Nehru’s frontier folly: How Bharat lost NWFP and gave Pakistan ‘strategic depth’

The latest clashes between Pakistan and Afghanistan along the Durand Line have exposed the bankruptcy of Islamabad’s long-celebrated doctrine of “strategic depth”. For decades, Pakistan believed that controlling Afghanistan would give it geopolitical leverage vis-à-vis Bharat. Today that fantasy lies in tatters as Islamabad confronts hostility on the very frontier it once hoped to dominate.

Pakistan’s strategic nightmare along the Durand Line, however, only tells half the story.

Bharat’s Afghanistan policy since Independence has been no less flawed. While Pakistan tried to weaponise Afghanistan against its eastern neighbour, New Delhi responded with moralistic posturing, one-sided generosity and a total lack of geopolitical realism. Instead of realising that the Great Game was being played in the region, Bharat chose to remain indifferent and aloof. This resulted in Afghanistan gradually slipping out of Bharat’s strategic horizon, while Pakistan entrenched itself as the primary external actor shaping events there, largely aimed at hurting Delhi’s interests, especially in Jammu & Kashmir.

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The roots of this strategic failure go back to the earliest years of Independence, and, predictably, to one individual: Jawaharlal Nehru.

Much has been written about Nehru’s mistakes — China, Tibet, Kashmir, et al. But one blunder remains largely forgotten: his (mis)handling of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) during Partition.

The NWFP was no ordinary province. It was the historic gateway between the subcontinent and Central Asia, inhabited largely by Pashtuns who possessed a fierce sense of ethnic identity and an equally vehement suspicion of outside, centralised authority. Politically, the province was aligned with the Congress through the leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly known as Badshah Khan or the “Frontier Gandhi”. In fact, the NWFP refused to be swept away by the Muslim League wave in the 1946 election, making it the only Muslim-majority province governed by Congress.

Yet as Partition approached in 1947, Jinnah succeeded in overcoming the ethnic obsession among the Pathans with his call that Islam was in danger. Amidst all this, the Congress made the most fatal of mistakes. Under the influence of Nehru, it agreed to decide the fate of the province through a referendum organised by the British. The choices offered to the people were stark: join Bharat or go with Pakistan. The crucial third option was missing — independence.

Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgar movement had demanded precisely this: the right of the Pashtuns to have the third option, to vote for their own state, often referred to as Pashtunistan, if a referendum was accepted. Given the deep distrust many Pashtuns felt towards the Muslim League dominated by the Punjabis, such a state could have radically altered the strategic map of South Asia.

Mahatma Gandhi reportedly sympathised with Ghaffar Khan’s demand, and many within the Congress were open to considering it. However, Nehru, serving in the interim government as the External Affairs Minister and playing a central role in negotiations with the British, did not support the independence option.

The Congress decision was remarkable not only for its consequences but also for its lack of political realism. Nehru had visited the NWFP shortly before Partition and faced an openly hostile reception. At one place he was saved from harm by a whisker. By then the Muslim League had successfully mobilised religious sentiment, portraying the creation of Pakistan as a defence of Islam. It was by then obvious that Bharat had little chance of winning the referendum.

In such circumstances, the logical strategy would have been to support the notion of an independent Pashtun state. Such a move would have fractured the territorial continuity of Pakistan at birth. It would also have strengthened Afghanistan, historically suspicious of Pakistani dominance, thus creating an ally for Delhi on Pakistan’s western front.

Here the role of Lord Mountbatten was dubious, to say the least. The last British Viceroy realised very early the importance of Nehru in his scheme of things and started wooing him even before he landed in Delhi. He, as the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, invited Nehru to Singapore in March 1946. Although British authorities initially sought to restrict his visit due to concerns over his meetings with Indian National Army (INA) personnel, Mountbatten intervened to treat Nehru with high-level honours.

Also, what has not been highlighted enough is the close relationship Mountbatten shared with Churchill. In fact, Mountbatten got the Viceroyalty despite the disastrous World War II outing, precisely because of Churchill’s blessings. Once this relationship is analysed, Mountbatten’s dubious role in Bharat’s partition becomes obvious.

In fact, Nehru went out of his way to ensure that Mountbatten’s referendum plan, which Gandhi and many other Congress leaders had initially opposed, was not just put in place but also ensured that there was no third option inserted therein. Nehru did so merely to please Mountbatten.

In India’s Lost Frontier: The Story of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, author Raghvendra Singh writes: “Nehru was convinced that Mountbatten realised the difficulties the Frontier faced and would do everything in his power to settle them. He felt that Mountbatten’s predicament of having committed himself to a referendum should be sympathetically considered as it was now impossible to get out of it without grave injury to his own prestige and impartiality. Mountbatten would rather resign than face a situation where he had to retract from his decision (Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 3, p.278). Nehru was not one to fight shy of defending his friend. But in doing so he lost the NWFP for India.”

For Nehru, Mountbatten’s prestige mattered more than the country’s strategic interest. In the process, he had thrown Abdul Ghaffar Khan — and with him, Bharat’s strategic interests — “to the wolves”. Ironically, not long before, to counter the ruling NWFP Congress’ stiff opposition to first the referendum and then the absence of the third option, the same Mountbatten had “no moral compunctions in exploring the possibility of some Congress legislators shifting their allegiance to the Muslim League”.

The long-term implications of this gross strategic oversight for personal relations were profound.

An independent Pashtunistan — which would have either maintained close ties with Afghanistan or later merged with it — would have drastically altered the geopolitical balance in the region. Pakistan would have been geographically truncated and strategically vulnerable; it would have become “a moth-eaten Pakistan” in the true sense of the word. Its ability to project influence westward into Afghanistan would have been severely compromised.

More importantly, many of the terror networks that later emerged from the Pashtun belt to provide a perennial source of terrorism in Bharat, especially Jammu & Kashmir, might never have developed into the transnational jihadi infrastructure we see today.

No wonder, former diplomat Rajiv Dogra, in his seminal work Durand’s Curse: A Line Across the Pathan Heart, argues that such a development might even have prevented “the tribal invasion and the loss of its territory in Kashmir”.

Today, as Pakistan grapples with unrest along the Durand Line and the Pashtun question resurfaces once again, one wonders what would have happened had Nehru, under Mountbatten’s influence and also under the spell of his own misplaced ideas and ideologies, not done what he actually did. There wouldn’t have been the Pakistan problem the way it existed since Independence. Instead, there would have been a weakened, cornered and compromised Pakistan, much to Bharat’s relief. More importantly, Delhi would have had a greater presence in the region, giving it far more access to Central Asia.

(This is the final part of a two-part series examining Bharat and Pakistan’s approach to ‘Pashtunistan’ and Afghanistan. Read the first part here.)

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)