Omar
Khalidi points out
that the ratio of Muslims in the Indian
defence forces is much less than their
numerical strength in the population.
In mid-August 1947, with Independence, the
British left the subcontinent, while the
Muslims found themselves divided between two
sides of the border of the new countries of
India and Pakistan, hostile to each other
from the beginning. The central government
in New Delhi was faced with a sensitive
question: will the Muslim armymen and future
recruits with kin across the frontier in the
enemy country become a fifth column? In
other words, a "Trojan horse dilemma"
haunted the Nehru administration. Or to use
Cynthia Enloe's words: would Muslim soldiers
be "politically reliable and dependable"
under conditions of conflict with Pakistan?
Are Muslim loyalties divided?
By the terms of the Partition, jawans
(young men) and officers of the Raj's army
were given the choice of joining the forces
of India or Pakistan, though the AFRC
"assumed" that Muslims would opt for
Pakistan. Non-Muslim officers who were
already in the Pakistan territories could
also join the new country's forces, as some
in fact did...
For some Muslims outside Pakistan
territories, the full implications of the
Partition were unclear. On its part, in
September 1947 the "Pakistani army
headquarters approached the Aligarh Muslim
University authorities to provide
appropriate candidates for regular
commissions to its army", which it did. But
as many as 215 Muslim Commissioned Officers
and 339 VCOs (Viceroy's Commissioned
Officers, later called Junior Commissioned
Officers) chose India, according to the
Ministry of Defence.
Notable among those who decided to remain in
India were officers like Brigadiers Muhammad
Usman and Muhammad Anis Ahmad Khan, and Lt
Col Enayat Habibullah. Like millions of
other Muslim families, Partition divided the
Rampur nobility, exemplified by the cases of
Majors Yunus Khan and Sahibzada Yaqub Khan.
Yunus decided to remain in India, while
Yaqub, fearing discrimination in an
independent India dominated by the Hindus,
chose Pakistan instead, becoming its Foreign
Minister in the 1980s. To this list may be
added seven officers of the Hyderabad State
Force (HSF) when its Second Infantry
Battalion was merged with the Kumaon Rifles
in April 1951.
The test of Muslim loyalty to the country
came barely a couple of months after the
Partition, when India went to war against
Pakistan over Kashmir in October 1947. In
this war, a paratrooper Brig Muhammad Usman
died fighting for India, which earned him a
posthumous gallantry award. A year later, a
further test of Muslim loyalty followed,
during India's military invasion of
Hyderabad in September 1948, called
Operation Polo. According to a New Delhi
military expert, "about 700 Muslims left the
army after it invaded... Hyderabad... and
forced its merger with India".
While it is possible that some Muslim
soldiers may have deserted due to the fact
that they were fighting fellow Muslims in
the Hyderabad State Force, contemporary
accounts of the Operation Polo do not
mention what would be a major event. One
senior Muslim officer, Maj Gen Muhammad Anis
Ahmad Khan, "after having opted for India
and advanced to positions of responsibility
and access to secret information,
voluntarily retired and at once settled down
in Pakistan, accepting a Pakistan government
post".
With Maj Gen Anis Ahmed Khan's migration to
Pakistan in unusual circumstances, the
military became suspicious of the Muslims.
This is articulated by an authority no less
than a former Commander-in-Chief, Gen K.M.
Cariappa. In an offensively titled diatribe
published in the Organiser, the
mouthpiece of the Hindu extremist
organization called the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), Cariappa bluntly
declared:
"[Muslim] loyalty seems to be primarily to
Pakistan. This is a crime unpardonable. This
is also the impression of a large percentage
of non-Muslim intellectuals in India. Here
is the root cause for there being a
none-too-happy feeling towards Muslims by a
large percentage of the majority... This is
understandable."
Others may in fact have shared Cariappa's
charge against Muslims, as the civil
servant-historian G.D. Khosla reported
rumours about Muslim infidelity to the
nation floating in New Delhi around the same
time.
Fortunately for Muslims, Cariappa's
fulmination was proven wrong, not long after
he wrote the piece for the RSS weekly. Raju
Thomas, an India-born American academic, who
interviewed army officers, found that:
"When the [India-Pakistan] war began in
September 1965, a Muslim majority battalion
of the Rajput Regiment stationed in the
crucial Poonch sector of Jammu and Kashmir,
far from being hastily withdrawn, was
allowed to play its part in the execution of
the army's forward actions. According to
several high-ranking Indian army officers,
the fact that the battalion did not flinch
and carried out its assigned role with
considerable credit, sufficiently dispelled
worry - at least within the military - about
the loyalty of Indian Muslim soldiers."
In the same war, two Muslim soldiers,
Havildar Abdul Hamid of the Grenadier
Regiment and Maj M.A.R. Sheikh, received
high military honours for gallantry, a
pattern repeated in the 1971 war between the
two countries over Bangladesh. However,
despite clearly demonstrated loyalty to the
nation in the two major wars, Muslims may
have remained suspect, as two researchers on
the Indian Army, Daljit and Katherine Singh,
"were able to find not a single Muslim
officer above the rank of a major-general
occupying a responsible position of military
command".
Leaving aside the cases of the handful of
Muslim officers who in any case joined the
Army before Independence, what do we know
about the recruitment of Muslims after
Independence? As early as 1953, Prime
Minister Nehru noted the absence of Muslims
from the Army in a communication addressed
to the chief ministers, observing:
"In our Defence Services, there are hardly
any Muslims left... What concerns me most is
that there is no effort being made to
improve this situation, which is likely to
grow worse unless checked."
Nehru's concern for lack of recruitment
among Muslims was confirmed by no less a
person than Mahavir Tyagi, the Minister of
State for Defence. He told the Aligarh
University Union that in 1953:
"The percentage of Muslims in the armed
forces which was 32 per cent at the time of
Partition has come down to two. To correct
this state of affairs, I have instructed
that due regard should be paid to their
recruitment." This corroboration of Muslim
absence in the armed forces, coming from the
highest executive authority in the country,
is further confirmed by the data/information
for Kashmir.
Omar Khalidi
is an independent scholar and a staff member
of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass, USA. He is the
author of Indian Muslims Since Independence.
This book focuses on India's military and
police which constitute one of the largest
security forces around the globe. It looks
into the ethnic composition of these forces
and if they reflect the ethno-religious
diversity of the country. |
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