Kashmir Affairs - Security & Conflict Analysis of Kashmir

Lentha: Mujahid ki Diary (Urdu)
By Lt. Colonel Mohammad Abdul Haq Mirza Sher Jang
Compiled by Anwar Ayub Raja
Bradford: The Book Centre, 2004

Review by Murtaza Shibli
10 August 2008

A story of love, betrayal, emotion, intrigues and misfortune, this is a diary of a dejected and displaced Kashmiri who is thrown into the thick of action due to the love of his motherland. He is an embodiment of the festering wound that Kashmir has become. It offers a rare opportunity to reflect upon the political uncertainty and servitude that have become the collective experience of Kashmiris.

Mirza Abdul Haq Beg is orphaned at only ten months old. Son of a policeman, he completes his Matric (10^th grade) in 1941 from Akbar Islamia High School Jammu and joins Khaksar Movement of Allama Inayatullah Mashriqi. Later he joins police force and is trained in Srinagar for nine months. But in 1944 he resigns from his job and moves to Jalalpur Jatan in Punjab and begins life as a shopkeeper. Soon after 15^th August, Mirza faces reality when some Muslims spread rumours that Hindus and Sikhs have killed Muslims in a nearby village. This raises tempers and results in attacks against the local Hindus and Sikhs. Being a member of Muslim National Guards (MNG), an organisation founded to stop such riots, he is shocked when his fellow MNG members participate in the riot. Many innocent Hindus and Sikhs are killed while he unsuccessfully tries to stop the dance of death. In another incident he sees a Muslim police officer looting money from an affluent Hindu trader. In disgust, he burns his MNG uniform, sells his shop and leaves for Kashmir.

His return to Kashmir is no different. He suddenly finds himself entangled in the web of bitter relations that follow the creation of India and Pakistan. Over the years he completely loses himself as he encounters bias, hatred, racism at the hands of the Pakistani Army and civilian establishment. Lentha, a colloquial Pahari word for eagle, is unusually chosen by the editor of the dairy, Anwar Ayub Raja as the title. Lentha depicts the struggle of Kashmir through the life of a Kashmiri whose life was wrecked and interrupted by the events of 1947 and its aftermath. An original piece of work, distant from the official claims of bravery and festivity, this book depicts the failures and frustrations, joys and pains of the people of Kashmir and their attempt to define their identity through war, struggle and politics. It shows how such efforts have been frustrated by outside forces. Haq Nawaz lives a very unhappy life and dies a tragic death. Despite his great military service, he suffers a lot of humiliation and racism for being a Kashmiri. He is denied recognition and after his retirement circumstances force him to leave Kashmir and migrate to Gujrat in Pakistan where he writes down his thoughts in a diary. But no one, not even his former friends are willing to meet with him or acknowledge the receipt of a photocopy of his diary, because they are fearful of what might follow. The new and seemingly free ‘Azad Kashmir’ had squeezed any space to manoeuvre for those seeking true freedom and democracy.

Haq Nawaz is blunt about the role of Qabaili Raiders from the North West Frontier Province who were sent to Kashmir in 1948 to aid the ‘freedom struggle’. He exposes their brutalities and their penchant for killing, rape and loot. It was due to their greed and lust, writes Haq Nawaz, that many Gujjar sardars shared information about their movement with the Indian army. He highlights the miseries of two Hindu women from Rajouri - Chand and Kanta whose family were killed as they were subjected to sexual abuse and rape before being rescued by the advancing Indian Army. He writes about how Qabaili raiders humiliated the people of Kotli-Khoyi Rata and on one occasion he disarms a group of these raiders. ‘Raider incursion has clouded the whole matter and undermined the contributions of Kashmiri Mujahideen’. [p. 64]. This, he states, created and widened tension between the Kashmiri fighters and Pakistani rulers.

He curtly and bluntly describes his encounters in life. He emerges as human when he describes his first military engagement with the Indian Army, saying that his heart was filled with dread at the beginning. He talks about tribal intrigues and differences among various clans of Azad Kashmir and how their mutual historical rivalries posed a challenge, since they refused to cooperate with each other in the ‘liberation of Kashmir’. He expressly assigns blame to Sudhan tribesmen for their refusal to help anybody outside of their clan area and claims that Sardar Abdul Qayoom Khan, former President and Prime Minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, never fired a shot and was very scared to enter the battlefront. This goes against the belief that Qayoom was the first man to fire a bullet - hence the much publicized title Mujahid-e-Awwal or the first Mujahid.

His observation about the role of the Pakistani Army in the 1948 battle is that it was a disjointed and disparate force, a ragtag army that had no direction or purpose; everyone engaged or disengaged according to his own will or choice. He talks about a Pakistani Army colonel - Ali Akbar - who was too scared to enter the battle front and whiled away his time in waiting and finding excuses. Similarly, Subedar Major Natha Khan ‘did not fight the enemy but took credit for many victories and became famous’. On one occasion, Haq Nawaz fights under the command of a Pakistani Army officer and it turns out to be a huge disaster. The commander is too afraid to fight and gives his rifles and ammunition to the villagers and deserts the camp in hurry.

