Kashmir | Prem Shankar Jha

14-12-2024

The Victimisation of Yasin Malik: The Role of Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, aka Latram

The government is keen to hang Malik over the Rawalpora killings but there is a strong possibility that it was Latram who planned them.

`File image of Mushtaq Ahmad Zargar. Photo: Website of Jammu and Kashmir CID.`

This article is the second in a two-part series on the Union government’s pursuit for the death penalty for Yasin Malik. Read the first here.

In the preceding part of this article, I had described why the “new” evidence the government claims to have obtained, that pins Yasin Malik to the killing of four airmen at Rawalpora on the outskirts of Srinagar on January 25, 1990, will not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny in any self-respecting court of law.

But if Malik and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) did not kill the airmen at Rawalpora twenty-five years ago, then who did?

Despite a decade of digging around for witnesses and sweating the accused in jails, the Central Bureau of Investigation failed to get an answer. But today, the benefit of hindsight allows us to identify one terrorist, little known by the public and the media in Kashmir at the height of the insurgency, as the mastermind, if not the actual killer of the airmen.

This is Mushtaq Ali Zargar, better known in Kashmir as Mushtaq Latram.

Latram is almost completely unknown outside the circle of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The public got an inkling of his importance in Pakistan’s long-term plans for snatching Kashmir away from India only in 2000, more than two decades after the start of the insurgency, when the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) insisted that he had to be one of three terrorists in Indian jails who must be released if Indian Airlines’ flight IC 814 was to be allowed to return to Delhi from Kandahar.

The other two were Masood Azhar, who went on to head the Jaish-e Mohammad, and the British-born extremist, Ahmed Omer Sheikh.

In the decade of peace that had followed the Vajpayee-Musharraf meeting in Rawalpindi in 2004, and the Musharraf-Manmohan joint statement of April 2005, Azhar had created a training centre for terrorists in the Pir Panjal region of South Kashmir. He was also the mastermind behind the Pulwama slaughter of Indian jawans in 2019.

Sheikh was a Britain-born terrorist who became a member of the extreme Islamist jihadist group Harkat-ul-Ansar, also known as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, in the 1990s. He was arrested-in India for the part he played during the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists and jailed in 1994, where he stayed till he was exchanged for IC 814 in 2000.

After his release, he joined the Jaish-e-Mohammed and used his British education and upper-class accent to lure the Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Pearl to his kidnapping and execution in Karachi.

Latram was in the exalted company of the Jaish-e Mohammed’s top killers because, till his arrest in 1992, he had been the single-most important recruiter of killers for the ISI in Kashmir.

Pakistan’s hand in stoking the violence in Kashmir

Pakistan’s complete failure to garner any support from locals in Kashmir in the 1965 war had shown Islamabad that Kashmiris had no desire to become Pakistanis.

But Pakistan never lost its appetite for Kashmir. So when General Zia-ul-Haq, who was an ardent Islamist, came to power via a military coup in 1978, he immediately revived the attempt to seize Kashmir, but this time through “other means”.

Relying upon the religion card, Pakistan’s ISI first approached leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Kashmir, invited them to Muzaffarabad, and even introduced its leaders to Zia.

The Jamaat was willing to work towards the annexation of Kashmir by Pakistan, but the ISI soon realised that its following in Jammu and Kashmir was much too small, as it is even today. So it was left with no option but to approach the leaders of the then-nascent JKLF.

By 1983, only months after Sheikh Abdullah’s death, Kashmir had been thrown into turmoil by New Delhi’s undermining and displacement of Farooq Abdullah, and its imposition of his uncle, Gul Shah, in the chief minister’s seat. When the Gul Shah gambit came unstuck, it declared governor’s rule and sent in Jagmohan as the governor.

So disenchantment with New Delhi was running high when the ISI took some of the senior leaders of the JKLF to Muzaffarabad and Islamabad, to persuade them to revolt. But they soon found that while these were willing to accept Pakistan’s assistance, their goal was to win independence from New Delhi, and not to join Pakistan.

By the late eighties, therefore, Pakistan had been forced back on to the only remaining alternative.

This was to find impressionable young men in Jammu and Kashmir, bring them to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), give them intense indoctrination and military training, supply them with arms (sent separately), get them to launch attacks on Indian soldiers, policemen, Kashmiri Pandits and pro-India leaders of opinion in Kashmir, and allow the inevitable police response, which would involve mass arrests, crackdowns on entire villages and the use of varying degrees of coercion, to create the discontent in spreading ripples that would pave the way to a wider insurgency.

The rigged elections of 1987, and the Gawkadal massacre in 1990 came to it as Manna from Heaven.

Latram was an even earlier convert to separatism than Malik. Belonging to a middle-class family from Srinagar’s old town, he had been arrested on a petty charge and mistreated by the police in 1983 and had never gotten over it. Among the thousands who crossed over into POK to seek revenge for the betrayal of their rights in the 1987 elections, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar was one of the earliest and, as it turned out, most lethal.

In August 1988, after a falling out with Malik over the use of violence, Zargar crossed over to Pakistan through Trehgam in southern Kashmir and received training at a camp that had been organised by the Pakistan army for the JKLF¹.

He came back, formed the Al Umar Mujahideen (AUM), went back to PoK for a second round of training in May 1989 and came back to form an even more violent assassins’ group within the AUM. He named it the Al Umar Commando Force and put it under a close confidant and possibly also a relative, named Shabbir Ahmed Zargar.

Together with the much more publicised (and dispensable) Hizbul Mujahideen, the AUM and the Al Umar Commando Force became Pakistan’s most valued weapons for unleashing targeted violence aimed at triggering an Indian over-reaction that would alienate Kashmiris, and to assassinate prominent Kashmiris who were prepared to discuss paths to peace with New Delhi.

Spate of kidnapping-murders, not yearning for release, made Malik order JKLF to lay down arms

Latram was one of the four men who kidnapped Rubaiya Sayeed on December 9, 1989. One of the prisoners whose release the kidnappers demanded in exchange for her release was Javed Ahmad Zargar. Zargar is a common surname in Kashmir, but he too may have been a relative of Latram or of Shabbir Ahmad Zargar. Latram was therefore almost certainly responsible for getting Javed Ahmad Zargar on the list of prisoners to be released.

Six weeks after his release, Javed Ahmad Zargar was accused by the CBI of being one of the planners, if not assassins, of the Rawalpora murders. Given the strained relations between Latram and Malik, there is a strong possibility that it was Latram, not Malik, who planned the Rawalpora killing.

Latram’s presence among the terrorists who kidnapped Sayeed could also be the reason why Malik not only accompanied the kidnappers but was willing to let her see his face. He may have joined the plot to ensure that Sayeed would not be killed even if the government did not accept the kidnappers’ demands, and shown her his face to reassure her that she would be safe. That would explain why he was the only person whom Sayeed was able to identify.

The kidnapping of Sayeed almost certainly completed the split between the JKLF and the AUM. That would explain why Malik played no part in the kidnapping of Mushir-ul-Haq, the vice chancellor of Kashmir University, his secretary Abdul Ghani Zargar, and H.L. Khera, the general manager of the Hindustan Machine Tools plant in Kashmir, all of whom were killed when the kidnappers’ ransom demand was not met.

Those murders set the mould in which violent militancy flourished for the next four years. These years saw a spate of kidnappings of children of politicians and senior civil servants. There were 169 in 1990, 290 in 1991, 281 in 1992 and 349 in 1993. All these occurred while Malik was languishing in jail.

No one has kept count of how much money the militants collected from the parents, but it undoubtedly became the bait that lured more and more disaffected and poor Kashmiri youth into the insurgency.

Malik was in jail when all this was happening. So all Kashmiris know that the JKLF played no part in these kidnappings.

The HAJY [i.e. Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Wani, Javed Ahmad Mir, Jasin Malik] group’s initial outburst of rage had been at the rigging of the 1987 elections, and the reversal of the election victory of their candidate, Mohammad Yusuf Shah (now Salaheddin). But Malik was appalled by the spate of murders and kidnappings that followed. That, more than the yearning to be released from jail, was what made him order the JKLF to lay down its arms in 1994. He had understood within months of taking up arms in 1987 that acts of violence alone would not secure ‘Azadi’.

What is certain is that with Malik in jail and the JKLF in disarray, Latram’s AUM and Commando Force became the main killing instruments of the ISI in Kashmir. Unlike the dozen or so other militant groups that were spawned by the uprising, these did not advertise themselves. In the almost daily news reports carried by the print and television media in the 1990s, there are only occasional references to the AUM, and none to the Al Umar Commando force.

Kashmir’s police and intelligence services credited them with at least 40 murders, but apparently had no idea of Latram’s pivotal role in Pakistan’s game plan. This only became apparent to Delhi and Srinagar when the terrorists who hijacked IC 814 to Kandahar included him in the three terrorists whose release they demanded in exchange for allowing the plane to fly back to Delhi.

What is more, it had become clear even before 1990 that Pakistan was prepared to arm and train only those who espoused the goal of making Kashmir a part of Pakistan.

Hashim Qureshi, the second hijacker with Maqbool Butt of an Indian Airlines plane to Pakistan in 1971, had absolutely refused to fight for Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan and had to flee to Holland to save his life. In an article in Chattan, a celebrated Urdu magazine published from Srinagar, he had warned Kashmiris to beware of Pakistan’s enticements.

This became glaringly apparent when by mid-1990 itself, the ISI had withdrawn arms and training from around 5,000 JKLF youth who had crossed over into PoK in the wake of the Gawkadal massacre of January 21, 1990, and had created a rival tanzeem, the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, out of those who were willing to make this commitment. By October, the Hizb numbered close to 1,500².

Malik’s first act upon coming out of jail in 1994 therefore, was to order the JKLF to lay down its arms and adopt non-violent methods of agitating for independence. The JKLF paid a heavy price for following his instructions, because it became an easy prey for both the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and security forces personnel hungry for the prize money that the government was offering for the head of every slain militant.

In the next two years it lost somewhere between 100 and 300 of its cadres in the internecine three-sided war that erupted in the valley.

Despite this heavy toll, Malik stuck to his resolve. In the golden period of Vajpayee followed by Manmohan Singh in Delhi, Musharraf in Pakistan and Mufti Sayeed in Kashmir, Malik and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq became intermediaries in ironing out details of the Delhi agreement of 2005. Both made it clear to Musharraf that Kashmir wanted to retain its own identity and not become a part of Pakistan.

At a conference held at the Islamabad campus of the National University of Science and Technology, they both told an audience of Pakistan army officers bluntly that Kashmir did not wish to become a part of their country. This took place in this writer’s presence.

In 2007, Malik launched a Safar-e-Azadi – a ‘journey to freedom’ – in which he covered virtually every village in the valley, urging the people to shun violence and fight for self-determination peacefully. This was two years after Manmohan Singh and Musharraf had agreed to a four-point programme for bringing peace to Kashmir and ending the hostility between Pakistan and India, but were dilly-dallying over its details.

Malik did this to speed up the process. India and Pakistan came within an inch of success then, and again between 2012 and 2014. But Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on December 27, 2007, by terrorists widely suspected to have been employed by the ISI, and the UPA’s defeat in the 2014 election, killed both initiatives. The rest is history.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

Footnotes

1. Manoj Joshi: The Lost Rebellion, 1998.
2. Indian intelligence reports seen by the author in October 1990.

By: Prem Jha

09-12-2024

Articles, Kashmir

The Controversial Pursuit of a Death Sentence for Yasin Malik

In the shadow of Kashmir’s decades-long turmoil, the case against Yasin Malik – a prominent separatist leader accused of a 1990 attack on Indian Air Force personnel – has resurfaced, raising critical questions about justice, political motives, and the rule of law.

