Kashmir personified
Kashmir personified
William Crawley on a book that argues how New Delhi, in failing to understand former CM of Kashmir Farooq Abdullah, did not to profit from his essential goodwill towards India
The former chief minister of Kashmir, Dr Farooq Abdullah, never quite inherited the same massive reputation and magnetism as a politician and national leader as his father Sheikh Abdullah, known as ‘the Lion of Kashmir’. The Sheikh was both a friend and opponent of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and later of his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Both tried to use him to achieve their aim of validating Kashmir’s accession to India under the original British-decided terms of the partition settlement of1947. Nehru imprisoned Sheikh Abdullah for 11 years before releasing him in 1964.He was imprisoned again by Indira Gandhi for a further four years, though she released him in 1975 and, following an election, he returned as chief minister until his death in 1982.
Farooq Abdullah was drawn into continuing his father’s political legacy as a dedicated political leader, but he was not of the freedom fighter generation or mould. He qualified as a medical doctor, married an Englishwoman and spent many years in England, which became almost his second home, and which he returned to frequently. His critics called him a ‘stooge of Delhi’. There was a widely held view in the media, shared by the Intelligence services, that Farooq’s style of leadership was ‘mercurial’ and ‘unpredictable’, even ‘outrageous’, more cinema than politics. He had the image of a playboy, pictured often in the company of glamorous film personalities.
The Chief Minister and the Spy: An Unlikely Friendship, is written by a former Indian intelligence chief, Amarjit Singh (A.S.) Dulat, whose professional job for many years was to watch Farooq and report back to Delhi on his moods and attitudes to developments in Kashmir, but who appears also to have formed a genuine if ‘unlikely’ friendship with him. The repeated message of this book is that Delhi has consistently failed to understand Farooq and therefore to capitalise on his fundamental goodwill towards India.
From the title onwards, the author’s writing style is informal and conversational. Dulat was no ordinary spy but the head, at different times, of two of India’s most powerful and often feared agencies: the Intelligence Bureau(IB)and the Research and Analysis wing (RAW). Within IB he headed the powerful Kashmir Operations Group (K-Group),which oversaw India’s policy in Kashmir.
He has previously written scholarly books on Kashmir, most notably Kashmir: The Vajpayee years (2015). But readers looking for comparability with his previous work will be disappointed that there is no index to help follow events and actors in Kashmir’s history of the past 50 years, and in the political and personal drama of Farooq Abdullah’s career.
Farooq Abdullah was drawn into continuing his father’s political legacy as a dedicated political leader
This has become a third-generation political dynasty. Farooq’s son Omar Abdulla his chief minister of the newly designated Union Territory of Kashmir, which no longer has special status under Article 370, abolished by Narendra Modi’s government in 2019.
The dynastic aspect of Farooq’s career is highlighted by Dulat’s account of the rivalry for succession to the mantle of Sheikh Abdullah within the family between Farooq and his brother-in-law Ghulam Muhammed Shah, husband of his sister Khalida. Shah was older and had longer experience in politics than Farooq; he had served in the Sheikh’s administrations since the 1975 accord with Indira Gandhi and had at one time been considered a natural successor. He later became chief minister of Kashmir when Indira Gandhi sacked Farooq in the wake of Operation Blue star in 1984. She believed (mistakenly, Dulat says) that Farooq had been encouraging Bhindranwale’s separatist ambitions for the Sikhs in neighbouring Punjab. The operation – or coup – was carried out by Jagmohan, known as Indira Gandhi’s loyal ‘hatchet man’ since the 1975-7 Emergency, and the man later held responsible in the crisis of 1989-90 for the ‘worst massacre in Kashmir’s history’.
Dulat attributes the crisis in Kashmir during those years to General Zia ul Huq’s determination to avenge the loss of East Pakistan to Bangladesh in 1971. Farooq nurtured lifelong resentment at having been ‘betrayed both by Mrs Gandhi and his own family’.
Low points for Farooq included his disappointment at not being nominated as Vice President of India
Ghulam Shah was later to be superseded Farooq’s son Omar as the Abdullah family’s dynastic representative. The return of Jagmohan as a key player in Kashmir had a negative influence on Dulat’s own career at the highest levels of the Indian Intelligence and security apparatus. Dulat was thought at the time to be too close to Farooq and was sacked by Jagmohan. His account from his own perspective, maintaining that he was always doing the job that Delhi had given him, is a particularly illuminating feature of the book.
It is clear that Dulat believed consistently that Farooq was India’s best bet in Kashmir, preferable both to Ghulam Shah and to the charismatic and uncompromising Kashmiri separatist Shabir Shah, with whom Delhi had also held long, exploratory but ultimately unproductive talks. His account of the man whose career he monitors so closely for many years repeatedly warns about the dangers of underestimating him as a politician, and his manner is always deferential to Farooq’s experience and position.
The journalist and editor Shekhar Gupta, reporting on Farooq’s reinstatement as chief minister in 1996, describes him as full of ‘beans and banter’ as his confidence returned at his swearing in as chief minister. There were later high points, notably when his son Omar was inducted as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir in 2009. The low points, apart from his dismissal as chief minister by Indira Gandhi, were his disappointment at not being nominated as Vice President of India, as had been promised, and most consequentially the abrogation of Kashmir’ special status under Article 370.
Dulat gives an account of a meeting between Farooq and Narendra Modi shortly before the abrogation was announced, in which Modi is said to have been full of the friendliest assurances. Despite them, when the move was announced – by the Home Minister Amit Shah, not by Modi himself –both Farooq and Omar were arrested and detained for six months under the Public Safety Act, with the full apparatus of military repression. Farooq regarded this as a betrayal of his record of loyalty to India. His support for Kashmiri rights has increasingly stressed the political importance of Kashmiriyat ,a non-communal sense of cultural identity common to all Kashmiris.
Dulat paints a portrait of Farooq in his old age as more focussed on his family and his Islamic faith, though still committed to the secular ideals which his father and his party, the National Conference, had always advocated. Controversies notwithstanding, Dulat concludes, sweepingly and unequivocally: ‘He is Kashmir’.
Dr William Crawley is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London
News has just come in that a member of the independent Election Commission, Ms PMS Charles, has resigned. The reason for her resignation is not known but speculation in Colombo is that she was pressured to quit in further moves to scupper the election. It is also being said that one or more of the surviving three members will also resign as pressure mounts. This could happen by independence day