The maharaja’s army was no match for the energetic tribal forces, which advanced swiftly through the northwest parts of Kashmir; an older generation of Kashmiris still remembers the killings and looting and rapes that they committed on their way to Srinagar. The maharaja panicked as they came closer and closer. His son, Karan Singh, describes in his autobiography the moment when the lights went out in the palace—the invaders had destroyed the power station—and the noise of howling jackals suddenly sliced through the darkness and silence. The maharaja appealed to the Indian government for military assistance, but the legalistic response from Delhi was that the Indian Army could enter Kashmir only after the state had formally acceded to India. There was no longer any choice for the maharaja. As the tribal army drew nearer to Srinagar, he fled the city for the Hindu-dominated city of Jammu, where he went to bed after instructing his aide-de-camp to shoot him in his sleep if the Indian government’s representative didn’t turn up with the instrument of accession. He never returned to Kashmir and died in far-off Bombay in 1962.
The Indian Army finally arrived in Srinagar in late October 1947, and its offensive against the invaders became a full-fledged war with Pakistan that lasted more than a year. A cease-fire was eventually declared under the auspices of the UN on January 1, 1949, by which time the Indian Army had driven the invaders out of the valley. However, the northwestern part of the princely state, which is different, culturally and socially, from the Kashmir valley and closer to the Muslim Punjab, remained under Pakistani control, and, though named Azad (Free) Kashmir, is effectively as much a part of Pakistan as the valley is of India.
It was Sheikh Abdullah, released from prison just three weeks before the invasion, who had organized the defense of Srinagar. The National Conference came out in support of the Indian Army. Abdullah not only endorsed the accession to India but also generated popular Kashmiri support for it, which wasn’t hard since the atrocities committed by the tribal army had put fear of Pakistan in the Kashmiris, and this fear took a long time to fade.
In retrospect, the tribal invasion seems to have spoiled everything. Certainly, the issue of Kashmir acquired a degree of complication from which it never recovered. Nehru took the dispute to the UN on January 1, 1948, and offered to hold a plebiscite under international auspices to confirm the accession to India This sounds generous given that Nehru already had physical control of the valley. But Nehru also wanted the legitimacy of popular support for Indian rule over Kashmir. He was confident that with Sheikh Abdullah on his side, India would win a plebiscite in Kashmir.
As things turned out, the Indian offer of a plebiscite under the supervision of the UN was never redeemed. There was no withdrawal of the Indian and Pakistan armies from Kashmir, which had to be achieved before the plebiscite could take place, and the issue got bogged down in various legalities as the years passed. Pakistan remained in occupation of one-third of the state and denounced the accession to India as fraudulent since in its view the maharaja had surrendered all authority by fleeing Srinagar after the Muslims rebelled. The Indians kept dismissing the claim and saying that Pakistan had acted illegally by invading the state and frequently raised the rhetorical ante, as they still do, by stating that the only unresolved issue for India concerned the return of Pakistan-occupied territories.
Positions hardened on both sides as the cold war reached the subcontinent. The State Department under John Foster Dulles always suspected Nehru of being soft on communism and was openly contemptuous of his nonaligned position. The United States drew closer to Pakistan, which it included, in the mid-1950s, in such military treaties as CENTO and SEATO. This further stiffened Nehru’s position on Kashmir; there was no more talk of a plebiscite. The Soviet Union under Khrushchev became a consistent supporter of Nehru’s line, which became the official Indian line, that Kashmir was an integral part of India and thus not subject to any international arbitration. The cease-fire line between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, called the Line of Control (LOC), became a de facto international border.
This would have been the end of the dispute, the status quo accepted by all parties as an unalterable reality. Certainly, in those early years, the populations in both Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir seemed resigned to being where they were. Sheikh Abdullah was now in charge, and almost the first thing he did as prime minister of Kashmir from 1948 to 1953 was to initiate a series of ambitious land reforms whereby ownership of lands in excess of twelve and a half acres was abolished. In effect, this meant taking land away from the Hindu landlords and distributing it among poor Muslim tenants. It was a mini-revolution, and it assured Abdullah the gratitude and support of two generations of Kashmiri Muslims.
Less than four decades later, however, Kashmiris were to take up arms for the first time in their long history; India was to face a popular insurgency in Kashmir and come close to nuclear war with Pakistan. The grave of Sheikh Abdullah, eight years after his crowded funeral, would require around-the-clock protection from vandals.
Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan had innocuous beginnings. From the desire for a guarantee of Muslim rights in a Hindu-majority India, it developed into a demand for a confederation of India where Muslims would not have minority status but would share power with Hindus. However, the Hindu leaders of the Congress Party, so close to achieving real political power for the first time, were in no mood to share it.
The clumsily partitioned provinces toward the eastern and the western borders of India weren’t what Jinnah had asked for—there were almost as many Muslims in India as in the new state of Pakistan—but it was all the Congress was prepared to part with. In the end, with the British impatient to depart and hustling everyone else, it was the Congress that was eager to settle for partition in order to consolidate its hold on the much bigger Hindu-majority provinces and the institutions of the colonial state—the army, the bureaucracy, and the police—that were its great inheritance from the British.