The high voter turnout in the September and October legislative assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir demonstrated that, despite five years of near-total political disempowerment and strict military rule, Kashmiris have not lost their faith in democracy.

However, this fragile trust could be irrevocably shattered if the Narendra Modi government follows through on its determination to execute Yasin Malik, the chief of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), for a crime that occurred 34 years ago. While few Kashmiris may actually like Malik, he commands widespread respect. Among the separatist leaders who emerged from the unrest triggered by the rigged elections of 1987, Malik has been the most steadfast advocate of self-determination through peaceful means—a stance that sets him apart in the region’s turbulent history.

The Rawalpora incident and its alleged perpetrators

The crime for which the Modi government is demanding his death is the killing of four Indian Air Force (IAF) men, and the injuring of 22 others, in an early morning assassination bid by three scooter-borne terrorists at Rawalpora, on the outskirts of Srinagar, on January 25, 1990.

At 7.30 a.m., when some 30 to 40 IAF men were waiting for the bus that would take them to work that morning, three persons on a motorcycle approached them and opened fire with Kalashnikovs, killing four and injuring 22 others.

The CBI filed a report within days of the shooting, claiming that the assassins were Malik, the chief of the JKLF, and Javed Ahmed Mir, also known as Nalka, who were armed with Kalashnikovs; and Mushtaq Ahmed Lone, who was the driver of the motorcycle, armed with a .30-bore pistol. It also identified five other members of the JKLF who had helped to hatch the conspiracy – Ali Mohammad Mir, Manzoor Ahmed Sofi alias Mustafa, Nanaji alias Saleem, Javed Ahmed Zargar and Showkat Ahmed Bakshi.

But although all of these eight have been arrested and imprisoned multiple times in the past 34 years, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) court has been forced to release them because of the lack of evidence against them. The Rawalpora case has therefore lain dormant for 34 years for want of evidence. This is the case that the Modi government is now determined to revive.

In March 2020, only months after the Modi government read down Article 370 of the Constitution and turned the entire state into a de facto occupation run directly from New Delhi, it charged Malik and six others with a string of crimes that fell under the headings of criminal conspiracy to commit murder, committing terrorist acts, raising funds for terrorist acts, conspiring to commit such acts, being members of a terrorist organisation, hatching criminal conspiracies, and advocating sedition.

Malik refused to contest the charges levelled against him, so the trial court awarded him life imprisonment and two consecutive 10-year sentences that would ensure that he remained in jail for the rest of his life. But it concluded that the crimes of which he was being convicted did not fit into the category of “the rarest of rare cases” and rejected the government’s demand for a death sentence.

Dubious accusations by Tushar Mehta

This verdict did not satisfy the Modi government because Malik’s refusal to contest the charges had robbed it of the publicity that his trial, in the full glare of the media, would have given it. So a year later, solicitor-general Tushar Mehta came back to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) trial court with the assertion that Malik had to be given the death sentence on two additional grounds. The first was his “attempt to separate one part of the country from the rest of it.” The second was his having personally participated in the attack on the IAF men at Rawalpora on January 25, 1990.

Both these actions, Mehta told the court, fell within the “rarest of rare” cases in which capital punishment was merited. Mehta also accused Malik of pleading guilty to the lesser charges levelled against him only to avoid the death penalty. He argued that allowing Malik to escape the death penalty would set a dangerous precedent, paving the way for other criminals who deserved capital punishment to avoid it and continue living.

To bolster his plea for the death sentence still further, Mehta claimed that Malik had not only committed the “sensational killing of the four IAF officers” in 1990, but “even kidnapped the daughter of then Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed” a month earlier in Srinagar. This, he castigated the court, had led to the release of four dreaded criminals “who masterminded the 26/11 attack in Mumbai in 2008.”

This was an outright lie that banked upon the ignorance of the judges hearing the case to further reinforce his case, for Mehta would have to be both deaf and blind not to know that David Headley in the USA and Tahawwur Rana in Canada, had confessed more than a dozen years earlier that they had been the mastermind and financier respectively, of the 2008 attack on Mumbai by the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed, working hand in hand with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Kashmiris cannot have failed to perceive this blatant contempt both for human life and the truth. So a sentence of death upon Malik, coming on top of the sentences passed upon Maqbool Butt (1984) and Afzal Guru (2013) will complete their alienation from India, and give Pakistan the success it has been working towards ever since the Kashmiri insurgency first broke out. If the Modi government succeeds in adding Malik to that list, it will hand Pakistan the victory it has been hankering for since 1947. So the case being built against Malik needs to be examined in the minutest possible detail to ensure that Modi does not score a self-goal for India and help Pakistan’s ISI.

Questionable testimonies and missing links

To target Malik, the Modi government has revived the almost 35-year old case against him by suddenly finding not one, but two, alleged “eyewitnesses” who are prepared to swear that they recognised Malik as one of the assassins at Rawalpora. These are Rajwar Rajeshwar Singh, who sustained four bullet injuries but survived, and Nirmal Khanna, the wife of Squadron Leader Ravi Khanna, who was killed in the attack.

Neither witness is even remotely credible. Firstly, neither of them claim that he or she actually saw Malik at the time of the shooting. Rajeshwar Singh, a corporal in the IAF in 1990, has stated that he was amongst the group of IAF personnel waiting for the staff pickup bus at Rawalpora on the outskirts of Srinagar on January 25, 1990, when he saw a man pull out a gun from under his “pheran” and open fire at them, killing four men. He was questioned by the CBI shortly afterwards but said that he had been in too much pain himself to be able to notice anything else.

In 2020, however, 34 years later, his memory had cleared. Deposing before a special TADA court in Jammu, the former IAF corporal said, “I was among the IAF personnel waiting for their bus to get to office.” Pointing to Malik, who appeared in court via video link from Tihar Jail in Delhi, he said, “He had pulled out his gun after lifting the ‘pheran’ and opened fire on us.”

The second witness was Nirmal Khanna who has, for some reason, changed her first name to Shalini. She described what happened thus: “I lived in Rawalpora and our house was just 50 yards away from the crime scene. Amid curfew, I heard sound of crackers that morning. At wit’s end, I went to the roof top and saw some army vehicles and men in uniform. I went there to see what actually had happened and spotted my husband’s briefcase with a bullet mark on it. I realised that something wrong has happened.”

“At a distance, I saw my husband lying in a pool of blood. I saw a bullet injury in his abdomen. Initially, I felt embarrassed thinking that if my husband could not endure a single bullet, then how could our borders be secured,” she added. But she claimed that Flight Lieutenant B.R. Sharma, who was with her husband at the time, told her that Malik was behind the attack. “Malik was leading the attackers and had sought directions for Natipora from my husband,” she told newspersons. “Ravi was giving him directions in a friendly manner when Malik fired the first bullet in his abdomen. Following a scuffle, Malik emptied an entire magazine on my husband’s back.”

Incongruities in witnesses’ accounts

There are profound incongruities in both these accounts that need to be explained. The CBI report stated that there were three shooters who had come on a motorcycle, but Rajeshwar Singh’s account mentioned only one assassin who was on foot when he opened fire. This may be because the shooter had first dismounted and approached the airmen with an incongruous question before pulling out his Kalashnikov from underneath his “pheran.” It could also be that, having been severely wounded himself, he was in no position to know what else was happening.

Nirmal (Shalini), on the other hand never actually saw Malik and relied entirely upon what Flight Lieutenant Sharma, who she claimed had been standing close to her husband, told her. Her account is entirely second-hand. The witness who needs to be found is, therefore, Flight Lieutenant Sharma.

Given the fervour with which the government is pursuing this case, it is surprising that the CBI has been unable to find, and get a deposition, from him. One possible reason is that he does not exist, for there is no mention of him anywhere, by anyone, in the CBI’s files or in subsequent news reports. When I tried to find him through a search of the Bharat Rakshak database of IAF officers, I got the following information: “Flight Lieutenant Baldev Raj Sharma: Service No & Branch 10852 AE(M) (Orig: ARMT); Commissioned: 03 Jun 1967;Died in Service 29 Apr 1973.” Another Baldev Raj Sharma retired as a Squadron Leader in 2002 and died in 2016 but if he was already a Flight Lieutenant in 1990, he ordinarily ought to have made the rank of Wing Commander by 2002.

Despite dying a hero’s death, Ravi Khanna’s name was somehow not included in the National War Memorial for Indian soldiers killed in combat. Shalini (aka Nirmal) Khanna spoke in detail to Open magazine in two stories about this exclusion, and about what she saw in the immediate aftermath of the January 25, 1990 incident. Her accounts were carried on September 12, 2019 and October 23, 2019. The first story appears to have been based on the reporter’s earlier conversations with her, before the trial began that day, where she mentioned her husband’s exclusion from the War Memorial but did not say anything about Flt Lt B.R. Sharma identifying her husband’s killer as Malik. The second story, by the same reporter, drew on her testimony at the trial. On October 6, the government rectified its “mistake” in omitting Squadron Leader Khanna from the war memorial and had his name duly engraved.

Either way, the identity of Flight Lieutenant B.R. Sharma, present or retired, circa 1990, is not clear, nor is it apparent why he ever came forward with his testimony to the authorities at the time or subsequently.

There are two other purely situational reasons for regarding the identification of Malik at Rawalpora by anyone as worthless. The first is that, on January 25, the shooting took place at 7.30 am. But the sun rose in Srinagar at 7.32 am on January 25 so it took place in the pre-dawn twilight, when the landscape is still fairly dark. To get a good look at any person in that pre-dawn light, one would have to be only a few metres away. But Rajeshwar Singh was not close enough to do so, and B.R. Sharma’s very existence is in doubt.

The second is that the minimum temperature anywhere in the world is reached at dawn just before the sun rises. In Srinagar, this minimum is between minus 3 and minus 5 degrees Celsius throughout January. In such bitterly cold weather, is it conceivable that anyone would not have his or her face covered by a heavy muffler while riding on a motorcycle? So for his face to have been seen, Malik would have had to remove his muffler for some reason, and risk being seen.

The inescapable truth is that, for the assassins, it would have been essential to keep their faces covered by thick mufflers not only to avoid recognition and identification but simply to stay warm. So there is no way in which either Rajeshwar Singh or B.R. Sharma, if he exists, could have seen the face of the person who killed Squadron Leader Ravi Khanna.

The final flaw in the case Mehta is trying to build is the way Malik has been “recognised.” Every police force in the world knows that visual recognition is a highly subjective act. The human eye is not a camera. In virtually every situation, people see what they are prepared, or want, to see. That is why police procedures for ensuring that a visual recognition will stand the test of cross examination are elaborate and rigidly specified.

The most frequently used way is to line up a group of persons with similar characteristics, make them turn, bend or speak as required by the witness, and ask them to identify the culprit. A second-best procedure is to show the witness a set of photographs of persons and do the same. But it is apparent from all that has been reported or presented in court that the prosecution has used neither of these methods to recognise Malik. Instead, it seems that the NIA has not required a visual recognition at all, and has relied solely upon “confessions” extracted from other prisoners by the police, or on photographs of Malik that it has shown to witnesses, and asked them whether this is the man they saw.

