NEHRU, SHEIKH ABDULLAH AND THE ACCESSION OF KASHMIR

Why did Nehru Support Abdullah?

On October 26, 1947, a meeting at Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s residence would eventually decide the future of Jammu and Kashmir. We get the full story of what happened that day, in Former Jammu and Kashmir Prime Minister Mehr Chand Mahajan's autobiography, Looking Back. 

“Give army, take accession and give whatever powers you want to give to the popular party (National Conference headed by Sheikh Abdullah), but the army must fly to Srinagar this evening, otherwise I will go and negotiate terms with Mr (Muhammad Ali) Jinnah (founder of Pakistan) as the city must be saved,” cautioned Mehr Chand Mahajan to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Nehru fumed at the J&K PM, “Mahajan, Go away.”

As Mahajan got up to leave, Patel detained him and murmured in his ear, “Of course, Mahajan, you are not going to Pakistan.”

As Mahajan’s threat to go to Lahore to sign a deal with Jinnah hung in the air,  a piece of paper was passed on to Nehru.

“Sheikh Abdullah, who was staying in the Prime Minister’s house, was overhearing the talks. Sensing a critical moment, he sent in a slip of paper to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister read it and said that what I (Mahajan) was saying was also the view of Sheikh Sahib,” recollects Mahajan. “His (Nehru’s) attitude changed completely.”

Abdullah, an avowed enemy of Jinnah, wanted to head the government in the state and opposed the idea of Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan.

Mahajan’s telling account of the accession of Kashmir to India comes from his autobiography which was first published in 1963.

Sheikh Abdullah with Nehru

A notable lawyer in pre-independence Punjab, Mahajan (1889-1967) was appointed a judge of the Punjab high court in 1943. He was the Indian National Congress nominee on the Radcliffe Commission, formed to demarcate the boundary between India and Pakistan following the partition and also of the Royal India Navy Mutiny Commission of 1948.

Most importantly, he played a key role in Kashmir's accession to India as J&K’s Prime Minister during Maharaja Hari Singh's reign between October 1947 and March 1948 when Sheikh Abdullah succeeded him. Later, Mahajan became a Supreme Court judge and retired as the third Chief Justice of India in 1954.

The most interesting fact is that Mahajan had become the PM only on 15 October 1947- he visited Kashmir at the invitation of the Maharani Tara Devi in September 1947 and was asked to be the Prime Minister. He served in that post until 5 March 1948. Tara Devi, mother of Dr Karan Singh, separated from Hari Singh in 1950.

“As per my understanding, Mahajan is the only one among the protagonists of the episode who has left us with the written account of the extremely crucial meeting and his integrity is unimpeachable,” said Karan Singh, son of  Hari Singh.

Mahajan records that by October 24, 1947, tribal raiders from Pakistan had reached the borders of Srinagar. 

By mid-October, small bands of armed mercenaries - now viewed as Pakistan's attempt to test whether Indian forces were rushing to rescue the King - had started guerrilla raids on bordering villages. Pakistan was now ready to invade the Kashmir Valley but it carried out its military mission masquerading as raids by tribal invaders. In truth, the whole operation - codenamed Operation Gulmarg - was placed under Pakistan Army's officers. This has been detailed in a  book, Raiders in Kashmir, by Pakistan Army's retired Major-General Akbar Khan, who was part of the military plan.

On October 22, thousands of tribal mercenaries and Pakistan Army regulars invaded the Kashmir Valley overrunning the outposts manned by the King's forces in Muzaffarabad and other places as they headed towards Srinagar, their ultimate target.

Records Akbar Khan: “On October 26 (1947), the Pakistani forces captured Baramulla where only 3,000 survived out of 14,000. The troops were now only 35 miles from Srinagar when the Maharaja (Hari Singh) sent his papers of accession to Delhi asking for help.”

According to Khan, at the beginning of September 1947, he was asked by Mian Iftikharuddin, then a leader in the Muslim League (the ruling political party) to prepare a plan to take over Kashmir.

“Ultimately, I wrote a plan under the title of “Armed Revolt inside Kashmir”. As open interference or aggression by Pakistan was obviously undesirable, it was proposed that our efforts should be concentrated upon strengthening the Kashmiris themselves internally -- and at the same time taking steps to prevent the arrival of armed civilians or military assistance from India into Kashmir,” Khan said.

Giving proof of top leadership’s role in the crisis, Khan Wrote, “I was called to Lahore for a conference with the prime minister of Pakistan Liaqat Ali Khan. On arrival there, I first had to attend a preliminary conference at the Provincial Government Secretariat in the office of Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan who was then a minister in the Punjab government. I saw copies of my proposed plan in the hands of some...”

“On October 22, the operation began with Pakistani forces crossing the border and attacking Muzaffarabad and Domel on October 24 from where the Dogra troops had to withdraw. The next day these troops moved forward on the Srinagar road and again took on the Dogras at Uri... On October 27, India intervened and sent troops to Kashmir,” Khan wrote.

In the summer of 1947, Hari Singh had toyed with the idea of remaining independent, a kind of Switzerland of Asia, but with Pakistan organising a raid on the state, the Dogra King was left with no option but to accede to India. He dispatched his deputy Prime Minister Ram Lal Batra to Delhi with the proposal of accession.

Hari Singh sent two personal letters to Nehru and his deputy PM Sardar Patel, seeking military help. Despite Batra reaching Delhi, there was no sign of Indian military help in Srinagar.

Meanwhile, Jinnah had decided to celebrate Eid at Srinagar. According to Mahajan, Jinnah ordered his British commander-in-chief Frank Walter Messervy, to march two brigades of the Pakistani army into J&K on October 27, one from Rawalpindi and the other from Sialkot.

The Sialkot brigade was to take Jammu and capture Hari Singh while the Rawalpindi brigade was to reach Srinagar. But Messervy refused to march the troops of one dominion to fight those of another dominion (of the UK) without consulting the supreme commander of both the dominions. Hence, Mahajan rushed to Delhi.

Hari Singh appealed to Lord Mountbatten, the Governor-General of India for Indian military aid. In his Accession Offer dated 26 October 1947 which accompanied The Instrument of Accession duly signed by him on 26 October 1947, Hari Singh wrote "I may also inform your Excellency's Government that it is my intention at once to set up an interim Government and ask Sheikh Abdullah to carry the responsibilities in this emergency with my Prime Minister."

The Supreme Commander Claude Auchinleck told Jinnah on October 26 that Kashmir had decided to accede to India, which therefore had the right to send troops at Maharaja’s request. Jinnah then cancelled his orders.

The next morning, the Indian army landed in Srinagar following the offer of accession as well as the Maharaja’s promise to consider handing over power to Sheikh Abdullah.

A few days later, as per the desire of Nehru, Sheikh Abdullah was sworn in as head of the emergency administration and as the Prime Minister of the state, from March 5, 1948.

He raised a force of local Kashmiri volunteers, dubbed as Dagan Brigade to patrol Srinagar and take control of administration after the flight of the Maharaja along with his family and Prime Minister Meher Chand Mahajan to Jammu even before the Indian troops had landed. This group of volunteers would serve as the nucleus for the subsequent formation of the Jammu and Kashmir Militia. This, Abdullah hoped, would take over the defence of Kashmir after the Indian army was withdrawn. 

