'The People's Militia: Communists and Kashmiri nationalism in the 1940s'
I've posted below an academic article I wrote about the influence of the left in Kashmir, and particularly within Kashmiri nationalism, in the 1940s. The full citation is:
Andrew Whitehead, ‘The People’s Militia: Communists and Kashmiri nationalism in the 1940s’, Twentieth Century Communism: a journal of international history, 2, 2010, pp.141-68. The article was republished in Partition: the long shadow, ed Urvashi Butalia, Zubaan / Viking Penguin: Delhi, 2015
There are some photos of the militia on another page of this site - do take a look:
| aw__comms_in_kashmiri_nationalism.pdf |
Twentieth Century Communism – Issue 2
The People’s Militia: Communists and Kashmiri nationalism in the 1940s
Andrew Whitehead
‘The people’s movement of Kashmir’, declared the British
communist Rajani Palme Dutt in the summer of 1946, ‘is the
strongest and most militant of any Indian State … Its leader,
Sheikh Abdulla [sic], impressed me as one of the most honest, courageous
and able political leaders I had the pleasure of seeing in India.’1
This was warm praise from the austere Palme Dutt. His week-long
stay in the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, in July 1946 came at the end of
a five month visit to India which was intended largely to guide and
instruct the Communist Party of India (CPI).2 It arose from a
personal invitation from Sheikh Abdullah, the leader of the National
Conference, the main nationalist party in princely-ruled Kashmir. By
the time Dutt reached the Kashmir Valley, Abdullah had been arrested
for leading a mass protest campaign against the maharaja. The same
issue of Dutt’s Labour Monthly that published the account of his trip
to Kashmir also carried Sheikh Abdullah’s speech in his own defence
at a trial in which he was sentenced to three years imprisonment for
making seditious speeches.3
Dutt, the British-born son of a Bengali doctor, was a doctrinaire
exponent of orthodoxy within the leadership of the Communist Party
of Great Britain (CPGB).4 In the British party, he was more feared
than loved; in the Indian party, his stock was much higher. Palme
Dutt’s India To-Day, a huge book first published in 1940 at which
time the author had never set foot in India, was enormously influential
there. Dutt acted as mentor to the younger party, and the CPI
leadership would have taken careful note of his comment that
Kashmir was ‘the political storm-centre of the Indian fight for
freedom’. In his Labour Monthly article, Dutt made much of the
resemblance of the National Conference5 emblem, a red flag with
plough, to the red flag with hammer and sickle which flew over the
bonnet of his car on the arduous road journey from Rawalpindi to
Srinagar. In the Kashmiri capital, under the thrall of what he
described as a ‘reign of terror’ established by the maharaja, he
attended Sheikh Abdullah’s trial:
the sympathy even among the soldiers and armed guards for
Abdulla was visible. When Abdulla entered the court, the entire
court with the exception of the judge stood up in his honour –
which was more than they had done for the judge. He saw me as
he entered and moved away from his guards to shake me by the
hand, and we exchanged greetings and I was able publicly to
express to him the admiration and support felt for his stand. The
proceedings were held up till we had completed these greetings.
A few days later, Dutt button-holed Jawaharlal Nehru, a friend and
ally of Abdullah, to advise him against ‘letting down the Kashmir
fight’. By the end of the following year, Nehru had become the first
prime minister of independent India and Sheikh Abdullah was in
power in what had become Indian Kashmir.
Rajani Palme Dutt’s ringing endorsement of Sheikh Abdullah and
the movement against autocracy in Kashmir both reflected and gave
impetus to Indian communist activity in this out-of-the-way valley in
the Himalayan foothills. Communists helped to shape Sheikh
Abdullah’s radical campaign against princely rule. In turn, Palme Dutt,
it has been suggested, saw in the mass action in Kashmir a potential
model for left campaigns, midway between insurrectionism and the
restraint advocated by Nehru’s Indian National Congress.6 Yet in the
year following Dutt’s visit to Srinagar, communists in Kashmir took the
lead in organising a popular armed force. Hundreds of young Kashmiris
enrolled in the militia, and some saw active service while helping to
repulse an invasion by pro-Pakistan irregular forces. The militia bore
such leftist imprints as political officers, a women’s wing, and a linked
cultural front staging popular dramas and organising propaganda.
The establishment of a volunteer force was a remarkable innovation
in a part of India where there was no martial tradition. The
involvement of women in the militia was even more of a breach with
convention in such a conservative region, with little space for women
in public life. For Indian communists, too, this was new territory. The
party had little history of armed activity, and was sharply critical
during the Second World War of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian
National Army, a force raised outside Indian soil which fought alongside
Japanese troops. The militia in Kashmir was a revolutionary force
– part of a political mobilisation which saw a new political order take
shape there. Sheikh Abdullah’s advent to power marked the end of
more than a century of princely rule, and he became the first
Kashmiri Muslim to hold the reins of power for well over three
hundred years. The volunteer force, however, was not a challenge to
the newly independent Indian state; rather it was established to
support Kashmir’s accession to India and was equipped and trained by
the Indian army. It was a defence force, intended to safeguard the
Kashmiri capital from a very real threat of occupation and ransacking
by armed Pakistani tribesmen, rather than a propagator of insurgency.
When after a few weeks the immediate danger to Srinagar abated, so
too did the temper of militia activity. The women’s section disbanded,
and the men’s militia was eventually incorporated into the Indian
armed forces.
Kashmir had not been a focus of communist activity prior to the
mid-1940s, and it largely disappeared from the party’s horizons
within months of Sheikh Abdullah’s political takeover. When at the
close of 1947 the CPI moved towards a policy of promoting a popular
uprising in southern India, this amounted to a repudiation of the
policy pursued in Kashmir. The communist approach to Kashmiri
nationalism in the mid-1940s harked back to the Popular Front
period – a practice of working within progressive parties which had
mass support. Although communists in Kashmir made no secret of
their political allegiances, they did not seek to organise as a separate
party. Their influence within the National Conference was considerable,
and endured into the early years of Sheikh Abdullah’s period in
office. As well as their leadership of the militia, communists also
shaped an exceptionally radical political programme with the ‘New
Kashmir’ manifesto of 1944. The land reform measures outlined in
the manifesto were eventually implemented, and are widely seen as
one of the most radical and successful measures of political and social
empowerment in South Asia. This article looks at the means by which
communists gained influence within the Kashmiri nationalist
movement, the nature of the militia which it helped to establish, and
the reasons for the failure to develop a mass-based communist
movement.
