India, explained.
Indian paramilitary soldier mans his position standing on an armoured vehicle in Srinagar (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP via Getty Images)
An Australian general played a little-known but crucial role in one of the world’s deadliest flashpoints.
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Abnormal states: Kashmir between empire, insurgency, and intrigueAbnormal states: Kashmir between empire, insurgency, and intrigue
As we interrogate the circumstances in which India and Pakistan found themselves racing towards catastrophe late last week, a photograph from almost exactly 80 years ago offers a good symbolic starting point.
It is from a more hopeful time, of four men, at ease with themselves and each other, who are in San Francisco to notionally assist those who would midwife the birth of the United Nations. To the left, we have an American and a Brit: a State Department Middle East hand and an under-secretary in the British Indian foreign department. To the far right, with a cigarette in hand is a dapper KPS Menon, who would go on to serve as independent India’s first foreign secretary and ambassador to the Soviet Union and China.
However, it is the Australian man to the left of Menon who interests us the most.
Left to right: Clyde Dunn, US State Department; Captain T. E. Brownsdon, Secretary; Major General W.J Cawthorn, military adviser; K.P.S. Menon, principal adviser India (UN Photo)
Major General Sir Walter Joseph Cawthorn’s life is the stuff of far-fetched fiction, much of it saved from obscurity thanks largely to an excellent biography by Alan Fewster that came out last year. After Cawthorn’s death, Robert Menzies described him as a “quiet man,” perhaps an accidental homage to Graham Greene’s Alden Pyle. Between early 1940s and late 1960s, Cawthorn ran British Indian, Pakistani and Australian intelligence at the highest levels. He served as Director of Military Intelligence in India in the twilight of the Raj as the Soviet threat coalesced. He headed the Australian Secret Intelligence Service between 1960 and 1968, expanding the organisation’s footprint in Southeast Asia, including setting up a station in Saigon as Vietnam heated up.
Fewster’s biography of Cawthorn ends with the story of a senior Australian diplomat visiting the Indian National Security Adviser in 2011. On learning that the diplomat had visited Pakistan, the NSA would point out that the country’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence – the ISI – was founded by an Australian.
The Indian official was referring to Cawthorn. Fewster does not identify the Indian NSA, simply noting that the visiting diplomat “found it curious that his host had Bill on his mind.”
The ISI is – bluntly put – Pakistan’s famous brand.
In 2011, the Indian NSA was Shivshankar Menon, whose grandfather, KPS, is the man next to Cawthorn in the 1945 photograph. As foreign secretary during the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Shivshankar Menon would advocate targeting a key terrorist facility run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Muridke, a town not far from Lahore, along with the ISI, the group’s lead patron. At the time, the Indian government would not act due to a variety of reasons. But Menon predicted that should another attack rivalling Mumbai in its impact ever happen again, an Indian military response would be a certainty.
He was right. LeT’s Muridke headquarters was hit last week by the Indian Air Force as part of a broad and deep attack targeting terrorist infrastructure.
This was not entirely unexpected. Soon after the 22 April Pahalgam carnage, the Indian government had pointed to the LeT as the perpetrator through a proxy named the Resistance Front. Significantly, the Australian government also determines that the group’s moniker is cover for LeT. Canberra’s interest in the group is far from academic. Investigators established direct links between a 2003 plot to attack the Lucas Heights reactor and Sajid Mir, an LeT leader. Indian and Western intelligence services accuse Mir of planning and guiding the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, and have probed the role of ISI personnel as his backers.
The ISI is – bluntly put – Pakistan’s famous brand. Its interventions have led to a small library of books. Many of them were written by Americans trying to figure out the road that led to the 2001 attacks, and the subsequent disaster in Afghanistan. As early as 1994, the Washington Post would flag the ISI’s interest in narco-terrorism. Some suspect the agency was complicit in Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation gambits. As Lawrence Wright wrote in 2011, “[i]f any group within the Pakistani military helped hide [Osama] bin Laden, it was likely S Wing [of the ISI].”
An Indian army soldier stands guard at the top of Randhawa overlooking Kargil district in July 2024 (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP via Getty Images)
Cawthorn became Pakistan Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff in February 1948 amid a military and political crisis born out of gross miscalculation.
The year before, India and Pakistan had become independent through a hasty partition of British India largely along religious lines. In the process, the fate of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir became an open, vexing question. Created in 1846, the British vassal was then ruled by a Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, from the Dogra dynasty.
Apart from his chronic susceptibility to insularity, tone-deafness, and garden-variety despotism, three other things made matters particularly tricky for all concerned.
First, the kingdom was the child of geopolitics, a product packaged by the dismal British experience in Afghanistan and subterfuge during the first Anglo-Sikh War. Over the course of the 19th century, London would come to view Jammu and Kashmir as a key piece of the Great Game with tsarist Russia. As the Cold War dawned – Winston Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech in 1946 – Western capitals as well as Moscow began to view the fate of post imperial India, and Kashmir, in irreducibly geostrategic terms.
