Kashmir: Behind the Vale

KASHMIR

MJ Akbar is among those who have made a significant impact on Indian society by their writing, whether as authors or editors. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the seminal newsmagazine, Sunday, in 1976, and The Telegraph in 1982, he revolutionized Indian journalism in the 1970s and 80s. In the 1990s he launched The Asian Age, a multi-edition daily that once again had substantive impact on the profession. He has also served as the Editorial Director of India Today, Headlines Today and as the editor of the Deccan Chronicle and the Sunday Guardian.

MJ, as he is popularly known, first entered public life in 1989, when he was elected to the Lok Sabha. He went back to media in 1993, and returned to the political area in 2014, when he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and became the party’s national spokesperson during the 2014 campaign led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In July 2016, he was named the Minister of State for External Affairs by Prime Minister Modi.

His seven books have achieved great international acclaim: Kashmir: Behind the Vale; India The Siege Within; Nehru: The Making of India; Riot-after-Riot; The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity; Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan; and Blood Brothers, his only work of fiction. In addition, there have been four collections of his columns, reportage and essays.

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OTHER TITLES BY MJ AKBAR

Blood Brothers: A Family Saga

Byline

Have Pen, Will Travel: Observations of a Globetrotter

India The Siege Within: Challenges to a Nation’s Unity

Nehru: The Making of India

The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity

OTHER LOTUS TITLES

FORTHCOMING TITLE

KASHMIR

BEHIND THE VALE

M.J. AKBAR

Lotus Collection

© M.J. Akbar 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the author.

First edition published in 2002

Ninth impression, 2017

The Lotus Collection

An imprint of

Roli Books Pvt. Ltd

M-75, Greater Kailash II Market, New Delhi 110 048

Phone: ++91 (011) 4068 2000

E-mail: info@rolibooks.com

Website: www.rolibooks.com

Also at Bengaluru, Chennai, & Mumbai

Cover design: Anoop Bhat

Layout design: Bhagirath Kumar

Production: Yuvraj Singh

ISBN: 978-81-7436-250-6

Typeset in Sabon LT Std by Roli Books Pvt. Ltd and

printed at Nutech Print Services, New Delhi

To

Mukulika and Prayaag

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Introduction

THE RIPPLES OF FALLING

1. The Rishi and The Raja

2. Of Human, and Inhuman, Bondage

3. Crosscurrent Affairs: A Dream Come True

4. Bud Shah: Days of Flowers

5. Delhi Durbar: The End of Independence

6. The End of Independence

7. The Politics of Stability

8. Kabul and Lahore: A Bitter Century

9. He Who Wishes to Climb…

LOVE, POLITICS AND OTHER TRAGEDIES

10. A Tide, Rising at His Feet

11. Eloquence and Freedom

12. Nehru, Abdullah, Jinnah: The Triangle of Hopes

13. A Basket of Apples

14. Do Not Disturb

15. The Will of the People; the Wont of the Powers

COLD BLOOD

16. Clause 7, Article 370 and a Three-Nation Theory

17. The Puppets of Allah

18. An Answer to Their Prayers

19. Thorns

Select Bibliography

Index

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Every book lives in its own time and place. To throw – I mean that literally – another chapter at the end in order to make it artificially up to date works occasionally, but is most often a publishing trick to entice buyers. Neither I, nor my publisher, have any desire to indulge in artifice to push sales. This book is a compact, detailed and I hope engrossing history of Kashmir from Pandit Kalhana and before to 1991. In the decade and more since then, the Jhelum has turned red with blood and that is a related but different story. This book provides the reasons why the most beautiful valley in the world was stained by the mistakes of generations and extracted such a heavy price in young lives. You may recognize the present without the knowledge of the past, but you cannot understand it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Almighty tends to have a sardonic sense of humour. He creates Paradise, and then lets slip a snake in the apple orchard. The curse of every earthly Paradise is pain. The irony of this pain is that it is self-inflicted, a consequence of free will. Original sin has become a commonplace of history.

When does the modern history of Kashmir begin? With the Dogra dynasty that was gifted the state as reward for services to the British empire in its wars with the Sikhs? Or in the mind of a young graduate of Aligarh Muslim University who, in 1931, wanted a job with the Dogra bureaucracy, and felt discriminated against when he was denied it? Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah dreamed of a Kashmir free from feudalism, free from poverty, and simply free as well.

