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

by Ramachandra Guha

  Through the month of January there were protests and demonstrations in the Valley. The ripples spread through the Muslim world. In distant East Pakistan there were religious riots aimed at the minority Hindu community, hundreds of thousands of whom fled to India. Now there was the danger of retaliatory riots targeting Muslims in India itself.

  In the last week of January Nehru dispatched Lal Bahadur Shastri to Kashmir. After speaking to officials, and consulting local politicians, Shastri decided to hold a special showing, or deedar, to certify whether the returned relic was genuine. A panel of senior clerics was constituted to view the relic. They did so on 3 February, and to palpable relief all round decided that this was the real article. Calm returned to the Valley. To keep the peace going the government of India appointed, as chief minister, G. M. Sadiq, a politician known for his left-wing views, but also forhisintegrity.18

  The Hazratbal incident brought home, once more, the fact that trouble in Kashmir had its repercussions on life in the subcontinent as a whole. The China fiasco had made Nehru more alert to the need to seek a final resolution of the Kashmir dispute. For India could not afford to have two hostile fronts. He was encouraged in this line of thinking by his old friend Lord Mountbatten. In April 1963 Mountbatten had told Nehru that ‘if his glory had at one time, brought India credit’ in the world, the country, and he, now had a ‘tarnished image’, principally owing to the failure to settle the question of Kashmir. The Englishman felt that this could be ‘rectified’ by a ‘heroic gesture by India’, such as the ‘granting of independence to the [Kashmir] valley regardless of the Pakistani attitude’.19

  In fact, during 1962 and 1963 there were several rounds of talks with Pakistan on the issues that divided the two countries. Here, the government of India was represented by the experienced Sardar Swaran Singh, while Pakistan was represented by the young and ambitious Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. At these talks no one represented Kashmir. But, as the Hazratbal incident showed, it was not prudent to neglect the feelings of the people at the centre of the dispute. And who better to take their pulse than Sheikh Abdullah? By the end of 1963 Nehru was already thinking of releasing the Sheikh, who by this time had been in jail for ten years. The stroke at Bhubaneshwar, with its intimations of mortality, made him think further in this regard. Why not release Abdullah and have a last shot at solving the Kashmir problem before he was gone?

  V

  Sheikh Abdullah, we may recall, had been arrested by the government of India in August 1953. No charges were brought against him, but in January 1958 he was suddenly released. He made his way to the Valley, where he met with a spectacular reception. He addressed well-attended public meetings in Srinagar, including one at the Hazratbal mosque. This seems to have unnerved his enemies in the administration. Towards the end of April he was arrested once more. This time he was shifted to a jail in Jammu, and charged with plotting with Pakistan to break up India. He was accused, among other things, of attempting ‘to facilitate wrongful annexation of the territories of the state by Pakistan; create communal ill-feeling and disharmony in the state and receive secret aid from Pakistan in the shape of money, bombs, etc.’.20

  The charges were, to put it politely, trumped up. While the Sheikh contemplated independence, he never wanted to join Pakistan. And while the idea of being the ruler of a free Kashmir appealed to him, he saw as his subjects all the people of the state, regardless of religion. As even his political opponents conceded, he had not a communal bone in his body.

  Speaking at his trial, the Sheikh said that he stood for a single objective: the right of self-determination for the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who, he insisted, were ‘not a flock of sheep and goats to be driven by force one way or another’. Even so, he repeatedly underlined his commitment to secularism, his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi and his once-strong friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru. He recalled that Nehru himself had conceded that ‘the people of the state are the final arbiters of their fate’ , significantly adding: ‘He does not, I believe, deny this right to us even now.’21

  Two months after the Sheikh’s first arrest, in 1953, Nehru had written that ‘the mere fact of his detention is of course a matter which troubles me greatly’.22 The months turned into years, deepening the guilt. One way of sublimating the guilt was to take a close interest in the education of his friend’s children (which, by some accounts, he even helped pay for). In July 1955 Nehru was visited by Abdullah’s eldest son, Farooq, then studying in a medical college in Jaipur. Farooq told the prime minister that his classmates routinely referred to his father as a ‘traitor’. This prompted Nehru to write to a minister in the Rajasthan state government, asking him to ensure that the boy had ‘proper living quarters and some friendly companionship’, so that he did not develop any ‘complexes and the like’ . As Nehru put it, ‘Some people foolishly imagine that because we have had differences with Sheikh Abdullah, therefore we are not favourably inclined towards his son and his family. This, of course, is not only absurd but is just the reverse of how we feel. Personally, because Sheikh Abdullah is in prison, I feel rather a special responsibility that we should try to help his sons and family.’23

