India After Gandhi (45 page)

Once, Abdullah had been Nehru’s man in Kashmir. By the summer of 1952, however, it was more that Nehru was Abdullah’s man in India. The Sheikh had made it known that, in his view, only the prime minister stood between India and the ultimate victory of Hindu communalism.

Meanwhile, discussions continued about the precise status of Kashmir vis-à-vis the Indian Union. In July the Sheikh met Nehru in Delhi and also had a round of meetings with other ministers. They hammered out a compromise known as the Delhi Agreement, whereby Kashmiris would become full citizens of India in exchange for an autonomy far greater than that enjoyed by other states of the Union. Thus the new state flag (devised by the National Conference) would for ‘historical and other reasons’ be flown alongside the national flag. Delhi could not send in forces to quell ‘internal disturbances’ without the consent of Srinagar. Where with regard to other states residuary powers rested with the centre, in the case of Kashmir these would remain with the state. Crucially, those from outside the state were prohibited from buying land or property within it. This measure was aimed at forestalling attempts to change the demographic profile of the Valley through large-scale immigration.
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These were major concessions, but the Sheikh pressed for greater powers still. In a truculent speech in the state’s Constituent Assembly he said only the state could decide what powers to give away to the Union, or what jurisdiction the Supreme Court would have in Kashmir. Then he told Yuvraj Karan Singh, the formal head of state, that if he did not
fall into line he would go the way of his father, the deposed Hari Singh. The young prince, said the Sheikh, must ‘break up with the reactionary elements’, and instead identify with the ‘happiness and sorrow of the common man’. For ‘if he is under the delusion that he can retain his office with the help of his few supporters, he is mistaken’.
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The ‘reactionary elements’ referred to here were the Hindus of Jammu. They had restarted their agitation, with an amended if equally catchy slogan: ‘Ek Desh mein Do Vidhan, Do Pradhan, Do Nishan – nahin chalenge, nahin chalenge’ (Two Constitutions, Two Heads of State, Two Flags – these in one State we shall not allow, not allow). Processions and marches, as well as clashes with police, became frequent. Once more the jails of Jammu began to fill with the volunteers of the Praja Parishad.

The Hindus of Jammu retained a deep attachment to the ruling family, and to Maharaja Hari Singh in particular. They resented his being deposed and were displeased with his son for being ‘disloyal’ by agreeing to replace him. But their apprehensions were also economic-namely, that the land reforms recently undertaken in the Kashmir Valley would be reproduced in Jammu. In the Valley, zamindars had been dispossessed of land in excess of the ceiling limit. Since this was fixed at twenty-two acres per family, their losses were substantial. The land seized by the state had been vested chiefly in the hands of the middle peasantry. The agricultural proletariat had not benefited to quite the same extent. Still, the land reforms had gone further and been more successful than anywhere else in India.
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As it happened, the large landlords in the Valley were almost all Hindu. This gave an unfortunate religious hue to what was essentially a project of socialist redistribution. This was perhaps inevitable; despite the sincerity of the Sheikh’s secularist professions, they could not nullify the legacies of history. At one time the state had been controlled by the Dogras of Jammu, who happened to be Hindu; now it was controlled by the National Conference, which was based in the Valley and whose leader and most of its members were Muslim.
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Through the years 1950–2, as the rest of India became acquainted with its new constitution and had its first elections, Jammu and Kashmir was
beset by uncertainty on two fronts. There were the unsettled relations between the state and the Union, and there was the growing conflict between the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley and the Hindu-dominated Jammu region. Here was a situation made to order for a politician in search of a cause. And it found one in Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who was to make the struggle of the Dogras of Jammu his own.

Dr Mookerjee had left Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet to become the founder-president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. His new party fared poorly at the general election of 1952 – only three of its members were elected to Parliament. The troubles in Kashmir came at an opportune time for Dr Mookerjee and the Jana Sangh. Here was a chance to lift the dispirited cadres, to forget the disappointments of the election and reinvent the party on the national stage.

