India After Gandhi (61 page)

After his illness, Nehru was able to persuade the party to return Lal Bahadur Shastri to the Cabinet. Shastri was officially called ‘minister without portfolio’, but in fact functioned as the
de facto
deputy to the prime minister. The two shared a language, a home state and a history of being in the same jails at around the same time. Nehru trusted and liked Shastri, whose own quiet, understated personality was in such marked contrast to his own.

The first assignment entrusted to Shastri pertained to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. On 27 December 1963 a major crisis had been sparked by the theft of a holy relic, a hair of the Prophet Mohammed, from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar. A week after it vanished, the relic mysteriously reappeared in the mosque. No one knew how it came back, just as no one knew how it had vanished in the first place. And no one knew whether the relic now in place was the genuine article, or a fake.

Through the month of January there were protests and demonstrations in the Valley. The ripples spread through the Muslim world. In distant East Pakistan there were religious riots aimed at the minority Hindu community, hundreds of thousands of whom fled to India. Now there was the danger of retaliatory riots targeting Muslims in India itself.

In the last week of January Nehru dispatched Lal Bahadur Shastri to Kashmir. After speaking to officials, and consulting local politicians, Shastri decided to hold a special showing, or
deedar,
to certify whether the returned relic was genuine. A panel of senior clerics was constituted to view the relic. They did so on 3 February, and to palpable relief all round decided that this was the real article. Calm returned to the Valley. To keep the peace going the government of India appointed, as chief minister, G. M. Sadiq, a politician known for his left-wing views, but also forhisintegrity.
¹⁸

The Hazratbal incident brought home, once more, the fact that trouble in Kashmir had its repercussions on life in the subcontinent as a whole. The China fiasco had made Nehru more alert to the need to seek a final resolution of the Kashmir dispute. For India could not afford to have two hostile fronts. He was encouraged in this line of thinking by his old friend Lord Mountbatten. In April 1963 Mountbatten had told Nehru that ‘if his glory had at one time, brought India credit’ in the
world, the country, and he, now had a ‘tarnished image’, principally owing to the failure to settle the question of Kashmir. The Englishman felt that this could be ‘rectified’ by a ‘heroic gesture by India’, such as the ‘granting of independence to the [Kashmir] valley regardless of the Pakistani attitude’.
¹⁹

In fact, during 1962 and 1963 there were several rounds of talks with Pakistan on the issues that divided the two countries. Here, the government of India was represented by the experienced Sardar Swaran Singh, while Pakistan was represented by the young and ambitious Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. At these talks no one represented Kashmir. But, as the Hazratbal incident showed, it was not prudent to neglect the feelings of the people at the centre of the dispute. And who better to take their pulse than Sheikh Abdullah? By the end of 1963 Nehru was already thinking of releasing the Sheikh, who by this time had been in jail for ten years. The stroke at Bhubaneshwar, with its intimations of mortality, made him think further in this regard. Why not release Abdullah and have a last shot at solving the Kashmir problem before he was gone?

Sheikh Abdullah, we may recall, had been arrested by the government of India in August 1953. No charges were brought against him, but in January 1958 he was suddenly released. He made his way to the Valley, where he met with a spectacular reception. He addressed well-attended public meetings in Srinagar, including one at the Hazratbal mosque. This seems to have unnerved his enemies in the administration. Towards the end of April he was arrested once more. This time he was shifted to a jail in Jammu, and charged with plotting with Pakistan to break up India. He was accused, among other things, of attempting ‘to facilitate wrongful annexation of the territories of the state by Pakistan; create communal ill-feeling and disharmony in the state and receive secret aid from Pakistan in the shape of money, bombs, etc.’.
²⁰

The charges were, to put it politely, trumped up. While the Sheikh contemplated independence, he never wanted to join Pakistan. And while the idea of being the ruler of a free Kashmir appealed to him, he saw as his subjects all the people of the state, regardless of religion. As even his political opponents conceded, he had not a communal bone in his body.

