Dreams Of Lion Valley

Informed and sympathetic biographers must locate ‘the lion of Kashmir’ in Kashmir’s struggle for freedom against the repressive Dogra raj. Ajit Bhattacharjea has done just that. In the 1930s and 1940s, we hear Abdullah thundering at a doomed social order and an economic system resting on inequity, injustice and exploitation. Without being a firebrand revolutionary, he worked the system as a consummate behind-the-scenes insider who influenced everyday events through connections and friendships. Nehru, the future prime minister of free India, was probably his best friend outside the Valley.

In his lively and readable book, Bhattacharjea argues that Abdullah’s career was informed by political and ideological purpose and was shaped in response to the vicissitudes of contemporary politics. Unlike Nehru, Abdullah was at bottom a mass preacher and public teacher, busy preparing the masses for their redemption through a socio-economic programme. This was the idea behind the ‘Naya Kashmir’ plan, an expression of his fiercely egalitarian worldview.

Abdullah enthusiastically embraced the mission of reaching out to the thousands who wanted to be free of exploitative rulers and secure a dignified place under the sun. His Kashmiriyat was a political rather than a religious statement, reflecting the people’s regional fears and aspirations, Muslims and Pandits alike. It connected well—though nobody was prepared to establish that connection—with the regional and linguistic manifestations of Indian nationalism in other parts of India.

Kashmiriyat, which is nowadays grossly misunderstood, seemed compatible with the principle of ‘unity in diversity.’ Moreover, Abdullah, a quintessentially secular politician, lent legitimacy to this profoundly secular idea. But our rulers, having inherited the Partition legacy, felt that any kind of Kashmiriyat conflicted with the Nehruvian vision of a secular state. A small but influential group misled Nehru into believing that Abdullah was jettisoning the national interest.

Abdullah’s arrest on August 8, 1953, was a monumental folly. The circumstances leading to it are shrouded in mystery. And the authorities did not take into confidence Midhat Kamil Kidwai, then chief secretary in Kashmir. According to Karan Singh, the Sadr-i-Riyasat, he was blissfully unaware of what was happening. When he learnt that Abdullah had been dismissed and arrested, the chief secretary "sank down on the steps holding his head in his hands and was revived only after he had been plied with a couple of stiff whiskies".

Abdullah was admired by those who knew him as a warm and generous person. Some, to be sure, thought he was petty and vindictive. Like most public figures, he was riven by contradictions and ambivalence. He lived and spoke spontaneously and saw words as the agent of instant change. He was not quite aware of the inexorable influence of time and history. He exaggerated and indulged in myth-making, like the fantasy of azadi. He raised expectations which he couldn’t fulfil; hence the great fall and the charge of betrayal.

Abdullah is faulted—though not by Bhattacharjea, who is an unabashed admirer—for being inconsistent in his attitude towards Pakistan, his ‘corrosive compromise’ with Indira Gandhi after the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965, and the volte face he executed in March 1972 on Kashmir’s accession to India. In his last chapter, Bhattacharjea traces the widening gap between Abdullah and Indira Gandhi.

Opinions will vary widely on a final evaluation of Abdullah’s role in Kashmir politics. But he was the exemplar for the pre-1947 generation of the necessary marriage of ‘Marxism of the mind’ and ‘liberalism of the heart.’