control’ that divides ‘Indian Kashmir’ from ‘Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir’
or ‘Azad Kashmir’ is such a line.) The desired plebiscite was never held.
Jinnah had contended that no fair plebiscite could be conducted with
Indian troops and a government sympathetic to India in place – soon after
accession to India, the National Conference formed the government in
Kashmir – and later, with Kashmir divided between India and Pakistan,
this would hardly have been practical. By late 1948, Nehru had abandoned
the idea of a plebiscite, and had said so to Sheikh Abdullah in January
1949, but he never publicly abandoned the idea until 1954. Kashmir’s
accession to India had been loose and partial rather than one of complete
incorporation into the new federation: constitutionally, the subjects of
defence, external relations and communications were the only three on
which the Indian Union was empowered to legislate for Kashmir. This
constitutional position has never been respected. (Nehru himself was later
to be complicit in putting his friend Sheikh Abdullah in jail, and the
autonomy of Kashmir was gradually eroded.)DOMESTIC BATTLES: NEHRU’S SEARCH FOR POWER
Through all this, the ‘duumvirate’ was engaged in what effectively was
an internal Cold War. There was a brief thaw after Gandhi’s assassination
in which Nehru and Patel appeared to stand together on the issue of
communalism and to have overcome differences: in his address on All-
India Radio, following Nehru’s, after Gandhi’s assassination, Patel referred
to Nehru as ‘my dear brother’.^14 But this was illusory. Patel, the man who
increasingly felt in control of the Congress’s organisational politics
and who had done so much to set up the continuity and functioning
of the institutional mechanisms of the new Indian state, wished to have a
larger say in political matters. Representing the Congress right, he also
commanded the allegiance of a large section of the party, possibly, he
believed, the majority; especially after he had engineered the transfor-
mation of the Congress into a more disciplined party, had engineered the
exclusion of the CPI from the Congress after the war, and had seen the
secession of the socialists in 1949. Nehru was definitely indispensable to
the Congress as the most popular and recognisable figure both on a world
stage and within India that the Congress could present in public. But the
attempted disempowerment of Nehru in terms of day-to-day practical
politics was to continue, if possible. Patel hoped he could work Gandhi’s180 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55