The Spoils of Division

Mirpur, Mangla and Massacres

Ahmed had got up to… Perron did not clearly hear what Ahmed said, but it sounded like, ‘It seems to be me they want.’ … Ahmed opened the door and went.

If we’d have been travelling only a week or two later we’d have been prepared for it, because by then the business of stopping trains and slaughtering people had become part of life… We weren’t prepared for it. Ahmed was, or saw at once how things were… The massacre itself must have been a retaliation for the killings and burnings the night before in Mirat when Muslims attacked Hindus because Mirat was going under Congress rule… I felt it was our responsibility, our fault that after a hundred years or more it still existed.¹

Mirpur, 25 November 1947

Paul Scott’s fictionalised account of the last days of the Raj (well dramatised by Granada as ‘The Jewel in the Crown’) ends with a horrific scene of massacre. Ahmed Kasim, the younger son of one of the princely states comprising “India”, is travelling with British friends by train when it is stopped (a cow is tied to the tracks), and Hindu militants murder the Muslims on board. Ahmed sacrifices himself to save the rest of the carriage. (The second paragraph I have quoted above is ‘written’ in the novel by the Englishwoman, Sarah Layton.)

There is no greater work of fiction (certainly in English in the twentieth century) than Scott’s two thousand page masterpiece². There is certainly no better description of our complex relationship with the “Jewel in the Crown” itself, British India. And the countries that became India and Pakistan, the wars, population exchanges, communal violence and general terror of 1947, are brushed under the carpet of history in the west, but nonetheless live on.

“It’s not Islam; it’s the peasants”

There’s no mystery as to why I’m writing this now: the issue of mass rape gangs (previously known as “grooming”) has been re-ignited this year. The regime distraction of “It happens in all communities” exemplified in the Jay report has narrowed into a admission that mass rape is localised in certain “communities”; even into the British Pakistani community. What is largely missing is the fact that it is and has been centred around the largest Pakistani community in the UK: the Mirpuris.

Estimates suggest that up to 70% of British Pakistanis are of Mirpuri descent. The most prominent in the current administration is the head of the judiciary, Lord Chancellor and (after the Blair reforms) Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood³. Nonetheless, and despite their numerical dominance, Mirpuris are undoubtedly underrepresented at the higher levels of British Pakistanis in politics: for example, London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s family moved from Lucknow to Karachi in partition; former Scottish First Minster Humza Yousaf hails from Rajputs who relocated to the Punjab; and pretending that party politics is real, Sajid Javid’s family is also from quite a different tribe, the Arains of Punjab; whereas the “Baromess” Sayeeda Warsi’s origins are near Rawalpindi. I have elsewhere pointed out that Sir Kier’s favoured lawyer, Nazir Afzal, is a Pathan. Matters are different at the level of local councils where Murpuris are present, with Nazir Ahmed even finding himself ermined by Labour (unfortunately, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham was subsequently convicted of child sex offences.)

Mirpur is seen as an “overlooked backwater” in Pakistan⁴, and attitudes to Mirpuris are summed up here:

Those from Karachi or Islamabad use the term “Mirpuri” pejoratively, and adverts on online dating sites such as muslimsingles.com often stipulate “No Mirpuris”. Many Mirpuris prefer simply to call themselves Azad Kashmiri.

These attitudes can be explained by the huge disparities in development between urbanised and rural areas in Pakistan. Lewis points out that Mirpuris might struggle in Lahore, never mind British cities.

Not surprisingly, the Mirpuri community is close-knit. Cousin marriage is widely prevalent - although this is a widespread practice across rural Pakistani communities (first cousin marriages are just over 50% of the total, whereas in rural Sindh the level is over 70%.) But it acts as an immigration funnel to the UK: the article quoted above estimates up to 10,000 a year (and that was from 2010). Mirpuri Muslims “travel back to Pakistan to bury their parents in the graveyard of the patrilineage — a symbol of the unity of the in-marrying clan.”

These facts are covered over by referring to the rape gangs as simply “Pakistani”, let alone “Muslim”. Kemi Badenoch alluded to it recently, where she referred to “peasant” communities; it is seized upon here where Rakib Ehsan (of Bangladeshi heritage) questions: “To what extent are Pakistani-heritage perpetrators of GLCSE⁵ originally from relatively modern and developed cities such as Karachi in Sindh province, or Lahore in central-eastern Punjab? How many educated white-collar professionals in office-based roles are directly implicated in street-based grooming? Or is Pakistani-driven GLCSE in the UK ultimately rooted in biraderi-style Mirpuri clannishness among men who operate in segregated and low-skilled parts of the night-time economy?”

