Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah: A fraught relationship
(This article has appeared on the Tehelka website too.)
Having been raised in Kashmir in the 1970s and the 1980s, I instinctively knew that my parents would protect me from the shackles of restrictive traditions and from the pigeonholes of modernity. My own wariness of statism, perhaps, stems from my Mother’s fraught childhood and youth. Her father, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, reigned as Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir from 1948 to 1953.
When the pledge to hold a referendum in Jammu and Kashmir was not kept by the governments of India and Pakistan, his advocacy of the right of self-determination for the state led to his imprisonment. He was shuttled from one jail to another until 1972 and remained out of power until 1975. Despite tremendous changes in the world order, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah did not lose faith in the international system which was premised on Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination, post-World War 1. The Sheikh, I argue, sought self-determination for Jammu and Kashmir as a territorial unit, not as a Muslim nation. He wanted Kashmir to be an international polity. I posit that he perceived the evolution of Kashmiri nationalism in world-historical terms, as opposed to a domestic and local issue.
After the rumblings and subsequent explosion of armed insurgency and counter insurgency in Kashmir in 1989, a few of those organizations that advocated armed resistance to secure the right of self-determination for the people of Kashmir, in accordance with the United Nations Resolutions of 21 April and 3 June 1948, of 14 March 1950 and 30 March 1951, blamed the nationalist leader, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, for having, purportedly, succumbed to pressures brought on by the government of India in 1975. He had given the clarion call for Kashmiri nationalism. After 1975, the allegation leveled against the Sheikh was that he had, purportedly, capitulated to the insistence of the government of India to relinquish the struggle for autonomy or self-determination. It was a heart-rending period for Mother to see reductive readings of her father’s ideology and the attempted erasure of the political and sociocultural edifice of which he had been the primary architect. In one of those few and far between moments of unburdening herself, Mother recalled that the Sheikh had remained clear headed about his political ideology during his time in internment and even until he breathed his last.
It would be relevant to mention that the partition of India in 1947 into the dominions of India and Pakistan along religious lines enabled divisive forces of violence and brutality to rip the common anti-colonial, cultural legacy to pieces.1 Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, on the contrary, was ambivalent about the partition because he did not agree with the rationale of the two-nation theory. He was equally ambivalent about acceding to India, because he felt that if that choice was made, Pakistan would always create juggernauts in the political and economic progress of Kashmir. As for the idea of declaring Kashmir an independent state, he recognized that “to keep a small state independent while it was surrounded by big powers was impossible” (Abdullah 1993: 60). Was Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah willing to concede the necessity of political compromise and accommodation? Did the Sheikh draw attention to the political, cultural, and territorial compromises that the autonomy model might entail? He did categorically declare that ‘Neither the friendship of Pandit Nehru or of Congress nor their support of our freedom movement would have any influence upon our decision if we felt that the interests of four million Kashmiris lay in our accession to Pakistan’ (quoted in Brecher 1953: 35). The decision to accede to either India or Pakistan placed Maharaja Hari Singh in a dilemma.
When the monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, acceded to the Indian dominion on 26 October 1947, it was with the understanding that the accession was provisional. He officially ceded to the government of India jurisdiction over defense, foreign affairs, and communications. He was assured by the first Governor-General of India, Lord Mountbatten, that a referendum would be held in the state after the restoration of law and order in the Indian subcontinent. The popular vote would enable the administration to ascertain the wishes of the people. In January 1948, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, brought the Kashmir issue before the United Nations Security Council. Subsequently, the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan was established in 1948 in order to facilitate a resolution of the Kashmir dispute to which both India and Pakistan were parties. The United Nations advocated the cessation of infiltration of tribal raiders, backed by Pakistani army regulars, into Jammu and Kashmir. The United Nations also proposed a program of gradual demilitarization and withdrawal of regular Indian and Pakistani forces, which were not required for the purposes of maintaining law and order, from the cease-fire line. The cease-fire line, now the line of control, is the border separating Jammu and Kashmir (Indian-administered) from “Azad” Kashmir (Pakistan-administered). But neither India nor Pakistan fulfilled the pre-requisites outlined by the United Nations in order to hold a plebiscite.
The rift within the organization was further widened by Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s insistence that Abdullah extend his support to the Muslim League and thereby disavow every principle he had fought for. Abdullah’s refusal to do so sharpened the awareness of the Muslim League that it would be unable to consolidate its political position without his support. Initially, the Congress supported the Quit Kashmir movement and reinforced the position of the NC on plebiscite. The Congress advised the maharaja, right up to 1947, to gauge the public mood and accordingly accede to either India or Pakistan. Nehru’s argument that Kashmir was required to validate the secular credentials of India was a later development. Jinnah refuted the notion that Pakistan required Kashmir to vindicate its theocratic status and did not make an argument for the inclusion of Kashmir in the new nation-state of Pakistan right up to the eve of partition.