This was articulated in his letter to Sardar Patel dated 7 October 1948 in which he wrote, "With the taking over of the State forces by the Indian Government, it was agreed that steps would be taken to reorganise and rebuild our army so that when the present emergency is over and the Indian forces are withdrawn the State will be left with a properly organised army of its own to fall back upon." Abdullah has alleged that most of the Muslim soldiers of the Militia were either discharged or imprisoned before his arrest in 1953.

The Rise of Abdullah

Abdullah was born on 5 December 1905 in Soura, a village on the outskirts of Srinagar, 11 days after the death of his father Sheikh Mohammed Ibrahim. As claimed by him in his autobiography Aatish-e-Chinar, his great-grandfather was a Hindu Brahmin, a Kashmiri Pandit of the Sapru clan, who converted to Islam after getting influenced by a Sufi preacher. His father had been a middle-class manufacturer and trader of Kashmiri shawls. Abdullah, the youngest of six siblings, had to walk the distance of ten miles to school and back on foot, but in his own words, the joy of being allowed to obtain a school education made it seem light work.

In 1930, Abdullah obtained an M.Sc in Chemistry from Aligarh Muslim University. There he came in contact with and was influenced by persons with liberal ideas. Abdullah and his colleagues were influenced by the lectures of a Kashmiri polymath and lawyer Molvi Abdullah. Molvi Abdullah's son, Molvi Abdul Rahim, Sheikh Abdullah and Ghulam Nabi Gilkar were the first three educated Kashmiri youths to be arrested during the public agitation of 1931.

Kashmir's first political party the Kashmir Muslim Conference with Sheikh Abdullah as President, Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas as general secretary, and Molvi Abdul Rahim as Secretary was formed on 16 October 1932, and subsequently, Abdullah became an undisputed leader of Kashmiri Muslims.

Mahajan

Abdullah was introduced to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937. As a leader of the Indian National Congress, he too was demanding similar rights for the people of British India and had formed The All India States Peoples Conference for supporting the people of Princely States in their struggle for a representative government. Thus the two became friends and political allies.

On 27 April 1939, it was decided to rename Muslim Conference as All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference.

Suspicious of outsiders, National Conference leaders Abdullah, Abbas and Bazaz declared that it would be most harmful and dangerous to bring the Kashmir Freedom Movement under the influence of any outside organisation. It was decided that the organisation should keep aloof from the Indian National Congress as well as the Muslim League.

Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas, later President of POK, acknowledged Nehru’s influence in the renaming of the Muslim Conference, thus:

“Sheikh Abdullah was now out of our hands and had adopted Nehru as his Guru and probably also as his spiritual leader. In view of the political situation obtaining at the time and the policy pursued by the Maharaja and his Government with regard to Muslims, it was considered by us suicidal to cause disruption in Muslim ranks.”

Nehru, himself of Kashmiri ancestry, and opposed to Jinnah, read the situation politically. Abdullah and the Muslims in his fold entertained feelings of fear, and distrust towards Jinnah. Abdullah knew that he could never be equal in the Muslim League and a leader of Kashmir in an Independent Pakistan. But Nehru treated him as an equal and a brother. In their speeches, Nehru and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan paid generous tribute to Abdullah’s qualities of leadership at the first anniversary of the National Conference at Baramulla. When Nehru entered the pandal, Abdullah himself raised slogans of "Pandit Nehru Ki Jai". Both Nehru and Khan were taken in a boat procession in Srinagar.

On 7 August 1940 at a meeting held at Shitalnath (Srinagar), Nehru told the gathering of Kashmiri Pandit youths:

“If non-Musllms want to live In Kashmir, they should join the National Conference or bid goodbye to the country. The National Conference is the real national organisation and even if a single Hindu does not become its member, it will continue to be so. If Pandits do not join It, no safeguards and weightage will protect them.”

It is difficult to guess why Nehru gave this advice, but it should be read in the backdrop of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley fifty years later, in 1990.

Nehru also defended Abdullah, during the Quit Kashmir agitation in 1947 leaving the crucial negotiations he was conducting with the Cabinet Mission. Nehru was accompanied by three eminent lawyers, Dewan Chaman Lal,  Asaf Ali and Baldev Sahai, ex-Advocate-General, Bihar, followed by hundreds of Congress workers. However, Nehru was not allowed to enter Kashmir.

On 29 July 1947, as part of track II diplomacy, Nehru and other Congress leaders persuaded Gandhi to go to Kashmir. In the first week of August 1947, Gandhi visited Kashmir for talks with Maharaja and Begum Abdullah (Sheikh was in jail at that time) for an assessment of the situation and to assure every key player of their honourable place in free India. 

Nehru is accused of delaying the acceptance of the Instrument of Accession till Abdullah gave his nod. Nehru is also accused of not liberating the POK in 1947, the part of Kashmir that is now with Pakistan. It is said that Nehru wanted Abdullah’s approval as only he could mobilise Kashmiris against Pakistani raiders. But no reference is found to Nehru’s understanding of the Poonch revolt by Sudhans led by Sardar Muhammad Ibrahim Khan against the Maharaja.

The Sudhan/Poonch rebellion

About 40,000 of the Sudhans had fought in WWII under the Britishers. Many of them joined the Indian National Army of Subhash Bose. Major General Mohammed Zaman Kiani, Chief of General Staff of the Indian National Army, was put in charge by Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to overthrow the Maharaja of J&K in September 1947. 

General Kiani established a General Headquarters, GHQ Azad, based in Gujrat, a city in the Punjab province of Pakistan. From there, Kiani’s forces organised raiding operations on the Kashmir border and directed the Kashmiri rebels in Poonch, eventually leading to the formation of the POK. Col. Habibur Rehman, from Bhimber in POK, served as his Chief of Staff. It was the same Colonel Habibur Rehman whom Nehru defended. 

After the World War, Lt. Col. Shahnawaz Khan, Col. Habibur Rahman Khan, Col. Prem Sehgal and Col. Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon of the INA were put to trial at the Red Fort in Delhi for “waging war against the King Emperor”, i.e., the British sovereign. The four were defended by Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Nehru, and Bhulabhai Desai. However, Kaini and Habibur Rehman were not Sudhans.

The popular politics of Kashmir and Kashmiri identity that was evolving to become inclusive of the entire state became fractured and started to be reduced back to the Valley. The leadership of the Muslim Conference from Jammu, particularly Sudhans, saw no role for themselves in the politics of the state in alliance with the National Conference.

Sudhans wanted to have their own hegemony or tribal supremacy of Jirgas in Afghanistan and North-West Pakistan. It became a subplot within a complex problem: the ambition of Sheikh Abdullah vs. an ethnic tribe led by Chaudhary Ibrahim Khan. 

Thus, Muhammad Ibrahim Khan, a Sudhan, became the first President of the POK. He held the post of President four times, till 1950.

Ibrahim Khan

Ibrahim was dismissed during his first term and retd Colonel Sher Ahmed Khan, a  scion of the Sudhan tribe and the senior most military officer from Poonch, was made a cabinet minister with responsibility for defence, education and health. Sher Ahmed Khan was forced to resign because his community, the Sudhans, were strongly opposed to his appointment in view of the dismissal of their Chief,  Ibrahim Khan. 

This led to violent demonstrations, particularly in the Rawalakot and Pallandri areas of Poonch and a showdown occurred between the Sudhans and the Pakistan Army contingents posted in the area. The Poonch situation became so bad that the POK Police could not control it. Members of the Punjab Constabulary of the Pakistani Army were brought in. The Pakistan Army’s 12th Division, with headquarters in Murree and with forces already deployed in POK, joined in the suppression, declaring martial law in Poonch. Some Sudhans captured 120 soldiers of the Punjab Constabulary, and their arms. Sudhan’s anti-government actions started in February 1955 with an assassination attempt in Poonch on the POK President Sher Ahmed Khan. It took one year to suppress the uprising in 1956.

