Former chief editor of The Statesman, Pran Chopra is political analyst, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.
.........................He had always been opposed to accession to Pakistan, and had vigorously fought and defeated those who favoured it. He was the principal reason why Jinnah retreated from Kashmir as an embittered man in the early 1940s, and later in the decade supported rule by the Maharaja, not by the people. It was Abdullah who persuaded Nehru to support Vallabhbhai Patel in sending troops to Kashmir, against the advice of Mountbatten, to beat back the invasion from Pakistan. His popularity was the reason why Pakistan shied off from a plebiscite, refusing to carry out the UN's conditions for holding it, while India agreed to its part of the bargain.
Suddenly his standing was undermined by a rumour that when Adlai Stevenson called on him in Srinagar in the summer of 1953, he had offered Kashmir as a base for American operations against the Soviet Union in exchange for recognition of Kashmir as an independent state. The rumour mongers forgot that even at the height of the suspicion against Abdullah, he stood by the limited accession he himself had accepted and opposed only, but openly, the creeping expansions of it which had been brought about by his successors. This he affirmed repeatedly to me.
Unfortunately conversations with him dwindled thereafter on account of the long years he was to spend in jail and my departure from Delhi. Otherwise I would have tried to understand more closely two episodes in his life: his talks with President Ayub in 1964, when he went to Pakistan with Nehru's blessings; and the Kashmir Accord. But such understanding as I could gather from him and others showed the former to be an insubstantial event, the latter to be disgraceful.
I was thrilled when news of the accord reached me. In substance, the news was that the government would consider any request by the Jammu & Kashmir Assembly to roll the accession back to the level Abdullah had accepted himself. I thought peace was at hand because the dispute was not about the fact but about the extent of the accession and some subsequent expansions. But no request came from the Assembly. The mystery was impenetrable from a distance. The pieces fell into place later.
The first piece was the accord itself. Its language was as ambiguous as the clever lawyers around the Sheikh and Indira Gandhi could make it. The second piece was the advice they gave him. It was so elliptical and convoluted that he could not cut any path through it. The third was Mrs Gandhi. Caught up in the problems of the Emergency, she went along with those who wanted to use the accord for burying the problem instead of solving it.
But the centre piece was Abdullah himself. When the time came to move the state assembly, he was no longer able to move himself. Heart, diabetes and other ailments had laid him low. He was still the chief minister when I met him again, but neither in mind nor in body was he the man he used to be. He had become the classic picture of an ailing Sultan manipulated by cunning courtiers.Those years were an unbefitting end to a life which till then had been so significant.
Former chief editor of The Statesman, Pran Chopra is political analyst, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.
http://www.india-today.com/itoday/millennium/100people/sheikh.html
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