Quit Kashmir, 1946: the people against the sale deed

A woman at the head

In May 1946 a peasant woman named Fatima led a procession through Islamabad, the town also called Anantnag, against the repression of the Dogra maharaja, Hari Singh. The maharaja’s forces shot her dead. All over the Valley that spring women marched in defiance of prohibitory orders and filled the public meetings at the Khanqah-e-Moula and at Hazratbal, while the men who led the movement were in jail.

On 22 May alone the maharaja’s forces killed almost twenty people and arrested more than three hundred. On 26 May Jawaharlal Nehru, a leader of the Indian National Congress, repeated the account he had received from Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and Dwarka Nath Kachru, who had just reached Delhi from Kashmir. “The whole of the valley was handed over to military administration. The police, being Kashmiris, were withdrawn,” he said. “Clashes occur daily and even women have been shot down.” And: “My information is that far more people than officially admitted have been killed.”

Kashmiris were dying that spring for a single claim: that the ruler had no right to rule them, because their land and their persons had been sold to his family a century earlier without their consent.

From grievance to New Kashmir

The movement that began with the killings of 13 July 1931 had changed. In June 1939 the Muslim Conference renamed itself the National Conference and opened its doors to people of every religion. On 31 July 1944, at its headquarters, Mujahid Manzil in Srinagar, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah presented Hari Singh with a programme called Naya Kashmir, New Kashmir.

It had been drafted with the help of left-wing writers from Punjab, among them B. P. L. Bedi and his wife Freda, who typed the manuscript. Its draft constitution kept the maharaja only as a constitutional monarch beside an elected National Assembly. Every citizen who had “reached the age of eighteen years, irrespective of race and sex, nationality or religion” would vote. “Women citizens shall be accorded equal rights with men in all fields of national life,” it declared. Kashmiri, Dogri, Balti, Dardi, Punjabi and Hindi were named national languages, with Urdu as the common tongue.

Its charters for peasants, workers and women pledged far-reaching land reform. Abdullah called it “a revolutionary document”. P. N. Jalali, a veteran Kashmiri communist, recalled that it was “almost a carbon copy” of a Soviet text. When the National Conference came to power, its land reform became, in the historian Andrew Whitehead’s words, “one of the most radical and egalitarian measures introduced in independent India”.

A sale deed, not a treaty

In 1946 a British Cabinet Mission came to India to arrange the transfer of power. The princes were claiming that their treaties with the British gave them rights that would survive it. On 17 January 1946 the National Conference’s working committee replied that those treaties had been “framed without seeking the consent of the States People” and stood in the way of their progress.

Abdullah’s telegram to the Mission made the case for Kashmir in particular. “Hundred years ago in 1846 land and people of Kashmir were sold away to servitude of Dogra House by British for seventy-five lacs of Sikh rupees,” it said. The governor of Kashmir had resisted the transfer and had been subdued with British help. “Thus sale deed of 1846 misnamed treaty of Amritsar sealed fate of Kashmir masses.” The deed, it said, conferred no rights like those the treaty states claimed, and Kashmir’s people pressed “their unchallengeable claims to freedom on withdrawal of British power from India”.

Then came the sentence that defined the movement: “no sale deed however sacrosanct can condemn more than four million men and women to servitude of an autocrat when will to live under this rule is no longer there. People of Kashmir are determined to mould their own destiny.”

The call to quit

On 12 May 1946 the Cabinet Mission issued its memorandum on the states. Three days later, on 15 May, Abdullah launched the campaign in a speech in Srinagar. Its slogan answered the Quit India call that the Congress had raised against the British: Quit Kashmir.

“The tyranny of the Dogras has lacerated our souls,” he said in a speech published under the date of 26 May. “The British gained hold of India by the force of arms and by treachery,” he went on, and as the British were being told to quit India, the princes must quit their states. “Sovereignty is not the birthright of a ruler. Every man, woman and child will shout ‘Quit Kashmir’. The Kashmiri nation has expressed its will. I ask for a plebiscite on this question.”

The demand was that the people of Kashmir should decide by their own vote who would rule them.

Arrest and martial law

On 20 May Abdullah was arrested at Garhi as he travelled out of the Valley towards Rawalpindi. The maharaja’s prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak, declared martial law and had the leaders of the National Conference arrested. Hundreds of their supporters were detained. Nehru, on 26 May, promised: “We shall stand by the people of Kashmir and their leaders in this heavy trial.”

