Part III: Teething Years
Holding on to Kashmir
[HOLDING ON TO KASHMIR](part0002.html#INC8)
We shall meet each other frequently as the best of friends and in the same spirit of good comradeship that we have had the good fortune to enjoy all these years.
– GENERAL CARIAPPA, SPEAKING AT A FAREWELL FUNCTION FOR PAKISTANI OFFICERS IN 19471Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 21.
Lieutenant Colonel Dewan Ranjit Rai, commanding officer (CO) of the first battalion of the Sikh Regiment (1 Sikh as it is commonly called) was a happy man as he surveyed the Gurgaon landscape from his battalion headquarters on a crisp autumn evening in late-September 1947. Lieutenant General Dudley Russell, the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C), Delhi and Punjab Area had just finished his inspection of the unit and remarked to one of his staff officers, Major S.K. Sinha (later retired as lieutenant general and vice chief of the army staff), that he was impressed with the unit and was glad that he had selected it along with its dynamic CO,2Lieutenant General S.K. Sinha, A Soldier Recalls (New Delhi: Lancer, 1992), p. 96. for the task of protecting Delhi during the troubled days of Partition. Sinha recalls:
One could not but be struck by the confidence and bearing of the Colonel and little did I then realize that this visit would influence in selecting this battalion for a crucial assignment.3Ibid.
Gurgaon during those days was the back of beyond and lay on the south-western approaches to the capital city of Delhi, a far cry from the bustling suburban metropolis that it is today. Lieutenant Colonel Rai was happy for one other reason – he had been selected as independent India’s first military attaché to Washington and the family was all excited heading westwards. Little did they realize that fate had other things in store for the dashing infantry officer.
The speed and decisiveness with which the British decided to leave India in 1947 was in contrast to the century-long period they took to gain control of the huge land mass of the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reeling from the financial burden of World War II and realizing that the winds of self-determination were gathering speed in Asia and blowing across British colonies from Malaysia to India, a tactical retreat from Asia after having stripped large parts of the continent of much of its natural resources and wealth was the best that could be orchestrated by Clement Attlee and his Labour government without losing much face. Battle-hardened British military leaders like Auchinleck, who had led and fought alongside Indian officers and men and then occupied centre stage in turbulent post-war India offered sage advice to the political leadership on the futility of hanging on to India. Writing to Wavell, the viceroy of India in August 1945, Auchinleck pondered:
I am continually being impressed in the present rapidly changing state of India with the urgent need of facing facts and for discarding the habit prevalent for some time past in British official circles in India of pretending that things are as they were ten or even five years ago.4John Connell, Auchinleck: A Biography of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (London: Cassell, 1959), p. 790–91.
What of Wavell, the penultimate viceroy of India and the first military man to be entrusted the job by the Crown? Overshadowed by the flamboyant Mountbatten in the dying years of the Raj, the conservative and stodgy Wavell quietly paved the way for the creation of Pakistan as part of Britain’s strategy to check the advance of the Soviet Union towards the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and the oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf. In his correspondence and interaction with both Churchill and Attlee, he argued that a Jinnah-led Muslim state in the north-western part of the subcontinent would be far more malleable in terms of providing military bases and launch pads from where the Russians could be watched over as compared to an undivided Congress-led India. He rightly assessed that Nehru had great aspirations for India and was more than likely to chart an anti-colonial and independent foreign policy. Wavell was bang on target – Britain had played the Great Game well – right till the end.5For an absolutely riveting narrative of Wavell’s machinations to covertly ensure the partition of India, see the chapter, ‘Wavell Plays the Great Game,’ in Narendra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 167–98.
From the time the decision was taken to hand over political power to popular leaders of the independence movement, it took the British barely six months to put in place mechanisms and procedures for the partition of India into India and Pakistan. Guidelines were quickly drawn for the division of the armed forces and amalgamating the 550-odd princely states into the Unions of India and Pakistan.6Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi (London: Pan Macmillan, 2007), p. 36. It is paradoxical that the leaders of India’s largely non-violent independence movement including stalwarts like Gandhi and Nehru had to oversee one of the most violent transfers of power in the twentieth century. The widespread carnage and horror of sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims was something that no one, including the British, had really anticipated.