Neither of these procedures can stand a moment’s examination in a court of law. This is especially true of Malik, whose face has appeared a hundred or more times in newspapers, TV news channels and the internet, so he would be instantly recognisable to the witnesses, but for the wrong reason.

Note: This article was edited at 1625 IST to add references to Nirmal Khanna’s comments in OPEN magazine in September and October 2019.

This is the first of a two-part series on the trial of Yasin Malik.

Prem Shankar Jha is the author of Kashmir 1947–The Origins of a Dispute and a former media adviser to former Prime Minister V.P Singh.

By: Prem Jha

24-11-2024

Kashmir

Those Speaking of Kashmir as an Independent State Err in Conflating Freedom With Independence

Freedom is a birthright of individuals, and families. It has no territorial connotation and presupposes democracy. Independence, on the other hand, relates not to control over our lives, but to control over territory.

Sometime in October, I became aware that the Oxford Union was holding a debate on the motion ‘This House Believes That Kashmir Should Be An Independent State’. What had brought it to my attention was a refusal by Vivek Agnihotri, the maker of the film Kashmir Files, that he had put up on the internet. Agnihotri was within his rights to refuse, but the tone of his reply, which was belligerent and defensive, was an implicit admission of defeat. The Union had then asked a second speaker from India, a member of the pro-BJP ‘Chanakya Forum’, who had apparently first accepted and then withdrawn from the debate.

Knowing that refusal to engage in a debate is an implicit acceptance of defeat, I volunteered to join the debate to oppose the motion. My offer was immediately accepted. The Oxford Union paid neither my air fare to England, nor my hotel bill at Oxford. Both were paid by me, because I felt that my country needed to be defended against allegations made by organisations sponsored by the very country that had turned Kashmir from a little bit of heaven on earth into the first circle of hell.

The following is the full text of my speech, slightly edited for style and clarity, given at the Oxford Union on November 14, 2024 on the motion, ‘This house believes that Kashmir should be an independent state.’

Those who have spoken in favour of the motion have talked about independence for only the Indian part of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. I am sure this house will agree that whatever we decide, whatever solution we recommend, should apply to the whole of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, because it was the whole of this state that had acceded to India. I see that none of them have proposed independence for their part of the Kashmir state. My response will therefore be confined to the Indian part of Jammu and Kashmir. I will leave it to the House, to judge its relevance for ‘Azad’ [i.e. Pakistan-occupied] Kashmir.

It is my belief that the people of Kashmir are entitled to freedom. But Independence, more specifically the creation of an independent state, will not give them the freedom they desire and is their right. On the contrary it could lead to a different, and worse, form of servitude.

Let me illustrate this by highlighting the difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘independence.’

The demand for freedom is a demand for control over our lives – over how we wish to live, the freedoms we wish to enjoy, and whom we wish to worship. It is a personal demand and the desire for it is as old as time. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt in the 13th century BC to make them free to live as they wanted to. Slaves in America pined for freedom not to return to Africa but to acquire the rights that free American men and women enjoyed.

Freedom is a birthright of individuals, and families. It has no territorial connotation. Independence, on the other hand, relates not to control over our lives, but to control over territory.

The motion we are debating implicitly assumes that independent statehood is a necessary requirement for freedom. This idea is not only simplistic but, in the chaotic world that is being created by the convergence of decolonisation with economic globalisation, it is rapidly becoming the opposite of the truth.

The proof is all around us. For the people of most of the new nations of the world, independent statehood has led not to freedom, but to one or other form of servitude. When I speak of servitude I am referring not only to their country’s economic servitude to other larger nations, which is pervasive but does not impinge directly upon their everyday lives. I am speaking of the servitude that dominant economic, linguistic, religious, or tribal majorities in these countries have imposed upon their people, and especially minorities.

To understand the profound misgivings that the proposal for creating an independent state of Kashmir arouses in me you only need to remember the tribal war, stoked by copper mining conglomerates using hired European mercenaries, that broke out after independence was achieved by the former Belgian Congo; or the civil war that broke out in Angola immediately after it gained its independence from Portugal, or the Hutu massacre of the Watutsis in Rwanda. In none of these countries did independence bring freedom to their people. Instead, it brought poverty, and death.

The only true guarantee of freedom within a nation is a vigorous democracy.

All the members of the United Nations are independent countries. But how many are democracies, even in name? Here are a few observations:

The UN began with 51 charter members. By 1958, the number had risen to 82. By 2011 its membership had risen to the present 193 countries. Nearly all the post-colonial members started out as democracies. But how many were able to sustain it? The answer is that in 2010, only five of the 61 states that joined the UN between 1958 and 1975 had been able to do so.

Very few in the following wave of decolonised countries have succeeded in staying democratic. When I asked on Google how many of the present members of the UN are democracies the answer I got was: “There isn’t much information about how many UN member states are democracies, but here’s some related information…”

The United Nations requires only sovereignty, not democracy as a precondition for membership. How low democracy stands in its concerns can be judged by a finding published by Ideas International, an intergovernmental organisation that supports democracy worldwide, on September 26 this year. It estimated that democracy had ranked 27th in the issues discussed that the UN between 2015 and 2023!

So let me repeat once again: Independence is not a prerequisite even for peace, let alone freedom. On the contrary, far too often in the past three-quarters of a century, it has become a prelude to tyranny and genocide. There is one going on even as I speak.

Then why do we keep conflating freedom with independence?

The answer is that our minds have been moulded into this belief by the era of the nation state in which we were born, and are still living. Nation states require clearly defined territories over which their governments have total control. They are not natural entities, but have been created by a ruthless suppression of feudal forms of rule, through war.

The main driver of this change has been the inexorable expansion of markets which has been driven by advances in technology. These have steadily increased the minimum size of the market needed for their efficient use, from the city states of the 15th century, to the nation states of the 18th to 20th centuries, to the global market of today.

Nation states have required protected markets, in which infant industries can develop free from the threat of competition. That has required them to create sharply defined frontiers, to restrict, if not ban the import of foreign products, and create barriers to the entry of foreign labour. The capacity to create and maintain these protective walls, has therefore become the yardstick of freedom.

Today, despite the fact that globalisation has begun to destroy these protective walls, the identification of freedom with territorial sovereignty continues to dominate our minds. We have therefore forgotten how violent the creation of nation states has actually been. In country after country throughout Europe, it has subordinated regional languages, dialects and customs to a single “national” language.

Age-old cultural practices, and even religions, have been forcibly homogenised and those who have resisted this, have been identified as irredeemably alien and been ‘ethnically cleansed’. I would therefore like to ask the house about the kind of independent state they would like Kashmir to become.

What do Kashmiris really want even after 14 years of police rule?

Despite 34 years of interaction with Kashmiris from every walk of life, I do not feel qualified to give any definitive answer to this question. As I have pointed out earlier, it certainly isn’t the kind of independence Kashmiris in Indian Kashmir want.

This was made abundantly clear by two opinion polls carried out in Jammu and Kashmir, by MORI [editor’s note: now known as Ipsos] and Gallup, Europe and the US’s most respected polling agencies.

The MORI poll of 2004 was commissioned by a British organisation headed by Lord Avebury, called the Friends of Kashmir. I think to their surprise it showed that almost no one in any part of Indian Kashmir wanted the state, or any part of it, to merge with Pakistan. 61% of those polled said they felt they would be better off politically and economically as Indian citizens. Only 6% said the same about Pakistani citizenship. 33% said they “did not know”.

Its other, more significant, finding was that 81% the respondents in Jammu and Kashmir wanted ‘the unique cultural identity of Kashmir,’ i.e its Kashmiriyat, to be preserved in any long-term solution’. Even In Srinagar, the epicentre of the Kashmiri uprising, 76% were of this view.

The core of Kashmiriyat is its form of Sufi Islam. There are five variants of this in Kashmir: the Naqshbandi, the Qadri, the Suhrawardi, the Kubrawi and the Rishi. None of these come even close to the brand of Sunni-ism advocated by the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is now the form of Islam encouraged in Pakistan.

Sufism is derived from Sunni Islam, but it came to India from Iran and not Arabia. It is therefore not only different in important respects but is intermixed with practices adopted from Hinduism, to make the conversion of Hindus easier.

Since its first abortive attempt to annex Kashmir through an invasion in 1965, Pakistan has spared no effort to annex Indian Kashmir by other means. These have been the source of the misunderstanding and distrust of Kashmiriyat in India, especially but not only, by the present government.

In the 2004 MORI poll the respondents cited their goals as follows

86% wanted free and fair elections to elect the people’s representatives;
87% wanted direct consultation between the Indian government and the people of Kashmir;
86% wanted an end to militant violence in the region ;
88 % wanted the government to stop the infiltration of militants from Pakistan, across the Line of Control.
Finally, and not at all surprisingly, 93% of those polled wanted economic development of the region to provide more job opportunities and reduce poverty.

The MORI poll’s results came as a shock to its promoters, so a second poll, with a larger sample size was organised in 2009-10 under the auspices of Chatham House, Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. Its results were very similar to those of the MORI poll of 2004. But for Indians its most welcome finding was that in the four most militancy affected districts of Kashmir valley in India only 2.5 to 7.5% said they preferred becoming citizens of Pakistan.

According to the poll, the vast majority of those polled wanted ‘Independence’. But the polling was not done in English. The respondents would have used the word ‘azadi’. But azadi and its companion demands, “khud mukhtari“ and “nizam-e Mustafa,” do not have the connotations that the English word ‘independence’ has. Azaadi and khud mukhtari are demands for the right to make one’s own decisions and choose one’s way of life. These could be for oneself, one’s family, tribe, religious group or nation. Nizam-e Mustafa is the right to live by “the order of the Chosen One” – in the case of Muslims, by the dictates of the Prophet.

All three are expressions of the way people wish to live. They are what the late professor Isaiah Berlin of Oxford University defined in his celebrated essay on Two Concepts of Liberty, as Positive freedoms, i.e the freedom to control oneself, to act rationally and choose responsibly. As the 2004 MORI poll showed, none of these were demands for the separation of Kashmir from the rest of India.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

By: Prem Jha

23-09-2024

Kashmir, Politics India, Uncategorized

The Modi-Shah Game in Kashmir Is to Split Opposition Vote and Pave Way for BJP to Form Government

The only way for the NC-Congress alliance to ensure the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them that, no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government.

_{^{File image of Modi and Shah. In the background is an image uploaded by the EC on X, of voters in Anantnag.}}

Kashmir has one chance to win back the autonomy that it had enjoyed under Article 370 of the constitution. With the first phase of voting for the assembly polls over, it is apparent that its main political parties are throwing this chance away. The Bharatiya Janata Party strategists have known from the very beginning, that they will not get a single seat in Kashmir, and that solid support for the party exists only in a part of Jammu. As a result, it does not have the faintest chance of winning an absolute majority of the Union Territory’s 90 assembly seats. Kashmiris therefore have a real chance – possibly their last – of winning back the autonomy they lost after Modi read down Article 370.

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are fully aware of this. That is why, from the very beginning, their aim has been to break the Kashmiri vote into pieces, use the BJP’s almost guaranteed 25-seat block of seats in Jammu to emerge as the largest single party, and claim the right to form the government of Jammu and Kashmir. Once the BJP has secured that right, it will seduce, buy, or coerce a sufficient number of independents and smaller parties in Kashmir, using the Public Safety Act, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, and a host of ancillary laws, to seduce or compel a sufficient number successful individuals and small parties to join it, till it has a majority in the J&K assembly.