There’s a clear drift from “It’s not Islam, it’s Pakistanis”; to “It’s not Pakistanis, it’s Mirpuris”. It is a pass-the-parcel community blame-shifting that is accurate, but also serves a political narrative.

The story of how our isles came to be inhabited by around a million Mirpuris needs a little historical context.

The dam that launched a hundred thousand rapes

The first waters flow from the Mangla Dam

The Mangla Dam was built in four years from 1963, as part of a vast water control and irrigation project following the Indus Water Treaty, signed by Pakistan and India in 1960. Rights to the five rivers that give the Punjab its name were shared between the nations, with Pakistan gaining control over the Jhelum and Chenab, as well as the Indus itself (into which the five rivers flow). This was important to provide “water independence” for Pakistan; as otherwise all five of the rivers - rising in or passing through India (including Indian controlled Kashmir) - would have the potential to be diverted and risk Pakistan being “starved” of water. India had demonstrated this in 1948, impeding the Sutlej, and damaging irrigation downstream in Pakistan.

Two major dams were to be built: the Mangla (on the Jhelum) and the even larger Tarbela (on the Indus). The Mangla Dam flooded 280 villages and displaced 110,000 people. The project was promoted by the World Bank, at a total cost of £1.1bn (£7.9bn today), almost half of which was supplied by the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, West Germany and New Zealand (note the central presence of what we now know as the Anglosphere, or the Five Eyes).

The design was by the respected British engineers Binnie and Partners (a venerable Victorian firm which had built the Blackwall Tunnel and Vauxhall Bridge), but construction was undertaken by a consortium of US firms in what was then the world’s largest competitive tender. A army of 2,500 Westerners (led by the Americans) supervised 18,000 locals; and a small town was built for them, including a school, American supermarket and even a nine-hole golf course.⁶

It is interesting to contrast the geopolitical strategies of India and Pakistan as illustrated in “water wars”. India had taken a head start in water management with the construction of the Bhakra dam on the Sutlej, opened by Nehru in 1954. Though smaller, this was still a vast undertaking - the second highest in the world (after the Grand Coulee Dam). But the project was financed and built entirely by Indians, with one exception - the American Harvey Slocum, who had no formal training but had worked his way up to a superintendent on the construction of the Grand Coulee. As chief engineer, he drove the project by personal force through many frustrations, once telling Nehru (after the telephone system broke down “Only God, not Slocum, could build the Bhakra Dam on schedule.”⁷ The schedule was met.

The construction of the Mangla Dam was important enough that not even a war could stop it. (It is worth debating to whom it was more important - Pakistan or the Western contractors.) A key point in construction was September 1965. The construction schedule was dependent on the monsoon: it was necessary to divert the Jhelum in time for enough of the main dam to be built before the next monsoon season, otherwise a year would be lost. But in August 1965, Pakistan launched a raid into the Indian-held Vale of Kashmir with up to 40,000 troops, hoping to ignite an insurgency in the Muslim population. The war was short but intense; the Kashmir incursion failed, and casualties on both sides were high, before a ceasefire six weeks later. In spite of the war, construction on the dam continued (fighting was only fifty miles away), and the September deadline was met.

But for us, in England sixty years later, the central question is this: Why did the Mangla Dam project lead to such an emigration to our shores? How and why did Mirpur take over Bradford?

In contrast, consider the second great Pakistani project, the Tarbela Dam. The timescale was longer: construction started in 1968, initial operations of the dam started in 1978 but only completed in 1984, at a cost of $1.49bn. Unlike Mangla, the engineering was European; led by an Italian contractor and including other Italian, French, German and Swiss companies. The displaced peasant farmers were barely fewer than the earlier dam (96,000), but were re-settled locally (albeit with claims lasting for decades.)

