The darkness of the end descended on Wahab Din under the light of the midday sun, as the elderly man was dragged through the streets of Mirpur, which he had walked each night for decades, lighting the kerosene street lamps. Then, a young man named Panju held up an ancient muzzle-loading rifle and fired at the lamplighter point-blank. Wahab fell over, his hands still clasped together as if begging for mercy. “This was the first violent death I witnessed,” Partition survivor Bal Gupta would later write, “and at a mere ten years old, this horrifying scene affected me deeply.”
Elsewhere in the province, British officials recorded seeing Kashmir’s maharaja, Hari Singh, handing out weapons to Sikh and Hindu militia, sometimes pausing to watch the killing from his car. Former British-Indian Army soldiers and ethnic Pashtun tribesmen, historian Illyas Chatha records, also slaughtered Hindus in the thousands. The victims included Sardar Jagat Singh, who had saved Bal Gupta’s Urdu teacher from a mob.
Even as the state collapsed, one officer in the Maharaja’s militia sought to dam the rising tide of blood. Lieutenant-Colonel Pir Mohammad Khan was made one of the four Kashmir representatives sent to the Rajya Sabha in 1952. Then-Kashmir Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah hailed his efforts, saying that “when terror reigned supreme on every side he stayed there undaunted and extinguished the communal fire.”
Later, the plot twisted: Lieutenant-Colonel Khan, a landed aristocrat who listed hunting and shooting as his hobbies, ran several madrasas for children, and served Kashmir’s government as minister of communications, forests and militia until 1951, became state president of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Jana Sangh.
Then, the man who an official party account of the movement called the ‘Nationalist Khan’, was all but erased from history. Lieutenant-colonel Khan’s marginality to today’s Hindu-nationalist pantheon helps us understand a larger story unfolding in Jammu and Kashmir: The story of a state that remains partitioned by a line drawn in blood.
A partitioned land
Earlier this week, as home minister Amit Shah staged a triumphant election rally in Jammu, news emerged that the Bharatiya Janata Party will not put up candidates to contest the three Lok Sabha seats in Kashmir. “The lotus will bloom on its own in the Valley,” the home minister said, an apparent admission that the BJP hasn’t been able to gain popular legitimacy outside the Hindu-majority regions south of the Chenab river. The Kashmir valley clearly remains a distinct universe, separated by faith, culture and ethnic identity.
As Shah noted, the stone-throwing Islamists have disappeared after Article 370 was revoked. The tortured communal relationship that created the Kashmir crisis to start with, though, remains raw.
Kashmir’s modern political life began to emerge a century ago, as a new class of educated young Muslims brought the ideas of the plains to challenge the Dogra political order and the elites who held it up. Islam, historian Ian Copland has noted, provided young leaders like Sheikh Abdullah a language with which to assert the collective rights of Kashmiri Muslims. The stage had been set by the Dogra monarchy, historian Chitralekha Zutshi has shown, which founded its legitimacy on its status as a guardian of the Hindu faith.
The fires set off in 1947 burned down Abdullah’s hopes of emerging as leader of all Kashmir. That summer, Muslim residents of Poonch—many supportive of the Muslim Conference, Abdullah’s pro-Pakistan rivals—began a civil disobedience movement. Hari Singh responded by seeking to suppress the movement with brutal force. This, in turn, led local veterans of the British Indian Army and Indian National Army—many resettled around the region as rewards for service—to form themselves into militia.
Former soldiers—some of whom promoted themselves to the rank of Field Marshall, historian Christopher Snedden wryly notes—soon evicted the Maharaja’s forces from much of what is today Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Though Poonch would eventually be saved by the Indian Army, after a long campaign documented by Lieutenant-General LP Sen, communal slaughter erupted all around.
Large-scale Partition pogroms broke out in Jammu after news of massacres in Rawalpindi, Sialkot and Mirpur were carried there by refugees. The eminent journalist GK Reddy, then working for The Kashmir Times, saw Muslim refugee convoys being hacked to pieces by militia, and entire villages being burned down. The state-enabled slaughter, mirrored by genocidal violence in Punjab and elsewhere, provoked fears among Abdullah’s constituency in Kashmir over their future in India.
