AS we flew from Srinagar upon the conclusion of the assembly election campaign for the state elections of ’83 in which the Indira Gandhi-led Congress was ranged against the National Conference headed by Farooq Abdullah, Indira Gandhi called me into her cabin. She, with perspicacity, had sensed her impending rout. ‘How am I to handle Farooq?’ she asked. The most powerful influence on Farooq at the time was his mother. Reflecting a popular perception, I referred to Ms Gandhi’s family’s old relationship with the Abdullahs to help in dealing with Farooq.

After a lingering sidelong gaze from the cabin window Ms G turned to me once more to describe how her own relationship with Akbar Jehan, the wife of the Sheikh, who had secured her son’s succession to his father in ’82 was, since 1941, never close. Begum Abdullah suspected that Ms G was working to distance Abdullah from his Muslim support base, which she herself considered the pivot of his political strength. This contradiction between commitment to nation or to community in fact underwrote the relationship between the Sheikh and Pandit Nehru.

In 1931 Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah founded the Muslim Conference, starting a movement against the Maharaja’s rule. It was in 1941, with the growing friendship between the Sheikh and the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru and the Sheikh realizing that a freedom movement must be universal, the Conference split into the relatively secular National Conference and the Muslim Conference. The former enjoyed wide support in the Kashmir Valley, while the latter had support in Mirpur and Poonch – the Muslim-majority districts outside the valley. The National Conference was ‘relatively’ secular because its support continued to be firmly rooted in Kashmir’s Muslim peasantry. By contrast the Muslim Conference supported the Muslim League, with a large following among Kashmir’s middle class.

As the National Conference leader, Sheikh Abdullah faced a clear choice: he could join a Muslim nation whose leadership would surely be Punjabi – a people the Kashmiris despised and who were unlikely to respect the distinct religious tradition and identity of Kashmiris. Alternatively, he could join a secular state, where Kashmiris would be free to live a life of their own choosing. Jawaharlal Nehru, the source of that assurance of freedom was of Kashmiri descent, a heritage that Nehru cherished, with an inclusive vision of what India was to be.

By contrast, the leader of the newly emerging nation of Muslims, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was a cold and distant figure, a modernist who could excite awe but little affection. Although Abdullah visited Pakistan after his release from the Maharaja’s prison at the behest of India’s new prime minister in September 1947, Jinnah did not deign to give him audience.

 

At the time of accession, the portion of the state where Pakistan had its strongest popular support lay not in the Kashmir Valley but across the Pir Panjal, in Mirpur and the old Poonch principality of the feudal state of Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan retains control over a large part of this area, which it calls ‘Azad Kashmir’. It is important to remember that the Kashmir movement was not so much a part of India’s national movement as a movement to rid Kashmir of monarchy, a movement working in tandem with the national movement. This was essentially a Kashmiri movement drawing almost universal Kashmiri support in a Muslim majority state where the Kashmiris were the largest single community but by no means an ethnic majority.

Despite efforts by Hari Singh’s Prime Minister Ramchandra Kak for eliciting the Sheikh’s support for independence, the latter stood steadfast in his demand for the end of the monarchy. It was only when Jammu and Kashmir forces faced an uprising by the British Indian Army’s decommissioned Sixth Punjab Regiment in the border district of Poonch, and then a military rout by invading frontier tribesmen in the state’s border town of Domel on 22 October 1947, that the Maharaja turned in desperation to India.

 

According to the 1941 Census, 77.11 per cent of the population of Jammu and Kashmir was Muslim, 20.12 per cent was Hindu and 1.64 per cent Sikh. Pakistan has argued that the logic of Partition meant that the state had to be part of Pakistan. But by recourse to an invasion by Pakistan’s frontier tribesmen and the support of the invasion by Pakistan’s armed forces, Pakistan virtually lost its case, certainly in the eyes of Kashmiris. And India’s argument would have been conclusive had India asserted that its case was based on the public will. Indeed, Sheikh Abdullah spoke for Kashmir at the United Nations in February 1948, firmly declaring, ‘We shall prefer death rather than join Pakistan. We shall have nothing to do with such a country.’

In his discussion with Joseph Korbel, head of the UN Commission for India and Pakistan, Abdullah explained:

‘I have meditated about four possible solutions to our problem. First or second – accession to India or Pakistan through a plebiscite. This could not take place in less than three years, because of the destruction of the country and the dislocation of its population. Even then it would be difficult to ascertain impartially the wishes of the people scattered over large areas and possibly subjected to intimidation.

