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How Indian is Kashmir? - Andrew Whitehead

8/19/2019

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Earlier this month, the Indian government removed the special constitutional status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. At the same time, the government announced that that the state was to be cut in two and that both parts would be turned to Union Territories, largely governed from Delhi. Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only state where Muslims are in a majority. It has been fought over between India and Pakistan ever since independence in 1947, and for the past thirty years has endured a separatist insurgency which has claimed, according to the conservative estimate given by the Indian government, at least 42,000 lives. This was the biggest change in its constitutional status since the 1950s.
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Support for the move extended well beyond the ranks of India’s governing Hindu nationalist BJP – and what opposition there was focussed on the manner in which the changes were introduced more than the measures themselves. In the state itself, Hindu-majority Jammu and largely Buddhist Ladakh – both of which are content being part of India and resent the association with rebellious Kashmir – broadly endorsed the changes. But in the Kashmir Valley, overwhelmingly Muslim and the heartland of the Kashmiri language and culture, the move was greeted by a sullen fury and despair.
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Map of the former princely state of Jammu + Kashmir - areas under Indian control in lilac, under Pakistan's control in green and under China's control in yellow. The thick red line delineates the Kashmir Valley. Creative Commons - University of Texas
The autonomy promised in Article 370 of the Indian constitution has been greatly diluted over the decades but Kashmiris valued it as a symbol of their identity. The message from Delhi to the seven million people of the Kashmir Valley now seems to be: you are Indians, whether you like it or not! And most Kashmiris don’t like it.

Ahead of the announcement, the Indian authorities imposed an extraordinary range of security measuresacross the Kashmir Valley to pre-empt protests and unrest: tens of thousands of additional troops were sent there; tourists and Hindu pilgrims were told to leave; schools and colleges were ordered to close; public gatherings were banned; freedom of movement was curtailed; the internet and both mobile and landline phone connections were switched off; and hundreds of people were arrested, including the leaders of constitutional political parties who have at times allied with the BJP.  Kashmir was locked up and sealed off.

KASHMIR’S ACCESSION TO INDIA

The Kashmir crisis arose from a botched independence settlement when Britain pulled out of India in 1947. Jammu and Kashmir was a vast area stretching from plains north of Punjab deep into the Himalayas, and with no common thread beyond being part of the same princely state. It was up to princely rulers to decide whether to accede to independent India or to the explicitly Muslim nation of Pakistan. Three-quarters of Jammu and Kashmir’s citizens were Muslims; the ruling family were Hindus. The maharaja dithered but – his hand forced by an invasion of Pakistani tribal fighters – he eventually signed up with India and an airlift of Indian troops successfully defended the Kashmiri capital from the invaders.

The decision to accede to India was also supported – at the time – by the maharaja’s most vociferous opponent, Sheikh Abdullah, a radical Kashmiri nationalist. The accession crisis was accompanied by a popular political mobilisation in Kashmir from which Sheikh Abdullah emerged as the key figure. At the same time, India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir. That resulted in an informal partition of the state – though the larger part came under Indian control, including all the Kashmir Valley.India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, promised that Indian troops would withdraw from Kashmir once the invasion threat was banished and that there would then be a plebiscite about the region’s future. Neither promise was kept. But India did refer the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations – and to this day there are UN military observers in both sides of Kashmir, though to no practical purpose.

What became Article 370 of India’s constitution – giving Jammu and Kashmir special status and, on paper at least, considerable autonomy – was endorsed by India’s Constituent Assembly in October 1949 with little debate and no opposition. It was part of a political accommodation intended to make Kashmir comfortable within India – a goal which was never fully achieved. The unilateral tearing up of this special status is seen by many Kashmiris as the end of any aspiration in Delhi to rule Kashmir by consent. For Hindu nationalists, who resent a special status based in part on Kashmir’s Muslim identity, the goal has been to integrate Jammu and Kashmir fully into India – though it’s difficult to see how the revocation of Article 370 will in itself promote development or end terrorism, as the Indian government has claimed.

Sheikh Abdullah, after a few years in power in Srinagar, started talking up the prospect of an independent Kashmir – and that led in 1953 to his dismissal on Delhi’s orders and imprisonment. Ever since then, Delhi has repeatedly interfered in the governance of the state. The rigging of state elections in 1987 was a trigger for the separatist insurgency which erupted two years later – which was also armed, financed and encouraged by Pakistan.

In 2006, Pakistan’s military ruler, General Musharraf, came up with a four-point peace plan for Kashmir, which proposed that both India and Pakistan settle for control of the regions they currently hold and allow a measure of self-governance. The Indian government was keen to take this further – but Musharraf lost power before any substantial progress was made.