If the BJP succeeds, it will have five full years to destroy Kashmiriyat – that unique, syncretic blend of Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism, that Sheikh Abdullah and the Maharaja had been determined to protect when they refused to accede to Pakistan but asked for the safeguards (eventually provided by Article 370 of the constitution) prior to signing the Instrument of Accession to India in 1947.

When, realising their folly, Kashmiris begin to rebel against their subjugation once more, Delhi’s crushing response will reignite armed militancy in the valley and bring various ‘Lashkars’ sponsored by Pakistan back into J&K. Kashmir will then sink back once more into the hell in which it had existed from 1990 till former prime minister, the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee went to Srinagar in 2003, and held out a hand of reconciliation towards Pakistan, from that city.

The Kashmiri intelligentsia is fully aware of this, but has been made powerless to prevent it by the illiterate and irresponsible behaviour of Kashmir’s main parties, the Congress, and the National Conference. It should have been apparent to them from the moment the Supreme Court mandated a return to full statehood for Kashmir that if they wanted to protect J&K’s autonomy, they would have to fight the elections as a single coalition, with a single common platform – the release of all Kashmiris held without trial in jails all over India, and restoration of Kashmir’s cultural autonomy, i.e Kashmiriyat.

This required the NC and Congress to join hands with the People’s Democratic Party. Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the PDP, understood this from the very beginning but the Congress and the NC did not, and still have not understood the need for doing so. Indeed, the NC has continued to make her a major target of attack in Kashmir.

As for the Congress, Rahul Gandhi’s preference for being in the United States to lecture the Indian diaspora for 10 crucial days from the September 7-16 – after paying a single visit to a single constituency to campaign for a single candidate in Kashmir – and his refusal to go back there while the BJP ensures, step by step, the fragmentation of the Kashmiri vote, speaks volumes for his political naiveté and lack of awareness of the role he needs to play.

Neither of the Abdullahs has spoken out against the reign of terror that the BJP unleashed on the Kashmir valley for four long months before it read down Article 370. Neither of them has protested against the prolonged imprisonment of every Kashmiri who has dared to speak out against the actions of the Delhi-imposed administration, during the president’s rule that followed.

Neither protested against the specious meaning that the Supreme Court attached to the word ‘temporary’ to vindicate the reading down of Article 370, when it had to have been was obvious to the judges that this referred only to the fact that it applied only to a part of the princely state of Kashmir that had acceded to India, and that the rest had still to be liberated from Pakistan’s illegal occupation.

It should have been apparent to them that the BJP, knowing that it could not win a single seat in Kashmir, would do its level best to split the Kashmiri vote into as many fragments as possible. It had already split the Peoples’ Conference by tempting, or coercing, assassinated leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s son Sajjad into joining them. It had also done this with businessman and former friend of Mufti Sayeed, Altaf Bukhari, by forcing him to choose between defection and jail.

The pathetic performance of both Omar and Sajjad in the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency – their combined vote did not even come close to that of Engineer Rashid – seems to have convinced the BJP’s strategists that releasing other Kashmiri radical leaders and allowing them to stand for election would split the Kashmiri vote into many more irreconcilable pieces, and severely dent the NC-Congress combines share of the vote.

The BJP coined this strategy only after witnessing the doubling of the number of votes cast in Baramulla, in comparison to 2014, and the fact that virtually all of the increase went to Engineer Rashid. But even there, it hedged its bets by releasing Rashid only after the first round of nominations had been completed. By the time he came out of jail, Rashid was able to nominate only 12 candidates to fight the assembly elections, against the 18 assembly segments of the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency where he had gained the largest number of votes.

This was a product of careful calculation. For if Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party won all the 12, seats neither the Congress, nor the NC would be able to form a government without its support. But, recognising that incarceration has endowed political activists with the halo of martyrdom, the BJP’s strategists have decided to release more political dissidents from jail, in ones and twos from other parties and religious affiliations to scatter the Kashmiri votes more widely and prevent them from going to the Congress-NC alliance.

The only way for the Congress-NC alliance to ensure that the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them, that no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government of the state.

This will not be as hard as it looks, for far more difficult reconciliations have taken place in other countries. The most striking was the Lebanese peace agreement signed in Doha in 2008. On that occasion, the Christian leader, Michel Aoun, parted company with his more die-hard co-religionists and the American-backed Lebanese Sunnis, and agreed to Hezbollah’s demand to make it a part of the Lebanese cabinet, in proportion to its vote.

A similar, pre-election agreement between the three major parties, Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party and the Jamaat-i-Islami would enable a stable government to be formed in Jammu and Kashmir once the results are in.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

By: Prem Jha

07-09-2024

Kashmir, Politics India

The NC and the Congress’s Hubris Has Put Them – and All of Kashmir – in a Risky Place

The prospect of a return to popular rule has breathed new life into Kashmiri politics, but the decision by the Congress and the NC to leave out the PDP and the AIP could lead to the BJP emerging the largest party in J&K.

`NC and Congress leaders on August 26. Photo: X/@JKNC_/Basit Zargar.`

This is the second of a two-part series by the author on Kashmir. Read the first here.

Srinagar: If the Congress had returned to power in 2014 under Manmohan Singh, then long before the present day, there would have been no Kashmir problem left to resolve.

This was because, as Thomas Friedman, the veteran columnist of the New York Times, pointed out in an article comparing Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas attack and Singh’s response to the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba attack on Mumbai that killed 175 persons and injured scores more in 2008, the Indian prime minister had done with restraint what Netanyahu has been unable to do with blind reprisal.

The Indian prime minister, he pointed out, had brought remorseless international pressure to bear on Pakistan till it was left with no option but to arrest, try, and reluctantly punish the masterminds behind the attack, and to provide the US and Canadian governments with the information they needed to arrest and punish David Headley, the mastermind and Tahawwur Rana, the financier behind the plot.

This restrained response kept Pakistan in the dock for the next decade and was largely responsible for its being put on the watch list of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism.

Singh’s restraint in 2008 was also the reason why Pakistan turned to India for help in weathering the foreign exchange crisis that the US plunged it into, four years later, when it abruptly cut off all foreign aid and payments after Islamabad reacted angrily to a bungled US helicopter attack on the Taliban in November 2011 that hit two Pakistani military border posts and killed 28 of its soldiers.

India came to its rescue then and used that as a lever for reopening talks to end the Kashmir dispute on the basis of Musharraf’s four-point plan. These had almost come to fruition when the UPA government fell, and Modi came to power in 2014.

Modi’s government lost no time in turning the clock of Indo-Pakistani relations back to where they had been in the early nineties. He did this in August 2014 by abruptly ending all communication with the Hurriyat, banning its members from even meeting the Pakistan high commissioner, and resuming heavy firing across the Line of Control on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Five years later he used his brute majority in parliament to end Kashmir’s special status and turn it into a Union territory.

From then till now, Kashmir has been a police state. Police states do have some advantages, for in the short run they are capable of imposing peace upon a turbulent society. This has been so in the valley, especially in Srinagar, which was the cockpit of militancy in the early nineties.

The city has grown rapidly in size. Business seems to be booming and, in the more affluent parts of the city that most tourists visit, there is an absence of the fear that was ever-present in the nineties, of not knowing where and when the next confrontation between militants and the police would take place.

But these benefits are limited to Srinagar and a few other tourist destinations, and even in Srinagar to its more modern and affluent parts. In these areas, armed police or Border Security Force (BSF) personnel are no longer stationed out in the open at key points and intersections. Instead, they patrol the city discreetly from armoured cars that move slowly and unthreateningly through the streets. This change has virtually eliminated the sudden “crossfires” that killed or injured hundreds of civilians over two decades from the nineties till 2010.

In most of Srinagar, therefore, life is almost normal. But in the rural areas, a different kind of peace is maintained through constant patrolling by the Rashtriya Rifles and the BSF, and frequent arbitrary arrests and incarceration of suspected militants, almost always in jails far from home. Experience has taught them to concentrate on the youth, of whom as in the rest of India, up to four-fifths are unemployed.

During a visit to Pulwama, this writer saw a rounding-up operation in progress. Half a dozen or more young men were being led away in shackles. The villagers were standing around, angry but helpless. Their fear and anger was palpable, but so was their helplessness.

The one bright spot in this sorry tale is that the army and the BSF have become more discriminating in their exercise of force. The data that the army command regularly releases show that the spontaneous mass militancy of earlier years has been replaced by an organised, low-level infiltration of terrorists from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, who use caches of arms, much of it flown in by drones, from Pakistan and logistical support from disaffected youth.

An idea of the scale on which this is happening, and the degree of Kashmiri involvement, can be had from the annual and monthly statements released by the army command in Jammu and Kashmir. Its release on January 13 this year revealed that of 76 terrorists killed in encounters in 2023, only 21 had been locally recruited.

The decline in local participation is welcome but the numbers of local youth being killed is still sufficiently high to maintain tension and alienation in the rural population.

It is in these conditions – of an uneasy peace bought by force – that Kashmir is holding its first election after ten years. The prospect of a return to popular rule, even though Jammu and Kashmir is still a Union territory, has breathed new life into Kashmiri politics, for it offers a chance to end the enslavement that has followed the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.

Kashmir’s political parties are therefore conscious of the need to avoid splitting the vote in Kashmir because of the BJP’s formidable hold on Jammu, where it was the leading party in 29 out of 36 assembly segments in the Lok Sabha elections.

They are also aware that the Modi government is deliberately holding this election at a time when J&K is still a Union territory and the lieutenant governor has an unchallengeable right to decide which party he will call upon first to form the next government.

If the seats in Kashmir are divided between two or more recognised parties in such a way that the BJP wins more seats in Jammu than either the National Conference (NC) or the Congress win individually in the state as a whole, then the governor will be well within his rights to call upon it to make the first attempt to form the next government. After that, Modi’s ‘friendly persuasion’ machine will go into top gear.

All Kashmiri parties are acutely aware of this, so the Congress and the NC have immediately formed a seat-sharing alliance, with the former putting up 32 candidates, and the latter 51. They are fighting each other in only five constituencies where their local leaders could not be persuaded to agree to a seat-sharing arrangement. They have called this a friendly contest because no matter who wins they will still be a part of the same coalition.

The two parties of consequence that they have left out of their calculations, and therefore of their alliance, are Mehbooba Mufti’s Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and Engineer Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party (AIP).

Boycotting the PDP at such a pivotal moment in Kashmir’s history simply did not make sense. It is true that Mufti Sayeed lost most of the following his party had gained between 2002 and 2014 by trying to make a coalition government with the BJP in 2014, when he had no real need to. But voters do not hold grudges forever, and this year’s Lok Sabha elections had shown that the PDP had remained the largest party in five assembly segments in South Kashmir.

What is more, Mehbooba Mufti had offered not to put up any PDP candidates if the Congress and the NC adopted her seven-point agenda. Since these were very similar to their own agendas, all that these parties had to do was formally accept her offer and offer the PDP the five seats in South Kashmir where it is strongest. But by treating her and her party as pariahs, they have forced her to nominate candidates for 30 seats.

Another formidable contender whom the Congress and the NC have both underestimated and spurned is Rashid’s AIP. Every psephological indicator shows that Rashid owed his colossal victory in the Baramulla parliamentary constituency to the emergence of a huge protest vote that had been absent in earlier elections, for want of a candidate in whom it could place its trust.

