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 III of V. Ed.)
Gundevia’s deconstruction of the infamous Kashmir Conspiracy Case of 1958 places the Intelligence Bureau of India, the Home Ministry of India, and the Government of J & K, headed by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, in a scrutinizing public glare. I quote the then Director of the Intelligence Bureau B. N. Mullick’s account of the Kashmir Conspiracy Case and the attempted indictment of Akbar Jehan:
Bakshi [Prime Minister of J & K] at this stage declared that whatever be the strength of the evidence against Begum Abdullah, he could not agree to her prosecution. Muslim opinion in Kashmir valley would not excuse him from dragging this lady, who was known as “Madr-e-Meharban,” to the courts. I argued that without her in the trial we 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 also agreed with that Abdullah should not be prosecuted. We were in a quandary because for years we had been told that Sheikh Abdullah could not be indefinitely detained without trial and now that a proper charge-sheet had been prepared and legal opinion left no doubt about his directing hand in the conspiracy. We were told that he should not be put on trial.
. . . When the case opened, he [Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah] would address the court in commanding tones and assumed a haughty posture and said he would expose the prosecutors. But, after the opening address and the leading in of some evidence regarding the Begum’s activities, he became crestfallen and receded to the background. (86-94)
If, as the prosecution claimed, Akbar Jehan was indeed complicit in her husband’s pro-Pakistan “espionage activities,” why did the Government of India not indict her? Historically, governments have not been deterred from indicting and prosecuting those considered “criminals” by respect for the gender or maternal obligations of the accused. Mullick’s vitriolic outbursts, rancor, and vicious endeavors to vindicate the unwarranted incarceration of the Sheikh and his colleagues proved futile, as 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, fragile, 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 an intergovernmental organization like the United Nations and its member nations.
During the ignominious Kashmir Conspiracy Case, the Government of India and its intelligence agencies worked assiduously to not just indict the Sheikh, Akbar Jehan, and their trusted colleagues, but to get them harshly convicted as well. The loyal lieutenant of the Sheikh, Mirza Afzal Beg, while attempting in brilliant legalese to counter the allegations leveled at the leader, distressingly recounts that every word the Sheikh spoke after his unlawful ouster and arrest in 1953 was held against him and misconstrued as treasonous. He quotes the Sheikh’s intense conversation with his children when they visited him in jail, where they mourned their loss of home and hearth:
Surat siraf yih hai ki aapko Khuda tala par bharosa hona chahiye, aapko Khuda tala par yakin hona chahiye, wohi behtrin madadgar hai. Jis ko is baat par yakin hai who haq ka daman kabhi nahin chhoor sakta. Main ne kaha ki who baat mujh par lazim nahin hai jo Khuda tala ke kehne ke khilaf ho. Main ne jail qabool kiya magar sachai ka daman na chhora. (Quoted in Beg, 37)
You must have unflinching faith and trust in God. Whoever believes that there is no one to turn to but God will always fight for truth. It would not behoove me to defy God’s will. I have accepted incarceration, but will not disavow the truth. (translation is mine)
Beg, in his eloquent defense of the Sheikh and his family, pointed out, “Now, Sir, he is describing his own tale to his children. Does it amount to spreading hatred against the Government? . . . If a father tells his children: Depend on God if you have no home to live in, depend on God if you have no bread to eat in the evening, does it mean that he is indirectly telling them to annex the State to Pakistan?” (Beg 38) The deprivation that Akbar Jehan and her children were subjected to in the Sheikh’s long absence, the isolation that they were condemned to, and the invisibility that was imposed on them might have discouraged, even distressed, Akbar Jehan but did not make her cringe. She was the powerful trooper, the silent force that kept the flag flying while stalwarts like the Sheikh, Beg, and other soldiers of the Plebiscite Front were shunted from one jail to the other, from one solitary confinement to the other.
Akbar Jehan accompanied her husband and Mirza Afzal Beig, on the Haj pilgrimage to the cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia in 1965. Subsequent to the submission of Sheikh’s application to the Government of India for permission to go to Haj, Gundevia reminds the reader that, “The same passport, in which Sheikh Abdullah had put himself down as a ‘Kashmiri Muslim,’ and which, I think, had originally been endorsed only for Pakistan, was now endorsed for a number of other countries. . . . Sheikh Abdullah accompanied by his wife and Mirza Afzal Beg [sic] left Bombay in the first week of March on what turned out to be quite a tour of Europe and other countries, which was to end with the pilgrimage to Mecca” (132). It was on that tour that Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah made a trip to Algiers where he met the Chinese premier, Chou En-lai, whose antipathy toward India was an open secret and whose anti-India campaign had become even more vociferous in the wake of the 1962 Indo-China war. Gundevia recalls that when he asked the Sheikh why he had chosen to court the displeasure of New Delhi by meeting with Chou En-lai, the Sheikh “innocently” replied, “I did not ask to see him. Chou En-lai sent me an invitation, so I went and saw him. What was wrong with that? After all, Kashmir has a common border with China, hasn’t it?” Gundavia then goes on to sympathetically speculate, “That simple, it was, and I am sure he still looks at it with the same simplicity. But how many people outside Jammu and Kashmir are prepared to call him ‘innocent’ and ‘simple’?” (133) Subsequent to this much publicized meeting, mainstream Indian politicians expressly voiced their antipathy to the politics of the Sheikh and demanded that Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah be asked to return to the country without further delay. Mainstream Indian politicians considered it culpable that the Sheikh had accepted Chou En-lai’s invitation to visit China, India’s arch foe at the time. On being told that his passport would expire on April 30, 1965, the Sheikh took the initiative of writing to the then Prime Minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shashtri, informing him that Akbar Jehan, Mirza Afzal Beig, and he would be unable to complete the obligatory Haj rituals by then and would require more time to fulfill their religious obligations. The letter was sent to the Indian embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. However, Shashtri claimed that he never received the letter (Gundevia 134). On May 7, 1965, Akbar Jehan and the Sheikh returned to India, where they were greeted with an arrest warrant under the Defense of India Rules and externed to Kodaikanal in South India. Not only were they removed from their home, family, supporters, party loyalists, but their physical movements were restricted to the municipal limits of the tiny hill station.
Dr. Nyla Ali Khan can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com
Here are Part I & Part II. Part IV of this excerpt will appear in tomorrow’s edition of Globeistan.