Jammu Kashmir – A Victim of faulty discourse ( Part-1)
   11-Oct-2018
 
 
 
 
There is a struggle going in the State of Jammu Kashmir between Nationalist forces and Separatists.
 
The Political Background of Jammu and Kashmir.
 
The history of Jammu Kashmir is ancient. According to the ancient sources it begins with Kashyap Rishi. Kashmir, perhaps, is the only region in India which has a systematically documented history. The Rajtarangini by Kalhan is a document of the same nature.

The history of Jammu is equally ancient. If one investigates, the sources can be traced up to the time of Mahabharata. The history of Laddakh, Gilgit and Baltistan is connected with the history of Himalaya. The history of these regions is as old as the Himalaya. However, the history of the principality/estate/princely state Jammu and Kashmir, created by combining these five regions is not very old, it is very recent. The credit to form the principality of Jammu and Kashmir goes to Maharaja Gulab Singh. He was coronated in the year 1822, and since then there was no turning back for him. By adding small estates like Gilgit, Baltistan and Laddakh,
 
He became the ruler of a very big province. After the death of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh in Lahor, his army was scattered in the wars with the British in Punjab region, thus Kashmir was taken over by the British. It was in 1846 that Kashmir was added to Jammu province, creating the second largest Princely state of India. When in the first war on independence was fought in 1857, the same year Maharaja Gulab Singh passed away. A new chapter in the history of the state was added when the British started conspiringagainst the heir Maharaja Hari Singh, the son of Maharaja Gulab Singh. The British believed that Maharaja Hari Singh sympathised with the freedom fighters of India.
New researches are establishing role of the then Muslim Conference, now National Conference cooperating in the conspiracies of the British, which may or may not be deliberate. The British left India in 1947, India had to face the disaster of partition. The independence also put an end to the hereditary rule of more than 550 princely states. The princely hereditary rule of Jammu and Kashmir also came to an end but as a result of partition one third of the principality was forcefully/illegally occupied by Pakistan. What remained of the state was also subject to various movements of separatism and integration by political parties. In these movements National Conference with its demand for autonomy and PrajaParishad demanding integration created permanent footprints in this region. PrajaParishad is the first nationalistic movement of independent India. Look at the irony, the main demand of PrajaParsiahd was full integration of the State with India. Even then , historians of India forgotten this very movement.
 

 
 
The Satyagrah in Jammu Kashmir by Praja Parishad is very significant in the history of independent India, and it had far reaching consequences. Although the Satyagrah had started with the formation of the PrajaParishad on 17th November 1947, but the real fierceness of the movementwas felt when Pt. Nehru and Shaikh Abdullah reached a consensus on the format of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir. The ground work of this movement, actually, had begun with the partition of India. After Maharaja Hari Singh signed the instrument of accession to integrate Jammu and Kashmir with India, Sheikh Abdulla was made the caretaker/emergency administrator, (Aapatprashasak), but in 1949, with the exile of Maharaja Hari Singh, Abdulla enjoyed unrestrainedpowers.  
 

 
This agitated the Nationalist forces not only in Jammu and Kashmir but all over India. After Nehru took the Jammu Kashmir matter to the United Nations, the suspicion in the mind of the nationalists from the state became more intense. Amid all the conflicts and debates, when Shaikh Abdulla, except for the Sunni Muslims of Kashmir, started marginalization of the people from Jammu and Laddakh, to the extent that he even refused to accept them as the party in the entire issue, then the nationalist forces of the state started unifying themselves. After all the pride and identity of the people and the security of the nation was at stake. The situation became worst when Shaikh Abdulla started giving communal colour to the issue of Jammu and Kashmir. He started demanding Special Status for Jammu and Kashmir, just because the state had a Muslim majority. He said “The Government of India time and again claims that India never accepted the Two Nation theory of Pakistan, nor was this country divided on communal lines. The claim of the Indian government is correct, but whenever the issue of Jammu and Kashmir is raised, it feels as if there is no better advocate of the Two Nation theory, other than India.”
 
It was but natural that the nationalist forces were quite disappointed with this communalization of Jammu Kashmir issue. It was ironical that those who were opposing communalization of the issue, the same people were called communal by Shaikh Abdulla. The efforts of Nehru and Abdulla to suppress this nationalist movement was like adding fuel to fire. The discontent, which started brewing up in 1947 spread like wild fire by 1952, and finally culminated in the Satyagrah of the PrajaParishad. In order to understand the background of this movement it is important to understand the background of the then political scenario and political conspiracies of Britian.