The cabal, which comprised many though not all of Abdullah’s former comrades (there were important exceptions like Afzal Beg and Maulana Masoodi), falsely appropriated the National Conference name. The real NC was reconstituted as the Jammu & Kashmir Plebiscite Front in 1955 with Beg as its first president and the incarcerated Abdullah as its ‘patron’, and existed under that name until 1975. But the cabal in power developed a schism in 1957 when Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, Abdullah’s successor as J&K’s Prime Minister, failed to appoint any members of the faction clustered around GM Sadiq to cabinet positions after the first elections to the J&K Legislative Assembly. The ruling pseudo-NC had ‘won’ 69 of the assembly’s 75 seats in these elections; of the Valley’s 43 seats, 35 had been won without any contest (‘elected unopposed’). After the rift, 15 of the 69 legislators joined the rebel group led by Sadiq. The rift was papered over in late 1960 through New Delhi’s intervention and the pseudo- NC entered the 1962 Assembly elections formally re-united.

The young, ambitious Mufti Sayeed entered the Assembly in 1962 from his hometown, Bijbehara. It was not difficult— the official NC ‘won’ 68 of the 74 seats, and 32 of the Valley’s 43 constituencies were won without any contest. It was after these elections that Prime Minister Nehru, worried by adverse international media coverage, famously wrote to Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad mildly rebuking him for not having ‘lost a few seats to bonafide opponents’.

Mufti retained his seat in 1967. It was again a cakewalk. By this time Bakshi was in the doghouse and the ruling party—led since 1964 by Sadiq (who made Mufti a deputy minister in his government)—had metamorphosed in 1965 into the Jammu & Kashmir Pradesh Congress. The Congress won a four-fifths majority— 60 of the 75 seats—in the J&K Assembly in 1967. Of the Valley’s 42 constituencies, 22 saw no contest, and 118 candidates who filed nominations were rejected, 55 because they had not taken the compulsory oath of allegiance to India and the rest with no reason given.

Only a very few undesirables got through this gauntlet. A young Plebiscite Front leader, Ali Mohammed Naik, took the oath of allegiance, managed to get his papers approved, and was elected to the Assembly as an independent from Tral, a southern Valley town fairly close to Bijbehara. Another successful opposition candidate was none other than Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, disgraced and sulking since his fall from power in late 1963. In 1967, J&K elected Lok Sabha members for the first time. The Congress won five of the six Lok Sabha seats, including two of the Valley’s three. The exception was Srinagar, where Bakshi stood on a platform of Kashmiri pride and won despite attempts by intelligence operatives sent from Delhi to ensure his defeat. When he turned chameleon and ran from Srinagar as a Congress candidate in the 1971 Lok Sabha elections, he lost badly to Shamim Ahmed Shamim, a journalist and Plebiscite Front supporter who contested as an independent.

The people’s interest and allegiance lay elsewhere, outside this ‘democratic process’. On 18 April 1964, Sheikh Abdullah arrived in Srinagar after being released from prison. The Central and J&K governments had decided to free him in a desperate bid to calm down the Valley, which had been in a state of uprising since end-1963, turmoil triggered by the temporary disappearance of Prophet Muhammad’s hair from the Hazratbal shrine but rooted in pent-up rage at the police-state repression and fraudulent governments since 1953. It was reported that Abdullah ‘entered Srinagar and was greeted by a delirious crowd of 250,000 people. Srinagar was a blaze of colour and everyone seemed out on the streets to give him a hero’s welcome… Addressing a gathering of 150,000 people on 20 April, Abdullah said that in 1947 he had challenged Pakistan’s authority to annex Kashmir on grounds of religion, and now he was challenging the Indian contention that the [Kashmir] question had been settled’. Abdullah remained at liberty until May 1965, when he was re-arrested under the Defence of India Rules, a colonial-era regulation used by the British against Indian freedom fighters.