by NYLA ALI KHAN
IMAGE/Palgrave
Telling this story enables me to trace my personal trajectory and work on healing the pain that I inherited. To give the reader a holistic picture of some events of great historical and political significance, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s side of the story should, in my opinion, be given space as well, and the complexity of the situation should be foregrounded. After the rumblings and subsequent explosion of armed insurgency and counter insurgency in Kashmir in 1989, one saw and still sees reductive readings of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s ideology and the attempted erasure of the political and sociocultural edifice of which he had been the primary architect.
I consider it pertinent to underscore that in Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s lifetime, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed did not win a single election from his home state. Although he was made Deputy Minister for Agriculture in Sadiq’s government in 1967 by a strange twist of fate, when the Sheikh was a persona non grata and a political prisoner, Mufti couldn’t claim to be electorally successful. Although, his politics were always centrist and integrationist even at the cost of the democratic aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, it wasn’t until much later in his political career that Mufti could claim electoral victory in his home state.
My concentration on the political milestones in the lives of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and Akbar Jehan provides an insight into the history, politics, and society of Kashmir in the major part of the 20th century. My attempt is to paint a picture of the era in which the later Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, was a loyal Congressman, piggybacked on Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq in order to carve a niche for himself in the political architecture of Jammu and Kashmir. While Mufti Sayeed was being groomed by Bakshi and Sadiq and enjoyed their patronage aka the patronage of the Indian state, those opposed to the Indian National Congress, the Sadiq-led Democratic National Congress, and to centrist politics were pariahs and ousted at the behest of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
I begin this story by writing about the fateful decade of the 1950s. 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.
While looking for archival material on the coup d’état of August 9, 1953, which still requires substantive research, I came across the correspondence between Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and G. M. Sadiq, a principal political actor and once a trusted comrade of the Sheikh, and in 1956 the President of the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir. Sadiq’s complicity with the arbitrary and undemocratic forces responsible for the coup was established beyond a doubt. In his letter to Sadiq written from sub jail, Kud, Jammu on August 16, 1956, the Sheikh, in the third year of his detention, eloquently and intrepidly protests his dismissal and subsequent confinement.
He articulately states that enough evidence had surfaced to establish beyond a shred of doubt that the 9th August coup was the fruition of a well-hatched conspiracy by communal and extremely conservative elements in politics “with whom the Bakshi [Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad replaced the Sheikh as Prime Minister of the state] clique joined hands in order to sabotage the great movement of which I have been the spearhead since 1931.” He assertively observed that the newly installed ruling coterie in Jammu and Kashmir had eradicated the fundamental principles for which several of his comrades had sacrificed their lives during the struggle for responsible government and the sovereignty of the people of the state. The ruling clique had allied itself with the forces of centralization and integration “to crush the spirits of freedom fighters in the State of Kashmir which is being ruled by a lawless law of Preventive Detention, which authorizes arrest without warrant and detention without trial for a period of five years.” This draconian law of Preventive Detention was frequently deployed to brutally curtail dissidence and to snuff out legitimate political aspirations, which might jeopardize the interests of the powers-that-be. This harsh law was brazenly used for coercing members of the opposition in the legislative assembly to tender their resignations (Sheikh-Sadiq Correspondence [August to October 1956], 3-4).
The Sheikh protested, “To crown all this ignominious state of affairs, there is my continued detention without trial for the last three years extended from time to time for the sole reason of giving the present Government a fresh, albeit brief, lease of life.” Needless to say, such a sordid situation had created terrible hurdles in the restoration of a democratic process in Jammu and Kashmir. It had invalidated a secularism that recognizes diverse religious identities and allows for the accommodation of those identities within a secularist framework. The Sheikh concluded his letter discerningly, “History has produced many quislings, but the world knows the doom of every enemy of the people” (Ibid.).
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