A resistance movement seeking a more democratic state of POK has been active since September 1950. In 1951 a parallel government was formed in Poonch in retaliation to Pakistan’s dismissal of  Ibrahim Khan as head of state. The situation calmed down for some time because of Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination.

When Ibrahim Khan was dismissed by Pakistan, a revolt erupted in Rawalakot and Palandri in the Poonch district. A military contingent of 120 personnel led by Major Osman (A Bengali officer who later led Mukti Bahani to establish Bangladesh in 1971 as Brigadier Osman) was sent in to crush the revolt and arrest its leaders. After an initial skirmish, Ibrahim’s forces were defeated and his tribe was disarmed under the guidance of Pakistan’s then Minister of Kashmir Affairs, Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani.

Over the years, Sudhans lost control of power. They have realised that it is not possible to achieve independence through armed struggle. Mirpuris also seem to have the same goal but they are not a fighting race. They were hated by people from West Pakistan. They slowly started asserting their identity as far back as the Gandhar days. They refused to be known as Pakistani Muslims and successfully got an official status for their language Mirpuri or Pahari. 

Nehru was perhaps aware of the ambitions of the Sudhans and their revolt against Muslim Pakistan prevented him from liberating the present POK in 1948. The Sudhans revolted against Muslim Pakistan. If they had fought against India, it would have been more intense and a constant headache for India. Even then, Nehru's bonhomie with Sheikh Abdullah remains still a mystery.

Nehru's deal with Abdullah

Ironically, Abdullah was instrumental in the drafting of Article 370 in the Constituent Assembly (then Article 306A). He even got into intense arguments with Gopalaswami Ayyangar over the provisions of the article. He eventually also fiercely advocated Azadi (independent status) for Kashmir, which was shot down and subsequently also led to his imprisonment.

Nehru in Kashmir

In an interview on 14 April 1949 to The Scotsman, Abdullah said, “Yes, independence—guaranteed by the United Nations—may be the only solution. But why do you talk of partition? Now you are introducing communalism and applying the two-nation theory to Kashmir—that communalism which we are fighting here. I believe the Poonchis would welcome inclusion in an independent Kashmir; if however, after its establishment, they chose to secede and join Pakistan, I would raise no objection. we won’t submit to a communal solution. There has never been a religious problem in the Vale of Kashmir. Hindus and Moslems, are of the same racial origin, we have the same customs, wear the same clothes, and speak the same language. In the street, you cannot distinguish between Moslems and Brahman Pandits.”

After the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir arrived at its main decisions, representatives of the Indian government and the State met to discuss their implications. Nehru gave in to Abdullah's demands, and this arrangement between Abdullah and Nehru agreed upon in July 1952 came to be known as the Delhi Agreement. Its main contents are:

1. The Government of India agreed that while the residuary powers of legislature vested in the Centre in respect of all States other than  Jammu and Kashmir, in the case of the latter they vested in the State itself.

2. It was agreed that persons domiciled in Jammu and Kashmir shall be regarded as citizens of India, but the State Legislature was empowered to make laws for conferring special rights and privileges on the State’s subjects.

3. As the President of India commands the same respect in the State as he does in other units of India, Articles 52 to 62 of the Constitution relating to him should be applicable to the State.

4. The Union Government agreed that the State should have its own flag in addition to the Union flag, but it was agreed by the State Government that the State flag would not be a rival of the Union flag.

5. The Sadar-i-Riyasat, equivalent to the Governor of other States, will be elected by the State Legislature itself instead of being nominated by the Union government and the President of India.

6. In view of the peculiar position in which the State was placed, in particular, Sheikh Abdullah’s land reforms programme, the Fundamental Rights enshrined in the Constitution could not be made applicable to the State. The question that remained to be determined was whether Fundamental Rights should form a part of the State Constitution or the Constitution of India.

7. With regard to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of India, it was accepted that for the time being, owing to the existence of the Board of Judicial Advisers in the State, the Supreme Court should have only appellate jurisdiction.

8. The Government of India insisted on the application of Article 352, empowering the President to proclaim a general Emergency in the State. The State government argued that the Union, in the exercise of its powers over Defence, would anyway have full authority to take steps and proclaim an Emergency. In order to meet the viewpoint of the State’s delegation, the Government of India agreed to the modification of Article 352 in its application to Kashmir by adding the words,  “but in regard to an internal disturbance at the request or with the concurrence of the Government of the State”, at the end of clause (1).

9. Both parties agreed that the application of Article 356, dealing with the suspension of the State Constitution, and Article 360, dealing with a financial emergency, was not necessary.

Nehru fells out with Abdullah

Despite being instrumental in drafting the provisions of Article 370, Abdullah kept persisting in his fight for the cause of Kashmir’s independence. Constitutional scholar AG Noorani has written that Sheikh Abdullah’s Kashmiri nationalism clashed with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s Indian nationalism. It was this very clash which led to his imprisonment in 1953 for 11 years on the charge of plotting accession to Pakistan and waging war against India.

On 8 August 1953, Abdullah was dismissed as Prime Minister by the then Sadr-i-Riyasat (Constitutional Head of State) Dr Karan Singh, son of Hari Singh, on the charge that he had lost the confidence of his cabinet (not the house). He was denied the opportunity to prove his majority on the floor of the house and his dissident cabinet minister Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed was appointed as Prime Minister. Abdullah was immediately arrested and later jailed for eleven years, accused of conspiracy against the State in the infamous "Kashmir Conspiracy Case".

According to Abdullah, his dismissal and arrest were engineered by Nehru. To support this view, he quoted B.N. Mullicks' statements in his book "My Years with Nehru".  According to A.G. Noorani, Nehru himself ordered the arrest. On 8 April 1964, the State Government dropped all charges in the so-called "Kashmir Conspiracy Case". Abdullah was released and returned to Srinagar where he was accorded an unprecedented welcome by the people of the valley."

After release, he was reconciled with Nehru. Nehru requested Abdullah to act as a bridge between India and Pakistan and make President Ayub agree to come to New Delhi for talks for a final solution to the Kashmir problem. Ayub Khan also sent telegrams to Nehru and Abdullah with the message that as Pakistan too was a party to the Kashmir dispute any resolution of the conflict without its participation would not be acceptable to Pakistan. This paved the way for  Abdullah's visit to Pakistan to help broker a solution to the Kashmir problem.

Abdullah went to Pakistan in the spring of 1964.  Ayub Khan held extensive talks with him to explore various avenues for solving the Kashmir problem and agreed to come to Delhi in mid-June for talks with Nehru as suggested by him. Even the date of his proposed visit was fixed and communicated to New Delhi. However, before Ayub Khan could make his visit, Nehru died on 27 May 1964. Abdullah was en route to Muzaffarabad in POK when he received the news. He addressed a public rally at Muzaffarabad and returned to Delhi.

© Ramachandran 

THAPPAN NAIR WAS WITH GANDHI AT DANDI

He died after Dharasana satyagraha, in 1933

The Salt March, also known as the Dandi March was an act of nonviolent civil disobedience in colonial India led by Gandhi. The twenty-four-day march lasted from 12 March to 6 April 1930 as a direct action campaign of tax resistance and nonviolent protest against the British salt monopoly. 

