Even with eyes shut tight, it was hard to imagine spring blossoming through the acrid clouds of gun smoke and the blood-soaked earth. The bodies of the dead and the faces of the living all seemed to cry, ‘No, not yet.’ From his stage at the Sher-i-Kashmir stadium in Srinagar, though, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee invoked the words of the poet-laureate of Kashmir’s nationalist movement, Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor, to proclaim the coming of a new Eden: “Come, gardener, create the glory of spring, make Guls [flowers] bloom and Bulbuls sing.”
Last week, more than a decade after Vajpayee’s 2003 speech, another Indian prime minister was in Srinagar, delivering similar promises in simple prose. The termination of Kashmir’s special constitutional status, Narendra Modi said, heralded the coming of a Naya Kashmir, or New Kashmir. The pillage of Kashmir’s resources by a corrupt, dynastic élite had ended, opening the way for economic development and social equity.
Eighty years before Modi’s speech, Kashmir’s freedom movement leader Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah had promised the same thing. Abdullah’s New Kashmir manifesto aimed to raise the people “from the abyss of oppression and poverty, degradation and superstition, from medieval darkness and ignorance into the sunlit valleys of plenty.”
To Mahjoor, it had seemed Abdullah was leading Kashmir to paradise: “The ranges of the mountains shall yield gold; Pearls shall emerge out of the Wular lake.”
Less than five years later, though—months from his death—Mahjoor became embittered with Abdullah’s rule. The reality of New Kashmir was one-party authoritarianism, electoral malpractice and communalism, enabled by successive central governments. “Freedom being of heavenly birth, can’t move from door to door; You’ll find her camping in the homes of a chosen few alone.”
Ever since Independence, Kashmiris have discovered paradise can look suspiciously like a prison.
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Denial of democracy
Educated at Oxford, already the authors of an incisive three-volume work on modern India, Freda Houlston and her husband Baba Pyare Lal Bedi (also known as BPL Bedi) began their journey to Kashmir in 1934. The colonial authorities were less than pleased: The young communist couple, BPL Bedi later recalled, were welcomed with a rigorous police search. Following the start of the World War II, Bedi was interned in Rajasthan. However, the communist movement reversed its opposition to the war in 1941 after Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, leading to Bedi’s release.
Together with other élite Lahore families, Freda and BPL had spent their summers vacationing in Kashmir, at the centre of a circle of radicals. Following his release from jail, Bedi spent much of his time in the state. Abdullah picked him to draft a manifesto for his new, nationalist party.
Liberally lifting from the Soviet Union’s 1936 constitution, journalist and historian Andrew Whitehead notes, the New Kashmir manifesto promised the eradication of feudal landholdings. It also included radical promises on the rights of women, mass education, and healthcare.
However, financial mismanagement, coupled with corruption and cronyism, soon engendered disillusionment with Abdullah’s reforms. Forced levies of crops from farmers and chronic shortages of food in urban areas created widespread disaffection, political scientist Aijaz Ashraf Wani records. Two successive bad harvests, in 1949-1950 and 1950-1951, sharpened the discontent among the people.
Abdullah responded by seeking to build a one-party state. The Jammu & Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) ended up winning all 75 seats in the 1951 elections after 45 out of 49 candidates of the Hindu-nationalist Jammu Praja Parishad party were barred from contesting. The media was muzzled, and opponents were intimidated and imprisoned. The National Conference politician Syed Mir Qasim observed notices posted on walls, ordering people to stop discussing politics.
Villages got a radio set, opening the Kashmir valley to the world, scholar Navnita Chadha Behera writes—but each set was “tuned to Radio Kashmir, fixed and sealed” with wire.
Although Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu & Kashmir had acceded to India in 1947, the former director of Intelligence Bureau of India BN Mullik recorded that this did not solve India’s problems. “If India could claim Kashmir purely by virtue of the Maharaja signing the instrument of accession,” the spymaster wrote, “then she would have to concede Pakistan’s claim over Junagadh for the same reason and also tolerate Hyderabad as an independent state”.
For obvious reasons, Junagadh and Hyderabad were of considerably more strategic significance to India than Kashmir: Handing either to Pakistan would have involved creating dangerous enclaves inside the country. To avoid this trap, Jawaharlal Nehru had promised a referendum in Kashmir, and needed Abdullah to win it. Tolerating the Kashmiri leader’s authoritarianism was the necessary price—but the deal wouldn’t last long.