Among the people who took a harder line as a result of the demand for partition was Nehru, who, over most of a lifetime spent fighting the British, had never accepted the idea of Pakistan and held on to the idea of a united multicultural India. The bloodshed that accompanied the partition came as a bigger blow to him; he was now more convinced than ever of the need to have, in the colonial way, a strong central government for India, with as little autonomy as possible for the diverse communities that constituted it. He regarded all regional assertiveness—and there was much of that across India in the fifties—with suspicion. National unity, along with secularism, became his mantra, which was taken up by almost all political parties and echoed by the colonial bureaucracy that was keen on holding on to its own power.
It was hard, nevertheless, to keep down sectarian demands in a country as diverse as India, where independence had released a new longing for self-expression, where millions of previously disfranchised people could find a political voice only through the community they were born to. A lesser leader would have proved disastrous here. Nehru dealt astutely with the demands for a linguistic reorganization of India, which in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, for example, had developed into a movement for outright secession. He used a carrot-and-stick policy—a mix of limited democracy and state repression—to pacify various regional groups and keep them within India.
But his own emotional connection with Kashmir made him wield a big stick there with Sheikh Abdullah, who, soon after becoming prime minister, had come up against the problems of running a large multi-ethnic, multireligious state, problems not unlike those Nehru himself faced, but which Abdullah was much less equipped to deal with. He was primarily the leader of the Muslims of the Kashmir valley, who represented the majority of the state’s population, 53 percent. But there were also the influential Hindu majority in Jammu to the south, who resented Abdullah’s radical politics, and the Buddhists of Ladakh, who were worried about the power of the valley’s Muslims.
As usually happens, the lack of a political alternative turned Abd
ullah into an authoritarian ruler. Impressed by the Soviet model, he made the party inseparable from the administration, and as the aggrieved tone of his letters to Nehru shows, he interpreted all opposition to him as an attempt to undermine his personal authority and, by extension, the right of the Kashmiri Muslims to run the state after centuries of foreign rule.
In the early 1950s, when the Hindu nationalists in Jammu, the forebears of the BJP, organized the dispossessed landlords and followers of the sulking maharaja into a movement for greater integration with India, Abdullah became more insecure. He had bargained hard with the Indian government to preserve the state from excessive interference by New Delhi; Kashmir, he argued, needed special guarantees for the protection of its autonomy. He now revived his idea of an independent Kashmir, bringing it up with, among other visiting diplomats, Adlai Stevenson in 1953.
This was disturbing news for Nehru. He felt Abdullah moving away from him and toward a course of action that was likely to end in the loss of Kashmir and India’s secular credentials. He was quick to act: Abdullah was dismissed in 1953 and put in prison, where he stayed, initially without trial, for all but four months of the next eleven years.
This sounds rather unbecoming of Nehru, who by then was known internationally as a statesman. But national unity had become his obsession. He had praised Abdullah’s land reforms; he had ensured there was no viable opposition to Abdullah; he had offered personal friendship to him. But now Abdullah was working against the “national interest.” The support and dismissal of Abdullah were consistent with Nehru’s belief that politics in Kashmir revolved around personalities. As he had told an activist who was arguing for a democratic alternative to Abdullah, there was “no material for democracy in Kashmir.”
The other side, then, of Nehru’s enchantment with Kashmir was a fear of losing control, a possessiveness that he gradually transformed into a national imperative; Kashmir, he began to argue, couldn’t be separated from India without exposing the Muslims in the rest of India to retaliation from Hindu fanatics. You still hear a version of this idea in liberal circles in India today: that communal riots of the same scale and intensity as those during the partition of India are around the corner if Kashmir is allowed to break away.
And then, in 1953, an old protégé of Abdullah’s named Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed took over as prime minister of Kashmir and did everything Nehru wanted to constitutionally integrate Kashmir into India. Promises of autonomy made earlier to Abdullah were canceled, and fear of violence came to dictate Indian policy. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed was himself sidelined after serving ten years as the India approved prime minister of Kashmir and was imprisoned in 1965, when he sought to undermine an India-backed chief minister. Kashmir without Sheikh Abdullah reverted to what it had been for centuries under Moghul rule, a dependency, its fate controlled by a distant great power whose representatives could do what they wished as long as no one rocked the boat. Its political life, which had really only begun with Abdullah, came to be dominated by small men with small aims of personal empowerment and enrichment, by constant intrigues and betrayals.
Elections, held periodically in order to demonstrate before the world the democratic nature of the Delhi-imposed regime, were farcically rigged. The nomination papers of opposition parties would be rejected or their candidates beaten up and arrested; the National Conference won most elections unopposed. A concerned Nehru had to tell Mohammed that it might look better if he were to lose a few elections to a few “bona-fide opponents.” The central government poured money into the state for development and education, and for a handful of Kashmiris at least, the stakes for holding on to power went higher. A new elite of politicians and bureaucrats emerged from the culture of corruption that grew around the administration.
