As the Centre and the newly formed State Government grapple with the problems in Kashmir, it is important to always keep in mind that Kashmir became a part of sovereign India after a great deal of political struggle and perseverance by Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah
Kashmir refuses to go away from our collective mindscapes. Years after its accession, it remains a hot button. This year opened with the continued suspense over whether Mehbooba Mufti will renew her relationship with BJP after her father Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s death. Now, as that door shut, another opened, and these days, the media is obsessing over the Handwara and Kupwara killings after smoke and mirrors over a 16-year old girl’s alleged molestation. In between, we had the student unrest at NIT Srinagar. Handwara and Kupwara in north Kashmir was a decisive test for the new State administration, for the Hurriyat, which controls south Kashmir, wanted to make a statement in the northern part; and it succeeded in its misguided endeavour. The moving target was the Indian Army. Removal of the Army bunkers in the middle of the town was part of ‘mission north Kashmir’.
For me personally, it is my madre vatan (birthplace and motherland), and deeply ingrained in my psyche and consciousness. The fact that my grandfather played a key role in the princely State’s accession only adds to those bonds. Its imprimatur is such that one is constantly traveling back in a Wellsian Time Machine. Even as the Maharaja of Kashmir, Hari Singh, signed on the dotted line, thereby formalising the structure of the accession of his State to India and packing his bags to flee to the safer haven of Jammu, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who treasured Kashmir as a big prize of his two-nation theory, tried his best to reach out to National Conference leader Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah one last time. Knowing well that Abdullah didn’t like him and had constantly dodged the bullet to meet him, he knew that at that late stage, the Sheikh was his only hope to pouch Kashmir. Realising that of the two principals in the Kashmir equation, Hari Singh had surrendered and the Sheikh was aligned with Jawaharlal Nehru, his last ditch attempt also failed. As the tribal lashkars knocked on Srinagar’s doors, the real drama shifted to New Delhi.
At the behest of the British Home Office Political Department, Jinnah made repeated attempts to contact Sheikh Abdullah at 17 York Road, Pandit Nehru’s residence. Abdullah had arrived in Delhi to appeal to the Indian Cabinet to despatch Indian Armed Forces to help Kashmiris repel the tribesmen. Jinnah wanted the Sheikh to visit lahore for a dialogue. It was late October and the Indian Cabinet was in an emergency session, deciding on whether to send the Indian Army to Kashmir or not. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel recommended strong action as did Defence Minister Sardar Baldev Singh. Sheikh Abdullah was a petitioner but he too waited for Hari Singh’s sign-off. Sitting in the ante-room, he was apprehensive as he spoke with Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Nehru’s Private Secretary DN Kachru. As the phone rang and Jinnah asked for the Sheikh again, the tall Kashmiri nationalist spurned the architect of Pakistan’s repeated overtures.
VP Menon finally returned with the signature (larry Collins & Dominique lapierre claiming in their book, Freedom at Midnight, with the words: “The bastard has signed it”) and he was accompanied by Kashmir’s Prime Minister Meher Chand Mahajan. Mahajan found Nehru in no mood to relent as he pleaded for military relief, till he made the cardinal error of saying that he would go to Jinnah and negotiate. Abdullah, realising the gravity of the situation, sent a slip of paper from the ante-room, saying all would be lost if the Army wasn’t sent to Kashmir. Things calmed down and the Defence Committee met again and green-lighted the assault on Srinagar. It was nip-and-tuck as the first sortie of 40 Dakotas took off the following morning on October 27.
Nehru had played the waiting game with Mahajan because he wanted an assurance that Hari Singh would set up an interim Government headed by Sheikh Abdullah. A catalogue of writing, both domestic and international, has tried to dissect and disseminate the Kashmir problem, some successfully and others not so successfully. While Pakistan labels it as an indigenous uprising and a freedom struggle, the seeds of discord were sown in the dark days of the accession.
The dramatic personae of the Kashmir imbroglio were Nehru, himself a Kashmiri and loathe to giving it away since his idea, ideal and idiom of a secular and unified free India had to have Jammu & Kashmir, a shop window for the whole nation, a laboratory of secularism, given that it was a Muslim-majority State ruled by a Hindu. Throw in two more characters — Sheikh Abdullah, Nehru’s personal friend, a die-hard nationalist, and the insular Hari Singh, who flirted with the idea of independence (wedged as he was geo-strategically between so many nations). The inter-play between Abdullah, leader of the Muslim masses and Hari Singh and his repressive Prime Minister Ram Chandra Kak, was a bitter power tussle. Add the manically obsessive Jinnah to this end game, and you have an incendiary drama.
Towering above all the players was Nehru himself, who was convinced that Kashmir was worth fighting for. So he advocated the Mysore model after its accession. He wanted an interim Government in Kashmir where the leader of the popular party was asked to choose his colleagues. Nehru chose Abdullah because he believed the latter could deliver the goods. But his counter-weight in Kashmir remained Jinnah, a man who visited Kashmir for holidays in the late 1920s and was besotted by its beauty. He returned again in 1936 till he finally arrived to a hero’s welcome in May 1944, when he spent over two months as a guest of the Muslim Conference. Shunned by the Ruler, his Prime Minister and of course the elusive Abdullah, Jinnah gave many speeches asking Kashmiris to answer their true calling as Muslims and side with him when the time came.
Playing the Muslim card adroitly, Jinnah appealed to them repeatedly, “If your objective is one, then your voice will also become one. I am a Muslim and all my sympathies are for the Muslim cause.” At another gathering he reportedly said, “It is better to live in a hut in Pakistan with a sense of security, than to live in a bungalow in India under the shadow of insecurity.”
The counter-point came from Abdullah, who ignored his presence in the valley and attacked him in a series of mass contact meetings, even threatening to expose Jinnah’s plan for Kashmir. Some of Nehru’s thinking on Kashmir was also predicated by the inputs of his Private Secretary and fellow Kashmiri, Kachru. On June 8, 1947, for instance, Kachru wrote to Nehru saying, “Geography, it has been suggested in certain influential quarters, will no doubt play a great part in determining the course which the princely States follow.” His views were prescient. He added that due to the proposed division of Punjab, it was, therefore, permissible to argue that Kashmir will find itself geographically isolated from the rest of India. Powerful influences may also develop which will tend to draw Kashmir to the new alignment of forces within areas adjacent to it.
Nehru and Abdullah thwarted that to make Kashmir a part of sovereign India. The journey over these last 69 years has been one of heart-break and heartache, stop-start, with lesions and bruises brutalising minds and bodies. It reminds one of the famous saying: A gallstone can be extracted without unnecessary trauma to the liver.