* * *
The mountain valley of Kashmir was ‘great game’ territory, part of
that inaccessible region of Asia where China, Tibet, Russia and the
British Raj all met. The principality of Jammu and Kashmir took
shape from the mid-1840s. A century later it was the biggest by area,
and second biggest by population, of all India’s princely states. The
ruling family were Dogri-speaking Hindus from Jammu – in other
words, outsiders in the eyes of many Kashmiris – who managed to
agglomerate, though never quite bind together, a huge area stretching
north from the Punjab plains, through valleys in the Himalayan
foothills, to some of the high mountain ranges. The Kashmir Valley
was the heartland of their fiefdom, though it accounted for well under
half of the princely state’s total population and less than a tenth of the
land area. It was the centre of the Kashmiri language and culture and
of a tolerant Sufi-influenced form of Islam, the religion of more than
ninety per cent of the Valley’s population. The maharajas were, by and
large, wealthy, sporting Anglophiles. They presided over an autocracy
where the Muslim majority was disadvantaged, facing heavy taxes and
other feudal-style impositions and with little prospect of education or
advancement.7
The opening of the Jhelum valley road in 1890 for the first time
allowed access to Srinagar by wheeled transport and started to chip
away at Kashmir’s political and intellectual isolation. From the
1920s, increasing numbers of civil servants and army officers
descended on Srinagar during the summer to escape the blistering
heat of the plains. There was travel in the other direction too. The
offspring of Kashmir’s tiny Muslim middle class started to secure an
education in Punjab or further afield. From the beginning of the
1930s, popular politics began to take root in the Kashmir Valley, and
achieved some concessions from autocratic princely rule.
Newspapers and public gatherings for political purposes were
permitted from 1932. From the start, the example of the Russian
Revolution loomed large in the thinking of Kashmir’s small group of
politically minded youngsters. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the son
of a shawl maker, was the most prominent Kashmiri political leader
from the early 1930s until his death in 1982.8
Sheikh Abdullah was a graduate of Lahore and Aligarh universities
and a charismatic leader and orator who rejoiced in the title
Sher-e-Kashmir: the lion of Kashmir. The initial political mobilisation,
in the face of often severe repression, was largely communal.
Sheikh Abdullah’s party was initially known as the Muslim
Conference, but in 1939 it was renamed the National Conference,
marking an important turn from a community-based identity to
aspiring to represent all Kashmiris. The party made an open appeal
for support from the Kashmir Valley’s small but influential Hindu
and Sikh minorities. From the late 1930s, Sheikh Abdullah developed
a strong bond with two of South Asia’s commanding
nationalist leaders: Jawaharlal Nehru, who was himself of Kashmiri
Hindu ancestry, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as the
‘Frontier Gandhi’, who like Abdullah was an inspirational, secularminded
leader in an overwhelmingly Muslim region. This was an
alliance of progressive nationalists, who courted popular support
and were willing to tackle feudal privilege. Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s
Muslim League and its allies, the political forces which secured the
creation in 1947 of the explicitly Muslim nation of Pakistan, had
significant support in the Kashmir Valley, but never managed to
rival Sheikh Abdullah’s mass appeal.
There was another factor encouraging and sustaining Sheikh
Abdullah’s turn to a more socialist-minded style of politics. Leftleaning
intellectuals from Lahore began to congregate in Srinagar.
Some came during the summer; others settled there. As the temper of
politics in Kashmir quickened, so did their interest and involvement.
In 1941, Sheikh Abdullah himself performed the nikah or Muslim
marriage ceremony in Srinagar of his friend, the renowned progressive
poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and a London communist, Alys George. Her
sister Christobel was already married to a prominent Punjabi marxist,
M.D. Taseer, who became the principal of Kashmir’s most prestigious
college of higher education. Her memoir of the Valley includes a
group photograph of a remarkable constellation of coming leftist
literary talent, among them Faiz and the novelist Mulk Raj Anand,
taken in Kashmir in 1938.9 Most were close to the CPI and several
came to be active in the Progressive Writers’ Association or the Indian
People’s Theatre Association, organisations of enormous influence in
Indian literature and cinema. The actor and writer Balraj Sahni, a
party member, was also an influential figure, and the family home in
Srinagar was another gathering place of left cultural figures. ‘Since I
had come from Bombay, where the Central Office of the Communist
Party was,’ Sahni wrote, ‘the Srinagar comrades used to treat me with
a deference, which was out of all proportion.’10
Another communist couple began to travel up from Lahore and
came to be key players in Kashmiri politics. B.P.L. Bedi was a Punjabi
Sikh who as a student at Oxford had met a woman from Derbyshire,
Freda Houlston. ‘Barely a week after finishing Final Schools’, she
reminisced, ‘we were married in the dark and poky little Oxford
Registry Office.’11 She wore a sari as her wedding dress, and in the
autumn of 1934, the Bedis and their four-month-old baby moved to
India. They were a striking couple, politically committed and socially
outgoing, and to this day warmly remembered by the few survivors of
their once large circle of friends. ‘In the summer months’, reminisced
Christobel Bilqees Taseer, ‘the Leftists from different parts of India
would also be there [in Kashmir], mixing with and influencing the
National Conference workers. One particularly popular couple were
the Bedis … Both husband and wife were dedicated Marxists.’12
‘Baba’ Bedi was gregarious and forceful – ‘very funny character, very
happy go lucky type … he had a big smile on his face’.13 Freda was
courageous, clever and her beauty was much commented upon. In the
words of her younger son, the film star Kabir Bedi, ‘she was blue eyed,
white skinned and fighting the British’.14 They became close friends
of Sheikh Abdullah and part of his immediate political circle.
* * *
Organised CPI activity in the Kashmir Valley appears to date from the
late 1930s. Prem Nath Bazaz, who was both a historian of and a
participant in Kashmir politics in this era, recorded that two
‘Moscow-trained’ workers from Lahore spent several weeks in
Srinagar in 1937 but achieved little. In the early 1940s, several small
socialist-minded discussion groups were set up by students in
Kashmir.15 In this more propitious climate, the CPI made another
attempt to recruit. ‘In September 1942, Fazal Elahi Qurban, the well
known Communist from Lahore organized an anti fascist school in a
house boat in Srinagar’, according to an Indian intelligence report,
‘and the party’s influence was slowly being extended.’16 Pran Nath
Jalali, a schoolboy at the time, attended the sessions: ‘I ran away from
my home to join the first study circle, they called it, which was held
in Dal Lake. It was in a boat. We had the first schooling on communist
ideology in that doonga [boat].’17
Jalali had expected to be taught how to make bombs, but instead
learned about topics ranging from evolution to the French
Revolution. He recalled about fourteen participants in the classes,
most of them students.18 Among those attending were two future
chief ministers of Indian Kashmir and key lieutenants of Sheikh
Abdullah. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad’s association with the communist
movement was brief. G.M. Sadiq’s links were much more long
lasting.19 Small numbers of communists became active particularly
within the students, youth and labour wings of the National
Conference. ‘They did not raise their hand that here we are, communists’,
Pran Nath Jalali recalled. ‘Except that everybody knew. Even
Sheikh sahib [Sheikh Abdullah] knew … There was no ban as such.
