(The following is an excerpt from 'Dark Secrets: Politics, Intrigue and Proxy Wars in Kashmir', written by Iqbal Chand Malhotra and published by Bloomsbury. The book is an investigative account that uniquely reexamines India's contemporary history about the Kashmir conflict and its foreign relationships with Britain, Soviet Russia, Pakistan and China. It underlines the convoluted nature of British policy in the Indian subcontinent and how it impacted both India and Pakistan.)
After Hari Singh acceded to the throne, an organisation called Anjuman-e-Nusrat-ul-Islam, founded in 1905 by the Maulvi of Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid, started a movement calling for the educational emancipation of Kashmiri Muslims. As a result, many Kashmiri Muslims went to study at universities all over India. In 1931, among the first Kashmiri graduates to return to Srinagar were Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, Mirza Afzal Beg and G.M. Sadiq.
These young men got politically involved and stood in opposition to the Maharaja’s perceived autocracy. This opposition was triggered by a succession of incidents in Jammu wherein some state government officials purportedly demolished a mosque. When the news reached Srinagar, it caused public outrage. On 25 June 1931, a Pakhtoon man called Abdul Qadeer made a seditious speech against the Maharaja’s rule. He was arrested and put on trial in Srinagar on 6 June 1931.
A Massive Agitation
On 13 July 1931, while Qadeer’s trial was on in the Srinagar Central Jail, the police opened fire on an unruly mob of Qadeer supporters, killing 22 demonstrators. The agitation then spread throughout the state. The Maharaja was convinced that a senior minister in his court, a British bureaucrat named G.E.C. Wakefield, was the brain behind this agitation and immediately dismissed him. The Maharaja believed that the agitation was a pre-planned attack on him, a punishment for taking a contradictory stance against the British at the Round Table Conference in London in 1930. Wakefield was replaced by a distinguished Kashmiri Pandit Sir Hari Kishan Kaul, who was made the state’s Prime Minister.
The cover of 'Dark Secrets'.
(Photo: Bloomsbury)
The agitation throughout Kashmir was spearheaded by two men: a religious leader called Mirwaiz Mohammad Yusuf Shah and his protégé, a young schoolmaster called Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah. The agitation led by these two men with the support of other Muslim leaders in the country forced the Maharaja to set up a commission of enquiry that would investigate this violence.
The commission presided over by Sir Bertram Glancy asked Hari Singh to create a constitution for the state that would enshrine freedom of speech, expression and assembly for its inhabitants. At the same time, Sheikh Abdullah and the Mirwaiz were imprisoned in Srinagar Central Jail.
Their arrest added to their popularity, and they found a dedicated population of followers in the state. In 1934, the promised constitution was introduced in the state of Kashmir. This was the first time that the government imposed a constitution upon a princely state.
The document guaranteed certain fundamental rights and forced Hari Singh to concentrate on his subjects and their political and economic needs.
How Maharaja's Powers Were Brought to Check
Just as Pratap Singh’s political freedoms were heavily constrained, Hari Singh’s powers were also brought to check by the imposition of the constitution. The introduction of the constitution enabled some of the agitators to act upon and consolidate the power gained from the political mobilisation of 1931. Sheikh Abdullah and Mirwaiz Mohammad Yusuf Shah, while still in prison, orchestrated the establishment of a political party called the Muslim Conference in 1932, which brought together all political forces that opposed the Maharaja’s rule.
Though the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir now had a legal and lawful political Opposition, it was far from being a perfect democratic arrangement.
Hari Singh’s Dogra community, the Valley’s Sikh population who lived there since the time of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s conquest, and the Hindu Kashmiri Pandits all stood at the receiving end of the evergrowing strength of the Maharaja’s Muslim subjects. The political mobilisation of the large Muslim population created a communal divide. Maharaja Hari Singh was outsmarted by the British, who very deftly engineered a deepening rift in the former’s political power and authority.
Sheikh Abdullah with other leaders of the 1931 agitation.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
However, rising differences between Sheikh Abdullah and Mohammad Yusuf Shah gave the Maharaja some breathing space. Sheikh Abdullah, then a 29-year-old, acquired a progressively cosmopolitan outlook while studying at Aligarh. He made peace with the Maharaja and upon his release from prison in 1933, married the half-Kashmiri daughter of Harry Nedou, the extremely wealthy Croatian proprietor of a chain of hotels in the state.
Already enamoured by progressive political ideas, Abdullah’s outlook on politics underwent further changes when he met Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in 1938. Abdullah embraced the political lineage of the Congress party and began to operate the Muslim Conference as an extension of the Congress party in Jammu and Kashmir. His new and progressive ideas clashed with the ultra-conservative religious mindset of the Mirwaiz.
How the Maharaja Was Ultimately Unseated
A split in the Muslim Conference was inevitable given the rising differences between the two leaders. Unable to work together, they finally dissolved the Muslim Conference in 1939. In its place, Abdullah founded the National Conference, a secular and progressive body where Islamic theology gave way to more pressing issues such as land reforms.
In 1941, following the announcement of the Pakistan Resolution in Lahore, many Muslims in the state, disgruntled with Abdullah and the secular nature of the National Conference, convinced the Mirwaiz to resurrect the Muslim Conference. The newly resurrected organisation became the trump card for both Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League. The National Conference, with its secular agenda, and the Muslim Conference, with its rabidly communal agenda, spearheaded the political struggles against the Maharaja’s rule.
For a decade, the political opposition to the Maharaja’s rule was legally mobilised under two different ideological strains. The British had succeeded in gradually eroding the omniscience of the Maharaja and had ensured the institutionalisation of a process that caused him continuous problems and ultimately unseated him.
The 1934 constitution lasted only five years. A relentless protest campaign by the majority of Muslim politicians forced the Maharaja to scrap the constitution in favour of a new one in 1939. The crown of thorns that sat on the Maharaja’s head since the 1930 Round Table Conference in London never gave him a moment of peace.
(The above is a book excerpt from Dark Secrets: Politics, Intrigue and Proxy Wars in Kashmir. Blurbs, paragraph breaks and subheadings have been added by The Quint for the ease of readers.)
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