As in the history of any dependency and its court politics, what you come to miss in accounts of Kashmir is a sense of the people, the way life went on in the villages and towns. One of the images that springs to mind is of the corrupt government official in his large house, his sons studying in the best colleges of India. The other image is of the peasant in his rice field and mud hut, living as depressed a life as he was when, in 1831, the French botanist Victor Jacquemont visited the region.
However, the image alters as you read about the rise in literacy levels today. In all likelihood, today the peasant’s son has gone to school—one of hundreds opened by the Indian government—or even to the new university or the medical and engineering colleges. The peasant himself hasn’t done badly with his apple orchards; horticulture still forms the mainstay of the economy.
In less than two decades, then, the peasant’s son has become ready for a job but then finds that his options are very limited. Modern education has taken him away from a life in the rice fields or the apple orchards, but there is no local industry in the valley. The only jobs are to be had with the government, and here he finds himself excluded by the culture of bribery and nepotism. In India, he finds himself a foreigner, likely to be discriminated against on grounds of religion; it is not easy for a Muslim to find a job or rent a house in a Hindu-dominated region.
It was this sense of a blocked future that educated Kashmiris came to have, along with the realization, hammered into them by repeatedly rigged elections, of their political impotence, that eventually led to the insurgency in the early 1990s.
In 1975, out of jail and once again chief minister of the state, Abdullah entered into an arrangement with the Indian government whereby he promised to give up the demand for self-determination in exchange for becoming what other men before him had been, a satrap of the Indian state in Kashmir.
The downside to the total investment of faith invited by charismatic individuals like Iqbal, Abdullah, even Nehru is that in the absence of institutions, the welfare of a country comes to depend on a few favored ideas and, more dangerously, on personal temperament. The success or failure of individuals has consequences, sometimes damaging, for many future generations. With Iqbal, the danger always was that his followers would go for the simplest and most emotional of the ideas he was trying out in his mind, and after the first flurry of land reforms, Abdullah wasn’t able to offer anything more to Kashmiris than his formidable rhetoric and the glamorous myth of the prisoner of conscience.
A few months before he died, Abdullah, in the style of third world dynasts, anointed as his successor his son, a U.K.-based doctor. Farooq Abdullah, inexperienced but enthusiastic, had barely begun when he clashed with Indira Gandhi, who had by then evolved her own authoritarian style. In 1975 she brought her father’s anxiety about national unity to a new hysterical pitch as she arrested opposition leaders for being “antinational” and suspended fundamental rights.
In Kashmir, Mrs. Gandhi found herself thwarted by Farooq Abdullah, who refused her offer of an election alliance between her party, the Congress, and the National Conference. Abdullah’s victory in the elections of 1983, and subsequent hobnobbing with other politicians opposed to her, made Mrs. Gandhi determined to get rid of him. Her tactics resembled those of the colonial state, something the British had employed to great effect: encouraging religious sectarianism in order to downplay regional disaffection with the central government. In Punjab, she had built up Bhindranwale, an illiterate Sikh preacher, as a counterweight to the province’s anti-Congress government; the preacher subsequently turned into a murderous demagogue and declared war on India. Undeterred by the setback in Punjab, she set to work on building up an atmosphere of Hindu jingoism over the issue of Kashmir.
A few stray anti-India demonstrations and violent incidents were held up as evidence of Farooq Abdullah’s unreliability. The Indian press, which for decades had faithfully followed the government line on Kashmir, went along with Mrs. Gandhi. Not that the Hindu middle classes needed much persuasion. By then Nehruvian nationalism had begun to degenerate into Hindu nationalism, into a search for external and internal enemies, the enemies who, when they were not the CIA or Pakistan, invariably belonged to the minority community,
whether Sikh, as in the case of Punjab, or Muslim. The mass murder arranged by Congress leaders of three thousand Sikhs in Delhi after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 came out of that frenzy of Hindu xenophobia Mrs. Gandhi had herself encouraged.
Abdullah’s elected government was illegally dismissed in 1984 by Jagmohan, a governor specially appointed by Mrs. Gandhi after she had transferred the previous governor, who had refused to act against Abdullah, out of Kashmir. The new government, made up of defectors from Farooq Abdullah’s party, the National Conference, had to impose a curfew for seventy-two out of its first ninety days in office in order to keep down public agitation against it. Then, in early 1986, Jagmohan dismissed the government and took charge.
During his tenure as governor of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the eighties and then again in the early nineties, Jagmohan did more than anyone else to provoke insurgency in the state. He came to be known as a pro-Hindu bureaucrat during Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency, when he sent bulldozers into Muslim slum colonies in Delhi as part of an attempted “beautification” of the city. In Kashmir, an isolated state with a docile population always seeming ready to be trampled upon, he was no more subtle.
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond Page 22