H-Diplo Article Review 681 on “America, India, and Kashmir, 1945–49: ‘If Ignorance about India in This Country is Deep, Ignorance About the [Princely] States is Abysmal’.”
H-Diplo
Article Review
No. 681
23 February 2017
Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Web and Production Editor: George Fujii
Rakesh Ankit, “America, India, and Kashmir, 1945–49: ‘If Ignorance about India in This Country is Deep, Ignorance About the [Princely] States is Abysmal’.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 27:1 (March 2016): 22-44.
URL: http://tiny.cc/AR681
Review by Paul M. McGarr, University of Nottingham
The enervating and seemingly intractable dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has exasperated generations of post-war American policymakers. It is the Kashmir conundrum, above all else, that has been responsible for frustrating Washington’s objective of sustaining simultaneously close and constructive relations with South Asia’s two most powerful nations and bitterest rivals. The enmity that Kashmir injected into Indo-Pakistan relations has, in large part, complicated and invariably obstructed the regional objectives of successive administrations in the United States, from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama. Throughout the Cold War and, more recently, in the context of a so-called ‘War on Terror, the Kashmir problem has exercised a preponderant influence over Indian and Pakistani diplomacy. In the past, it has undermined American efforts to employ Islamabad and New Delhi as tacit-partners in the containment of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. In a contemporary context, its toxic legacy has amplified dangers posed to the United States by transnational terrorism, and hampered American attempts to eradicate such threats. In short, the Kashmir problem has constituted a considerable thorn in the side of the United States’ post-war relationship with India and Pakistan, and acted as an impediment to America’s broader national-security interests.
Situated in the far north of the Indian sub-continent, at a strategic juncture between the People’s Republic of China, Afghanistan, and the now independent Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, over the past seven decades Kashmir has remained at the epicentre of deeply entrenched ideological, strategic, and religious fault lines within South Asia. In August 1947, when two-centuries of British rule in India concluded with the partition of the sub-continent into the sovereign states of India and Pakistan, the fate of Kashmir, one of over 500 Princely States subject to London’s suzerainty, but retaining significant internal autonomy, remained uncertain. The bellicose and bitter conflict that ensued between India and Pakistan for ownership of a prime piece of South Asian real estate rapidly acquired a broader political importance and, for India’s Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose ancestors were Kashmiri Brahmins, an emotive and intensely personal dimension. Above all, the incorporation of Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim state, into Pakistan was seen by that country’s leaders as an essential validation of the ‘two-nation theory,’ or the notion that religion should be paramount in determining citizenship of the sub-continent’s population. Equally, for the fledgling Indian Republic, the integration of a Muslim state into the Indian union represented a potent symbol of the nation’s commitment to secularism and policy of inclusivity. It was against such a backdrop of competing and seemingly mutually exclusive strategic objectives in respect to Kashmir, that India and Pakistan have, since the 1940s, engaged in no less than three wars (four, if one includes the ‘Kargil War’ of 1999), several major military skirmishes, and innumerable minor border clashes. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth-century, with both countries in possession of nuclear weapons, the Kashmir dispute had, in the words of the then President of the United States, Bill Clinton, seen South Asia labelled as “the most dangerous place in the world.”[1]
In a meticulously researched and thought-provoking article, Rakesh Ankit, makes a strong case for reperiodising the history of the United States’ involvement in the Kashmir dispute. Specifically, Ankit contends that the attitudes of American foreign policymakers towards India, and Kashmir more particularly, were determined by Cold-War considerations far sooner than has hitherto been acknowledged. For Ankit, a close analysis of the actions and utterances of American policymakers during the two-years between 1945 and 1947, during which the Cold War coalesced with the onset of an initial wave of decolonisation in South Asia, sheds valuable new light on how and why the United States came to see Kashmir as a potential impediment to the containment of Communism in Asia. Influential studies of the United States’ relationships with India and Pakistan, as Ankit notes, have tended to discount the existence of any direct linkage between Kashmir and the Cold War in official American minds until the late 1940s, and often much later. Prominent scholars have suggested that it was the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949 and the outbreak of war in the Korean peninsula the following June that prompted Washington to re-evaluate the importance of South Asia as a Cold War theatre, and, in turn, to interpret the Kashmir dispute through a new and broader international prism.