It is difficult to believe that Sheikh Abdullah is dead. He has been so much a part of the scene as people of my generation have known it since the early forties that it is just not possible to think of India without him.
The Sheikh was never an all-India leader. He was not another Maulana Azad, not even another Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. He could not be and he was not interested. He was too much of a Kashmiri Muslim to think even in terms of Indian Islam, not to speak of the larger entity of India. This was his great strength as well as weakness; weakness, that is, from the point of view of the rest of us. It did not bother him. The Kashmir valley was his world.
This made him ambivalent towards the Indian connection which he had initially favoured in order to save his people and land from the rapacious Pathan hordes which Pakistan had unleashed in a bold bid to seize the state by force. It led almost inevitably to his estrangement with Mr Nehru, his overthrow and arrest in August 1953. But we should not in fairness take a wholly negative view of his ambivalence.
In the deepest sense, it is a futile discussion. The Sheikh was what he was, not because he chose to be that way, but because he was made that way. He was primeval, elemental, almost a part of the valley’s landscape. Even so, it may be worth our while to remember that a non-ambivalent Sheikh might not have served either India or Kashmir all that well.
Resisted Jinnah
Such a Sheikh could have opted for Pakistan in the wake of partition and the communal holocaust that accompanied it. He held out against Mr. Jinnah’s attempts to cajole him and frighten him and he ignored for all practical purposes the massacre of the Muslims in Jammu not so much because he was committed to secularism and India as because he knew merger with Pakistan would be the end of Kashmir as a distinct cultural-linguistic entity. He was much shrewder than the East Bengali Muslim leaders.
He in all probability calculated that a predominantly Muslim Kashmir could survive the embrace of predominantly Hindu India but not of Muslim Pakistan. In view of his subsequent attitude, it is obvious that given time and the freedom to decide, the Sheikh would have preferred an independent Kashmir without, of course, the Dogra Maharaja, under his tutelage. Pakistan closed this choice for him with its attack, though he continued to toy with the idea for years.
Alternatively, a non-ambivalent Sheikh could have identified himself completely with India and accepted Kashmir’s complete merger with the union, as is the case of the other states. In theory that would have been a neat arrangement and it can be argued that it would have helped avoid all the subsequent complications in Indo-Pakistan relations and the consequent cost to the sub-continent in terms of the arms race, wars and involvement of the two superpowers and China in its affairs. But Pakistan would never have reconciled itself to such a solution once it had made the bid to seize the state. Even otherwise the arrangement might not have been all that neat in practice.
Let us face it, the Kashmiri Muslims are at once Kashmiris and Muslims. The first fact, together with their long experience of Punjabi Muslims and of the attack by the Pathans, makes them distrustful of Pakistan, the second of India. The Sheikh embodied this Janus-facedness of his people and made it possible for this to survive, thanks largely to Mr. Nehru’s willingness to play along in view of his own sympathies for the minorities in general and such special minorities as the Kashmiri Muslims and the tribals in particular. Without Mr. Nehru, Sheikh Abdullah would have been sunk and without the Sheikh the Kashmiri people. They needed him to remind them that it was as important for them to preserve their linguistic-cultural identity as to assert their religious identity.
For years, indeed decades, that is, since the Sheikh’s alleged defection from Indian nationalism to which he never belonged, it has been a commonplace in our country that Mr. Nehru committed a blunder in accepting a limited accession on the part of Jammu and Kashmir to the union and referring the conflict with Pakistan to the United Nations. This criticism is invalid.
Pakistan would have gone to the UN if India had not; indeed Karachi was preparing to do so. Mr. Nehru was, to his credit, able to anticipate Mr. Jinnah, whether under Lord Mountbatten’s advice or on his own. And implicit in the first proposition is another proposition which is that he should have been willing to put the state under military rule from the very start and to change the composition of its population. An Assam in reverse, and not slowly and gradually as in the case of Assam, but brutally and quickly. The Sheikh would not have accepted full accession and without his cooperation, the proposition could not have even been put to the people in the state.
The clash between Indian nationalism (despite its essentially secular character and its mildness on account of the proverbial capacity of the Hindus for tolerance of other faiths) and Kashmir particularism (despite the absence of fanaticism among the Kashmiri Muslims generally) was not easy to avoid. It began soon after the Pakistani marauders had been beaten back and the cease-fire line stabilised. Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerji, the first prominent Indian leader to challenge the Sheikh and to lead a movement against his government in the state, cannot be dismissed as a mere Hindu communalist. He represented one face of Indian nationalism and enjoyed the sympathies of Mr Nehru’s own party and cabinet colleagues. Mr. Nehru was appalled by Dr. Mookerji’s movement but perhaps not so much because he was satisfied with the Sheikh’s attitude and performance as because he feared, quite rightly, that it would make the Kashmiri chieftain even more intransigent and then complicate the situation further. This is exactly what happened with consequences that are well known – the Sheikh’s overthrow, arrest, prolonged imprisonment, expulsion from Kashmir for some years and so on.