‘Would such a plebiscite be democratic, and would India or Pakistan accept the verdict?

‘Third, there is a possibility of independence under the joint guarantee of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, and the Soviet Union. I would be willing to meet the leader of Azad Kashmir, Ghulam Abbas, with whom I was once tied by bonds of friendship and a common struggle. We had been together in prison and often had discussed the future of our country.

‘But even should Kashmir’s powerful neighbours agree to give us a guarantee of independence, I doubt that it could last for long. There is in my opinion, therefore, only one solution open. That is the division of the country. If it is not achieved, the fighting will continue; India and Pakistan will prolong the quarrel indefinitely, and our people’s suffering will go on.’

 

Was it a coincidence that this division would also leave the Kashmiri Muslims of which Abdullah was undisputed leader, the ethnic majority of what remained of J&K in India? In What Went Wrong and How? Munshi Ghulam Hassan of Srinagar – whose father, Munshi Mohammed Ishaq, was a leading functionary of the Sheikh’s party – has shown, from the letters exchanged between National Conference leaders, how the issue of accession was still being spiritedly debated up to 1946. Before Partition, the Sheikh was unhappy with Congress’s policy of appeasing Indian princes; the Sheikh’s movement was primarily directed against just such a prince.

Perceived as impeding integration of Jammu and Kashmir with the rest of India, the Sheikh was arrested in the wee hours in August 1953. He was released in 1958, only to be arrested again. Released in 1964 as part of Prime Minister Nehru’s final effort to settle Kashmir, the Sheikh visited President Ayub Khan in Pakistan. But he was arrested again in the summer of 1965 on his return from Haj. Released in 1967, he was detained once more in 1968 when his demand for plebiscite was perceived as a threat by Indira Gandhi’s Congress government in the uncertain early years of its ascendancy.

The Sheikh finally returned to power in February 1975 after a November 1974 settlement with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi under the Indira-Sheikh Accord. This accord, which I have argued in my book My Kashmir: The Dying of the Light (Penguin 2011) was, in light of the Simla Agreement of 1972, the best option open to the Sheikh in keeping with his aspiration for liberty. But it is to this day looked upon by Kashmiris as a betrayal.

 

By this time the Sheikh, always self-centric, was convinced that what he said was best for his children – the Kashmiris – to be loved but not to be heard. I recall when I was Additional Deputy Commissioner Srinagar in 1973 seeking to settle a land dispute between the Auqaf and Dharmarth Trusts, I tried to explain to the Sheikh from whom I had received a call, that I was studying the history of the dispute only to be told in stern admonition, ‘I am the history of Kashmir, and I tell you that the property is that of the Auqaf.’ And because it brought the state no closer to the perceived autonomy promised by the Sheikh, the accord sparked unrest culminating in the outbreak of 1988 that still persists.

India’s case was to rely on the argument that the accession was in accordance with the India Independence Act of 1947, passed not by India but by the British Parliament. But because of the state’s Muslim majority, Pakistan argued that it should logically have acceded to that country. Neither India’s nor Pakistan’s case rested on the will of the Kashmiri people. But herein lies a paradox: Nehru had traditionally argued for decisions in cases of problematic accession by reference to the people, whereas the Muslim League had argued in favour of decisions made by the princes. Hence Jinnah’s refusal to meet the Sheikh on the grounds that he was in touch with the authorities of J&K, the government of the hated Maharaja.

 

The Maharaja was indeed the signatory to the Instrument of Accession, but his choice, in the face of an invasion by the Afridi and Mahsud tribesmen from Pakistan’s North West frontier, had turned into a compulsion, because Nehru would not agree to committing troops to foreign soil, and so the state’s defence by India’s army was only possible if it were part of India.

By 1952 the Soviet Union began to look for openings into South Asia. The erstwhile kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir lay on the borders of what were then some of the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics and with China’s Xingjian and Tibet. The Soviet Union’s Jacob Malik, having thus far abstained from the UN debates on Kashmir, made a strident declaration to the Security Council in January 1952 sharply critical of US and UK intentions in Kashmir. This catapulted the Kashmir issue into the theatre of Cold War politics as Pakistan moved towards an alliance with the United States in the winter of 1953-54.