For Kashmiris, many of whom hanker for independence, Pakistan’s initiative raised concerns that again the future of their homeland was being decided without their active involvement. And that’s also why there’s such anger in the Kashmir Valley about the scrapping of Article 370. Once more Kashmiris have been denied any agency in how their region is governed. What we don’t yet know is how – once the curfew and other restrictions are eased – that anger will be expressed.



This article was first posted on History Workshop Online and is reposted here with their kind permission.
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Rajani Palme Dutt in Kashmir: a documentary note

1/17/2018

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This letter from Sheikh Abdullah has come to light in the archives of the Communist Party of Great Britain, held at the People's History Museum in Manchester. It was written to Rajani Palme Dutt, the eminence gris of the British CP (born in Cambridge, his father was a Bengali doctor and his mother was Swedish) who was then making his first trip to India.  

Palme Dutt spent four months in India, arriving in late March 1946. During that time, he met not simply the leaders of the CPI but most of the movers and shakers in Indian political life, including Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. Sheikh Abdullah's letter suggests that he was expecting Palme Dutt in Srinagar, and was disappointed that he changed his plans. Abdullah was writing just as the Quit Kashmir campaign - the biggest mass mobilisation that the National Conference ever attempted - was getting going. The 'Bedi' he mentions is the Punjabi Communist B.P.L. Bedi, husband of Freda Bedi, who had been the principal architect of the 'New Kashmir' manifesto two years earlier.

Three days after Sheikh Abdullah wrote this letter, he was arrested - and was only released from the maharaja's jails in September 1947. Palme Dutt did get to Kashmir, but only in July 1946 at the very end of his time in India. He met Bedi in Lahore before travelling to Srinagar, where he talked to Freda Bedi and other key figures in Kashmir - and had the chance to attend part of Sheikh Abdullah's trial in Srinagar and indeed talk to the defendant.

​Palme Dutt was nominally travelling around India as a correspondent for the London-based Daily Worker. From Srinagar, he wrote for the paper about Sheikh Abdullah's court hearings.
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Palme Dutt's fullest account of his time in the Kashmir Valley was published in the journal he edited, Labour Monthly. The issue for October 1946 reported that Sheikh Abdullah had, the previous month, been sentenced to three years in jail for sedition. It published part of Abdullah's speech from the dock. The same issue included the final section of Palme Dutt's India travel notes - the portions relating to Kashmir, which he described as 'the political storm centre of the Indian fight for freedom', are posted below.
Andrew Whitehead
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Bhagwan Das Garga's 'Storm over Kashmir'                                           by Andrew Whitehead

8/15/2017

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B.D. Garga during the filming of 'Storm over Kashmir', 1948 - photo courtesy of Donnabelle Garga
B. D. Garga (1924-2011) was one of India's most renowned documentary makers - and 'Storm over Kashmir' made in the late 1940s was his first film. As such, it's an important piece of cinema for what it reveals of such a key figure in Indian film as well as for what it says about Kashmir. I'd love to be able to post the video of 'Storm over Kashmir' here, or at least include a link. But I can't. There's a copy at Pune and another at the Indian government's Film Division, but I haven't yet managed to see it or obtain a copy (and I've been trying for a long, long time).

With the help and permission of Garga's widow, Donnabelle Garga, I am able to post some wonderful images both from the film and taken at the time it was being made and to share a little more about this historic documentary. Garga was a leftist and his take on Kashmir reflected a progressive mindset, which in the late 1940s was sympathetic to Sheikh Abdullah, the leader of the main Kashmiri political party, the radical and nationalist National Conference.
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Garga with Shiekh Abdullah (with glasses) during the filming of 'Storm over Kashmir' - photo, Donnabelle Garga

In an article entitled Fragments of a Life, Garga wrote about how 'Storm over Kashmir' came to be made:

'Soon after the traumatic experience of partition, I found myself in Kashmir exploring the possibility  of making a documentary film (eventually titled Storm over Kashmir) on the political situation there. K.A. Abbas, who was already in Srinagar at the invitation of Sheikh Abdullah, invited me to stay with him in his large, lovely houseboat. This was the beginning of a long friendship and collaboration on ‘various adventures and misadventures’ as he put it. Kashmir in 1948 was a most exciting place to be in. Raiders from across the border had overrun the valley, pillaging and killing innocent people. They did not even spare the nuns and burnt a chapel. There was widespread anger and revulsion against the marauders and their atrocities. Journalists and photographers from all over the world had converged on Srinagar. Our houseboat was a sort of ‘Press Club’ where everybody met and discussed the day’s happenings. Among the other visitors, I particularly remember the late D.P.Dhar, a firebrand, who would arrive with a rifle slung across his shoulder.