Second, the Muslim majority in the kingdom would become resentful of the Dogra rule, intensifying in face of the interacting influences of rising literacy, Muslim nationalism, industrial modernisation, socialist precepts, and percolation of anti-British sentiments from the Indian heartland (something Cawthorn kept a close eye on, one imagines with growing alarm, from his perch as a key Raj intelligence honcho).
The Pakistan army’s strategy of jihad seeks to ensure that the country’s periphery will forever remain off-kilter.
Finally, in the months leading up to the Partition in August 1947, Hari Singh would initially opt for independence and then dither, instead of choosing between India and Pakistan; the Maharaja was not a big fan of either democracy or Islam. This flew in the face of British advice, not to mention common sense and elementary understanding of tectonic political and geopolitical shifts underway.
For Pakistan, the Maharaja’s prevarications were an affront. Its founders saw Jammu and Kashmir as a key piece of the puzzle as they went about transmuting nascent ideas of Muslim nationhood into a politically cohesive and ideologically defensible project. And then there were bald considerations. A Jammu and Kashmir that acceded to India would grant Delhi the ability to seriously imperil Pakistan’s security, including that of water, at will. Somewhat melodramatically put, Pakistan’s “jugular vein” would forever be in Indian hands, as the country’s current army chief once again reminded his listeners last month, days before the Pahalgam massacre.
In October 1947, Pashtun irregulars, with some Pakistan army personnel thrown in the mix, invaded the Maharaja’s kingdom to force his hand amid growing local discontent. On one hand, the gambit spectacularly backfired. On the other hand, as the Indian journalist Praveen Swami has demonstrated, it also set the template for several future Pakistani actions against India, overt and covert.
On seeking Delhi’s help to fend off a brutal invasion, the Maharaja was told – artfully – that it could hardly send troops to an independent country. Within days, he acceded to India following which Indian troops began to repel the tribal militia. Even after the Pakistan army formally entered the fray, the situation was far from being ameliorated from Karachi’s viewpoint.
Muslim devotees react as a priest displays a relic believed to be a hair from the beard of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, on the last Friday of Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi at the Hazratbal Shrine in Srinagar in September 2024 (Tauseef Mustafa/AFP via Getty Images)
From Cawthorn’s vantage, this was an intelligence failure which he sought to redress through the creation of the ISI, probably sometime in the summer of 1948: an all-services intelligence organisation with civilian representation and strong signals and reconnaissance support. The design and structure reflected Cawthorn’s lifelong professional obsessions. There is very little hard evidence, though plenty of conjecture, to show that Cawthorn viewed the ISI as a sharp scalpel in future asymmetric conflicts with India. In any event, it is believed that the agency developed a covert activities division within a couple of years of Cawthorn’s departure from the Pakistani army.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground turned into a stalemate. In July 1949, India and Pakistan formalised a ceasefire line dividing Jammu and Kashmir. Cawthorn would sign the Karachi Agreement on behalf of Pakistan. The ceasefire line, by definition tentative in nature, would be consolidated and granted political weight through the 1972 Simla Agreement, going on to become the now-infamous “Line of Control”.
By the 1950s, the military stalemate on the ground in Kashmir, as Cawthorn observed, was matched by a political stalemate about the region’s future. India had tactically demonstrated faith in the newly created United Nations in resolving the India-Pakistan dispute. But the Security Council’s resolution from 1948 calling for a plebiscite proved to be a non-starter. This was not the least because of the fact that it asked Pakistan to withdraw troops and irregulars from the region under its control as a precondition, something the country didn’t, and still hasn’t, done.
Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru hardened his position. By November 1963, Nehru was asserting that Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy through Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which grew out of Hari Singh’s accession conditions, was “part of certain transitional provisional arrangements” and “not a permanent part” of the document.
As Cawthorn, back in Karachi as Australian High Commissioner, accurately judged in an April 1956 diplomatic despatch, for India “the Kashmir question was closed” even as Pakistan was warning it would settle the dispute through “warlike means” if its allies couldn’t effect a resolution (presumably on Karachi’s terms).
The implication of this statement was soon seen on ground. From the 1950s and on, Indian intelligence watched Pakistan back separatists in Indian Jammu and Kashmir.
Meanwhile, by the end of the 1980s a popular indigenous rebellion of Kashmiri Muslims was brewing in Indian Kashmir. Three trends cooked the cauldron.
As Kashmir caught fire, India’s response was extraordinarily short-sighted, with mass detentions, torture and general ham-fistedness abound.
