To Issue ‘Stand Down’ or Not…: Britain and Kashmir, 1947–49

Abstract

‘It turned out to be a war unlike all others in that the respective Commanders communicated daily by telephones between Rawalpindi and New Delhi’. Thus it was that Henry Devereux – a British officer with the Pakistan Artillery – remembered the India-Pakistan conflict on Kashmir, 1947–49. It was a unique conflict with British generals commanding armies, on both sides, engaged in open warfare with each other and British diplomats taking up cudgels on behalf of the hostile governments they were accredited to. Therefore, whether to issue an order of “stand down” to the British military personnel involved in Kashmir emerged as an important question which the Clement Attlee Government (1945–51) faced as it struggled to formulate its response to the conflict. The article focuses on this question of the involvement of British officers in the armies of two warring dominions of the British Commonwealth and analyses the response of Great Britain, which sought to resolve the dilemma by keeping in mind the wider, international ramifications of its response – a fascinating though neglected aspect of the immediate aftermath of British decolonization in South Asia.