by Prem Shankar Jha.