India, with a philosopher, Savrepalli Radhakrisnan, as its president, a brooding intellectual, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the closest disciple of Gandhi, as prime minister, a woman, Nehru's sister Vijaylaxmi Pandit, as its ambassador to the US (women ambassadors were bit of rarity then), and a maverick foreign minister, Krishna Menon, who acted and talked as if he was the founder of Socialism, was the 'darling' country of liberals in American academia, and in majority of the mainstream media.
Nehru's intellect and charm, whenever he chose to switch the charm on, won over even the most hardened interlocutors. Stanley Wolpert in his book 'Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny' writes how he was taken on an absorbing journey on the roots of Indian nationalism, and on the broader horizons of history by Nehru for over an hour when Wolpert was given only a fifteen-minute appointment.
Americans, even those who served as ambassadors to India, or in other positions that brought them into contact with Nehru, usually returned home quite overwhelmed by him. They became India's powerful 'lobbyists' in the US, few more than Ambassador Chester Bowles, who upon return to the US, began to advance India's cause more ardently than India's own incumbent ambassador.
Pakistan assigned an intellectual, and recognised legal brain, to India as high commissioner in the late 1950s, hoping he would build a useful rapport with Nehru. He did, except his reports began to show increasing signs of Nehru's influence on his thinking.
He was hurriedly recalled.Against the Indian leadership mix Pakistan had on offer: Liaquat Ali Khan and Zafrullah Khan, and subsequently Ghulam Mohammed, Iskander Mirza, Chaudhry Mohammed Ali, Suharwardy and the rest who preceded or followed, ending with Ayub Khan during the Nehruvian period.
The seedy political situation in Pakistan, after Liaquat's assassination, is reflected in Time magazine's comment, after Ayub took over in 1958, to effect that 'Nehru will no longer be able to offer the excuse that he would like to talk to Pakistan on Kashmir, and other issues, if only he knew who to talk to. He can begin to talk to General Ayub Khan'.
Nehru talked to Ayub, and in 1964 after Ayub-Nehru-Sheikh Abdullah meetings, a settlement on Kashmir is claimed by Pakistan to have been almost reached, just before Nehru passed away. It seems strange though that the thread of 'settlement' was not picked up by Nehru's successor, fellow party man Lal Bahadur Shastri. Instead, within a year of Nehru's death, India and Pakistan went to war in 1965 over Kashmir. There is clearly a lot more to the tale of the 1965 war than has been given out, just as there is behind the East Pakistan debacle, and humiliation of the Pakistan army in 1971.
Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the powerful Indian minister for interior at independence,
also a hardcore Hindu extremist, considered Hyderabad state's accession to India more critical than Kashmir's.
He is said to have offered not to resist Kashmir's accession to Pakistan if Pakistan did not encourage Hyderabad on seeking to be independent. Patel was overruled by Nehru, less for logical reasons and almost solely for his deep emotional attachment to Kashmir. Liaquat was delusional, he not only saw Kashmir coming to Pakistan, but also saw Hyderabad as an independent state in the heart of India.
India encouraged the Hindu Dogra ruler of Kashmir to push as many Muslim Kashmiris as his forces could into Pakistan. There was an organised massacre of Muslims in Jammu. Pakistan facilitated an Australian adventurer, Sydney Cotton, to virtually run an arms airlift to Hyderabad, blatantly over-flying India in his WW2 transport plane, at heights the Indian Air Force tried, but could not reach.
The Hyderabad and Kashmir issues would not really be problems if
Nehru was less emotional on Kashmir, and Liaquat less delusional on Hyderabad. In the end it was might that became 'right', India seized Hyderabad by force of arms, and stopped Pakistan from doing the same in Kashmir.
Hyderabad became Indian territory, while Kashmir, most of it held by India, ended up in the UN. Pakistan's foreign minister, Zafrullah Khan, debated India to the ground on Kashmir at every UN or international forum. Mountbatten, the Indian governor-general of India, in his official biography by Philip Zeigler, has lamented that "The inept presentation of India's case (on Kashmir) as opposed to the skilled professionalism, both legal and oratorical, of the Pakistan representative, Zafrullah Khan, was a factor in India's lack of success."
Pakistan's impressive presence on international stage in its early years was undoubtedly the result of the competence of the founders of its Foreign Office, and brilliance of its first foreign minister, but neither would have produced results, as they did, without the back-up of the bright and gifted young men, selected through a strictly merit-based procedure, for the country's foreign service, and then methodically trained and developed to be professionals in the field.
If Pakistan is still to recover from the devastating effect of the impulsive nationalisation by the first PPP government in 1972, of industry, banks, education and virtually anything that moved, it continues to stagger by the havoc caused by the same government's abolition, on personal whim of its leader, of the age-old administrative system, without a new one to replace it.
Since then, Pakistan has been caught in a quagmire of incompetence, and is being pushed deeper into it by the pretenders, or successors, of the polity that created the quagmire.
Huh., Now I understand, Wretched Indians BRUTAL HINDU EXTREMISTS and MUSLIM WIMPS with little Islam in their brain made the following tragedy
Otherwise ..If Muslims followed Quran/Sunnah/Hadith whole continent would have been reverberating with Allah hoo Akbaar sounds and Indian Muslims would have been in charge of Mosques in Mecca and Madina.
Topic: Pakistan: The Nation.. The Politics... and The Religion