Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the ‘Lion of Kashmir’, died in September 1982. He was three months short of seventy-seven. He had been ailing, especially since a heart attack in 1977. Sheikh Abdullah’s funeral procession was gigantic. It may have been the single largest ever seen in the Subcontinent. The mass outpouring of grief was a measure of the stature he commanded among his people even in the twilight of his life. He had, after all, been the dominant figure of Jammu & Kashmir’s politics for a full half-century.
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.
In March 1968, during another, shorter spell out of prison, ‘almost the entire population of Srinagar turned out to greet him’ as he arrived in the city, The Times of India reported. It added that the hundreds of thousands were chanting: “Sher- e-Kashmir zindabad, Our demand plebiscite!” Days later, Abdullah told a 100,000-strong gathering in Anantnag that “repression will never suppress the Kashmiri people’s urge to be free”. In 1968, Abdullah also said: “The fact remains that Indian democracy stops short at Pathankot. Between Pathankot and the Banihal [Pass] you may have some measure of democracy, but beyond Banihal there is none. What we have in Kashmir bears some of the worst characteristics of colonial rule.”
Speaking in Jammu city on 23 December 1970, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made it clear that she would not tolerate this scenario. Asked by journalists how it could be prevented, she replied cryptically: “Ways will be found.”
During the political and human tragedy that engulfed Kashmir through the 1990s, the small town of Bijbehara became one of numerous sites of massacres of civilians. In October 1993, BSF troops fired on a march in the town taken out in solidarity with Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) militants besieged by the Army in Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine. Some three dozen people were killed and double that number seriously injured.
The metamorphosis can and does have different explanations, from the romantic to the cynical. Yet one thing is certain. The septuagenarian Sheikh Abdullah was a spent, defeated politician. The septuagenarian Mufti was not. He performed competently as Chief Minister from late 2002 to late 2005, as J&K struggled to move beyond the violence of insurgency and counter-insurgency, until he was compelled to prematurely step down. A decade later, he was able to negotiate, in a spirit of equality, an ‘agenda of alliance’ document with the BJP, which embodies a concrete vision of resolving the Kashmir conflict in its multi-dimensional totality. Because of his past, he retained credibility among Jammu Hindus and Ladakhi Buddhists even while seeking to give voice to the grievances and aspirations of the Valley’s Muslims.
The later political life of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed— 1999- 2015 —has left a genuinely valuable legacy. Jammu & Kashmir, and India, cannot afford to—and must not—lose this legacy.
source: http://www.openthemagazine.com / Open / Home> Open> Voices> Open Essays / by Sumantra Bose / January 15th, 2016
 Sumantra Bose is Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent book, Transforming India (2013), includes an analysis of contemporary Kashmir as one of Indian democracy’s unresolved challenges |