Another reason for the march was that the Civil Disobedience Movement needed a strong opening that would inspire more people to follow Gandhi's example. Gandhi started this march with 78 of his trusted volunteers.

Among the 78, there were five from Kerala. The state of Kerala did not exist then, and in the list of 78, all five have been marked as belonging to Madras Presidency. The five on the list are Thevarthundiyil Titus, C Krishnan Nair, K Shankaran (Shankarji), N P Raghava Poduval and Tapan Nair. 

Thappan Nair

While details on four of them are available, the whereabouts of Tapan Nair remained a mystery. But now, Tom Jose, a teacher of History at Arakkulam St Maries' High School in the Idukki district of Kerala has cracked the mystery- He was not Tapan Nair, but Thappan Nair, and he belonged to the Vadavattath family at Ramassery, Palakkad. The hamlet Ramassery, incidentally, is known for its incredibly soft and fluffy idli, which is a bit flatter in shape than the regular idli. It was brought to Ramassery by a family that migrated from Kanjeepuram in Tamil Nadu.

Thappan Nair migrated to history at the age of 19, bidding farewell to his home and village, to be part of the freedom struggle and the non-violent army of Gandhi. Being not sure whether he will be able to return, he just told his family members that they will meet again, only if destiny deems so. Probably, he might have read about the Dandi march in the newspapers and would have felt the urge to join the march to history.

The Salt march spanned 385 kilometres from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi, which was called Navsari at that time (now in the state of Gujarat). Growing numbers of Indians joined the march along the way, but 78 were there from beginning to end. 

The march was part of the struggle to attain self-rule. At midnight on 31 December 1929, the Indian National Congress raised the tricolour flag of India on the banks of the Ravi river at Lahore. Congress publicly issued the Declaration of sovereignty and self-rule, or Purna Swaraj, on 26 January 1930.

The Congress Working Committee gave Gandhi the responsibility for organising the first act of civil disobedience, with Congress itself ready to take charge after Gandhi's expected arrest. Gandhi's plan was to begin civil disobedience with a satyagraha aimed at the British salt tax. 

The 1882 Salt Act gave the British a monopoly on the collection and manufacture of salt, limiting its handling to government salt depots and levying a salt tax. Violation of the Salt Act was a criminal offence. Even though salt was freely available to those living on the coast, by evaporation of seawater, Indians were forced to buy it from the colonial government.

Initially, Gandhi's choice of the salt tax was met with incredulity by the Working Committee of Congress. Jawaharlal Nehru and Dibyalochan Sahoo were ambivalent; Sardar Patel suggested a land revenue boycott instead. The British colonial administration too was not disturbed by these plans of resistance against the salt tax. The Viceroy Lord Irwin did not take the threat of a salt protest seriously, writing to London, "At present, the prospect of a salt campaign does not keep me awake at night."(1)

However, Gandhi had sound reasons for his decision. An item of daily use could resonate more with all classes of citizens than an abstract demand for greater political rights. The salt tax represented 8.2% of the British Raj tax revenue and hurt the poorest Indians the most significantly. Explaining his choice, Gandhi said, "Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life." 

Gandhi felt that this protest would dramatise Purna Swaraj in a way that was meaningful to every Indian. He also reasoned that it would build unity between Hindus and Muslims by fighting an evil that touched them equally.

After the protest gathered steam, the leaders realised the power of salt as a symbol. Nehru remarked about the unprecedented popular response, "it seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released."(2)

Dandi March

Gandhi's first significant attempt in India at leading mass satyagraha was the non-cooperation movement from 1920 to 1922. Even though it succeeded in raising millions of Indians in protest against the British-created Rowlatt Act, violence broke out at Chauri Chaura, where a mob killed 22 unarmed policemen. Gandhi suspended the protest, against the opposition of other Congress members. He decided that Indians were not yet ready for successful nonviolent resistance. 

However, the Bardoli Satyagraha in 1928 succeeded in paralysing the British government and winning significant concessions. Due to extensive press coverage, it scored a propaganda victory out of all proportion to its size.

Gandhi claimed that success at Bardoli confirmed his belief in satyagraha and Swaraj: "It is only gradually that we shall come to know the importance of the victory gained at Bardoli ... Bardoli has shown the way and cleared it. Swaraj lies on that route, and that alone is the cure ..." (3)

Gandhi recruited activists from the Bardoli Satyagraha for the Dandi march, which passed through many of the same villages that took part in the Bardoli protests.

On 5 February 1930, newspapers reported that Gandhi would begin civil disobedience by defying the salt laws. The salt satyagraha would begin on 12 March and end in Dandi with Gandhi breaking the Salt Act on 6 April. Gandhi chose 6 April to launch the mass breaking of the salt laws for a symbolic reason—it was the first day of "National Week", begun in 1919 when Gandhi conceived of the national hartal (strike) against the Rowlatt Act.

Gandhi prepared the worldwide media for the march by issuing regular statements from Sabarmati, at his regular prayer meetings, and through direct contact with the press. Expectations were heightened by his repeated statements anticipating arrest, and his increasingly dramatic language as the hour approached: "We are entering upon a life and death struggle, a holy war; we are performing an all-embracing sacrifice in which we wish to offer ourselves as an oblation." (4)

For the march itself, Gandhi wanted the strictest discipline and adherence to satyagraha and ahimsa. For that reason, he recruited the marchers not from Congress Party members, but from the residents of his own ashram, who were trained in Gandhi's strict standards of discipline. The 24-day march would pass through 4 districts and 48 villages. The route of the march, along with each evening's stopping place, was planned based on recruitment potential, past contacts, and timing. Gandhi sent scouts to each village ahead of the march so he could plan his talks at each resting place, based on the needs of the local residents.

On 2 March 1930, Gandhi wrote to the Viceroy Lord Irwin, offering to stop the march if Irwin met eleven demands, including reduction of land revenue assessments, cutting military spending, imposing a tariff on foreign cloth, and abolishing the salt tax: (5)

If my letter makes no appeal to your heart, on the eleventh day of this month I shall proceed with such co-workers of the Ashram as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the Salt Laws. I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man's standpoint. As the sovereignty and self-rule movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil.

After Irwin ignored the letter and refused to meet with Gandhi, the march was set in motion. Gandhi remarked, "On bended knees, I asked for bread and I have received stone instead." (6)

On 12 March 1930, Gandhi and 78 satyagrahis, among whom were men belonging to almost every region, caste, creed, and religion of India, set out on foot for the coastal village of Dandi, Gujarat, 385 km from their starting point at Sabarmati Ashram. The Salt March was also called the White Flowing River because all the people were joining the procession wearing white Khadi.

According to The Statesman, the official government newspaper which usually played down the size of crowds at Gandhi's functions, 100,000 people crowded the road that separated Sabarmati from Ahmedabad. The first day's march of 21 km ended in the village of Aslali, where Gandhi spoke to a crowd of about 4,000. As they entered each village, crowds greeted the marchers, beating drums and cymbals. Gandhi gave speeches attacking the salt tax as inhuman, and the salt satyagraha as a "poor man's struggle". Each night they slept in the open. The only thing that was asked of the villagers was food and water to wash with.

Every day, more and more people joined the march until the procession of marchers became at least three km long. To keep up their spirits, the marchers used to sing the Hindu Bhajan Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram while walking. At Surat, they were greeted by 30,000 people. When they reached the railhead at Dandi, more than 50,000 were gathered. The march arrived at the seashore on 5 April.

