India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  VI

  The popular movement led by Dr Mookerjee planted the seed of independence in Sheikh Abdullah’’s mind; the outcry following his death seems only to have nurtured it. Sensing this, Nehru wrote two long emotional letters recalling their old friendship and India’s ties to Kashmir. He asked Abdullah to come down to Delhi and meet him. The Sheikh did not oblige. Then Nehru sent Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (the most senior member of the Cabinet) to Srinagar, but that did not help either. The Sheikh now seemed convinced of two things: that he had the support of the United States and that ‘even Nehru could not subdue [Hindu] communal forces in India’. On 10 July he addressed party workers at Mujahid Manzil, the headquarters of the National Conference in Srinagar. After outlining Kashmir’s, and his own, grievances against the government of India, he said that ‘a time will, therefore, come when I will bid them good-bye’.33

  The Sheikh’s turnabout greatly alarmed the prime minister. Writing to a colleague, Nehru said the developments in Kashmir were particularly unfortunate, for ‘anything that happens there has larger and wider consequences’. For the ‘problem of Kashmir [was] symbolic of many things, including our secular policy in India’.34

  By now the government of Kashmir was divided within itself, its members (as Nehru observed), liable ‘to pull in different directions and proclaim entirely different policies’. This was in good part the work of the government of India’s Intelligence Bureau. Officers of the Bureau had been working within the National Conference, dividing the leadership and confusing the ranks. Some leaders, such as G. M. Sadiq, were left-wing anti-Americans; they disapproved of the Sheikh’s talks with Stevenson. Others, like Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, had ambitions of ruling Kashmir themselves.35

  There was now an open rift within the National Conference between the pro-India and pro-independence groups. The latter were led by the Sheikh’s close associate Mirza Afzal Beg. The former were in close touch with the sadr-i-riyasat, Karan Singh. It was rumoured that Sheikh Abdullah would declare independence on 21 August – the day of the great Id festival – following which he would seek the protection of the United Nations against ‘Indian aggression’.36 Two weeks before that date Abdullah dismissed a member of his Cabinet. This gave the others in the pro-India faction an excuse to move against him. Led by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, they wrote the Sheikh a letter accusing him of encouraging sectarianism and corruption. A copy of the letter was also sent to Karan Singh. He, in turn, dismissed Abdullah and invited Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed to form a government in his place.

  Abdullah was served his walking papers in the early hours of the morning. When he was woken up and handed the letter of dismissal, the Sheikh flew into a rage. ‘Who is the sadr-i-riyasat to dismiss me?’, he shouted. ‘I made that chit of a boy sadr-i-riyasat.’ The police then told him that he had not just been dismissed, but also placed under arrest. He was given two hours to say his prayers and pack his belongings before being taken off to jail.

  Why was Abdullah humiliated so? Did he have to be dismissed in the dead of night, and did he then have to be placed under detention? Karan Singh later recalled that this was done because ‘Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed made it quite clear that he could not undertake to run the Government if the Sheikh and Beg were left free to propagate their views’. In other words, he was safe and quiet in jail, whereas as a free man, put out of office, he would quickly mobilize popular sentiment in hisfavour.37

  Then, and later, it was widely believed that the arrest of Abdullah was masterminded by Rafi Ahmad Kidwai. Kidwai was a left-leaning member of the Cabinet, and a close friend of Nehru’s. In Delhi it was thought that his desire to humiliate the Sheikh had its roots in the fact that Abdullah was currying favour with the Americans. In Kashmir, however, it was held that this was a plain, if misguided, act of revenge. Back in 1947 Kidwai’s brother had been murdered by a Kashmiri in the hill station of Mussoorie. Deposing the Sheikh was away of settling accounts.38

  Did Jawaharlal Nehru himself sanction the arrest of his friend Sheikh Abdullah? Nehru’s biographer thinks he did not know beforehand, whereas his chief of intelligence suggests he did. One thing is clear, however: once the deed was done he did nothing to countermand it.39