Distrusted People
Unlike Mr. Nehru, the Sheikh was not democratic at heart. Perhaps he saw himself as a successor to Maharaja Hari Singh whom he had managed to deprive of his throne. Perhaps he saw himself as a great patriarch who had to protect his people from not only external encroachments (Pakistan’s in one way, India’s another) but also from their own waywardness. Apparently he did not trust his people, at least not sufficiently to hold a wholly fair and free election in 1951. Yet the democratic process such as it was in Kashmir complicated the task of maintaining the delicate balance which had been worked out between Indian nationalism and Kashmiri particularism. As the Sheikh saw his popularity decline, he became more intransigent in his dealings with New Delhi because he felt that this was the best method of retaining his hold on the people in the valley.
Mr. Nehru did his best to accommodate him. No other Indian leader would have gone to the extent of negotiating a regular agreement known as the Delhi agreement with him. But Mr. Nehru’s efforts were of no avail. Finally, Maulana Azad and Mr. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai took the bit between their teeth and put the Sheikh behind the bar. They acted on behalf of both Indian nationalism (they were not prepared to see New Delhi’s authority eroded) and of Indian Islam (they feared that the status of the community would suffer if things began to go wrong in the predominantly Muslim Kashmir).
In1982 it might appear that Maulana Azad, Mr Kidwai and those associated with them on the other side of the line in Srinagar – Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Mr GM Sadiq, Mir Qasim and Mr. D.P. Dhar – acted rashly. But things were different in 1953. Most secular minded Indians were not quite sure that they had managed to bring the communal passions in the country as a whole under firm control and were, therefore, not willing to take any risk in Kashmir. Now it is at best a matter of academic interest whether the Sheikh, on his part, would in fact have, as was then widely feared, gone to the extent of getting the state legislature to adopt a resolution favouring independence for Jammu and Kashmir. In my view, however, such an action would have been out of character for him.
Abhorred Violence
I have not known the Sheikh sufficiently to be sure that I can sum up his character accurately. Like most journalists in Delhi I met him several times. But after a couple of meetings in the ’fifties, I did not regard it particularly useful to get into a serious discussion with him. I knew he spoke in two languages – one to Indian journalists and the other to his own people whenever he got onto a rostrum. Unlike many other fellow journalists, I regarded this not as a case of double-think and double-speak but an unavoidable necessity. So whenever we met – in recent years mostly for dinner at the residence of his physician and friend Dr JS Bajaj, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi – we exchanged only pleasantries.
Yet my assessment would be that while the lion could roar and often did, he was not keen to bite. Like the Kashmiri people generally, he abhorred violence not because he had come under the influence of Gandhiji, though he quoted him quite frequently, but because Islam in the valley is of a more tolerant variety. He was obstinate as far as the rights and dignity of his people were concerned but he was at the same time a realist. He recognised the limitation of his and Kashmir’s situation. In this regard, he was not too unlike Mr. Nehru, though, of course, he lacked the latter’s breadth of vision and sophistication of approach. He could give the impression of being led as he did in respect of Mirza Afzal Beg for a long time but he could never be someone else’s tool. He valued friendship as in the case of Dr. Bajaj. Indeed, he could be quite sentimental, as on the occasion of Mr. Nehru’s death when he made no attempt to hold back his tears.
In the last two years he was not wholly averse to encouraging the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing, the Jamaat-e-Tulba, in order to ensure that Mrs. Gandhi did not push him too far. But he knew where to draw the line. Such a man could not have led the kind of struggle which a serious attempt at secession would have involved even in 1953.
The people of Kashmir loved him and followed him as they have not followed anyone perhaps in their history. They forgave him everything – his inconsistencies, his indifference to democratic and other norms and what not. For them, he was above the law in every sense of the term. As such he is truly irreplaceable. He knew his end was near and had had the foresight to name his eldest son, Dr. Farooq Abdullah, as his successor. This has at least insured smooth succession and avoided immediate confusion. But with the passing away of the Sheikh, Kashmir has entered a new era. And like any new era anywhere, it holds out promise as well as dangers.
The Times of India, 10 September 1982