But we were conscious not to run Sheikh sahib on the wrong side
because he was very sensitive about any parallel political activity.’
A disproportionate number of these pioneer Kashmiri communists
were, like Jalali, Pandits – that is, high caste Kashmiri speaking
Hindus, a community which at that time made up less than a tenth
of the Valley’s population. One Pandit communist, Niranjan Nath
Raina, achieved prominence both within the National Conference in
Srinagar and in the local trade union movement. ‘I admired him
because he had great intellect … he was a man of calibre’, recalled
Mohan Lal Misri; ‘he was the number one communist’ in the recollection
of Mahmooda Ahmed Ali Shah.20 Raina ‘had been
indoctrinated with the philosophy of communism while studying in
the Allahabad University’, recorded Prem Nath Bazaz. ‘On his return
to his homeland he became the staunchest propagandist of the creed.
Through his efforts, the party gained dozens of adherents among the
intelligentsia of the Pandits.’21 Nevertheless, Kashmiri communism
was a secular movement which sought to embrace all communities,
with secularism at the root of its political purpose.
The most powerful evidence of communist influence within the
National Conference came with the party’s adoption in September
1944 of the ‘Naya Kashmir’ (New Kashmir) policy document.
According to some of those involved, communist allies of Sheikh
Abdullah had urged the National Conference to develop a policy
platform. ‘In order to get it in a concrete shape’, one veteran
commented many decades later, ‘the National Conference party
invited from its members their opinions, articles, suggestions and
view-points, all in writing. When a bulk of such material was
collected, it was sifted and all good things accepted, compiled and
given a proper shape. It was then prepared into a well arranged
document with the help of a communist leader, B.L.P. [sic] Bedi who
… mixed his own ideological substance with the material.’22 Most
accounts agree that Bedi was responsible for the greater part of the
forty-four-page manifesto, perhaps in collaboration with prominent
CPI members in Lahore. Jalali’s recollection is that apart from the
introduction, there wasn’t much writing to do, because the manifesto
was ‘almost a carbon copy’ of documents issued in Soviet Central
Asia.23
The ‘New Kashmir’ manifesto has been authoritatively described as
‘the most important political document in modern Kashmir’s
history’.24 In the introduction, Sheikh Abdullah advocated democracy
and responsible government for Kashmir and a planned economy,
and made clear where he looked for inspiration:
In our times, Soviet Russia has demonstrated before our eyes, not
merely theoretical but in her actual day to day life and development,
that real freedom takes birth only from economic
emancipation. The inspiring picture of the regeneration of all the
different nationalities and peoples of the U.S.S.R., and their
welding together into the united mighty Soviet State that is
throwing back its barbarous invaders with deathless heroism, is an
unanswerable argument for the building of democracy on the
cornerstone of economic equality.
There was certainly no shortage of rhetoric. The preamble to what
was in effect a draft constitution asserted the determination of the
people of Jammu and Kashmir to ‘raise ourselves and our children
forever from the abyss of oppression and poverty, degradation and
superstition, from medieval darkness and ignorance, into the sunlit
valleys of plenty ruled by freedom, science and honest toil, in worthy
participation of the historic resurgence of the peoples of the East …
to make this our country a darzling [sic] gem upon the snowy bosom
of Asia’.25 The socialist tone was emphasised by the front cover, red in
hue, with a Marianne-style depiction of a woman, her head covered,
holding the National Conference red flag.
The body of the document was much more earnest, incorporating
charters for workers, peasants and women. It advocated equal rights,
irrespective of race, religion, nationality or birth. Freedom of speech,
press and assembly were to be guaranteed. There was particular
emphasis on rights for women, which extended to equal wages and
paid leave during pregnancy. The main features of the National
Economic Plan were the ‘abolition of landlordism’ and ‘land to the
tiller’, radical measures in any country but exceptionally so in an
underdeveloped and partly feudal principality. All key industries were
to be ‘managed and owned by the Democratic State of Jammu and
Kashmir’. The draft constitution proposed universal suffrage for those
aged eighteen and over, though the powers of the National Assembly
were to be subject ‘to the general control of H.H. the Maharaja
Bahadur’. This tolerance of a constitutional monarchy, a deference
sharply at odds with the democratic tone of the programme, was
further reflected in the decision of the National Conference to present
their policy document in person to the maharaja.
‘One thing that is difficult to understand is that the programme
was not produced in a high tide of mass upsurge’, wrote the Kashmiri
communist, N.N. Raina. ‘On the contrary political activity in 1943-
44 had fallen to its lowest ebb … There was an air of unreality about
the whole operation.’ Yet the ‘New Kashmir’ programme, Raina
argued, pointed the way for the National Conference and allowed it
to establish a mass base, and also found a wider audience for communist
ideas. ‘By the summer of 1945 the number of copies of People’s
War, [a] weekly run by the C.P.I. sold every week [in Kashmir]
reached 270’, he wrote. ‘This was in addition to about 100 permanent
subscribers … A few tens were communists by conviction and
were National Conference office bearers at various levels.’26
* * *
While ‘New Kashmir’ countenanced the continuance of princely rule
in some form, the memorandum the National Conference submitted
to a British cabinet mission to India in early 1946 took a more
militant tone. In this, the party took strong exception to the terms of
the treaty a century earlier, under which a local warlord acquired the
Kashmir Valley. It was the treaty which had established Dogra
princely rule over the Valley – and the National Conference now
demanded what amounted to its annulment: ‘We wish to declare that
no sale deed however sacrosanct can condemn more than four million
men and women to servitude of an autocrat when will to live under
this rule is no longer there’, Sheikh Abdullah declared in a telegram
sent to the cabinet mission while they were in Srinagar. ‘People of
Kashmir are determined to mould their own destiny and we appeal to
Mission to recognise justice and strength of our cause.’27
‘Quit Kashmir’ was a slogan that resounded around the Valley in
the spring of 1946. It was an echo of the Congress’s ‘Quit India’
campaign of a few years earlier. The target of Kashmir’s mass agitation,
though, was not the British but their own maharaja. The ‘Quit
Kashmir’ movement seems more formidable in retrospect than it did
at the time, and provided no immediate threat to princely rule. Yet it
strengthened Sheikh Abdullah’s political primacy in the Valley, caught
the mood which was increasingly hostile to the maharaja and his
family, and wrong-footed rival parties.28 It was arguably the biggest
organised political mobilisation the Kashmir Valley had seen – and
was the movement that won the attention and applause of Rajani
Palme Dutt. The concept of the sovereignty of the people which had
been part-expressed in the ‘New Kashmir’ document was more
powerfully achieved on the streets. The maharaja responded to the
threat to his rule with repression. Hundreds of National Conference
activists were rounded up, and on 20 May 1946, Sheikh Abdullah
himself was arrested.
