Sheik Abdullah served as Kashmir’s Prime Minister with Nehru’s blessings for India’s first five years. His land reforms destroyed the Hindu landlord class and created a landholding Muslim peasantry. But in 1953, Abdullah began to publicly call for Kashmir’s independence, as New Delhi would not fulfill special promises of autonomy. Nehru was outraged, and dismissed Abdullah, jailed him for the next 11 years, and installed a puppet, Bakshi Mohammad in his place.
Nehru and Bakshi Mohammad had complete contempt for democracy in Kashmir. Nehru himself said there was “no material for democracy in Kashmir.” Mohammad was so efficient at rigging elections that Nehru once suggested that it might look better if his party was to lose a few elections to a few “bona fide opponents.” (Mishra, NYRB). But even Bakshi ended up as not being compliant enough, and was also thrown in jail in 1965.
Sheik Abdullah, after promising to renounce independence, was returned to his throne as Prime Minister of Kashmir in 1975 by Indira Gandhi, and then went on to anoint his son Farooq Abdullah as his heir and head of the National Conference which was the party that ran Kashmir. He took over in 1982 when his father died. But much to Indira Gandhi’s distress, he refused her offers of an election alliance with the Congress Party in Kashmir. Indira vented her rage by illegally dismissing his government in 1984, and installing Jagmohan, a Hindu, to be special governor of Kashmir. For 72 of its first 90 days in office, the new government had to impose curfew in Srinagar due to a popular agitation against it.
Jagmohan is the person most responsible for the violent insurgency in Kashmir as his autocratic and anti-Muslim policies led to the complete disenchantment of the Kashmiri Muslims with the India Union. He engaged in petty Hindu chauvinism, such as forbidding Muslims to slaughter sheep on a Hindu festival day, even though Kashmiri Hindus have no prohibition on meat. His agenda was to force Kashmir to join the “national mainstream”, which to the Muslims meant an all-out assault on the distinct Kashmiri culture and religion.
During the 1980’s madrassas were also taking roots in Kashmir, many run by Muslim refugees from Assam State who had survived anti-Muslim riots and massacre in the early 1980’s. The madrassas taught a more militant form of Islam, in contrast to the traditional mild Sufi strain that was Islam in Kashmir. Islamist political parties came to be formed, and contested the 1987 elections. These elections were viewed as among the most fraudulent in Kashmir’s history, with candidates and polling-agents beaten up and tortured. Syed Salahuddin, the leader of Hizbul Mujahideen, was imprisoned after having nearly won his race. Farooq Abdullah, who had made his peace with the Congress Party and was willing to behave, was “elected” as the Prime Minister.
The children of Kashmir’s peasant Muslims now had educations, many at the University level, but had no jobs or prospects of any, and were barred from the political system. New Delhi ruled Kashmir like a colony, with only the barest fig leaf of democratic covering. At first few Kashmiris started to go to Pakistan, seeking training and weapons to fight for freedom. Meanwhile, in Srinagar, the people began to demand independence for the first time in Kashmir’s history. Several hundred thousand would fill the streets of the capital in 1989 shouting “Azadi, Azadi” (freedom), hoping that the same wave of history liberating Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union that year would carry them along.
India responded by sending Jagmohan again to reassert control, which he did in a brutal fashion.
In the next six months, several hundred peaceful demonstrators were shot dead by Indian forces, all civil liberties were suspended, torture was used routinely on old men and young boys, foreign journalists were expelled and local newsmen confined to their homes, and the state had no elected leader, as Abdullah had resigned.
During Jagmohan’s rule, the 140,000 strong Hindu minority living in the Vale left. The professional class scattered in a worldwide diaspora, but the poor ended up in Jammu, still stuck to this day in a refugee-like status in their own country. The small Hindu minority was attacked during that time by Muslim guerrillas, but many Kashmiris believe that Jagmohan encouraged the Hindus to leave the Vale so as to make it easier for him to deal harshly with the Muslims. Kashmir, although still officially part of the Indian Union, was now nothing more than a colony, where Indian rule was maintained through the violence endemic in all colonialisms.