POLITICS IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR ON THE EVE OF THE TRANSFER OF POWER PART 2

 POLITICS IN KASHMIR TO 1947

The State Silk Factory strike brought the condition of the ordinary people in Jammu and Kashmir State to the attention of the British Government of India in a manner which it was difficult to ignore. When, in October 1924, the Viceroy, Lord Reading, visited Srinagar, he was presented with a Memorandum signed by many prominent members of the Kashmiri Muslim community (including the Minoclizi-Kashmir) which outlined their grievances not only in the context of the State Silk Factory but in all aspects of their life. It called for an increase in the number of Muslims employed in State service. improvements in Muslim education, land reform, protection of the Muslim religious establishments from Hindu encroachments, the abolition of all forms of forced labour, equitable distribution of (;overnment contracts to all communities, and a State Constiti~tion providing for a Legislative Assembly in which the Muslin~s \\.ere properly represented. The Memorandum. in fact, pl-orided an outline programme of reform which any effective organised opposition to the Maharaja's autocracy could hardly fail to follow. It also indicated to the Political Department of the Government of India, which was responsible for the conduct of the British Crown's relations with the Indian Princely States, that there existed serious social and political problems in Jammu and Kashmir, a Princely State the strategic importance of which was only too well appreciated (as we have already seen in the previous two Chapters), which it would be unwise to ignore for much longer. This point was emphasised in 1929 by Sir Albion Bannerji, an Indian Christian who had served the Government of India with distinction and who, since 1927, had been Senior Member of the Council of State of Jammu and Kashmir, a post which was soon to be given the title Prime Minister. In March 1929 Bannerji resigned on the grounds, which he made public through the Indian vernacular press, that he could no longer be associated with the Maharaja's misgovernment. He declared that: Jammu and Kashmir State is labouring under many disadvantages, with a large Muhammadan population absolutely illiterate, labouring under poverty and very low economic conditions of living in the villages and practically governed like dumb driven cattle. There is no touch between the Government and the people, no suitable opportunity for representing grievances and the administrative machinery itself requires overhauling from top to bottom to bring it up to the modern conditions of efficiency. It has at present no sympathy with the people's wants and grievances.7 Bannerji was replaced as Senior Member of the Council by a British official, G.E.C. Wakefield, who had hitherto been in charge of the State's Police and Public Works. Wakefield was presiding over the Maharaja's administration when, in 193 1, a crisis developed in Srinagar from which the modern political history of Jammu and Kashmir can be directly traced. Some Indian commentators, with sharp eyes for any signs of a conspiracy, have suspected that Wakefield was more than a spectator in the precipitation of that crisis, and that he was acting in collusion with the British Government of 1ndia.' During the 1920s, in part a consequence of the development of Muslim associations interested in educational reform, a number of young Kashmiri Muslims were able to leave the State to study in institutions of higher learning in British India such as the University of the Punjab and the Aligarh Muslim ~niversit~."~ the beginning of the 1936s the first Kashmiri graduates from Aligarh had returned to their native State, and to Srinagar in particular, where they rapidly assumed of dominant place in local political activity in collaboration, and also in competition, with the old Muslim leadership which was headed by the two Mirwaiz. Among the young graduates who came back to the Vale about this time were Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, Mirza Afzal Beg, and G.M. Sadiq, men who in their various ways would dominate the internal politics of the State of Jammu and Kashmir for many decades. The result was a new focus of opposition to the autocracy of the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. It was still, inevitably, inextricably bound up with Islamic sensitivities, though it was supported by some members of the Kashmiri Brahmin (Pandit) community, like Prem Nath ~azaz," who sought to guide political activity in a secular direction, with the initially guarded approval of some of the Muslim young men who had been exposed while away in British India to the thoughts of Marx and Engels. It had very little to do with the hostility to the Maharaja's administration that was to develop in Poonch; and it received relatively restricted popular support in Jammu, where the bulk of the State's Hindu and