[2] Others have gone further, contending that Kashmir remained on the margins of world affairs and peripheral to the Cold War until the early 1950s, and in some accounts, as late as 1954, when the United States concluded a Mutual Defence Assistance Agreement with Pakistan.[3] Ankit, however, contends that more weight needs to be placed upon the speed with which the State Department came to see Kashmir as an issue on which the Soviets and the Chinese were likely, to reference a subsequent observation made by the British Premier, Harold Wilson, to ‘fish in troubled waters’ and ensure that ‘the Kashmir problem became a happy hunting ground for other countries.’[4]
Ankit does a commendable job of constructing a nuanced and finely grained account of how the Kashmir evolved from a matter of incidental concern to the Truman administration into an issue of increased importance and consequence. In explaining this transformation, emphasis is placed on a range of diverse and interconnected factors. Ankit cites evidence of subtle shifts in the reading of Soviet expansionist designs on Kashmir that took place within the Washington’s military and intelligence communities; growing anxiety amongst U.S. diplomats in India that Kashmir was susceptible to Communist subversion; and the emergence of a consensus back in the United States that Nehru was naive in his interactions with Moscow, and was vulnerable to the application of Soviet pressure. These lines of argumentation are well supported by an impressive array of archival material. Ankit has clearly done a tireless job of mining illuminating primary material from documentary repositories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India.
Almost inevitably, any article-length study of a complex foreign policy question is likely to throw up almost as many questions as it does answers. In this regard, Ankit’s article leaves a number of loose ends and underdeveloped arguments that, it is to be hoped, he, or other scholars, will address in future studies. Notably, significance is placed on the extent to which, after 1947, the United States continued to view South Asia as lying firmly within a British sphere of influence. Washington’s insistence that the British should play a leading role in underwriting Western interests in India, inclusive of Kashmir, persisted well into the 1960s. Yet, it is not made entirely clear by Ankit how the Truman administration’s willingness to defer to purported British experience and expertise in matters South Asian, a state of affairs that both surprised and alarmed London, played out in practical terms against a narrative of increasing American assertiveness in respect of Kashmir. One possible explanation, which touches upon a separate facet of Ankit’s analysis, lies in the existence of a marked dissonance between middle and lower level American officials with a South Asian brief, both in Washington and New Delhi, and American foreign policy principals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, American ambassadors to India, such as Henry Grady and Loy Henderson, were convinced by Kashmir’s significance in the context of a burgeoning Cold War, and lobbied tirelessly for a more interventionist approach to India. It is much less clear that President Harry Truman, or his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had much time for such arguments, or lent them any particular credence when formulating national security policy.
Still, Ankit is to be congratulated for producing a cogently crafted and important article that establishes a clear case for reperiodising America’s focus on the Kashmir dispute as a source of international great-power rivalry. In sum, Ankit’s study represents a valuable new intervention in the field of U.S.-South Asian relations, and has enhanced our understanding of the Truman administration’s approach both to India and Kashmir in the context of the early Cold War.
Paul M. McGarr is the author of The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). He has published articles in Diplomatic History, The International History Review, Modern Asian Studies, and Diplomacy & Statecraft. His next project investigates interventions by American and British intelligence services in India and Pakistan. He is currently Assistant Professor of U.S. History at the University of Nottingham.
© 2017 The Authors | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License
Notes
[1] William J. Clinton, ‘Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast,’ 3 February 2000, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=58733.
[2] See, for example, Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
[3] See, Dennis Kux, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941-1991 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1992); Howard Shaffer, The Limits of Influence: America’s Role in Kashmir (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2009).
[4] Memorandum of conversation between Harold Wilson and Aghampuakha Hilaly (Pakistan High Commissioner to the United Kingdom), 7 September, PREM 13/393, United Kingdom National Archives, Kew, London.
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