Sheikh Abdullah

Anyone asking who was Sheikh Abdullah must begin in Soura, a village on the outskirts of Srinagar, where he was born on December 5, 1905. His father, Sheikh Mohammad Ibrahim, a middle-class trader in Kashmiri shawls, died eleven days before the boy's birth, and the family raised him in modest circumstances under the princely Dogra state of Jammu and Kashmir ^[1]. The Kashmir of his childhood was ruled by a Hindu maharaja while the overwhelming majority of subjects were Muslim peasants, many of them bound to landlords and burdened by taxes on nearly every trade they practiced ^[2].

Abdullah proved a determined student at a time when education was rare for Kashmiri Muslims. He studied at Islamia High School in Srinagar and at Sri Pratap College, then left the Valley for higher studies because local avenues were closed to him. He earned a master's degree in chemistry from Aligarh Muslim University in 1930, an unusual qualification for a future agitator, and one that shaped his methodical habits of organization ^[1]. Aligarh also exposed him to the political currents of late colonial India: nationalist debate, Muslim reformist thought, and the growing demand for representative government ^[3].

On returning home he found that even a science postgraduate faced a ceiling. He worked briefly as a teacher, since the state administration reserved its better posts for others, and the experience of blocked advancement pushed the young chemist toward public life ^[2].

The turning point came in 1931, when protests against the Dogra administration ended in police firing outside Srinagar Central Jail on July 13, killing more than twenty demonstrators. The event galvanized Kashmiri Muslim opinion, and Abdullah, then in his mid twenties, emerged from the agitation as its most compelling voice ^[2]. In October 1932 he became the founding president of the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, the first organized political party in the state, created to press for civil rights and representation under Maharaja Hari Singh ^[3].

Abdullah's politics soon widened beyond a single community. Influenced by socialist ideas and by his friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru, he argued that the fight was against autocracy, not against any religion. In 1939 he persuaded the party to rename itself the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference and open membership to Hindus and Sikhs, a decision that split him from colleagues such as Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, who later revived the Muslim Conference and aligned with the Muslim League ^[4]. His oratory in Kashmiri and Urdu, delivered in mosques, orchards, and village squares, earned him the title Sher-e-Kashmir ^[1].

In 1944 the National Conference adopted the Naya Kashmir (New Kashmir) manifesto, a detailed program calling for a constitutional monarchy, universal franchise, and radical land redistribution. Two years later Abdullah launched the Quit Kashmir movement, demanding that the Dogra dynasty hand power to the people. The maharaja's government tried him for sedition and sentenced him to imprisonment, which only enlarged his standing ^[3].

Abdullah was released from prison on September 29, 1947, weeks after British India was partitioned, as Maharaja Hari Singh hesitated over whether to join India or Pakistan. In late October, tribal raiders backed from Pakistan invaded the Valley, and the maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession to India on October 26, 1947. Nehru's government insisted that Abdullah, as the popular leader of Kashmir, be placed in charge of the emergency administration, and he took office days later ^[5].

He threw his organization into the defense of Srinagar, mobilizing a citizen militia while Indian troops flew in, and he became Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir in March 1948. Abdullah defended the accession at the United Nations Security Council in 1948, arguing that Kashmir's secular movement belonged with democratic India rather than with Pakistan, though he always maintained that the arrangement rested on the promise of autonomy ^[4]. He helped negotiate the Delhi Agreement of 1952, which spelled out the state's special position, later reflected in Article 370 of the Indian constitution ^[5].

Among the most consequential Sheikh Abdullah achievements were the land reforms his government enacted. The Big Landed Estates Abolition Act of 1950 stripped absentee landlords of holdings above a modest ceiling and transferred land to the tillers without compensation, a measure of a scope rarely matched elsewhere in the subcontinent. Hundreds of thousands of peasant families received land, transforming the rural economy of the Valley and cementing his political base ^[2].

Relations between Abdullah and New Delhi deteriorated in the early 1950s. He grew uneasy about pressures to integrate the state more fully into India, faced agitation from the Jammu-based Praja Parishad demanding exactly that, and began speaking publicly about options for Kashmir's future, including independence. On August 9, 1953, he was dismissed as Prime Minister by the state's head Karan Singh and arrested, and his deputy Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad replaced him ^[4].