In the face of mass arrests, the communist network helped sustain
the larger National Conference as an underground political force.
Several leaders of the National Conference, including Sheikh
Abdullah’s principal lieutenant Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and the
leftist G.M. Sadiq, managed to sidestep arrest and reach Lahore. From
there, they sought to organise protests and publish party literature.
Ghulam Mohiuddin Kara (or Qarra) – a founder member of the
National Conference who recounted that in 1942 he had been ‘won
over to the Communist cause through the Bedis’29 – went underground.
Kara has been described by a writer not generally sympathetic
to the National Conference as the hero of the moment. ‘The
Government strained every nerve and spent large sums of money to
get him arrested but in vain … He did not hide just to prevent his
imprisonment but sustained the Movement in Srinagar.’30 The
American photo-journalist Margaret Bourke-White met Kara at the
Bedis’ home when she visited Kashmir at the close of 1947 and heard
stories, legends perhaps, of his underground heroism, and of his affectionate
nickname of ‘Bulbul-i-Kashmir’, the nightingale of Kashmir.31
Women filled some of the vacuum left by the arrest or flight of
male leaders, acting as couriers and also seeking to maintain morale
and a sense of purpose. Freda Bedi memorably dressed as a local
Muslim woman to enable her to conduct an ‘underground messenger
service’ for the nationalists.32 Kashmiri women gained a prominence
and confidence that they had never before attained or sought. ‘When
[the] male leadership was put behind the bars or driven underground’,
wrote Krishna Misri, herself a young political activist in
Kashmir in the 1940s, ‘the women leaders took charge and gave a new
direction to the struggle … However, the leaders addressed no controversial
woman-specific issues for they did not want to come across as
social rebels.’33 The leading women activists in Srinagar included the
pro-communist Mahmooda Ali Shah, who had graduated from Lahore
and was later a pioneer of women’s education in Kashmir, as well as
Begum Zainab and Sheikh Abdullah’s wife, Begum Akbar Jehan.
The Indian communist weekly People’s War paid little attention to
Kashmir, even when the National Conference adopted a socialist
policy platform. Its successor People’s Age made good the omission,
championing the ‘Quit Kashmir’ campaign and lionising Sheikh
Abdullah. The CPI’s young and popular leader P.C. Joshi described
Sheikh Abdullah as ‘the wisest and tallest among the State people’s
leaders’.34 In August 1947, the paper carried a photograph of a ‘giant
meeting at Hazratbal [outside Srinagar] … addressed by four underground
National Conference workers’. But when the following
month, a People’s Age correspondent reported on a stay of several
weeks in Kashmir, the tone was distinctly critical: ‘The movement at
present is nearly wholly disorganised and among the rank and file
workers there is great dissatisfaction and confusion. There is even a
danger of disintegration.’35
By then the Raj had ended and British India had been partitioned.
Nehru had become the first prime minister of independent India,
while Jinnah was governor-general of the new nation of Pakistan.
Both were preoccupied by the profound loss of life, communal
violence, and mass migration that accompanied a hastily executed
partition. In the initial post-Raj weeks, the Kashmir Valley was largely
unaffected by communal unrest, but there was great confusion about
which nation the state would join. In formal terms, the decision
rested with the maharaja. He was torn between Pakistan’s greater
indulgence of princely rulers and the ties of religion which bound him
(but only a minority of his citizens) more closely to India.36 The
maharaja dithered and played for time, and Abdullah and many of his
supporters were still in jail as India and Pakistan celebrated independence
in mid-August 1947.
Sheikh Abdullah was eventually released on 29 September. The
rejoicing crowds that paraded through Srinagar were testament to his
popularity and political authority. Within days, Abdullah began to
make a case for what can only be regarded as a political militia – a
startling novelty in Kashmir which had no militia tradition, and
indeed where no Valley Kashmiris had been allowed to serve in the
maharaja’s army. Addressing a public meeting, Abdullah called for
volunteers to come forward to establish a ‘peace brigade’. Referring to
reports of a possible incursion into Kashmir, he advocated ‘a volunteer
corps to maintain peace and protect “our hearth and homes”,
irrespective of creed and community’.37 Whether or not the idea originated
with communists, they took on themselves the urgent task of
organising the volunteer force.
Two weeks after Sheikh Abdullah called for the establishment of a
peace brigade, the invasion of Kashmir he had warned of began. A
‘lashkar’ or tribal army, ill-disciplined but well armed and numbering
several thousand fighters, descended from the tribal agencies
bordering Afghanistan. They were pursuing a jihad or holy war – and
as well as championing Islam, they were also seeking to claim the
Kashmir Valley for Pakistan and (for many the most immediate preoccupation)
to seek booty. The extent of Pakistan’s complicity in this
raid has been hotly debated and disputed. It is clear that the provincial
government in Pakistan’s North-West frontier aided and
encouraged the invasion, as did some in Pakistan’s national government
and in the army. Aided by Muslim mutineers within the
maharaja’s forces, the invaders progressed rapidly, capturing
Muzaffarabad, advancing along the Jhelum river, and taking the
Valley’s second town, Baramulla. There the ‘lashkar’ looted and raped,
and caused an international outcry by ransacking a Catholic convent
and mission hospital where three Europeans were among those killed.
Although the targets were often non-Muslims, the attackers were
indiscriminate in their violence and so lost much of the goodwill they
might have enjoyed as self-proclaimed liberators from Hindu princely
rule.
The fall of Baramulla and word of the atrocities committed there
caused alarm in Srinagar, just thirty-five miles away on a good and flat
road. The maharaja, prompted by the Indian government, fled at
night in a long cavalcade of cars across a mountain pass to the city of
Jammu. Many Kashmiris saw this as an act of cowardice. Once in
Jammu, Maharaja Hari Singh signed the instrument of accession by
which his state became part of India. Sheikh Abdullah was quick to
endorse Kashmir’s union with India, but he recognised that the most
urgent task was to repulse the invaders. With the collapse of the state’s
army and of much of the maharaja’s administration, Srinagar was
undefended. The Indian government began an ambitious airlift to
provide some defence for the Kashmiri capital, but Srinagar’s airstrip
was so basic it was impossible to land more than three or four
hundred troops a day.
On the day the airlift began, Nehru wrote a private letter endorsing
the volunteer force Sheikh Abdullah had envisaged. ‘We shall be
sending you more arms for distribution to the civil population’, he
told an Indian officer sent as his personal emissary to Srinagar.