  Like his predecessor, the new prime minister of Kashmir was a larger-than-life figure. He was known commonly as the Bakshi, much as his predecessor was known as the Sheikh. Born in 1907 in modest circumstances, Ghulam Mohammed began his political career by organizing a union of carriage drivers in Srinagar. That, and four terms in Hari Singh’s jails, gave him sterling nationalist credentials. However, by temperament and orientation he was quite different from the Sheikh. One was a man of ideas and idealism, the other a man of action and organization. When the raiders attacked in October 1947, it was Abdullah who gave the rousing speeches while the Bakshi placed volunteers in position and watched out for potential fifth-columnists. After 1947, while Abdullah dealt with Nehru and Delhi, the Bakshi ‘kept the structure of the State intact, at a time when the whole Government had collapsed and was non-existent’. As two Kashmiri academics wrote in 1950, ‘being a strict disciplinarian himself, he can brook no indiscipline and dilly-dallying tactics. He is no lover of formal government routine and red-tapism. He believes in quick but right action. The conclusion, in the India of the time, was inescapable: ‘In fact, Bakshi is to Abdullah what Sardar [Patel] is to Nehru. 40

  The analogy, though attractive, was inexact. For Patel did not covet his boss’s job. And having got that job, the Bakshi intended to keep it. This meant, as he well understood, keeping Delhi on his side. Ten days after he had assumed power he visited Jammu, where he spoke to a large crowd, assuring them that ‘the ties between Kashmir and India are irrevocable. No power on earth can separate the two. Next, speaking in Srinagar to a meeting of National Conference workers, the Bakshi argued that ‘Sheikh Abdullah played directly into the hands of foreign invaders by entertaining the idea of an independent Kashmir’. That, he said, was ‘a dangerous game, pregnant with disastrous consequences for Kashmir, India, and Pakistan’. Since Kashmir lacked the resources to defend itself, independence was a ‘crack-brained idea’, calculated only to make the state a centre of superpower intrigue. It was an idea ‘which can devastate the people’.41

  As prime minister, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed adopted a populist style, holding a darbar (court) every Friday, where he heard the grievances of the public. An early move was to raise the procurement price of paddy. Next, he made school education free, sanctioned new engineering and medical colleges and abolished customs barriers between Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of India.

  In October 1954 the All-India Newspaper Editors Conference was held in Srinagar. The state government pulled out all the stops, placing the guests in the best hotels and throwing parties at which the finest Kashmiri delicacies were served. A grateful editor wrote that, although the new regime had been in place only for a year, ‘it can be safely said that the Bakshi Government has in some fields, brought in more reforms than did Sheikh Abdullah’s in its six years of existence’. After the public and the press it was the turn of the president. In October 1955 Dr Rajendra Prasad arrived in Srinagar amid ‘carefully whipped-up mass enthusiasm – crowds lining the road from the airport, a procession of boats on the Jhelum. The president had come to inaugurate a hydroelectric project, one of several development schemes begun under the newdispensation.42

  All the while Sheikh Abdullah was cooling his heels in detention. He was first housed in an old palace in Udhampur, in the plains, before being shifted to a cooler bungalow in the mountains, at Kot. He was raising poultry and reported to have become ‘very anti-Indian’.43

  Within and outside Kashmir the Bakshi was viewed as something of a usurper. Relevant here are the contents of two secret police reports on Friday prayers in Delhi’s Jama Masjid. On 2 October 1953 the prayers were attended by two members of Parliament from Kashmir. When they were asked by a Muslim cleric to organize a meeting on the situation in Kashmir, the MPs answered that the
time was not right, for they were working behind the scenes for the release of Sheikh Abdullah. The MPs said that ‘all Kashmiris would remain with India and die for it’, but if the Sheikh continued to be held in jail, the state might then, in anger, ‘go to Pakistan, for which the responsibility would not be theirs’.

