Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah of Kashmir, 1965–1975: From Externment to Enthronement
| Author | Rakesh Ankit |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023018762820 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah
Studies in Indian Politics
6(1) 88–102
of Kashmir, 1965–1975: From
© 2018 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
Externment to Enthronement
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023018762820
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/inp
Rakesh Ankit1
Abstract
Ousted as Premier, Jammu and Kashmir, in August 1953 and anointed as Chief Minister in February 1975,
the so-called ‘Lion of Kashmir’ Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was imprisoned, in between these years,
ultimately on charges of treason, with brief intermissions. Much has been written about the politics
of Kashmir dispute, less so about the Sheikh and his personal troubles especially after the death of his
friend Jawaharlal Nehru in May 1964. This somewhat overshadowed decade of his life, in comparison
with his hey-days of 1947–1953, shows the kind of settlement in Kashmir that the government of Indira
Gandhi was willing to consider. More interestingly, it shows how Sheikh Abdullah was willing to agree
to it and provides the context in which he moved from being in a conflictual relationship with New
Delhi to becoming, once again, a collaborator in Srinagar in 1975, thereby showcasing the limits of
Abdullah’s politics and popularity.
Keywords
Kashmir, India, Sheikh Abdullah, Indira Gandhi
Introduction
Between August 1953 and June 1972, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah of Kashmir spent 12 years in
Indian jails under four different spells of arrest, detention and internment (Abdullah, 1993). During this
period, the state of Jammu and Kashmir saw, successively, the regimes of the corrupt Bakshi Ghulam
Mohammad,2 ineffective Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq,3 and the Congressman Syed Mir Qasim.4
Simultaneously, the government of India put together a constitutional and electoral facade there, starting
from 1957. From June 1972, however, Abdullah entered into negotiations with Prime Minister Indira
1 Loughborough University, Diwani Takia, Kathalbari, Darbhanga, Bihar, India.
2 Born in 1907, the Bakshi was a National Conference politician, who served as Premier, Kashmir from 1953 to 1964. He died in
1972.
3 Born in 1912, Sadiq succeeded the Bakshi in 1964 and then continued in the renamed office of Chief Minister, Kashmir till 1971.
4 See Qasim (1992). He was the Chief Minister of Kashmir from 1971 to 1975.
Corresponding author:
Rakesh Ankit, Loughborough University, Diwani Takia, Kathalbari, Darbhanga 846004, Bihar, India.
E-mail: rakesh.ankit@gmail.com
Ankit 89
Gandhi, leading to the Indira-Sheikh Accord and his consequent return as Chief Minister in February
1975. The Sheikh’s troubles through the 1950s and 1960s have been put down to his ambitions and
ambiguities regarding the place of Jammu and Kashmir within the Indian union (Guha, 2008).
Subsequently, however, the India–Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971 made him see quite clearly that, first,
an independent Kashmir and, second, Pakistan’s participation in any process towards it, were then out
of question. The period from 1965 to 1975, thus, provides for a compelling study of the trajectory of the
Kashmir question and the turn-about in its chief protagonist, at this time, as he went from being a
persona non grata in the state to becoming its Chief Minister. Based on the papers of the Gandhian
Jayaprakash Narayan (hereafter, JP), journalist J.J. Singh,5 Quaker pacifist Horace Alexander,6 and the
bureaucrat P.N. Haksar, each of whom were involved in this transition in Abdullah’s personal fortunes
and the concomitant shift in Kashmir’s political tracks, this article attempts to delineate the key themes,
events and personalities of this process and throws a different light on the hopes and fears of all con-
cerned. It approaches the problem of Kashmir and the personality of Sheikh Abdullah, in this period,
within the prism of democratic manipulation manufacturing a moment for meeting Abdullah’s aims
within the Indian union. In traversing this trajectory, the tracks of Sheikh Abdullah’s political career
provide a touching rod, over-shadowed by the well-documented minutiae of the special constitutional
arrangement of Kashmir with India, namely, Article 370 (Noorani, 2011, 2012).