‘Chosen young men, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, should be given rifles
and if possible given some simple training. We must do all this on a
non-communal basis inviting everyone to joining in defence but
taking care of one major factor – to trust none who might give trouble
… These armed volunteers can well undertake the defence of, and the
duty of keeping order in Srinagar and other towns in the Valley …
This would leave our troops for more active work.’38
The following day, newspapers reported ‘hundreds of “National
Conference” volunteers’ in the streets. Two days later, ‘several scores
of them appeared armed for the first time with standard .303 rifles
which a spokesman said they had obtained from “friendly sources”’.39
Sheikh Abdullah reminisced that ‘Hindus and Muslims alike were
prepared to guard their national honour, having heard about the
atrocities inflicted on the innocents by the tribal people … Girls also
joined with the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh boys, and all were strictly
ordered to guard the non-Muslim households.’40 N.N. Raina, a
prominent Kashmiri communist, gave a sense of the excitement as
young Kashmiris enrolled in the militia:
Within a few hours the whole atmosphere in the Valley changed.
Young and old started marching, and offering for guard duties on
bridges and in bazaars, banks, telephone and telegraph exchanges
… The exhibition ground was used for training and lodging of
volunteers, many of whom were from the Srinagar factories,
schools and colleges. Gole Bagh was used for training lady volunteers.
41
He recounted that military veterans and others with relevant experience
were brought in to train the volunteers, and cars and motorbikes
were requisitioned for their transport.
Although Sheikh Abdullah had been named by the maharaja as
emergency administrator rather than head of government, he quickly
took the reins of power. The presence on the streets of a volunteer
force loyal to him was tangible proof that the old princely order had
gone. The militia’s task was to protect the Kashmiri capital from the
Pakistani invaders, and in so doing it buttressed Kashmir’s accession
to India. Militia members patrolled the streets of Srinagar, and sought
to defend the main points of entry to the city. A journalist who travelled
round Srinagar by jeep reported: ‘Every inlet to the city had its
posse of volunteers, some of whom were armed with guns, others with
swords and sticks.’42 In due course, some militia members accompanied
Indian troops, serving as guides and translators and occasionally
as combatants. Several members of the militia were killed in the
fighting. A few volunteers chose to work undercover in areas that had
been captured by the tribesmen. Among these was Maqbool
Sherwani, ‘an adventurer and a bit showy’ in the judgement of his
colleague Pran Nath Jalali, who was shot by tribesmen in Baramulla
and came to be regarded as a martyred hero of pro-India Kashmiri
nationalism.43
While there were many non-communists active in the militia and
a few in leading positions within it, the predominance of communists
and their sympathisers indicates the influence of the left within the
National Conference. The leftist G.M. Sadiq was often described as
the pioneer and leader of the militia. His sister, Begum Zainab, was
the guiding force behind the women’s corps. The military commander
was Said Ahmed Shah, a Muslim also known by the Hindu-style
name Sham-ji. Colleagues recall him as largely non-political in
outlook. Rajbans Khanna, a young communist intellectual from
Lahore and friend of the Sahnis, took a directing role – and in due
course married one of the women’s militia, Usha Kashyap. The
teenage communist Pran Nath Jalali was the militia’s political officer,
a post which bore an echo, by design or otherwise, of the leftist
International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War a decade earlier. He
had the task of promoting literacy and political awareness.
Indian army officers provided a modicum of training, as well as
some basic equipment. Photographs survive of groups of young
Kashmiri men drilling and parading, and taking part in rifle practice.
A children’s wing was formed, the Bal Sena, and a group of enthusiastic
youngsters was photographed drilling with wooden rifles in the
centre of Srinagar. The women’s militia was not intended for active
service. It was a self-defence corps, intended to give Kashmiri women
of all communities the chance to defend their homes and honour
should Srinagar be occupied. ‘For them it was a matter of life and
death’, one National Conference leader recalled, ‘because women and
wealth were the most coveted targets of the invaders.’44 The women
drilled (and on one occasion, were inspected with weapons on display
by Nehru) and some learnt how to fire .303 rifles and throw grenades.
‘When my instructor shot the first fire, we were so scared we ran
away’, recalled Krishna Misri, who was fifteen years old when she
enrolled in the women’s militia.45 The members also helped with relief
work for the thousands of refugees created by the advent of the tribal
army and the ensuing panic.
National Conference leaders suggested that as many as 10,000
young Kashmiris enlisted in the militia. This was probably an exaggeration,
but many hundreds certainly joined up in what was initially
known as the Bachau Fauj (Protection Force). While they contributed
to the repulse of the raiders, their military role was not crucial. Their
part in maintaining morale and in confirming Sheikh Abdullah’s
political ascendancy was more emphatic. The tribesmen advanced to
the outskirts of Srinagar. The capital was without power, fuel and
newspapers and supplies of food and cooking oil were limited. But the
attackers had not expected to face the might of the Indian army,
supported from the air, and within two weeks of the beginning of the
airlift Indian troops had secured Srinagar and repulsed the tribal
forces to the edges of the Kashmir Valley. The maharaja was still the
nominal ruler of Kashmir, but his state forces were almost nonexistent
and his authority in the Valley was minimal.
The success of the militia, both in attracting public support and in
bolstering the National Conference’s public standing, appears to have
emboldened communists to act more openly. They argued that the
volunteer force, which was largely restricted to Srinagar, should be
extended across the state and given an explicit political purpose. ‘Our
people should feel convinced that they are not fighting merely for the
continuance of the old oppressive order but their own freedom’,
stated an open letter from the communist group in the National
Conference written at the end of October 1947, when the Kashmiri
capital was still imperilled by the invaders. ‘On the basis of this
consciousness we should be able to build a patriotic People’s Militia
which can launch political as well as military offensives to defeat the
politico-military offensive of the enemy. We should be able to
organise a network of Village Defence Committees, and thousands of
Village Militia Units in every corner of the state.’46
The communist press echoed the demand for an effective militia
and gloried in its reported successes. At the same time as the communists
delivered their open message, the People’s Age declared that
Kashmir’s ‘freedom fight’ could not rely simply on the Indian army. It
would require ‘the mobilization and active participation of the entire
following of the National Conference, of the entire common people
of Kashmir and Jammu. It will be necessary to arm the entire mass
with whatever weapons one can get, to organise a popular guerilla
warfare against the raiders.’47 This call to arms was a new direction for
the CPI, which for much of the Second World War supported the
allied war effort and was thus opposed to the most formidable of
Indian wartime irregular forces, the Japan-aligned Indian National
Army. It was, however, not a call for an insurgency against the Indian
state, but for a militia which operated in the name of a non-communist
party and alongside the Indian army.