It was here I met the legendary French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Many a time he would invite me to join his photographic expeditions. He created all those incredible masterpieces with a battered old Leica, without filters or any artificial light. He told me that he had started his career with Jean Renoir and then switched over to Photography. Cartier-Bresson introduced me to a man to whom I owe much: Georges Sadoul'


The late Dileep Padgaonkar also wrote about the film in his foreword to Garga's 2005 book, The Art of Cinema: an insider's journey through 50 years of film history:


Around this time, Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi and Garga had to hasten to the capital to ensure the safety of his parents who lived there after partition. He had no project in hand. One day, BalwantGargi, the Lahore friend who had prodded him to take up cinema as a career informed him that Sheikh Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir had invited writers and artists to visit the state which had been invaded by raiders from Pakistan. The two decided to approach Abdullah for help to make a documentary.

The Kashmiri leader told them bluntly that he had no funds for the project. All he could do was to place a houseboat at their disposal and look after the transportation. With great difficulty they managed to get a camera and raw stock which was still in short supply. The writer Rajinder Singh Bedi suggested the plot.

Te main character was a woman who had been raped. Her husband had been killed and her house destroyed. A young girl from Delhi, AchalaSachdev, was given the role. This was the first time she faced the camera. The unit began work in Baramullah where atrocities had taken place. Nuns had been molested in a church and the chapel had been ransacked.

Garga felt at home in Kashmir for in his childhood and early youth he camped there every summer. He would take the ‘Nanda Bus Service’ which ferried passengers between Lahore and Srinagar. (Today, the Nandas rank among the leading industrialists of India.) The familiarity with Kashmir proved useful during the making of the documentary and so did the company of several people Garga met including the French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the American journalist, John Gunther, and budding Kashmiri politicians like Shamlal Watt and D.P.Dhar. The latter always went around armed with a rifle. Also present was K.A.Abbas whose houseboat served as a veritable Press Club.

The film was called Storm over Kashmir. Abbas had suggested the title after watching the rushes. RomeshThapar, a down-and-out editor of a communist publication, wrote the commentary and narrated it. Sardar Malik, who had been active in the pro-communist Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and had done musical scores for Uday Shankar’s academy composed the music.

Though the Congress President, PattabhiSitaramayya, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and several foreign correspondents had seen and appreciated the documentary, the censors would not pass it on the grounds that it did not show the Indian army defending Kashmir and that it depicted Sheikh Abdullah in a flattering light. Garga travelled to the front, befriended General Thimayya, then in charge of the Kashmir operations, shot images of soldiers as well as of a procession of children shouting” ‘Beware, you raiders. We Kashmiris are ready to face you.’ Four decades later a man came to meet Garga and told him that he was one of those children marching past his camera.

The censors finally cleared the film and it went on to win critical acclaim in prestigious publications like Indian Documentary which featured it on its cover page. But it was never released in India. Until 1988 the Famous Cine Laboratory in Tardeo, Bombay, reportedly had a print in its possession. Garga reckons that it may have found its way to the National Film Archive in Pune.
 

The most authoritative account of 'Storm over Kashmir is in Meenu Gaur's SOAS doctoral thesis entitled 'Kashmir on Screen: region religion and secularism in Hindi cinema'.

The Progressive legacy in Kashmir is brought out well by the film Kashmir Toofan Mei, or Storm Over Kashmir, made in 1949 by a group of theatre actors and filmmakers closely allied with PWA and IPT A. Storm Over Kashmir is produced by
India Art Theatres Ltd and directed by BD Garga, well-known film academic and
author of several books on Indian cinema. Keeping with Progressive traditions, the film introduces 'the people of Kashmir' in the star cast along with IPTA artists. The IPTA actress, Achla Sachdev plays the main protagonist of the film, and the commentary for the film is credited to the Progressive writer, Rajinder Singh Bedi.

The title of the film is reminiscent of Pudovkin's 'Storm over Asia' (1928), considered one of Soviet cinema's silent film classics. While Storm Over Kashmir is described as a documentary, most parts of the film are fictionalized, meant to function as a generic and not specific narrative of what ordinary Kashmiris endured during the tribal raid.

The film reveals to us the horrors of the tribal raid through the character of a
Kashmiri woman, Shabbo. The film opens with Shabbo mourning the death of her
infant, sitting amidst ruins and the destruction wrought at the hands of the tribesmen.