GEOPOLITICAL LANDSCAPE
It was during the early days of October 1947 when Major Onkar Singh Kalkat, an Indian and Hindu officer from the Bannu Brigade of the Pakistan Army in the North-West Frontier Province, was rummaging through some files in the absence of his brigade commander, Brigadier Murray, when he came across plans that were marked ‘Operation Gulmarg – Secret’ dealing with the tribal operation to seize Kashmir in early October 1947. Kalkat had not yet transferred to the Indian Army as he was waiting for his family to relocate to India before putting in his transfer papers. When suspected by his Pakistani colleagues of getting wind of the plans, he was taken to Lahore under close surveillance, but managed to escape from his captors. On reaching Delhi, he apprised his seniors at Army Headquarters, Delhi, of the audacious plans of Colonel Akbar Khan, the architect of the tribal invasion. Trashing his claims as ‘flights of fantasy’, the British and Indian leadership of the Indian Army, however, did take him to Nehru. The prime minister of India immediately found his story plausible and went into a rage when he was told a few days later that raiders were seen to be massing opposite Domel in the Muzaffarabad sector. When alarm bells were sounded by Major General Rajinder Singh, the C-in-C of the beleaguered and rather ineffective and communally divided Kashmir State Forces, it is believed that Nehru was furious with the army leadership7‘There was enough evidence of a tribal raid,’ from
In all fairness to both sides, General Frank Messervy, the C-in-C of the Pakistan Army, was in the knowledge of the impending invasion of Kashmir by the tribals and had shared details of the same with both Lord Mountbatten and General Lockhart. In fact, it is also believed that at the time of Partition itself in August 1947, the British governor of NWFP, George Cunningham, had written to General Lockhart about tribals preparing to attack Kashmir. The letter was shared with the other two British service chiefs8C. Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir: 1947–48 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002), p. 52. and possibly with Governor General Mountbatten, but not with the Indian political and military leadership. Other less reliable sources from the Kashmiri media (Kashmir Sentinel)9
While ruling India, Great Britain had always kept a careful watch on its frontiers.10For a detailed analysis of Indian strategic thought at the time of partition, see Jaswant Singh, Defending India (Bangalore: Macmillan, 1999), p. 1–60. Hence, it is strange that at the time of partition Lord Mountbatten and his transition team conveniently chose to ignore rumblings on India’s future north-western frontier. While there is no conclusive evidence to point at a deliberate attempt by the British to ensure that Kashmir fell into Pakistani hands, it is my belief that the British realized that they had an obligation to ensure a balance of power and retain some influence in the subcontinent before they finally left.
Preoccupied with the horrors of Partition, managing refugee camps and orchestrating communal peace across the vast breadth of the nation, it is only fair to say that there was very little strategic geopolitical vision for the new nation state that emerged from within Nehru’s government. Major General D.K. Palit, one of India’s more erudite soldier-scholars, recounts in a biography that he wrote of Major General Jick Rudra titled General Rudra: His Service in Three Armies and Two World Wars:
Shortly after Independence, General Lockhart as the Army chief took a strategic plan to the prime minister, asking for a Government directive on the defence policy. He came back to Jick’s office shell-shocked. When asked what happened, he replied, ‘The PM took one look at my paper and blew his top. Rubbish! Total rubbish! We don’t need a defence plan. Our policy is ahimsa (non-violence). We foresee no military threats. Scrap the army! The police are good enough to meet our security needs.’11D.K. Palit, Major General Rudra: His Service in Three Armies and Two World Wars (New Delhi: Reliance Publishing, 1997), p. 67.
While this approach was cause for concern, it is possible that General Lockhart caught the PM on one of his ‘off days’. The impending accession of Kashmir troubled Nehru immensely as the Government of India knew that plans were afoot to coerce Maharaja Hari Singh into ceding to Pakistan and his tentativeness on matters military led him to repose excessive trust in Mountbatten, who chaired the Defence Committee of the Indian cabinet. It was this committee which took all strategic military decisions during the ensuing conflict.