Speaking at his trial, the Sheikh said that he stood for a single objective: the right of self-determination for the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who, he insisted, were ‘not a flock of sheep and goats to be driven by force one way or another’. Even so, he repeatedly underlined his commitment to secularism, his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi and his once-strong friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru. He recalled that Nehru himself had conceded that ‘the people of the state are the final arbiters of their fate’ , significantly adding: ‘He does not, I believe, deny this right to us even now.’
²¹

Two months after the Sheikh’s first arrest, in 1953, Nehru had written that ‘the mere fact of his detention is of course a matter which troubles me greatly’.
²²
The months turned into years, deepening the guilt. One way of sublimating the guilt was to take a close interest in the education of his friend’s children (which, by some accounts, he even helped pay for). In July 1955 Nehru was visited by Abdullah’s eldest son, Farooq, then studying in a medical college in Jaipur. Farooq told the prime minister that his classmates routinely referred to his father as a ‘traitor’. This prompted Nehru to write to a minister in the Rajasthan state government, asking him to ensure that the boy had ‘proper living quarters and some friendly companionship’, so that he did not develop any ‘complexes and the like’ . As Nehru put it, ‘Some people foolishly imagine that because we have had differences with Sheikh Abdullah, therefore we are not favourably inclined towards his son and his family. This, of course, is not only absurd but is just the reverse of how we feel. Personally, because Sheikh Abdullah is in prison, I feel rather a special responsibility that we should try to help his sons and family.’
²³

In 1964, woken up by the China war, and put on high alert by his own fading health, Nehru decided to put an end to the matter. He spoke to the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, and after obtaining his consent, decided to release Sheikh Abdullah. The news was conveyed to the world by Nehru’s confidant Lal Bahadur Shastri. Abdullah’s detention, said Shastri, had been ‘a matter of pain to the government, and particularly to the prime minister'.)
²⁴

On the morning of 8 April the Sheikh stepped out of Jammu jail, a free man once more. He drove in an open car through the streets of the town, accepting garlands and bouquets. The next day he gave his first public speech. According to a newspaper report, ‘Sheikh Abdullah said the two pressing problems facing the subcontinent – communal strife and Kashmir – should be solved during Prime Minister Nehru’s lifetime.
He described Mr Nehru as the last of the stalwarts who had worked with Gandhiji and said that after him a solution of these problems would become difficult.’

Nehru had invited Abdullah to come and stay with him in New Delhi. The Sheikh said he would first go to the Valley, consult his friends and supporters, and meet the Prime Minister after the Id festival (which fell on 23 April). On the 11th he set off by car to Srinagar, a journey that normally would take a few hours. But the Sheikh travelled leisurely, stopping at towns and villages on the way. Wherever he halted, he also spoke. Thousands turned up to see and hear him, trudging miles from their own isolated hamlets. In these gatherings, women outnumbered men.

In his speeches, Abdullah described his state as a bride cherished by two husbands – India and Pakistan – neither of whom ‘cared to ascertain what the Kashmiris wanted’. He said he would meet Jawaharlal Nehru with an open mind, and asked the Indians not to make up their minds beforehand either. As a journalist who interviewed him noted, the Sheikh had ‘no personal bitterness, no rancour’ – rather, he was imbued with ‘a strong sense of mission’, a compelling desire to seek a solution to Kashmir. At one meeting he was asked what he now felt about Nehru. Abdullah answered that he bore no ill will, for ‘misunderstandings do occur even among brothers. I shall not forget the love Mr Nehru has showered on me in the past . . . I will meet him as an old friend and comrade.’

On 18 April a week after he had left Jammu the Sheikh drove in an open jeep from Anantnag to the Kashmiri capital Srinagar. The thirty-mile route was lined by a ‘near-hysterical crowd’ of half a million people. The road was covered with freshly plucked daisies and tulips and festooned with arches and bunting. When he finally entered the town, ‘Srinagar’s entire population . . . jammed the labyrinth of streets which were so richly decorated that even the sun did not penetrate the canopy of Kashmir silks, carpets and shawls’.

