Opinion Lal Chowk, the square at the centre of Kashmir

“Just when we find that India is on the verge of independence, we find the Kashmir authorities, totally oblivious of this fact, seeking to crush their own people and their desire for freedom. A real people’s movement can never be crushed in this way, much less can it be crushed when India herself is putting an end to foreign rule. …The story … will go on till it reaches the logical end which can only be the establishment of freedom in Kashmir within the larger frame-work of a free and independent India.” (The Rise and Fall of New Kashmir by Andrew Whitehead in Kashmir: History, Politics and Representation, ed Chitralekha Zutshi, Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Before that, as Whitehead points out, even the National Conference (NC) had not really paid attention to this question, including in its Soviet-inspired party manifesto, Naya Kashmir, written in 1944 and laid out its vision for the state. It was a unique document for its time — no other political party in the region had one — and it was this manifesto that guided many of the progressive measures that the state witnessed under his leadership. At the time, Jinnah’s advocacy of separate state for Muslims was just beginning to gain traction, but the NC document mentions neither Pakistan nor India and appears to be based on the assumption of J&K as an independent state, with its own national identity under a constitutional monarchy. It was only two years later that the NC would begin a Quit Kashmir movement against the Dogra rulers, but the question of which side to choose was still far away.

In October 1947, as Pakistani tribesmen infiltrated the princely state ahead of the Pakistan army, Maharaja Hari Singh signed off on J&K’s accession to India, leaving the state officially in charge of Sheikh Abdullah as the head of an interim government. The Dogra ruler had jailed the National Conference leader in May 1946 for the Quit Kashmir movement against the monarchy, but released him in September 1947 as the developments in the state spiralled out of the Maharaja’s control.

In 1948, Nehru and Abdullah stood together at Lal Chowk to declare victory in what was the first India-Pakistan war. Lal Chowk had been named after Moscow’s Red Square by the NC militias as they were fighting the Pakistani invasion. The Communist influence on the NC came in particular from B.P.L. “Baba” Bedi, a member of the Communist Party of India and his wife Freda Bedi — parents of the actor Kabir Bedi – who both had enormous say in the NC. It is said Lal Chowk got its name from them.

A report in the Times of India of 8 November 1947 does not mention them but records the moment: “The National Conference red flag … decorates every public building in the city. In the main square in the heart of the city, which has been renamed “Red Square”, a giant red flag flutters from a tall mast under which workers and ordinary people foregather at all hours of the day to hear the latest news of the war and exchange political gossip”. (Whitehead in Zutshi, 2017).

When India’s Prime Minister unfurled the tricolour there in 1948, Abdullah quoted Amir Khusro’s beautiful couplet to express Kashmir’s union with India, giving the realpolitik of the time a poetic flourish unmatched till date: “Munn tu shudam tu munn shudi, Munn tunn shudam tu jaan shudi.Taakas na goyad baad azeen,Munn deegaram tu deegari (I have become you, and you me,I am the body, you soul;So that no one can say hereafter,That you are are someone, and me someone else).”

Of course, Nehru also made his promise of a referendum there, but a week is a long time in politics, and Kashmiris see that broken promise as the first big betrayal. Then, as the Cold War took grip and that edition of the Great Game unfolded in this part of the world, in 1949, Nehru first got Abdullah to ease out Baba Bedi, who did not have an official position in the J&K administration but played an advisory role. Four years later, Abdullah would be jailed for treason in the Kashmir conspiracy case, and this time, among the allegations was that he had supped with the other side.

Lal Chowk’s centrality to the politics of and over Kashmir grew over the decades. In 1963, it became a site of violence by a mob protesting the rumoured theft of the holy relic from the Hazratbal Shrine during the chief ministership of Ghulam Mohammed Bakshi. In 1975, at the same square where he had so evocatively spoken about Kashmir’s union with India, Abdullah, reconciled to the new geopolitics of South Asia after the 1971 war and the liberation of Bangladesh, once again took the mike before a massive crowd to explain his accord with Indira Gandhi.

The Palladium cinema used to be the main landmark at Lal Chowk, and is visible in the background in photographs of the famous Nehru-Abdullah rally there. In 1985, with public apathy high in Kashmir and the first signs of militancy already in the air, a huge poster of Sheikh Abdullah at Lal Chowk was torn down by a group of young people, charged after watching the 1981 Anthony Quinn starrer The Lion of the Desert, about the Libyan hero Omar Mukhtar who fought the Italian colonial rulers. The movie had to be banned in the state.

After the onset of militancy, the “capture” of Lal Chowk by various sides to the conflict became symbolic of Kashmir itself, turning it into a battlefield between militants and security forces.

Writing in the J&K newspaper Early Times in 2014, M K Mattoo, a contributor, relates that in 1990, militants who had occupied the square placed a colour television set there, throwing a wager that anyone who unfurled the national flag there could walk away with the television. According to him, a group of NSG commandos won the challenge and the TV set was displayed for years at their mess. Mattoo describes Lal Chowk as the “political soul” of Kashmir.

BJP threw itself into the contest in 1992, with stalwart Murli Manohar Joshi leading an Ekta Yatra to Kashmir with the express intention of flying the Tricolour at Lal Chowk. Joshi’s day out at the square was successful – he hoisted the flag there. According to Mattoo, he and other BJP workers, including a young Narendra Modi, “walked gingerly” into the chowk surrounded by layers of security, “quickly unfurled” the flag, after which they were “bundled into bullet proof cars” and rapidly driven out of the place.

Subsequently, Lal Chowk has been “occupied” by protesters at various times, and raising the Tricolour there has been seen as a daring act of patriotism. But nearly four years after August 5, 2019, when the government read down Article 370, with a massive clamp down to ensure no one would protest these actions, the place hardly has the same contested feel to it. The Congress decision to unfurl the flag at its party office with the apparent subtext that it still has a following in the state sounds more courageous.