After identical telegrams offering a Standstill Agreement were sent by the Maharaja of Kashmir to both India and Pakistan on 12 August 1947, he vacillated for personal profit and did not follow up with India, who sought certain clarifications.12V.P. Malhotra, Defence Related Treaties of India (New Delhi: ICC India Pvt. Ltd., 2002), p. 5. Pakistan on the other hand agreed to a Standstill Agreement, but showed no signs of stopping its preparations to launch a tribal insurrection in the Kashmir Valley as the maharaja procrastinated. Being a Kashmiri himself and wanting to avoid bloodshed in the vale, Nehru and his home minister, Sardar Patel, took some time to close ranks on a common Kashmir strategy only sometime in September 1947 and started pressurizing the maharaja to join the Indian Union.13C. Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir: 1947–48 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002), p. 35–38. Also see Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi (London: Pan Macmillan, 2007), p. 59–63. While it would be fair to say that India was strategically surprised by the tribal invasion, orchestrated in full measure by the Pakistani state as a proxy actor, not enough lessons were learned and it would continue to be surprised in the years ahead by all its adversaries. Staying with the approach of independent India’s tallest leaders towards matters of the armed forces and national security, Narendra Singh Sarila writes candidly about Mahatma Gandhi in his book, The Untold Story of India’s Partition:
The Mahatma, who galvanized and united the heterogeneous Indian people in the 1920s with his mystical appeal that amazed the world, was of little help to his countrymen as they faced aggression not from the British police, but from jihadi forces.14Narendra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 406.
As a final stroke to this landscape, a word about how Kashmir looked like geographically is critical as this had a predominant role in how the conflict panned out. Robert D. Kaplan in a recent book titled The Revenge of Geography attempts to reiterate an age-old proposition that it is mainly geography and not just economics or politics that shapes strategic and geopolitical outcomes. The conflict over Kashmir in 1947 only reinforces his argument.15Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography (New York: Random House, 2012), p. xix–xii. The book is a masterly exposition of geography and its impact on strategic outcomes of interstate relations. Military operations in 1947–48 were concentrated in three distinct areas, each of which had their own geopolitical significance. The Kashmir Valley, with Srinagar as the summer capital of the princely state of Kashmir, constituted the ‘heart of the state’. Control of the Valley with its docile people and immense economic potential for tourism made it a prime target for the raiders. To the north and north-east of the Valley lay the high-altitude areas of Baltistan, Gilgit, Skardu and Ladakh. These areas, protected as they were by the mighty Himalayan ranges like the Zanskar, Ladakh and Karakoram, were always seen as a bulwark against invaders from the north. The British always kept a close watch on this area as it was seen as a potential gateway for Russian entry into the area. To the south of Srinagar, ringed by the Pir Panjal and Kishtwar ranges, was the fertile plain of Jammu province with Rajouri and Poonch being the prominent towns other than the winter capital of Jammu. This area was the ‘rice bowl’ of the region and, more importantly, there were no geographical obstacles between the province of Jammu and the plains of Punjab. Jammu was literally a ‘northern gateway’ to India.
Demographically, the Northern Area of Gilgit and Baltistan had a majority of Shia Muslims, while Ladakh was predominantly Buddhist; the Kashmir Valley was inhabited largely by peace-loving Sunni Muslims who followed a moderate Sufi way of life. A fair number of Hindus and Sikhs lived among them in peace and harmony; finally, the Jammu and Poonch areas had equal numbers of Hindus and Muslim and a sizeable Sikh population.16For a comprehensive description of the demographic distribution in Jammu and Kashmir, see Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), p. xiii, 8. Unlike the Muslims of the Valley, though, this region mainly comprised aggressive Punjabi Muslims and Pathans.17Joseph Korbel, Danger over Kashmir (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 8. The book mainly articulates a Pakistani viewpoint of the whole crisis and sensationalizes the persecution of Muslims by Hindus without sufficient evidence of first-hand narratives or eyewitness accounts. The pro-Pakistan tilt interspersed with impeccable research can be attributed to geopolitics at the time the book was written (1966) considering that the US was wooing Pakistan as a front-line ally against the Soviet Union. However, for the sake of objectivity, many well-made arguments and facts have been used from the book. Significantly, the region had been a fertile ground for recruitment into the Indian Army during the period between the two world wars and there was much resentment amongst the Poonchi Muslims after many of them were demobilized during the downsizing of the Indian Army after WW II. Here again, Auchinleck was on target when he predicted the trajectory of many such groups in a letter to Wavell on 26 July 1945. He wrote:
When demobilization begins in right earnest, we shall be unleashing on the villages a force which might be of great value, if handled properly, but which, if it is frustrated, may definitely be harmful. The mass of the men to be demobilized, however, will not have high standards of academic education but will be generally anxious to improve conditions in their villages. If they are frustrated by passive obstruction on the part of minor officials, or by mere inefficiency in administration, they might prove to be a real source of danger.18John Connell, Auchinleck: A Biography of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (London: Cassell, 1959), p. 789.
