Chapter 135: Ceasefire?

South Block, New Delhi

3 July 1950

Lahore had fallen on the twenty-eighth of June without a fight. Brigadier Hussain’s surrender at Karachi had cast its shadow before it, and the garrison, short of bread and cut off from Rawalpindi, marched out of the walled city under a white flag. The 1st Armoured Division entered through the Delhi Gate at noon. General Cariappa, who had never been one for ceremony, did not attend.

Five days later, he stood before the war map in the Cabinet Room and told the Prime Minister that the war was, in his judgement, as good as won, and that he intended to stop.

"Stop, General?" Nehru said. He sat with the Law Commission’s draft still open at his elbow.

"At the Jhelum, Panditji. Lahore is ours. Sialkot, Gujranwala, Sheikhupura, the whole of the Rechna and Bari doabs. We hold Karachi and Hyderabad, Sukkur and Rohri, the Makran coast, Khuzdar, and Quetta’s southern approaches. We hold the passes north of Gilgit. If I go on, I take Rawalpindi in a month, perhaps six weeks. And then I have to hold Rawalpindi."

"You do not wish to hold it," Ram said.

"I wish to hold what I have, Prime Minister, and hold it well." Cariappa laid his swagger stick on the map. "My supply lines run six hundred miles from Delhi by rail and road, and the Air Force flies half the rest. My divisions have been in the field for fourteen months. Every town we take has a hundred thousand hungry civilians, and every one of them has to be fed from our granaries. I have taken, in round figures, four million new mouths since April. The Punjab is the richest wheat land in Asia, and the harvest has been trampled flat."

"Your plan, General?"

"We consolidate our supply lines. We dig in on the Jhelum, we keep the Air Force over the Chenab-Jhelum doab, and we turn every captured district into a supply hub to the new borders, and administer it under the laws of the Republic with a working civil administration behind it. We do not advance until the engineers have laid broad-gauge track to the front and the depots are full. After that, we advance only if there is a reason."

Patel, in his high-backed chair, grunted. "A reason being?"

"If Pakistan will not make peace, Sardar-sahib."

"They will not," Patel said. "Liaquat Ali has repeatedly said he will fight in the mountains. I intend to believe him."

"Then he will fight in the mountains with nothing to eat." Ram came away from the window. "I agree with the General. We do not need Rawalpindi. We need Pakistan to understand that we can wait longer than it can. The refugees are doing more than the divisions now."

He had said it quietly, and nobody replied for a moment. The refugee figures were on the table, and none of them liked reading them. By the end of June, some four million people had fled north and west from the Indian-held districts into what remained of Pakistani Punjab, the North-West Frontier, and the Pakistani-held valleys of Kashmir. The Indian Army had fed everyone who asked. It had put no one on a train. But the rumour had run ahead of the guns, and it had done more than the guns.

"The enemy may use the time," Patel said.

"The enemy has no time to use, sir. Look at what we hold." Cariappa counted on his fingers. "Karachi and the whole Makran coast. Sindh from the sea to Sukkur, with every barrage on the Indus. Baluchistan, where the Khan of Kalat has signed and the sardars are with us. The high passes of Kashmir and Gilgit. Lahore, Nankana Sahib, Kartarpur and Hasan Abdal. Pakistan keeps the northern Punjab and the Frontier. It has no port, no oil, little coal, and fifty million people to feed from a third of the land it began with."

"And three million refugees on its roads," Patel said.

"Whom we have not driven there. I want that said every time anyone asks." Ram looked at Mullick. "How much longer can they fight?"

Mullick answered carefully. "Prime Minister, I will say what I can and what I cannot. Since the purge, we have been blind inside their government. We do not know what the War Cabinet intends, or what it is saying to the British, or to anyone else. What we can read is the country itself. Wheat in Lahore reached eleven times the pre-war price before the city fell. The railway from Karachi to the Punjab is ours, so their fuel comes by a single road through Quetta. The Frontier tribes were paid in advance in April and have not been paid since. The refugee count on the Punjab roads is three million four hundred thousand and rising."

"So?"

"So, I cannot give you a date. I can say they cannot fight on much longer. If I had to say how long, I would say not past the end of the year, and perhaps much less. The army can still shoot. It cannot eat, and it cannot be resupplied."

"Mr. Kao?"

"The same, Prime Minister. I would add one thing. A government that cannot see its way to winning will look for a way to stop. I have no source that tells me which way. I think we must be ready for several."

"We will be." Ram turned back to the map. "General Cariappa, I agree with you. From today, your whole task is consolidation. Engineers on every bridge and canal. Supply depots at Lahore, Sukkur and Karachi. Air bases at Mauripur and Walton. The Sindh railways in order by September. Every battalion that has fought gets leave, and every battalion that has not gets the line." He paused. "I want the border from the Ravi to the sea monitored, controlled and plugged at your discretion. The raiders who came to Ajnala and Kot Mehrban crossed by night through gaps. When this war ends, there will be no gaps."