  In 1964, woken up by the China war, and put on high alert by his own fading health, Nehru decided to put an end to the matter. He spoke to the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, and after obtaining his consent, decided to release Sheikh Abdullah. The news was conveyed to the world by Nehru’s confidant Lal Bahadur Shastri. Abdullah’s detention, said Shastri, had been ‘a matter of pain to the government, and particularly to the prime minister'.)24

  On the morning of 8 April the Sheikh stepped out of Jammu jail, a free man once more. He drove in an open car through the streets of the town, accepting garlands and bouquets. The next day he gave his first public speech. According to a newspaper report, ‘Sheikh Abdullah said the two pressing problems facing the subcontinent – communal strife and Kashmir – should be solved during Prime Minister Nehru’s lifetime. He described Mr Nehru as the last of the stalwarts who had worked with Gandhiji and said that after him a solution of these problems would become difficult.’

  Nehru had invited Abdullah to come and stay with him in New Delhi. The Sheikh said he would first go to the Valley, consult his friends and supporters, and meet the Prime Minister after the Id festival (which fell on 23 April). On the 11th he set off by car to Srinagar, a journey that normally would take a few hours. But the Sheikh travelled leisurely, stopping at towns and villages on the way. Wherever he halted, he also spoke. Thousands turned up to see and hear him, trudging miles from their own isolated hamlets. In these gatherings, women outnumbered men.

  In his speeches, Abdullah described his state as a bride cherished by two husbands – India and Pakistan – neither of whom ‘cared to ascertain what the Kashmiris wanted’. He said he would meet Jawaharlal Nehru with an open mind, and asked the Indians not to make up their minds beforehand either. As a journalist who interviewed him noted, the Sheikh had ‘no personal bitterness, no rancour’ – rather, he was imbued with ‘a strong sense of mission’, a compelling desire to seek a solution to Kashmir. At one meeting he was asked what he now felt about Nehru. Abdullah answered that he bore no ill will, for ‘misunderstandings do occur even among brothers. I shall not forget the love Mr Nehru has showered on me in the past . . . I will meet him as an old friend and comrade.’

  On 18 April a week after he had left Jammu the Sheikh drove in an open jeep from Anantnag to the Kashmiri capital Srinagar. The thirty-mile route was lined by a ‘near-hysterical crowd’ of half a million people. The road was covered with freshly plucked daisies and tulips and festooned with arches and bunting. When he finally entered the town, ‘Srinagar’s entire population . . . jammed the labyrinth of streets which were so richly decorated that even the sun did not penetrate the canopy of Kashmir silks, carpets and shawls’.

  Meanwhile, back in Delhi, the prospect of talks between Nehru and Abdullah alarmed many members of the ruling Congress Party. Senior Cabinet min
isters issued statements insisting that the question of Kashmir was ‘closed’; the state was, and would stay, an integral part of India. More combative still were members of the Jana Sangh. The party’s general secretary, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, deplored the Sheikh’s recent speeches, where he seemed to have ‘questioned even the axiomatic facts of the Kashmir question’ (such as its final accession to India). ‘Instead of stabilizing the political situation of the state’, complained Upadhyaya, ‘Sheikh Abdullah has tried to unsettle every issue.’

  The opposition from the Hindu right was predictable. As it happens, the left was also suspicious of Abdullah and his intentions. The Communist Party thought he was in danger of falling into an ‘imperialist trap’, designed to detach Kashmir from India. Among the Indian political establishment, it seems, only Nehru’s mind remained open. But he was to receive unexpected support from two old stalwarts who had also worked with Mahatma Gandhi. One was Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as ‘JP’, the former radical socialist who for the past decade had been a leading light of the Sarvodaya movement. JP was an old friend of the Sheikh; he had also been a vocal advocate of better relations with Pakistan. In 1962 he had set up an India—Pakistan Conciliation Group which, among other things, sought to find an ‘equitable and honourable’ solution to the Kashmir dispute.25

  Now, welcoming Sheikh Abdullah’s release in a signed article in the Hindustan Times, JP deplored the insinuations against Abdullah by politicians inside and outside the Congress. These had threatened that he would be put back in jail if he went ‘too far’. ‘It is remarkable’, commented JP acidly, ‘how the freedom fighters of yesterday begin so easily to imitate the language of the imperialists.’

