Rekindle Kashmir’s lost and real connect

Rekindle Kashmir’s lost and real connect

By, Amitabh Mattoo is Professor, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Context

• This article talks about the contributions of various Kashmiris who aspired for a united nation with J&K as an integral part of India due to ot shared cultural and social values.

Foiling ‘Operation Gibraltar’

• It was on August 5, 1965 that two Kashmiri Gujjars helped to thwart one of Pakistan’s most devious conspiracies in the Valley.
• Mohammed Din, and Wazir Mohammed at Galuthi in the Mendhar sector, reported the Pakistani infiltration (to, respectively, the Thana at Tangmarg and the headquarters of the infantry brigade at Poonch) that was intended to spark an uprising in Kashmir, as part of its insidious ‘Operation Gibraltar’ relying on a ready-to-rebel fifth column within the Valley.
• In short, ‘Operation Gibraltar’ failed, as did every other attempt by Pakistan because of the fundamental belief of Kashmiris in the goodness and greatness of India.

Baramullah’s Maqbool Sherwani

• Consider, for instance, the story of Baramullah’s Maqbool Sherwani.
• It was Sherwani, in 1947, who helped delay the Pakistan-backed tribal invaders march to Srinagar from Baramulla before the arrival of the Indian armed forces.
• The tribal invaders eventually found him out; tortured him, shot him and crucified him, but not, as I wrote once earlier, before he cried out one last time, “Muslim Sikh Etihad, Zindabad (Victory for the unity of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims).
• This, said Mahatma Gandhi at his prayer meeting, later, “was a martyrdom of which anyone, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or any other, would be proud.”

A principal with principles

• A legendary principal of the local women’s college, Ms. Mehmooda Ali Shah, who faced a minor act of rebellion.
• She heard that one of her students had shouted “Pakistan Zindabad!” on the college grounds.
• Dressed as always in a handloom sari, Ms. Shah (both a Gandhian and a Fellow Traveller) marched down the grounds, with hundreds of students and staff watching her, and confronted the student.
• The legendary principal slapped the delinquent student hard, admonished her and went back to her office amidst pindrop silence.
• For nearly two decades as principal, Ms. Shah exemplified through her personality, and through her word and deed, not just the quest for the empowerment of Kashmiri women but her ability to stand up for the ideas that endeared India to the Kashmiris.

The power of the Soviet bond

• At the height of the Cold War, in 1955, when the Anglo-American bloc (it is often conveniently forgotten these days) was arm-twisting New Delhi to hold a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and the Premier Nikolai Bulganin, visited India.
• Nehru insisted that they visited Srinagar where they watched the genius, Dina Nath Nadim’s opera: ‘Bombur Taa Yemberzal (The Narcissus and the Bumble bee’), an allegorical reference to the clash between Imperialism and Socialism.
• So deeply inspired were they by the visit that Khrushchev and the Soviet Union recognised Jammu and Kashmir as an integral part of India soon thereafter, and continued to cast its veto to block any attempt by the United Nations Security Council to intervene in Kashmir.
• If it was Nadim who brought the plight of Kashmir to the world, and the justness of India’s cause.
• It was the extraordinary art of Ghulam Rasool Santosh that revealed Kashmir’s unique syncretic culture.
• Santosh’s paintings reflected not just the unity of the cosmos, but also the glories of Sufi and Tantric thought.
• The larger fusion of the diversity of India within Kashmir’s multiple streams is reflected in Santosh’s art.

Steps needed

• The most effective police chief in the history of Jammu and Kashmir, was the barely school-educated Kashmiri, Peer Ghulam Hassan Shah, who broke the back of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and the Kashmir Al-Fatah.

Way forward

• In the legacy of leaders such as Peer Ghulam Hassan Shah and Ms. Mehmooda lies the future of New Delhi in Kashmir and the future basis of Kashmir’s faith in India.
• Executive decisions and even constitutional amendments are not the challenge; Article 370 had lost much of its potency even before the decisions made last year.
• The real challenge has remained the emotional integration of Kashmir within the national mainstream.