  Three months later Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed himself attended prayers in the Jama Masjid. This was a way of claiming legitimacy, for the mosque, built by Shah Jehan in the seventeenth century, was the subcontinent’s grandest and most revered. The keepers of the shrine, sensible of the Bakshi’s proximity to the ruler of Delhi, received him respectfully enough. But, as a police report noted, ‘the Muslims who had congregated there, including some Kashmiris, were talking against Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed in whispering tones. They said that he had become the Prime Minister of Kashmir after putting his “guru” – Sheikh Abdullah – behind bars.’44

  VII

  In the 1950s, as in the 1940s, the Valley of Kashmir was troubled and unsettled. Behind the troubles of the 1940s lay the indecision of the Maharaja – who refused to accede to either Pakistan or India while there was still time – and the greed and fervour of the tribal raiders who invaded the state. Behind the troubles of the 1950s were the ambitions of Sheikh Abdullah and S. P. Mookerjee. Neither was willing to play within the rules of constitutional democracy. Both raised the political stakes and both, tragically, paid for it.

  The developments in Kashmir were worrisome not just to Indians. The British general who had been in charge of the Indian army in 1947 thought that they might very well ‘result in a worsening of Indo-Pak relations’. In the defence of Kashmir he had come to know both the Sheikh and the Bakshi very well. The Sheikh, though ‘never a great man’, was nonetheless ‘sincere, in my opinion, in his love for his own country’. On the other hand, the Bakshi was ‘quite insincere’; he was ‘an individual without calibre’.45

  In fact, the Bakshi did have a certain talent for organization, and for feathering his nest. He used his closeness to Delhi to get a steady flow of central funds into his state. These were used to pay for dams, roads, hospitals, tunnels and hotels. Many new buildings rose up in Srinagar, including a new Secretariat, a new sports stadium, and a new tourist complex. However, in the development projects undertaken by Bakshi’s government there was always ‘a percentage for family and friends’. His regime soon became known as the BBC, or the Bakshi Brothers Corporation.46

  The developments of 1952–3 had raised sharp questions about India’s moral claim to the Valley. Six years had elapsed since the invasion of 1947 – enough time for the world to forget it, and to remember only that the Valley was Muslim and so was Pakistan. Besides, the Kashmiri leader so long paraded as India’s own had now been put into jail by the Indian government.

  Could things have turned out otherwise? Perhaps if Sheikh Abdullah and Syama Prasad Mookerjee had acted with responsibility and restraint. And perhaps if Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian government had listened to an obscure journalist of English extraction then editing a low-circulation liberal weekly out of Bangalore. In 1952–3, while Dr Mookerjee was demanding that Nehru should invade Pakistan and thus ‘reclaim’ northern Kashmir, Philip Spratt was proposing a radically different solution. India, he said, must abandon its claims to the Valley, and allow the Sheikh his dream of independence. It should withdraw its armies and write off its loans to the government of Jammu and Kashmir. ‘Let Kashmir go ahead, alone and adventurously, in her explorations of a secular state’, he wrote. ‘We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entanglements which write a lie in our soul.’

  Spratt’s solution was tinged with morality, but more so with economy and prudence. Indian policy, he argued, was based on ‘a mistaken belief in the one-nation theory and greed to own the beautiful and strategic valley of Srinagar’. The costs of this policy, present and future, were incalculable. Rather than give Kashmir special privileges and create resentment elsewhere in India, it was best to let the state go. As things stood, however, Kashmir ‘was in the grip of two armies glaring at each other in a state of armed neutrality. It may suit a handful of people to see the indefinite continuance of this ghastly situation. But the Indian taxpayer is paying through the nose for the precarious privilege of claiming Kashmir as part of India on the basis of all the giving on India’s side and all the taking on Kashmir’s side.’47

  That material interests should supersede ideological ones was an argument that came easily to a former Marxist (which Spratt was). It was not, however, an argument likely to win many adherents in the India of the 1950s.

  13

  * * *

  TRIBAL TROUBLE

  [T]hese tribes . . . not only defend themselves with obstinate resolution, but attack their enemies with the most daring courage . . . [T]hey possess fortitude of mind superior to the sense of danger or the fear of death.