The UN Resolution of 13 August 1948 called for determination of the future status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir; qualified by the resolution of 5 January 1949, which called for a plebiscite to determine its future, with the limited choice of opting to be either part of India or Pakistan. In May 1953, the National Conference led by Sheikh Abdullah, set up a committee to address the prevailing uncertainty and explore the feasibility of a plebiscite, allowing also for the third option of independence. That committee included Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, G.M. Sadiq, Girdharilal Dogra and Shamlal Saraf, many of whom went on to serve in the government that replaced Abdullah’s. This was in all likelihood a response to the founding of the People’s Conference in June 1953 by a close associate of Sheikh Abdullah from his days of the ‘Quit Kashmir’ movement against the Maharaja, his then second in command Ghulam Mohiuddin Karra, with the avowed aim of acceding to Pakistan.

But the Indian government irretrievably compromised its standing with Kashmiris when it dismissed the government of Sheikh Abdullah and arrested him on charges of treason in August 1953, for reasons that are still not clear. In his letter to the members of the UN Security Council of 1953 from prison, the Sheikh stated that, ‘India came to Kashmir as the champion and protector of our right of self-determination and under that slogan fought back the invaders with our support.’ But by this time there was a growing mistrust between the central government and the Sheikh, who had also begun consorting with representatives of the US embassy without seeking the government’s acquiescence.

 

An agitation, often violent, by Hindu nationalists led by the Praja Parishad (People’s Council) began in the Hindu dominated Jammu Division, protesting the state’s special status. When the Centre began to intercede in dealing with that movement, the Sheikh suspected that the situation had been connived at by India’s Congress government. In fact the letter of 10 January 1953 that Nehru wrote to Syama Prasad Mookerjee, founder of the Parishad, attests otherwise. ‘To me it seems perfectly clear’, he writes, ‘that the Jammu agitation, if it succeeded, would ruin our entire case relating to the State [of J&K].’ Was the Sheikh rethinking his support for accession?

In his inaugural address, Abdullah’s replacement, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, implied an ‘imperialist’ (read ‘American’) conspiracy to set up ‘an independent Kashmir under the influence of imperialist power.’ To support this accusation were Abdullah’s two meetings in Srinagar with Adlai Stevenson, the recently defeated US Democratic presidential candidate in 1952, who visited Srinagar in May 1953. Stevenson himself as well as the US government stoutly denied any such conspiracy, a denial substantiated by records now in the public domain. Prime Minister Nehru, for one, did not buy this theory. ‘As for Adlai Stevenson’, he wrote in a letter to his sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, on 3 October 1953, ‘I do not think he was to blame in any way.’

 

But the course that India’s relations with the US took thereafter planted seeds of doubt that continued to vitiate India’s Kashmir policy for decades. And in a letter of 25 January 1960 written from the Special Jail, Jammu to Chaudhry Noor Hussain who had set up a defence committee for Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the Sheikh quoted the late Sir Gopalaswamy Ayyangar telling the Security Council on 15 January 1948. ‘Whether she [Kashmir State] should withdraw from her accession to India, and either accede to Pakistan or remain independent, with a right to claim admission as a member of the United Nations – all this we have recognised to be a matter for the unfettered decision by the people of Kashmir after normal life is restored to them.’ (Emphasis mine)

Security became the key to India’s Kashmir policy with the Sheikh’s fall and increasingly so thereafter. Although Kashmir had joined India of its own volition, the Government of India was in constant fear that the loyalty of the Kashmiri public – overwhelmingly Muslim in the valley – would fragment and gravitate towards Pakistan. The Sheikh’s own philosophy stemmed consistently from a deep conviction that autonomy within India was the only viable alternative to his preferred ‘azadi’ – freedom – that was to become the underlying theme of Kashmiri sentiment into the next century.

 

Yet, for all his talk of freedom and liberty, the Sheikh denied his people the first principle of freedom by forcing an uncontested election to the State Assembly in 1950, the only general election in his term as prime minister. And, because of the events of 1953, successor governments openly suborned the election process, even as elections in the rest of India gained the world’s respect for India’s democracy. All potential candidates for heading the state government were subjected to the fine toothcomb of scrutiny regarding adherence to what the Intelligence Bureau considered India’s national security interest. Individual competence, integrity and even the measure of public support commanded were secondary considerations. It was only in 1977, under Morarji Desai’s government, that an election with some semblance of credibility was held in Kashmir under governor’s rule that swept the Sheikh back to authority as chief minister

Many among the Kashmiri Pandit leadership, recognizing the course that the state must take in the move to independence, had supported the Sheikh’s National Conference in its movement to end feudal rule. In its early days the Muslim Conference had been virulently critical of the ‘Hindu’ state of the Dogras and specifically of the Pandits who, because they provided the backbone of its administration, they saw as the allies of that abhorrent entity. Speaking in Tragapura village as leader of the Muslim Conference in 1933, Sheikh Abdullah had exhorted that the task of the Muslims of the valley was to ‘turn out the Hindus, who from times past had been giving the Muslims trouble.’