What followed consumed most of two decades. Released briefly in January 1958, he was rearrested within months and charged in the Kashmir Conspiracy Case, accused with others of plotting against India with Pakistani support. The case dragged on for years before the government withdrew it in 1964, and Nehru, shortly before his death, sent Abdullah to Pakistan to explore a settlement with President Ayub Khan ^[3]. Nehru died in May 1964 while the mission was under way, and the opening collapsed. Abdullah was interned again in 1965 after visiting Algiers, where he had met the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, and spent further years in detention or externment from Kashmir, not returning freely to the Valley's politics until the early 1970s ^[5].

Through these years he led the Plebiscite Front's cause, insisting that the people of the state deserved a say in their future. Whether one saw him as a democrat wronged or as an unreliable ally of Delhi, his imprisonment kept him at the center of the Kashmir question ^[4].

Circumstances shifted after the 1971 India-Pakistan war and the creation of Bangladesh, which weakened the case for reopening the accession. Prolonged negotiations between Abdullah's representative Mirza Afzal Beg and Indira Gandhi's envoy G. Parthasarathi produced the Indira-Sheikh Accord of February 1975. Abdullah accepted that Jammu and Kashmir was a constituent unit of India under Article 370, gave up the demand for a plebiscite, and returned as Chief Minister with Congress support ^[5].

In 1977 the Congress withdrew backing and fresh elections were held, widely regarded as the fairest the state had seen. The revived National Conference won decisively and Abdullah continued as Chief Minister with his own majority ^[4]. His final term mixed development work and patronage politics with controversy, including the Resettlement Bill permitting former state subjects to return, and criticism that he was grooming a dynasty. In poor health, he anointed his son Farooq Abdullah as party president in 1981.

Sheikh Abdullah died in Srinagar on September 8, 1982, at the age of 76, still in office. His funeral drew enormous crowds, and he was buried beside Dal Lake near the Hazratbal shrine, in a mausoleum that later required police protection when his reputation came under attack during the insurgency years ^[1].

In 1933 Abdullah married Begum Akbar Jahan, daughter of Michael Harry Nedou, a hotelier of European descent whose family ran the well known Nedou's Hotels, and his Kashmiri wife. Akbar Jahan became a political figure in her own right, organizing women during the 1947 crisis and later serving twice in the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of parliament ^[1]. The couple had several children; besides Farooq, who served multiple terms as Chief Minister, the family remained embedded in the state's public life, with grandson Omar Abdullah also leading the government decades later ^[5].

Abdullah retained a scholar's habits from his Aligarh days and wrote throughout his life. His Urdu autobiography, Aatish-e-Chinar (Flames of the Chinar), completed with the writer M. Y. Taing and published after his death, remains a principal source for his own account of events, later translated into English ^[6]. Tall and commanding, fond of Persian and Kashmiri verse, he often framed his speeches with lines from the poet Iqbal, whom he had encountered during the Aligarh years ^[3].

Any honest Sheikh Abdullah biography has to hold contradictory judgments together. To supporters he was the founder of modern Kashmiri politics: the man who broke the landlords, opened schools to the poor, and gave a voiceless population a party and a program. The land reforms of 1950 remain among the basic Sheikh Abdullah facts taught in histories of the region, and their effects on rural Kashmir endured long after him ^[2].

Critics read the record differently. Some in Jammu and Ladakh saw his rule as Valley-centered. Pakistani opinion viewed his support for accession to India as a betrayal of a Muslim majority region, while many Kashmiri nationalists later judged the 1975 accord a surrender of the plebiscite demand he had championed from prison ^[4]. After the armed insurgency erupted in 1989, his grave was guarded around the clock, a measure of how contested his memory had become ^[5].

His institutional imprint persists all the same. The National Conference he built remained a governing party into the twenty first century under his descendants, Sher-i-Kashmir institutions across the state carry his title, and every debate about autonomy, Article 370, and the relationship between Srinagar and New Delhi still returns to choices he made between 1947 and 1975 ^[1].