Nehru also charged that the bodies of Muslims killed by the troops were not being handed to their families for burial but were burnt. Harbans Singh, a historian sympathetic to the maharaja, calls these “wild allegations”. No inquiry into the killings is known to have been held, and no soldier or official is known to have been charged. Kak complained instead that the Congress had lent its “great weight of authority” to the agitation and published “highly coloured, inaccurate and vituperative statements” against the maharaja’s government.

The women’s movement

With the men in jail, women carried the movement. Begum Akbar Jehan, Abdullah’s wife, led demonstrations, collected money for the families of those who had been persecuted and in February 1947 chaired a food committee that ran subsidised distribution. Begum Zainab set aside the veil, led processions and spoke to party workers, and arranged relief for victims of the state’s violence. Zoni Gujri took part throughout and later joined a women’s defence force, which gave her the title Zoni Mujahid.

Fatima of Anantnag is remembered by name. Most of the others who fell that summer survive only in the totals given by Nehru and the press.

The trial of a people

Abdullah was tried for sedition before the Sessions Court in Srinagar. His defence was led by Asaf Ali. Nehru set out to join it, but Kak forbade him to enter the state. He defied the order, was stopped on 21 July and was detained in a dak bungalow, at Kohala by one account and at Domel by others, for two or three days, then went back to Delhi when Gandhi called him home.

Abdullah used the court to put the dynasty on trial. “I am not interested in a personal defence,” he told the judge, “and I would not have undertaken it if I had not felt that my trial for ‘sedition’ is something far more than a personal charge against me.” It was, he said, “a trial of entire population of Jammu and Kashmir”. The Quit Kashmir cry “symbolised and gave concrete shape to this demand for the termination of a system of Government: which was in process of dissolution all over India.”

He set out the principle on which he stood: “I hold that sovereignty resides in the people, all relationships political, social and economic, derive authority from the collective will of the people.” To the charge that the movement had communal or communist inspiration he replied: “This is a travesty of fact and I deny and repudiate these allegations.”

The court found him guilty and sentenced him to three years in prison. He told the United Nations Security Council in 1948 that he had been jailed seven times, and that “the last imprisonment carried with it an aggregate sentence of nine years”.

Allies and rivals

On 21 November 1946 the Congress Working Committee condemned the Kashmir authorities for “repressing the people of the State and denying them their normal civil liberties”. They had arrested the president and members of the National Conference’s election committee, it said, and their conduct “must reduce the coming elections to a farce”.

The rival Muslim Conference stood apart. Its leaders called the campaign a ploy by Abdullah to rebuild his standing, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Abdullah later said, dismissed it as “a movement of a few renegades”. In October 1946 the Muslim Conference launched its own campaign against the maharaja’s autocracy, and its leader, Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, was jailed too. In the assembly election of January 1947, held while the leaders of both parties were in prison and boycotted by the National Conference, the Muslim Conference won 16 of the 21 Muslim seats.

Release and its price

Abdullah was released on 29 September 1947, after sixteen months. The writer M. J. Aslam, citing the papers of Sardar Patel and Nida-e-Haq, the memoir of Munshi Ishaq, records that he was freed only after tendering an unconditional apology and offering the maharaja gold coins, as custom required. Some historians have judged the campaign harshly: Alastair Lamb called it a political ploy, and Josef Korbel wrote that Abdullah “played a poor card”.

Within weeks the state had been invaded and divided. On 27 October 1947 the governor-general of India, Lord Mountbatten, accepting the maharaja’s accession, noted that Hari Singh had decided to invite Sheikh Abdullah, his prisoner of a few weeks before, to form an interim government. In the same letter he wrote that the accession “should be settled by a reference to the people”.

Sovereignty belongs to the people

Quit Kashmir lasted only months as a campaign, but its argument has outlived every government since. It said in public, at the cost of prison and of lives, that Kashmir had been sold in 1846 without the consent of its people, that no deed or signature of a ruler could bind four million people against their will, and that the question of who rules them must be put to their vote.

That principle is the measure Kashmiris have applied to every later decision taken over their heads: the accession signed by the same maharaja in 1947, the plebiscite promised by India and the United Nations and never held, the dismissal and jailing of Abdullah himself by New Delhi in 1953, and the revocation of the autonomy of Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. In 1946 Abdullah asked for a plebiscite. Eighty years later the people of Kashmir have still not been allowed to cast that vote.