Overall, the state had a significant Muslim majority; and the culture in the Valley was a predominantly Sufi one19Sufism is a moderate form of Islam that is closest to secular in form. It spread in Kashmir in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. with secular and mild overtones. This is one of the main reasons why Hindu Dogra rulers had lorded over the region for over a century without having resorted to religious persecution as a means of retaining control over the majority Muslim population. However, as the winds of Partition swept across the subcontinent, the Maharaja of Kashmir alienated himself from the majority Muslim population from as early as mid-1946 by employing his predominantly Hindu Dogra forces to stifle the voices of dissent emerging from educated and secular Muslims like Sheikh Abdullah20Sheikh Abdullah represented the secular and moderate voice of the Kashmiri Muslim population and would go on to be the first chief minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir after the war.and radical elements of the Muslim League.21‘Kashmir in Charge of Blimps – High Handedness of the Kashmir State Forces,’ Bombay Chronicle, 29 May 1946, p. 1. Also see Bombay Chronicle, 30 May 1946, p. 8 (accessed Nehru Memorial Museum and Library on 1 June 2013). This resulted in the aggressive Punjabi Muslims of the Jammu and Poonch regions asserting themselves by organizing armed resistance against Maharaja Hari Singh.22Ibid. The situation was further exacerbated when Sardar Ibrahim, a young lawyer, emerged as a radical political alternative and approached the Pakistan Army for help in orchestrating a popular rebellion.23An excellent Pakistani perspective on the role of Poonch Muslims is offered by Shuja Nawaz. See Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 44. Fed up with uncertainty and led by the fiery Ibrahim, a large number of Poonch Muslims rose in rebellion and formed their own Azad Kashmir government in August 1947.24John Connell, Auchinleck: A Biography of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (London: Cassell, 1959), p. 930.
The Gilgit province at the geographical ‘roof of India’ emerged as an area of concern for Britain. Wavell had expected it to declare its allegiance to Pakistan despite Britain handing it back to the Maharaja of Kashmir after administering it directly for decades. The province had access to the Sinkiang province of China and was closest to the Soviet Union via the Wakhan corridor, which connected Afghanistan to the northern regions of Gilgit. Having assessed the geopolitical conditions rightly, it is possible that Wavell urged Mountbatten to turn a blind eye when the province was overrun by British-officer-led troops of the Gilgit Scouts soon after India and Pakistan were granted Independence as there was no way that the Maharaja of Kashmir or Indian troops could speedily intervene. Barring a fierce defence at Skardu before it fell to the raiders in mid-1948, Gilgit would remain the only part of the erstwhile princely state which was not contested for recapture by Indian surface forces in the year-long battle that would unfold in the lap of the intimidating Himalayan ranges.