The first is the voter turnout in the constituency. At 1.033 million, it was more than double of the 458,000 who voted in 2019. Second, Rashid’s own vote more than quadrupled, from 102,168 in 2019 to 472,481 this year. Third, his vote was greater than that of Omar Abdullah, Sajjad Lone, and the PDP candidate Mir Mohammad Fayyaz put together. Fourth, the AIP was the largest party in 18 out of Baramulla’s 21 assembly segments.

With Rashid still in jail despite being a member of parliament, would anyone like to bet against the AIP winning three quarters, if not more of these 21 assembly seats?

So if the PDP wins five seats in the south, the AIP 15 or thereabouts in the north, and two seats go to other parties or independents, it is perfectly possible that the NC and the Congress may be left with as few as 25 seats in the valley. Whether they are able to form a government or not will then depend on how they do in Jammu.

To sum up, the hubris that has made the Congress and the NC ignore both the PDP and the AIP could easily lead to the BJP emerging as the largest single party in Jammu and Kashmir and claiming the right to form the government.

Were that to happen, it would open the gates in Kashmir for the kind of bargaining that has corrupted democracy in the rest of India. It will also increase substantially the possibility of another intifada in Kashmir at some time in the future.

Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.

By: Prem Jha

05-09-2024

Kashmir, Politics India

Kashmir is on the Eve of an Election That Can Decide Its Future

Political dissent in Kashmir has been crushed with a ruthlessness that the rest of India is only now beginning to experience as Prime Minister Narendra Modi feels his power weakening. Today, Kashmir is under the Centre’s rule, untrammelled by anything except the will of Modi.

`Congress workers in Jammu and Kashmir stage protests in Srinagar demanding statehood on October 31, 2023. Photo: X (Twitter)/@vikar_rasool`

Srinagar: Kashmir is on the eve of the most fateful election in its history. For this election will decide whether it will be able to retain its Kashmiriyat, its unique syncretic identity articulated by Sheikh Abdullah almost nine decades ago – or will see it drowned in the communal and totalitarian tide that is gathering force in the rest of the country.

The threat of the latter comes from the growing authoritarianism of the BJP under Prime minister Narendra Modi.

Today, not only is Kashmir under the rule of a Lieutenant Governor; not only has it lost the protection of its cultural identity that was guaranteed by Articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution, but virtually every senior post in the administration and the police is manned by officers of non-Kashmiri cadres, and the whole of rural Kashmir is under an informal version of army rule.

Political dissent in Kashmir has been crushed with a ruthlessness that the rest of India is only now beginning to experience as Modi feels his power weakening. Today, Kashmir is under the Centre’s rule, untrammelled by anything except the will of Modi.

Crushing political dissent

Political dissent, except of the watery Farooq Abdullah variety has been crushed. A bare two weeks after the Modi government read down Articles 370 and 35A, it had arrested more than 4,000 Kashmiris under the Public Safety Act, and sent at least 1,122 of them to prisons outside Kashmir as those in Kashmir had run out of space.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of Hurriyat, and all its council members were among the first to be arrested under the Public Safety Act. They were kept incarcerated for more than a year and released only after they agreed not to make any public statements, thereby not only ending their political careers but also destroying the only organisation in Kashmir that the people of that state trusted.

*`Mirwaiz Umar Farooq being ushered into Jamia Masjid on Friday, September 22, 2023, by his aides. Photo: Jehangir Ali.`*

All this was done on the basis of PM Modi’s unique combination of ignorance, arrogance and prejudice. To execute its plan the Modi government chose not to remember that with the exception of the late Syed Ali Shah Gilani and a handful of his acolytes, Kashmiris had never expressed any desire to be a part of Pakistan.

As far back as October 1947, the British High Commissioner to Pakistan Sir Lawrence Grafftey-Smith had reported to London with palpable regret that if there was a plebiscite the people of then undivided Kashmir would ‘most likely opt to join India’. The only thing that might change their minds, he had concluded in his dispatch, was a huge massacre of Muslims by Sikhs in the border areas between Kashmir and Pakistan.

What had been true of undivided Kashmir became doubly true after the separation of POK, with its mostly non-Reshi Islamic population. The rigged election of 1987, and the subsequent outbreak of armed insurgency fuelled at least in part by mistaken perceptions and unfounded distrust in Delhi, were capitalised upon by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence to train insurgents and trigger an insurgency that caused thousands of needless deaths in Kashmir.

The sense of disempowerment in Kashmir

But even those nightmare years did not change the Kashmiris’ preference for autonomy within the Indian constitution. This was shown conclusively (much to even Delhi’s surprise) by two independent opinion polls, the first carried out in secret by MORI, Europe’s premier opinion polling agency, in 2003-4 and the second openly by MORI and GALLUP on behalf of Chatham House – The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London – six years later.

These showed that in no portion of Kashmir valley did more than 7.5 per cent of the population say that it would prefer to be a part of Pakistan. A far higher proportion said they wished to remain a part of India, but the highest proportion opted for some form of independence. That was 14 and 19 years after the armed insurgency had torn their lives apart!

The synonyms for Independence in Urdu and Hindi – Azadi, Khud Mukhtari, Swatantrata and Swadheenta – do not have quite the same meaning as ‘Independence’ has in English. The meaning of ‘Independence’ has been shaped by the era of industrialisation and the Nation-State, to mean a complete separation of one territory from another through the creation of clearly defined ‘hard’ frontiers, and controls over trade, travel and immigration.

The Hindi and Urdu equivalents have a far older provenance, that relates not to territory but to the status of the individual – more specifically his or her freedom to make their own decisions.

Innumerable conversations I had with Kashmiris during the height of the insurgency in the ‘nineties, and the years that followed, led back invariably to their sense of disempowerment.

*`Protests demanding the release of moderate Hurriyat chairman and chief cleric of Kashmir, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid on June 23, 2023. Photo: Special arrangement.`*

Naeem Akhtar, an associate of Mufti Sayeed and adviser to Mehbooba Mufti after his death, gave me the most precise explanation of what Azadi meant to him and most Kashmiri Muslims: “ Partition broke our link with our religious and cultural origins. We trace our Islam back to Sufis who came from Iran via the Jhelum valley. Our trade, and our cultural links with the rest of the sub-continent and west Asia, had always been via the Jhelum valley, through Rawalpindi with the south and the passes in the Hindu Kush with the west. To us Azadi means the repair of this break. It is more a psychological than a material need”.

Assassination of leaders to scuttle peace deal

That is the break that Prime ministers Manmohan Singh and Nawaz Sharif had come within an inch of repairing, when the defeat of the Congress and the rise of Modi in 2014 scuttled any possible deal between the two countries.

When insurgency raised its head in 1987 Pakistan thought its opportunity had finally come. But when the ISI realised that merger with Pakistan was not what the Kashmiris wanted, it began to assassinate all those in leadership positions within the insurgency who did not want to secede to Pakistan.

Umar’s father, Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq was the first to be assassinated in May 1990, on the orders of Pakistan’s ISI, barely three weeks after he had given an interview to BBC in which he had outlined the steps India needed to take if it wished to restore peace in Kashmir.

In 1996, when Abdul Ghani Butt, who was then the deputy Chairman of Hurriyat, expressed a desire for the organisation to contest that assembly election announced by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, his brother was killed by agents of the ISI a few weeks later.

Pak-sponsored and financed gunmen assassinated Abdul Ghani Lone, the seniormost and most respected leader in Hurriyat on May 21, 2002, barely two months after he had decided that his ‘Peoples Conference’ would contest the state assembly elections that year even if the rest of Hurriyat did not. The list of eminent Kashmiris who have paid the ultimate price for merely suggesting that there is a road to peace with honour within India, is too long to reproduce.

One of the most heinous killings was that of H.N. Wanchoo, on December 5, 1992. Wanchoo was a Kashmiri Pandit who had become the lawyer for a large number of members of the JKLF who had been jailed by the police, and become known as Kashmir’s most respected defender of human rights.

Wanchoo was shot dead in an auto-rickshaw by three men who had come to him asking for help in getting one of their colleagues released from police custody. His murder attracted worldwide attention and triggered investigations by intelligence agencies of several countries in addition to R&AW and the IB. These concluded that Wanchoo had been murdered on the instructions of the ISI because he had become the single greatest obstacle to it’s campaign of communal polarisation in Kashmir.

This was followed only months later by the killing of yet another hugely respected religious leader of Kashmir’s Reshi Islam, Qazi Nissar, the Mirwaiz of North Kashmir whom Pakistan’s ISI got assassinated in 1993.

Most journalists and intellectuals in Kashmir concluded later that it was these murders that turned Kashmiri Muslims against Pakistan.

Modi destroying every atom of autonomy

By the time Modi came to power, the Hurriyat, under the chairmanship of Mirwaiz Umar, had formally announced its decision to accept the Manmohan-Musharraf four-point plan that was then in the last stages of being hammered out by Tariq Aziz(Pakistan) and Sati Lamba (India).

It had done this through Fazal Qureshi, a senior leader of Hurriyat and friend of Kashmiri martyr Maqbool Butt, at a conference in Srinagar in October 2009. This was not to Pakistan’s liking so, six weeks later, another Pak-hired assassin shot this fine old man in the head, and turned him into a vegetable.

Former JKLF leader Yasin Malik had made it known as early as 1994, that the JKLF did not want to separate from India but wanted a different relationship with it, to be framed after consultations with like-minded people in Jammu and Ladakh. He is now in prison for life.

Shabir Shah, who founded the JK Democratic Freedom Party, and invested his entire political future in trying, and almost succeeding, in brokering a lasting settlement in Kashmir with home minister L.K, Advani, was released from jail only days ago, presumably also on the condition that he, like the Mirwaiz, refrains from politics in the future.

The Modi government has not spared even second and third-rung members of Hurriyat. Shahid-ul Islam, the Mirwaiz’s liaison officer with the media, was arrested in 2017 and has been in Tihar jail without being charged, and without bail, for seven years.

`PM Narendra Modi and Lieutenant Governor of Jammu & Kashmir, Manoj Sinha. Photo: X/@manojsinha_`

The Modi government imprisoned Shahid despite the fact that, knowing his closeness to Mirwaiz Umar, two assassins had come to his home in the mid-nineties to kill him, and hastily fired five bullets at him when he guessed their intent and rushed out of the room to save his life. Three of those bullets were still embedded in the walls of his parents’ home years later.

The common strand that bound all of these attacks on Kashmiri political and religious leaders was the anger of Pakistan and its ruthless Inter-Services Intelligence at Kashmiris’ refusal to make a union with Pakistan their goal in their struggle against New Delhi.

All this information, and much, much more, has been available in the files of the Home Ministry and the Prime Minister’s office, but Modi was not interested in peace with Pakistan. For him Kashmir and Pakistan are convenient whips with which to lash latent Hindu fury into a frenzy. To do this he has been bent upon destroying every atom of the autonomy given to Kashmir by the Indian constitution through articles 370 and 35A.

Why Kashmiri Political Parties Cannot Fight Each Other

By: Prem Jha

22-08-2024

Kashmir, Uncategorized

This election will not only decide the future of Kashmir, but also quite possibly, of India’s ethno-federal democracy as well.

From left, Mehbooba Mufti, Mallikarjun Kharge, Omar Abdullah and Sajjad Lone. In the background are voters in J&K. Photo: X/@ECISVEEP

When announcing the dates for Jammu and Kashmir’s assembly elections, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar told The Indian Express, “We would (sic) assure all the required security to candidates, and facilities to the electors”.