At the time, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah harbored the mirage of an independent Jammu and Kashmir. But he believed, in the interests of expediency, that provisional accession to predominantly Hindu India was a better option than unconditional accession to predominantly Muslim Pakistan. He felt that the political voice and socioeconomic interests of Kashmiris would be greatly threatened and diminished by the plutocracy of Pakistan, which was predominantly feudal. The successful implementation of the land to the tiller program by the Sheikh Abdullah-led state government in Jammu and Kashmir would have been a pipe dream in a country like Pakistan, which was ruled by the feudal aristocracy.
On 2 November 1947, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, reiterated his government’s pledge to not only the people of Kashmir, but also to the international community, to hold a referendum in Indian and Pakistani-administered Jammu and Kashmir under the auspices of a world body like the United Nations, in order to determine whether the populace preferred to be affiliated with India or Pakistan. Nehru emphasized this commitment several times at public forums over the next few years.
In January 1948 India referred the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations (Rahman 1996: 15–19). Prime Minister Nehru took the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir beyond local and national boundaries by bringing it before the UN Security Council, and seeking a ratification of India’s “legal” claims over Kashmir. The UN reinforced Nehru’s pledge of holding a plebiscite in Kashmir, and in 1948 the Security Council established the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) to play the role of mediator in the Kashmir issue. The UNCIP adopted a resolution urging the government of Pakistan to cease the infiltration of tribal mercenaries and raiders into J & K. It also urged the government of India to demilitarize the state by “withdrawing their own forces from Jammu and Kashmir and reducing them progressively to the minimum strength required for the support of civil power in the maintenance of law and order.” The resolution proclaimed that once these conditions were fulfilled, the government of India would be obligated to hold a plebiscite in the state in order to either ratify or veto the accession of J & K to India (Hagerty 2005: 19).
The “defining moment in Jammu and Kashmir’s post-Indian independence history” came in 1950 when disenfranchised peasants “were freed from the shackles of landlords through a law that gave them ownership rights on the land they tilled. . . . The sweeping land reforms under the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act passed on July 13, 1950, changed the complexion of Kashmiri society. The historical image of the emaciated local farmer in tatters, with sunken faces and listless eyes, toiling to fill the granaries of landlords changed overnight into one of a landowner who expected to benefit from the labor he had put in for generations” (Ahmed, F.). This program emphasized the necessity of abolishing exploitative landlordism without compensation and enfranchising tillers by granting them the lands they worked on. Many policy makers in the Indian subcontinent, political scientists, and economists have acknowledged the effectiveness and rigor of land reforms in Jammu and Kashmir.
A large part of Jammu and Kashmir, post-1947, is administered by India and a section by Pakistan. China annexed a segment of the land in 1962, through which it has built a road that links Tibet to Xiajiang (see Rahman 5–6). As I underline in my monograph on Kashmir, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan, the strategic location of Jammu and Kashmir renders it a covetous region for both India and Pakistan. The state borders on China and Afghanistan (Khan 7).
In August 1952, Nehru declared in the Indian parliament: “We do not wish to win people against their will with the help of armed force; and if the people of Kashmir wish to part company with us, they may go their way and we shall go ours. We want no forced marriages, no forced unions” (Bhattacharjea 2008: xiv; Lamb 1991: 46–47). But, once again, he equivocated and sought to capitalize on the formation of the de facto border by declaring in 1955 that he had asked his Pakistani counterparts to consider resolving the Kashmir issue by converting the de facto border into a permanent international one between the two nation-states. Nehru’s endeavor to renege on his oft-repeated promise of holding a plebiscite created a hostile obstinacy in Pakistan.
Nehru’s sentimentalism and vacillation regarding Kashmir, perhaps, played a large role in keeping this issue of international dimensions in limbo. The Kashmir dispute has thus remained troublingly infantile in its irresolvability. The re-mushrooming of the separatist movement in Kashmir in 1989 and the subsequent creation of a political vacuum has allowed the insidious infiltration of distrust and suspicion into the relationship between Kashmir, and the two nuclear powers in the Indian subcontinent, India and Pakistan.
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s ouster on August 9, 1953, at the behest of the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his subsequent arrest, was an event that alienated the Kashmiri masses and cast his next of kin as personae non grata. The Sheikh’s vociferous protests against, what he perceived as, endeavors to erode the constitutional autonomy of the state and undemocratically legitimize its integration into the Indian Union earned him the disapprobation of some of his former allies.
