Daily Times

In order to enhance their economic and political clout in the South Asian region, India and Pakistan require stability. Can they begin the process of establishing themselves as stable political forces by initiating a serious political process in Kashmir in which the people of the state have a substantive say? Can the governments of India and Pakistan make a smooth transition into the globalised world by shelving the politics of duplicity and recognising the autonomous status of the former princely state?

In 1953, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, then Prime Minister (PM) of Jammu and Kashmir, appointed a subcommittee, comprising members from the Muslim, Pandit, Sikh and Dogra groups, which propounded four viable options for Kashmir’s future. All of them involved holding a referendum and independence for part or whole of the disputed territory. The subcommittee recommended, on the suggestion of Maulana Masoodi, general secretary of the NC, that the people of Kashmir be offered the option of independence besides the option of acceding to either India or Pakistan. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah decided to publicly advocate this option as a feasible choice. But in the summer of 1953, an unbridgeable rift occurred among the top brass of the NC which pitted Abdullah and Mirza Afzal Beg (Kashmiri Muslims) against Shyamlal Saraf (a Kashmiri Pandit), Giridharilal Dogra (a Jammu Hindu) and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad (a Kashmiri Muslim). Abdullah’s pro-independence stance received a severe blow when the dissident faction of the NC was joined by the Constituent Assembly speaker GM Sadiq and DP Dhar, deputy minister of interior.

New Delhi cashed in on Bakshi’s dependent status by insidiously undermining democratic institutions in J&K and eroding the state’s autonomy with the complicity of the state government

The former Soviet Union’s stance on the Kashmir issue seemed to have had an influence on this group. The fall-out of the rift was the dismissal of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah as PM by the Sadr-i-Riyasat, Karan Singh, and his arrest under the Public Security Act, acoup authorised by Nehru. Abdullah would be shuttled from one jail to the next for the next twenty-two years, until 1975. A few days later, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s loyalists, including Mirza Afzal Beg, were also arrested under the same Act. Subsequent to Sheikh Abdullah’s arrest, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad was installed as PM. Bakshi’s de facto regime was given a semblance of legitimacy by being formally ratified by members of the NC general council and Constituent Assembly delegates in specially convened sessions. In September1953, Nehru, who earlier had underscored Sheikh Abdullah’s importance to the resolution of the Kashmir issue, did a political volte face. He justified Sheikh Abdullah’s undemocratic eviction from office before the Indian parliament by asserting that the latter’s ‘autocratic’ methods had resulted in the loss of the majority of his cabinet and had caused trauma to the electorate. The well-planned coup in Kashmir that led to Sheikh Abdullah’s prolonged detention, the mass arrests of his loyalists and the fabricated shows of loyalty to the new regime unveiled the strategies deployed by New Delhi as measures that lacked political and ethical legitimacy.

I met with the former Sadr-i-Riyasat (Governor) and former crown prince of the princely state of J&K, Karan Singh, at his quasi-regal home in New Delhi in the summer of 2007. Fortunately, he was willing to answer the questions I had regarding the 1953 coup. Debonair and composed, Karan Singh has a keen mind and was intent on rationalising his political decisions,including the debacles he had presided over. He was also gracious enough to give me a copy of his autobiography in which he has unapologetically written about his role in that manifestation of political wiliness and despotism. He has written about his acceptance of the office of Sadr-i-Riyasat, a constitutionally legitimate position, and of the repercussions of his momentous decision.

While Karan Singh thought Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was a political stalwart,he saw him as a “Kashmiri leader of the Kashmiris, not of the entire state of J&K.” Karan Singh, whose nostalgia for the monarchical era and the reverence his father, Maharaja Hari Singh, enjoyed in Jammu province remains unmitigated, spoke rather derisively of his father’s and Sheikh Abdullah’s nemesis: the chimera of the independence of J&K. Regarding Sheikh Abdullah’s dalliance with the notion of independence, as Karan Singh would have one believe, he writes in his autobiography that, “the Sheikh’s speeches became more and more strident, and it became increasingly clear that he was seriously working on the idea of some sort of independent status for Kashmir which, inevitably,would imply a virtual negation of the Accession to India” (ibid.: 156). He decries Abdullah’s launching of what he terms “the anti-Dogra movement,” as in essence, an anti-monarchical socialist movement. He perceives Sheikh Abdullah’sunwillingness to appease the Dogra monarchy as his inability to mollify the Dogra people of Jammu. In his conversation with me in July 2007, he seemed unwilling or unable to recognise the multiple political ideologies that exist among the populace of Jammu despite the hegemony of the monarchy in that province. In an anti-republican spirit, he characterizes Abdullah’s nationalism as “Kashmiri chauvinism” (ibid.: 153).

Contrary to what Karan Singh would have one believe, however, the dismissal of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s de jure regime and the installation of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad’s de facto government plunged the Valley into utter political and ethical turpitude, which reverberated in later years. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and the Communists leveled a series of allegations against the UN military observers for their purported encouragement of the protestors. GM Sadiq accused the UN observers of encouraging subversive clandestine activities between pro-Pakistan elements in Kashmir and the imperialist powers, and declared that the government of Kashmir would not approve the appointment of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, whom they perceived as the “nominee of an imperialist power,” as plebiscite administrator. Nehru validated the opposition of the Communists to Fleet Admiral Nimitz: “It will not be fair to any of the big powers to ask them to supply a representative as a plebiscite administrator, however admirable he may be,because that would be embarrassing and needlessly creating suspicion, not in my mind necessarily, but in some other big power’s mind” (speech madeon September 17, 1953). As Bose (2003: 67) astutely observes, the vicissitudes of decades of political uncertainty that buffeted Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah were clearly intended to underscore the agonising predicament of persons who did not endorse the undue interference of the federal government in Kashmir. Only those willing to disaffirm their political, cultural and social ideologies in obeisance to an increasingly centralised State or Union could hope to play a significant role in legitimised political institutions.

The dictatorial regime of Abdullah’s former trusted lieutenant, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, lasted an entire decade, until 1963. During that period New Delhi cashed in on Bakshi’s dependent status by insidiously undermining democratic institutions in J&K and eroding the state’s autonomy with the complicity of the state government. The autonomy of the state within the Indian Union, which had been proclaimed in 1950 by a constitutional order formally issued in the name of the President of India, was rescinded in 1954 by the proclamation of another dictum that legalised the right of the central government to legislate in the state on various issues. The state was financially and fiscally integrated into the Indian Union; the Indian Supreme Court was given the authority to be the undisputed arbiter in J&K; the fundamental rights that the Indian Constitution guaranteed to its citizens were to apply to the populace of J&K as well, but with a stipulation that those civil liberties were discretionary and could be revoked in the interest of national security.

The reasonableness of the autonomy solution may seem axiomatic, but its adoption in an undiluted would metamorphose Kashmir’s political, cultural, or territorial circumstances.

The writer is the author of Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir, The Life of a Kashmiri Woman, and the editor of The Parchment of Kashmir. Nyla Ali Khan has also served as guest editor working on articles from the Jammu and Kashmir region for Oxford University Press (New York), helping to identify, commission, and review articles. She can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com

Published in Daily Times, September 18^th 2018.