JK EXAMS

Then on October 30, 1947, after Hari Singh had formally agreed to accede to India, Abdullah was appointed the head of the emergency administration under an order issued by the prince, on Nehru’s insistence. Yet Abdullah had not abandoned the idea of self-determination for Kashmir. In 1953, he was jailed for conspiracy against the state – this time, the Indian state.

According to the late Sheikh Mohammad Maqbool, a leader of the National Conference from Baramulla and former law minister of Jammu and Kashmir, back in 1947, the party had hoped to leverage the Standstill Agreement that Hari Singh had signed with Pakistan, maintaining status quo until fresh administrative arrangements were made. “We believed that the Maharaja’s Standstill Agreement favoured us, we would have been a third state,” said Maqbool.

In those chaotic months after the invasion, as the maharaja fled, the National Conference became the most visible political force in the Valley. Sherwani was not the only party worker who had vowed to defend the Valley against the invaders. As the clouds of war gathered, the National Conference organised militias composed of local volunteers to defend the Valley, including the Women’s Self-Defence Corps. In Srinagar and Baramulla, these militias are remembered as the the Salamati Fauj.

Maqbool recalled they would march around Srinagar chanting “Hamla awan, khabardar,/ Salamati Fauj hai tayyar.” (Approaching invaders, be warned,/ the Peace Force is ready.) Harbans Singh, a Sikh resident of Baramulla who joined the Jammu and Kashmir Militia in the 1950s, rattles off another slogan: “Kadam, kadam badenge hum, Mahaz par ladenge hum.” Step by step we will advance,/ We will fight at the border.

Not everyone took a charitable view of the Salamati Fauj, especially not the Sheikh’s political detractors. “They were a brigade of lumpens whom we called the peace brigade,” snorted Anwar Ashai, a prominent student leader in the 1960s, whose father had been part of the original group that formed the Muslim Conference in 1932. “They would eavesdrop on people’s houses and see what we were talking.” The National Conference “ran Srinagar by force”, said Ashai. As for Abdullah, he was a “collaborator who led us into this mess”.
Post script
The contentions of that time, entombed in the Sherwani memorial, never quite left Baramulla. For Noor-ud-Din Shaal, 1947 was filled with bitter memories. It scuppered the Muslim Conference’s political agenda, it killed his friend, it led to a long estrangement from relatives across the Line of Control. After the war, he wound up the news agency to become a teacher. “Sab bichhad gaye the,” said Farooq Shaal. Everyone got scattered.

In the decades that followed, an angry, wounded town drew closer to the Kashmiri separatist movement. Regina Cinema, which stood next to the site of Sherwani’s execution, had survived the war. “I used to skip class and watch films here,” chuckled Farooq Shaal. But there was no trace of the cinema behind him, only an empty glass-panelled mall. When Baramulla became a militant stronghold in the 1990s, a group called the Allah Tigers burnt the cinema down.

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