Sikh population was concentrated. It made no perceptible impact in Ladakh, Baltistan and the Gilgit Wazarat and its dependencies. In 1931 one event more than any other seems to have turned a general dislike of the Maharaja's rule in the Vale of Kashmir into an organised opposition movement. There are various versions of the story; and there may well have been more than a single incident involved. It was reported, among other happenings, that a Mosque in Riasi in Jammu Province had been demolished by Hindus with the approval of the Maharaja's Government; that at another place in Jammu Muslims had been prevented from saying their prayers; that the Imam of a mosque in Jammu had been stopped by the authorities from giving his sermon (khutba) before Friday prayers; even that pages of the Holy Koran had been found discarded in a public latrine. The essential point common to all these stories is that in early June 1931 it was reported that in Jammu Province the Maharaja's Government, or officials in its employ, had caused Muslim worship to be disrupted and the Holy Koran to be insulted. When news of all this reached Srinagar it caused great outrage. There were fiery denunciations from mosque pulpits, processions and public meetings. On 25 June 193 1 at one such meeting a certain Abdul Qadeer, a nonKashmiri (he apparently came from the North-West Frontier region), made a particularly vehement speech advocating violence against the Maharaja's rule. He was promptly arrested. This provided a fresh focus for public demonstration and protest. Abdul Qadeer was put on trial at the Sessions Court. Srinagar, on (5 July 1931 ; but so great was the assembly of Muslims rvhich gathered outside the buildings that the proceedings had to be n1orved to the securer environment of the Srinagar C:ent~-a1 Gaol. It was outside the Gaol, on 13 July 193 1. when the trial of Abdul Qadeer jras reopened. that a crowd @thered only to be met with police baton charges. The police were resisted. stones were thnwn and eren. so some 1-epol-ts indicate, shots were fired at them. The police then opened fire. Some twenty-two demonstrators were killed as well as at least one member of the police (who was shot). 13 July 1931 became known in Kashmiri history as "Martyrs Day", the official beginning of a struggle for independence from alien rule (at that time the Hindu Maharaja and subsequently the Republic of India) which has not yet ended." It immediately produced Muslim protests and clashes between Muslim demonstrators and the State police throughout the Vale of Kashmir and in nearly every District in Jammu. Maharaja Sir Hari Singh was persuaded by some of his advisers that the immediate cause of the trouble was the encouragement given to Muslim agitators by his senior Minister, Wakefield, apparently acting as an agent of the Government of India. The Maharaja was convinced that the British were determined to punish him for his stand during the Round Table Conference in London in 1930 where, as we have seen, he had spoken out in a manner which was definitely not to the liking of the Political Department of the Government of India. There are still Indian writers who see the whole Abdul Qadeer affair as a British plot to destabilise the Government of Jammu and Kashmir as part of the Political Department's plan to secure the lease over the Gilgit Agency: they have even claimed that Abdul Qadeer was a professional agitator smuggled into Kashmir in the guise of a cook in the entourage of a British Officer, one Major ~ott.'~ Wakefield was dismissed and replaced, with the new title of Prime Minister, by Sir Hari Kishen Kaul, a distinguished Kashmiri Pandit. The Maharaja was certainly right in believing that the events of 13 July 1931 would not augment the good reputation of his State. A scarce week after the killings outside the Srinagar Central Gaol a Kashmir Committee was formed in British India by leading Muslims including that distinguished Kashmiri Sir Muhammad Iqbal who was strongly supported by the head of the Ahmadiya community at Qadian, Mirza Bashir Ahmed. Its aim was to alert the Government of India to the situation in the State of Jammu and Kashmir and to secure the appointment of an impartial Commission of Enquiry into the background to the crisis. It also resolved that henceforth, in memory of the martyrs of 13 July 1931, there should be observed a special Kashmir Day, for which the fateful date 14 August was selected. On the appointed day there were meetings all over India, in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Simla and elsewhere. Despite the prohibitions of the Maharaja, the Day produced demonstrations in his State including a rally of an estimated fifty thousand people outside the Jama Masjid in Srinagar. The crisis of June and July 193 1 in Srinagar was dominated by two Kashmiris. One was the religious leader Mirwaiz Mohammed Yusuf Shah; and the other was a young schoolmaster with a MSC Degree in (;hemistry from