"The Border Security Force is not yet formed, Prime Minister."

"Then the Army holds it until it is. That is the price of the fence."

Cariappa saluted. As the chiefs began to file out, Kao spoke from the end of the table.

"East Pakistan, Prime Minister. Akbar Khan has proposed an offensive through Jessore toward Calcutta, to take the pressure off the west. His own staff will not support him. East Pakistan has one under-strength division, three battalions of Bengali Rifles and no armour, and the Punjabi officers do not trust the Bengalis. A raid on Benapole on the twenty-fourth was thrown back by the 4th Gorkhas by noon. The prisoners said Calcutta would rise to meet them. Calcutta read about it on page four of the Statesman."

Patel laughed shortly. It did not turn into a cough.

"A raid is one thing," Ram said. "Mullick, I want a plan on my desk within the fortnight for a different thing. They have three million refugees in the west. They have a government that has found it cannot feed them. Suppose they decide to push people across the border, in the east or the west, refugees or not, in numbers we cannot stop with a patrol. Hundreds of thousands, with armed men among them. What do we do on the Bengal and Assam borders, and what do we do in the Punjab? I do not want to be inventing the answer in the hour it is needed."

"I will have it, Prime Minister," Mullick said.

"Work it with Cariappa and Kao. Let each of you find what the other has missed." Ram folded the map. "That is all. Chiefs may go. Nehru, Menon, Setalvad and Mr. Kao stay."

South Block

The same afternoon

The service chiefs had left. The door was shut. Nehru sat on Ram’s left, and Krishna Menon on his right, with a thin folder open before him. At the foot of the table sat M.C. Setalvad, the Attorney-General, a spare grey man with a legal pad and a pencil he had sharpened himself. Patel had stayed in his chair. Kao stood by the window.

"Mullick has told us what he can," Ram said. "They cannot fight on much longer. When they stop, they will not surrender to us. They will go to Lake Success, for it is the only way they have any hope of a reversal. I do not know when. I want to know what we will do when they do. Krishna, begin with the Council."

Menon turned a page. "Eleven members, Prime Minister. The five permanent ones: America, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and China. Six elected: Norway, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and ourselves."

"Who is voting for China?"

"The Nationalists still hold the seat. Their delegate is Dr. Tsiang, a patient, bookish man who has never raised his voice in my hearing. His government sits at Chongqing and governs perhaps a third of what it did. Peking has applied for the seat and has been refused. It is a fiction, and the Council knows it, but it is the fiction the Americans insist upon."

"And Moscow?"

"Absent. The Russians walked out of the Council in January over the China seat and have not returned. Their chair is empty. It makes the Council very quiet." Menon permitted himself a thin smile. "It also means there is no one to veto anything in a hurry."

"That cuts both ways."

"It does, Prime Minister. For six months the Council has been a Western club."

"Then, let us count the votes," Nehru said.

Menon ticked them off with his pencil. "Pakistan will bring a complaint and ask for a cease-fire with the forces withdrawn to the lines of the fourteenth of May. Britain will support her. She has always supported her in Kashmir, and this war is half of her making. France will follow Britain. She is still sore over Geneva.

"Norway votes with the Atlantic powers and will vote with Britain. Cuba and Ecuador vote as Washington votes. Egypt will be moved by the cause of a Muslim state in distress. That is six, and perhaps seven. Yugoslavia is Tito, who hates Moscow, but he also hates anyone who sets the great powers to dictate to the small. I would call him undecided."

"Nine is what they need."

"Nine, with no veto. Here is the difficulty for them. If America and China vote for Pakistan, they have nine. If America votes against, or abstains, they have six, perhaps seven. The Nationalist delegate will vote as Washington tells him, unless he has a reason not to."

"Has he?" Ram asked.

Kao spoke from the window. "He has one, Prime Minister. The Generalissimo’s armies in Yunnan and Szechwan are still being fed through Assam. If India closes the corridor, they will be hungry and out of bullets within the month. Dr. Tsiang knows it. I would not say he would vote against Pakistan. I would say he would find a reason to be absent."

"And America?"

"America signed a pact in April to defend Western Europe," Menon said. "She has spent the year being told by the British that India is a danger. She has spent the same year being told by Ambassador Henderson that India is a friend. Mr. Acheson will want a cease-fire, because he wants every fire in Asia to go out and focus solely on containing the Soviets in Europe. He will not want to be seen forcing India to give up what she has won in a war she did not begin. I think he would vote for a recommendation to stop. I do not think he would vote for anything with teeth."

"Setalvad," Ram said. "What can they do to us?"

Setalvad laid down his pencil.

"Less than the newspapers will tell you, Prime Minister. I have spent three weeks on the Charter. Two kinds of resolution matter here. The first falls under Chapter Six, which governs the peaceful settlement of disputes. It allows the Council to recommend. It does not allow it to compel. A recommendation to cease fire and withdraw is a request. A member may decline it."

"And we would be a party?"