PARTITION AND PLOTTING
As millions of Hindus and Muslims made their choice of either throwing their lot with a secular and pluralistic India, or Pakistan, opportunistic and rabid religious fringe groups within the two newborn countries orchestrated communal violence and ethnic cleansing that has few parallels – commonly called by historians as the ‘human tragedy of the partition of India’.25A moving account of the Partition reinforced by a treasure trove of archival sources is available in Ramachandra Guha’s book, India after Gandhi. Millions of hapless men, women and children, swayed by religious and political rhetoric, packed their bags and set out on westward or eastward journeys from their homes depending on whether they were Hindus or Muslims. Marching on foot, riding rickety bullock carts, squeezed in overcrowded buses and trains, and even perched precariously atop trains, they were waylaid by armed brigands and thugs and massacred in hundreds of thousands. With both the Indian and Pakistani armies located in remote and detached cantonments and completely unfamiliar with peacekeeping and stability operations, massacres and ethnic cleansing went on unabated for almost six months till the traumatic relocation was complete.
Though the Indian Army had set up a force for protection of civilians and monitoring the flow of refugees in Punjab under a British general, Lieutenant General Dudley Russell, its strength was far too limited to be effective. Because of a similar ethnic cleansing and communal violence taking place in Bengal and the fear of unrest in Hyderabad and other parts of southern India, resident army formations had to remain deployed in those areas stretching the already thin resources available in the crisis-ridden states of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, which also saw the maximum exchange of refugees. There was also another joint force created under the Partition Council, which was called the Punjab Boundary Force and comprised units from both the emerging Indian and Pakistan armies.26C.B. Khanduri, Thimayya: An Amazing Life (New Delhi: KW Publishers, 2006), p. 105–113. Tasked to control communal violence during the transition, it did a splendid job up to a point – after which it was caught up in the political wrangling between the two countries and was disbanded.
The Indian segment retained the formation sign of the 4th Division and was placed under Major General K.S. Thimayya with a mandate to control communal violence in East Punjab from Lahore and Jalandhar.27Ibid. Harvard aircraft of the Royal Indian Air Force operating from Palam28War Diaries of No. 7 Squadron, RIAF, Ministry of Defence, Historical Division, New Delhi. were deployed to carry out visual reconnaissance of the main routes of refugee flow and report the presence of violent mobs so that troops could be rushed to the spot. It was amidst this cauldron of uncertainty that the blueprint of another tragedy was unfolding right under the nose of the British and Indian leadership in Lutyens’s Delhi in the spring of 1947 when Partition was deemed imminent. It was here that a group of hard-core Islamist Muslim officers led by Colonel Akbar Khan in collusion with the future leadership of Pakistan regularly met at Jinnah’s residence at Aurangzeb Road29Lieutenant General S.K. Sinha, A Soldier Recalls (New Delhi: Lancer, 1992), p. 102. and put together an audacious plan to seize the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir through armed action – the objective being to coerce the Hindu maharaja of the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, Hari Singh, to cede to Pakistan. The plan in itself was pretty simple – train and push into the Kashmir Valley tens of thousands of warlike Pathan tribesmen from the constantly-at-war NWFP. Complemented by restive Poonch Muslims, who would spread across the Jammu province, the tribals had an added incentive of looting the prosperous towns of Srinagar, Rajouri and Poonch. The Poonchi Muslims, on the other hand, were politically aware and were expected to play a major role in any post-war dispensation that came up in a Pakistan-dominated Kashmir. It is interesting to know that prior to Partition, these very mercenary tribesmen from the NWFP had been bribed by the British with sixteen crore of rupees annually as legal gratuity to maintain peace on the frontiers.30Papers of Lieutenant General S.P. Thorat, NMML, New Delhi. The new Pakistani regime could not afford such largesse and found it best to direct them towards the prosperous Kashmir Valley.
The next step of the plan was to see whether this tribal aggression would coerce a dithering and militarily weak maharaja into throwing his lot with Pakistan. Finally, only if required, would the Pakistan military step in to accelerate the task of severing Kashmir from India. The plan itself was audacious and considered operationally viable by the overconfident group of conspirators called the Liberation Committee led by Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan with Akbar Khan as the military member. They considered the likes of Nehru and Gandhi incapable of responding to this incursion with force and envisaged wresting major parts of Kashmir in three months. Following the swift operation, the Liberation Committee was confident of forcing the accession of Kashmir to Pakistan.31Narendra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 350–51. For a jihadi perspective of the tribal invasion, a must read is Major General Akbar Khan’s book Raiders over Kashmir (Karachi: Army Press, 1992). Little did Pakistan realize that these actions would change the geopolitical landscape of the subcontinent forever and sow the seeds of unending violence in the beautiful state of Jammu and Kashmir and convert it into a proxy battleground to fulfil what it would repeatedly term as an unfinished agenda of Partition.