Abdullah responded by casting himself as the sole spokesman for ethnic-Kashmiri Muslims, and pushing for independence. This decision—made against the wishes of other National Conference leaders, notably Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad—would have profound consequences.
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The Hindu backlash
Even as Abdullah sought to secure Kashmiri self-determination, political scientist Navnita Chadha Behera has argued, he resiled on promises to grant similar freedoms to Ladakh and Jammu. Ethnic Kashmiris acquired disproportionate influence over the state’s political life, as well as its bureaucracy and economy. The reaction was predictable. Led by the redoubtable Hindu nationalist politician Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the Praja Parishad movement cast itself as a defender of Hindu rights, and fought for the full integration of Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian Union.
Though the Praja Parishad is sometimes cast as embodying the reactionary impulses of disposed feudal landowners, large traders and ex-military officials, scholar Rekha Chowdhury has noted that “it came to be supported by many others who perceived the policies of the National Conference as biased against Jammu.”
Following his release from prison in 1963, Abdullah used the spectre of the Praja Parishad to stoke communal fears in Kashmir. In one speech, he claimed that the Praja Parishad was part of a project to convert India “into a religious state wherein the interests of Muslims will be jeopardised.”
Then, in 1977, when the Jamaat-e-Islami in Kashmir allied with the Janata Party in Jammu, he accused its leaders of shaking hands with men “whose hands were still red with the blood of Muslims”. National Conference leaders administered oaths to their cadre on the Quran and a piece of rock salt—a symbol of Pakistan.
Later, the 1983 elections demonstrated others could also play the communal game. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi conducted an incendiary campaign in Jammu, built around the claim that the discrimination the region faced was because it was part of “Hindu India.”
Across the Pir Panjal, Farooq Abdullah and his newfound ally Mirwaiz Moluvi Mohammad Farooq — Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s father — let it be known that they were defending Kashmir’s Muslim identity. At a March 1987 rally in Srinagar, Muslim United Front candidates, clad in the white robes of the pious, declared that Islam could not survive under the authority of a secular state.
From the rise of the long jihad on, the division was cast ever stronger. In a 1998 book, Kashmir’s Islamic patriarch, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, suggested that Kashmir’s secession from India was essential for the survival of Islam in the region. In 2006, following a successful Islamist campaign against prostitution in Srinagar, Geelani launched the fateful mobilisation that would explode in the long-drawn street violence that tore apart both Kashmir and Jammu.
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Languages of hate
Leading up to the appointment of Lieutenant-Colonel Khan as Bharatiya Jana Sangh state president in 1972, the party had concluded that it was necessary to widen its reach. Even though the party’s Hindu-nationalist ideological positions had significant support, electoral success eluded it. Even as it pushed for the flowering of a new Hindu cultural order, political scientist Prabha Sharma noted in 1969, the party began casting itself as a platform for economic and social democracy, open to all. Elite Muslims like Khan, with roots in Kashmir and Jammu, seemed to represent a solution to this problem.
The competitive communalism unleashed by the National Conference and the Congress in the 1970s, though, put an end to this brief experiment. From the late 1980s, as jihadist violence exploded and Hindus were targeted in a series of massacres across the state, the BJP recast itself as the party of the Hindus.
Although Farooq Khan, a highly decorated police officer and grandson of the lieutenant-colonel, is a senior member of the BJP, his case is an exception. The party’s leadership inside Kashmir has little legitimacy and less electoral traction.
The second experiment in bridging the Kashmir-Jammu fault line—the BJP-People’s Democratic Party alliance, described as “a historic opportunity” by Prime Minister Narendra Modi—imploded under the weight of the Islamism cultivated by former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, and aggressive Hindu nationalist campaigns in Jammu. Today, its leaders have little but invective for each other.
The National Conference, for its part, is presenting itself as the party of the Muslims of Kashmir and Jammu, while the Congress has ceased to seek electoral space in the Valley.
Few think of Kashmir as a partitioned state. Yet, the deep trauma experienced in 1947, and fears that savage bloodletting could once again erupt, have led paranoiac communalism to congeal in the state’s political life. Ending this dysfunction needs a genuinely democratic politics that reaches across the hate.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)