I have not a shadow of a doubt that the EC will be true to Kumar’s word, and that Delhi will do everything in its power to vindicate his promise. But for Kashmir, and India’s, future it is not just a fair conduct of the elections by the EC that matters but the way in which the concerned political parties decide to fight it.

The fact that Rahul Gandhi and Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge have both gone to Kashmir to discuss election strategy for the J&K assembly election with the National Congress and the People’s Democratic Party, shows that the INDIA alliance, and the Congress in particular, is aware this election will not only decide the future of Kashmir, but also quite possibly, of India’s ethno-federal democracy as well.

To say that these elections are as important for both Kashmir and India as were the Jammu and Kashmir elections of 1987, would be an understatement.

1987 was a turning point for both Kashmir and India because while it created the first-ever opportunity for a democratic opposition to the National Conference and the Congress to emerge in Kashmir, the way in which the Muslim United Front (MUF) was suppressed by the NC-Congress coalition immediately after the election triggered the first armed insurgency in Kashmir.

This year’s elections are equally important because they are giving the same parties, the Congress and the National Conference, a chance to repair the damage they did in 1987. The threat this time is not external but internal – it comes not from Pakistan but from the BJP.

Put briefly, the danger that Kashmir now faces is that if Kashmir’s major parties continue with their present no-holds-barred competition with each other, and divide the Kashmiri vote, they will allow the BJP, which is certain to sweep Jammu, to emerge as the largest single party in the new state assembly. This will give it the right to form the next government.

The rise of the BJP in Jammu has been dramatic. In 2002 its vote share in the state elections was only 8.6% and it won only one seat in the J&K assembly. By 2008 its vote had risen to 11.28% and it won 11 seats. Six years later, in the next state assembly election in 2014, it won 25 seats and garnered 23.2% of the vote. Its share of the J&K vote in the parliamentary elections also doubled further from 23% in 2014 to 46% in 2019 in the wake of the Pulwama tragedy, but fell back to 24% in 2024.

This 24% was won almost entirely in the Jammu region, as was the 23% in 2014, and most of the 46% in 2019. These figures show that the political split between Jammu and Kashmir is now complete. With Ghulam Nabi Azad having left the Congress and formed his own party, the Democratic Progressive Azad Party, the BJP will face even less of a challenge in Jammu than it had in 2014 and 2019. It can therefore be confident of again winning the majority of the 43 seats allocated to Jammu after the recent delimitation of constituencies. In the recent general election, two of J&K’s five Lok Sabha seats went to the BJP, two to the National Conference, and one to an independent, Abdul Rashid Shaikh, a.k.a. ‘Engineer’ Rashid, a charismatic figure who fought as an independent from jail where he has been held for the last five years on allegations of ‘terror financing’ without being brought to trial.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the BJP won both of its seats in Jammu. The National Conference won its two seats in central and southern Kashmir. The PDP won no seats, but Engineer Rashid swept Northern Kashmir, winning from Baramula by defeating not only former chief minister Omar Abdullah, but also Mir Mohammed Fayyaz of the PDP and Sajjad Ghani Lone, the leader of the J&K Peoples’ Conference. Rashid’s victory was so enormous that he garnered more votes than all the other three combined.

If the BJP repeats its Lok Sabha performance in the coming assembly elections, it will find little difficulty in creating a majority coalition not only because it already has some allies in Kashmir like Sajjad Lone’s PC and Altaf Bukhari’s Apni Party, but because, thanks to its harvest from the now banned electoral bonds, it has both the money and the coercive power to secure some defections from the other major parties, and to entice other small parties and independents to join its coalition.

Since the election will be held when Jammu and Kashmir is still a Union territory, and the Supreme Court has set no deadline for J&K’s conversion into a full state, there will be no one to oppose the ratification of the laws that this first-ever BJP-led government could enact. It will, therefore, hasten the end of Kashmiriyat in the state.

But Kashmiriyat could well be only the first victim of Modi’s relentless drive to create a unitary Hindu Rashtra under his supremacy. There are nine other states that have benefited from special safeguards for their ethnic identity under Article 371 of the constitution, eight of which are in the Northeast. What happens next in Kashmir is therefore likely to be seen as a precedent for his handling of ethno-national discontent in these states as well.

Therefore, when Gandhi and Kharge speak to the Kashmiri leaders they will do well to remember that they are speaking not just for the Kashmiris, but for all the smaller ethno-regions of India. For should they fail to protect Kashmir’s ethnic identity, it will be seen by them as an unravelling not only of Kashmiriyat but a warning of what their fate could be if they dare to oppose Modi’s diktats in the future.

Modi’s Backing of Inflammatory, Fictional ‘Kerala Story’ Highlights Pressing Need for Opposition Unity

By: Prem Jha

08-07-2023

Uncategorized

PM Modi. In the background are posters of ‘The Kerala Story’. Photos: Twitter/@BJP4Karnataka and IMDb.

Barely a year after the release of The Kashmir Files, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is again using another grossly incendiary film, The Kerala Story, to fan hatred of Indian Muslims in order to consolidate the “Hindu” vote and stay in power next year.

The Kashmir Files was a hugely distorted and highly inflammatory depiction of the planned murders of prominent Kashmiri Pandits in the early months of 1990, which was designed to ethnically cleanse the valley of its Pandit community. The Kerala Story accuses Muslim organisations in Kerala of supplying 32,000 recruits to ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State terror group which briefly established control of territory in Syria and Iraq. Many of these, it claims, were women recruited to serve as the wives of IS fighters.

The brazen disregard for the truth displayed by both films reflects how completely the Bharatiya Janata Party, under Modi, has become a conduit for lies. For, one brief look at the actual Kashmir files – not the screen version but the Union home ministry’s papers – would reveal that the killing of selected Pandits in 1990 was planned and paid for, in weapons and cash, by the Pakistan army’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and carried out by a handful of self-styled mujahideen recruited by it from among the many thousand young Kashmiris who had joined the rebellion against India after the Gaukadal police firing upon civilians in Srinagar in January 1990 that took between 24 and 55 lives.

How opposed the average Kashmiri Muslim was to becoming a part of Pakistan, even after the 14 years insurgency of insurgency and draconian repression that followed, was revealed by two international opinion polls carried out in 2004 and 2009 . The first was conducted by MORI, Europe’s premier sampling survey organisation, and the second jointly by MORI with GALLUP. The 2004 poll showed that 61% of the population of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh wanted to remain a part of India and only 6% preferred Pakistan.

Similarly, the 2009 poll, which was initiated by Chatham House, Britain’s premier foreign policy think tank, and confined to the Kashmir valley, showed that even in the four worst-affected districts of the valley, only 2.5 to 7.5% of those surveyed preferred Pakistan to India.

That was the strength of the bond between Kashmiri Muslims and secular India that Modi fatally weakened within weeks of coming to power by breaking off all talks with the Hurriyat Conference, unleashing a reign of terror in the valley, gutting Article 370 of the constitution, and turning Jammu and Kashmir into a Union territory, thereby disempowering Kashmiris within their own state. That is the bond that The Kashmir Files has weakened further by creating alienation not in Kashmir but in the Hindu population of the rest of India.

The Kerala Story is intended to do the same to the 1200 year-old bond between the Hindus, Christians and Muslims of Kerala. It is a measure of Prime Minister Modi’s insecurity about his party’s – and his own – future that he is now openly endorsing the grotesque lie cooked up by his bhakts and his propaganda machine that there was an exodus of Muslims from Kerala to join Daesh, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Here is what Modi said in a pre-poll speech at Ballari in Karnataka, on May 5:

“ In these changing times, the nature of terrorism is also changing …Bombs, rifles and pistols… (have been replaced by) a new type which undermines society from within, makes no sound. The Kerala Story is a film based on one such conspiracy in Kerala”.

What is the theme of The Kerala Story that Modi is asking the people of Karnataka and the rest of India to treat as gospel? It is that Muslim organisations in Kerala supplied 32,000 recruits to ISIS when it established its brief, blood -soaked control of territory around Raqqa, Deir-ez-Zor and Mosul in Syria and Iraq. Many of these, it claims, were sent to serve as wives for the IS fighters.

What is far more incendiary, the film depicts in graphic detail how many of them were Hindu girls who had been converted to Islam before being inveigled into going.

Several reviewers, who did not bother to do the 30 minutes of research on the internet that has gone into the writing of this article, have stated that this is “a serious issue lost to bad direction, and worse writing” (India Today). The Organiser, the de facto mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, has described the film as “a dangerous truth told with a calculated balance”.

But the entire film is such a bald-faced lie that to find the prime minister of India mouthing its praise and endorsing its contents in a public speech brings shame upon the entire country. Study after study, both in India and abroad, has noted the almost complete absence of Indian Muslims in the ranks of the IS. On December 20, 2017, Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, Modi’s minister of state for home affairs in his first stint as PM, reported to the Rajya Sabha that only 103 people who “sympathised” with ISIS had been arrested across 14 states by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), according to the data available with the government. The minister added: “Very few individuals [from India] have come to the notice of the central and state security agencies who (sic) have joined ISIS.”

Uttar Pradesh – India’s most populous state – reported a paltry 17 sympathisers, followed by Maharashtra (16), and Telangana (16). Kerala had reported only 14 and Karnataka a mere 8. What is more, these were individuals accused of being ’sympathisers’ – and who had not left India to join ISIS in the desert.

Two years later, at the start of Modi’s second term in June 2019, minister of state for home Affairs G. Kishan Reddy stated in a written reply to Lok Sabha that the NIA and state police forces had registered cases against ISIS operatives as sympathisers, and have arrested 155 accused from across the country.

Three years later, in a detailed study published by the Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis at New Delhi, Adil Rasheed reported that until 2019 less than 100 migrants working in the Gulf were thought to have been lured into ISIS while 155 had been arrested in India for having ISIS links.

“The mystery behind the very few Indian names appearing in the long list of foreign fighters in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS),” he wrote, “has puzzled strategic thinkers for some time now. This pleasant yet inexplicable surprise finds a historical precedent in the conspicuous absence of Indians from the legions of foreign ‘mujahideen’ fighting the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s and from the Taliban and al Qaeda’s ‘Islamic Emirate’ of the 1990s”.

The figure of 32,000 recruits from India, and the assertion that a large number of them were women, is therefore absurd – all the more so because estimates by the European Union and the Central Intelligence Agency in the US have put the maximum strength of the IS at its height at around 30,000.

What is more, 5,000 of them had been recruited in Europe and most of the remainder had come from Arab countries devastated by civil war after the so-called Arab Spring. The largest number had come from Libya, whose economy had been totally destroyed by the concerted Euro-American attack upon it in 2011. The idea that 32,000 Indian Muslims had also joined IS, whether as fighters or sex slaves, is therefore ludicrous.

That Modi, speaking in Hindi, should have gone to the length of endorsing such a dangerously incendiary film at Ballari in Karnataka before a large crowd whose grasp of the language is poor to non-existent, reveals that his intended audience was not Kannadigas, but the vastly larger masses of unemployed and desperate youth in the Hindi-speaking belt. These are the young Indians to whom he has so far been unable to provide jobs and a secure future, and who are now being primed to attack Muslims in order to retain their support for the BJP in the 2024 general election.

If there is a lesson the opposition needs to learn from Modi’s endorsement of a film that he has almost certainly not even seen the trailer of, it is that he will stop at absolutely nothing to come back to power in 2024 and is willing to plunge the country into communal violence, not to mention war with a nuclear armed neighbour, if that is what it will take. This is what has transformed the role of the opposition in the next general election from one of winning the maximum number of seats to saving India from disintegrating in a sea of blood.

