Late one night in 1978, in a nation illuminated by the end of the Emergency, police dragged Ghulam Nabi Patel out of his home in Srinagar’s Batamaloo, and into the city’s Central Jail. Leviathan still cast a long shadow in this corner of the republic, it became clear. The head of the Kashmir Motor Drivers Association, it later emerged, had campaigned for the Janata Party in the just-concluded elections. This action enraged then-Prime Minister Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah enough to make the trade union leader the first victim of Kashmir’s just-legislated preventive detention law, the Public Safety Act.
The High Court ordered Ghulam Nabi’s release, but that wasn’t quite the end of the story. In 2018, the elderly politician, battling cancer and on a trip home to arrange his daughter’s wedding, was shot dead by terrorists. This time, the parties he’d served for decades — the Congress and the People’s Democratic Party — denied their association with him, so they would not have to condemn the assassins.
A last bit of the story remains. In 2020, Ghulam Nabi’s children were served notice by the government, ordering them to vacate the premises they were provided to protect them from terrorist attack.
This week, the Supreme Court is scheduled to resume hearing petitions seeking the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood, an issue it elided over after 32 paragraphs of elegant prose, in return for a promise from the Solicitor General. The decision to hear the issue is an important one, but it also evades a critical issue. The demotion of Kashmir to a Union territory isn’t the only issue that needs to be discussed, as India moves forward to reimagine its constitutional relationship with the once-was-a-state.
A state of abnormality
Kashmir has never been, in any sense of the world, allowed to be a normal state, with normal politicians and normal citizens. The state might have been the first to get rural radio sets, scholar Navnita Chadha Behera notes, but authorities were careful to disable their tuners with wire, so as to ensure only Radio Kashmir could be heard. There were elections to a constituent Assembly in 1951, true, but politician Syed Mir Qasim observed notices posted on walls, ordering people not to discuss politics.
Thus, Kashmir was bound to the republic with terror and blood, not ideas or culture. For this, the long jihad Pakistan unleashed against Kashmir in 1947-1948, and has since continued without interruption, must be held responsible. Like many other regions in India, from the adivasi heartlands in central India to parts of the Northeast, democracy has struggled to grow in exceptionally harsh conditions.
All blame, though, does not lie across the Line of Control. Elections that served to undermine democracy, the state-enabled subversion of the political system through corruption, the use of coercion unconstrained by law: All these, the story of Ghulam Nabi Patel should remind us, were Indian inventions.
Today, the challenge isn’t just to restore statehood in Kashmir. The task Indians need to embrace is to build a state that is Indian, an unremarkable part of our republic.
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The death of a dream
Eighty years ago, Prime Minister Abdullah had promised that a utopia would be built from the ruins of Partition and war. The Naya Kashmir manifesto — which, Andrew Whitehead reminds us, liberally helped itself to text from the 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union — held out promises to redistribute feudal landholdings to the peasants, to uphold the rights of women, and introduce universal access to healthcare and education. The communist couple Freda Houlston and her husband Baba Pyare Lal Bedi wrote the manifesto with Abdullah’s encouragement, though it is unclear if his commitment to communism was ever serious.
To the great Kashmiri poet Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor, it seemed Abdullah was leading the region out of the darkness: “The ranges of the mountains shall yield gold,” he gushed, “Pearls shall emerge out of the Wular lake.” Less than five years after Independence, though, the poet had encountered disillusionment. The reality of ‘New Kashmir’, it turned out, was one-party authoritarianism, electoral malpractice, and communalism. “Freedom being of heavenly birth, can’t move from door to door,” he acidly wrote, “You’ll find her camping in the homes of a chosen few alone.”
How did this come about? The story has something to do with bad luck, scholar Aijaz Ashraf Wani has written, in an excellent survey of the roots of misadministration in Kashmir. Two successive bad harvests, in 1949-1950 and 1950-1951, created enormous rural discontent. Forced levies of crops from farmers, imposed in a desperate effort to stave off famine, sharpened the resentment, while shortages of food in the cities grew to alarming levels.
The National Conference succeeded in dominating the Constituent Assembly, winning all 75 seats in the 1951 elections. This was only possible, though, because 45 out of 49 candidates of the Hindu-nationalist Praja Parishad party were barred from contesting, mainly on frivolous technical grounds, Behera has observed. The media was muzzled, and opponents were intimidated and imprisoned.
Less than five years later, though, the relationship between Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Abdullah had begun to break down. The Praja Parishad, denied electoral space, started a mass movement seeking the full integration of Kashmir into India. Abdullah, in a 10 April 1952 speech in RS Pura, suggested it was becoming impossible to “convince the Muslims of Kashmir that India does not intend to swallow them up.” The threat of war with Pakistan was alive, Nehru could not countenance this rebellion. “I am afraid Kashmir is heading in an adverse direction,” Nehru warned in a 28 June 1953 letter.
Following several failures to secure a rapprochement with Abdullah, the Intelligence Bureau of India facilitated an intra-party coup, which deposed him in September 1953.
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The unfinished endgame
The new regime of Prime Minister 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.
Like his predecessor and incarcerated friend Abdullah, Bakshi hoped development would subsume the urge for political agency and dialogue. The plan failed. In 1963, mass protests which followed the disappearance of a relic from the shrine of Hazratbal led the government to, quite simply, be swept aside. A parallel government, made up of Abdullah and the clerics Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq and Maulvi Mohammad Sayeed Masoodi, had to step in to restore order, regulate prices, and even direct traffic.
The prominent Congress politician Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq, Behera records, wrote a sharp letter to Prime Minister Nehru: “One of the beliefs, which have been commonly entertained in the past, is that the influence of Pakistan on the Kashmiri Muslims is fairly wide and firmly rooted. From this belief has stemmed a primordial fear of the people.”
Few lessons, though, were learned from the bitter experience of 1963. Large-scale state repression of opponents continued. In one case, Supreme Court records show, politician Ghulam Nabi Zaki was held under the Preventive Detention Act of 1964, without the state government even troubling itself to serve him the grounds of his arrest. Later, the government argued that no grounds could be disclosed without compromising the security of the state.
Then, in 1974, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi finally allowed Abdullah’s release, subject to his signing an agreement which led him to merge the National Conference into her Congress party. This ceded the opposition space in Kashmir to Right-wing clerical forces, which would eventually form the political foundations of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, as well as their allied ethnic Kashmiri jihadist groups. Another rigged election in 1987 added to the frustrations of the opposition, providing an opportunity for jihadism to find large numbers of recruits.
Like Indians everywhere, Kashmiris seek the right to speak their minds, to vote for who they wish, and to tune their radio sets and mobile phones to content of their choice. They resent arbitrary detentions, indiscriminate violence, and a security apparatus that seems to have been liberated from the laws of the republic. These demands cannot, and ought not, be made contingent on the behaviour of Pakistan’s Generals. Kashmiris need to be embraced and treated like all other Indians.
The Supreme Court could lay the foundations for a Kashmir that looks more like it did in 2019 — but that was no idyll. There is hard political work ahead that is needed if the wounds of eight decades are to be healed.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)