Article 370 revoked, Jammu and Kashmir is divided into two union territories, Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of Parliament, on 5 August 2019 while putting the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill, 2019, to vote which was passed with a majority. Later in the day, he ‘congratulated the nation’ and tweeted: ‘This historic decision will usher in a new dawn of peace and development in J&K and Ladakh region.’
On the ground, things were a mismatch, steeped in an eerie silence. The announcement on television came like a big bang and it changed everything. In an instant, space and time lost their meaning. Existence and identity, as we knew it, had been altered. The sheer force and shock of the new identity and a shrunken map vaporized the traces of the old. Stunned and stupefied, it was difficult to absorb the moment, leave alone analyse its full import. There were only two constants: disbelief and silence.
Sitting in Jammu, the silence around me was broken by low-key celebrations of the BJP and supporters of revocation of Article 370. But noises on the social media were louder. ‘Now the Kashmiris have been taught a lesson’; ‘I will buy land by the Dal Lake’; ‘Kashmiris could buy land in Jammu, but we couldn’t in Kashmir’. Such comments came from friends and acquaintances who were permanent residents of Jammu and Kashmir even though there had never been a legal bar on them for possessing landholdings in the Valley. But logic is the first casualty of both hatred and ignorance.
The author with Krishen Dev Sethi (Right) and Ved Bhasin, Founding Editor of Kashmir Times
A Living Legend
Uneasy and unable to put my mind to work, I sought solace in the company of Krishan Dev Sethi. Sethi Saheb, as he is popularly called, is a veteran crusader of the ‘Quit Kashmir’ movement, a communist leader, former legislator and a man who had played a role in shaping the history and politics of Jammu and Kashmir. On that day, he was the only surviving member of the J&K Constituent Assembly that had drafted the constitution of the state, but which was now rendered meaningless. He was a living legend, an active participant of the history of the state. He had played a key role in pushing through J&K’s crucial land reforms that gave land to the tiller, the gains of which, he feared, could now be reversed. I had asked him once whether the land reforms could have been possible without J&K’s special status, and he replied in the negative.
I couldn’t have met a sadder man that day. His voice choked, as he said, ‘Everything’s finished … they have destroyed everything … my life’s work is worthless … I wasted my life – went to jail, went underground, fought the powerful oppressors before and after 1947.’ For a man, who had been a life-long crusader, undaunted and fearless, this hopelessness was shattering.
In 1996, I had interviewed Moti Ram Baigra, one of the four people – apart from Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Maulana Masoodi and Mirza Afzal Beg – from Jammu and Kashmir who had been part of both the Constituent Assembly of India and the J&K constituent assembly. Talking about his engagement with ‘Quit Kashmir’ movement, Baigra had said of Sethi Saheb: ‘At Jammu’s City Chowk, I saw a young boy of about fourteen years being handcuffed and taken. The boy walked nonchalantly, head held high and laughing, without a care, without remorse. That was Krishan Dev Sethi. I was struck by his conviction and passion.’ Having jumped into politics and struggle for freedom at a young age, Sethi was forced to drop out of school. He was a self- taught man and a voracious reader.
At ninety-three, Sethi, despite his failing health and abysmally poor hearing, was mentally alert. Jammu and Kashmir’s history and politics existed not only in his mind, but it also ran through his veins. For years. as long as his health allowed, he had been a regular visitor to the Kashmir Times office, where many of my colleagues and I spent many an evening over cups of tea discussing politics and listening to his amazing anecdotes and acute analysis of the happenings around us. All these years, he had been active – speaking at gatherings, attending meetings of the Communist Party and bringing out an Urdu weekly Jaddojehed (meaning ‘Struggle’), which was critical of successive Central and state governments. His weekly had a small but serious readership, and he wrote with unflinching commitment. Suddenly, all of it seemed meaningless to him on 5 August. ‘From today, I stop printing my weekly,’ he told me. Jaddojehad came to an abrupt end, and he remained confined to his house till he passed away on 28 January 2021.
Sethi’s foray into politics began with the Quit Kashmir movement which was against the autocracy of the Dogra king. Post-1947, his tireless pursuit, along with his colleagues, to bring in land reforms and debt waiver had made Jammu and Kashmir a unique example where socio-economic disparities were not as striking as elsewhere in India.
‘There was clarity in the minds of Sheikh Saheb and all of us at that time,’ he told me, ‘about creating a model of governance that was opposed to exploitative feudalism and to maintain the state’s distinct identity.’ He went on: ‘We were aware that symbols had their own significance and endorsed that distinct identity. At the same time, there were suspicions that New Delhi was toying with the idea of retaining a quasi-monarchy in J&K.’ In 1949, Sheikh Abdullah had sent a small J&K delegation, including Krishen Dev Sethi, for negotiations on the future relations between India and Kashmir with India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and home minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The Central government was aware that the special status of Jammu and Kashmir had to be recognized for the region to be part of India’s democratic future. There were five points that the J&K delegation mooted: land reforms, debt waiver, ‘no’ to monarchy, separate currency and a flag. ‘They [Nehru and Patel] didn’t agree on the currency, but we managed to get their consent on the other four,’ Sethi said. ‘Thereafter, it was important that the flag represent our vision of opposing exploitative structures and standing with the working class,’ he added, his memory crystal clear.
That is how the flag came into being – a white plough on a red background with three white vertical lines denoting the three regions of the state – Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. After the revocation of Article 370, the flag lost its relevance. It was lowered for the last time on 25 August 2019. Before that, it was mandatory to hoist the state flag along with the Indian national tricolour.
Sethi said: ‘On 7 June 1952, the day when the state flag was adopted in the Constituent Assembly, I spoke about its significance, stating that the flag of any nation is the symbol of the class that is in power in the country, and it represents the system established in the country. When we unfurl this flag, we want to say to the world that exploitation of worker and peasant has ended. We want to free the worker and peasant from exploitation and thus our flag denotes the unity of workers and peasants.’
What was it that brought people like Sethi Saheb on the edge on 5 August 2019? He was one of the people who had drafted the constitution of J&K, constructed the edifices of the state and shaped its basic architecture, brick by brick. It must have been horrifying to find that structure being razed right in front of him, seven decades later. The irony that his son, Achal Sethi, as J&K’s law secretary, was signing all the relevant papers, reversing everything that he had painstakingly built, couldn’t have been any less traumatic.
I sensed a feeling of being uprooted in his mind from the manner in which he repeatedly talked about Mirpur, where he hailed from, and regretted that he had to leave Mirpur in the first place. Sethi was hardly nineteen when he left Mirpur in 1947, forced by the compelling circumstances of a communally surcharged atmosphere across Jammu division of the erstwhile state. He was still in jail in Mirpur when the subcontinent was partitioned and the flames of communal violence had begun to reach Jammu province, of which Mirpur was also a part, in its aftermath. In the heat of things, Sethi’s colleagues had broken the jail and freed him and other leaders. He walked to freedom only to realize that he was caught in a quagmire of hatred and violence around him. His Muslim colleagues and friends in Mirpur had requested him not to leave for Jammu and offered to give him and his family all kind of protection. Though he had faith in them, the atmosphere and mischievous elements that thrived in it created an air of uncertainty and insecurity. He left Mirpur under the troubling circumstances like many others. Seventy years on, that feeling of psychological displacement was revisiting him again.
Unlike Sethi Saheb, I was not part of history, nor had a role in its making. Then, what was it that completely left me perturbed? ………….
(Excerpted from Chapter ‘A constitutional fraud’ of Anuradha Bhasin’s A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After 370. Published by HarperCollins India in 2022)
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