It is, therefore, imperative that they put aside their political rivalries with each other and unite to meet the threat to India’s very existence that the BJP under Modi and Shah now poses to India’s very existence. The leaders of all the major opposition parties, including the Congress, are now fully aware of this. But, as the no-holds-barred struggle between Sachin Pilot and Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan, and AICC general secretary and former Delhi Congress party chief Ajay Maken’s incessant diatribes against the Aam Admi Party have shown, this realisation has yet to trickle down into the second rung of the Congress party’s leadership.

The resistance at this level is understandable, for these are the leaders who manage party cadres at the ground level, and the surrender of some seats to other parties inevitably leads to demoralisation and defections of cadres in those constituencies. All opposition parties, and particularly the Congress, face this problem, but there is a solution to it.

This is for the opposition to agree to confine coalition building to the Lok Sabha elections and continue to fight each other in the Vidhan Sabha elections. This would not have been possible earlier, when Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections were held more or less simultaneously – as used to happen till the 1960s – but today presents no major problem.

By concentrating entirely upon national and international issues in his relentless campaigning during the past nine years, Modi has made it possible for the opposition to do the same. If it comes to an agreement over this, its victory in 2024 will be assured.

Kiren Rijiju on Nehru’s ‘Blunders’ in Kashmir: The Dubious Benefit of Hindsight

By: Prem Jha

12-01-2023

Uncategorized

Kiren Rijiju on Nehru’s ‘Blunders’ in Kashmir: The Dubious Benefit of Hindsight

Jawaharlal Nehru in Kashmir in May 1948. Photo: Photo Division, MIB, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On October 26, the anniversary of Kashmir’s accession to India 75 years ago, Union law minister Kiren Rijiju highlighted five blunders made by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to explain why Kashmir remains a breeding ground for terrorism, and a bone of contention between India and its largest neighbours that, to use his words, is bleeding India till this day. His precise allegations were the following:

“July 1947: Maharaja Hari Singh approaches Congress to accede to India like other princely states. Nehru refuses, saying “he wants more”, a requirement which did not exist in any instrument.
October 20, 1947: Pakistani raiders invaded the Kashmir region. Nehru still waffles and does not accept Kashmir’s request to accede to India.
October 21: Nehru officially writes to PM of Maharaja Hari Singh, saying it is not desirable for Kashmir to accede to India at that time. This despite Pakistani forces rapidly advancing in Kashmir.
October 26: Pakistani forces surround Srinagar. Maharaja Hari Singh again makes desperate appeal to join India. Nehru still negotiating and waffling with inordinate delay in responding.
October 27: Kashmir finally accepted into Indian union when Nehru’s demand met on Sheikh Abdullah.

Rijiju used October 26, the 75th anniversary of Kashmir’s accession to India to launch his diatribe against Nehru’s dilatoriness in accepting its accession to India. But his main purpose seems to have been to shift the blame for the increasing alienation of Kashmiris, and the renewed attacks on the few remaining Kashmiri Pandits in the valley, upon Nehru’s shoulders from those of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where it rightly belongs.

There is one flaw in his attack on Nehru: it is seriously inaccurate. I am able to assert this with some authority because in 1995 I wrote a book titled Kashmir 1947 – Rival Versions of History, a book BJP spokespersons have often quoted (and sometimes misquoted) to substantiate their statements on Kashmir. So, using Rijiju’s five blunders as a frame, let me set the record straight.

First, Maharaja Hari Singh did not exactly offer to accede to India in July 1947. He asked Rai Bahadur Gopal Das, a prominent Hindu gentleman from Lahore to intercede with Sardar Patel to break the ice that had formed between him and Nehru, in order to commence negotiations on accession to India. This was because he had decided six months earlier in December 1946, that if the British denied the princes the option of remaining under their suzerainty, he would accede to India.

The last Maharaja of Kashmir, Hari Singh. Photo: Unknow author/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

The deciding event for him had been the arrival in Muzaffarabad on December 23, of 2,360 penniless and traumatised refugees, fleeing from the Muslim League’s first instigated pogrom against Hindus in Rawalpindi and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and been received with open arms by the almost entirely Muslim local population. The Maharani had rushed to Muzaffarabad to supervise their relief and rehabilitation. Her account of what the refugees had suffered made up the Maharaja’s mind: If a 6% minority of Hindus and Sikhs in the NWFP, who had lived in harmony with their Muslim neighbours for centuries, could suffer this terrible betrayal what, he wondered, would the fate of Kashmir’s 23% Kashmiri Hindus left helpless in Pakistan be?

Nor, he believed would Kashmiri Muslims be spared. This fear was founded on his knowledge of the umbilical cord that joined the Reshi Islam of Kashmir to Hinduism. Reshi is a corruption of Rishi. Their most revered saint, Sheikh Nooruddin, is known in the valley, and invoked by Kashmiri Hindus, as Nand Rishi. His most famous disciple, after whom the main Srinagar hospital is named, was Lal Ded. Her full name was Laleshwari Devi.

Kashmiri Muslims did not change their surnames, and have not even thought of doing so even today. Their diet is still almost entirely Shaivite Hindu: there is no beef in Kashmiri cuisine; most Kashmiris still shun chicken and eggs; Reshi Islam has a dawn prayer, the Aurad-e Fitrat, that has no counterpart in Sunni Islam but is the incorporation of Surya Namaskar into Islam. And finally, all prayers in Reshi Islam start with an invocation of their ancestors by name, just as I have done in every formal prayer I have ever uttered from my Upanayana, till the deaths of my wife and parents. In Sunni Islam this is haraam.

These differences had not gone unnoticed by the Muslim League. In 1943, when the J&K Muslim Conference asked for incorporation into the Muslim League, Jinnah sent a close advisor, possibly his private secretary Khurshid Hussain, to Srinagar to feel them out. Here are a few excerpts from Hussain’s assessment:

“The Muslims of Kashmir do not appear to have ever had the advantage of true Muslim religious leadership…. Islam in Kashmir has therefore throughout remained at the mercy of counterfeit spiritual leaders …..who appear to have legalised for them everything that drives a coach and four through Islam and the way of life it has laid down….It would require considerable effort, spread over a long period of time, to reform them and convert them into true Muslims.”

Hari Singh, therefore, knew, viscerally, what would happen not only to Kashmiri Pandits and Jammu Hindus, but to Kashmiri Muslims if he acceded to Pakistan. But in December 1946, he had lost access to Nehru because, six months earlier, when he jailed Sheikh Abdullah for raising the twin cries of ‘Land to the Tiller’ and ‘Down with Dogra rule’, Nehru had tried to force his way to Srinagar to see Abdullah, been stopped at the border in Kohala on the Srinagar-Rawalpindi road, and virtually held captive in the state guest house for three days till he turned back.

In 1947, Hari Singh made not one but three unsuccessful attempts to break the resulting ice but failed. For the first, he sent his Maharani, accompanied by the 16-year-old Karan Singh, to Lahore for a secret meeting with a judge of the Lahore high court, Mehr Chand Mahajan. At the meeting, which occurred in Faletti’s Hotel, Mahajan asked for time to consider but before he could decide, the British, who had their spies, took the option away from him by appointing him within days to the Radcliffe Boundaries Commission. This was the first indication that the British were determined, to ensure that Kashmir should become a part of Pakistan. The Congress never got to know of this secret power play.

Hari Singh made his second attempt to break the ice in July by asking Rai Bahadur Gopal Das, a prominent Hindu gentleman living in Lahore, to meet Sardar Patel when he visited Delhi, inform Patel of his desire to accede to India, and ask Patel for his help in ending his estrangement with Nehru. Patel’s reply to him, dated July 3, was the first formal communication between the future government of India and the state of Kashmir. There was no communication between the Maharaja and Nehru either in the rest of that month, or in August.

Hari Singh made a third and final attempt on September 19, and this was directly with Nehru, via Mehr Chand Mahajan, who had taken over as prime minister of Kashmir after the dissolution of the Radcliffe Commission.

A postage stamp issued in honour of Mehr Chand Mahajan. Photo: Post of India, GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons

Mahajan’s memoirs give us the first explicit clue to Nehru’s reasons for not responding earlier. At his meeting with Nehru, when he reiterated that the maharaja was prepared to make the internal administrative changes that Nehru desired only after his accession had been accepted on the same terms as all the others, Nehru apparently lost his temper and virtually threw him out. As a highly insulted Mahajan was leaving the room, he said “Release Sheikh Abdullah from prison, then we can talk”.

That single, throwaway, sentence holds the key to understanding the dilemma of the new government and therefore to Nehru’s strategy for resolving it. The dilemma was, “If we accept Kashmir’s accession now, what will we do if Hyderabad opts for Pakistan?”

For the architects of the future Indian Union, Hyderabad was the Mr Hyde (in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel) to Kashmir’s Dr Jekyll. Hyderabad was the second largest of the princely states, only marginally smaller than Kashmir but with three times the population and four times the wealth. It too was one of the only four princely states that had enjoyed full internal autonomy, including the right to have their own armed forces, and be given a 21-gun salute by the British. It had an 81% Hindu population ruled by a Muslim elite, against Kashmir’s 77% Muslims ruled by a Hindu elite.

Finally, Hyderabad had a far better claim to independence than Jammu and Kashmir because while the latter was a creation of the British and had existed for a mere 98 years, Hyderabad had never been annexed, either by the East India Company or the British Raj. In 1947, therefore, it was the last, still-autonomous, part of the Mughal empire. So, not surprisingly, the Nizam too was determined to remain independent no matter what it cost him. And unlike Kashmir, he had made this plain on June 11, 1947 by announcing that Hyderabad would not participate in the constituent assemblies of either India or Pakistan.

Contemporary Indian assessments of Nizam Asaf Jah VI have painted him as a miser, as somewhat unbalanced and harbouring delusions of grandeur, and if not as a Muslim fanatic himself, then as a willing tool of Qasim Razvi, who had emerged as the head of the Razakars by 1947. What else could make him believe, for even a moment, that Hyderabad could exist as an independent state when it was plumb in the centre of the Decan almost 200 miles from the nearest sea?

But later assessments provide an explanation that is far better grounded in realpolitik. The Nizam had the sovereign right to accede to either India or Pakistan. He was therefore using the leverage that gave him to bargain for the greatest possible autonomy from India. What was worse, with communal clashes increasing and the Razakars steadily gaining the support within the Muslim elite, and Jinnah offering every kind of inducement to him, to the point of pressing the Maharaja of Jodhpur to accede to Pakistan, the Nizam’s bargaining strength was getting stronger by the day.

The only way to take the initiative away from the Nizam was to accept Kashmir’s accession to India not from the Maharaja but from the people of Kashmir. For this, Nehru had to show that not only the Maharaja but also the majority community wanted to be a part of India. And for that, he needed the explicit endorsement of Sheikh Abdullah. This made it absolutely impossible for India to accept Hari Singh’s accession while he was keeping Sheikh Abdullah in jail.

Mahajan took Nehru’s message to the maharaja and Hari Singh lost no time in putting Abdullah’s release in motion by sending his former prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak, to mend his bridges with Abdullah. Sheikh Abdullah met him more than halfway. In his reply to the Maharaja, he wrote:

“In spite of what has happened in the past , I assure your highness that myself and my party have never harboured any sentiments of disloyalty to your highness’s person, throne or dynasty….I assure your highness the fullest and loyal support of myself and my organisation.”

