in the north-east of India that the Nehruvian vision took on its most brutal
and violent forms.
Kashmir, equally, was now both an internal and an international
issue, especially with Pakistan raising Kashmir as a central issue in inter-
national fora and with the USA, incorporating Pakistan into its system of
international alliances through the Baghdad Pact and the South-East
Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), having to support Pakistan’s claims
to Kashmir. Nehru’s Kashmir policy had been built around Sheikh
Abdullah’s commitment to an Indian connection rather than a Pakistani
one. Now, Abdullah’s position had begun to shift towards independence
for Kashmir. India’s interference in Kashmiri affairs beyond the three
subjects of defence, external affairs and communications, the basis of
Kashmir’s accession to India, had been gradual but steady, and was
beginning to be the cause of some resentment in Kashmir. In India, there
was, on the other hand, some resentment at Kashmir’s special status,
which S.P. Mukherjee, now leader of the Jan Sangh, sought to exploit.
Abdullah had been quite frank with Nehru: however much he
sympathised with Nehru’s attempts to build a secular state, and agreed
that Kashmir’s connection with India was an important part of achieving
this goal, he also saw clearly that communal forces were constantly
working against Nehru’s vision of India. He, Abdullah, as a Kashmiri
leader, could not afford to subordinate Kashmir’s future to an Indian
project, however desirable. At the end of 1952, Mukherjee and the Jan
Sangh led a coalition of sectarian forces to challenge Kashmir’s special
status within the Indian Union, and to detach the Hindu-majority Jammu
area from the rest of Kashmir. Nehru attempted an exercise in damage
control by trying to prevent cross-party support for Mukherjee, requesting
socialists not to support the movement, and at the same time trying to
get Abdullah to look like an Indian nationalist, among other things
by flying the Indian flag alongside that of the Kashmir state; he failed.
When Mukherjee crossed into Jammu without a permit in March 1953,
Abdullah had him arrested; Mukherjee then died in prison on June 23.
In the face of Abdullah’s public call for Kashmiri independence, it was
useful to be able to claim that Abdullah no longer had public support
in Kashmir and in his own party. Whether this was the case or not was
less important than the fact that on August 9, 1953, his government was
dismissed, and the new prime minister of Kashmir, Bakshi Ghulam
Muhammad, promptly had him arrested. Nehru accepted the course of
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 211