Jagmohan’s return and the imposition of Governor’s Rule

After the election of 1987

By the winter of 1989 the Kashmir Valley was in revolt against Indian rule, and the roots of the revolt were political. In the state election of 1987, Human Rights Watch later wrote, “blatant rigging assured a National Conference victory, which was followed by the arrests of hundreds of MUF leaders and supporters”. With the road of the ballot closed, young Kashmiris turned to arms. Fighters of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front and other groups attacked government buildings and the houses of state officials and enforced a boycott of India’s parliamentary election of November 1989.

In December 1989 the Liberation Front abducted the daughter of India’s home minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, and freed her when the government gave in and released five detained fighters. That event, “together with a surge in popular protest against the state and central governments,” Human Rights Watch wrote, “led the central government to launch a massive crackdown on the militants.”

Armed men were also killing civilians. Tika Lal Taploo, a lawyer and political activist, was shot dead on 14 September 1989, Prem Nath Bhat, a lawyer, on 27 December 1989, and M. L. Bhan, a government employee, on 15 January 1990. All three were Kashmiri Pandits. These were killings of civilians, and they frightened a whole community.

A governor Kashmir remembered

Jagmohan was not new to Kashmir. He had been its governor from 1984 to 1989. On 2 July 1984, in the words of Kashmir Life, Indira Gandhi “fully utilised his services to engineering a coup” against the elected chief minister, Farooq Abdullah. A revolt led by Abdullah’s brother-in-law, G. M. Shah, brought the government down, and Shah became chief minister with the support of the Congress. In 1986 Jagmohan dismissed Shah’s government too, after allegations of communal tension in south Kashmir. He also removed three professors from service, among them Professor Abdul Gani Bhat, for “anti-India activities”.

Some Kashmiris had first expected good of him. A senior newspaper editor told Scroll that people believed he was capable at the civic level, and Rasheed Shahid, a former editor of Greater Kashmir, recalled that he held open durbars where “the poorest of Kashmiris could bring their problems”. But the coup of 1984 had made him, for many Kashmiri Muslims, the face of New Delhi’s interference in their politics.

The decision in New Delhi

From December 1989 New Delhi was governed by V. P. Singh’s National Front coalition, led by his Janata Dal and dependent on outside support from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left. Its home minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, wanted Jagmohan back in Kashmir. The state’s chief secretary, Moosa Raza, tried to stop it. Kashmir Life, summarising his memoir, Kashmir: Land of Regrets, writes that knowing the appointment would push the state into a constitutional crisis, he “literally went from door to door to get the decision reconsidered”.

Raza took his objections to the home minister himself. Mufti Sayeed dismissed them. “He is an accidental CM,” he said of Farooq Abdullah, and he predicted that Abdullah would not resign: “Once we appoint Jagmohan and give Farooq a helicopter and a motorcycle, he will relax and enjoy his life. He will be happy. Jagmohan will take care of the real administration.”

He was wrong. At eleven on the night of 18 January 1990 Farooq Abdullah signed his resignation. The outgoing governor, K. V. Krishna Rao, tried to persuade him to stay on as caretaker chief minister, Raza writes, but “he had flatly refused”. In June 1990 Mufti Sayeed defended the choice to India Today: “By sending Jagmohan to Kashmir we made major gains. He set up this nucleus of officials to fill the administrative vacuum. And we established the authority of the state.”

19 January 1990

On 19 January Krishna Rao left and Jagmohan took his place. Bad weather kept the new governor at the Raj Bhavan in Jammu that night. Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir now had no elected government at all; Human Rights Watch dates New Delhi’s direct rule over the state from that day. The men who would decide when to impose curfew, whom to arrest and when to open fire answered to no one Kashmiris had voted for.

That night India’s Central Reserve Police Force and the police carried out house-to-house searches in Chota Bazaar and Guru Bazaar in downtown Srinagar. More than four hundred people were dragged from their homes into the cold and arrested, Kashmir Life reported; not one turned out to be an armed fighter and no weapon was found. Residents said that women had been molested. Jagmohan and Farooq Abdullah both denied ordering the raids, and no inquiry has ever established who did.

