Kashmir's flawed hero

Chitralekha Zutshi's book on Sheikh Abdullah is outstanding, and there is much to learn for readers irrespective of their political affiliations

Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir 

Author: Chitralekha Zutshi

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 384

Price: Rs 799

So, what was Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir? A good guy? A bad guy? A traitor? A patriot? All? None?

This book answers these questions and more objectively, based on research spanning 30 years.

The book is outstanding, and there is much to learn irrespective of your political affiliations.

Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah (1905-82) was a deeply conflicted individual. He was a fierce Kashmiri nationalist but also aspired to lead the Muslims of

the entire Indian subcontinent — Chitralekha Zutshi says this could be one reason M A Jinnah gave him short shrift — and become the sole leader of Kashmiri Muslims. This ambition brought him early into conflict with the Mirwaiz — Kashmir had two — who saw in Abdullah a challenge to their own position as old guard landed elites as well as government servants who had much to lose by taking on Maharaja Hari Singh, Kashmir’s Hindu ruler.

Abdullah used a strategy that was to become his hallmark in  politics — playing both ends against the middle. The two Mirwaiz were rivals and he leveraged this, while denouncing them as Wahhabis (saint worship is a key element in Kashmiri Islam) and even worse, servants of a Hindu Maharaja. This gave rise to the clashes that were popularly called fights between Shers (Abdullah’s followers) and Bakras (followers of the Mirwaiz of the Jama Masjid, Yusuf Shah).

At the same time, many of Abdullah’s closest advisors and friends were Hindus, testifying to the idea of Kashmir, where it was possible for people of different religious affiliations to accept and acknowledge differences, and to co-exist despite real conflict and inter- and intra-religious violence at particular historical moments.

Abdullah’s politics grew to become much more than just the leadership of a religious majority ruled by the autocratic ruler of a minority. He himself came from an extremely poor family and understood deprivation. This made communism an attractive creed, to the point that a young Indira Gandhi wrote to her father that Abdullah was completely in thrall to communists. This also informed the revolutionary land reforms he implemented as Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, that ended tenancy and debt bondage among the peasantry, instantly making them landholders, though they were implemented poorly and came back to bite him politically. The Dogra monarchy’s exploitative economic and political system has been researched extensively by many scholars, including Mridu Rai, in her brilliant book Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects. This book explains the response to that system.

That said, his struggle against the monarchy did not make Abdullah the embodiment of democratic politics. The book describes him as a highly autocratic leader, suspicious of colleagues and intolerant of dissenting views when it came to managing his political affairs. Whether it was communists like Baba Pyare Lal and Freda Bedi, Maulana Masoodi (General Secretary of the National Conference), Balraj Puri or Afzal Beg, National Conference members and deep personal friends who fell out following differences in doctrine, all of them pointed to Abdullah’s insecurity as the reason for the rupture in relationship.

This insecurity came from the central dilemma in the life of the Sheikh: How was he to balance his stature as a representative of Kashmiri nationalism while remaining a loyal Indian who did not question India’s absolute sovereignty over Kashmir? The book says this issue haunted him to the end of his days. His rejection of the Two Nation theory ruled out accession to Pakistan; but much of India’s political class saw him as a traitor who espoused divided loyalty. In postcolonial India, this was unacceptable.  For this, he was incarcerated for two decades.

Despite this, maybe because of it, he was one of Kashmir’s most beloved leaders until the current government “erased” him in 2020 by removing his birth anniversary from the list of official holidays in the Union Territory of J&K. In 2022, his image on J&K police medals was replaced by the emblem of the Government of India.

What status did he really want Kashmir to have? At first, it was the idea of Switzerland, an independent unaligned enclave. But partly because of his friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru, distrust of Pakistani politicians despite his own personal popularity in that country, and little international traction for the idea, he revised his commitment to Kashmiri self-determination and later, came to terms with the Indian government in 1975.

But India itself was not averse to the idea of accepting Kashmir as a confederation and Ms Zutshi cites evidence of correspondence between Foreign Secretary Y D Gundevia and the eminent lawyer V K T Chari about the idea that India and Pakistan would remain sovereign states while

Kashmir would be brought into the confederation.

Because he spent a large part of his life in prison, Abdullah’s family life and his children suffered badly. His wife Akbar Jahan known in Kashmir as Madre Meharban (benevolent mother) became a focal point for his political activity when he was in detention. When it came to naming his successor, and he could not decide between his son in law, G M Shah and son Farooq, it was Akbar Jahan who put her foot down on Farooq. Another recent book, Farooq of Kashmir, tells the story slightly differently.

Based on new archival sources as well as oral histories, the book is a rich, many-layered exploration of one of the most towering personalities in India’s history. Anyone who wants to understand Kashmir and its place in India must read it.