The following week, the communist weekly reported on the mobilisation
and activities of the Bachao Fauj, which it said, with boundless
optimism, numbered 25,000 volunteers. Later in the month, the
People’s Age gave over its front-page to a series of photographs of the
militia under the headline: ‘Kashmiris Resist’. An accompanying article
recounted that ‘these kids who rouse their whole mohalla [district] with
the spirit of resistance, come every day to the headquarters demanding
jobs to do, and, of course, rifles to fight the enemy with’. It also
published a letter from Srinagar (apparently written by Usha Kashyap,
though her name was not given) giving a sense of the political energy
in the air: ‘I am writing this letter to you from the Paladium [sic]
Cinema which is our headquarters now’, she wrote, supposedly to relatives
in Bombay. ‘Down below at the crossing, thousands of Kashmiris
are always mounting guard with their rifles. The whole city is mad with
joy … Today four of us girls will be taught the use of rifles. Tomorrow
we may be sent to the … front as field-nurses.’48
The next issue reported the pushing back of the invaders and the
taking by the Indian army of the key town of Baramulla – which
meant the lifting of the danger to the Kashmiri capital. The following
week, the People’s Age devoted two pages to photographs of women
members of the militia: ‘For the first time on the soil of India is there
being built an army of women, trained to use the rifle and other
modern weapons of war’, the paper declared with rhetorical flourish,
though it was certainly justified in pointing out the striking innovation
of arming and training women volunteers, all the more
remarkable in a conservative, mainly Muslim princely state. ‘The
women in Kashmir are the first in India to build an army of women
trained to use the rifle. By their example they have made Indian
history, filled our chests with pride, raised our country’s banner higher
among the great nations of the world.’49 The prominence in the
women’s self-defence corps of communist sympathisers, among them
Mahmooda Ali Shah, Begum Zainab and Sajida Malik, again underlines
the role of the left in leading and directing this citizen’s militia.50
Alongside the armed militia, a Cultural Front was instituted, with
again communists in leading positions – largely to conduct propaganda
against the tribal raiders and in favour of Sheikh Abdullah and
his radical policy programme. Simple dramas, what would later be
called agitprop pieces, were hastily devised and performed: ‘We used
to go to the front and play the local themes’, recalled Usha Kashyap;
‘how these raiders, they’ve come to only kill Hindus, they were doing
all sorts, molesting women and all that. And those plays used to be a
big, big hit … And my name turned into, instead of Usha, Ayesha,
Muslim name. And they loved me.’51
‘In Battle-Scarred Kashmir A People’s Theatre Is Born’ read a
headline in the People’s Age.52 The article reported that the first two
dramas had been written and ‘are being rapidly rehearsed’, both
dwelling on the heroism of the militia volunteers. One told the story
of Maqbool Sherwani, the motorcycling militia man who had been
shot dead by the raiders in Baramulla. The other was entitled ‘Sara’,
portrayed as a ‘true story’ of a young Kashmiri woman who offered to
cook for the raiders when they entered her village but instead
informed on them:
And in a short while, the volunteers of the National Militia were
on the spot. They stormed the house, captured the raiders before
they knew what to do. The Chief of the raiders tried to take advantage
of the confusion to make good his escape from the back of the
house. But Sara had her eyes on him. Hardly had he gone a few
yards when she shot him with her own revolver.
Usha Kashyap played the lead role in the drama, which had been
written by ‘a young Kashmiri writer’.
In a later issue of the People’s Age, Usha Kashyap wrote that the
renowned writer K.A. Abbas attended an early performance of ‘Sara’
in Srinagar. Abbas was not a Kashmiri, but recorded in his autobiography
how he was determined to join other progressive cultural
figures in Srinagar and, with Nehru’s help, got a place on a plane
while the emergency was at its height. At Srinagar’s airstrip, Abbas was
met by a young Kashmiri Pandit, D.P. Dhar – a communist worker,
according to the People’s Age – who later became a political figure of
great influence in Delhi. Abbas recalled Dhar as ‘a handsome young
Kashmiri’ who ‘carried a rifle slung over his shoulder … who seemed
to be doing a dozen things – from training Kashmiri boatmen and
farmers into a militia to keep track of the infiltrators who were still
prowling about the valley, and looking after the intellectuals who were
coming in every day’.
Abbas recalled that an array of leftist writers and artists had assembled
in Srinagar. ‘The atmosphere reminded one of Spain and the
International Brigade where, it was said, writers had come to live their
books, and poets had come to die for their poetry!’53 The
International Brigaders in Spain were of course outsiders who fought
in solidarity with the Spanish struggle against fascism and Abbas and
many others were similarly displaying solidarity with a cause with
which they identified strongly but which was not entirely their own.
India had not won its independence on the battlefield, but the battle
for Kashmir just weeks after independence day became a rallying
point for young progressive nationalists. It also became a focus for
their creative work in later months and years. Mulk Raj Anand and
K.S. Duggal, among others, wrote about the Kashmiri nationalist
struggle. Leftist actors and filmmakers worked together to produce in
1949 ‘Kashmir Toofan Mei’ (Storm Over Kashmir), a documentary
film about the tribal raid and the popular response to it. K.A. Abbas
and Balraj Sahni both played key roles in determining how Kashmir
came to be depicted in Indian cinema and culture.54
The presence of artistic talent also shaped the visual depiction of
the Kashmir movement. Madanjeet Singh, a photographer and
painter, was among those who headed to Kashmir, in spite of his
looming final exams at Delhi Polytechnic. He had been invited ‘to
build the National Cultural front in Srinagar to strengthen Kashmir’s
secular culture and help in resisting the invaders’. He recalled that
D.P. Dhar and B.P.L. Bedi were the main patrons of the Cultural
Front, and found that several Kashmiri poets and writers – notably
the ‘coolie poet’ Aasi – were also actively engaged in the movement.55
Some of Madanjeet’s photographs of the militia appeared in the
communist People’s Age. When a few months later the Kashmir
Bureau of Information put out a well illustrated propaganda
pamphlet entitled Kashmir Defends Democracy, it was graced by a
striking cover designed by Sobha Singh, then a young progressive and
much later in life renowned for his portraits of the Sikh gurus. This
combined a photograph of the women’s defence corps with a dramatic
outline in red of a Kashmiri woman lying and taking aim with a rifle
(a portrayal of a Kashmiri Muslim milkwoman known as Zuni). In
design and iconography, as well as in political message, it was a bold
progressive statement.56
The guiding role within the militia of communists and their
supporters, however, attracted the attention of their rivals. To judge
by the account of N.N. Raina, the authorities in Delhi took fright at
the extent of communist influence. Early in 1948, Raina asserted,
Sheikh Abdullah’s deputy, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, took control
of the militia ‘virtually through a coup … and put it under commanders
supplied by the Indian Army. Communists were made
uncomfortable by various provocations.’57 Certainly, in the course of
1948, the militia’s independence was curtailed and it never became
the people’s militia that the left had envisaged.