Sadly, the modern history of Kashmir probably begins on a night in the third week of October 1947 when Pakistan, quite unnecessarily, attempted to seize by force what was still on the negotiating table. The state of Jammu and Kashmir was ruled then by Maharaja Hari Singh. It has not acceded to either India or Pakistan because the Maharaja, like the Nizam of Hyderabad, entertained fantasies of independence. He had signed a Standstill Agreement with both India and Pakistan, a term that meant precisely what it said. But it was obvious that at some point, rather sooner than later, the future of Jammu and Kashmir would be placed on a table at which both India and Pakistan would be seated. But time did not stand still for Pakistan. It sought to win by war what it might conceivably have obtained through peace. That war has not ended. It has mushroomed into a nuclear confrontation. In the summer of 2002 India and Pakistan brought the world as close as it has ever been to the reality of a nuclear war. That of course would have been one solution to the Kashmir problem. No Kashmir, no problem. There would not have been much left of India and Pakistan either. In so many devastated cities, survivors might have preferred the incineration of a moment to years of horrible suffering.

Nothing clears the mind better than the prospect of a hanging. It was with a very clear mind therefore that Pramod Kapoor, the owner of Roli Books, suggested that a new edition of a book first published in 1991 was required. Kashmir: Behind the Vale was my fourth book, the others being The Siege Within: Challenges to Indian Unity, Nehru: The Making of India, and Riot After Riot. All had earlier been published by Viking/Penguin. I am grateful to Pramod for believing in this book, and ensuring that it reaches a new generation of bookshelves.

I dedicated this book to my children, Mukulika and Prayaag. They were ten years, and a lifetime, younger when it first appeared. They are now at an age when they will fully understand why this book was for them. Kashmir is the hinge on which the future of our subcontinent, and therefore the future of their lives well, will turn. They cannot protect the future without the knowledge of the past.

INTRODUCTION

Zahiruddin Babur, a prince of literature and emperor of India, thought he had discovered the meaning of Kashmir. Once you cross the Indus, he wrote in Baburnama, the land, water, trees, stones, people, tribes, manners, and customs are all of the Hindustani fashion. The first kingdom after the Indus is that of Kashmir, and the snow never melts on these mountains, which he heard were called the Sivalik Parbat. "Once past Kashmir, there are innumerable peoples, tribes, districts, and provinces in this range. There are people continuously in these mountains all the way to Bengal, even to the ocean. This much has been ascertained and confirmed by the people of Hindustan, but of these groups no one can give any real information. All they say is that the people of the mountains are called Khas. It has occurred to me that since Hindustanis pronounce the sound sh as s, since the principal city in the mountains is Kashmir, which means ‘mountains of the Khasis’, since mir means mountain and the people of this mountain are called Khasia, and since aside from Kashmir no other city has ever been heard of in these mountains, this may be why they call it Kashmir."

Whimsy? Conjecture? More than a thousand miles from Kashmir, on the other side of the Himalayas, in the North East of India, we still call some people of the mountains Khasis. And all across this curving, swerving line of the Himalayas there are tensions between the people of the mountains and the people of the plains.

The latter have never understood the former; the former have never trusted the latter. The syndrome extends far beyond Kashmir: to the tensions between peak and plain in Uttar Pradesh (leading eventually to the creation of a separate state); to the differences between hill and terai in Nepal; to Bengal which has seen a violent struggle between Darjeeling and Kolkata; and then to the troubled North East of India whose diversity is reinforced by diverse violence. In each place, traditional differences have provoked demands for separate political status.

At least part of the tension has to do with distortion and painful caricature. The hill-personality is split into weak and violent; menial and provocative; human, but dangerously so. A domestic servant that has not quite been domesticated. Or a vendor who cannot be trusted. What the plains never see, despite it being plain enough, is that the hill-people are children of nature. We are not talking of a romantic virtue, just fact. They are closer to the elements, and the joys of summer are bought at the harsh price of winter. Their pristine simplicity should never be confused with either lack of intelligence or docility. They are fiercely protective of their identity; they have been repeatedly exploited, and, understandably, they do not want it to persist. They do not prefer violence; you will see more thoughtless cruelty on a single street in an urban sprawl on a single day than you will see in a year in the mountain village. But it is easy to give their search for identity a bad name, in order to hang them. The easiest label is anti-national, whether in the West or the East of the Himalayas. Sometimes, accusation invites a hostility that did not exist before.