The following morning, after a prayer, Gandhi raised a lump of salty mud and declared: "With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire." (7)

He then boiled it in seawater, producing illegal salt. He implored his thousands of followers to likewise begin making salt along the seashore, "wherever it is convenient" and to instruct villagers in making illegal, but necessary, salt.

Most of the marchers were between the ages of 20 and 30. They hailed from almost all parts of the country. Most of them simply dispersed after the march was over.

But, C Krishnan Nair (1902–1986), belonging to Thirumangalam in Neyyattinkara, became a Member of the First and Second Lok Sabha, representing Outer Delhi. Known as Delhi Gandhi or Nairji, he was nominated by Nehru as the first Chief Minister of Delhi in 1952. A true Gandhian, Nair politely refused and suggested instead, Choudhary Brahm Prakash, who was only 34 at the time.

Nair joined the Sabarmati Ashram in 1928, after studies at Jamia Milia, Aligarh and Delhi. After the Dandi March, he stayed at the Wardha ashram. In 1942, he participated in the Quit India movement. Since 1943, he served as the Vice-President and Chief Public Relations Officer of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC) and as its President in 1952.

Shankar, Poduval, Krishnan Nair, Titus

Titus, born to Pathanamthitta Maramon Chirayirambil T K Titus and Eliyamma on 18 February 1905, served as governing secretary for Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram milk project near Ahmedabad, after securing a diploma in Dairy development from the Allahabad Agricultural University. Gulzarilal Nanda, who later became the Prime Minister of India, was the secretary of another unit. Both of them were trusted friends of Gandhi. Gandhi used to call Titus, "Titusji." He died on 8 August 1980, at the Kasturba Hospital, Bhopal.

Raghava Poduval, born in Paruthipra, Shornur, had his education at Bhardwaj Ashtam and Santiniketan. After the Dandi march, he became a full-time khadi activist at Payyannur. He died on 20 December 1992.

K Shankarji, son of Raman Ezhuthachan and Lakshmikutty of Thiruvilvamala, belonged to Mayannur, Chelakkara, in Thrissur. He was only 16 (born in 1914) when he was marching to Dandi. He returned after the march and started a weaving centre. He died on 30 April 1986.

After the march, the wealthy Thappan Nair entered the list of most wanted criminals, and the Police conducted frequent searches of his home. But what happened to Thaappan Nair? 

Barrister A K Pillai, records in Congress and Kerala, that Thappan Nair got arrested at Dharasana, near Dandi and died in 1933, while he was active in the satyagraha movement. 

Fortunately, a framed photo of Thappan Nair adores the wall of the living room of the 250-year-old Bungalow, where he was born. He was the younger brother to four sisters. A Thappanji Memorial Lower Primary School exists at Ramassery, but no one in the school is aware of who Thaappan is. 

Thappan's relatives claim that his ancestors were the soldiers of the Zamorin army. A branch of the ancestral family migrated to Thrissur, and a few among them reached Ramassery.

The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi records a letter written by Gandhi to Thappan Nair, on 7 June 1931, and it has been sent not to his home address, but to the Congress camp at Palakkad. In the letter, after advising Nair to read Young India regularly, Gandhi asks him to return to the ashram, if he finds it difficult to stay in his native village. Gandhi also pointed out that many who were part of the march had come to the ashram as inmates.

The letter:

LETTER TO THAPPAN NAIR

AS AT SABARMATI, June 7, 1931

 

MY DEAR THAPPAN,

I have your letter. You should diligently follow the columns of Young India. They might help you. So far as your immediate question is concerned, if you feel that there is no work for you there, you are at liberty to return to the Ashram. Many have done so.

Yours sincerely, 

SYT. THAPPAN NAIR 

CONGRESS CAMP 

PALGHAT (MALABAR)  

(Collected Works, vol 52, page 303)

It is clear that Gandhi's letter was in reply to a query by Thappan Nair, who had returned home. Obviously, he went back to Gandhi.

British rampage at Dharasana

From Barrister Pillai's account it is evident that after Dandi, Thappan Nair took an active part in the Dharsana salt satyagraha. 

Dharasana Satyagraha was a protest against the British salt tax in colonial India in May 1930. Following the conclusion of the Salt March to Dandi, Gandhi chose a non-violent raid of the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat, 119 km from Dandi, as the next protest against British rule. Hundreds of satyagrahis were beaten by soldiers under British command at Dharasana.

After Dandi, on May 4, 1930, Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin, explaining his intention to raid the Dharasana Salt Works. He was immediately arrested. The Indian National Congress decided to continue with the proposed plan of action. Many of the Congress leaders were arrested before the planned day, including Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

The march went ahead as planned, with Abbas Tyabji, a 76-year-old retired judge, leading the march with Gandhi's wife Kasturba at his side. Both were arrested before reaching Dharasana and sentenced to three months in prison.[2] After their arrests, the peaceful agitation continued under the leadership of Sarojini Naidu and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

Hundreds of Indian National Congress volunteers started marching towards the site of the Dharasana Salt Works. Several times, Naidu and the satyagrahis approached the salt works, before being turned back by police. At one point they sat down and waited for twenty-eight hours. Hundreds more were arrested.

On May 21, the satyagrahis tried to pull away the barbed wire protecting the salt pans. The police charged and began clubbing them. American journalist Webb Miller was an eye-witness to the beating of satyagrahis with steel-tipped lathis. His report attracted international attention. Miller's first attempts at telegraphing the story to his publisher in England were censored by the British telegraph operators in India. Only after threatening to expose British censorship was his story allowed to pass. The story appeared in 1,350 newspapers throughout the world.

Miller wrote: (8)

Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow.

Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. ..

Bodies toppled over in threes and fours, bleeding from great gashes on their scalps. Group after group walked forward, sat down, and submitted to being beaten into insensibility without raising an arm to fend off the blows. Finally, the police became enraged by the non-resistance...They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles. The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to inflame the fury of the police...The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches.

Miller later wrote that he went to the hospital where the wounded were being treated, and "counted 320 injured, many still insensible with fractured skulls, others writhing in agony from kicks in the testicles and stomach...Scores of the injured had received no treatment for hours and two had died."

It is possible that Thappan Nair was beaten up at Dharasana and died later, due to the injuries.

Santosh Ambat, Thappan Nair's grandnephew remembers his father (Thappan Nair was his father's only maternal uncle) telling him that, when he was young,  whenever his uncle would come to vadavattath tharavad, they would reach into his bag which contained a lot of moustaches, beards and wigs etc, since he was being tracked by the British police. To move around India, Thappan Nair used them to disguise himself. The father of Santosh and his siblings would try these on themselves and enjoy them as kids do. One day, a telegram reached the tharavad saying 'Thappanji no more."

________________________

1. Letter to London on 20 February 1930, Ackerman, Peter; DuVall, Jack (2000). A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, p. 84

2. Gandhi, Gopalkrishna. "The Great Dandi March — eighty years after, The Hindu, 5 April 1930
3. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 41: 208–209
4. Gandhi, Mahatma; Dalton, Dennis (1996). Selected Political Writings Hackett Publishing, p. 108
5. Gandhi's letter to Irwin, Gandhi and Dalton, p. 78
6. Parliament Museum, New Delhi, India – Official website – Dandi March VR Video. Parliamentmuseum.org
7. Gandhi and Dalton, p. 72.

8. Miller, Webb (1936). I Found No Peace. Simon and Schuster, p. 193-199

I am indebted to the feature written by Raju Mathew in the Sunday magazine of Malayala Manorama, on 4 December 2022.