The Popular Front style of politics pursued by communists in
Kashmir also fell victim to an abrupt change of line by the
Communist Party of India. In December 1947, the central committee
turned sharply to the left, denounced as ‘opportunism’ the policy of
seeking to work alongside Congress and influence the Nehru government,
and called for struggle against the ‘national bourgeois
leadership’. Two months later, at its second congress, the CPI
removed P.C. Joshi and installed a hardliner, B.T. Ranadive, as party
leader. In a key speech, the party’s policy of supporting Sheikh
Abdullah’s National Conference was condemned. The new emphasis
was on revolutionary struggle, and particularly on supporting the
rural uprising in Telengana in another princely state, Hyderabad.58
The building of influence within progressive non-communist parties
was rejected.
In his early years in power, however, Sheikh Abdullah established a
reputation for radicalism. One of his first acts was to rename
Srinagar’s main square as Lal Chowk (Red Square).59 The echo of
Moscow was unmistakable – and the name has endured to this day. A
much more substantial achievement was the execution in the early
1950s of the most far-reaching land reform in modern India, seeing
through the most ambitious of the policy proposals in the ‘New
Kashmir’ manifesto. About half of the state’s arable land was taken
away from large and medium-size landlords within the initial two
years of the scheme, creating hundreds of thousands of peasant
proprietors. The main beneficiaries were poor Muslim villagers in the
Kashmir Valley. Land redistribution secured Sheikh Abdullah’s power
base for a generation and is seen as his enduring political success.
More generally, Sheikh Abdullah was more successful as a political
mobiliser than as a statesman or administrator. There had been little
in the way of representative institutions in princely Kashmir, and
while Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference used the rhetoric
of democracy they were not by instinct pluralist in their outlook.
Once settled in power, Sheikh Abdullah became something of an
autocrat and his critics complained of intolerance and repression.
Among the communists who initially surrounded Sheikh Abdullah,
B.P.L. Bedi was given a post in charge of propaganda, but after a while
there was a parting of the ways. Ghulam Mohiuddin Kara, the hero
of the Quit Kashmir movement, broke more decisively and set up his
own political party. Pran Nath Jalali found that his growing disillusionment
with Sheikh Abdullah’s administration, and concern about
corruption and abuse of power, was compounded by the indifference
of the CPI national leadership. He came to Delhi to talk to communist
leaders but found that they were ‘busy with their own revolution
those days … I came to the conclusion they were not interested in
building up a movement [in Kashmir], and the type of movement
they wanted, I wasn’t interested.’60
Sheikh Abdullah’s personalised style of governance, and the change
of outlook by the CPI, together greatly weakened the influence of
communists. At the same time, his radicalism and authoritarianism,
and the legacy of his close association with communists, aroused deep
misgivings among those inimical to the Soviet Union. Josef Korbel
came to South Asia in 1948 as the Czechoslovak member of the five
nation UN Commission for India and Pakistan. When a few years
later he wrote Danger in Kashmir, the peril he had in mind was the
sort of Soviet-style communism which had taken root in his home
country. He regarded Sheikh Abdullah as ‘an opportunist and, worse,
a dictator’, and expressed the fear ‘that Kashmir might eventually
become a hub of Communist activities in Southern Asia’.61
A similar argument was expressed by local critics of Sheikh
Abdullah. In 1952, a pamphlet entitled Rise of Communism in
Kashmir rehearsed how the left was using Sheikh Abdullah as a
‘catspaw’ as they prepared to capture power.62 The following year
Sheikh Abdullah was removed from office as Kashmir’s prime
minister, largely because India’s national government came to regard
him as unreliable on the issue of the permanence of the state’s accession
to India. Concerns about communist influence continued to
reverberate. An opposition group asserted that G.M. Sadiq, the most
high profile communist sympathiser, had great influence in the new
state government and that there were several other communist ministers.
‘[If ] no immediate steps are taken to nip the evil’, it warned,
‘Kashmir may be lost to Communism.’63
In 1955, the Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin travelled to
Srinagar during a visit to India. It was a public demonstration of
Soviet support for Kashmir’s still disputed union with India – the
‘Russians are the first great power to have definitely and clearly gone
on record as accepting the accession of Kashmir to India as final’,
Kashmir’s constitutional head of state told Nehru.64 In the following
decade, G.M. Sadiq served as chief minister, still pro-Soviet by faction
and inclination, but successful above all because he was Delhi’s candidate.
The steady erosion of Kashmir’s autonomy, and Delhi’s
persistent interference and rigging of elections, prepared the way for
the separatist insurgency that erupted in 1989. Some Kashmiris
sought independence, others wanted to become part of Islamic
Pakistan – but disaffection with Indian rule was evident across the
Valley. Over the following two decades, at least 40,000 people, more
than one in a hundred of the Valley’s adult population, died in the
conflict between Pakistan-backed militants and Indian security forces.
Over that time, communists have had little visible presence in
Kashmir. Many of the youthful communists who enrolled in the
volunteer militia remained loyal to the ideology all their lives. Yet at
the time of writing (in the summer of 2009), the Communist Party
of India (Marxist) has a solitary member of the Jammu and Kashmir
state assembly. Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson is chief minister of the
Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, at the helm of the National
Conference and governing in alliance with Congress. But the strand
of militant, pro-India secular nationalism that the Kashmiri communists
of the 1940s espoused now has limited resonance. The shifting
sands of Kashmiri politics, however, should not be allowed to obscure
the substantial role of communists in giving a radical complexion to
Kashmiri nationalism in the crucial decade of the 1940s, securing
popular support towards ending princely rule and taking up arms in
defence of a secular, democratic Kashmir.
Notes
1. Rajani Palme Dutt, ‘Travel Notes No. 5’, Labour Monthly, 28/10,
October 1946, pp319-26. The ‘Indian States’ refers to the princely
states which had not been fully incorporated into British India. I am
grateful to Ajit Bhattacharjea, Sumantra Bose, Suchetana
Chattopadhyay and Matthew Worley for their valuable comments on
an earlier draft of this article.
2. Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959, pp240-4.
3. Sheikh Abdulla [sic], ‘Not Guilty’, Labour Monthly, 28/10, October
1946, pp311-14.
4. Dutt’s life and career is detailed in John Callaghan, Rajani Palme
Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism, London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1993.
5. Dutt persistently referred to Sheikh Abdullah’s party as the People’s
Conference – apparently confusing the National Conference with
another body in which Sheikh Abdullah was prominent, the All-India
States People’s Conference, which sought to represent the subjects of
princely India and was aligned with the Indian National Congress.
6. Overstreet and Windmiller, pp241, 244.
7. Of the many modern histories of Kashmir, among the best is
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Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 2003. An engagingly polemical version is Tariq
Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity,
London: Verso, 2002, pp217-52.
8. Ajit Bhattacharjea, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah: Tragic Hero of
Kashmir, New Delhi: Roli, 2008, pp29, 42-3, 48.
9. C. Bilqees Taseer, The Kashmir of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah,
Lahore: Ferozsons, 1986.