One of the most open statements of the relocation of the Mirpuris is made here by the Institute of Chartered Engineers: “Some of the people affected were given work permits for the UK. The government was one of the international guarantors for the project and migrant status was part of a compensation package for locals.” I have struggled to find much debate around this question made public. One of the few speeches in the Commons, given by the Conservative John Tilney (Eton and Magdalen) provides some details:

We saw refugees at Muzzaffarabad⁸ and Mirpur and heard their horror stories and were told that since the cease-fire started about 100,000 had come out of Kashmir with little hope of land on which to settle…

Despite the usual stories of the abduction of all the girls from 10 to 20, I do not think that it would help if I went into details about the much graver reports which we heard from many quarters…

Some of us said that we would like to go to the front at Lahore. It was like going to Waterloo from Brussels—the broken wire, the dust, the derelict villages, 225 near Sialkot and 85 near Lahore. It reminded me very strongly of Normandy, 21 years ago…

Although Islamabad and Mangla rise in the Western Plains as great memorials to man, landless labourers and illiteracy increase in the East, and the race between co-operative endeavour and Communism may not be won by our friends.

It is an early case of a familiar pattern: concern for refugees, a passing over of sexual crimes, the recall of World War II, and the siren against the Russian foe.

Amidst this, the actual policy of importing large numbers of displaced peasant farmers appears to have been glossed over (again, contemporary events resonate.) The narrative of the time of Britain “needing workers” for the mill towns was certainly out of date by 1965, for example: “The Cotton Industry Act of 1959 was intended to help modernise and amalgamate the industry. Mill closures occurred throughout Lancashire, but cost cutting did little to improve industry profits. Lancashire was still failing to compete with foreign competition. During the 1960s and 70s, mills were closed across Lancashire at a rate of almost one a week.”

The inference must be: we (the UK) granted settlement to significant numbers of Mirpuris as part of the deal with the Pakistani authorities to secure the Mangla Dam project, and with it the acquiescence of the country at a key stage of the Cold War.

The Kashmir Question

Pakistan and India became independent of the British Empire in 1947. To say the process was “rushed” is an understatement: Atlee’s Labour government elected in 1945 - as the remnants of the war were still being fought in the east - was practical rather than ideological. India was too much of a problem, let alone an expense, to be a part of the welfare state New Jerusalem future (as Correlli Barnett put it). They set a date of 1948 to leave, and appointed a viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, who took it upon himself to advance that date by a year: not accidentally, to 15 August 1947, two years from the day the Japanese surrendered in the East (to Lord Louis himself).

Imperial India itself was never an integrated entity. Most was “British”, in the sense of being “owned” by the legacies of East India Company rule, such as the Bombay and Madras Presidencies. But substantial chunks were still ruled as princely states. At the level of foreign affairs and geopolitics, Britain ruled; but internally, the prince had power, albeit “advised” by a British Resident. Scott fictionalises this in his “Mirat” - where the Nawab is under the sway of the kindly but distinctly debauched White Russian émigré Count Bronowski.

In the real India, around 40% of the territory was ruled by the Princely States. It is noteworthy that even the number of them is uncertain: maybe 562 or 584⁹. This is of course because at the bottom end some were tiny (Vejanoness at 22 acres may be the smallest); but at the other end of the scale, the largest states created significant problems for all parties: the British, seeking a swift exit from empire, the new states of Pakistan and India, and the princely states themselves.

Of the five most significant princely states - those that were entitled to a 21 gun salute! - three were distinctly problematic: Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad and Baroda (the other two were Gwalior and Mysore). Baroda succumbed to pressure in 1949; Hyderabad was taken by India by force in 1948¹⁰. The largest, and most strategic, of these states was Jammu and Kashmir.

J&K was itself a creation, if not of the British empire, of circumstance. It is worth remembering that “British India” (as it was partitioned in 1947) was barely a century old, with the last major consolidation of territory coming with the Sikh Wars. The Sikh Empire of Ranjit Singh had been an important ally of Britain, but fractured after his death in 1839. The Sikh Empire had controlled what is now Pakistani Punjab, along with J&K. Two wars in 1845-6 and 1848-9 saw British victories, and the annexation of the land to the borders of Afghanistan.

Jammu was ruled by an old ally of Ranjit Singh, Gulab Singh (not related), a Hindu of the Dogra tribe. Britain (still at that time in the shape of the East India Company) had persuaded Gulab to stay neutral in the First Sikh War. One week after the conclusion of the first Sikh War, the British decided to sell their new conquest of Kashmir to Gulab rather than rule it directly. The reasons are subject to some speculation: it may have been a deal arranged prior to the war with Gulab, or the temptation to cash in a large sum (7.5 million rupees) may have been too tempting for a trading entity - the proceeds covered the costs of the war. Equally, the British may have underestimated the strategic value of Kashmir, in what was still unknown land: its “immense value was not known to us at the time”¹¹. In any case, it freed the British for the subsequent annexation of the Sikh Empire - its ruler, Duleep Singh became a favourite of Queen Victoria - and Jammu and Kashmir were united into a single tributary princely state.