© Ramachandran 

INDIA AND THE CIA PLOT TO KILL ZHOU ENLAI

The Last Survivor Dies

MC Dikshit, who co-piloted the Air India Flight 300 Constellation Kashmir Princess that fell into the sea after a mid-air bomb blast on April 11, 1955, died in Delhi on December 5 at the age of 105 after a prolonged illness. And with him, the world lost the last of the witnesses to a gruesome CIA conspiracy. The Kashmir Princess, a small four-engine propeller-driven Lockheed, was sent by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to take Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai to Jakarta for the historic Bandung conference.

Sporting a Ho Chi Minh beard, the frail Dikshit lived in East Delhi’s Samachar Apartments and shopped in the local market even during his last days.

Even in his sunset days, Dikshit was reluctant to talk about what happened in 1955. However, his colleague Anant S Karnik told the story in a book.

M C Dikshit

The backdrop to the CIA's assassination plot is provided by several political upheavals like China's annexation of Tibet in 1950, the CIA-sponsored flight of Dalai Lama to India, Nehru's subsequent slogan, Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai or "Indians and Chinese are brothers," and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954-1955.

But the deputy prime minister Vallabhbhai Patel, who was suspicious of Nehru's bonhomie with China, wrote to him in December 1950:

We have to consider what the new situation now faces us as a result of the disappearance of Tibet, as we know it, and the expansion of China up to our gates. Throughout history, we have seldom been worried about our northeast frontier. The Himalayas has been regarded as an impenetrable barrier against threats from the north. We had friendly Tibet which gave us no trouble. The Chinese were divided. They had their domestic problems and never bothered us about our frontiers." (1)

Patel died soon on December 15th and Nehru continued to dovetail China. India officially recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet through the 1954 agreement on Trade and Intercourse between India and the Tibet Region of China. But India had in effect recognized Tibet as part of China in September 1952, when it decided to change the status of its mission in Lhasa to that of a Consulate General. 

The preamble of the 1954 agreement included the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence, known as the Panchsheel Treaty. 

But, at the homefront, China was facing a nuclear threat from the U.S. in the aftermath of the first Taiwan Strait Crisis.

Taiwan Strait Crisis

The First Taiwan Strait Crisis was a brief armed conflict between the Communist People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Nationalist Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. The conflict focused on several groups of islands in the Taiwan Strait that were held by the ROC but were located only a few miles from mainland China. The crisis began when the PRC shelled the ROC-held island of Kinmen (Quemoy). Later, the PRC seized the Yijiangshan Islands from the ROC. The ROC then abandoned the Tachen Islands (Dachen Islands), which were evacuated by the navies of the ROC and the US.

In August 1954, the Nationalists placed 58,000 troops on Kinmen and 15,000 troops on Matsu. The ROC began building defensive structures and the PRC began shelling ROC installations on Kinmen. Zhou Enlai responded with a declaration on 11 August 1954, that Taiwan must be "liberated." He dispatched the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to the area, and it began shelling both Kinmen and the Matsu Islands.

Despite warnings from the U.S. against any attacks on the Republic of China; five days before the signing of the Manila pact, the PLA unleashed a heavy artillery bombardment of Kinmen on September 3, during which two American military advisers were killed. In November, the PLA bombed the Tachen Islands. This renewed Cold War fears of Communist expansion in Asia at a time when the PRC was not recognized by the U.S. Chiang Kai-shek's government was supported by the U.S. because the ROC was part of the U.S. policy of containment of communism.

On 12 September 1954, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the use of nuclear weapons against mainland China. President Eisenhower resisted the pressure. However, on 2 December 1954, the U.S. and the ROC agreed to the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which did not apply to islands along the Chinese mainland.

The PLA seized the Yijiangshan Islands on 18 January 1955. Fighting continued in nearby islands off the coast of Zhejiang, as well as around Kinmen and the Matsu Islands in Fujian. On 29 January, the Formosa Resolution was approved by both houses of the U.S. Congress authorizing Eisenhower to use U.S. forces to defend the ROC and its possessions in the Taiwan Strait against armed attack. The U.S. Navy then assisted the Nationalists in evacuating their forces from the Tachen Islands.

In February, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned the U.S. against using nuclear weapons, but in March, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated publicly that the U.S. was seriously considering a nuclear strike. In response, the NATO foreign ministers warned at a meeting of the alliance against such action. In late March, U.S. Admiral Robert B. Carney said that Eisenhower is planning "to destroy Red China's military potential. The PRC backed down in the face of American nuclear brinksmanship and in light of the lack of willingness by the Soviet Union to threaten nuclear retaliation for an attack on the PRC.

Filled with internal squabbles, China was weak and Nehru was the champion of the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa. The Panchsheel came to form the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was born when leaders from 29 newly independent Asian and African countries met in the Indonesian resort city of Bandung from April 18 to 24, 1955. 

The previous year, 1954, the US had set up a body to help “direct the thinking” of poor countries on the other side of the world.

American political operatives travelled to Asia to pull together a group called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, described as a political-military alliance of states to "contain communism". In practice, it was a body designed to foster loyalty to the US and create negative feelings towards groups associated with socialism or communism.

But Indonesia’s Sukarno, leader of the world’s fifth most populous country, responded by organizing a group of home-grown Asian voices: the Bandung Conference. Asian leaders who signed up to attend the Indonesian meeting were in favour of a doctrine of neutralism as the logical default position of the developing world.

From the US administration’s point of view, neutralism was unacceptable. The antipathy of CIA deputy director Frank Wisner towards Sukarno and Zhou Enlai was well known. Asia contained more than 50 per cent of the world’s population – it was unthinkable that it should lean toward socialism or communism.

In the allied-US territory of Taiwan, leaders feared that Zhou Enlai’s peace initiatives (including the cultivating of good relationships with British leaders, such as Hong Kong’s Governor Alexander Grantham) meant that it had become conceivable that China would one day join the United Nations. That had to be prevented.

Amidst its fruit orchards, Dutch-built canals, and colonial bungalows, it was Indonesia's Sukarno who played host to an array of leaders, including the mercurial Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, Egypt's firebrand Prime Minister Gamal Abdul Nasser, Sir John Kotelawala of Ceylon, Pakistan's Prime Minister Muhammad Ali Bogra, and Burma's Premier U Nu. 

China's Zhou Enlai was also there, invited at Nehru's insistence.

The explosion inside

In view of the security threat to the Chinese PM Zhou Enlai, Nehru had offered to ferry him and his delegation in the Air India aeroplane, Kashmir Princess, from Hongkong to Jakarta to attend the Bandung conference, from April 18 to 24, 1955. 

The plane took off on the night of April 11, 1955, from Hong Kong's Kai Tuk Airport, but without Zhou Enlai and his senior colleagues. China had gotten wind of the CIA plot. But, Li Hing, in The Truth Behind the Kashmir Princess Incident, records that Zhou had delayed his travel due to health reasons. (2) Xinhua reported in 2005 that Zhou was forced to change his schedule for an appendicitis excision.

Five hours after the takeoff, Kashmir Princess exploded at a height of 18,000 feet. Around 09:25 GMT, while cruising at FL180, a muffled explosion was heard and smoke entered the cabin. 

An instant later, the pilots saw flames streaming from behind the number three engine on the right wing. Smoke began to fill the cockpit. As the captain shut down and feathered the number three engine, he saw too that the fire warning light for the baggage compartment was illuminated.