Dr Mookerjee began his charge with a series of blistering attacks on the government in Parliament. ‘Who made Sheikh Abdullah the King of Kings in Kashmir?’ he asked sarcastically. The Sheikh had apparently said that they would treat both the provincial and national flags ‘equally’; this, said the Jana Sangh leader, showed a ‘divided loyalty’ unacceptable in a sovereign country. Even if the Valley wanted a limited accession, Jammu and the Buddhist region of Ladakh must be allowed to integrate fully if they so chose. But a better solution still would be to make the whole state a part of India, without any special concessions. This would bring it on par with all the other princely states, which – despite earlier promises made to them as regards autonomy – had finally to agree to be subject to the provisions of the constitution
in toto
. Abdullah himself had been a member of the Indian Constituent Assembly, yet ‘he is asking for special treatment. Did he not agree to accept this Constitution in relation to the rest of India, including 497 States. If it is good enough for all of them, why should it not be good enough for him in Kashmir?’
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In the autumn of 1952 Dr Mookerjee visited Jammu and made several speeches in support of the Praja Parishad movement. Their demands, he said, were ‘just and patriotic’. He promised to ‘secure’ the Constitution of India for them. He then went to Srinagar, where he had a most contentious meeting with Sheikh Abdullah.
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The support of a national party and a national leader had given much encouragement to the Dogras. In November 1952 the state government moved to Jammu for the winter. As head of state, Karan Singh arrived first. Years later he recalled the ‘derisive and hostile slogans’ and black flags with which he was received by the Praja
Parishad. Although ‘the National Conference had tried to lay on some kind of reception it was swamped by the deep hostility of the Dogra masses’. Writing to the government of India, he noted that ‘an over-whelming majority of the Jammu province seem to me to be emphatically in sympathy with the agitation . . . I do not think it will be a correct appraisal to dismiss the whole affair as merely the creation of a reactionary clique.’
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Which, of course, is what Sheikh Abdullah was disposed to do. Through the winter of 1952/3 the Praja Parishad and the state government remained locked in conflict. Protesters would remove the state flag from government buildings and place Indian flags in their stead. They would be arrested, but others would soon arrive to replace them. The movement got a tremendous fillip when a Parishad member, Mela Ram, was shot by police near the Pakistan border. In Jammu, at least, Abdullah’s reputation was in tatters. He had made his name representing the people against an autocratic monarch. Now he had become a repressive ruler himself.
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In January Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee wrote a long letter to Jawaharlal Nehru in support of the Parishad and their ‘highly patriotic and emotional struggle to ‘merge completely with India’. He added a gratuitous challenge with regard to the ‘recovery of the part of the erstwhile undivided state now in the possession of Pakistan. How was India ‘going to get this [territory] back’? asked Mookerjee. ‘You have always evaded this question. The time has come when we should know what exactly you propose to do about this matter. It will be nothing short of national disgrace and humiliation if we fail to regain this lost portion of our own territory.’

Nehru ignored the taunt. As for the Praja Parishad, he thought that they were ‘trying to decide a very difficult and complicated constitutional question by methods of war’. Abdullah (to whom Mookerjee had written separately) was more blunt; as he saw it, ‘the Praja Parishad is determined to force a solution of the entire Kashmir issue on communal lines’.

Mookerjee asked Nehru and Abdullah to release the Praja Parishad leaders and convene a conference to discuss the future of Kashmir. Mookerjee again challenged Nehru to go to war with Pakistan: ‘Please do not sidetrack the issue and let the public of India know how and when, if at all, we are going to get back this portion of our cherished territory.
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Eventually the exchange ran a ground on a matter of pride. Nehru thought the Parishad should call off the movement as a precondition to talks with the government; Mookerjee wanted the government to offer talks as a precondition to the movement calling off the struggle. When the government refused to bend, Mookerjee decided to take the matter to the streets of Delhi. Beginning in the first week of March, Jana Sangh volunteers courted arrest in support of the demands of the Praja Parishad. The protesters would collect outside a police station and shout slogans against the government and against the prime minister, thereby violating Section 188 of the Indian Penal Code.

