T H E I N F O R M A L WAR

Investigations Department in Rawalpindi, Major Asghar Ali Shah, a security

officer at Hillan, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Taj Din, Inspector of
Police in Nowkote, again in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. As far as I have
been able to determine, these charges were the first legally supported allegatio
ns
by Indian authorities of Pakistani covert sponsorship of terrorism in India.49 O
ver
the coming decades, dozens of similar charges would be leveled against Pakistan,
as the secret war was ratcheted up to ever-higher levels.
In addition to this kind of low-grade terrorism, the India Pakistan Cease-Fire
Line (CFL) in Jammu and Kashmir itself remained unstable, much as it was to
be after the rise of jihadi terror in the 1990s. On May 7, 1955, for example,
an armed patrol of the Pakistani Border Police crossed on to the Indian side of
the Sialkot Jammu frontier and opened fire on a party made up of both soldiers
and civilian employees of the State Agricultural Farm. As a result, an officer,
five other ranks and six civilians were killed. The UN Military Observer Group
subsequently carried out an investigation, which deemed the incident a violation
by Pakistani troops.50 Such incidents could not have but fuelled Indian concerns
about the direction that events in Jammu and Kashmir were headed.
Critics of Indian policy during the period have often asserted, correctly, that
it did not apply the same standards of democracy to Jammu and Kashmir at
this time as were applied to other States. Sumit Ganguly has noted that the
national political leadership, from Jawaharlal Nehru onwards, adopted a singular
ly
peculiar stand on the internal politics of Jammu and Kashmir: as long as
the local political bosses avoided raising the secessionist bogey, the governmen
t
in New Delhi overlooked the locals political practices, corrupt or otherwise .51
Nehru himself candidly admitted that it was true that political liberty does not
exist there in the same measure as in the rest of India .52 The fact remains,
however, that Jammu and Kashmir, unlike any other State, was on the theatre of
a continuing sub-conventional conflict which could have at any stage escalated
into an India Pakistan war.
Politics after the war
The threat of war
and the fact that Jammu and Kashmir s accession to India
was being contested through covert warfare by Pakistan shaped the course of
politics in Jammu and Kashmir.
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah took power as Prime Minister of Jammu and
Kashmir in 1948, having earlier served as head of the war-time Emergency
Administration. The pressures on him were immense. He had little experience in
administration, and, from the outset, his relationship with Maharaja Hari Singh
was strained. Hari Singh complained that Abdullah was communal; Abdullah in
turn complained that the Maharaja was sponsoring violence by Hindu fundamentalis
t
groups in Jammu. Hindu elites opposed the National Conference because it
threatened to strip them of their land and privileges; Muslim elites because of
Sheikh Abdullah s stubborn opposition to Pakistan.53
27