Rise of communalism
“The way crops need sunlight to ripen for harvesting and the gardens need water for maintaining their greenery,” Kashmiri leader Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas Khan proclaimed in 1935, “likewise, to keep a nation alive, the blood of martyrs is pre-requisite.” Four years earlier, calls for jihad against Kashmir’s Hindu rulers had escalated into large-scale violence. Following the killing of protestors by the Maharaja’s police, mobs attacked Hindu-owned properties in Srinagar. Like in the rest of India, religious nationalism had cast its shadow over Kashmir.
By 1938, Abdullah had spearheaded efforts to heal the communal divisions in Kashmir, renaming the Muslim Conference as the National Conference. However, faced with growing challenges to his popular legitimacy in Kashmir after 1951, Abdullah turned again to ethnic-religious chauvinism.
The breaking point came amid a movement led by the Praja Parishad, seeking full integration of Kashmir into India. In a 10 April 1952 speech in Ranbir Singh Pura, Abdullah suggested it was becoming impossible to “convince the Muslims of Kashmir that India does not intend to swallow them up.”
For months, tensions with Pakistan had threatened to escalate into war. To Nehru, it became clear that Abdullah’s rebellion could not be tolerated. “I am afraid Kashmir is heading in an adverse direction,” Nehru warned in a 28 June 1953 letter. Following the failure to secure a rapprochement with Abdullah, the Intelligence Bureau of India facilitated an inner-party coup, which deposed him in September 1953.
The regime of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad came to power on the back of a unanimous vote of confidence from Jammu & Kashmir’s constituent assembly, many of whose members were released from prison that very day. Early in 1954, the Union government restricted Kashmir’s special status by passing constitutional amendments that cut back the state’s autonomy.
Long before Kashmir’s special status ended, 260 of the 395 Articles in the Indian Constitution were already applicable in Jammu & Kashmir; the remaining 135 were identical provisions found in the constitution of Jammu and Kashmir. Kashmir’s political destiny had been decided without a meaningful election.
Bakshi’s own government collapsed in 1963 after large-scale anti-India violence exploded in the wake of the disappearance of a relic from the Hazratbal shrine in Kashmir. Later the National Conference was folded into the Congress—ceding the opposition space to the secessionists.
Freda Houlston had abandoned her communism as well as Kashmir long before these events unfolded, choosing instead to become a Buddhist nun: To some, it might have seemed a kind of penance; to others, evidence of supreme disillusion.
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Price of autocracy
Following the events at Hazratbal shrine, large-scale anti-Hindu riots broke out in East Pakistan, historian Mayurakshi Das records. The large-scale exodus of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan led to retaliatory communal violence in Kolkata. From 1964 onwards, the tempo of communal violence escalated steadily in India. In Ahmedabad, individuals charged with the murder of Muslims were publicly facilitated. The crisis in Indian secularism, the Kashmiri politician Pran Nath Bazaz wrote, led Kashmiri Muslims to increasingly question their future in India.
Looking at the crisis of 1963, Nehru concluded it was time for India to “reconsider the basic premise and structure of the Kashmir policy,” Behera writes. However, little was learned.
Imprisoned in 1953, Abdullah was released in 1958, and then returned to jail. The National Conference was pushed into a shotgun alliance with the Congress in 1974 after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed an agreement with the Kashmiri leader. Later, former Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah rigged the elections in 1987 with catastrophic consequences. As Bazaz had presciently warned, Indian authoritarianism had ended up giving legitimacy to Pakistan and Islamism.
For four years from 1999 to the time of Vajpayee’s speech, India and Pakistan were in a state of savage warfare over Kashmir. A staggering 2,125 Indian security force personnel had been killed; more by far than the 521 soldiers the country lost during the Kargil war. Thousands of civilians and jihadists were also killed. To Vajpayee, it seemed that a fair election could provide a foundation for peace. Even as covert negotiations began with Pakistan’s military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, the People’s Democratic Party was installed in power in Kashmir.
Even though all the elements for peace seemed to be in place, Kashmir’s political system had long ago lost legitimacy. The peace process would finally collapse in 2018, when jihadist social media icon Burhan Wani’s death sparked off an uprising in southern Kashmir.
Today, successful peacebuilding in Kashmir needs the restoration of legitimacy to its political institutions. That means the government needs to announce a timeline for holding elections and reinstitute a genuinely democratic government. Kashmir’s people need to be empowered to build their own New Kashmir, not have it erected around them.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.