The Sheikh’s testimony regarding his arrest in 1953 and the plight of his persecuted wife and children might benefit the reader: On the chilly night of August 9, 1953, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Akbar Jehan, and their children were staying at the government guest house in Gulmarg while on a tour of that part of the Valley. They had been accompanied by the Sheikh’s secretary and a couple of other staff members as well. In the wee hours of the morning, the Sheikh was woken by his alarmed secretary who tremulously told him that the guest house had been surrounded by “armed military police.” On hearing this, the Sheikh sat bolt upright and strode out of his bedroom, only to find a police superintendent brandishing his baton in the living room. The Sheikh maintained his composure and calmly asked the police superintendent why he had swaggered into the guest house where the head of government was staying with his wife and offspring. The police superintendent did not reply. Instead, he produced a warrant for the Sheikh’s arrest and menacingly pointed toward the well-equipped police cordon around the guest house.
Realizing that he had been deceived by those who had sworn allegiance to him and also by those who had claimed to cherish their ideological commonalities with him, the Sheikh prepared to go into incarceration. Dejected but not defeated, he asked the police superintendent to allow him time to say his morning prayers, to which the swaggering official readily agreed. Soon after the Sheikh had said his prayers, the aid-de-camp of Karan Singh, Regent of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, delivered a letter to him from the Regent, in which he had, ironically, commiserated with the Sheikh.2 The letter also brought to the Sheikh’s notice that he had been, without prior notification or consultation, dismissed as head of government by the Regent. The rationale provided by the Regent for the Sheikh’s arbitrary dismissal was that his colleagues in the legislative assembly of Jammu and Kashmir, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, Shyam Lal Saraf, and Girdhar Lal Dogra, had lost confidence in his leadership.
Once the reality of the coup d’état sunk in, it was plain as day that his political adversaries had employed wantonly undemocratic stratagems to remove him from the position of Prime Minister. “At about 4:20 a. m.,” the Sheikh recounts, “I bade good-bye to my wife [Akbar Jehan] and children and moved under a military escort to Udhampur, about 175 miles from Gulmarg.” Subsequently, the Sheikh was held incommunicado in a house that belonged to the former Maharaja of Jammu & Kashmir and father of Regent Karan Singh, Hari Singh.
He was further anguished and disheartened on hearing that his house in Srinagar had been sealed, and Akbar Jehan and their children had been illegally evicted from the premises. The family was rendered fatherless and destitute. The autocratic and despotic regime of the newly appointed Prime Minister of Jammu & Kashmir, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, had instilled such fear into the hearts of the populace that people were afraid to be associated with Akbar Jehan and the Sheikh. In a situation of hopelessness, the Akbar Jehan and her progeny were provided with a place to stay by Khwaja Ali Shah, brother-in-law of the Sheikh’s older daughter, Khalida. But this arrangement hurt Akbar Jehan’s pride, because she did not want to have to accept succor from her daughter’s in-laws which she considered an abomination. The Sheikh gratefully writes that, “fortunately a Hindu, Madan Lal, came to my family’s rescue and in spite of the coercive measures of the government, he extended a hand of friendship to my wife and children by offering them a portion of his house.” The Sheikh’s seemingly interminable incarceration took a heavy toll on his flesh and blood. The government, in a rare show of benevolence, offered an allowance to Akbar Jehan, but she adamantly refused to take it. Within a few months, the jail administrators decided that the Sheikh could not be held incommunicado indefinitely. He was allowed to meet with Akbar Jehan and his children after several months of seclusion, and, he notes, “I could get authentic information about events in Kashmir” (Abdullah and Gundevia, Testament, 47).
My impressions regarding the Sheikh’s arrest and the Kashmir Conspiracy Case became more coherent after reading the monograph by Y. D. Gundevia. The Chicago Daily Tribune was just as unequivocal in its criticism of the Sheikh’s detention as other international commentators and political analysts. The editorial in the Tribune underlined that the Sheikh’s arrest was under the Nehru government’s Preventive Detention Act, which gave Indian authorities free rein to hold a suspect for a period of up to ten years without either lodging formal charges or a formal warrant. The Sheikh, the editorial explained to its readers, had been “making himself unpopular by demanding that the people of Kashmir be permitted to decide their own future by a plebiscite.” It further noted that the significant and exemplary role played by the Sheikh in India’s freedom struggle and the arduous work of nation-building had won him disapprobation from the British authorities. In the days of British rule, the Sheikh’s “record of arrests rivals that of Nehru himself.” The editorial observed that in a recent letter to Nehru, the Sheikh had drawn an analogy between a Nazi concentration camp and the political morbidity in the Valley of Kashmir. He had also expressed his consternation at the halted march toward democracy after political stalwarts in the Indian subcontinent had campaigned and fought against the British colonial power. The commentator concludes, “All that has happened is that Abdullah has become a martyr in the cause of liberty under Britain’s heir” (May 5, 1958). It did not take a skeptic to question whether articles in newly ratified constitutions of sovereign nations, which pledged to protect the fundamental rights of citizens, had a real impact on institution building.
