by NYLA ALI KHAN
(The following is an excerpt from the biography Professor Nyla Ali Khan is currently writing about her grandmother Begum Akbar Jehan Abdullah, the wife of Kashmiri leader Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah. Dr. Nyla Ali Khan teaches at the University of Oklahoma. Part II of V. Ed.)
The night of August 9 was very cold. I was staying at the government guest house at Gulmarg while on tour. My wife and children were with me along with my secretary and other staff. At about four o’clock in the morning, my secretary awakened me and informed me that the Dak Bungalow was surrounded by armed military police. I came out of my bedroom and saw a police superintendent whom I knew personally. I asked him what authority he had to come to the rest house in the middle of the night. Instead of replying, he showed me the warrant for my arrest and pointed towards the soldiers armed with machine guns. I asked him to allow me time to finish my morning prayers and he agreed. I had just finished my prayers when Maharaja Karan Singh’s ADC delivered a letter to me from the Maharaja offering his sympathies on my arrest. The letter also conveyed notice of my dismissal as Prime Minister. Attached to the letter was another document signed by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, Shyam Lal Saraf and Girdhar Lal Dogra, indicating that they had all lost confidence in my leadership. . . . At about 4:20 a. m. I bade good-bye to my wife [Akbar Jehan] and children and moved under a military escort to Udhampur, about 175 miles from Gulmarg.
I was imprisoned in a house belonging to the ruler of Kashmir and all my communication with the outside world came to an end. After a few days I learned that my house in Srinagar had been sealed and my wife and children were not permitted to stay there. My family was helpless and had no one to turn to. People were so afraid of the regime in Kashmir that they were reluctant to give their houses on rent to my children. For some time the members of my family stayed with a relative, Khwaja Ali Shah [Abdullah’s older daughter Khalida’s brother-in-law], but then fortunately a Hindu, Madan Lal, came to my family’s rescue and inspite 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. Later my wife was offered an allowance by the government but she refused to accept it.
. . . Within a few months the attitude of the jail administrators changed considerably. My wife and children were permitted to see me and I could get authentic information about events in Kashmir. (Abdullah 47)
The attempted political, social, and economic marginalization of Akbar Jehan and her children during the politically tumultuous, dictatorial, ruthlessly arbitrary post-1953 era placed her in the unenviable position of being virtually disowned by her near and dear ones. Her brothers, George Nedou aka Mohammad Akram, Harry Nedou aka Ghulam Qadir, and Benji Nedou aka Shamsuddin, did not have the wherewithal or clout to help her. Also, Akbar Jehan’s brothers, two of whom later became enterprising hoteliers, did not want to provoke the wrath of the Government of India and the government installed by it in the State, which was led by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. They, like a lot of other people at the time, did not have the courage to overtly espouse the putatively wilting political cause of struggling for the autonomous status of Kashmir and for the right of the people of Kashmir to determine their own political future. Akbar Jehan’s immediate family, excluding her mother, did not offer her a sympathetic ear or a shoulder to cry on during the traumatic period that my mother, Suraiya, her siblings, and my maternal cousin, Iftikhar Ahmad, older son of Khalida and Ghulam Mohammad Shah, still recall with anguish. Iftikhar vividly recollects that,
After the ouster and arrest of Grandfather in 1953 we were rendered homesless. A Hindu by the name of Madanji and his wife offered their house to Grandmother. At that very traumatic period, they were angels for us; and the family moved to their very comfortable house in Buchwara, Srinagar. Madanji and his wife lived in the house adjacent to the one that they had given us. My younger brother Muzzaffar was born in that house in 1956. Grandmother was very particular about her children’s education and would push me to excel in school.
Times were very difficult; even physicians were afraid to come to our house to treat a sick family member. I remember with gratitude and affection the only two physicians who, in spite having been threatened by Prime Minister Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, would visit the house on a regular basis to ensure that the family was doing well. One of them was Dr. Hafizullah, a soft-spoken gem of a person, who, unfortunately, died in a plane crash in 1966, and the other was the eminent Dr. Ali Jan, who stayed with the family until his death in the 1990s. I have taken this opportunity to pay tribute to them.