A fire in the cargo hold, a fire on the wing, and smoke in the cockpit were extraordinary, life-threatening emergencies. As the captain pointed the plane’s nose down toward the sea, he hoped to ditch the plane into the water so that the survivors could escape in life rafts. A distress call was transmitted, declaring the airliner’s position over the Natuna Islands, in Indonesia.

Moments later, the radio went dead as the electrical system in the aeroplane began to fail, along with other critical systems as the fire spread below.

During the descent hydraulic failure occurred, followed by an electrical failure. A ditching was planned, but dense smoke entered the cockpit. The aircraft struck the water's surface with the right wingtip and crashed. Rescuers arriving at the scene discovered that it had broken into three parts on impact.

Kashmir Princess

Sixteen persons, including the crew, were killed as the smoke-filled plane nose-dived into the South China Sea near Natuna island. Three crew members — co-pilot M C Dikshit, flight navigator J C Pathak, and mechanical engineer A S Karnik — survived the crash. They kept themselves afloat on the South China Sea for 12 hours before Indonesian fishermen rescued them the next day. A British warship took them safely to Singapore.

All except three crew members — Dikshit, Pathak and Karnik — were killed. Captain D K Jatar remained in his seat and supervised the rescue operations. Air hostess Gloria Berry kept her calm and distributed seat belts to the passengers risking her own life. Jatar and air hostess Gloria Berry courageously saved the passengers from the falling plane.

Gloria Berry had pleaded with Jatar for him to jump and save his own life, but he knew that this was his plane to man till the end and as the duty of a pilot he did that without hesitation. Gloria remained with him till the end. When the wreckage of the aircraft was recovered during the investigation, Jatar’s body was found slumped on his chair in the cockpit.

Jatar and Gloria were awarded the Ashok Chakra, posthumously. They were the first civilians to be posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra.

Three members of the Chinese conference delegation, five Chinese journalists, one member of the Vietnamese delegation, one Polish journalist and one Austrian journalist died in the crash.

Three journalists were from the Xinhua news agency: Shen Jiantu, Huang Zuomei and Li Ping. Shen, who died at the age of 40, was the eldest, while Li was only 26.

The dead included a war hero, Raymond Wong Chok-Mui, who worked for the Chinese and the British against invading Japanese soldiers in the 1940s.

The passengers were a decoy delegation of lesser cadres, according to a research paper, Target Zhou Enlai: The Kashmir Princess Incident of 1955 by Steve Tsang. The flight had been chartered by China.

Back in Delhi, Nehru invited the three survivors to Teen Murti House. But they politely declined any special honours.

The CIA-Taiwan plot

In July 2005, China declassified the records relating to the CIA conspiracy. It revealed that four days before the blast, on April 7, Zhou had changed his plans and decided to accept Burmese leader U Nu’s invitation to fly him from Rangoon to Jakarta. Zhou left China three days after the crash and flew to Rangoon. Nehru and Egypt’s Kamal Abdul Nasser also joined the team, from Rangoon to Bandung. However, the change in the flight was kept a secret with a view to confusing the U.S.

The de-classified Chinese documents revealed that Zhou Enlai had been tipped off about the upcoming bombing of the Kashmir Princess. Rather than cancel the flight and lodge a protest, he had assigned lower-level Chinese cadre officials onto the aeroplane as well as a set of journalists, as their presence would result in wider press coverage.

Three days later, Zhou would emerge in Jakarta, riding a wave of positive press coverage.

The full evaluation of the events determined that an explosion had taken place in the plane’s wheel. That, in turn, had ignited fires in the baggage compartment and on the right wing. The most obvious explanation was a bomb mixed in with the passenger bags.

To the investigators, it made no sense for one of the passengers to have brought a bomb on board in a suicidal bid to down the plane. The fact that originally Zhou Enlai was supposed to have been on board was strong circumstantial evidence pointing to an assassination attempt, but by whom? 

Interviews were conducted with all of the ground crew, fuel truck staff and baggage handlers who might have had access to the plane at its points of origin as well as in Hong Kong, where the flight had made a stop en route to Jakarta. All of the personnel checked out and were proven to be innocent, except for one Hong Kong janitor working for an airport contractor. Quite simply, the man who investigators had originally identified as the lowly janitor, Chow Tse-Ming, was missing.

Zhou with Nehru in Bandung

China’s investigations showed that the plot was masterminded by the CIA but executed by Kuomintang agents in Hong Kong. Chow, 34, a cleaner of Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company (HAECO) at the airport and a drug addict, had planted the explosive — a US-made MK-7 detonator — in the wheels of the aircraft. In the middle of the investigations by the British administration of Hong Kong, Chow was flown to safety in Taipei in an aeroplane owned by a CIA-funded firm.

Chow Tse-Ming was an alias; in fact, two other aliases for the same man were also uncovered. He used the name Chow Tse-ming in Cantonese and Zhou Ju in Mandarin. As well, in the days leading up to the bombing and crash of the plane, Chow had been spending a lot of money around Hong Kong.

Finally, his disappearance from Hong Kong was finally traced to him having departed quietly, hidden in the luggage compartment of a Civil Air Transport (CAT) flight to Taiwan. CAT was a frequent CIA contract air carrier, though it also flew other airline operations and cargo flights around the region. CAT was set up in Delaware to serve US interests in East Asia.

Wreckage of Kashmir Princess in sea

Indonesian investigators reported that amidst the wreckage, they had identified an American-made MK-7 detonator device. The British-run Hong Kong police surmised that it seemed likely that the man was an agent of the Kuomintang’s intelligence operations arm, a theory which the Chinese also felt had validity — undoubtedly, the CIA had supplied MK-7 triggers to Taiwan.

Li Hong writes that deeply grieved by the crash, Zhou Enlai personally oversaw efforts to crack the case, dispatching trusted intelligence officer Xiong Xianghui to Hong Kong as his liaison with other intelligence outfits. (2) In June 1956, British authorities in Hong Kong arrested 44 Chiang Kai-shek spies, who were all expelled from the territory, and thus set free. On August 4, Zhou lodged a formal complaint with British authorities, saying "the British government still bears an inescapable international responsibility.

Zhou Enlai made enormous efforts to expose the destructive US-Taiwan plot. The Chinese Premier, in his talks with Henry Kissinger in 1971, described the incident of Kashmir Princess thus:(3)

When I went to the Bandung Conference in 1955 I almost lost my life. At that time we chartered an Indian plane, the “Kashmir Princess” from Hong Kong. Because Prime Minister U Nu wanted me to go with him, I went to Burma. He asked Nehru and Nasser to go with him and I changed my route at the last minute while the others went via Hong Kong. The saboteurs thought I was on the “Kashmir Princess” and set a time bomb on the plane. Just as the “Kashmir Princess” was about to reach Bandung, it exploded in mid-air and crashed into the sea.

India, together with authorities in Hong Kong, investigated the bombing. We have evidence that the bomb was placed by a Chinese who was brought over to Hong Kong, and I convinced the Indian Commissioner to go directly with our people to Hong Kong and demand from the Hong Kong authorities that they arrest that man. But such news leaks out, and the Indian told his Embassy, and just as we got to Hong Kong, that man flew to Taiwan.

In the years that followed, the Chinese asked the Nixon White House twice about the events of the plane’s bombing and whether the CIA had been involved, expecting that perhaps the attempt had been a joint CIA-KMT operation. In response to the second request, Kissinger quietly noted that the Chinese thought far too highly of the CIA’s actual abilities. Ultimately, the evidence was compelling but not conclusive that the Kuomintang Government of Taiwan had attempted to assassinate Zhou Enlai.

