When a General Refused Quaid-e-Azam's Order | History of Pakistan #1

Ten weeks after Pakistan was created, its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah gave his army chief a direct order on the night of 27 October 1947 — move regular troops into Kashmir. The general refused. Episode #1 of the History of Pakistan series tells how that was even possible.

The army Pakistan inherited in August 1947 was divided from the British Indian Army, but almost every senior post was still British, and one joint Supreme Commander, Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, sat above both dominions' armies. A standing stand-down order said that if India and Pakistan went to war, every British officer would be withdrawn — and Pakistan had almost no senior Pakistani officers to replace them.

Kashmir, a princely state whose Maharaja Hari Singh had joined neither dominion, ignited in October 1947: tribal fighters entered on 22 October, the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession to India on 26 October — an accession Pakistan disputes to this day — and India airlifted troops into Srinagar on 27 October.

According to General Shahid Hamid's account, Jinnah ordered two brigades to take Srinagar and the Banihal Pass. The acting Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Douglas Gracey, would not move without Auchinleck's approval, because the order would trigger the withdrawal of the British officer corps.

The next morning Auchinleck flew to Lahore and laid out the price to Jinnah directly: the army would lose the officers who ran it, mid-war. Jinnah withdrew the order. Gracey later served as full Commander-in-Chief from February 1948 to January 1951, and the joint Supreme Command was abolished in November 1947.

The 1947–48 Kashmir war was therefore fought in a different shape, and the dispute remains unresolved. In Pakistan the night is remembered as the young state's first hard lesson in sovereignty. Next episode: the last moments of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Watch on YouTube: History of Pakistan #1

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@dailyinfodose-d5s


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Powerful Is Pakistan? | Most Powerful Nations on Earth #8

Image
How powerful is Pakistan, really? It is the only Muslim-majority country on Earth with nuclear weapons, and it built that arsenal for one purpose: deterring a much larger neighbour. In May 2025 its military was tested in live combat in the first missile and air exchange ever fought between two nuclear-armed states. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWq2ytI2TJ4 Start with people and money. Pakistan's population is about 241 million, the fifth largest in the world, and analysts at the IISS put its active military at roughly 660,000 personnel. Yet its defence budget is only about 9 billion dollars, against India's roughly 86 billion — an eight-to-one gap that explains its entire strategy: it cannot match its rival weapon for weapon, so it builds forces that make any attack too costly to attempt. The forces themselves are substantial: an army of about 560,000 with more than 2,570 tanks and 4,600 artillery pieces, an air force of over 420 combat aircraft mixing Ameri...
Read more

Qatar Kitna Powerful Hai? | Most Powerful Nations on Earth #4

Image
Qatar naqshe par ek chhota sa mulk hai, lekin taaqat ke hisaab se wo apne size se kahin bara khel khel raha hai. Duniya ke teesre sab se bare gas zakhaair isi ke paas hain, aur North Field jaisa duniya ka sab se bara gas field iski asal bunyaad hai. Isi gas ki daulat se Qatar Investment Authority ka bara sovereign wealth fund bana hai, jo duniya bhar mein invest karta hai. Saath hi Al Udeid Air Base, jo Middle East ka sab se bara Amreeki fauji adda hai, Qatar ko ek aisi strategic ahmiyat deta hai ke bari taaqatein isey nazar-andaz nahi kar sakteen. Qatar ki soft power bhi kam nahi hai. Al Jazeera ke zariye uski awaaz poori duniya tak jaati hai, Qatar Airways uska global chehra hai, aur FIFA World Cup 2022 ne usey duniya ke naqshe par aur numaya kar diya. Yehi woh taaqat hai jo is episode mein tafseel se samjhai gayi hai. Poori tafseel ke liye neeche di gayi video dekhein aur Nation Power series ke agle episode ka intezar karein. Daily Info Dose — YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@d...
Read more

How Powerful Is Canada? | Most Powerful Nations on Earth #2

Image
Canada is the second-largest country on Earth, yet only about forty-one million people live there. So how powerful is it, really? In Episode #2 of the Nation Power series, Daily Info Dose measures Canada's true strength. The land itself is the first superpower: nearly ten million square kilometres, the longest coastline on the planet, the world's third-largest proven oil reserves at around one hundred and seventy billion barrels, and roughly a fifth of the world's surface fresh water. The economy produces about two point four trillion dollars a year, placing Canada among the ten or eleven largest economies on Earth and inside the G7. More than three quarters of its exports go to one customer, the United States — both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Militarily Canada is deliberately modest, with around sixty-eight thousand regular troops and no nuclear weapons, but through NORAD it jointly guards the northern sky of North America with the United States, ...
Read more