The
satyagraha
was co-ordinated by Dr Mookerjee from his office in Parliament House. Participating were members of what the authorities were calling the ‘Hindu communal parties’: the Jana Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Ram Rajya Parishad. By the end of April 1953 1,300 people had been arrested. Intelligence reports suggest that they came from all parts of India, yet were overwhelmingly upper caste: Brahmins, Thakurs, Banias.
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It was now summer, tourist season in the Valley. Among the first visitors to arrive, in late April, was the American politician Adlai Stevenson. He had come to Kashmir to sail on the Dal lake and see the snows, but also to meet Sheikh Abdullah. They met twice, for upwards of two hours each time. The content of these conversations were not revealed by either side, but some Indians assumed it was all about independence. A Bombay journal otherwise known to be sympathetic to the United States claimed that Stevenson had assured Abdullah of much more than moral support. A loan of $15 million would be on hand once Kashmir became independent; besides, the US would ensure that ‘the Valley would have a permanent population of at least 5,000 American families, that every houseboat and hotel would be filled to capacity, that Americans would buy up all the art and craft output of the dexterous Kashmiri artisans, that within three years every village in Kashmir would be electrified and so on and so forth’.
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Stevenson later denied that he had encouraged Abdullah. When the Sheikh offered the ‘casual suggestion that independent status might be an alternative solution’, Stevenson stayed silent; he did not, he claimed, give ‘even unconscious encouragement regarding independence, which did not seem to me realistic . . . I was listening, not talking’.
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So the Sheikh was once more contemplating independence. But independence for what? Not, most likely, the whole of the state of
Jammu and Kashmir. One part (the north) was in Pakistani hands; another part (Jammu) was in the grip of a prolonged agitation. Abdullah’s own papers are closed to scholars and he is silent on the subject in his memoirs, but we can plausibly speculate that it must have been the Valley, and the Valley alone, for which he was seeking independence. Here he was in control, with the population largely behind him; and it was here that the tourists would come to nurture his dreams of an ‘Eastern Switzerland’.
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Not long after Stevenson, another politician came seeking to fish in troubled waters. On 8 May Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee boarded a train to Jammu, en route to Srinagar. He had planned to take his
satyagraha
deep into enemy territory. Anticipating trouble, the state government issued orders prohibiting him from entering. Mookerjee disregarded the order and crossed the border on the morning of the 11th. The police requested him to return, and when he refused arrested him and took him to Srinagar jail.

Before the Praja Parishad movement, Dr Mookerjee had been a lifelong constitutionalist. A Bengali
bhadralok
of the old school, he was comfortable in a suit and tie, sipping a glass of whisky. During the entire nationalist movement he never resorted to
satyagraha
or spent a single night in jail. Indeed, he had long held, in the words of his biographer, that ‘legislatures were the only forum for giving vent to diverse viewpoints on Government policies’. That belief sat oddly with Dr Mookerjee’s support for the protests of the Praja Parishad. And now he was sanctioning and leading a street protest himself.

Why then did Dr Mookerjee resort to methods with which he was unfamiliar? He told his follower (and future biographer) Balraj Madhok that he was convinced that this was the only language the prime minister understood. ‘As a man who had been [an] agitator all his life, Pandit Nehru, he felt, had developed a complex for agitational methods. He would bow before force and agitation but not before right or reason unless backed by might.’
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Now, in Srinagar jail, while charges were being compiled, Dr Mookerjee spent his time reading Hindu philosophy and writing to friends and relatives.
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In early June he fell ill. Pain in one of his legs was
accompanied by fever. The doctors diagnosed pleurisy. Then on 22 June he had a heart attack and died the following day.
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