For Kashmiri Pandits, Scroll wrote, it was a night that “reverberated with dire warnings”. Jagmohan recorded in his memoir, as the Pandit writer Rahul Pandita quotes it, the frightened calls that reached him that night from Pandit homes: “Tonight is our last night.”

A season of killing

The new administration answered the protests that followed with curfew and gunfire. On 21 January the Central Reserve Police Force fired on thousands of marchers at the Gawkadal bridge in Srinagar, killing at least fifty. On 25 January the Border Security Force fired on a procession in Handwara, killing at least twenty-one. A United Nations special rapporteur recorded reports that more than fifty people were killed by Indian forces in demonstrations in various towns between 21 and 30 January alone.

The firing went on. Scroll lists killings by Indian forces at Handwara, Zakura, the bypass, Hawal and Mashaali Mohalla in the five months of his second term. The Committee for Initiative on Kashmir, an Indian civil liberties group that toured the Valley in March, concluded that “Jagmohan’s return to Jammu and Kashmir as governor signalled the unleashing of state repression on a massive scale”. The Caravan later summed up the period in one sentence: “Under Jagmohan, Jammu and Kashmir entered a period of unfettered repression.”

Closing Kashmir to the world

The administration also moved against the press. Around 26 January, Kashmir Life reports, it confined a contingent of about thirty foreign reporters to the Broadway Hotel in Srinagar, after the police told the governor that they had come to cover a planned takeover of Radio Kashmir. When nothing happened, officials said the attempt would come on 11 February, the anniversary of Maqbool Bhat’s hanging. The governor then had the entire visiting press escorted to the airport and banned their return.

The local press was squeezed in turn. In early April the government closed four Srinagar Urdu newspapers, Aftab, Al-Safa, Wadi Ki Awaz and Azaan, and sealed their presses for publishing what it called “subversive and anti-national material”. The Srinagar Times stopped publishing on 8 May after police pressure drove away its machine operators. Editorials, Kashmir Life wrote, “moved out of print barring on key occasions”. Armed men attacked the media too: Lassa Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit and the director of Doordarshan in Srinagar, was shot dead by the Liberation Front on 13 February.

Marches to the United Nations

The killings did not clear the streets. In the weeks after Gawkadal, processions marched to the office of the United Nations Military Observer Group at Sonawar in Srinagar to hand in memoranda demanding freedom from India. The plebiscite that India and the United Nations had promised Kashmiris in 1948 had never been held. Men in burial shrouds walked at the front. On 1 March, Kashmir Life writes, “more than a million people marched on Srinagar streets”. That day Indian soldiers fired on a procession at Zakura and on buses carrying marchers home at Tengpora, killing forty-seven by most Kashmiri counts. Curfew followed for seventeen days.

Jagmohan saw a conspiracy. The Liberation Front, he wrote in his memoir, “blatantly misused the facilities provided for the religious festivals and organised a very large number of processions”, and he blamed pro-Pakistan organisations for the killings of 1 March. The Committee for Initiative on Kashmir drew the opposite conclusion: “The government’s tendency to treat mass demonstrations as the handiwork of Pakistani agents and use indiscriminate force against the people has alienated the Kashmiri public from India and pushed them into the arms of militants.” Kashmir Life records that thousands of young men crossed the Line of Control to get arms training.

The Pandit departures

The same months saw the departure of most of the Valley’s Kashmiri Pandits. The killings of Pandit civilians by armed men went on: Lassa Kaul on 13 February, R. N. Handoo, the governor’s personal assistant, on 18 March, A. K. Raina of the food and supplies department on 20 March. The writer Siddhartha Gigoo has pointed to a press release of Hizbul Mujahideen in the Urdu daily Aftab that asked Pandits to leave the Valley within thirty-six hours or face the consequences.

Human Rights Watch put the number who left at some 100,000; the political scientist Alexander Evans, cited by the historian Mridu Rai in an interview with Al Jazeera, put it at 150,000 to 160,000, about 95 per cent of the Pandits then living in the Valley. Official figures given in 2010 and 2013 put the number of Pandits killed at 219; Pandit organisations say the real number is higher because many killings were never reported. In 2011 Rai told Al Jazeera that many thousands still lived in camps in Jammu, Delhi and other parts of India “in atrocious conditions of deprivation”.

