You have lost a lot of credibility in my eyes, Joe Shearer, sad to see you post statements based on self-assumptions and biased Indian sources. Thought you were better, but it seems not.
Pakistan invaded after 300,000 Kashmiri refugees escaping genocide came knocking on Pakistan's door crying out for help and revenge. These included my grandparents who saw over half of their family slaughtered by Dogra forces.
10 August 1948 report published in The Times:
"237,000 Muslims were systematically exterminated – unless they escaped to Pakistan along the border – by the forces of the Dogra State headed by the Maharaja in person and aided by Hindus and Sikhs.
This happened in October 1947, five days before the Pathan invasion and nine days before the Maharaja’s accession to India."
Pakistan would not sit idly by as this happened.
He is a tyrant descended from a lineage of tyrants. His dynasty was responsible for an extensive ethnic cleansing of the region's Muslims. He alone was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands.
You are very wrong. These tribes began to mobilise the moment Kashmiri refugees began to flood Pakistan. Sometimes the entire male population of a tribe was mobilised, these included children. Many Kashmiri refugees joined these lashkars and were crucial in guiding the Lashkars through various routes in Jammu and Kashmir.
Muslim clerics all around Pakistan, startled and angered by the stories brought by Kashmiris of brutality against Muslims, called for Jihad and revenge. These included many prominent clerics such as the Caliph of the Ahmadiyya community who authorized for the forming of a Ahmadiyya militia known as the Furqan force to help liberate Kashmir.
Sir,
I am not looking for credibility; it is too late in the day for me to tell any story other than what I have personally researched and verified, and I will not change under the threat of incurring the displeasure of somebody, however much I respect them and their views. My respect for you and most of your colleagues is immense; however, you will agree that for me to repeat something that I have not verified and not convinced myself about will be hypocrisy of the highest order. I hope it is not come about that at this late stage, you think me to be capable of such hypocrisy. Before you decide that I am fixed in my views and that these are based on one-sided and Indo-centric accounts, do yourself the favour of reading what I have to say specifically about the matters that you have mentioned.
There is not a single fact that I have mentioned based on what has been mysteriously described as 'self-assumption' or on Indian sources. Not one. Your inability to discriminate between parochial, self-serving writing and my documented account is not my problem at all.
The Violence in West Jammu
This is not unknown, and it was neither accidentally nor deliberately omitted from my account. I have also gone through Christopher Snedden's very useful account, and the tables that he prepared are familiar; if you have quoted them in your note, it would have been proper to mention the source. I am familiar with the figure of between 300,000 and 500,000 casualties or displacements of Muslim families living in that region, and with the accounts that they have preserved of the attacks on them and their settlements by local Dogras who were their neighbours and by Sikhs bent on taking revenge for the mass attacks in the Punjab.
The Lashkars and their composition, assembly and arming
Having said that, it is wrong both to infer that the tribals raids were directly inspired by the outrage and indignation that these occasioned, or to assume that these were spontaneous, as you have suggested in your note. My inferences are based on two sources over and above Snedden, Brigadier Akbar Khan's "Raiders in Kashmir", and Tariq Ali's account in his publications. Both have confirmed that it was sought to convert the standstill agreement into a compelled accession to Pakistan by the Maharaja, and towards this end, Akbar Khan and others were asked to organise demobilised ex-servicemen, arm them with surplus arms that had come to Pakistan's share, and provide them leadership from officers of the Pakistan Army who were to go on leave and serve this mission. This was against the backdrop of General Messervy's refusal to countenance the intervention of the formal Army in Jammu & Kashmir.
I regret that the picture of spontaneous mobilisation presented is not consistent with these sources, themselves Pakistanis in positions of authority or knowledgeable about the background of these events.
You have mentioned the mass mobilisation of entire tribes, and their support and guidance by Kashmiri Muslims that enabled them to approach the Maharaja's forces and attack them. On the other hand, it is clear from both the Pakistani accounts that I have cited that there was ONE group, that they were a coherent group with no outriders, no segments and no independently active contingents, that they reached Muzaffarabad as one group, that they were welcomed there by the newly formed representatives of the Government of Azad Kashmir (the government in question being located outside the state), and that they set out from there as one body for Srinagar by way of Baramula.
These two accounts cannot be reconciled. As long as I have printed accounts by Pakistani sources on the one hand, and anecdotal evidence based on oral history on the other hand, it is plain that in case of a difference between the two, which version must take precedence.
This obviously relates to the raid that went from Muzaffarabad through Baramula towards Srinagar. I have not dealt here in detail about the northern raid, led by a combined contingent of the Gilgit Scouts and the State Forces of the Mehtar of Chitral. It was that contingent, those two columns, that captured the greatest extent of territory before being driven out, including the whole of Gilgit, the whole of Baltistan, including Skardu and then Kargil, and finally Leh (which was besieged). Nothing that the raiders did came close to emulating these feats.
I have NOT taken my account from Indian sources; my sources are respectable and well-placed Pakistanis and their accounts. If you have alternative sources contradicting these, do feel free to produce them. You have not done that so far.
I request that you should go through these two accounts before further comment on the matter. It seems from your note's contents that you are already familiar with Snedden, whether you choose to acknowledge him or not; a little extension of your reading will bring us onto the same page.
Lastly, it is a matter of some regret that some of us should assume that we are the sole repositories of the accounts of those days, or, for that matter, that the death and destruction that accompanied those events were confined to areas familiar to us alone. In case it has slipped the attention of Pakistani readers, there were as many deaths in the east; India is distinguished for its refugee rehabilitation programme in that 95% of funds allocated for refugee rehabilitation was devoted to the refugees from west Punjab, and 5% was spent on those fleeing east Pakistan. The minister in charge was, of course, a refugee himself, one from the west Punjab.
It was the Roman custom for candidates for election to stand in the Forum in candidates' togas, and to seek to win the votes of constituents by showing the wounds that they had won for their country in battle. I would rather not emulate that practice, and would rather keep my own family's personal tragedies outside this account, except to mention that I am a descendant of families that belonged to Dhaka and to Barisal, and now live in Hyderabad, and confine myself to the written fact, and to well-documented accounts exclusively from Pakistani sources.