The territory of J&K can no better be summed up than by a map: the Vale of Kashmir surrounded by mountain ranges, roads metalled only later, and still near impassible in winter. Jammu, in contrast, inhabits the foothills running down into the Punjab plain.

J&K divided; the line of control, and the Mirpur area, are clear

Come 1947, J&K was not only the largest of the princely states, it was also the only one bordering both the new Pakistan and India, and having two foreign borders (Afghanistan and China). The strategic position of the territory was key. In addition, independent India’s first prime minister (and dominant figure) Jawaharlal Nehru’s family were Kashmiri Hindus; and he had a deep love of the Vale, “where loveliness dwells and an enchantment steals over the senses”¹². Jinnah (the leader of the Muslim League and Pakistani PM on independence) in contrast appeared somewhat unconcerned about the territory, notwithstanding its Muslim majority.

Gulab Singh’s descendant, Maharajah Hari Singh, favoured independence from both India and Pakistan. British policy favoured the Indian Princes committing either way, and quickly, rather than independence. Of all the states, J&K could have survived as an independent entity, trading on its strategic position, between India and Pakistan, and between the West and the USSR. Hari Singh’s chief political opponent within his state (politics did exist within the princely states - more so perhaps than in the directly-administered territories) was a Muslim from Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah. Abdullah was an associate of Nehru (whose Congress party, after all, was cross-communal). Abdullah’s programme curbed at least some elements of corruption, and supported Nehru’s dream for a non-sectarian independent India.

The very word of the new Muslim-majority state that emerged from British India included Kashmir at its core. “Pakistan” (a term that had been in circulation since the 1930s) was an acrostic based on the Muslim-majority territories; and although different versions of this have predominated over time, the “K” has always stood for Kashmir¹³. British policy was clear, though: it would be the rulers of the Princely States themselves who decided where their dominions would end up. In British India - particularly relevant in the Punjab and Bengal - administrators drew lines and divided the land, but the minority Princely States would accede to either Pakistan or India wholly. Mountbatten could (and did) nudge, but the one thing the departing Raj did not want was independent kingdoms being created, nowhere moreso than the strategic J&K.

The matter was undecided when the British quit in August 1947. 77% of the population of J&K were Muslim, but many followed Sheikh Abdullah (likely from charisma rather than principle) in leaning towards a secular India rather than a tribal Pakistan. The geographical isolation of the Vale of Kashmir is obvious from the map, and its religious and social practices were and have always been separate too; a more mystical, sufi variety of Islam. Abdullah and Nehru represented a more “progressive” path, against the more absolutist tendencies of the Maharajah.

Maharajah Hari Singh was still vacillating as the British left, and events forced his hand to side with India, whilst dividing his state to this day. Prior to the departure of the British, Muslims (many discharged from the army) had started a local rising in Poonch (in Jammu) against the Maharajah. Both the Indian and Pakistani governments - weeks old, remember - claimed that their opponent forces were infiltrating the territory. Communal violence escalated into some of the most horrific scenes of partition, violence on both sides increased by the fact that populations were still transiting between the newly divided states.

Kashmir itself came under attack from a force of invading Pathans (from Pakistan’s North-West Province) in October. As India’s leading contemporary historian puts it: “What is not.. certain is why they came and who was helping them. These two questions lie at the heart of the Kashmir dispute, sixty years later, historians still cannot provide definitive answers to them.¹⁴” The Pathans killed, looted and raped, Hindus and Sikhs and Christians, but also the local Kashmiri Muslim population. Hari Singh called in the Indian army to repel the invaders, and threw his state in with Nehru. The Indian troops were much better disciplined than the Pathan irregulars, and Kashmir (the vale at least) was secured for India.