Indeed, Pandit intellectuals, such as leftist writer and activist Prem Nath Bazaz, coined the term ‘Kashmiriyat’ to project a common cultural heritage among Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims, though in the process papering over religious and social fissures. But the course set at the dawn of India’s independence meant that this interpretation of their heritage would not be accepted by either community.

 

President Kennedy made a concerted effort to resolve the issue in 1962-63, consequent to India’s China debacle in an attempt at ‘pivotal peacemaking’. Secretary of State Dean Rusk defined US objectives by making it clear that the outcome of talks would have a genuine impact on each country’s relations with the US; friendship was therefore the bait. In pursuance of a joint statement issued by President Ayub Khan of Pakistan and India’s Prime Minister Nehru, a delegation led by Sardar Swaran Singh held six rounds of talks with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then Pakistan’s foreign minister. That initiative foundered because efforts to force the issue were resisted; India was supported by the Soviet Union, and Pakistan was leaning towards China.

The 1963 agreement between Pakistan and China was based on a history that went back to the nineteenth century, in fact from the time the British had created the state of Jammu and Kashmir by the treaty of Amritsar of 1846. The Amritsar treaty was crafted by the British to compensate their ally Gulab Singh for having betrayed his own Sikh masters to help them vanquish the Sikh kingdom of Lahore. The British then went on to impose a boundary on a weak and suspicious China, in which the boundary between Kashmir and East Turkistan (now Xinjiang) remained undefined, leading C.U. Aitchison, Undersecretary to the Government of India in the foreign department to write in a publication of 1929 that ‘the northern and eastern boundary of the Kashmir State is still undefined’.

 

Pakistan thus ceded 5,180 square kilometres to China as part of 38,000 square kilometres of what Nehru regarded as India’s territory in Jammu and Kashmir, although the facts show that it was Pakistan that added 750 square miles to its administered territory of Hunza from what had historically been Chinese and never clearly defined as part of British India. And in his statement to Parliament, Prime Minister Nehru said that, ‘In all these six talks, spread over nearly five months, Pakistan showed no readiness to discuss anything apart from Kashmir.’ The potential promise of help from the US ended with the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963.

But Nehru persisted in his effort, with Sheikh Abdullah visiting President Ayub Khan in Islamabad. In his letter to Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri from London on 17 March 1965, the Sheikh, protesting what he described as ‘widespread arrests’ in pursuit of a policy ‘of repression and oppression’ of Kashmiris following his deposition and arrest in 1953, wrote:

‘Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, at long last realised the futility of this policy by taking a bold stand and calling a halt to it. He released me and my colleagues from prison and invited me for talks to Delhi… My talks with him convinced me of his genuine desire to find a solution to the problem. It was at his instance that I went to Pakistan in order to pursue my mission of bringing about an honourable and equitable solution. I was heartened to find that the President Ayub Khan fully shared the desire for such a settlement. But, unfortunately, when a meeting between him and Panditji was arranged, the latter passed away.’

 

The only substantive proposal that seemed to emerge therefore, was for a confederation of India, Pakistan and Kashmir, described in his autobiography as an absurd proposal by Ayub Khan leading the Sheikh to respond in a letter to Ayub Khan clarifying that all he had proposed was that no issue be considered closed including such a proposal. Certainly the sullied relationship between Abdullah and Nehru, who had by then suffered a stroke, had begun to mend, most conspicuously by Nehru’s personal intervention in reaching out to the Sheikh to help restore sanity in Kashmir when the disappearance of the Prophet’s relic at Hazratbal in December 1963 had brought the state close to an administrative breakdown. The Sheikh languishing in prison at the time walked free in April 1964.

In writing of his objectives in Kashmir Life of 4 June 2018, Yasin Malik, Chair of the separatist JKLF and member of a group of separatists calling themselves the Joint Resistance Leadership, says, ‘Ideas have a permanency that excels time and spans generations. The seeds of the idea of freedom and liberty have been sown in my land. It will surely sprout one day.’ So today we have an echo of the cry of the Sheikh of 1953 by the leader of a group that considers itself heir to the National Conference of 1941. But freedom and liberty are germane to the very idea of India. In this lies the hope.

