A declassified CIA report of April 22, 1964, titled ‘Sheikh Abdullah and the Kashmir issue’, was released last year. The report throws light on some vital details about Sheikh and the US interests in the Kashmir region. According to the declassified document, “Sheikh Abdullah was also moved strongly by Kashmir’s feeling of separateness. Conversations with him in 1947—and, more particularly, with his wife and some close associates—bear out that he then favoured some solution in which the state would go its way. He seems to have agreed to accession to India out of the strength of his regard for Nehru and his fear that otherwise the state would be overrun by Pakistan…. In time, as Nehru continued to build a strong and centralised federal structure in New Delhi, Abdullah found himself questioning New Delhi’s policies—first privately and then in 1953 publicly.” The CIA report says this culminated in his arrest, and that the suspicion of “foreign contact was directed mainly at Pakistan, but also at the United States, which, in heyday of anti-American feeling in India, was portrayed as encouraging Abdullah in his schemes for an autonomous or independent Kashmir, which would then become a US base”.