Aligarh Muslim University, Sheikh ~ohammed  Abdullah, one of those graduates who, as we have seen, had recently returned from their studies in British India. Mohammed Yusuf Shah had just succeeded his uncle in March 1931 as the Minuaiz-i-Kashmir, the acknowledged head of the Kashmiri Islamic community. Unlike his uncle, however, the new Mirwaiz was prepared to speak out openly against the policies of the Maharaja's Government. He was the chief inspiration behind the protests against the blasphemous insult to the Holy Koran which had resulted in the Abdul Qadeer crisis; but in this he was greatly assisted by his protege Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah. Sheikh Abdullah was born in 1905 at Sorah not far from Srinagar into a family of Kashmiri Brahmin origin which had converted to Islam in the 18th century.I3 His father, who died two weeks before his birth, had been a dealer in pashm (or pashmina, the undercoat of sheep from Western Tibet which was the basis of the Kashmir shawl trade). While poor, his family were evidently well connected; and Sheikh Abdullah was able to obtain an excellent education culminating in his MSc at Aligarh (unlike the degrees in law or the arts usually acquired by aspiring politicians in the British Indian Empire). On the eve of the crisis he was employed in a rather humble, and to his own mind far from satisfactory, position of schoolmaster at the State High School (on a salary of Rs. 60 per month), having failed to secure a gazetted post in the State Government service. He had set up what came to be known as the Fateh Kadal Reading Room, a meeting place where young men of like mind could gather to discuss the problems of the day without running foul of the Maharaja's ordinances against public assemblies. He appears at this time to have been (or to have given the public impression of being) an extremely devout, and highly orthodox (Hanifite), Muslim and, as such, to have won the affection and approbation of Mirwaiz Mohammed Yusuf Shah. Even as a young man he impressed all who met him, not always favourably, in part because of his obvious intelligence and in part, no doubt, because of his sheer size - he was over six feet tall and towered above most of his fellow Kashmiris. Between them, Mirwaiz Mohammed Yusuf Shah, with his religious prestige, and Sheikh Abdullah with his charismatic personality and organising ability, made a formidable team. The opposition which they inspired, reinforced by the protests of distinguished Muslims in British India, resulted in the Mahar.7Ja.s appointment, under considerable pressure from the Government of India, of a Commission of Enquiry to be presided over by a senior British official from the Indian Political Department, R. (later Sir Bertram) Glancy; and in early 1932 the Maharaja found it expedient to appoint a new Prime Minister, Colonel E.J.D. C:ol\.in who \vas seconded from the Indian Political Department (and \vho remained in office until 1936). The Glancy Commission, in which the Chnirmm was assisted by four Kashmiris, two Muslims including Chaudhri Ghulam ~bbas,'~ and two Hindus including the Kashmiri Pandit intellectual Prem Nath Bazaz, obliged the Maharaja to grant the State a Constitution supported by a significant degree of freedom of speech and association. Meanwhile both Mirwaiz Mohammed Yusuf Shah and Sheikh Abdullah had served terms in the Maharaja's prisons, which did nothing to diminish their popular standing. By the time that the Constitution came into being, in 1934, politics in Srinagar had developed rapidly. A party had been established by a group of Kashmiri patriots including Sheikh Abdullah and Mirwaiz Mohammed Yusuf Shah, the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, which became the major vehicle for opposition to the Maharaja. It held it first annual assembly in 1932. Early Muslim Conference activists included Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas (from Jammu) as well as those newly fledged graduates Mirza Afzal Beg, and G.M. Sadiq, who were joined by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed. The 1934 Constitution provided for a Legislative Assembly (with severely limited powers and no control over the appointment of Ministers which remained with the Maharaja) in which there were thirty-three elected seats out of a total of seventy-five, of which twenty-one were reserved for Muslims (with ten for Hindus and two for Sikhs). The use of communal constituencies, a highly restricted electorate (as little as 3% of the total adult population it has been estimated by some observers), a by no means impartial system of scrutiny of nominations and the presence of nominated and appointed members (who were in a majority in the 1934 Constitution), combined to produce a far from perfectly democratic arrangement.I5 It did, however, create a forum for political activity which the new Muslim Conference exploited to the full, dominating the Muslim constituencies.