In Kashmir, proximity to Pakistan, the legacy of a confused and even chaotic partition, and the machinations of five decades of bitter politics have turned a smouldering fire into a virtually uncontrollable blaze. But Kashmir is older than Pakistan.

Kashmir, where geography was alchemised into a dream, was often sought, but never truly subjugated. The historian Kalhana (who identified Kashmir’s virtues as learning, lofty houses, saffron, icy water and grapes) wrote in Rajtarangini: Kashmir may be conquered by the force of spiritual merit but never by the force of soldiers. Asoka the Great’s soldiers brought Kashmir into the Mauryan empire, and he founded the capital, Srinagar; but the spiritual merit of the emperor’s Buddhist missionaries had more impact. The Hindu valley, said by antiquity to have been settled by the sage Kashyap, devotee of the Lord Shiva, took to Buddhism. Kanishka, the first Indian emperor of Turkish descent, held the Third Great Council of Buddhism in Kashmir. The land accepted the sword, but bowed to faith. On occasion, though, faith provided inadequate protection, as when the gods did not prevent Mihirakula, the Hun from Sialkot, who looked like Death, and whose approach was known by the vultures flying ahead of his army waiting for the corpses that would inevitably be left behind, from forcing his way to the throne of Srinagar.

The gods were more helpful, using their favourite officer, General Winter, when the unconquerable Mahmud of Ghazni arrived, twice, in 1015 and 1021, and was checked on the southern slopes of Pir Panjal by the snows. Changez Khan stopped at the door in 1203 but never entered; and under the redoubtable Kublai Khan, Kashmir passed briefly under nominal Chinese rule. When, in 1320, a Mongol tyrant, Dulacha, did choose the right season to enter the valley, seized Srinagar, massacred the people and ravaged the land (Kashmiris emerged, it is said, like mice from holes after he left) General Winter caught him on the way out: a fierce blizzard trapped his army at Banihal. There were no survivors. But the consequences of Dulacha’s eight months in Kashmir were farreaching: the people lost their faith in the ruling family, and the mood was ready for change.

Marco Polo mentions the presence of Saracens in Kashmir. Islam spread in the Valley to any significant degree with the arrival of the venerated and beloved divine, Bulbul Shah, in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. It was what might be called an opportune moment. The collapse of the ruling family left a vacuum that was eventually filled in October 1320 by Rinchin, a Ladhaki, with the help of a Muslim adventurer from Swat, Shah Mir. Buddhism had by now retreated from the valley, and the astute Rinchin, appreciating that a king’s faith must not be distant from that of the people, wanted to become a Hindu. That was easier desired than done. The Kashmiri Pandits informed Rinchin, solemnly, that he could not become a Hindu because they could not decide which caste he should join on conversion. Rinchin became a Muslim and a sequence of Muslim dynasties began to rule over Kashmir.

Sixty years after Babur became master of the north by defeating Sultan Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat, his grandson Akbar brought the valley under the political control of Delhi, in 1585. The Mughals seized power from the heirs of perhaps the greatest of Kashmir’s kings, Zainal Abedin. The valley’s first experience of Delhi’s power was benevolent. Although Jahangir sniffed that the Kashmiris never bathed and called them dirty, he was in awe of and in love with Kashmir’s beauty. His remark is famous: if there be Paradise, it is this, it is this, it is this. He described a visit to the Guri valley: How shall I write its praise? As far as the eye could reach flowers of various hue were blooming, and in the midst of the flowers and verdure beautiful streams of water were flowing: one might say it was a page that the painter of destiny had drawn with the pencil of creation. The buds of hearts break into flower from beholding it. (Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, or Memoirs of Jahangir; translated by Alexander Rogers and edited by Henry Beveridge.)

Bernier, who visited Kashmir with Aurangzeb, commented not only on the magnificence of the Kashmiri shawl, just as so many Europeans after him (Josephine was to make this shawl a fashion statement in Europe). He wrote that the people of this terrestrial Paradise were celebrated for wit, and considered much more intelligent and ingenious than the Indians… In poetry and sciences they are not inferior to the Persians, and they are also very active and industrious…. The whole kingdom wears the appearance of a fertile and highly cultivated garden…. Meadows and vineyards, fields of rice, wheat, hemp, saffron, and many sorts of vegetables, among which are mingled trenches filled with water, rivulets, canals, and several small lakes, vary the enchanting scene.