THE FORCES
At this juncture, a quick overview of India and Pakistan’s army and air forces would be necessary for the reader to understand how the operational contours of the India–Pakistan war of 1947–48 unfolded. Some of the key lessons of the conflict will also emerge from the force levels, equipment and indigenous leadership within the two opposing forces. After Partition, the Indian Army had a combatant strength of approximately 2,60,000 troops comprising eleven infantry regiments (not including six regiments of the Gorkhas), fourteen cavalry regiments, approximately eighteen artillery regiments and sixty-one engineer units.32Jaswant Singh, Defending India (Bangalore: Macmillan, 1999), p. 96–98. It also had the usual supporting element of signal regiments and allied units from the Supply and Ordnance Corps.
The Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) had a total of six fighter squadrons, each equipped with eight to twelve Tempest fighters and four to six WW II vintage Harvard trainer aircraft for reconnaissance and limited fire support duties, twenty Spitfire aircraft with internal canons and machine guns at a training establishment at Ambala, and approximately half a squadron of Dakota transport aircraft with seven aircraft.33After extensive research, the most authentic source of information came from the Historical Cell at the Directorate of Operations (Joint Planning), Air HQ, New Delhi. Also see the Operational Record Books of Nos 7, 8, 10 Squadrons, IAF, at the Ministry of Defence, Historical Division, New Delhi. Air Vice Marshal Tiwary puts the total strength of aircraft at sixty-eight Tempest fighters, thirteen Spitfires, thirty Dakotas with barely half a dozen serviceable and about sixty Harvard trainers. See Air Vice Marshal A.K. Tiwary, Indian Air Force in Wars (New Delhi: Lancer, 2012), p. 48. A couple of lumbering Oxford reconnaissance aircraft with the army made up the numbers. The Tempest was the main strike aircraft with its flexibility of carrying up to eight rockets with a high-explosive warhead or two 500/1,000 pound bombs in addition to its twin internal Bofors 20mm guns for strafing. The aircraft had provision for external fuel tanks and had excellent range and endurance characteristics that allowed it to fly sorties of over two hours with full armament load.
The Pakistani army, on the other hand was much smaller, but was able to concentrate quickly in a small geographical area to support the tribal action at critical times. It was allotted eight regiments of infantry, seven cavalry regiments and nine artillery regiments.34Jaswant Singh, Defending India (Bangalore: Macmillan, 1999), p. 96–98. A brigade comprised three or four battalions, an artillery regiment and its complement of supporting arms like an engineer regiment or an engineer company depending on whether the brigade was assigned an offensive or defensive role. The main artillery gun of the Indian and Pakistani armies in their early days was the 25-pounder towed gun (also called a howitzer) with a range of approximately 10.5 km. A brigade was also assigned with a squadron of armour depending on the terrain and its role. The Indian Army’s main offensive element was its armoured regiment, equipped as it was with WW II vintage Stuart and Sherman tanks. Adding to the mobility were the Daimler Ferret Scout cars, which provided some protection for reconnaissance elements. The equipment and weapons hardly inspired confidence, but the men who operated them were raring to prove themselves! A typical infantry battalion on both sides had about 800 men and comprised three rifle companies and one headquarter company. It had a mortar and heavy machine gun platoon. The main infantry weapons on either side were the WW II vintage .303 bolt-action rifles, Sten carbines, Bren machine guns, and 2", 3" and 4.2" mortars.
The early years of the PAF were difficult ones for the fledgling service. Though it inherited a number of airbases and training establishments and had a denser concentration of airfields across the country as compared to the IAF, thanks to the British focus on aerial policing in the NWFP, these were outweighed by a number of systemic deficiencies. Among these was the sheer asymmetry in forces at Independence. It comprised two fighter squadrons with sixteen Tempest fighters and the other half of a squadron of Dakotas with what the PAF calls ‘one or two aircraft’,35History of the PAF, from