Kashmir – Shock, Fury, Turmoil
In his seminal work What is History, E.H.Carr challenges the long held belief that facts speak for themselves. “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.” Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello through one of his characters describes a fact as “a sack – it won’t stand up till you’ve put something in it”.
Page after page in his new book, Khalid Bashir appears not just calling on the forsaken facts but also makes them stand up.
Kashmir – Shock, Fury, Turmoil: Theft of Prophet’s Relic, Outrage and Spinoff is published by Gulshan Books Kashmir. It is yet another milestone in Khalid’s growth as an incisive and passionate historian. His earlier works River Through My Backyard, Kashmir: Exposing the Myth Behind The Narrative, Kashmir: Looking back in Time and Kashmir – A Walk Through History have already won him accolades.
The sacrilegious theft of holy relic from Hazratbal in late December of 1963 and the subsequent agitation has for generations lived in the collective consciousness of Kashmiri people. But reading Khalid’s new book, centered on the mysterious theft, leads one to understand how seemingly apolitical events in Kashmir have proven volatile as well as ethereal.
Deploying his unique methodology, using both documented as well as oral accounts from the eyewitnesses, the author draws a lucid portrait of sacrilegious theft, which has for decades remained wrapped in mystery.
Although the book doesn’t clearly demystify the event, it widens the lens through which the future historians can, far less ambiguously than past, place this event in Kashmir’s checkered political history.
It has eyewitness accounts of investigators and victims, shining spotlighting everyone – from local political echelons to corridors of power in Delhi – who were directly or indirectly linked to the crisis.
The book begins with the key incident of theft at Hazratbal shrine and then takes us back to the Holy Relic’s Blessed Journey from Medina in Arabia to Kashmir in March 1700 AD, quoting authentic sources such as Mirza Qalandar Baig, a Kashmiri poet who witnessed the Holy Relic’s arrival, and his mentor Hazrat Sheikh Muhammad Chisti Radho who documented the Blessed Journey in long Persian poem Hujjat-i-Qasirah.
The following chapter Storm in the Valley sketches out the expanse of protest marches and the role of those who organized as well as those who suppressed them. In the later chapters the author takes us, with utmost discipline of detail, through local, national and international fallouts of the Holy Relict theft and the crisis that ensued.
The author, like an ace filmmaker, doesn’t offer a dull and drab chronology of events. He goes back and forth. After setting the stage for a bigger conflict that was brewing, he garnishes the journey with a cultural sightseeing in the chapter Rhymes of Angst. The chapter elucidates the creative energy the agitation exuded, compiling Urdu as well Kashmiri slogans, often coined spontaneously yet some versified by veteran poets. Women, especially, would throw up off-the-cuff songs:
Aes karaw na seeni chaak
Asei nyükh moy-i-paak
Tchooras karin jal shinaakh
Asi nyükh moy-i-paak
Asi chhu thawun itefaaq
Asi nyükh moy-i-paak
Context And Consequences
Gleaning from the published opinions in mainstream national Urdu press as well as U.S. State Department’s five conclusions about the genesis of this crisis, the book sets a significant context.
From “Pakistan playing Chinese game to weaken India’s defenses” – embers of 1962 Sino-India war were still warm –to the crisis providing “an excuse for regular Pakistan infiltrators into Indian side of Kashmir,” the book draws a significant politico-military context to the 1963 crisis.
Among the local actors, the work sketches detailed portraits of Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad, who was installed as autonomous J&K’s Prime Minister after Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah was deposed and arrested for anti-India activities, and his lackey Baskhi Rashid, who presided over the suppression of dissenters, arrest of protesters and torturing of activists in ways that are quite harrowing. The details make the book quite relatable to the 1990s generation as well as to the millennial youth.
While the overwhelming popular belief rested on the rumor that Bakhshis were behind the crime, Khalid connects several dots ranging from the central bureaucracy to several Kashmiri politicians who were closer to the Prime Minister of India Jawahar Lal Nehru. This jockeying for credit to recover or identify the stolen relic might have obscured the truth.
Sheikh Abdullah’s close confidante and secretary G Ahmad hints at D P Dhar’s involvement and the student leader Abdul Rashid Kabuli links the agitation with a ploy to press for Sheikh’s release.
Among the contextual entries is that of Sirajuddin, a former Indian asset believed to have been evacuated from Pakistan in 1958.
Recalling a visit to Nedou’s Hotel on M A Road, the most happening place in 1960s for official as well as secret meetings, Sirajuddin hints that the establishment was in know of things a month before the actual theft occurred.
After a careful and dispassionate contextualization, the author turns to the consequences in a long chapter The Fallout, dividing it into three subchapters, Communal, Diplomatic and Political fallout. Although the Holy Relic theft sparked a communal conundrum in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and several Indian states, not a single incident was reported from J&K. Then President Dr. Rajindra Prasad and Prime Minister Nehru had praised the communal harmony, displayed during the prolonged protest movement across J&K.
Major consequences discussed are political changeover in Kashmir, souring of Indo-Pak relations leading to an all-out war in 1965 and on the sidelines of the war eruption of Pakistan-backed underground militant movement that saw tens of thousands of armed infiltrators spreading across Kashmir.
Subverting Political Myths
Recent decades have seen certain political narratives taking root. An ahistorical approach seems to have even fascinated learned politicians, who trace the source of all wrongdoing either to 1987 –when a massively rigged election anguished the youth – or 5 August 2019, when the Parliament read down article 370.
By revisiting the events that unfolded in mid 1960s, the book highlights J&K’s innate vulnerability to subversion, sabotage and violence, at times supported by local political actors.
The accounts about setting up of insurgent groups like Jehad Committee, Al-Fateh, Red Kashmir and Master Cell can help young readers of history to navigate the mythical fog that wraps the genesis of what had been going on in Jammu and Kashmir.
The fact, as the book mentions through authentic sources, that in mid 1960s eight thousand armed men including Pak regulars were pushed into Jammu and Kashmir clearly rebuts the widely held belief that the militancy in J&K began in 1990 that too as a consequence of a rigged election.
Enormity of that situation in mid 1960s can be gauged from the fact that gunfights were taking place between militants and security forces in places like Bemina, Budgam, Beerwah, Yusmarg and Gulmarg. The conflict took an ugly turn when working on an input about the presence of insurgents, entire Batamaloo was set on fire reducing to ashes 440 houses.
About the call for removal of article 370 being exclusively a BJP call, the book shines a brighter light on how the Holy Relic agitation had got Congress leadership around the need to get rid of it because it was fostering the separatist sentiments.
The book appears like a boy scout whose duty is to identify not fight. Khalid Bashir is a cool historian; he doesn’t confront the facts but identifies their place, locates the context and compares them with other available facts, leaving for the reader enough room to draw his own conclusion.
The dormant nature of Plebiscite Front till the sacrilegious theft at Hazratbal Shrine, PF’s silence about the gradual erosion of constitutional guarantees and wavering nature of PF’s frontline leaders are the scenes that come alive as if one is watching a period movie.
Khalid has steered clear of using repulsive academic jargon. This makes the book not just accessible for a common reader but also illuminating for a researcher.
(Riyaz Masroor is Srinagar-based Journalist and Writer.)