Such good fortune invites a curse. The curse appeared in the form of Afghans, who seized the province from weak Mughal governors in 1750. Kashmir had rarely experienced such brutal tyranny, and one that was, as the British noted, unrelieved by honour. Officials were usurers, and that was only the beginning. They killed without thought; oppression was indiscriminate. For seventy years the Afghans destroyed without pity, and stole without mercy.

When Maharaja Ranjit Singh finally defeated the Muslim Afghans, both the Muslims and Hindus of Kashmir were overjoyed. But this joy was short-lived. The physical brutality eased a little, but the economic oppression continued. Moorcroft visited Kashmir in 1824 and was appalled by the extortion and wretchedness. The government took three quarters of the produce from the peasant; everything was taxed at every level. A kotwal had to pay thirty thousand rupees a year (an enormous fortune at that time) as a bribe to a governor for his appointment and then compensate himself through extortion. Moorcroft writes that the government seemed to look upon Kashmirians as little better than cattle… the murder of a native by a Sikh is punished by a fine to the Government of from sixteen to twenty rupees, of which four rupees are paid to the family of the deceased if a Hindu, and two rupees if a Mohammedan. It was not until Raja Gulab Singh fell out with Ranjit Singh’s heirs, supported the British in their wars against the Sikhs and was rewarded with the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir that the people experienced some relief. But poverty and serfdom remained the fate of Kashmiris until the fateful year of 1947.

The modern history of Kashmir begins with the greatest Kashmiri of modern times, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. He was born in 1905, two months after his father died. His grandfather was born a Hindu Pandit, whose family converted to Islam in 1766, at a time when there was no material purchase in conversion. In 1931, after a master’s degree from Aligarh, he tried to join Maharaja Hari Singh’s government and applied for a job in civil service. He was rejected. Talk of historic mistakes… Within a year he had become influential enough to be arrested. He was named the first president of a new political vehicle, the Muslim Conference.

Within seven years came the defining moment in Sheikh Abdullah’s life, when he made a decision whose consequences stretch to this moment. By 1938, the mood of India had darkened. Paradoxically, it was a general election, India’s first taste of real democracy, albeit limited democracy, that released the spectre of communalism into the mass consciousness. The Muslim League, anxious to win the vote of those it claimed to represent, and unable to make much headway, sharpened the rhetoric. Its defeat in the elections of 1936 gave the Congress just a pyrrhic victory; for in power the Congress made the mistakes of inexperience and ego that so often prove fatal in public life. Paradoxically and understandably, the Muslim League grew faster in defeat than it might have in victory. Its leader sought to bring all the important Muslim leaders, and organizations onto the League platform to strengthen the negotiating power of the community in the critical days ahead; and one by one the giants of Bengal and Punjab, who had kept away from Jinnah in 1936 and 1937, edged towards his fold. It was at such a moment of history that Sheikh Abdullah struck out towards a different direction. He raised his voice against the politics that would divide the unity of India.

On 26 March 1938, at its sixth session, the Muslim Conference rejected the philosophy of communal division and renamed itself the National Conference because, in the words of the Sheikh, We must open our doors to all such Hindus and Sikhs who like ourselves believe in the freedom of their country from the shackles of an irresponsible rule. If the Muslim Conference had remained what it was, there would have been little dispute in 1947 because the Kashmir valley met the Mountbatten criteria for accession with one country or the other: the will of the people, and geographical contiguity. Those who today accuse Sheikh Abdullah of being pro-Pakistani, or subverting India, skim over a nodal question: why did the Sheikh opt for India in 1947. All through the crisis and later, he was Nehru’s argument for Kashmir’s merger with India. Maharaja Hari Singh signed a document of accession, but the representative of the people’s will was Sheikh Abdullah.

Maharaja Hari Singh, as is well known, wanted independence for Kashmir, just as the Nizam of Hyderabad wanted independence for his state. Hari Singh could well become an icon for the Azadi Movement, which seeks independence rather than accession to either India or Pakistan. Kashmir was independent for nine weeks. But Sheikh Abdullah made his preference for India clear long before August, and much before the raiders came across from Pakistan, when he was still languishing in the Maharaja’s jail, which is where he was when freedom came. He was released only by the end of September after intense pressure from Jawaharlal Nehru.