Gundevia was Special Secretary handling Kashmir Affairs in the United Nations, then Commonwealth Secretary handling Kashmir Affairs, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Foreign Secretary, all in the 1960s. Gundevia’s monograph is appended with The Testament of Sheikh Abdullah (1974). I quote portions of Gundevia’s astute observation about the Sheikh’s ouster and arrest in 1953. Gundevia observes that the Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir [Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah], at this stage, was contending with the rabidity “of Muslim communalism of the pro-Pakistan variety and Hindu communalism of the strongly entrenched Praja Parishad (today’s Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-wing ultra-nationalist organization) in Jammu.” The increasing communalization of Indian politics was a juggernaut that questioned the myth of secularism in India, and the increasing religiosity in Pakistan was just as damaging. Punitive measures taken against Muslim communalists were welcomed with quiet sighs of relief and approval in India, but any attempt to crack down on the divisive politics of the ultra-nationalist, right-wing Praja Parishad met with strong denunciation.
Mullick, in his intransigence and determination to close the chapter of Kashmiri self-determination and autonomy, argued that without Akbar Jehan in the trial the prosecution would be unable to corroborate the charge of seditious conspiracy leveled against her, the Sheikh, and their political colleagues. He insisted that without the prosecution of Akbar Jehan, they would “miss one of the main connecting links with Pakistan and this would greatly weaken our case; but on this question Bakshi would not budge; and Pandit Nehru [Prime Minister of India] also agreed that the Sheikh should not be prosecuted.” The Intelligence Bureau and the Ministry of Home Affairs [India] were in a state of perplexity and uncertainty over how to proceed in this rather difficult situation, because they had moved mountains to prepare a “proper charge-sheet.” But, to their utter dismay, they were categorically told that, “he [Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah] should not be put on trial.” The Intelligence Bureau, however, persevered, in its attempt to bring Akbar Jehan and the Sheikh to book. Mullick’s vitriolic outbursts, rancor, and vicious endeavors to vindicate the unwarranted incarceration of the Sheikh and his political colleagues proved futile, as Prime Minister Nehru was averse to detaining a leader against whom no substantive evidence could be garnered. The evidence fabricated by Mullick and his cohort was fragmented, contradictory, and could not hold water. India, a young nation-state in the late fifties and early sixties, sought the approval of the international community and could not brook the corrosive criticisms of world powers and intergovernmental organizations.
While harboring his heritage, culture, and values of the past, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was well-aware of the exigencies of the present and had the courage to translate his vision into reality, thereby, opening a new chapter of peasant emancipation, and further instituting educational and social schemes for marginalized sections of society. Despite his flaws, I find an incredible depth of thought and strength Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s politics, manifested in the dialectic of resistance and accommodation. I say this not as a granddaughter, but as a student of his life and politics. The Sheikh’s nationalism was premised on geography and history, not on religion. He clearly did not subscribe to the notion that a powerful global ideology, like pan-Islamism, communism, or fascism, could effectuate universal liberation. He advocated the creation of a political structure in which a popular politics of mass mobilization would be integrated with institutional politics of governance.
A point that I have made in several forums, and most recently in my interview with Natana Delong-Bas for Oxford Islamic Studies Online is that the foundation of Kashmiri nationalism was laid in 1931, and this nationalism recognized the heterogeneity of the nation. It was not constructed around a common language, religion, culture, and an ethnically pure majority. This process of Kashmiri nationalist self-imagining is conveniently ignored in the statist versions of the histories of India and Pakistan. Here, I also point out that there are some purportedly “subaltern” versions of the history of Kashmir which, in their ardent attempts to be deconstructionist, insidiously obliterate the process of nation-building in Kashmir in the early to mid-decades of the twentieth century, inadvertently feeding off statist and oftentimes right-wing versions of history. In romanticizing militant resistance in Kashmir, such versions fail to take into account the tremendously difficult task of restoring the selfhood of a degraded people, and also the harsh fact that a political movement which does not highlight the issues of governance, social welfare, and the resuscitation of democratic institutions ends up becoming obscurantist. In trying to espouse anti-establishment positions, some of us tend to ignore the dangers of obscurantism and the growth of a conflict economy, in which some state and well as non-state actors are heavily invested.
Bibliography
Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammad, Flames of the Chinar: An Autobiography , translated by Khushwant Singh, New York: Viking, 1993.
Dr. Nyla Ali Khan
