Sheikh Abdullah with working committee election as leader of the state assembly in 1951,

 

 

 

 

In the wake of his election as leader of the state assembly in 1951, Sheikh Abdullah had set up a working committee on a draft constitution. It was evident that the degree of autonomy envisaged by Nehru was not what the National Conference wanted. Of particular irritation to the Indian side were enabling clauses within Abdullah's proposal that any constitutional settlement was provisional upon a referendum and eventual re-unification of Kashmir. Indeed, Abdullah was thinking of independence and a Kashmir, in association with India and Pakistan, a bridge between two states.

    As Perry Anderson further points out, Delhi was becoming uneasy about the regime it had set up in Srinagar. In power, Abdullah’s main achievement had been an agrarian reform putting to shame Congress record of inaction on the land. But its political condition of possibility was confessional: the expropriated landlords were Hindu, the peasants who benefited Muslim. The National Conference could proclaim itself secular, but its policies on the land and in government employment catered to the interests of its base, which had always been in Muslim-majority areas, above all the Valley of Kashmir. Jammu, which after ethnic cleansing by Dogra forces in 1947 now had a Hindu majority, was on the receiving end of Abdullah’s system, subjected to an unfamiliar repression. Enraged by this reversal, the newly founded Jana Sangh in India joined forces with the local Hindu party, the Praja Parishad, in a violent campaign against Abdullah, who was charged with heading not only a communal Muslim but a communist regime in Srinagar.

    In the summer of 1953, the Indian leader of this agitation, S.P. Mukerjee, was arrested crossing the border into Jammu, and promptly expired in a Kashmiri jail.     Nehru sheikh Abdullah Ramchandra Guha in his seminal work, India After Gandhi puts it as: 
   The popular movement led by Dr Mukherjee planted the seed of independence in Sheikh Abdullah’s mind; the outcry following his death seems only to have nurtured it. He further mentions, sensing this, Nehru wrote two long emotional letters recalling their old-friendship & India ties to Kashmir.

    He asked Abdullah to come down to Delhi & meet him. The Sheikh did not oblige. Then Nehru sent Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (the most senior member of the cabinet) to Srinagar, but that did not help either. The Sheikh now seemed convinced of two things; that he had the support of the United States & that even Nehru could not subdue Hindu communal forces in India. On 10th July, 1953 he addressed party workers at Mujahid Manzil, the headquarter of the National Conference in Srinagar;

    After outlining Kashmirs & his own grievances against the government of India, he said a time will, therefore, come when I will bid them good-bye.

  The sheikhs turnabout greatly alarmed the Prime Minister Nehru. By now the government of Kashmir was divided within itself, its members (as Nehru observed), liable to pull in different directions & proclaim entirely different policies. This was in good part the work of the government of Indias Intelligence Bureau. Officers of the Bureau had been working within the National conference, dividing the leadership & confusing the ranks. Some leaders, such as G.M. Sadiq, were left-wing anti-Americans; they disapproved of the Sheikhs talks with Stevenson. Others, like Bakshi Gulam Mohammad, had ambitions of ruling Kashmir themselves.

    It was not Sheikh Abdullah but Maharaja Hari Singh who first threatened secession in a letter to Patel, but Patel did not reprimand him as he did the Sheikh when he spoke of independence. As early as on January 31, 1948, Hari Singh wrote;

    Sometimes I feel that I should withdraw the accession that I have made to the Indian Union. The Union only provisionally accepted the accession and if the Union cannot recover back our territory and is going eventually to agree to the decision of the Security Council which may result in handing us over to Pakistan then there is no point in sticking to the accession of the State to the Indian Union.

    For the time being it may be possible to have better terms from Pakistan, but that is immaterial because eventually it would mean an end of the dynasty and end of the Hindus and Sikhs in the State. 


    There is an alternative possible for me and that is to withdraw the accession and that may kill the reference to the UNO because the Indian Union will have no right to continue the proceedings before the Council if the accession is withdrawn. The result may be a return to the position the State held before the accession. The difficulty in that situation, however, will be that the Indian troops cannot be maintained in the State except as volunteers to help the State, (Durga Das; page 162).