Like
many Kashmiri Pandits, Sanjay Tickoo, a Srinagar businessman, is
imprisoned by the history of his state, the ambivalent positions of its
leaders, and his own paranoia of being a member of a minority community
with a dominant past. Yet, in the mass exodus of the ’90s in which 34
Pandit families of his locality left Kashmir, his didn’t. In fact, he
“still believes that by instinct, the Kashmiri Muslim is a secular
person”. That Tickoo can say this is not simply magnanimity. Behind this
outlook of his lies an almost forgotten history of a robust secular
tradition. And over this tradition looms large the shadow of a man who
symbolised it; almost perfectly one could say. That man was Prem Nath
Bazaz, a committed progressive Kashmiri Pandit.
The story of
Bazaz’s life is intimately entwined with the modern history of that
secular tradition – at times referred to, a tad offhandedly, as
‘Kashmiriyat’ – and its vicissitudes. So, to tell his story is to also
recall the history of that tradition, and its forgetting.
Sanjay Tickoo, president of the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti at his home in Srinagar.
(Burhaan Kinu / HT Photo)
Kashmiri Pandits have a past that is as invisible
as it is visible. An influential minority in the Dogra Hindu kingdom
(they occupied all major jobs in the king’s administration and revenue
departments), some of them were social reformers attacking orthodoxies
in religion. They took active part in the politics of the day. And one
of them even took the unconventional step of forging a common platform
with Kashmiri Muslims to try to build a fair society.
Bazaz, a
small-time government official and a writer, was the man who took that
initiative to bring the Yuvak Sabha, a predominantly Kashmiri Pandit
outfit in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir of the ’30s, to a
working relationship with the Muslim Conference, Kashmir’s first
political party, after the 1931 anti-Dogra uprising in which Muslims
protesting age-old social inequalities were massacred. (22 men died in
the uprising.) Bazaz was the confidant and comrade of Sheikh Abdullah,
Kashmir’s first mass leader, and was a champion of Kashmiris’ right to
self-determination, a stand unthinkable for Kashmiri Pandits today, and
for most of mainland India.
Clearly, this ‘Kashmiryat’ was as much
about politics as it was about culture. Its ground was laid through the
’30s and ’40s when the first cracks in the Dogra kingdom were emerging
as a result of the mobilisation of Kashmiri Muslims led by Sheikh
Abdullah.
Pragmatic
Kashmiri Pandits like Prem Nath Bazaz (along with other Pandits such as
Kashyap Bandhu, Shamlal Saraf, Jia Lal Kilam) realised the end of Dogra
rule was near and set about building a common platform with Abdullah
and his movement, the Muslim Conference (the predecessor of the National
Conference or the NC). By working with them, people like Bazaz also
came to terms with their own history of past privileges and understood
the urgency of Muslims’ need to ease out the monarchy.
Bhushan
Bazaz, Prem Nath Bazaz’s son at his home in Delhi. After Sheikh
Abdullah came to power in Kashmir in 1947, Bazaz was externed to Delhi .
(Saumya Khandelwal / HT Photo)
Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims share no
collective socio-political project now. Its potential was finished off
by the Pandit exodus of the ’90s when, according to Kashmiri Muslims
themselves, the “best of them left”. Pandits like Tickoo, not
surprisingly, remember Bazaz only as the man who turned his back on his
own community. Before a fact-finding commission set up after the
anti-Dogra uprising in 1931, Bazaz had upheld the reality of Muslim
grievances even when that would diminish the case and privileges of his
own community. After Partition in 1947 he went on to back plebiscite and
independence”.
Controversial from the start
For
Kashmiri Muslims too, Bazaz’s positions then and now, are filtered by
his eventual parting of ways with the NC and personal differences with
Abdullah. They say he also influenced the changing of the name of
Kashmir’s first mass party – from the Muslim Conference to the National
Conference, a momentous event in Kashmir’s history. This change of
denomination, Kashmiris say, had a fallout for which Bazaz cannot escape
blame.
Mohammad
Yousuf Taing, biographer of Sheikh Abdullah, says Bazaz was a great
intellectual. He persuaded Sheikh Abdullah to honour Bazaz as a fellow
of the Kashmir Academy of Art and Culture in the ’70s.