  What alarmed politicians in Delhi was the Sheikh’s talk about ascertaining afresh the wishes of the Kashmiri people. JP thought this eminently reasonable, for the elections in Jammu and Kashmir in 1957 and 1962 were anything but free and fair. In any case, if India was ‘so sure of the verdict of the people, why are we so opposed to giving them another opportunity to reiterate it? A satisfactory settlement of the Kashmir question would greatly improve relations between India and Pakistan. JP hoped that the leaders of India would display ‘the vision and statesmanship that this historic moment demands’. He added, ‘Happily, the one sane voice in the ruling party is that of the Prime Minister himself.’26

  More unexpected perhaps was the endorsement received by Nehru from C. Rajagopalachari (‘Rajaji’), the veteran statesman who had once been an intimate associate of the prime minister but had latterly become apolitical opponent. As the founder of the Swatantra Party, Rajaji had savaged the prime minister’s economic policies. These criticisms sometimes had a sharp personal edge. Now, to the surprise of his followers, he came out strongly in favour of Nehru’s initiative in releasing Abdullah. Like JP, he deplored the threats to put the Sheikh back in jail, thus to ‘force him into silence and submission’. Fortunately, ‘the Prime Minister may be ill but he preserves his balance, and has evidently refused to take any foolish step and degrade India’.

  The freeing of Abdullah, argued Rajaji, should act as a prelude to allowing ‘the people of Kashmir [to] exercise their human right to rule themselves as well as they can’. Indeed, solving the Kashmir tangle would pave the way for a larger resolution of the Indo-Pak dispute itself. Thus, Rajaji wrote of the need to

  try and think fundamentally in the present crisis. Are we to yield to the fanatical emotions of our anti-Pakistan groups? Is there any hope for India or for Pakistan, if we go on hating each other, suspecting each other, borrowing and building up armaments against each other – building our two houses, both of us on the sands of continued foreign aid against a future Kurukshetra? We shall surely ruin ourselves forever if we go on doing this . . . We shall be making all hopes of prosperity in the future a mere mirage if we continue this arms race based on an ancient grudge and the fears and suspicions flowing from it.27

  VI

  In Kashmir, meanwhile, Sheikh Abdullah was talking to his colleagues and associates. He discovered that while he had been in jail, he had come to be associated with the Pakistan party. At his trial Abdullah had insisted that he never expressed a desire for Kashmir to join Pakistan. India or independence – those were the only two options he had countenanced. But the trial proceedings never reached the common people of the Valley. They knew only that he was being tried for conspiracy against the Indian nation. Would not that make him, by default, a friend of Pakistan?

  The common people were strengthened in their beliefs by the propaganda of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s government, which had painted the Sheikh as an agitator for a plebiscite, and hence anti-Indian. Moreover, the chicanery and corruption of the Bakshi regime had greatly tarnished the image of India among the Kashmiris. Abdullah found that the pro-Pakistani elements were now perhaps in a majority. This did not please him. But, sensing the mood on the ground, he worked to gradually win over the people to his point of view. He met the influential priest Maulvi Farooqui and urged him to support a ‘realistic’ solution, rather than claim that Kashmir should accede to Pakistan in pursuance of the two-nation theory.28

  On 23 April, two weeks after he was released, Sheikh Abdullah addressed a prayer meeting in Srinagar. A solution to the Kashmir dispute, he said, must take into account its likely consequences for the 50 million Muslims in India, and the 10 million Hindus in East Pakistan. Three days later, in his last speech before leaving for Delhi, he urged the Kashmiris to maintain communal peace, to thus set an example for both India and Pakistan. ‘No Muslim in Kashmir will ever raise his hand against the minorities,’ he proclaimed.