In Grandfather’s absence, Grandmother became the rallying force against the Indian occupation of Kashmir. She led protest marches against Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad’s puppet regime on several occasions and faced the full wrath of the government, including baton charges and getting doused by water cannons. I remember well that back then the authorities, instead of water deluges, would use human waste to disperse the protestors. Despite the terrible hurdles in her way, she fought the good fight. (E-mail from Iftikhar Ahmad to author, 31 January 2012)
It cannot be hard for a relatively objective observer to admit, even one who might disagree with Akbar Jehan’s politics, that despite her forbearance, quiet strength, and unbuckling conviction, she was sorely tried. Akbar Jehan was subject to familial strictures and responsibilities: care for children, maintaining and enhancing the vibrancy of her husband’s political mission, remaining steadfast and resilient in the midst of persecution, dispossession, and relocation. Seasoned journalist Ajit Bhattacharjea observes, “When freed of her domestic chores, Akbar Jahan [sic] developed the personality latent in her. . . . She was regarded as being even more committed to securing Kashmir’s autonomy than her husband. Known in the Valley as ‘Madr-e-Meharban’ (kind mother), she was to be accused by the Intelligence Bureau of having links with Pakistan in the final conspiracy case filed against her husband and his associates” (43-44).
I had collected bits and pieces about the troubled period after Abdullah’s arrest and the strategy deployed by the Intelligence Bureau of India in collusion with the Government of J & K to frame not just Abdullah, but Akbar Jehan as well. I vaguely knew that in order to justify Abdullah’s undemocratic dismissal and incarceration, he was labeled a Pakistani agent and allegations of receiving large sums of money from the Government of Pakistan were leveled against him. Akbar Jehan was accused of being the conduit through whom Abdullah purportedly received “illegal funding” for just as purportedly “espionage activities.” My impressions became more coherent after reading the monograph by Y. D. Gundevia, 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 Abdullah’s ouster and arrest in 1953:
The Kashmir Prime Minister [Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah], at this stage, was dealing pretty harshly with Muslim communalism of the pro-Pakistan variety and Hindu communalism of the strongly entrenched Praja Parishad (today’s Jana Sangh) in Jammu. The action against Muslim communalists was quietly welcomed in India; but every move against the Praja Parishad was strongly criticized. Mullick [a senior member of the Intelligence Bureau in the Home Ministry in 1953] says: “If anything accelerated the final break between Sheikh Abdullah and India, it was the Praja Parishad’s agitation in the winter of 1952-53 in Jammu Province over the demand for the full integration of Jammu and Kashmir with India on the basis of one Constitution, one flag and one President.” That this would mean the negation of the Instrument of Accession, the subsequent Delhi Agreement [of 1952] and Article 370, it would seem was nothing to be bothered about.
. . . For the Home Ministry [of India] the arrest of Sheikh Abdullah was not the end of the story: it was only the end of a chapter and the beginning of another. It is admitted all round that Nehru was unhappy at this ultimate development. Far more had to be said and done before Nehru could be satisfied. The story put out was that the Sheikh had been receiving large sums of money from Pakistan and that he had gone to Gulmarg (with his wife and family) on the night of his arrest to contact important Pakistan agents—or, to make it even more dramatic, did he intend going over, bodily, to Pakistan?
. . . The Sheikh, however, featured in a further complaint that was filed on October 23, five months later [1958]. The Begum Saheba [Akbar Jehan] was never charged and never brought to book. One would have thought that she would be the principal accused, with hundreds of letters said to be in the hands of the prosecution, “proving” that [she was complicit]. (111-112; 113; 116)
Dr. Nyla Ali Khan can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com
Read Part I. Part III of this excerpt will appear in tomorrow’s edition of Globeistan.