The dispute over Jagmohan’s role

What part the governor played in the departures is one of the most bitterly disputed questions in Kashmir’s recent history. Kashmiri Muslim accounts hold that his administration helped the Pandits to leave so that the forces would have a free hand against those who stayed. The historian Mridu Rai, interviewed by Al Jazeera in 2011, noted that several separatist leaders made that claim and that many Kashmiri Muslims had witnessed departing Pandits boarding vehicles organised by the state, though she judged it hard to believe that encouragement alone could explain departures on such a scale. “Insiders believed he facilitated the migration,” the political commentator Mohammad Yusuf Taing told Scroll. Human Rights Watch wrote in 1999 that “with the encouragement and assistance of the government, some 100,000 Hindu Kashmiris, known as ‘Pandits,’ fled the valley.” The Committee for Initiative on Kashmir found in March 1990 that “Jagmohan’s identification with the BJP in the popular perception and his pronounced anti-Muslim measures has widened the gulf between Pandits and Muslims in the state”.

Wajahat Habibullah, then a senior Indian administrator in Kashmir, recalls, according to Rai, groups of Muslims appealing to him to stop the Pandits from leaving, and his suggestion of a television broadcast of their appeal. Jagmohan did not agree. Instead he announced that camps had been set up for Pandits who chose to leave and that departing Pandit civil servants would keep their salaries; according to the political scientist Sumit Ganguly, as Rai cites him, and to The Quint, he also announced that his government could not guarantee the safety of those who stayed. Habibullah allows that transport may have been organised for a few groups but denies that this was “part of a widespread concerted policy”.

Pandit writers reject the charge. Rahul Pandita points out that on the night of 19 January there was no government in place to organise anything, cites a press note of 7 March 1990 in which Jagmohan appealed to Pandits not to leave the Valley even temporarily, and quotes the Srinagar Times editor Ghulam Mohammed Sofi, who said in a 1997 interview: “The Pandit flight from the valley was the sequel to a plan hatched well in advance from outside the state. It had nothing to do with Jagmohan.” Some Pandit leaders say that by facilitating the migration Jagmohan saved their community’s lives. Jagmohan and the Indian government denied engineering the departures. Both communities lost: one its homes, the other its neighbours.

Recall and direct rule

Jagmohan’s second term lasted just over four months. On 21 May 1990 Mirwaiz Muhammad Farooq was assassinated at his home, and the Central Reserve Police Force fired on his funeral procession at Hawal, killing dozens of mourners. New Delhi removed Jagmohan after the firing on the funeral, and Girish Chandra Saxena took over on 26 May.

His removal changed the governor, not the policy. On 6 July 1990 the governor’s administration declared the six districts of the Valley and the belt within twenty kilometres of the Line of Control in Poonch and Rajouri disturbed areas. The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, applied from 5 July, barred any prosecution of soldiers for acts under it without the permission of the central government. Kashmir was ruled from New Delhi until 1996, when, Human Rights Watch noted, the National Conference formed the first state government since 1990. By June 1999 the same organisation counted some 400,000 Indian army troops and federal forces deployed in the Valley, including those on the Line of Control. Kashmir has remained one of the most heavily militarised places in the world.

In 2016 India gave Jagmohan the Padma Vibhushan, one of its highest civilian honours, and Kashmiris answered with the hashtag #JagmohanTheMurderer. When he died on 3 May 2021 the administration declared three days of state mourning. Kashmir Life noted that neither the National Conference nor the Peoples Democratic Party said a word.

What the period decided

January 1990 fixed the pattern of the decades that followed in Indian-occupied Kashmir. A political crisis that had grown out of a rigged election was handed to an appointed governor and to the paramilitary forces. Mass demonstrations were treated as the work of Pakistani agents, and the first answer to unarmed crowds was gunfire.

No official was ever called to account for that winter. No inquiry established who ordered the searches of 19 January or who authorised the firing that followed. The police cases for Gawkadal, Handwara and Zakura ended without anyone being traced, and the police told a reporter in 2016 that they had no file on Tengpora at all. For Kashmiris the lesson of 1990 was that an elected government could vanish overnight, that what replaced it answered to New Delhi alone, and that the vote on their future promised by India and the United Nations was further away than ever.