"We would, and under Article 27, paragraph three, a party to a dispute must abstain from voting on a Chapter Six resolution. That means we could not veto it. But it also means it cannot bind us. If Pakistan wants a resolution that India is required to obey, she must go to Chapter Seven."

"Which is?"

"Action with respect to threats to the peace and acts of aggression. Under Article 39, the Council must first determine that a threat to the peace, a breach of the peace, or an act of aggression exists. Once it has, under Articles 41 and 42, it may order sanctions or the use of force. Those decisions bind every member under Article 25." Setalvad paused. "They require nine votes, and no negative vote from a permanent member. It is the most serious thing the Council can do. It has never done it to anyone."

"Could they find India an aggressor?"

"They could try. I think they would fail, and I think I can say why." Setalvad took a sheet from the folder. "Every Pakistani officer killed in Kashmir carried his paybook. Our troops recovered more than two hundred in January alone. The raid on Baramulla, the Domel mutiny, Gilgit, the camps at Attock and Sargodha, all are documented. A bomb at Ajnala that killed fourteen, and the abduction at Kot Mehrban, sworn to in an affidavit by the headman. The girl Santosh made a statement to the Tribune.

"Our Mutual Defence Pact with Kashmir was signed before the invasion, on the twenty-ninth of September. We acted in defence of a state that had asked. Under Article 51, the right of self-defence is inherent. We have never crossed an international boundary except in answer to an attack."

"A Council that wishes to find against us will do so regardless of evidence," Nehru said.

"If it has the votes, Foreign Minister. It does not. It would need America, and America will not. It would need Moscow not to veto, and Moscow is absent, which is the one point on which I have doubt." Setalvad looked up. "If the Russians return, they will veto any Chapter Seven resolution against us. If they stay away, they cannot. Washington would have to choose whether to carry a resolution that no American president can afford, or to let it die."

"Which would the President do?"

"He would let it die, I think," Menon said. "He remembers the Chinese dossier, and more importantly, the KMT are still being supplied through our borders."

Ram sat for a moment. "So, the realistic danger is a Chapter Six resolution, recommending we stop where we are and withdraw behind the old lines."

"Yes, Prime Minister."

"Which we need not obey."

"We need not, legally. I will not tell you there is no cost. A government that is seen to defy the Council loses a measure of sympathy. The newspapers will call it defiance. The British will say India has put herself outside the family of nations." Setalvad spread his hands. "The cost is political. It is not legal. And I would add that the Council has twice in the last two years requested Powers to cease fire and withdraw, in Indonesia and in Palestine, and on both occasions the Powers continued until their own ends had been reached. The Council did nothing."

"A precedent," Nehru said.

"Several."

"I do not like it," Nehru said slowly. "I have spent my life arguing that India should be a good citizen of the world. I do not want her to begin her career at the United Nations by ignoring it."

"Nor do I, Jawaharlal." Ram leaned forward. "Which is why we do not wait to be asked. When Pakistan comes to the Council, we will not be defending ourselves against a recommendation. We will have our own proposal on the table the same week. A cease-fire, offered by India, on the lines we hold, with conditions that no sensible member can call unreasonable."

"What conditions?" Patel asked.

"The release of every abducted woman, living, from Peshawar to Attock, with a Red Cross inspection, and the abolition of those markets. The closure of the training camps. The dissolution of the lashkars. The return of every Indian prisoner. The surrender of the men who ran the Ajnala and Kot Mehrban raids, to be tried by a neutral tribunal. A permanent line, fenced and patrolled. And recognition, by Pakistan, of the accessions of Kalat, of Sindh, of Gilgit and the rest."

"They will not accept the last."

"They will not accept any of it. That is the point. We will have stated a peace they could have had, in public, with every concession we can defend. When they refuse, the Council will see who has been asked to withdraw from what."

Menon almost smiled. "It is a trap, Prime Minister."

"It is a proposal. It becomes a trap only if they refuse it." Ram looked at Menon. "I want you in New York when the time comes, with a draft already in your case. The evidence, Setalvad’s brief, and every photograph and affidavit we have. I want the American, Egyptian, Cuban and Yugoslav delegates seen individually. The Egyptians in particular. Their sympathy is genuine, and it is not for sale, but it can be answered. Ask them about how India can mediate in their difficulties with the Suez."

"And the Nationalist delegate?"

"Say nothing to him. Let him think."

"Kao," Ram said, without turning. "Whatever your sources can tell us about when Pakistan means to move, I want it, however faint."

"I have none, Prime Minister. I would be lying if I said otherwise. The British know, and Pakistan’s friends in London know, and I do not."

"Then we prepare for every date. Menon leaves within a day of the first sign, and Setalvad’s brief is in his hands before he goes."

Nehru sat looking at the table. "It will be said that I was against this, Ram. That I raised objections and was overruled."

"It will be said that you were the one who reminded the country of the principle," Ram said. "That is worth more than being the one who agreed."

Nehru lifted his head. For a moment he almost smiled.

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