news details |
|
|
| Ayyangar, Shah, Nehru & conspiracy against Jammu | | Omar’s Tributes To Sheikh | | RUSTAM | 12/6/2011 12:21:05 PM |
|
STARK REALITY
JAMMU, Dec 5: Paying tributes to his Late grandfather Sheikh Abdullah on his birth anniversary yesterday, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said: “Sheikh Sahib personified the aspirations of people of Jammu and Kashmir. He was the symbol of unity and amity. Sheikh Sahib denotes the State’s high traits of pluralistic ethos and communal harmony. He nurtured and strengthened this characteristic and cemented the bonds of love between various sections of the society
and different regions of the State”.
This is not the proper occasion to agree or disagree with Omar Abdullah because the occasion is such. However, it is time to refer here to what a distinguished member of the Indian Constituent Assembly Prof K T Shah from Bihar said on May 27, 1949, while participating in a heated debate on the nomenclature of Jammu & Kashmir. The participants were Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Minister of Kashmir Affairs Gopalaswami Ayyangar, Prof K T Shah and Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra from West Bengal. Ayyangar had moved a motion in the Constituent Assembly suggesting that the State of Jammu and Kashmir should be renamed as the “State of Kashmir”.
Those who opposed the motion were Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra and Prof Shah. Shah possessed first-hand knowledge about Jammu & Kashmir and its people as well as the kind of political upheavals it had witnessed since 1931. He remained associated with the affairs of this princely State for 15 long years and was its Planning Advisor for a few years before October 1947. He was also aware of the shape things would assume in Jammu & Kashmir in the days to come as he had a 15-day long interaction with National Conference president Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who had gone all the way from Srinagar to Mumbai to discuss with him his New Kashmir Plan. (The NC adopted “New Kashmir” programme in September, 1944, and demanded that “the Treaty of Amritsar dated March 16, 1846, signed between Maharaja Gulab Singh and the then British Government of India, which was in the nature of sale deed and was thus an insult to the people the State (Kashmir) must go lock, stock and barrel. This became the theme” of the ‘Quit Kashmir’ movement”, which ‘was launched in early 1946 -- April-May” (Report of the State Autonomy Committee, Jammu, April, 1999, P. 11).
While Pandit Maitra put question after question to know “if the word ‘Kashmir’ includes both Jammu and Kashmir”, Prof. Shah moved an amendment to the official motion and made an appeal to the Constituent Assembly to ensure that the words “Jammu and” also figure before the word “Kashmir wherever it occurs”.
Moving the amendment, Prof Shah said: “…There is some significance in this matter, which makes it more than ever necessary that you (Ayyangar) should not omit the other part (Jammu), and, if one may say so, the first part of the title of that ancient State. By calling it the State of Kashmir only you are perpetrating an error…May I ask…if we have made a mistake in the first instance, if we have been carried away by the importance of one sect (Sunni Muslims) of the State, by the importance of personages (the Sheikh and his colleagues) connected with that part of the State, is that any reason why we should forget the other side and no less important part of the State; and in this formal document continue to perpetuate that mistake and speak only of Kashmir, when we really mean Jammu and Kashmir? It is a fact not denied by the mover that is the correct name of the State”.
Prof. Shah also told the Constituent Assembly that the relations between Kashmir and Jammu were not very cordial. To make his point, Prof Shah said: “Those at any rate who remember the campaign of the present Prime Minister (Sheikh Abdullah) of the State in connection with (the 1946) Quit Kashmir movement will realize that in the sequence of events that have happened, it is liable, if you describe it in this manner, to be gravely misunderstood wherever such nomenclature is allowed to be used; and our public records will be disfigured to that extent…The State of Jammu and Kashmir is correctly described as Jammu and Kashmir, so to say, there are two States in one kingdom, just as Scotland and England were two States under the first of the Stuarts. The king was the King James the sixth of England and King James the First of England. There were two crowns worn by one person. In regard to the State of Jammu and Kashmir until about the communal rising in 1931, it was for all practical administrative purposes actually divided into two provinces more or less distinct, though under the same ruler…”
He did not stop here. Prof. Shah went on cautioning the Constituent Assembly, saying “the matter of nomenclature is not merely a matter of verbal emendation that it has behind it a significance, a significance, in the sequence of events, not confined only to this House or this country. It has repercussions outside this country…Therefore, we must be careful in every word that we use, so that our expression, our nomenclature, our whole wording is in conformity with the situation and the correct facts”.
In reply to Pandit Maitra, Ayyangar said: “Kashmir means Jammu and Kashmir”. He also justified his motion saying “in the Draft Constitution, the Schedule mentions the State of Kashmir” and “in the list that is attached to the Constituent Assembly Rules, it is already described as Kashmir”. He urged the members not to make this an issue and “let this description of the State of Kashmir stand, because if you change it, we will have to change other things which are already in our Statutes and Rules”. In other words, Ayyangar expressed his unwillingness to insert the words “Jammu and” before Kashmir for reasons better known to him and which failed to carry conviction with Pandit Maitra and Prof. Shah. This is evident from the questions they raised in response to the lengthy statement of Ayyangar on the nomenclature of the State.
Convinced that Ayyangar would not be in a position to convince Pandit Maitra and Prof. Shah, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself took the stage. He defended Ayyangar and said that his stand was “correct”. He said that “I have been connected with Kashmir in many ways, and, in a sense, I belong to Kashmir more particularly than to any part of India. I have been connected with the fight of freedom in Kashmir…And so, if I venture to say anything in this House, I do so with greater authority than Prof. Shah can presume to have on the subject…” After saying so, he made a lengthy statement to counter the arguments of Prof. Shah and in praise of Sheikh Abdullah and his NC and the Quit Kashmir Movement. At the same time, he suggested “a small change in the wording of the motion” with a view to “removing” what he called “a slight confusion in the people’s mind”. What he actually suggested was that the “State be described as Kashmir State, and then putting within brackets, the words otherwise known as the State of Kashmir and Jammu”. (Constituent Assembly Debates, Book No 3, Vol VIII, May 16, 1949 to June 16, 1949, Reprinted by Lok Sabha Secretariat, New Delhi, Second Reprint, 1989, pp. 357-373).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
STOCK UPDATE |
|
|
 |
| BSE
Sensex |
 |
| NSE
Nifty |
|
|
| |
CRICKET UPDATE |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