Meanwhile, back in Delhi, the prospect of talks between Nehru and Abdullah alarmed many members of the ruling Congress Party. Senior Cabinet ministers issued statements insisting that the question of Kashmir was ‘closed’; the state was, and would stay, an integral part of India. More combative still were members of the Jana Sangh. The party’s general secretary, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, deplored the Sheikh’s recent speeches, where he seemed to have ‘questioned even the axiomatic facts
of the Kashmir question’ (such as its final accession to India). ‘Instead of stabilizing the political situation of the state’, complained Upadhyaya, ‘Sheikh Abdullah has tried to unsettle every issue.’

The opposition from the Hindu right was predictable. As it happens, the left was also suspicious of Abdullah and his intentions. The Communist Party thought he was in danger of falling into an ‘imperialist trap’, designed to detach Kashmir from India. Among the Indian political establishment, it seems, only Nehru’s mind remained open. But he was to receive unexpected support from two old stalwarts who had also worked with Mahatma Gandhi. One was Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as ‘JP’, the former radical socialist who for the past decade had been a leading light of the Sarvodaya movement. JP was an old friend of the Sheikh; he had also been a vocal advocate of better relations with Pakistan. In 1962 he had set up an India—Pakistan Conciliation Group which, among other things, sought to find an ‘equitable and honourable’ solution to the Kashmir dispute.
²⁵

Now, welcoming Sheikh Abdullah’s release in a signed article in the
Hindustan Times
, JP deplored the insinuations against Abdullah by politicians inside and outside the Congress. These had threatened that he would be put back in jail if he went ‘too far’. ‘It is remarkable’, commented JP acidly, ‘how the freedom fighters of yesterday begin so easily to imitate the language of the imperialists.’

What alarmed politicians in Delhi was the Sheikh’s talk about ascertaining afresh the wishes of the Kashmiri people. JP thought this eminently reasonable, for the elections in Jammu and Kashmir in 1957 and 1962 were anything but free and fair. In any case, if India was ‘so sure of the verdict of the people, why are we so opposed to giving them another opportunity to reiterate it? A satisfactory settlement of the Kashmir question would greatly improve relations between India and Pakistan. JP hoped that the leaders of India would display ‘the vision and statesmanship that this historic moment demands’. He added, ‘Happily, the one sane voice in the ruling party is that of the Prime Minister himself.’
²⁶

More unexpected perhaps was the endorsement received by Nehru from C. Rajagopalachari (‘Rajaji’), the veteran statesman who had once been an intimate associate of the prime minister but had latterly become apolitical opponent. As the founder of the Swatantra Party, Rajaji had savaged the prime minister’s economic policies. These criticisms sometimes had a sharp personal edge. Now, to the surprise of his followers,
he came out strongly in favour of Nehru’s initiative in releasing Abdullah. Like JP, he deplored the threats to put the Sheikh back in jail, thus to ‘force him into silence and submission’. Fortunately, ‘the Prime Minister may be ill but he preserves his balance, and has evidently refused to take any foolish step and degrade India’.

The freeing of Abdullah, argued Rajaji, should act as a prelude to allowing ‘the people of Kashmir [to] exercise their human right to rule themselves as well as they can’. Indeed, solving the Kashmir tangle would pave the way for a larger resolution of the Indo-Pak dispute itself. Thus, Rajaji wrote of the need to

try and think fundamentally in the present crisis. Are we to yield to the fanatical emotions of our anti-Pakistan groups? Is there any hope for India or for Pakistan, if we go on hating each other, suspecting each other, borrowing and building up armaments against each other – building our two houses, both of us on the sands of continued foreign aid against a future Kurukshetra? We shall surely ruin ourselves forever if we go on doing this . . . We shall be making all hopes of prosperity in the future a mere mirage if we continue this arms race based on an ancient grudge and the fears and suspicions flowing from it.
²⁷

In Kashmir, meanwhile, Sheikh Abdullah was talking to his colleagues and associates. He discovered that while he had been in jail, he had come to be associated with the Pakistan party. At his trial Abdullah had insisted that he never expressed a desire for Kashmir to join Pakistan. India or independence – those were the only two options he had countenanced. But the trial proceedings never reached the common people of the Valley. They knew only that he was being tried for conspiracy against the Indian nation. Would not that make him, by default, a friend of Pakistan?