Schofield Victoria. Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War
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Bravado and Despair
Yet critics, such as Sardar Abdul Qayum Khan, who had risen from being
a ‘mujahid’ of the war to become first president and later prime minister
of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, believe that Sheikh Abdullah was a ‘stooge’
of the Indian government. ‘He had no locus standi; he was a nonentity. He was
a quisling boosted by the power of the Indian Congress Party.’
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Qayum
condemned Abdullah’s accord with Indira Gandhi in as ‘getting power
through the back door’ and had little sympathy with an old man who, perhaps,
after so many years wanted peace. Amanullah Khan acknowledged the Sheikh’s
contribution in the early years of the independence struggle against the
Dogras. But in later years he held the Sheikh ‘mainly responsible for the
trials and tribulations of the Kashmiris. He trusted in Nehru far more than he
should have done.’
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At Sheikh Abdullah’s funeral all the shades of dissatisfaction and dis-
appointment in him were forgotten. ‘The grief, as the cortege passed,’ writes
Tavleen Singh, ‘burst out like an uncontrollable wave. The salutation – our
lion – was on everyone’s lips. People wept, they chanted dirges and mouthed
melancholy slogans . . . for that day the man Kashmir remembered was not
the Sheikh who had been chief minister for five years but the man who, for
nearly thirty years, had symbolised Kashmir’s identity.’
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There is a certain
irony in the present day that his marble tomb overlooking Dal lake, close to
the Hazratbal mosque, is protected by Indian soldiers against desecration by
the sons of those Kashmiris whose cause he had championed.
The Sheikh’s legacy
Once Sheikh Abdullah was gone, in a climate of renewed assertion of
religious identity, it was impossible to prevent the rise of communalist
tendencies. During the period following his death, mistakes were made both
by the state government and in Delhi, which changed the course of events
and renewed the demand not so much for Kashmiriyat or union with Pakistan,
but for azadi, freedom – for the people of the valley from what they perceived
to be not secular, but Hindu-dominated, India.
Famed as the ‘disco’ chief minister, who enjoyed riding around Srinagar
on his motor bicycle, the first problem which Farooq Abdullah inherited
from his father was the Jammu and Kashmir Grant of Permit for Resettle-
ment bill. Before his death the Sheikh had put forward a bill which enabled
anyone who was a citizen of Kashmir before May or a descendant
to return to Kashmir, provided he swore allegiance both to the Indian and
Kashmiri constitutions. As a refugee from the valley, Mir Abdul Aziz, a
Muslim Conference supporter and political opponent of Abdullah’s since the
s, believed it was ‘the only good thing Sheikh Abdullah did.’ In Delhi
the bill, which had been passed by the legislative assembly, but still required
assent from the governor to become law, aroused fears that Pakistani
sympathisers and agents could cross the border and create trouble in the
