Two Countries, One King, and a War

Of all the wars fought between India and Pakistan, the first one, the 1947-48 conflict over Kashmir, is perhaps the strangest. It is mentioned in history textbooks as the “First India-Pakistan War,” as if the two countries were fully formed, sovereign rivals, fully ready with their armies, and their naval and air forces. But that is not how things really were. The reality is frankly quite bizarre.

Indian troops landing on the Srinagar Airfield, 1947.

In late 1947, India and Pakistan were not quite the “republics” in the sense we now understand them. They were dominions, legally still under the British Crown. George VI was the King of both countries. Yes, the same King. There was no President of India, no President of Pakistan. Jawaharlal Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan were Prime Ministers, not heads of state. Their respective countries were still transitioning out of the British Empire, and in the middle of this awkward situation, a war broke out. A war in which both dominions having the same King, sharing the same British officers, and the same military history, turned against each other. And that is just the beginning of the weirdness.

At that time, both countries also had British Governor-Generals, acting as the representative of the King-Emperor. In India, it was Lord Mountbatten initially, and in Pakistan, it was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who held both the titles of Governor-General and Quaid-e-Azam. This meant that in a strange way, Jinnah was supposed to represent the British monarch in Pakistan, even while leading a war effort against India, also under that same monarch. It was almost colonial theatre, except the fact that people were dying in real battles, and territories were being claimed and annexed. What was happening was real, but at the same time, the framework which held it all together, felt outdated and ghostly.

And then, there’s the matter of the armed forces. This is where it gets even more surreal. After the Partition, India and Pakistan were supposed to divide the British Indian Army between them. But they hadn’t yet fully done that. When the war broke out in October 1947, most of the military command structures, logistical supply lines, and officer training systems were still linked, and even shared. And in the middle of all this, the Supreme Commander of both Indian and Pakistani armed forces for weeks after Partition, was the same person, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, a British officer stationed in Delhi. Yes, the same man overseeing both armies. Again, this is not exaggeration. It’s a well-documented historical fact.

Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck

Auchinleck found himself in a very awkward position. When Pakistani forces, initially tribal irregulars, but eventually including army personnel entered Jammu and Kashmir to push the Maharaja into acceding to Pakistan, India flew in troops to Srinagar, after the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession in favour of India. That triggered the full-scale war. But now you had two dominions under one King, who shared the same Supreme Commander, now going to war with each other over a princely state that had not joined either of them.

Auchinleck, to his credit, tried to stop British officers from being placed in a position where they might end up fighting each other. He was still technically the Supreme Commander of both Indian and Pakistani forces when the war began in later October. He made it clear that if British officers in the Pakistani Army entered Kashmir, he would pull out all British personnels from both the Pakistani and the Indian armies, in retaliation. The threat worked, and although British officers remained in advisory or administrative roles on both sides, they were kept out of frontline combat. Still, that does not remove the absurdity of the situation, two armies fighting a war under the same King, with the same Supreme Commander of their armed forces.

At the time of the war, both countries were still members of the Commonwealth too. This meant, in theory, that they were part of the same intergovernmental family, attending the same diplomatic gatherings, and recognising and swearing allegiance to the same monarch. While soldiers fought over the strategic towns in Jammu and Kashmir, the civil servants were busy, still finalising the paperwork of the partition. They had to decide how to divide the military stores, who gets which rifles and tanks, how to settle payments, and so on. Pakistan, in fact, did not even have its own currency until mid-1948. Until then, it was using Indian currency with “Government of Pakistan” stamped over it. Think about it, Pakistani soldiers in Kashmir, in the early months of the war, might well have been paid in overprinted Indian rupees.

Indian troops in Kashmir, 1947.

None of this is to say that the war was not serious or real. It was very real. Thousands died. The fighting was intense, and affected the relations between the two countries permanently. It in a way, cemented Kashmir as the core territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, and it marked the beginning of a long, bitter, and violent relationship. The most strangest and tragic part of this war is that it happened before the two countries even finished becoming truly independent countries.

There is something that is very unsettling about this early period after the independence of these two countries. The conflict far from merely being a territorial conflict, was more of a conflict born from the administrative chaos, the political desperation, and the consequence of centuries of British colonialism. It was a war fought with the shared institutions, histories, and in some cases, uniforms too. The Indian and Pakistani armies of 1947 were not simply cut from the same cloth, they were just a few months prior, literally the same army. Many officers had trained together at Sandhurst or Dehradun. Some had even served in the same battalions during the Second World War. Now, they were standing on opposite sides of a war neither country had fully prepared for, let alone understood the long-term consequences of.

Maybe the strangest thing about this war is that no one really knew what it was supposed to be. It just happened in the middle of all the chaos and confusion that came with Partition, while everything else was still being figured out. And somehow, that mess became the starting point for everything that came after. It became a fight that dragged on, and in a way, never really ended.