First, since 1947 key mainstream Muslim political figures, most prominently Sheikh Abdullah, assiduously safeguarded their political prospects through ideological somersaults, even if that meant cutting deals with Delhi and bartering away Kashmir’s increasingly token autonomy in the process.
Second, Kashmir’s incredible diversity – Hindus and Muslims from various sub regions, Ladakhi Buddhists, as well as numerous ethnic communities – and resulting interest groups left very little scope for the kind of political compromises that drive “normal” Indian politics.
Finally, autonomy provisions, however whittled down, provided ideological legitimation for separatists, even as their discriminatory nature inadvertently empowered Kashmiri Muslims at the expense of the region’s Hindu and Ladakhi populations.
This was combustible stuff. The match came in the form of a blatantly rigged state election in 1987, which ensured that Delhi favourite Farooq Abdullah’s grip on Kashmiri politics remained unchallenged. (Farooq was the Sheikh’s son.) Just who did the rigging and to what end is the subject of endless claims and counterclaims. But the distance between Delhi and Srinagar was undeniably shrinking.
As Kashmir caught fire, India’s response was extraordinarily short-sighted, with mass detentions, torture and general ham-fistedness abound. A cycle of violence ensued. Meanwhile, the ISI went about changing the character of the insurgency, by eliminating relative moderates and pushing Islamists in, including battle-hardened fighters from Afghanistan. Surely enough, Kashmir’s azaadi (independence) slogans became conjoined with Islamic kalima (traditional prayers). Not ones to be sidelined, the Indian security services joined this ideological, often literal, covert battle in earnest. By the early 2000s, a full-fledged proxy war in Kashmir was well under way.
The pro-Pakistan Al Umar militant group during an anti-India demonstration in Srinagar, 1992, on India's Independence Day (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
“[S]upporting jihad,” S. Paul Kapur writes, “constituted nothing less than a central pillar of Pakistani grand strategy.” Kapur, who was nominated for a key US State Department position by the Trump administration in February, argues that as a key tool of the country’s statecraft, the pursuit of jihad is coterminous with Pakistan’s existence as an independent state. Drawing on voluminous internal Pakistan military documents, Christine Fair argues that the country’s military has long maintained an explicitly Islamic orientation that legitimises jihad as an instrument of state policy.
But just why this strategy persists remains something of a riddle. After all, despite occasional bluster, India has never made an honest attempt to seize Pakistan-administered Kashmir by force. Even after carving an independent Bangladesh out of Pakistan in 1971, New Delhi did not foist its terms on Kashmir upon Islamabad; nor did it occupy the newly independent country.
Others have argued that Pakistan’s support for militancy persists largely because of multiple competing power centres within the military and the ISI, where the left hand is often unaware of what the right hand does. As an example, the ISI has an “S directorate” dedicated to Afghanistan and Kashmir so compartmentalised from the rest of the organisation as to render it functionally independent. I have argued in the past that inter-group bargaining reinforces this “non-unitary” nature of the Pakistani state.
And then there is of course the sharp rightward shift in Pakistani military culture under Zia-ul-Haq, in the 1980s, legitimised by the United States’ framing of its proxy war in Afghanistan in explicitly religious terms.
Whatever the case, the Pakistan army’s strategy of jihad seeks to ensure that the country’s periphery will forever remain off-kilter.
From India’s perspective even if the Kashmir problem was to disappear tomorrow, deus ex machina, the country will remain in the crosshairs of ISI-cultivated groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (literally, “army of the pure”). The distance from Mumbai to Srinagar is some 2,000 kilometres; framing the 2008 attacks as insurgent action makes little analytical sense. Kashmir and the Indian Northeast are 3,000 kilometres away. That did not stop the ISI from supporting assorted Naga and Assamese insurgents between the 1960s to 1990s. The list goes on.
The Australian government’s backgrounder on the LeT notes the group’s maximalist agenda, which “include establishing an Islamic Caliphate across the Indian subcontinent.” “To this end,” the Australian intelligence community judges, “Lashkar-e-Taiba intends to pursue the ‘liberation’ of all India’s Muslim population, even in areas where they do not form a majority.”
Assuming New Delhi continues to focus on Kashmir’s economy and generate opportunities for the region’s youth despite the Pahalgam carnage, while providing enough political space for the region’s grievances to play out, Kashmir is likely to go the way of contemporary Indian Punjab, which battled a serious Sikh insurgency a few decades ago. If all goes well, even as bad blood will undoubtedly continue to circulate, Jammu and Kashmir is unlikely to face sustained security challenges, discounting episodic, contained flare-ups. But that does not mean India’s terrorism challenges will fade away too. As far as New Delhi is concerned, India must now reach for a radically muscular security doctrine to meet them.
And for that, we have Cawthorn’s creation to thank.
About the author
Abhijnan Rej
Abhijnan Rej is an Indian researcher and writer.
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