(Burhaan Kinu / HT Photo)
Mehmood ur Rashid, columnist, Greater Kashmir, says
the emergence of the Muslim Conference was part of a larger political
awakening of Muslims in the subcontinent. “By dropping the word
‘Muslim’, the DNA of the movement was changed ’40s onwards. It’s as if
the documents of the property were changed and these secular/Islamic
binaries have remained at the core of Kashmir’s politics as a whole. It
gives people the chance to raise the fiction of the rise in Kashmir now
of Salafi Islam over Sufi Islam as if the former is bad Islam and the
latter good. But the reality is that Sufis too had always questioned
power. They were great diplomats, they just did it skillfully. There is
more in common with both Islams than is generally known.” Bazaz, Rashid
seems to suggest, should have known better than to influence Abdullah to
impose a secular grid on a national liberation struggle at a time when
it could have mobilised itself on the strength of the majority religion.
Without
Bazaz, would Abdullah have adopted a different path? Mohammad Yousuf
Taing, biographer of Abdullah, an NC man, who also knew Bazaz well, says
one shouldn’t second-guess men of history. “You don’t know what is in
people’s hearts. In history, you go by records,” says he, while steering
the conversation to that part of the story where Bazaz was beaten up by
fellow Pandits after he deposed in the fact-finding commission set up
after the 1931 uprising to address public grievances.
“Bazaz said
the Muslim grievances were correct. Some Pandits urinated in his mouth!
He had to leave his home and move into another neighbourhood in
Srinagar, at Amirakadal,” he adds. This displacement gave Bazaz a unique
identity, bringing him into the vortex of the state’s politics. It gave
him a new audience. And he came to be seen as a man of interest in the
eyes of both Kashmir’s and India’s nationalists around the time of the
buildup to India’s independence.
Jawaharlal Nehru addressing a meeting in Srinagar in 1947 with Sheikh Abdullah (L) by his side.
(HT Photo)
NC old-timers, however, slip in that “Bazaz was
writing letters to Nehru and Gandhi.” The suggestion is that he was a
Congress informant, a perception that contradicted his public statements
of conducting Kashmir and India’s respective freedom struggles
“independent” of the other. The diaries maintained by his son Bhushan in
Delhi, Bazaz, however, show how Bazaz saw this. Sometimes, he also
refers to himself in the third person! He was clearly self-conscious of
his role in history-making and saw himself criss-crossing both worlds --
he saw himself as the man who “cleared many misunderstandings” about
Abdullah, that the anti-Dogra uprising was not a communal one, and that
he had vouched for the secular credentials of Abdullah to Nehru.
“Nehru
also offered father one of the two general secretaryships of the States
People’s Conference that the former headed. He declined saying he had
work in Kashmir,” says Bhushan.
“Sheikh
Abdullah and Bazaz completely differed on the subject of Accession,”
says Dr Farooq Abdullah, Sheikh’s son and a former chief minister of
Jammu and Kashmir in Srinagar.
(Burhaan Kinu / HT Photo)
The ‘idea’ of Bazaz
Like all years,
this year too, Kashmir commemorated the 86th anniversary of Martyrs Day,
on July 13, the date of the massacre of Kashmiris in the anti-Dogra
uprising. Coincidentally, Bazaz’s 112th birthday also falls on the same
date. Bazaz’s invisibility in official or popular memory is tied to an
existential question that is relevant in Kashmir even today. It can be
asked by one Muslim to another should they differ on the mode of the
struggle, or simply while making sense of the conflict. It can be posed
by a Pandit to a fellow Pandit not living in the Valley or by a Muslim
to a Pandit, or vice-versa.
And that question is simply this: If
you are one of us, why are you with them? Or, since you are one of them,
can you really be one of us? Ideas of a catholic politics – one that is
open to all, and open for negotiation – like Bazaz’s, are suspect at
all times. People like him are always out of place.
Tickoo fleshes
out what he understands by ‘us’ and ‘them.’: “It is not the Jamaat or
Hurriyat that branded us Hindus/Indians in the Kashmiri Muslims’ eyes.
