Prof Hari Om
Former Chief Minister (CM) and National Conference (NC) vice-president Omar Abdullah on Thursday, Dec 15, 2022, sprung a big surprise by claiming that J&K was permanently granted a special status within the Indian Union under Article 370. “His party has been saying right from the first day that whatever happened on August 5, 2019 was wrong. That was a deception with J&K. The promises made with us had no time limits. Nowhere was it written that it was for 10 years or 20 or 30. It is clearly mentioned there that till J&K is a part of India, J&K will have this special provision (in this case Article 370). But they (read Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah) snatched it from us illegally, unconstitutionally. We are fighting for its restoration,” he told reporters in Anantnag.
“We will get justice,” asserted rattled and sulking Omar Abdullah said, when asked about Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud’s December 14 remarks that the Supreme Court would consider plea for early listing of petitions challenging the Centre’s decision to abrogate Article 370. “We hope that the case is listed sooner and hearings take place. I am of the belief that our case is strong and God willing, we will get justice for the people of J&K from the court,” he also said. Now that Omar Abdullah, who was both Chief Minister and Home Minister for six years, claimed what he claimed, it’s time to ask him to put in public domain that official document which provided for a special status for the solitary J&K State on a permanent basis. We as students of history have not seen any such document either at the State Archives Repository, Jammu, or at the National Archives of India, New Delhi. We have seen only three documents and one statement made by the Indian Prime Minister, JL Nehru, in the Parliament and J&K Wazir-e-Azam, Sheikh Abdullah, in the J&K Constituent Assembly, which the NC leadership and other Kashmiri leaders wrongly misinterpret as “Delhi Agreement of 1952”.
The first authentic document is the October 26, 1947 Instrument of Accession, signed between J&K Maharaja Hari Singh and the Dominion Government headed by Nehru and ruled by the British Governor-General, Lord Mountbatten. Hari Singh, who alone had the prerogative under the Indian Independence Act of 1947 to decide the political fate of his princely state, nowhere laid down a condition that he would throw in the political lot of his state with the Indian Dominion only if a special status was conferred on his state on the ground that J&K was a Muslim-majority State and the people of Kashmir were a race apart. Omar Abdullah may put in any amount of effort to find if the Instrument of Accession or even what Lord Mountbatten wrote while endorsing the accession offer said what he claimed, he would come out of the exercise minus everything. On the contrary, he would find that the Instrument of Accession signed by Maharaja Hari Singh was 100 per cent similar to the one signed by 560-odd other princely states as it was the Indian State Department (read Home Ministry) which had drafted it. The other authentic record is the proceedings of the Indian Constituent Assembly, which are available with all libraries and also with the legislative assembly library of the erstwhile J&K State. Just look at the proceedings in the Constituent Assembly, which took place on October 17, 1949. It was on this day that the Constituent Assembly adopted Article 306-A (read Article 370) without any discussion ignoring the warning of one of its members, Maulana Hasarat Mohani, that “grant of special status to Kashmir” on the score of religion “would enable it to assume independence”. And, it was adopted on the unambiguous assurance held out by none other than the Minister of Kashmir Affairs Gopalaswami Ayyangar that Article 370 was a purely “temporary and transitional” provision. Even a superfluous study of what transpired in the Constituent Assembly on October 17, 1949 would make even a naive to conclude that nobody in the Dominion Government, not even Prime Minister Pt Jawahar Lal Nehru, held out any promise that J&K State shall enjoy special status as long as it remained part of India. The third authentic document on the subject is what the Kashmiri leaders of all hues call “Delhi Agreement of 1952”. Leave aside for the moment the fact that there exists no such agreement as the Delhi Agreement on J&K State. It was a mere statement on the discussions which took place between PM Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah during June 14-July 24, 1952 in New Delhi. The statement was made in the Parliament by Nehru on July 24, 1952 and Sheikh Abdullah in the J&K Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1952. These statements nowhere said what Omar Abdullah claimed.
It needs to be underlined that both Nehru and the Sheikh had arrived at an agreed solution only as regards the aims and ideals and bare outlines of the new constitution. Numerous matters, which will form the basis of Centre-State relations, had been left undetermined as proper subjects for further discussion and explanation. Some of these issues such as the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, jurisdiction of the Election Commission, emergency powers, fundamental rights and the question of finance were yet to be clinched. These were never clinched because Nehru had the Sheikh dismissed and arrested on August 9, 1953 on the sedition charge. And, the fourth authentic document is 1974-75 Indira Gandhi-Sheikh Abdullah Accord, under which the deflated Sheikh was brought back to power in February 1975 after a long gap of 22 years, did empower the Sheikh to review the Central laws introduced in J&K after August 1953 considered harmful for the state and its people. But his Deputy Chief Minister D D Thakur in his report said that all the Central laws had “benefitted the state and its people” and “the needles of the clock cannot be turned back”. The Sheikh accepted the Thakur report in its entirety. Not just this, both the Sheikh and his successor Farooq Abdullah applied almost two dozen new Central laws in J&K. This is the whole truth. Omar Abdullah would do well to put in public domain the document, if any, that says “till J&K is a part of India, J&K will have this special provision” (Article 370), failing which it shall be presumed that he is only murdering history and misinterpreting and misrepresenting the sacrosanct facts to mislead his constituency in Kashmir.