Sheikh Abdullah had a rare quality: he was an idealist. Half a century later, a cynic might say that this was his undoing. Sheikh Abdullah was not always right. But his ideals were never wrong. After sixteen months in Hari Singh’s jail, Sheikh Abdullah addressed his people at a historic rally in Srinagar on 4 October 1947. Kashmir was still independent; Hari Singh was still Maharaja; the war with Pakistan that would shape the tragedies of the subcontinent was still three weeks away. Sardar Patel had asked the Muslim Nawab of Junagadh, and the Muslim Nizam of Hyderabad, who had not declared for either India or Pakistan to respect the wishes of the majority in their principalities instead of deciding on the basis of their personal wishes. Sheikh Abdullah stressed this in his speech on 4 October. Rajas and Nawabs had no right, he said, to act on behalf of the people; the people must speak for themselves. What then should the Kashmiri people do? The answer was given in public, and reported in the newspapers. Said the Sheikh, We shall not believe (in) the two-nation theory which has spread so much poison. Kashmir showed the light at this juncture. When brother kills brother in the whole of Hindustan, Kashmir raised its voice of Hindu-Muslim unity. I can assure the Hindu and Sikh minorities that as long as I am alive their life and honour will be quite safe.

On that same day, Mahatma Gandhi told his daily prayer meeting that he wanted to abandon his dream of living up to be 125 so that he could see Ramrajya in India, for life now did not seem worth the effort. The riots had scarred his soul and diminished the freedom of his dreams. In Kashmir there was not a single communal incident during partition, despite the horrors in neighbouring Punjab.

But idealism rarely escapes the cancer of suspicion. The understanding of 1947 between Abdullah and Nehru deteriorated into the misunderstanding of 1953, and thence to the Sheikh’s arrest in 1953. It is a long story, and this book tells it in necessary detail. In the past lies the present, and the present seeds the future.

In 1978, Sheikh Abdullah told me in an interview that being sent to jail in 1953 was the third crisis in his political life. The first came when he changed the name of his party from Muslim Conference to National Conference despite the opposition of the mullahs; the second came in the shape of the riots of 1947. His colleagues despaired in 1953 and told them that there was nothing now to stop them from declaring for Pakistan. But the fact is that the ideals we stood for were more important than Pakistan or India. We had joined India because of its ideals – secularism and socialism, Sheikh Abdullah said in that interview.

Socialism, or at least land reform, was vitally important to the Sheikh because that was the only means by which land could be transferred from the old feudal oligarchy to the peasant. Sheikh Abdullah was, justifiably, suspicious of the ruling elite of Pakistan; his fear that it would not change its feudal character was justified.

In 1947, events consumed options. Before any negotiations between the various parties could begin, presumably under the stewardship of Lord Mountbatten, who remained India’s Governor General after freedom, on the future of Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan aborted the chance of a peaceful solution by sending in raiders, mostly Afghan or Pathan tribals, to take by force what had not come by negotiation. The first war of Kashmir between India and Pakistan began on the night of 23 October 1947. Over five decades and more the pattern has not changed. Armed infiltrators, always disowned by the Pakistan government, have crossed the border and tried to seize Kashmir by force. That was always the wrong way to win Kashmir. If there is another war over Kashmir, there will be no more wars. There will be nothing left to fight over.

In the dry and debilitating summer of 2002 the two countries came as close to mutual nuclear devastation as is possible. It was the climax of decades of a confrontation that has become so infused with the illogic of hatred and perversity that there seems to be no space left in for undramatic virtues like humanity and common sense. It often reminds me of Mihirakula, who so enjoyed the shriek of an elephant who fell by accident into the gorge of Pir Panjal that he had a hundred more thrown so that he could enjoy that last death-scream. Water does not flow under the bridge in Paradise; blood does. Since the last edition of this book, terror and response have made that flow a torrent. If there is any qualitative change it is merely this: that what used to be a dread limited to the subcontinent has become a nightmare for the world. It is the prospect of a nuclear war, rather than the prospect of any solution that has placed Kashmir, in the words of the American