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| Issue of J&K Accession: And now it's S M Krishna's turn | | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Oct 18: "When I (J&K Prime Minister Mehr Chand Mahajan) told the Prime Minister of India (Jawaharlal Nehru) that I had orders to go to Pakistan in case immediate military aid was not given, he (Nehru) naturally became upset and in an angry tone said, 'Mahajan, go away.' I got up and was about to leave the room when Sardar Patel detained me by saying in my ear, 'Of course, Mahajan, you are not going to Pakistan.' Just then, a piece of paper was passed over to the Prime Minister (Nehru). He read it and in a loud voice said, 'Sheikh Sahib also says the same thing' (read accept accession offer and send army to evict Pakistani invaders/intruders). It appeared that Sheikh Abdullah had been listening to all this talk while sitting in one of the bedrooms adjoining the drawing room where we (Nehru, Patel and Mahajan) were. He now strengthened my hands by telling the Prime Minister that military help must be sent immediately. This came as a timely help for the success of mission to New Delhi. The Prime Minister's attitude changed on reading the slip. After a few minutes talk, he told me to go and have some rest…He was calling a meeting of the defence council at 10 a.m. to discuss the matter and promised to convey its decision to me through my host, Sardar Baldev Singh (Defence Minister), before lunch…At 12.45 p.m. Sardar Baldev Singh came and told me that a decision had been taken to send two companies of Indian troops to Srinagar. All the planes in India had been requisitioned for the purpose…The Cabinet meeting in the evening affirmed the decision of the Defence Council to give military aid to the Maharaja to drive out the tribesmen. Around dinner time, the Prime Minister (Nehru) sent a message to me that with Mr V P Menon, I should fly to Jammu to inform the Maharaja of his decision and also to get his signature on certain supplementary documents about the accession..."
What Prime Minister Mehr Chand Mahajan, who was a man on the spot, an eyewitness and negotiator, wrote in his autobiography should, among other things, establish two things. One is that the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir signed the necessary documents about the accession that were prepared by New Delhi and, hence, the question of attaching conditions to the accession offer doesn't arise. Leave alone the non-existent agreement Chief Minister Omar Abdullah talked about on October 6 on the floor of the assembly. This should put Omar Abdullah and Foreign Minister S. M. Krishna on the mat and establish that the accession of J&K to India was unconditional, legal and non-negotiable. The other is that Nehru committed a grave blunder by taking a decision on the state's accession after reading a slip sent to him by Sheikh Abdullah, who had no locus standi in the matter. Nehru should have accepted the accession offer then and there, as the accession had been suggested by the Maharaja, who alone had the power in terms of constitutional law on the subject to take a final decision on the political future of his state. By not accepting the accession offer and by giving undue importance to what the Sheikh wrote in that particular slip, Nehru undermined the very process of accession at the very outset. In fact, he committed an act of constitutional impropriety by question the authority of the Maharaja vested in him by the Indian Independence Act of 1947.
The blissfully ignorant S. M. Krishna, who has been systematically spoiling the Indian pitch in Kashmir by making irresponsible statements, like the biased and communal Omar Abdullah, on October 15 equated the case of Mysore with Jammu and Kashmir and virtually defended the erring Chief Minister, obviously, at the behest of someone in New Delhi. He said, " he found nothing wrong in his (Omar Abdullah's) statement that the state had acceded and not merged with the Union of India, that "it is a fact that Jammu and Kashmir has acceded to India just like Mysore acceded to India" and that "the Maharaja of Mysore had also signed an accession treaty" and that "I am a citizen of Mysore."
Doesn't he know that all the princely states, 562 in number, which were neither part of the British India nor part of the partition plan, acceded to India or Pakistan, had signed the instrument of accession before becoming part of the Indian or the Pakistani Dominion. Most of the princely states, smaller in size and unviable administrative units, had thrown in their lot with the British Indian provinces after the reorganization of the states on linguistic basis in 1951. Take, for example, Mysore, Patiala and Kapurthala in Punjab, Baroda in Gujarat, Jaipur and Alwar in Rajasthan, the Hill States in what we today call Himachal Pradesh, to mention only a few.
Jammu and Kashmir, which was a bigger state having a land area of 84.000 sq miles, was not required to sign the instrument of merger. Jammu and Kashmir perhaps was the only princely state that was not brought under the jurisdiction of the States' Reorganization Commission. Why did the authorities exclude Jammu and Kashmir from the purview of the States' Reorganization Commission is still a mystery. Perhaps, the then leadership in New Delhi wanted to oblige Sheikh Abdullah, who had by 1947 abandoned his quit Kashmir plan and had entertained the ambition of ruling over Jammu as well for reasons not difficult to understand. One of the reasons was that he wanted to avenge what the Kashmir-based National Conference leadership consistently termed as the insults and barbarities the Dogras had perpetrated on the Kashmiri Muslims. (To be continued) |
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