It was the RSS. And its activities in the Valley. Television too.” Dr
Sameer Kaul, a Pandit who is with the NC, says even in the time of Bazaz
and Abdullah, Pandits “didn’t have the numbers but we had say….That has
been lost over the years as Pandits responding to changes in the Valley
clung to religion and allowed the tragedy of the exodus to shape their
lives.”
Separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq (centre). Farooq maintains close relations with Bazaz’s family in Delhi.
(Waseem Andrabi / HT Photo )
On the move
Bazaz wasn’t a man to be
put off by roadblocks, personal or political. He joined organisations,
left them, and put up others. A follower of the Communist-turned-Radical
Humanist MN Roy after he left the NC in the ’40s, he built his politics
and a milieu of like-minded people around his journals. Most got him
into trouble. (Bazaz’s daily, Vitasta, started in 1932, was, in fact,
Kashmir’s first newspaper.) Abdullah was unhappy with him for giving
space to his opponents like Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah (the great-grand uncle of
the present Mirwaiz, Umer Farooq) in Hamdard, the paper they jointly
edited in the ’30s. When Abdullah was jailed by the Congress government
in the ’50s, Bazaz, despite his fallout with the NC leader, published a
booklet in his defence,
Sheikh Abdullah-What is his crime?
Nehru replies to Bazaz’s letter: “You wrote to me about the accession of the state not being complete...It is complete.”
(Saumya Khandelwal / HT Photo)
Flowing against the current – Bazaz simply didn’t
know what that meant. In the ’60s, he was shooting off letters to Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru saying the “Accession of Kashmir to India was
not complete”. His differences with Abdullah and his exile in Delhi – he
was forbidden from entering Kashmir by the NC government for raising
the issue of self-determination at periods inconvenient for the NC
leader who himself vacillated on the issue – however changed Bazaz. He
was “now willing” he wrote to Nehru, to work with Kashmiri Muslims to
wean them to a position for Autonomy. But he kept raising the issue on
Kashmir’s right to self-determination from time to time. On this point
he would not budge.
The flip-flops of most Kashmiri leaders -
Bazaz, Sheikh and the Mirwaiz included - is the story of a common
Kashmiri under pressure to define his politics within and outside
Kashmir, says academic Abir Bazaz of Haryana’s Ashoka University. “The
pressure of politics forces a leader’s hand…. One wrong move and the
movement suffers for years…or you can be made completely irrelevant. It
can turn giants into dwarfs.”
Dual Identities
Prem Nath Bazaz till the last remained a student of history. Like Rughonath Vaishnavi, another
pro-freedom Kashmiri Pandit, Bazaz read the political awakening of
Kashmiri Muslims as part of the community’s assertion in the
subcontinent. He saw this assertion as a matter of right and their
affiliation with Pakistan, and even their consideration of Pakistan as a
post-colonial possibility, as natural.
A Kashmiri who considered
his regional identity to be on a par with his religious identity,
Bazaz’s conception of a single society was one in which neither of the
two communities would dominate the other, says Rashid. “The Kashmiri
Pandit should not feel like an alien and the Kashmiri Muslim should not
be a hegemon.”
It was from such a standpoint that Pakistan - or a
Muslim-dominated discourse - did not seem an incompatible option to
Bazaz, says Hurriyat Conference leader Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, who retains
strong family ties with the Bazaz family even now. ‘Post-Plebiscite’,
should Kashmir choose Pakistan, Bazaz never made clear if he would join
it, but he stood for the right of Kashmiris to exercise that choice.
“His views were that if Kashmir was to remain with India it should be
out of choice not compulsion and that the democratic institutions should
be allowed to run,” says the Mirwaiz. “India needs to ask itself
whether it has increased that capability or shrunk it.”
Bazaz and
Sheikh’s story shows that it was not inevitable that a Kashmiri Pandit
would take an unambiguous pro-India position while a Kashmiri Muslim
would take a pro-Pakistani one.
His achievement is that he
represented the possibility of thinking a new politics across positions,
points out Abir Bazaz. The question is: does Kashmir, in its most
fraught period, need him now?
