My political struggle

My political struggle

My early life:Part I

M Asghar Khan

I was born in Jammu on January 17, 1921. My grandfather, a Malik Din Khel Afridi, had moved to Kashmir in about 1855 from Tirah, in the tribal territory of the North-West Frontier. He had four sons of whom my father was the youngest. My grandfather, who died in about 1903, had settled in Buttal Balian, near Udhampur in Jammu province of Kashmir State. His sons joined the state armed forces and my uncle, Summander Khan, in whose house I was born, was living a quiet life, having retired from service as a major-general. He had more leisure than my father and gave us all his attention. A kinder man would be difficult to imagine. No trouble was too much for him. He had no children of his own and treated us with unimaginable love and affection. I was the second of eleven children born to my mother – eight sons and three daughters. My father had another son from an earlier marriage, who was about 20 years old when I was born. My uncle, his wife, my father, mother, my brothers and I lived, as was the custom those days, as one family. My father joined the Jammu and Kashmir Army, took part in the First World War in East Africa and was a major when I was born. He retired as a brigadier in 1941. My father was a strict disciplinarian and professionally very competent. He could not tolerate incompetence or laziness and set a high standard of morality and character in his personal life. As children, my brothers and I saw very little of him, dreaded his strict nature and spent most of our time in our uncle’s care. Our aunt was also like a mother to us and she and our uncle gave us so much love and affection that had it not been for the balancing factor of the terror that our father inspired in our minds, we might have been thoroughly spoilt. As it turned out, the balance was perfect and I do not think that I suffered as a result. As I grew up, I began to feel closer to my father than I had as a youngster and this relationship continued to grow until his death in 1966. My mother, with a new child every year and half to two years, was kept so busy that she could give us very little individual attention. The early years passed very quickly and at the age of 12, I came across an advertisement in a newspaper which invited applications for interview for entry to the Prince of Wales’s Royal Indian Military College in Dehra Dun. The age of entry was 11-12 years and after successful completion of six years at this college, one could appear for an examination for entry into the Indian Military Academy for service as a commissioned officer in the Indian Army. I immediately made up my mind to try to get into this college and began to pester my father. Since the tuition fee was about Rs125 per month which was about one-fifth of my father’s total salary, he was reluctant at first but finally agreed to allow me to try. I was selected in the interview and went to Dehra Dun in March 1933. The six years that followed were very interesting and rewarding. ‘RIMC.’, as it was called, was probably the best school of its kind in India at that time. Run on English public school lines it combined liberal education with a military environment, only sufficient to induce us to lead a regular disciplined life, new to most Indian children. The emphasis was very well-defined and the products of this college did well in comparison with those of other schools in India at that time. The principal and all the staff were British, except the Urdu and Hindi language teachers. The college had a mosque, a temple and a gurdawara and we were marched daily in time for evening prayers to our respective places of worship. Playing facilities were ample and the surroundings and the environment clean and healthy. I was an average student in class and had nothing to show in the way of brilliance in any particular field. A convention that caused me considerable annoyance was the wrong age with which most children entered schools in India. Since there were no birth certificates, it was normal for parents to show the child’s age a year or two less than their actual age. This put those children at a disadvantage in the class whose year of birth had been recorded correctly. So at the age of 12, I was in a class whose average age was 13 or 14. I would have much preferred to have been dropped a class but had to struggle throughout my educational career with some children my seniors in age. Some 30 years later when I put my own children in school, I remembered my experience and when my son Omar was experiencing a little difficulty in class, I asked the principal, much to his surprise, to put him back in a lower class. I wanted him to feel comfortable in class and not undergo the experience I had in school. I think Omar benefited from this decision. In 1939 I took the entrance examination at Delhi for the Indian Military Academy (I.M.A) at Dehra Dun. In those days, only fifteen boys were selected for the Indian Army every six months for Officers’ training. Twelve were selected by an open examination and three were taken from the ranks of the Indian Army. I was one of the twelve who passed the open examination. Another, also from the RIMC, was Yaqub Khan. The examination at Delhi was an interesting affair. There were almost equal marks for the written examination and the interview. The members of the interview board were five or six senior British armed forces or civilian officers and Sir Hissamdudin Khan of Peshawar. Sir Hissamuddin Khan knew my father and the interview was a pleasant affair. A few general questions were asked by the panel and Sir Hissamuddin Khan asked me to do a ‘cart-wheel’. This I did and so ended the interview. I am sure that my ‘cart-wheel’, though not perfect, got me good marks and I had no difficulty in being one of the twelve selected for the IMA. Yaqub Khan was also selected. One of the other three, selected from the ranks of the Indian Army, was Tikka Khan, who also rose to be a general in the Pakistan Army. Yaqub and I lived in Srinagar and were required to be medically examined at the Combined Military Hospital at Sialkot before joining the IMA. When we reported to the CMH at Sialkot, we were given laboratory tests and examined by Major Puri of the Indian Medical Service (IMS). Yaqub was declared fit but I was told that I was suffering from a serious disease. I was admitted into the hospital. I was told that my laboratory test had shown that I had albumin in my urine which was at a dangerous level. Yaqub bade me farewell and I asked him to inform my father in Srinagar about the state of my health. I felt perfectly well but spent an anxious two days in the hospital until my father arrived with a doctor from Srinagar with a few medical books. These showed that albumin had been considered a dangerous thing in the past but recent tests had shown that some of the Cambridge University rowing crew had albumin in their urine and research on the subject had revealed that albumin was of two kinds – caustic and functional. The caustic variety was considered dangerous but functional albumin was quite harmless. In my case, the albumin turned out to be functional. Major Puri was sufficiently convinced and I was declared fit for joining the IMA. The two-and-a-half-year course at the IMA was reduced to one and a half years because of the war. Yaqub and I graduated from the IMA at the end of 1940 and I was commissioned in the ‘9 Royal Deccan Horse’. Immediately afterwards, however, the Indian Air Force asked for volunteers from the army for the Indian Air Force. I was one of those who volunteered, was interviewed and selected without having to do a cart-wheel! Wing Commander Shubrato Mukerjee, the senior-most Indian Air Force officer at the time, was one of the members of the interview board. (To be continued) This is an excerpt from the writer’s book “My Political Struggle”. He is a retired air chief and veteran politician.