Coming of Age

How the Kashmir issue provided a leg up to Vajpayee’s political career. An extract

Abhishek Choudhary

Mookerji’s first impulse was to agitate on traditional social and economic issues of the day—beginning with food inflation, especially the increase in the prices of rationed wheat. But by the time the Jan Sangh recovered from the shock of defeat, the issue had been hijacked by the communists and socialists, who had fared better at the polls. Low on morale, the party had, its president lamented in mid-May, kept itself ‘aloof as a mere spectator’. The RSS launched a massive signature campaign with the intention to force the government to bring a central legislation to ban the killing of cows. Mookerji sympathized with it from a distance, but did not think it a strong enough plank to start a countrywide agitation. Unable to come up with any new ideas, the party fell back on an old obsession: Kashmir.

Jammu & Kashmir was the only Muslim-majority state of India that was, under Sheikh Abullah’s leadership, determined to remain autonomous. Given their hostile relationship in the past, Abdullah, the new prime minister of J&K, was keen to pay the former ruling class of Dogras back in their own coin. Soon after taking over he had, in July 1950, carried out radical land reforms without paying any compensation, which had hurt many of the Dogra jagirdars. In theory the Jan Sangh supported land reforms, with Mookerji mentioning in his presidential speech of October 1951 that the ‘abolition of zamindari along with other integrated measures will usher in agricultural reforms necessary for the country. But compensation should be paid.’ Since the party drew much of its support form the landed class and some lapsed maharajas, its private stand was more ambiguous.

The Dogras resented the decline in their economic and political influence. It did not help that officials sent by Abdullah to run the administration in Jammu ‘did not conduct themselves well’ either. Unfortunately, for someone who had spent years in the prison, Abdullah acquired a reputation for becoming ‘notoriously intolerant of dissent’, frequently locking up opposition workers without trial, sometimes for year.

Matters worsened during the 1951 assembly elections. The nominations for forty-five out of forty-nine Praja Parishad candidate were declared invalid on flimsy grounds. The Parishad boycotted the election; the National Conference had a walkover on all of its seventy-five seats. With no space for manoeuvre, the Praja Parishad began to agitate for removing the special status granted to J&K and to