Then came Elmhurst, Bucher and Mountbatten !----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sam Manekshaw, the first field marshal in the Indian army, was at the ringside of events when Independent India was being formed. Then a colonel, he was chosen to accompany V P Menon on his historic mission to Kashmir. This is his version of that journey and its aftermath, as recorded in an interview with Prem Shankar Jha. At about 2.30 in the afternoon, General Sir Roy Bucher walked into my room and said, ';Eh, you, go and pick up your toothbrush. You are going to Srinagar with V P Menon. The flight will take off at about 4 o';clock';. I said, ';why me, sir?'; ';Because we are worried about the military situation. V P Menon is going there to get the accession from the Maharaja Fortunately for us, and for Kashmir, they were busy raiding, raping all along. In Baramulla they killed Colonel D O T Dykes. Dykes and I were of the same seniority. We did our first year';s attachment with the Royal Scots The Maharaja';s forces were 50 per cent Muslim and 50 per cent Dogra. The army knew that if we had to send soldiers, we would have to fly them in. Therefore, a few days before, we had made arrangements for aircraft and for soldiers to be ready. But we couldn';t fly them in until the state of Kashmir had acceded to India. . The troops were already at the airport, ready to be flown in. Air Chief Marshall Elmhurst was the air chief and he had made arrangements for the aircraft from civil and military sources. . Eventually, I also got the military situation from everybody around us, asking what the hell was happening, and discovered that the tribesmen were about seven or nine kilometres from what was then that horrible little airfield. (On arriving at Delhi) the first thing I did was to go and report to Sir Roy Bucher. He said, ';Eh, you, go and shave and clean up. There is a cabinet meeting at 9 o';clock. I will pick you up and take you there.'; So I went home, shaved, dressed, etc. and Roy Bucher picked me up, and we went to the cabinet meeting. The cabinet meeting was presided by Mountbatten. There was Jawaharlal Nehru, there was Sardar Patel, there was Sardar Baldev Singh. There were other ministers whom I did not know and did not want to know, because I had nothing to do with them. At the morning meeting he handed over the (Accession) thing. Mountbatten turned around and said, '; come on Manekji (He called me Manekji instead of Manekshaw), what is the military situation?'; I gave him the military situation, and told him that unless we flew in troops immediately, we would have lost Srinagar, because going by road would take days, and once the tribesmen got to the airport and Srinagar, we couldn';t fly troops in. Everything was ready at the airport. we started flying in troops at about 11 o';clock or 12 o';clock. I think it was the Sikh regiment under Ranjit Rai that was the first lot to be flown in. And then we continued flying troops in. That is all I know about what happened. Then all the fighting took place. I became a brigadier, and became director of military operations and also if you will see the first signal to be signed ordering the cease-fire on 1 January (1949) had been signed by Colonel Manekshaw on behalf of C-in-C India, General Sir Roy Bucher. That must be lying in the Military Operations Directorate. Excerpted from Kashmir 1947, Rival Versions of History, by Prem Shankar Jha, Oxford University | FREE mobile app with Company email. | Know More > |