On the Jammu front, however, even worse atrocities occurred, centred on no less a place than Mirpur. By November, the Maharajah’s kingdom was effectively split, on lines than run virtually unchanged, between Indian Kashmir and the northern portion of the original Dogra territory of Jammu, now controlled by Pakistan as Azad (“Free”) Kashmir. As ever, estimates vary but perhaps 20,000 people were slaughtered in one day - 25 November 1947 - along with 5,000 girls raped and abducted. It is possible¹⁵ that a comparable number of Muslims were killed in the year, but the violence of Mirpur was exceptional. 25 November is commemorated as Mirpur Day in Kashmir.

The dance of death continued till afternoon and at the end of day 18000 people were slaughtered in most barbaric way of the human history by Pak army and tribals. The raiders killed 10,000 of the captives along the way and abducted 5,000. The remainders, most of them women or children were marched to Alibeg Gurudwara Sahib which was converted to a prison camp. Only 2000 people could reach Janger on foot and then escorted by Indian army to Jammu refugee camp. Women were raped and abducted. To avoid the victimization, number of women committed mass suicide by consuming poison before falling into the hands of the militants. Many who didn’t get the poison were done to deaths with swords by their fathers and bothers. Men too committed suicide.¹⁶

The Spoils of Division

This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened. There are the action, the people and the place; all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs.¹⁷

Paul Scott begins his novel sequence with a rape: the rape of the English girl Daphne Manners by a gang of Muslims, during the “Quit India” riots of 1942. Scott served in the Army in India during the war, until his discharge in 1946, and received first-hand reports from his friend Jim Corben, who witnessed the communal violence in Calcutta in August 1946 (where more than 20,000 were killed or seriously injured): “‘All hell’s let loose! The Muslims are having a pitched battle with the Hindus in every open space in Calcutta.’ Jim reported shots and dwellings set on fire, a Hindu girls’ school broken into and its inmates raped; the police were doing nothing, the army was standing by to be called in, even as he wrote a mob was surging up Chowringhee…”¹⁸

The Mirpur massacres occurred less than a generation before the mass migration of Mirpuris to the UK began - with the connivance, seemingly, of the British and Pakistani governments, for reasons of Cold War geopolitics. The northernmost territories of the old J&K represented the closest “listening post” to the USSR (what is now Tajikistan); separated only by the thin Wakhan Corridor, itself awarded to Afghanistan in the previous Great Game as a notional buffer between the British and Russian Empires.

The raising of the Mangla Dam by only 30 ft in the mid 2000s saw a further 40,000 villagers evicted.

How many of these have found their way to our shores?

How much press coverage did it receive?

We have a perfect storm of history: a legacy of violence and displacement ongoing to this day, aided by the fact that the Azad Kashmiris are the Pakistani representatives of the greatest (and still outstanding) cause of tension between the two nations, the final settlement of Kashmir itself. And at the same time, Mirpuris in the UK are something of a “majority-minority” amongst the wider British Pakistanis, numerous but under-achieving.

It may be simplistic to draw a direct line from all of this to the rape gangs, but it is surely relevant.

1. From “A Division of the Spoils”, Paul Scott, Everyman edition pp 1002 - 1013

2. The reasons as to why it has been ignored are important, and I would write about them, except there is somebody much better qualified so to do

3. Closer followers of politics will be aware of Naz “Sake of Diversity” Shah and Nusrat Ghani, the charity worker turned BBC World Service staffer who became the first female Muslim to speak minister of state (as a Conservative, naturally)

4. The quote is from the late Roger Ballard, an academic and advocate for the Mirpuris (including before parliamentary committees)

5. This is not an educational qualification, but the latest acronym euphemising mass rape

6. There is an fascinating documentary on the construction here

7. Ramachandra Guha, “India after Gandhi”, p 215

8. Sic. Scott immortalises the great strategic hub in the Muzzy Guides regiment

9. See Snedden, “Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris”, p 125

10. “In 2010, Hyderabad remained on the ‘list of matters with whivh the [United Nations] Security Council is seized”, which says more about the UN than India. Snedden, p 152

11. Quoted in Snedden, p 74

12. Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Discovery of India”, p 618

13. The earliest variant appears to be Pakstan, coined in 1933 and standing for Punjab, Afghan (the North-West Pathan provinces), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan. I am always struck by how Baluchistan has been sidelined from the start

14. Guha, p 65

15. Snedden, p 167

16. See here

17. Paul Scott, “The Jewel in the Crown”, Everyman edition p5

18. Hilary Spurling, “Paul Scott: a life”, p 164