10. Balraj Sahni, Balraj Sahni: an autobiography, Delhi: Hind Pocket
Books, 1979, p143.
11. Freda Bedi, Behind the Mud Walls, Lahore: Unity Publishers, [1947], p1.
12. Taseer, The Kashmir of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, p38.
13. Pran Nath Jalali interview, Delhi, 11 April 2007. Audio recordings
and transcripts of interviews have been deposited in the archive of the
School of Oriental and African Studies, London (accession OA3).
14. Kabir Bedi, personal communication, April 2007. Freda Bedi later
became a senior Buddhist woman religious. B.P.L. Bedi also turned to
religion in later life, in his case to the faith he was born into, Sikhism.
15. Prem Nath Bazaz, The History of Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir,
Cultural and Political, Srinagar: Gulshan, 2003 (first published
c1953), p421. Accounts of these small groups can be found in Asifa
Jan, Naya Kashmir: An Appraisal, Srinagar: Zeba, 2006; N.N. Raina,
Kashmir Politics and Imperialist Manoeuvres, 1846-1980, New Delhi:
Patriot, 1988.
16. Sandeep Bamzai, Bonfire of Kashmiriyat: Deconstructing the Accession,
New Delhi: Rupa, 2006, p106. The author makes extensive use of
official documents in his family’s possession assembled by his grandfather,
K.N. Bamzai, a Kashmiri Hindu who was a close confidante of
Nehru.
17. Pran Nath Jalali interview, Delhi, 30 March 2007.
18. Jan, Naya Kashmir, pp73-4.
19. According to his son, Sadiq came into contact with communist intellectuals
while a student in Lahore in the 1930s and was one of the
points of contact with Punjabi communists during the repression of
the mid-1940s. Rafiq Sadiq interview in the Kashmir Sentinel,
February 2003.
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20. Mohan Lal Misri interview, Faridabad, 12 June 2007; Mahmooda
Ahmed Ali Shah interview, Srinagar, 18 June 2007.
21. Prem Nath Bazaz, p422.
22. Maulana Masoodi quoted in Jan, Naya Kashmir, p78.
23. Pran Nath Jalali interview, Delhi, 30 March 2007.
24. Bose, Kashmir, p25.
25. New Kashmir, New Delhi: Kashmir Bureau of Information, n.d., pp7,
12.
26. Raina, Kashmir Politics, pp121, 125.
27. Kashmir On Trial, Lahore: Lion Press, 1947, p224.
28. The Quit Kashmir campaign has been described by one historian as
‘something of a flop’, largely because major disturbances were
confined to four towns: Srinagar, Anantnag, Pampur and Sopore – see
Ian Copland, ‘The Abdullah Factor: Kashmiri Muslims and the crisis
of 1947’, in D.A. Low (ed.), The Political Inheritance of Pakistan,
London: Macmillan, 1991, pp. 218-54. This seems a harsh judgement.
29. Taseer, The Kashmir of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, pp174-9.
30. Muhammad Yusuf Saraf, Kashmiris Fight for Freedom, Lahore:
Ferozsons, vol 1, 1977, p686.
31. Margaret Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New
India, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949, p200.
32. Ibid, p201.
33. Krishna Misri, ‘Kashmiri Women Down the Ages: A Gender
Perspective’, Himalayan and Central Asian Studies, 6/34, 2002, pp3-
27.
34. People’s Age, 13 April 1947.
35. People’s Age, 7 September 1947.
36. For contrasting accounts of the origins of the Kashmir crisis in 1947,
see Andrew Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir, New Delhi: Penguin
Viking, 2007; Alastair Lamb, Incomplete Partition: The Genesis of the
Kashmir Dispute, 1947-48, Hertingfordbury: Roxford Books, 1997;
and Prem Shankar Jha, Kashmir 1947: The Origins of a Dispute, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003.
37. Times of India, 9 October 1947.
38. Nehru to Hiralal Atal, 27 October 1947, Selected Works of Jawaharlal
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167
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Nehru, 2/4, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1986,
pp283-6.
39. The Times, 28, 29 and 31 October 1947.
40. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Flames of the Chinar: An
Autobiography, New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 1993, pp93-4.
41. Raina, Kashmir Politics, p152
42. Statesman, 8 November 1947.
43. For an early telling of the Maqbool Sherwani story, see Bourke-White,
Halfway to Freedom, pp210-11. His death was the inspiration for a
novel by Mulk Raj Anand, Death of a Hero: Epitaph for Maqbool
Sherwani, first published in 1963. The mythologising of his life is
discussed in Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir, pp212-7.
44. Mir Qasim, My Life and Times, Bombay, 1992, p37.
45. Krishna Misri (nee Zardoo) interview, Faridabad, 26 May 2007.
46. Raina, Kashmir Politics, p156.
47. People’s Age, 2 November 1947.
48. People’s Age, 23 November 1947.
49. People’s Age, 7 December 1947.
50. The women’s self-defence corps is discussed briefly in Nyla Ali Khan,
Islam, Women and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan,
New Delhi: Tulika, 2009, pp118-23.
51. Usha Khanna (nee Kashyap), telephone interview, 31 August 2008.
52. People’s Age, 21 December 1947.
53. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, I Am Not an Island: An Experiment in
Autobiography, New Delhi: Vikas, 1977, pp304-6.
54. I am grateful to Meenu Gaur for her expert observations about the
progressive cultural movement and Kashmir, which is discussed in her
coming University of London doctoral thesis.
55. Madanjeet Singh, The Sasia Story, Lalitpur, Nepal:
UNESCO/Himalmedia, 2006, pp48-54. There are also photographs
of the Cultural Front and its productions in Usha R. Khanna, The
Making of Samovar, Worli, India: Spenta Multimedia, [n.d.], pp8, 11.
56. Kashmir Defends Democracy, Delhi: Kashmir Bureau of Information,
[c1948].
57. Raina, Kashmir Politics, p160
58. Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, pp265-74.
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59. Times of India, 8 November 1947; Hindustan Times, 12 November
1947.
60. Jalali interview, 30 March 2007.
61. Josef Korbel, Danger in Kashmir, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1966, pp97, 198, 207. The book was first published in 1954.
62. Rise of Communism in Kashmir, Delhi: Kashmir Democratic Union,
1952, pp31-2. The author, who was probably either Prem Nath Bazaz
or an associate, suggested that there was a sharp rift in Kashmiri
communism along religious lines, with rival factions lead by N.N.
Raina and G.M. Kara.
63. Jagan Nath Sathu, Red Menace in Kashmir, Delhi: Kashmir
Democratic Union, [c1954].
64. Karan Singh to Nehru, 11 December 1955, in Jawaid Alam (editor),
Jammu and Kashmir 1949-64: Select Correspondence Between
Jawaharlal Nehru and Karan Singh, New Delhi: Penguin Viking,
2006, pp182-3.