The commentary informs the audience, 'Death and destruction, hate and fear, these
were the gifts of raiders from Pakistan brought to the people of Kashmir'. The film then goes into flashback painting a portrait of an idyllic village life in Kashmir. The
commentary in the film highlights the struggles of the Kashmiri workers and peasantry, and eulogizes Sheikh Abdullah as a revolutionary leader:

Sheikh saheb's arrival sent a thrill through the village ... there was an air of
expectancy. A movement was being launched demanding a popular government
and economic reforms for the peasants .... Sitting in the cool shade of the
Cyprus trees, she had heard her revered leader tell them that they must win the
power with which to build a new life, that they must never despair, that victory
would ultimately be theirs. The peasants of the Kashmir valley had suffered
much and at times it looked as if their fate would never change. With Sher-i-
Kashmir amongst them their determination grew to end the rotten state of affairs
in their land ... .

This idyllic village life is disrupted with the attack of the tribesmen. Scenes of plunder follow, and the entire village is razed to the ground. This is followed by documentary National Conference voluntary militia, portraying the resistance offered
to the tribesmen by the people of Kashmir. Images of workers, the children's army ('Bal Sena') and the women's militia, marching and carrying banners, 'Shahidani Kashmir Zindabad ['Long Live the martyrs of Kashmir'] - Silk Weaving Factory Workers Union, Raj Bagh', and 'We will defend our motherland with our young blood- Bal Sena', are inter-cut with images of Sheikh Abdullah paying his respects to the 'martyrs'. The commentary speaks of hope and freedom in the framework of socialism as images of Abdullah and Nehru roll on the screen:

The Kashmir of tomorrow is taking shape today. Men, women and children all
of them have a part to play. The masses of Kashmir have found their soul. Bent
backs are no longer bent, eyes doused by poverty are aglow. The old hates have
dissolved. A new comradeship had evolved between worker, peasant, and
intellectual. Freedom has begun to find its roots. Yes, a new Kashmir is rising
from the rubble heaps. It is the Kashmir ofShabbo's dreams. Her son is dead but
there are millions of other sons of Kashmir who will defend their new won
freedom, till their fertile field, and finally reap the rich harvest. An ugly chapter
has ended. A new age has begun.

The question of the conditional and contested accession of Kashmir to India is not
represented in this film, and instead, Kashmir's past and present are intrinsically woven with the future of a socialist India.


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Donnabelle Garga has also sent some wonderful photos of Achala Sachdev (1920-2012) in 'Storm over Kashmir'. Her film career continued until 1995, when she played Kajol's grandmother in 'Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge'. 
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Donnabelle has also sent me a photo of her and B.D. taken in Goa in 1998. Many thanks to Donnabelle for making this article possible.
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Sheikh Abdullah: in his own words - by Andrew Whitehead

7/7/2017

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A news photograph of Sheikh Abdullah arriving at Heathrow airport, London, 7 March 1965 - full details below

I have, by chance, come across two brief interviews with Sheikh Abdullah recorded in the 1960s. Both appear to have been BBC interviews - probably for BBC radio. They both offer real insight into his character and political outlook - and are as revealing of the man as of the movement he led.
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Sheikh Abdullah: March 1965


This interview with Sheikh Abdullah, conducted by William Clark, took place in London, three days after his arrival in the UK.
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What asked what Kashmiris are seeking he replies: 'They feel that the future of the Kashmir state must rest in their hands'. He insists that Kashmiris view the accession to India as provisional. He is asked whether he would like to see a plebiscite to decide whether Kashmir should be part of India or Pakistan and responds: 'Or take another course' - a clear indication of his preference for independence. 
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Sheikh Abdullah: January 1968
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An interview with Sheikh Abdullah recorded on 3 January 1968. He had just been released from detention and had not yet returned to Srinagar. The interviewer was Donald Milner.


As you might expect for someone just released from jail, Sheikh Abdullah is circumspect about politics and his personal plans - but at one point he remarks of the chief Minister, G.M. Sadiq, and his government: 'I consider them quislings'.
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Sheikh Abdullah on Sunil Khilnani's 'Incarnations' series
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And as a bonus, here's Sunil Khilnani's short (14 minutes) programme on Sheikh Abdullah broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016. It includes archive clips of Sheikh Abdullah, a burst of MC Kash (rapping to the riff from Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir') and the voice of the historian Chitralekha Zutshi - and the 'anonymous' BBC correspondent you hear 3'20 in and again at 13'00 is me (and David Loyn at 11'55, followed very briefly by the voice of Elizabeth Blunt).
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... and the photo

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The image of the top of the page is a news syndication photo. On the back it bears the headline: 'GREAT AIRPORT SUPPORT FOR THE "LION OF KASHMIR": March 7th 1965'. And the text reads: 'Overwhelming support and affection is shown SHEIKH MOHAMMED ABDULLAH, the Kashmiri leader, as he finds himself in the centre of the crowd on arrival at London Airport (Heathrow) to-day (Sunday) for a visit. Known as the "Lion of Kashmir", during his stay in Britain he is expected to address meetings in London, Bradford, and Birmingham'

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