Haq Mirza writhes in pain while pointing at the intransigence of Pakistani rulers, the Army and the “criminality of Azad Kashmiri leaders to exploit the Kashmir issue”. He is critical of Pakistani leaders concluding that the Indian leadership has always done private deals with the Pakistani leaders. He says that Liyaqat Ali Khan had a personal deal with Nehru, adding “Kashmir was treated like a colony during Liyaqat Ali Khan’s regime” (p.64). He calls the ceasefire of 1948 a conspiracy, saying that Pakistani government didn’t want to go further into Kashmir. To silence the critics and divert attention from its 1948 defeat, the Pakistani army arrested the resistance fighters, calling them Indian agents. Haq Nawaz’s diary clearly demonstrates that the Kashmir conflict is an asymmetrical conflict, in which Kashmiri resistance movement supported by Pakistan is old fashioned and run by semi-literate fundamentalists. It is always and easily outsmarted by the well developed, professional political and military setup of India.

To add to this insult, he gets a rude shock when he comes back from Jihad and realises that all the credit is taken by the Pakistani Army and its elusive Generals who were nowhere to be seen on the battle front. He concludes that the Pakistani official media had constructed and fed lies to its people. He has nursed a sense of embitterment as he laments the inaction and torpor of the Pakistani Army at every stage. He is very critical of the role of colonial British officers who were still in the Pakistani Army. Haq finds that they also frustrated efforts to help to the Kashmiri resistance fighters.

After the war with India, Haq Nawaz gets a commission in the Azad Kashmir Army only to encounter racism, hatred and rejection at the hands of what he calls the Punjabi dominated Pakistani Army. He starkly points out the institutional bias and bigotry towards the newly formed Azad Kashmiri Army. When he finished his training from the Infantry school he was made lieutenant with a salary of Rs. 150 a month. However, a Pakistani Army Lieutenant got 350 a month. His salary as a Lieutenant was later raised by Rs 50, but the disparity with the Pakistan Army was never bridged. Later, when the Azad Kashmiri Army was amalgamated into Pakistan Army the racism against them continued and they were humiliated and they couldn’t usually progress beyond Major rank.

The book carries some interesting and personal anecdotes of tension, fights, ego-clashes, frustrations and his romantic encounter with a beautiful Gujjar girl on the edge of a war zone. He is honest in depicting his emotions and frustrations. While on the war front, in August 1948 he falls in love with a Bakerwal girl after he sees her legs while she was playing with water in a nearby stream. She was the daughter of Chaudhary Ali Mohammad Zaildar of Budhal, one of the top nobles of the region. She later offers him food and he cherishes and continues to see her for some time, despite the fact that Mirza Haq knew that he was “married and had a nice wife”.

There are some bizarre twists and claims in his story as well. Haq attributes his earlier success against the Indian Army at the Pir Panchal mountain range to the ‘blessings’ of the Sufi Pir Panchal on whose shrine he had slaughtered a sheep as offering. But later, as he and his colleagues are beaten by the Indian Army, that period of blessings seems to have evaporated without any explanation. He also feeds into the widely held belief that Qadiyanis, damaged the resistance movement against India. He states that the followers of this new faith supported Indian claim on Kashmir. However, he fails to offer any conclusive evidence. Qadiyanis are followers of Mirza Ghulam Qadyani a British funded and inspired Muslim scholar who variously claimed to be an Islamic prophet, Jesus and Hindu god in the late 19^th Century. There is a deep running feud between the Muslims and Qadyanis, fuelled by its founder Mirza Qadiyani, and his often militant rhetoric and controversial conjecture.

He was also part of the 1965 Guerrilla war and plays a significant role in carrying out operations inside the Indian controlled Kashmiri territory. In 1965 Pakistan Army led 15,000 guerrilla forces into the Indian part of Kashmir, where they stayed for more than month and took full control of the Keran Valley. The planning of the Pakistan Army and its intelligence agencies could be gauged by the fact that according to Mirza Haq, “the list of friends and enemies given to us by the Army Intelligence Directorate was useless - as many people among them had either died or were untraceable”. He talks about many Kashmiri civilians, government servants, local men and women who supported them and helped them during their stay in the Kashmir Valley. He narrates an incident about a young boy who would bring him and his people cigarettes and other supplies, but the local Pandit trader suspected him and got him killed by the Indian Army. The operation was suddenly called off, which he calls the betrayal of the Kashmiri people. On 11/12 October 1965, he ‘breaches the trust of the Keran people’ and returns to Azad Kashmir along with his men via Kalang Mallang. He fights with the Pakistani Brigadier Khilji, who blamed Kashmiris for the failure and blames the Pakistani Army for the failure of the operation, and condemns those who blame Kashmiris for their failure during the mission. He concludes that all the Pakistani forces got back safely “only because of the Kashmiri people”. After the 1965 retreat of the Pakistani Army from Kashmir, they made many Kashmiri officers into scapegoats and arrested and tortured them, accusing them of being Indian agents.

He concludes, “Freedom of Azad Kashmir was not due to any professional army but the people of Kashmir” and makes this shocking judgement, that the Pakistanis don’t trust Kashmiris and never thought seriously about preparing Kashmiris for a proper resistance struggle. Though the book was written long before 1990 when the popular resistance movement started, it has many of reflections on what Kashmiris have experienced during the last 20 years. It reminds us of how the dreams of Azadi were constructed in the minds of Kashmiris and later abandoned in 1948, 1965, 1971-74, Kargil war in 1999 and now the militant resistance from 1990. The book contains a strong lament on the Azad Kashmiri politicians, that they are “paid agents of Pakistan” and concludes that “Pakistanis and Kashmiris have always fought with emotions and blindly and without any plan or assessment”. A wonderful resource that gives us insider’s view of history away from the official glare and spins and lets us peep into the tragedy that Kashmir has become. A shortened version of this book has been translated into English. The Withering Chinar is published by the Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad Pakistan.