Kao reveals the plot

India deputed R N Kao to investigate the crash of the Kashmir Princess. Kao later became the founding chief of the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW).

Born in the holy city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh in 1918 to a Kashmiri Hindu Pandit family who migrated from Srinagar, Rameshwar Nath Kao joined the Indian Imperial Police, after clearing the civil services examination, in 1940. After completing the Master's degree in English Literature at Allahabad University, Kao, for a while, took up a job in a cigarette company floated by Pandit Jag Mohan Narain Mushran, the then Chief Justice of the Benaras State.  

As a police officer, his first posting was in Kanpur as an Assistant Superintendent of Police. Kao was deputed to the Intelligence Bureau (IB) on the eve of Independence when it was being reorganised under B.N. Mullick. He was put in charge of VIP security, which included the task of looking after the security ring of  Nehru. Sometime in the late 1950s, he was sent to Ghana to help the then government of prime minister Kwame Nkrumah set up an intelligence and security organisation there. But it was the Kashmir Princess investigation that made the reclusive Kao, a hero.

The three survivors, including Dikshit, were crucial to the investigation. The details of Kao's investigation have been recorded in a book, The War That Made R &AW by Anusha Nandakumar and Sandeep Saket.

At the Chinese premier’s office in Beijing, Kao’s one-on-one briefing with Zhou Enlai was held behind closed doors. Even though Kao was determined to be the neutral investigator on the case, Zhou advanced theories of a Taiwanese conspiracy behind the crash and urged Kao to expedite the investigation process and submit his findings.

Xinhua journalists who died in the crash

Over several months, Kao worked doggedly in collaboration with the Chinese, Hong Kong and British police to unravel the threads of the conspiracy. The investigation took him to Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and China.

His patience and rigour finally paid off in September 1955. A clear picture had started emerging of the events that had occurred on the day of the Kashmir Princess crash. Realising that he had finished his probe, Kao sent an official message to Zhou Enlai with his investigative results. In Beijing, Zhou immediately sent for Kao.

In a detailed briefing, Kao told Zhou how his investigation had led him to Chow Tse-Ming or Chow Chu. A Taiwanese national working as a member of the ground maintenance crew of the Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company, Chow had agreed to place a time bomb—a weapon of choice in those days—in the Kashmir Princess. In return, he was promised a reward of 6,00,000 Hong Kong dollars, by a Taiwanese spy named Wu Yi-chin. He guaranteed Chow's escape to Taiwan, a place from which he could not be extradited, and where he could live out his days as a king on his huge pot of wealth.

Chow had been in Hong Kong since 1950, and gambling debts made him a receptive target. He would be part of the crew performing routine maintenance on Zhou Enlai’s plane, meaning he’d have a window of opportunity to plant an explosive on board.

On April 11, Kashmir Princess arrived in Hong Kong from Bangkok around noon and spent nearly 90 minutes on the ground at Kai Tak. Luggage — 37 pieces — were loaded onto the place, supervised carefully by CTS. During that time, while part of the crew was performing its scheduled maintenance, chow placed a time bomb in the aircraft’s starboard wheel well.

The mastermind behind the plot was Chiang Kaishek, the ousted Chinese leader, who had gone on to become the ruler of Taiwan. Kai-shek was plotting to kill Zhou Enlai, and when it was publicly known that he would be taking a chartered flight from Hong Kong to attend the Bandung Conference, he made his move. The Kashmir Princess crash was the result of this ongoing political rivalry between China and Taiwan.

Captain D K Jatar

Zhou Enlai was impressed with Kao’s investigation, including the dexterity of his mediations between the colonial government in Hong Kong and the communist government in mainland China. Zhou rewarded Kao with his coveted personal seal, an honour reserved for the most deserving public servants in the Chinese republic.

The US confession

From the very beginning, the U.S. had viewed the Bandung conference as a Soviet ploy against it. Three months before the conference, in January, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles set up a working group which included intelligence outfits and diplomats to keep a tab on what was seen as an anti-US line-up.

At the time, the West viewed the Bandung Conference as a gathering of communists and pro-communists that would boost the expansion of communism in Asia. The CIA believed that China planned to use the conference to boost its image as a world power. Although the CIA sent several agents posing as journalists to cover the conference, evidence suggests that some CIA officers might have taken a further role in the action.

In 1975, a U.S. Senate committee heard testimony about CIA activities in East Asia in the 1950s and CIA officers revealed the plot to assassinate an East Asian leader “to disrupt an impending Communist [sic] Conference in 1955.” That leader’s identity would remain unknown until 1977, when William Corson, a retired U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in Asia, published Armies of Ignorance, identifying that leader as Zhou Enlai.

CIA agent John Discoe Smith, working in India, defected to the Soviet Union, on October 24, 1967. He accounted for many of his operations in his memoirs, I Was a CIA Agent in India, including his delivery of a mysterious bag to a KMT agent. He says that in 1955, Jack Curran, a CIA officer attached to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, asked him to deliver a bag to one Wang Feng at the Maidens Hotel in the Indian capital. Smith claimed that the bag contained the bomb used to sabotage Kashmir Princess. Curran told him to be careful, as the suitcase contained explosive devices—for use in Hong Kong.

The book reveals that Smith had spent 1954 to 1959 in India working as a communications technician and code clerk at the US Embassy in New Delhi. This involved routinely performing tasks for the CIA.

Between June 1954 and January 1957, Zhou paid four visits to India, and in October 1954, Nehru flew to Beijing, where he met not only Zhou but also Mao. It was the first visit by the head of a non-communist government since the creation of the People's Republic of China. According to New York Times, "The six miles between city and airport were walled by unbroken banks of humanity, clapping, cheering and crying the inescapable Chinese slogan, "Long live peace."

So, China raising the question of the annexation of Taiwan time and again, is not without substance. The Kashmir Princess incident reminds us that not too long ago, the fighting between the two sides was not limited to words and worry, but included very real attacks, attempted high-level assassination, spycraft, and murder.

Tail end:

Interestingly, former flight engineer A.S. Karnik, 82, received a cheque for 50,000 rupees ($8,800) in 2005 from the Chinese ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi. Karnik approached the Chinese embassy in September last year after the Indian government failed to pay him the monthly allowance it promised for his bravery in 1972.

Captain D K Jatar, who piloted Kashmir Princess, is a part of Indian aviation history-Air India's maiden international flight was captained by K R Guzdar and D K Jatar. On June 8, 1948, Malabar Princess, a 40- seater Lockheed L-749 Constellation flew over 8407 km from Mumbai to London via Cairo and Geneva. It carried 35 passengers, including JRD Tata.

On arrival in Taiwan, Chow Tse-ming, the man who planted the bomb, was arrested at Taipei airport as an illegal immigrant. Taiwan officials told him that he was going to be sent back to British Hong Kong.

But at the last moment, someone had a word with immigration officers and Chow was allowed to disappear into the Taiwanese population. He lived out his years as a rich man in Taiwan.

The incident suggests that the heinous crime involving the Indian aircraft was being supervised by the larger power, which still guides Taiwan.

__________________

1. Quoted in Bertil Lintner, China's India War, Page 14

2. Selected Essays on the History of Contemporary China, Brill, 2015

3. Office of the Historian, Government of the United States. 162. Memorandum of Conversation. Beijing, October 21, 1971. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XVII, China, 1969-1972. Retrieved from: Office of the Historian, United States Department of State (https://history.state.gov/).

© Ramachandran