Book Review: 'Kashmir Under 370' Has New Revelations About the Militancy Days

The book narrates the vignetted accounts of Mahendra Sabharwal's journey as a top cop in Kashmir.

The detailed account of the Hazratbal shrine recapture is part of the new book ‘Kashmir Under 370’ authored jointly by Sabharwal and his son.

(Photo: The Quint)

In October 1993, the J&K Liberation Front's (JKLF) militants breached the security ring outside the revered Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar, dashing straight for the mosque's inner compound, where they took worshippers and staff as hostages.

The insurgency had just begun to explode in Kashmir and the administration had lost all semblance of control.

The hostage crisis at Hazratbal was a major security lapse. The militants had three major demands: the curfew across the Valley to be lifted, the captors be given a safe passage, and that the holy relic [a strand of hair from Prophet Muhammad’s beard enclosed in a glass ampoule] be authenticated.

For the then police chief of J&K Mahendra Sabharwal, the development could have serious implications, for 30 years prior to this episode, another similar event [involving a theft of a holy relic by unknown actors] had plunged J&K into a big political crisis that set in motion a tumultuous chain of events culminating in the India-Pakistan war of 1965.

Eventually, the government prolonged the negotiations to gain a strategic advantage over militants in a process that entailed roping in ‘co-opted’ leaders from the Hurriyat Conference. The forces then tightened the siege around the mosque, frustrating the hostage-takers until they decided to surrender.

Initially, the Kashmiri people were outraged over the besiegement of the mosque, triggering a wave of public fury against the Indian forces. But what eased the situation were the public speeches of Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose dismissal of the idea of independence for Kashmir as chimeric, surprised the Kashmiris.

The local sympathies for militants began to taper away, making it easier for the government forces to double down on the siege.

New Revelations About Kashmir's Militancy Days

The detailed account of the Hazratbal shrine recapture is part of the new book ‘Kashmir Under 370’ authored jointly by Sabharwal and his son.

The book narrates the vignetted accounts of Sabharwal's journey as a top cop in Kashmir. The narrative is punctuated with some important snapshots into the region’s troublesome history. The result is a highly readable and engaging memoir that adds a new layer of perspective to Kashmir’s loud didactical canvas.

Sabharwal is one of those earliest officers drawn from the pool of the All India Services who were permitted to fill in the ranks of the police and the bureaucracy in J&K - a highly controversial decision taken by the J&K assembly in 1958 during the rule of Prime Minister (the PM post was abolished in 1965) Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad. As such, that makes him one of the crucial record keepers of J&K’s most eventful decades of the 60s and the 70s.

The book argues that the special status was responsible for much of the misery that J&K witnessed since its accession to India. To that end, Sabharwal herds his narrative through the stormy decades in the aftermath of J&K's accession with India.

It is interesting how he uses this prism to interpret the ruling years of Sheikh Abdullah, Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, GM Sadiq, Syed Mir Qasim and Farooq Abdullah. The picture that he draws is that of chronic misgovernance that aggravated the political situation in the state and obstructed J&K’s emotional and physical integration with the rest of the country.

The book has important revelations about the key events in Kashmir's long historical trajectory.

One particular anecdote is explained in the context of violence against the Jamaat-e-Islami cadres in 1979 following rumours that some Jamaat members had distributed sweets over the execution of Pakistan’s ex-premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at the hands of the country’s dictator Zia-ul-Haq. Since Bhutto was much admired in Kashmir, his killings sparked reprisal attacks.

Sabharwal recounts how, in spite of his aversion to the Islamist group, Abdullah toured the most violence-hit part of South Kashmir, and met the aggrieved families, pressing them to come to terms with the act of riots as “God’s doing.”

A New Take on Farooq Abdullah as CM

Sabharwal’s account of the succession of Sheikh Andullah's son Farooq as head of the National Conference, and his subsequent steering of the state as chief minister is full of interesting details, some of which are coming to light for the first time.

He builds a context to the disastrous rivalry between Farooq and Indira Gandhi.

Apparently, Farooq continued to aggravate this relationship by expanding his party’s influence into areas of Jammu (which the Congress saw as an act of encroachment); introducing a bill to resettle Kashmiris living in exile in Pakistan; rebooting relations with the pro-Pakistan Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq on friendlier terms; and worse yet, joined NT Rama Rao’s big-tent coalition opposed to Gandhi’s dictatorial policies.

Farooq’s ill-thought decision to overhaul his cabinet after taking over as CM came back to haunt him as some members with questionable bona fides willingly became the pawns for Gandhi’s machinations. 12 of his new legislators defected, toppling Farooq’s government.

Sabharwal has new details regarding this historical episode. He reveals how he gave Farooq the information about his dismissal beforehand, but Farooq was too overconfident about his regime, arguing that a “revolution” would sweep Kashmir if he was so much as touched.

In the Run-up to Insurgency 

After Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, his son Rajiv was less hostile to Farooq and angled for a modus vivendi, culminating in what is now called a Rajiv-Farooq Accord, where the NC was ready to put behind the memories of the disastrous coup orchestrated by the Congress-led Centre and fight the following elections of 1987 as an alliance.