The twists and turns herein can be located in the large context of the politics of resistance in Kashmir,
which in turn they serve to illuminate, having had a chequered relationship with it. With the state currently
locked in a conflict against the society, much of the recent past, 1990s, and a lot of the last decade (2008–
2017) has been a catalogue of determinisms—historical and political, imaginations—of sacred soil and
profane people, ideologies—post-colonial and primordial, and resistance—of everyday life. In such a
scenario, Abdullah’s political career that served as a rationale for Kashmiri politics for so long, then, serves
as a raison d’etre to reflect upon it, today. After all, Abdullah was the peasant mobilizer of 1930s–1940s,
who became the Prime Minister (1947–1953) and was the rebel imprisoned for sedition (1953–1972), who
was first installed and then reduced to running a patron–client administration (1977–1982). This meant
that while for New Delhi, Abdullah went from being a man who for long personified the ‘Kashmir prob-
lem’ (Guha, 2004, p. 3905), to becoming the person on whom the latter relied for the solution to the
problem (Lockwood, 1975, p. 256); for Kashmiris, he made the journey in reverse: from personifying
the ideal of ‘self-determination’ and symbolizing aspirations of ‘identity assertion’ (Lockwood, 1969,
p. 395), to exemplifying the smothering and stifling of the crucial questions of its relations with India
(Puri, 1983, p. 186). Quite naturally then, the corpus of writings on ‘demystifying’ Abdullah, as well as
‘understanding’ Kashmir comprise the entire range from the uncritical to the condemnatory.7
1965–1967
Sheikh Abdullah was arrested on 7 May 1965 from the Palam airport in New Delhi as he stepped out of
his flight and was taken to Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu. He had gone abroad on 13 February on the Hajj
pilgrimage and the charges against him read like, at best, vague assumptions, namely, that he had been
5 On J.J. Singh, see Shaffer (2012).
6 On Alexander, see Ankit (2014).
7 See Bazaz (1941, 1945, 1978), Saraf (1977, 1979), Volumes 1 and 2, Taseer (1986), Mullick, My Years with Nehru: Kashmir,
Bhattacharjea (2008), Hussain (2016), and Para (2013). Also, see Abdullah’s own (1993). See the latest addition to the massive
literature on Kashmir, Snedden (2015).
90
Studies in Indian Politics 6(1)
‘leaning towards Pakistan embassies abroad’ and that in his meeting with the Chinese Premier Chou
En-Lai at Algiers, he had allegedly discussed Kashmir’s independence. His friends—from the self-
proclaimed Gandhi’s emissary Sudhir Ghosh (1967) to Horace Alexander and from the rebel-activist
with a cause Mridula Sarabhai (Basu, 1996) to JP—had been worried for the unpredictable and the
temperamental Sheikh during this visit. Twenty days into his trip, Ghosh had shared his anxiety with
Alexander when the Sheikh headed to the UK that
if, under pressure from over-zealous British newspaper men, Sheikh Abdullah makes a few unwise statements
in London…A few wrong remarks will give those elements in the Congress party who are anxious to push their
knives into Sheikh the necessary handle to upset the possibility of any settlement.8
Two days before his return, Mridula Sarabhai was convinced as she confided in JP that ‘there is no doubt
left that even before he went abroad, a conspiracy had been hatched to create such circumstances as
would compel him to remain out of the country’.9
Mridula alleged that the Congress hardliners had, actually, not wanted the Sheikh to get a passport to
go abroad, instead wanting him arrested, and, second, they had sought to spread an impression that
‘Sheikh Abdullah was reluctant to call himself an Indian’. They had taken up the story of the Sheikh’s
leanings towards Pakistan embassies abroad, started a storm on his utterances abroad and, finally, after
the news came of Abdullah’s meeting with Chou En-Lai, clamoured for action against Abdullah, getting
the government to cancel the endorsements on his passport and asking him to return by 30 April. She was
convinced that ‘a decision had been taken that if Sheikh Saheb returns, he would be arrested immediately
and sent to an unknown place for house detention’ and was writing to JP to intervene ‘to stop this…to
persuade the Government not to arrest Sheikh Saheb on arrival and give him an opportunity to explain
his activities to the country’. As her own efforts ‘seemed to be falling’ and there was a possibility of the
‘Jana Sangh members creating uproar’, she needed JP’s good offices to ‘normalise the relationship’
between the Sheikh and the government. Claiming a deep-seated conspiracy, Mridula claimed that her
correspondence with the Sheikh, while he was abroad, had been stopped and Abdullah’s letter to Prime
Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri explaining his position was mysteriously lost to prevent ‘Sheikh Saheb’s
version to reach Lal Bahadurji’. She also informed JP that, contrary to the widespread and prejudicial
claims about Abdullah’s anti-India utterances abroad, the returning Hajjis had reported that ‘in the
Muslim Conference at Mecca and in Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Saheb’s role was exemplary’. He had worked
in close collaboration with government of India’s...
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