Anoop Verma's Diary: Itihasa & Darshana: Mahatma Gandhi’s First Trip to Kashmir

Wednesday, 24 August 2022

Mahatma Gandhi’s First Trip to Kashmir

Hari Singh in 1931

Hari Singh, the Maharaja of Kashmir, had in his personal capacity invited Mahatma Gandhi to visit his state at a time when the First World War was still going on and the latter had returned from South Africa. Gandhiji accepted the Maharaja’s invitation after more than 30 years, and decided to go to Kashmir in the first week of August 1947. At that time, India was hurtling towards independence and division, and a civil war was raging between Hindus and Muslims throughout the country.

Why was Gandhiji going to Kashmir at a time like this? The answer to this question is not clear. Hari Singh did not want to receive Gandhiji in the state at this time. He wrote to Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, requesting that Gandhiji should cancel his trip. But Gandhiji insisted on going to Kashmir. On July 29, before leaving for Kashmir, he declared at a meeting in Delhi: “I am not going to tell the Maharaja to join India and not Pakistan. The people of Kashmir are the true owners of Kashmir.” But there was certainly a political agenda behind his visit.

Gandhiji arrived in Srinagar, via Rawalpindi, on August 1, 1947. At that time it was not clear which way Kashmir would go. Hari Singh wanted the state to become an independent country, but the most popular politician in the state, Sheikh Abdullah, was in prison and he had not clarified his position. While he was in the state, Gandhiji had meetings with the prime minister of Kashmir, Ramchandra Kak, and with Hari Singh and his son Karan Singh. He also met Sheikh Abdullah’s wife, Begum Akbar Jahan, who requested him to get her husband released from prison.

Kak was hostile towards the Congress party. He was responsible for arresting Sheikh Abdullah. When Jawaharlal Nehru tried to appear as Abdullah's counsel, Kak barred Nehru from entering the state. On August 11, within days of Gandhiji’s visit, Hari Singh fired Kak and placed him under house arrest. The senior officials in the state, such as the Chief Secretary, the Chief of the Army Staff, and the Inspector General of Police, were also fired. Janak Singh, who was close to Nehru, was nominated as Kashmir’s new Prime Minister.

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Nirad C. Chaudhuri

“In the south the temples have survived, and in the north they have not. Over seven centuries from the eleventh to the end of the seventeenth all the great cities of northern India dating from Hindu times were sacked by the Muslim invaders and conquerors of India. All the temples there and in all other centres of Hinduism were systematically destroyed. None were left standing at Ujjain, Ajmere, Delhi, Mathura, Brindaban, Kanauj, Prayag, or Benares—which were the centres of the political, cultural, and religious life of the Hindus. In most of these places mosques were built on the sites of the temples, and in some with pillars taken from them. This religious vandalism also worked its fury on the Buddhist centres. Moreover, it was not simply that the great temples in the cities were destroyed; so were the village temples. For most of the period of Muslim rule, there was a ban on building new temples and rebuilding the old in the regions the Muslims controlled.” ~ Nirad C. Chaudhuri

“The moral ideal, that when slapped on one cheek you should offer the other for a slap, has no place in politics. Here the maxim is just the reverse. If you are slapped, give proper return, and you would at once find a desire by the other side to make friends. The method of offering the other cheek for being slapped has now been tried for over 20 years. There has been enough of coaxing and fawning, which by giving undue importance to the other community has begotten only insolence and impudence. May we not now try the counter method and see its result?” ~ Rai Bahadur Lalchand

“Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers; a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging as his philosophical speculations were profound; a teacher who enchanted and inspired the brightest youth of Greece; a public figure who lived a turbulent life in a turbulent world. He bestrode antiquity like an intellectual colossus. No man before him had contributed so much to learning. No man after him might aspire to rival his achievements.” ~ Jonathan Barnes

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“Where Plato is whimsical and ironic, and proceeds by suggestion and indirection, Aristotle is matter-of-fact, almost pedestrian. Where Plato’s writing is filled with his sense of better and more beautiful world behind, above, beyond the world of ordinary experience, illuminating that experience but transcending it, Aristotle keeps his feet firm on the ground of ordinary experience. This is Aristotle's reality, and the business of philosophy in his view is to make sense of the here and now.” ~ W. T. Jones

“The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“Social evils cannot be reformed by legislation; defects of government machinery cannot be repaired by changes in the constitution; differences of opinion cannot be settled by compromise.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"There is no such thing as a right to be stupid; there is no such thing as a right to be illiterate; there is no such thing as a right to be incompetent.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." ~ George Santayana

"One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"In National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The fallacy in the ethics of evolution is the equation of the “struggle for existence” with the “survival of the fittest,” and the assumption that “the fittest” is identical with “the best.” But that struggle may favor the worst rather than the best.” ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

“The quest for the origin must take into account that the world of our experience is not a static structure but a process; and the speculation on the origin must project (in one symbolism or another) this experience into a process in the origin itself.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.” ~ Jacob Bronowski

“You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country's industrial plant—and centuries of effort won't be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start.” ~ Ayn Rand

“Can you be a conservative and believe in God? Obviously. Can you be a conservative and not believe in God? This is an empirical essay, and so the answer is, as obviously, yes. Can you be a conservative and despise God and feel contempt for those who believe in him? I would say no.” ~ William F. Buckley Jr.

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“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” ~ James Joyce