The Maharaja released Sheikh Abdullah three days later (September 29) and the road to Kashmir’s accession to India was finally open.

But why, one may still ask, did Nehru not act with greater celerity after that? Why did he allow 23 days to pass, giving Pakistan all the time it needed to organise the ‘spontaneous’ tribal raid into Kashmir that began on October 22? The question is legitimate, but it too is a product of selective hindsight. There were three reasons for the delay: first, the infant government’s preoccupation with the overwhelming disruption and slaughter unleashed by partition; second, the maharaja’s reluctance to make an explicit commitment on the role of Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference even after he had tacitly accepted Nehru’s pre-condition and released him; and third the lack of any information about what was brewing in Pakistan. For this, the British government was directly responsible.

Early in October, a British officer serving with the Pakistan army had reported to General Frank Messervy, the transitional commander in chief of the Pakistan army, that he had chanced upon a meeting at the home of the deputy commissioner of Rawalpindi, where seven or eight tribal leaders, including one Badshah Gul, leader of the Afridis, were planning the details of an invasion of Kashmir. Messervy must have reported it in turn to Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, the supreme commander of both the Indian and Pakistani armies, who was based in Delhi. But Auchinleck did not consider it necessary to inform the prime minister of India, and may not even have informed Lord Mountbatten, the governor-general. That led to his rapid, and unceremonious, exit from his position and replacement by General K.M. Cariappa.

General Cariappa, C-in-C, Indian Army, greets Jawaharlal Nehru at Plaam Aerodrome on the Prime Minister’s return from his foreign tour on November 15, 1949. Credit: Photo Division

The maharaja’s reluctance to make a commitment to the role of Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference remained a stumbling block even after the raiders had entered Kashmir, sacked Muzaffarabad, killing and injuring more than 3,000 civilians, and sweeping up into the Jhelum valley. It was only after they cut the power at Mahura power station 40 miles from Srinagar on October 23, plunging the maharaja’s Diwali dinner into darkness, that reality finally dawned on him. He sent deputy prime minister Ram Lal Batra with what the latter described as a ‘Letter of Accession’ to India, to Delhi the next morning.

Nehru immediately sent V.P. Menon, accompanied by then Lt Col Sam Manekshaw and Wing Commander Dewan of the Royal Indian Air force to get the maharaja’s signature, assess the military requirements, and gauge Srinagar airport’s capacity to sustain a military airlift. As Menon reported to the defence committee of the cabinet the next day (they were able to fly back only because National Conference cadres lit up the runway in the dead of night with flaming torches), even as late as the evening of October 25, Hari Singh had still been reluctant to make a firm commitment on democratisation that Nehru required to legitimise India’s acceptance of Kashmir’s accession.

This was not simply a battle of wills. Nehru knew that once the accession was complete, India could force the maharaja to do anything Delhi wanted. But democratisation after accession, even with Sheikh Abdullah’s consent, would not have made it an accession by the people of Kashmir. Nehru, and no doubt Patel, needed that because even at that crisis moment they had not forgotten Hyderabad. Every risk Nehru took during those fateful days was intended to ensure that an invasion of Hyderabad, were it to become necessary, would be considered legitimate in the eyes of the world. For there, whatever the Nizam may have desired, there was never any doubt that his people wanted to be a part of India.

Kiren Rijiju’s third, fourth and fifth ‘blunders’ are therefore nothing more than the querulous complaints of a government that knows that it has caused irrevocable damage not only to Kashmiris, but to India in Kashmir, and is now looking for ways in which to shift the blame onto the shoulders of a long-dead prime minister who can no longer defend himself, and whom the party that he helped to create is too lazy, complacent, or ignorant to know how to protect. He also seems to have forgotten that nine other states, listed in Article 371 of the constitution, have been formed on the basis of the explicit guarantee of Kashmir’s ethnonational identity provided by Article 370. Except for Arunachal Pradesh, to which he belongs, all the other states of the region have been its beneficiaries.

https://thewire.in/politics/kiren-rijiju-nehru-blunders-kashmir-hindsight

A CRISIS, AN OPPORTUNITY

By: Prem Jha

10-01-2015

Foreign Policy, Kashmir, Politics India

Last month’s election in Jammu and Kashmir gave a ‘hung verdict’ of a new kind: most of the seats in Jammu ( 25 ) went to the BJP, But most of the seats in Kashmir (28)went to Mufti Sayeed’s mildly nationalist Peoples’ Democratic party. Thus neither party could form a government on its own in the 87 member state assembly. This verdict brought to a head a struggle for power between the two main parts of this heterogeneous state whose roots go back 500 years. The split verdict has created both a crisis and an opportunity. The article reproduced below, which appeared in the Indian Express on December 31, 2014 examines its roots and what is at stake in the State.

The election results in Jammu and Kashmir have brought to the forefront an issue that has dogged Kashmir’s relations with the rest of India ever since Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession. It is, ‘which part of the state will dominate policy-making —Jammu or Kashmir?

In the hundred years before Independence , it was the Dogras from Jammu. Prior to that , while Jammu was squarely a part of the Mughal and later Sikh empires, Kashmir had been ruled for more than five hundred years by a succession of invaders, ranging from Afghans to Sikhs.

In 1947, therefore, the feeling of disempowerment was far more acute in Kashmir than in Jammu. It was assuaged only when Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference came to power in 1947. Sheikh Abdullah’s 1945 war cry of ‘Down with Dogra rule’ was not a repudiation of ‘Hindu’ rule, but of domination by rulers from Jammu. The National conference, and indeed the Sheikh’s, endorsement of the Maharaja’s accession to India was wildly popular in the valley because it shifted the base of power in the state from Jammu to Kashmir. To the educated , politically sensitive sections of the Kashmir’s population, this was ‘independence’ after more than 500 years of enslavement.

The need to empower Kashmiris explains Sheikh Abdullah’s lack of interest in recovering Gilgit, Skardu and “Azad’ Kashmir from Pakistan. He knew only too well that this would make Kashmir’s pre-eminance harder to sustain.

The roots of Abdullah’s growing disenchantment with India in the six years that followed Accession and his eventual, disastrous imprisonment, lay in Nehru’s failure to understand that waiting for Pakistan to vacate POK before holding a plebiscite was endangering not only its outcome but also Kasmir valley ( and the NC’s) control over the state. He was privy to the fact that Pathans made up only a fifth of the ‘Raiders’ from Pakistan and that more than two-fifths had come from POK. So had Nehru gone ahead with a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference would have been happy as clams because it would not only have fully legitimized the Accession in the part India controlled, but also Kashmir’s domination of Jammu in Indian Kashmir.

The reason why the Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s government rigged every election in the valley from 1957 till 1972 was its need to maintain its dominance of the state in the face of declining popularity. The suppression of dissent in the valley that this entailed led to the uprising of 1990.

The insurgency, however, broke Kashmir’s hold over Jammu. In the ensuing decade Jammu’s politics became detached from those of Kashmir and became those of the mainland. This parting of the ways, first vividly demonstrated by Jammu’s blockade of Kashmir in July 2008, reached its consummation this week.

Today the polarization between Jammu and Kashmir is almost complete. This has confronted the PDP and BJP with an extraordinary challenge, but also a unique opportunity. To its credit the PDP has been the first to realize that running a stable, functionally efficient and politically equitable government will not be possible if the polarization is not reversed. This requires cooperation – preferably a coalition – between the PDP and the BJP. But a coalition can only take shape if there is a broad agreement on the principles and goals of governance.

To the PDP the irreducible minimum is for the BJP to respect Jammu and Kashmir’s ethnic and religious diversity, explicitly distance itself from communal polarization in Kashmir and other parts of India, and avoid any attempt to change Kashmir’s special position within the Indian constitution.

Since the BJP’s main concern at the moment is to capture the chief ministership, and since Mufti Sayeed had shown in 2002 that he is not averse to sharing the chief ministership of the state, a deal is possible. But for this the BJP must agree to the basic principles of governance that Mufti has outlined.

This would have posed no problem for Mr Vajpayee, but today’s BJP is a different party in all but name. For Mr. Modi, therefore , stepping back from the programmes of communal polarization that the Sangh Parivar’s hardliners have let loose on the country, and resuming a constructive dialogue with Pakistan will be a supreme test of leadership.

It will also be a test of his sagacity. For Pakistan’s encounter with the most bestial face of has become a defining moment for its government and army. The Nawaz Sharif government has shed the last vestiges of its ambivalence towards Islamist terrorism, and declared an all-out war on it within Pakistan. It has lifted a six-year moratorium on the death sentence with the specific purpose of putting terrorists it held in its jails to death.

Around 500 terrorists are likely to be executed in the next few weeks. It is also revising its criminal code to award harsh punishment to terrorists, and is setting up special military courts for their speedy trial.

This is part of a comprehensive strategy that is designed to cut off all the insurgents’ sources of income including donations to charities under whose rubric they received their funds. The government also intends to enact a ban on religious persecution and punish the abuse of the internet for the glorification of terrorism and organizations sponsoring it.

The trigger was undoubtedly the killing of 133 children in a Peshawar school, but the demand to lift the moratorium had in fact been made by the army chief Gen Raheel Sharif, before this barbaric attack. Thus although it has done so for its own reasons, Pakistan is on the point of meeting Mr Modi’s demand that it should stamp out terrorism within its own country in order to build lasting good relations with India.

In the coming two years Pakistan will need all the help—military and economic– it can get. India could provide some of it indirectly by enabling it to move its troops from the Indian to the Afghan border. This would go a long way towards healing the scars of Partition. But even if does not, India will still be much better off with a stable Pakistan that is no longer hosting terrorists, than it is today.

The Victimisation of Yasin Malik: The Role of Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, aka Latram

The Controversial Pursuit of a Death Sentence for Yasin Malik

Those Speaking of Kashmir as an Independent State Err in Conflating Freedom With Independence

The Modi-Shah Game in Kashmir Is to Split Opposition Vote and Pave Way for BJP to Form Government

The NC and the Congress’s Hubris Has Put Them – and All of Kashmir – in a Risky Place

Kashmir is on the Eve of an Election That Can Decide Its Future

Why Kashmiri Political Parties Cannot Fight Each Other

Modi’s Backing of Inflammatory, Fictional ‘Kerala Story’ Highlights Pressing Need for Opposition Unity

Kiren Rijiju on Nehru’s ‘Blunders’ in Kashmir: The Dubious Benefit of Hindsight

A CRISIS, AN OPPORTUNITY

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The Victimisation of Yasin Malik: The Role of Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, aka Latram

The Controversial Pursuit of a Death Sentence for Yasin Malik

Those Speaking of Kashmir as an Independent State Err in Conflating Freedom With Independence

The Modi-Shah Game in Kashmir Is to Split Opposition Vote and Pave Way for BJP to Form Government

The NC and the Congress’s Hubris Has Put Them – and All of Kashmir – in a Risky Place

Kashmir is on the Eve of an Election That Can Decide Its Future

Why Kashmiri Political Parties Cannot Fight Each Other

Modi’s Backing of Inflammatory, Fictional ‘Kerala Story’ Highlights Pressing Need for Opposition Unity

Kiren Rijiju on Nehru’s ‘Blunders’ in Kashmir: The Dubious Benefit of Hindsight

A CRISIS, AN OPPORTUNITY

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