Daily Times

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 endeavour 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 and his comrade-in-arms, Mirza Afzal Beg, were released in April 1964 by the Government of India. Subsequent to his talks with the Indian premier, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah travelled to Pakistan with Maulana Masoodi and Mirza Afzal Beg, in sanguineness and good cheer, to hold talks with the Pakistani President, General Ayub Khan.

After a series of hopeful conversations with Ayub Khan, the Sheikh felt confident that the talks were making headway. He visited Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, and was exuberantly welcomed by a sea of people. During that period, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah did not once waver on his demand for self-rule, but he required the cooperation of Pakistan in looking for a viable solution to the conflict that had caused more corrosion than the two countries were willing to admit.

The heartwarming response to Abdullah and his stance, particularly in the Kashmir Valley, was not well received either by New Delhi or its ward at the time, G.M. Sadiq. Sadiq turned to New Delhi for support, but New Delhi, true to character, decided to cash in on the internecine battle that had polarized the Muslims of the Valley into pro-Bakshi, tacitly supported by the Sheikh Abdullah faction, and pro-Sadiq groups, thereby disaffirming their cultural, linguistic and social unities. Further alienation and marginalization of dissident opinions was exacerbated with the political externment of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah.

Perhaps it was an irony of fate that, soon after Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s talks with Nehru regarding the Kashmir imbroglio, Nehru died – on 27 May 1964.

Prior to the change in Nehru’s stance toward Kashmir, the two stalwarts had shared a commonality of vision: they were tied by a cord of anti-despotic, socialist political beliefs.

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah came from an unpretentious Muslim background, and was motivated to fight the structural inequities and injustices wrought by the peripheralization of Kashmiri Muslims who were quarantined in the alleyways of poverty, illiteracy and despondency, and who could not touch the corridors of economic and social prestige even with a barge pole.

Nehru came from an elite background, had been groomed in the privileged hallways of Harrow and Cambridge, and was a proud personage, often arrogant or condescendingly superior in manner. His intellectual grooming exacerbated his patronizing tone and manner.

Despite the fact that the two figures, Abdullah and Nehru, occupied different rungs of the social and economic hierarchy, the socialist politics that they shared in 1947 was of critical importance to large-scale socioeconomic reforms in Jammu and Kashmir.

Although Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah viewed the accession of J & K to India as a strategic and pragmatic necessity, and sought to justify it by deploying the rhetoric of socialism and secularism, he continued to harbor hopes for the creation of a sovereign Kashmir.

Prior to the change in Nehru’s stance toward Kashmir, the two stalwarts had shared a commonality of vision: they were tied by a cord of anti-despotic, socialist political beliefs

At this point in times, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah made some controversial observations in an interview with the London Observer. He voiced his concern over the increased vulnerability and instability of J & K caught between two countries that were hostile towards each other. He expressed his solicitude over the political and economic hardships that the location of the state would cause its populace. The only viable option, according to him, was for J & K to have a neutral status vis-à-vis both India and Pakistan. However, because of the ruptured politics within the state given its diverse political, religious and ethnic affiliations, the sovereign and autonomous status of J & K would need to be acknowledged and guaranteed not just by India and Pakistan, but also by the UN and other world powers. Abdullah’s candid observations created a furor in New Delhi. His ‘politically incorrect’ views met with particular objection from India’s right-wing Deputy Prime Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel.

In 1952 Abdullah voiced his relentless hostility towards Hindutva majoritarianism in the stronghold of the right-wing PrajaParishad. He referred to the attempts of the Congress Party and the central government to enforce the complete integration of J & K into the Indian Union as juvenile, impractical and ludicrous (ibid.: 196).

In March 1952 Abdullah stated that, “. . . neither the Indian Parliament nor any other Parliament outside the state has any jurisdiction over our state. . . . No country – neither India nor Pakistan – can put spokes in the wheel of our progress” (Delhi Radio, Indian Information Service). He further declared that “the existence of Kashmir did not depend on Indian money, trade, or defense forces, and he did not expect any strings to be attached to Indian aid. Threats and taunts would not intimidate him into servile submission (The Times, 26 April 1952).

The writer is the author of Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir