Sheikh Abdullah, known as the Sher-e-Kashmir (the Lion of Kashmir) is a figure Kashmiris have been taught to revere without reservation. The official version is clean: freedom fighter under Dogra autocracy, prisoner of conscience, father of the nation. But history, like the mountain passes separating Srinagar from Muzaffarabad, has a way of revealing paths the official map omits.
More than seven decades after his first fall from power, and four decades after his death, a more troubling portrait is emerging — not of a saint or a satrap, but of a revolutionary who failed his own people, a democrat who could not bear democracy, a secularist who learned the techniques of autocracy from the very Maharaja he once defied.
The man who once promised a ‘Naya Kashmir’ with its promise of land reforms, secular politics, and dignity for the poor, had become, in the eyes of many who knew him best, something far more complicated - an autocrat who could not tolerate dissent, whose memory for loyalty was matched only by his memory for betrayal.
The Making of a Movement
Abdullah's true political awakening came in March 1938 when, during consultations in Jammu, he transformed the Muslim Conference into the National Conference (formally constituted on June 11, 1939) as a secular, mass-based movement demanding an end to Dogra autocracy. He forged alliances with leftist intellectuals, gave his cause ideological weight, went to jail, and became a folk hero.
Not humbled by prison, but hardened, by the late 1940s, Abdullah had begun to consolidate power in ways that alarmed even his closest allies. The man who led the Quit Kashmir movement in 1946 against the Maharaja's overreach now presided over a political apparatus that used the same instruments - surveillance, detention, and the systematic marginalisation of opponents.
A contemporary observer noted the movement's fracturing, attributing it simply to egoism. Abdullah's ego, by then, had become a force of nature. He was, in the cruel phrase of one dissident, trying to become La Shareek - the one without partner or companion, like God himself (Nuzubillah ‘God forbid).
It is worth noting that when the Muslim Conference nomenclature was changed to National Conference in 1938, the Muslim Conference was revived again in 1941 by Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas and Syed Aziz Badshah. This split defined the valley's political culture for years. Supporters of the Muslim Conference in the Valley were mostly Mirwaiz loyalists. They were called Bakra, those of the National Conference Sher, and it produced the first of Abdullah's many enemies lists.
Naya Kashmir and the Architects He Discarded
The Naya Kashmir manifesto of 1944 was a landmark document. Running into 44 pages, and proposing a constitution for the state, agrarian land reforms, debt relief for peasants, and a modern orientation for Kashmiri society, it was drafted in a hotel in Lahore's Model Town. It made the National Conference stand apart from the Muslim Conference as a genuinely progressive force.
The principal architect was BPL Bedi, a Punjabi Sikh. The manuscript was typed by his wife, Freda Bedi, herself. Around them gathered a circle of leftist intellectuals like Dr KMD Ashraf, Daanish Daniyal, Advocate Lateefi, and Hafiz Jalandhari, who gave ideological rigour to a movement that had previously depended heavily on Abdullah's personal charisma. They represented a strand of progressive, cross-communal politics that Abdullah would later find inconvenient.
What happened to these architects of his ideology? Some were left out. Others left, disillusioned by his authoritarian drift. Abdullah adopted talented outsiders' ideas, deployed them, and discarded the people behind them once they no longer served his purposes. Loyalty to the patriarch became the only currency that mattered.
The Enemies List
Abdullah's intolerance for dissent was not selective. It extended across the full ideological spectrum.
From the Muslim Conference, his most persistent critics included Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas, Molvi Mohammad Yusuf Shah, Sardar Ibrahim Khan, and others - all Muslim rationalists, not secular leftists, who believed Abdullah had broken his promises to the common people. There were at least four distinct power centres within the Muslim Conference leadership, and their collective punishment under the Abdullah regime was marginalisation, political isolation, and, in some cases, exile.
Even Kashmiri Pandits who opposed him were not spared. One challenge came from Prem Nath Bazaz and the Kissan Mazdoor Conference. Bazaz had merged his Socialist Party into the Kissan Conference and became one of Abdullah's most vocal critics, accusing him directly of authoritarian tendencies and dangerous concentration of power. The response was systematic exclusion from political life.
Another progressive Kashmiri Pandit leader, Raghunath Vaishnavi, was targeted by National Conference operatives at Abdullah's behest. It was a reminder that Abdullah's secularism, whatever its theoretical commitments, did not extend to those who questioned his authority.
Activists such as Abdul Salam Itoo and Ghulam Ahmad Naaz, names that surface in the archives of the period, represent the thousands who had believed in the Naya Kashmir vision and found themselves, in the end, on the wrong side of his consolidation.
The Exile’s Witness: Ahmed Shamim
The beatings administered to young activists at Sri Pratap College in 1948, which the poet Ahmed Shamim endured, were not isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern.
Among those who felt the weight of Abdullah’s repression was a young poet from Srinagar’s Gosha-e-Haft Chinar neighbourhood. Ahmed Shamim, a gifted student at Sri Pratap College, joined the protests demanding self-determination for Kashmir. During a demonstration in 1948, Abdullah-controlled police beat him until his clothes were bloody and torn. He was taken to the Kothi Bagh prison. That cell became a birthplace.
Shamim realised something that would guide his writing for the rest of his life while sitting on a cold floor with his ribs throbbing: poetry could not be an escape from politics, nor could it be reduced to politics. Shamim left Srinagar, crossed into what would become Pakistan-administered Kashmir (PaK), and never returned.
His mother, Zainab, remained behind. When she died in 1963, he could not attend the funeral. The poem he wrote in her memory - Kabhi Hum Khoobsoorat Thay (We Were Adored Once) Kitabon mein basi khushbu ki manind... (Much like a scent trapped between pages...) became his masterpiece.
Shamim was not a revolutionary in the conventional sense. He never held a party card, never gave a fiery speech from a rally platform. In Muzaffarabad, he was a bureaucrat who filed paperwork and approved releases. But his poetry, written in cramped hotel rooms, on the margins of official documents, in the small hours after sleepless nights, remains one of the most sustained literary meditations on what exile means.
He carried Kashmir in his suitcase. And in doing so, he proved that the truest resistance sometimes lies in refusing to let power erase one’s humanity or memory.
An Architecture of Official Machinery
Abdullah used no covert tactics. He used the official apparatus of police, bureaucracy, intelligence to intimidate and silence opponents, fostering a culture of retribution that his successors would inherit and refine. It was copied by G.M. Bakshi in its most vile form, by G.M. Sadiq when he changed the nomenclature of Prime Minister to Chief Minister, signalling the death of Left movements in Kashmir to be repackaged later as extensions of Indian politics, and by Syed Mir Qasim, who used homogeneity bias.
The deepest irony was not lost on those who remembered his own years of imprisonment under the Maharaja. Abdullah had learned the techniques of autocracy not from abstract study but from the lived experience of being governed by them. He had internalised the lesson: once power is won, it must be kept by any means necessary.
He was caught in what political psychologists refer to as an avoid-avoid or avoid-attract grid. He wanted Indian support for autonomy but Pakistani backing for legitimacy. He wanted land reforms but feared alienating the landlord class, including Kashmiri Pandits and some Muslims to whom he was, on certain occasions, hand in glove, the very landlords who had been promised the Maharaja’s protection. The outcome was a lack of principle.
He began what critics call “fatwa politics” - issuing decrees not of faith but of fealty, demanding that every Kashmiri choose between him and chaos.
The arrest of August 9, 1953, which removed Abdullah from power and set in motion a long period of detention, saw machinery turning on its creator. In its immediate wake came political arrests, and killings that followed from that date onwards cast a long shadow over what the movement had claimed to stand for. The Plebiscite Front, founded on the same date in 1955 by Mirza Mohammad Afzal Beg to demand a plebiscite, operated for two decades in Abdullah's name while he remained imprisoned. It was a movement demanding freedom that Abdullah, its patron (though he never formally joined it), had himself been unwilling to extend to others.
When Abdullah eventually returned to power through the 1975 Indira-Sheikh Agreement, it was on terms that represented a definitive political settlement. In exchange for the Chief Ministership, he accepted Indian sovereignty. The man who had spent decades as a symbol of Kashmiri self-determination had negotiated, pragmatically and finally, the terms of accommodation.
The Machinery Claims Its Own
The pattern that began with August 9, 1953, found a haunting echo in August 5, 2019, when the abrogation of Article 370 ushered in a prolonged clampdown, an internet blackout lasting at least three months, and a period of political detention that descended on the valley with brutal administrative efficiency.
Just as Abdullah was never granted the floor test to prove his majority, Article 370 was revoked unilaterally in the parliament without ascertaining the will of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, leading to centralisation of power in the hands of New Delhi. Already in 2017, the enabling of the GST Bill by the PDP-BJP government had eroded the state’s financial autonomy.
Those who lived through 2019 watched the machinery that Sheikh Abdullah had built - the apparatus of surveillance, detention, and the management of political loyalty - turn, with full institutional force, against those who had helped build it, and against their children and grandchildren. They watched a state claim, as it always has in Kashmir, that what was being done was being done in the name of peace and prosperity. The machinery was eating up the creator’s children.
The Sheikh Abdullah who promised Naya Kashmir, who spoke of land for the landless, dignity for the poor, a secular polity that would transcend the communal fractures of partition, was not a fiction. He was real, and what he built in those early years mattered. But what he also built, and perhaps did not fully reckon with, was a template for how power in Kashmir organises itself: through loyalty rather than principle, through the absorption or elimination of dissent, and through the claim that the leader and the people are one.
That template has outlasted him by decades.
The Legacy That Will Not Settle
Sheikh Abdullah passed away on September 8, 1982, four days after the Legislative Assembly passed a landmark Resettlement Bill. He is still remembered by thousands, if not millions, of people as the ‘Lion of Kashmir’. But the contradictions of his rule did not die with him.