On 14 June 2018 at the close of Ramzan, the life of Shujaat Bukhari, editor of Rising Kashmir, a Kashmiri proud of his Kashmiri legacy and sorrowful of the current plight of his people, was extinguished brutally after sharing iftar with his colleagues on the evening of 14 June. Together with him died his two PSOs, both Kashmiri. Almost simultaneously the strapping young Aurangzeb, a rifleman of the 44 Rashtriya Rifles hailing from the border district of Poonch, en route to celebrate Eid with his family was tortured to death. The irony is that the rifleman, a Gujjar from Salani village of Mendhar tehsil in Poonch, hails from the district where the mutiny of Poonch troops had triggered the tribal invasion launched by Pakistan’s military in 1947. Today Aurangzeb has paid with his life for soldiering for India, while terrorists that murdered Shujaat were Kashmiri, a people that had risen to a man to resist Pakistani invaders in 1947. How the wheel of history has turned.

 

The ceasefire initiative in Ramzan, laudable as it was, was a political initiative. The fact is that it was in its first fifteen days an unqualified success. Violence receded both within the state and along the LoC. More importantly, recruitment to the ranks of terrorists within Kashmir tapered sharply down. The DGMOs of India and Pakistan met and agreed to resuscitate the foundering ceasefire agreement. But the latter half then showed setbacks climaxing on the eve of Eid in the bloodshed of June 14. June 15 was Jummatul Vida, the farewell Friday to Ramzan. This year the Jummatul Vida marked also the farewell to Shujaat and Aurangzeb and to the glimmer of hope that had briefly illuminated the tunnel of spiralling violence.

The initiative can hardly be considered to have been a well thought out strategic step because it was accompanied by no strategic move, only platitudes of somehow generating goodwill. Vague offers of talks with separatists without specifics on what was to be talked of and the unsure response of those separatists, themselves in no control of the pervasive violence, can hardly be described as strategy. There was no endeavour by the political leadership to reach out to the local social groups to argue the case of government, partly because no case had been made out. Former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah was liberal with his tweets but these were not conversations with a society prolific on the social media. And the flurry of violence at the close of Ramzan should have been expected because it was inevitable that a vested interest would resent a successful ceasefire brought about by the virtual dismissal of the Mehbooba government.

 

The day after the dismissal, the sense of relief that was palpable in the valley showed that the Mufti government, the first ever in the state to have been led by a woman, had squandered even the limited support it had marshalled in the elections of 2015. The limp efforts of the BJP in public debate to exonerate itself from this loss of popularity were amusing but the government of India was swift in strengthening the governor’s administration. While the political leadership was rife with activity, life for the Kashmiris went on.

The placid ambience of Kashmir’s daily life was typified by the mela Kheer Bhawani, one of the two most important Kashmiri Pandit festivals, celebrated annually in Ganderbal district, with parallel celebrations spreading from Kupwara in North Kashmir to Devsar, Kulgam in the South, which was attended by Pandits from across the state, the bulk being from among the émigrés from Jammu for whom the state government had arranged 70 subsidized buses, with ten more paid for by government transporting Pandits from Delhi.

The festival came to a close with a bustling cross section of Kashmiri society including Muslim and Sikh families relishing the savouries – the disposal of waste being markedly inadequate notwithstanding posters of Swachh Bharat – and dallying with friends. The Hurriyat had cooperated by deliberately postponing planned hartals. Surely this was redolent of what Abdullah had with the endorsement of Nehru, dreamt of in his Naya Kashmir.

 

But even as Governor Vohra exhorted his officers to act judiciously and with good sense in their dealing with the public, eliminating collateral damage in volatile encounters, the newspapers blared how government was stepping up security measures. Since Operation All Out was already maximal this is a curious claim. It has been readily demonstrated over the last three years that higher terrorist mortality has, contrary to expectations, led to young men from a cross-section of Kashmiri society, from the well heeled to the humbler sections, opting to throw up the prospects of a peaceful life and taking to terrorism, which they are misled into perceiving as a jihad. Surely the answer lies in inducting the youth in the quest for governance.

The ambience in the valley, even with the enveloping fear that characterizes Kashmir today, makes this still possible. The Sheikh’s legacy surely tells us that only by giving the feeling to the Kashmiris that the government is their own, which is the lesson of the vibrant democracy that the rest of India has grown into, that we can find a way forward.

 

* Wajahat Habibullah is the author of My Kashmir: The Dying of the Light (Penguin, 2011).