  On 28 April, the day before Abdullah was due to arrive in Delhi, the Jana Sangh held a large procession in the capital. The marchers shouted anti-Abdullah and anti-Nehru slogans and demanded that the government of India abrogate Article 370 and declare Kashmir to be an ‘integral and indivisible’ part of India. At a public meeting held the same day, A. B. Vajpayee demanded that the prime minister tell Abdullah that Jammu and Kashmir had ‘already been integrated with the Indian Union and that there was no scope for discussion on this matter’.

  On the 29th Abdullah flew into Palam airport with his principal associates. The party drove on to Teen Murti House, where the prime minister was waiting to receive Abdullah. It was the first time the two men had seen one another since Nehru’s government had locked up the Sheikh in August 1953. Now, as one eyewitness wrote, ‘the two embraced each other warmly. They were meeting after 11 years, but the way they greeted each other reflected no traces of embarrassment, let aside bitterness over what happened in the intervening period’. The duo posed for the battery of press photographers before going inside.

  This was a reconciliation between the leader of the nation and a man till recently regarded as a traitor to it. It anticipated, by some thirty years, the similarly portentous reconciliation between the South African president and his most notorious political prisoner. But even F. W. De Klerk did not go so far as to ask Nelson Mandela to stay with him.

  On this visit, Abdullah stayed five days with Nehru in Teen Murti House. They met at least once or twice a day, usually without aides. While the prime minister was otherwise occupied, the Sheikh canvassed a wide spectrum of Indian opinion. He spoke to Congress ministers, to leaders of the opposition and to prominent non-political figures such as Jayaprakash Narayan. He placed a wreath on Gandhi’s tomb in Rajghat and addressed a prayer meeting at Delhi s greatest mosque, the Jama Masjid.

  That Nehru was talking to Abdullah was not to the liking of the Jana Sangh. Notably, it also caused disquiet among members of his own Cabinet, who worried that the Kashmir question would now be ‘re-opened’. To pre-empt the possibility, a senior minister told Parliament that the ‘maintenance of the status quo [in Kashmir] was in the best interests of the subcontinent’ .And twenty-seven Congress MPs issued a statement arguing that ‘you can no more talk of self-determination in the case of Kashmir than in the case of, say, Bombay or Bihar’.
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  Within his party, the only senior man who appeared sympathetic to Nehru’s efforts was Lal Bahadur Shastri. There were, however, some opposition politicians who saw the point of speaking seriously with Abdullah. Thus the Swatantra Party leader Minoo Masani urgently wired Rajaji:

  Understand Nehru and Lal Bahadur endeavouring to find solution with Sheikh Abdullah but are up against confused thinking within Congress Party alongside of Jan Sangh communist combination. If you think telegram or letter to Jawaharlal from yourself encouraging him [to] do the right thing and assuring your personal support would help please move in the matter.29

  Rajaji chose not to write to Nehru, perhaps because he was too proud or feared a rebuff, but he did write to Lal Bahadur Shastri urging that Kashmir be given some kind of autonomous status. As he saw it, ‘self-determination for Kashmir is as far as we are concerned a lesser issue than the aim of reducing Indo-Pak jealousy’. He thought that ‘the idea that if we “let Kashmir go”, we shall be encouraging secessions everywhere is thoroughly baseless’. ’I hope you and Jawaharlalji’, wrote Rajaji to Shastri, ‘will be guided by Providence and bring this great opportunity to a good result.’30

  Shortly after his release Abdullah had expressed his wish to ‘pay my respects personally to Rajaji, and have the benefit of his mature advice’.31 Now, after his conversations with Nehru, he setoff south to meet the prime minister’s friend turned rival turned ally. He planned to stop at Wardha en route, to pay his respects to the Gandhian leader Vinoba Bhave. As he jokingly told a journalist, he would discuss ‘spirituality with Vinoba and ‘practical politics’ with Rajaji.

  On 4 May Lal Bahadur Shastri wrote to Rajaji urging him ‘to suggest to Sheikh Saheb not to take any extreme line . . . Sheikh Saheb has just come out [of jail] and it would be good for him to give further thought to the different aspects of the Kashmir question and come to a judgement after full and mature introspection and deliberation. It will be most unfortunate if things are done in a hurry or precipitated’.32