His son Farooq and grandson Omar inherited the political machinery he built — a lineage that critics call dynastic democracy, where power passes through bloodlines rather than mandate. Mufti Mohammad Sayeed followed the same template. The PDP passed not through any popular verdict but to Mehbooba Mufti, who is now quietly grooming her own daughter for politics. The pattern echoes the Achaemenid strategy - divide, delay, deny - a method of dynastic succession that Kashmir's mainstream parties have perfected while abandoning the Naya Kashmir promise of accountable institutions rather than flowing from the people.
The vacuum this left was predictable. First the Congress, then the BJP, stepped in to set the terms of New Delhi's Kashmir policy. Both regional parties fell in line, following orders as they have continued to do. That is the crude reality.
The land to the tiller, debt relief, modern education, and women's emancipation leftist vision of Naya Kashmir was partially realised. Abdullah did end landlordism, advocated for women's rights, and established institutions that still exist today.
But the democratic promise of the movement - the idea that Kashmiris would govern themselves through open, accountable institutions - was betrayed by the very man who articulated it most eloquently.
The physical beatings, psychological intimidation, and forced exiles that Abdullah used as part of his "fear politics" against his opponents have left scars that have not healed. The names of those he silenced - Molvi Mohd Yousuf Shah, Ab Salam Itoo, Gh Ahmad Naaz, Mir Abdul Aziz, Ghulam Hassan Dar Makhdoomi and countless others - remain footnotes in a history written by the victors.
The template of consolidating power, suppressing accountability, and subordinating popular mandate to personal authority that Sheikh Abdullah set was not unique to the National Conference. It became the operating logic of Kashmir's mainstream politics as a whole.
Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, despite positioning the PDP as an alternative when it emerged in July 1999, demanding self-rule where the NC had offered autonomy, ultimately reproduced the same pattern. His party's agenda drifted from its founding commitments, and critics argue he effectively robbed the Hurriyat of its political ground by mimicking its language while serving a different master.
The Hurriyat Conference itself was not without fault, though its failures were ones of execution by a few inefficient actors. Yet the cumulative effect of these failures across all formations was the same: a vacuum. That vacuum was precisely what national parties needed.
The Congress and the BJP stepped in, presenting themselves as alternatives to a local oligarchy that had exhausted its credibility. With local leadership rendered impotent - outmanoeuvred by Delhi, discredited at home - the politics of Kashmir ceased to flow from its people.
The Reckoning
People who conflate their own ambition with the cause of the people are rarely rewarded by history. In addition to being a moral failure, Abdullah's tragedy was that he began to believe his own mythology. He had endured hardship for Kashmir. He was imprisoned for Kashmir. He reasoned that, as a result, any opposition to him was opposition to Kashmir as a whole. This is the autocrat’s logic, and it is seductive precisely because it contains a grain of truth.
For decades, Abdullah was essential to Kashmiri politics. The movement might have split up, been taken over by communal forces, or lost its secular character without him. But indispensability is not a licence for tyranny.
The poet Ahmed Shamim, writing in exile, captured something Abdullah never understood: that power does not make you whole, that separation from those you love leaves wounds no political victory can heal, and that the truest measure of a leader is not how many followers he commands but how he treats those who dare to disagree.
The past tense is everything. It is the tense of memory, loss, and a beauty that cannot be recreated due to the absence of the conditions that produced it. The admiration Abdullah felt was genuine. However, so was the fall. The unfinished business of Kashmiri politics lies in the space between those two truths - between the revolutionary and the autocrat, between Naya Kashmir and the police cells where idealists were beaten.
The Lion has perished. But the cage he built remains. And there is still no answer to the question that his life poses. Can a revolution survive without its own leader?
The Cage That Remained
The Lion’s cage outlived him. What was passed down across generations was not the revolution but the cage. The control apparatus outlived Abdullah, outlived Sayeed, and will outlive their heirs because it was never dismantled, only inherited. Ironically, when in power, both the NC and PDP absorbed the logic of the centre, functioning less as representatives of Kashmiri aspirations than as transmission belts for Union policy. Ironically, when in power, regional parties like NC and PDP adopt the "logic of the center." In a classic instance of "political convenience over constitutional principle," they re-discover federalism while in power, donning the "opposition's garb" to invoke autonomy.
It is only in opposition that federalism is rediscovered, autonomy re-invoked, and the language of self-determination dusted off for the occasion. Principle becomes posture; resistance becomes positioning. Loyalist outfits scrambling for relevance have only confirmed what had long been true: political survival in Kashmir has always depended less on public trust than on New Delhi's approval. Abdullah and Sayeed's ghosts - revolutionary and autocrat, sometimes indistinguishable — will haunt every stratum of society and every seat where a rival once sat, until Kashmiris can dissent without punishment and lead without bloodlines.
One sometimes bends to tempests, not to break but to stand when calm returns. The rooted foot holds a silent truth: adaptation without capitulation. The art of yielding in posture while anchoring in principle is true resilience. The self-bows only to maintain its footing, not to abandon it.
(Note: Ahmed Shamim’s collection of works includes "Rait pe Safar ka Lamha". Chitralekha Zutshi's Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir (Fourth Estate, 2024) offers extensive scholarly evaluations on which the author relied.)
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