  British official commenting on the Nagas, circa 1840

  I

  THROUGH THE 1950s, while the government of India was seeking to maintain its hold on the Valley of Kashmir, its authority and legitimacy were also being challenged at the other end of the Himalaya. This was New Delhi’s ‘Naga problem’, much less known than its Kashmir problem, even though it was as old – even older, in fact – and easily as intractable.

  The Nagas were a congeries of tribes living in the eastern Himalaya, along the Burma border. Secure in their mountain fastness, they had been cut off from social and political developments in the rest of India. The British administered them lightly, keeping out plainsmen and not tampering with tribal laws or practices, except one – headhunting. However, American Baptists had been active since the mid nineteenth century, successfully converting several tribes to Christianity.

  At this time the Naga hills formed part of Assam, a province very diverse even by Indian standards, sharing borders with China, Burma and East Pakistan, divided into upland and lowland regions and inhabited by hundreds of different communities. In the plains lived Assamese-speaking Hindus, connected by culture and faith to the greater Indian heartland. Among the important groups of tribes were the Mizos, the Khasis, the Garos, and the Jaintias, who took (or gave) their names to the mountain ranges in which they lived. Also in the region were two princely states, Tripura and Manipur, whose populations were likewise mixed, part Hindu and part tribal.

  Among the tribes of north-east India the Nagas were perhaps the most autonomous. Their territory lay on the Indo-Burmese border-indeed, there were almost as many Nagas in Burma as in India. Some Nagas had contact with Hindu villages in Assam, to whom they sold rice in exchange for salt. Yet the Nagas had been totally outside the fold of the Congress-led national movement. There had been no satyagraha here, no civil disobedience – in fact, not one Gandhian leader in a white cap had ever visited these hills. Some tribes had fiercely fought the British, but over time the two sides had come to view each other with mutual respect. For their part, the British affected a certain paternalism, wishing to ‘protect their wards from the corrosive corruptions of the modern world.

  The Naga question really dates to 1946, the year the fate of British India was being decided in those high centres of imperial power, New Delhi and Simla. As elections were held across India, as the Cabinet Mission came and went, as the viceroy went into conclave with leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League, in their own obscure corner of the subcontinent some Nagas began to worry about their future. In January 1946 a group who were ‘educated Christians and spoke expressive English formed the Naga National Council, or NNC. This had the classic trappings of a nationalist movement in embryo: led by middle-class intellectuals, their ideas were promoted in a journal of their own, called The Naga Nation, 250 copies of which were mimeographed and distributed through the Naga country.1

  The NNC stood for the unity of all Nagas, and for their ‘self-determination’, a term which, here as elsewhere, was open to multiple and som
etimes mutually contradictory meanings. The Angami Nagas, with their honourable martial tradition and record of fighting all outsiders (the British included), thought it should mean a fully independent state: ‘a government of the Nagas, for the Nagas, by the Nagas’. On the other hand, the Aos, who were more moderate, thought they could live with dignity within India, so long as their land and customs were protected and they had the autonomy to frame and enforce their own laws.

  The early meetings of the NNC witnessed a vigorous debate between these two factions which spilled over into the pages of the Naga Nation. A young Angami wrote that ‘the Nagas are a nation because we feel ourselves to be a nation. But, if we are a Nation, why do we not elect our own sovereignty? We want to be free. We want to live our own lives’. . . We do not want other people to live with us.’ An Ao doctor answered that the Nagas lacked the finances, the personnel and the infrastructure to become a nation. ‘At present’, he wrote, ‘it seems to me, the idea of independence is too far off for us Nagas. How can we run an independent Government now?’

  Meanwhile the moderate wing had begun negotiations with the Congress leadership. In July 1946 the NNC general secretary, T. Sakhrie, wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru, and in reply received an assurance that the Nagas would have full autonomy, but within the Indian Union. They could have their own judicial system, said Nehru, to save them from being ‘swamped by people from other parts of the country who might go there to exploit them to their own advantage’. Sakhrie now declared that the Nagas would continue their connection with India, ‘but as a distinctive community’ . . . We must also develop according to our own genius and taste. We shall enjoy home rule in our country but on broader issues be connected with India.’2