But these polls were brutally rigged as soon as the alliance realised some crucial seats were going into the hands of the Muslim United Front, a pro-independence opposition that had crystallised against the NC-Congress in response to the decades of its monopoly over local power structures.

“I was present when PM Rajiv Gandhi called suggesting that a win for MUF’s candidate Muhammad Yusuf Shah, who was leading, could pose serious trouble for the government,” Sabharwal writes, adding that Farooq relayed the instructions to the J&K Police’s DIG Ali Watali who then visited the counting centres to “ensure victory” for NC-Congress candidates.

The rigged elections sparked a violent response which is how the militancy began.

Local Disillusionment With Violence

The book also reveals a fascinating portrait of Mirza Hamid Iqbal, a counter-intelligence officer with the J&K Police whose father had been defended in court by Pakistan’s founder MA Jinnah on his trip to Kashmir before 1947. It was Iqbal who probed the first batch of attacks that heralded the start of militancy in 1989.

The anecdotes about this period also reveal how many Kashmiris increasingly grew disillusioned with militancy on account of gratuitous violence committed by militant leaders.

One case in point is that of an encounter killing of Sher Khan, leader of the Al-Umar outfit, who had been at large after being released in exchange for Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of the Union Minister Mufti Sayeed.

The information regarding Sher Khan's whereabouts had come from a father whose two daughters had been raped by the militants. “Our informant kicked - some say danced - on the body of the terrorist (after he was killed),” Sabharwal writes.

Another interesting anecdote is about the massacre of 1995 in the Hawal neighbourhood of Srinagar involving CRPF soldiers accused of firing indiscriminately at the mourners of the slain Hurriyat leader Moulvi Farooq, resulting in 70 casualties.

Sabharwal reveals that he had initially decided to allow the mourners to lead the funeral procession from Soura Hospital to Mirwaiz’s ancestral residence in downtown Srinagar. “But Jagmohan’s habit of not listening led to him to overrule my decision,” he writes, adding that the controversial ex-J&K governor ordered the CRPF to stop the procession “at all costs.”

Pro-BJP Slant Mars the Narration

The fundamental flaw in the book is a narrative predetermined to dovetail with the political talking points of the ruling party, nudging the authors into making many assertions that are misleading mainly because they aren’t placed in the right historical contexts.

Throughout the book, the authors draw home the idea of J&K’s dependence on the Centre, arguing that Kashmiris have always remained the most pandered community. A good number of them - 25 percent - depend on government jobs, the authors contend.

J&K, they write, has been a revenue-deficient state and 80 percent of spending wouldn’t have been forthcoming without the central assistance. As a result, the region doesn’t have the financial security to stand on its own feet.

But making these assertions in the vein in which the authors have could be deceptive. As scholar Shahla Hussain has demonstrated, this culture of dependency didn’t come of its own free will but was engineered by the Union government as it struggled to contain the full-blown movement for a referendum in the aftermath of Sheikh Abdullah’s arrest.

Persuading his successor GM Bakshi to surrender J&K’s autonomy over finances, the Centre prioritised funnelling enormous aid to the region out of proportion to what other Indian states would get. Spooked by a sudden upsurge of a recalcitrant population, the Centre wanted to consolidate its control by fostering patronage politics in J&K.

It was only in 1970 - after having achieved significant integration through means that constitutional expert AG Noorani believes to be illegal - that the Centre reconsidered its financial relationship with J&K, ending the preferential treatment and disbursing further federal assistance in the form of 30 percent grants and 70 percent recoverable loans.

Far from being invested into income-generating programs, a large percentage of these grants, historian Hafsa Kanjwal has observed, was earmarked for police, intelligence, the Directorate of Public Relations (DIPR) and, from 1956 onwards, for ‘all India services’ of which the author was a part.

False Dichotomy of Good Islam, Bad Islam

The authors also appear to make a case for the quietistic Sufi Islam that Kashmiris ought to embrace more as opposed to Islam’s puritan strain which, in his telling, is the wellspring of separatism in J&K.

It is surprising that despite the stellar works by scholars Chitralekha Zutshi and Mridu Rai in the early 2000s, and more recently by Shahla Hussain - all of which meticulously deconstruct the role of Islam as an idiom of political expression in Kashmir - such orientalised logic can be still be smuggled into our midst.

For it were the religious spaces associated with this ostensibly pacifist Sufi Islam - Pather Masjid and Khanqah-e-Moula - that became active arenas from where the Islam-inflected political assertion against the Dogra monarchy took shape.

It is also somewhat hypocritical when the authors express heartbreak over the gutting of the Charar-e-Sharif mosque at the hands of Pashtun militants in 1995 and, in the same breath, call the title of Sheikh-ul-Alam (the patron saint of Charar shrine) to be dropped from Srinagar Airport so it could be renamed after an Indian major who fought Pakistani raiders in 1947.

It is a curious case of appropriation and erasure at the same time.

(Shakir Mir is an independent journalist. He has also written for The Wire, Article 14, Caravan Magazine, Firstpost, The Times of India and more. He tweets at @shakirmir. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)