Maharaja Pratap Singh instituted the Hereditary State Subject Order of 1984 (1927 C.E.),26 which defined hereditary state subjects as “all persons born and residing in the State before the commencement of the reign of His Highness the late Maharaja Gulab Singh Sahib Bahadur (1846 C.E.) and also persons who settled therein before the commencement of Samvat 1942 (1888 C.E.).”27 The 1927 state subject definition established that subjects of the monarchy had durable rights. By limiting the Maharaja’s ability to confer land rights and by restricting employment in government institutions to established state subjects, it also created a legal mechanism though which they could make claims on the Princely State. At the same time, state subjects also became the site of new forms of control, regulation, and political contestation. Whereas the regulatory acts of the nineteenth century had focused on the border, during the 1920s to 1940s, the Maharaja used the legal category “state subject” to exert claims over his subject nationals when they were in foreign territories. The category also facilitated the development of legal mechanisms to exclude foreigners and seditious (i.e., antimonarchist) ideas from the Princely State.28
Demands on the Maharaja’s government for patronage and legal recognition of proprietary rights continued into 1931, culminating in riots at religious sites in the Kashmir Valley, Mirpur district, and the city of Jammu.29 The subsequent Glancy Commission Report reflected British colonial anxieties about communal politics in British India. However, the commissioners’ recommendations reflected the emphasis within the state on legal and rights-based definitions of political belonging; the report recommended that government jobs be reserved for state subjects, that full proprietary rights be allocated to land occupants, that the state pay for all forms of labor services as a resolution to remaining bēgār taxation, and that state subjects participate in state government.
Between 1932 and 1936, Maharaja Hari Singh redefined the state subject and accepted the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution Act of 1996 (1934 C.E.),30 which established the state’s first Legislative Assembly—the Praja Sabha. An amended Hereditary State Subject Order (1932) was drafted concurrently with the Constitution Act of 1934; it established three classes of state subjects and a hierarchy of rights firmly based on claims to immovable property and agricultural land, bureaucratic labor, and limitations on taxation.31 Although these rights were not directly linked to political representation, the Praja Sabha representatives (who were appointed by the Maharaja) used the recognition and distribution of land rights as a means of conferring political rights. The Praja Sabha passed a number of regulations that prevented the commodification of property and transferred some of the power of conferring political status from the Maharaja to the Legislative Assembly. Similarly, the Maharaja’s council used the connection between land rights and state subject status to extend its own administrative control in the many internal feudatories it did not fully control. Poonch Jagir, for example, was not represented in the first Praja Sabha because in 1934 it was still an independent jāgīr with its own hereditary Rajas. In 1939, the council brought the Poonch Jagir into the Princely State’s direct administrative structure—and more pointedly shifted the right of taxation to the Maharaja—by conferring land rights, and thus state-subject status and Praja Sabha representation, to residents of the Poonch Jagir.32
In the late 1930s, political parties and subaltern movements began to argue for direct franchise rights for state subjects. The Praja Sabha allowed for only minimal direct popular participation and had only advisory power. Its formation, however, legalized political parties in the Princely State, and a number of regional and transregional parties developed after 1932. Political party development in Jammu and Kashmir was not a simple extension of anticolonial and nationalist movements in British India. Parties developed from networks of educational reading groups and religious associations that had been legally permitted formal associations before 1932. During the agitations of 1931, members of these groups, including the prominent leaders Ghulam Abbass, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, and Prem Nath Bazaz, met in the Maharaja’s prisons. They went on to found a number of parties, including the Praja Parishad, the Dogra Party, and the Kashmir Kisan Mazdoor Party, as well as the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference (AJKMC), which later split, forming a new AJKMC and the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (AJKNC).33 After 1941, the AJKMC was generally referred to as “the Muslim Conference” and the AJKNC as “the National Conference.”
Party leaders were influenced by global anticolonial, nationalist, and socialist thinking, but political parties in Jammu and Kashmir took up the issues that were of particular concern to the subjects of the Princely State.34 The Quit Kashmir protests, centered in the Kashmir Valley, and the armed Azad Kashmir insurrection, which began in Poonch, indicate how strongly the connection between land and rights influenced Kashmiri political identity and grounded political movements in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir by the 1940s.
Azad Kashmir and the Quit Kashmir Movement
A working committee of the National Conference first articulated the concept of popular sovereignty as a right of Jammu and Kashmir state subjects in its Naya Kashmir (New Kashmir) Manifesto, which the party adopted in 1944.35 The manifesto blended socialist land reform with sovereign rule by the people of the state, defined as “the people of the Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh and the frontier regions, including Poonch and Chenani Ilaquas.”36 This notion of self-rule was extended in the call for āzād kashmīr (Liberted/Free Kashmir) at a meeting sponsored by the Kashmir Kisan Mazdoor Party in May 1946. Representatives of various state political parties from Kashmir Province, Jammu Province, and the former Poonch Jagir attended the meeting, including members of the National Conference, the Muslim Conference, the Dogra Party, and the Praja Parishad. The meetings concluded with a demand for the liberation of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir and the creation of a free state in which the “people of the state” would be sovereign.37
Sheikh Abdullah, a politician educated at the modernist Aligarh University and well versed in European social and political theory, also demanded self-rule under the slogan “Quit Kashmir.” The Quit Kashmir Declaration of 1946 held that the “people of the state” henceforth abrogated the Treaty of Amritsar between the British and the Sikh princes, in which the people of the state has been ceded as well as the land itself.38 In a telegram to the Cabinet Mission officials responsible for partitioning British India, which was printed in the Srinagar newspaper Khidmat, Sheikh Abdullah announced the Quit Kashmir Movement as the last stage of Kashmiri peoples’ struggle for self-rule.39 This movement was led by Sheikh Abdullah and the AJKNC party, but it depended on multiple party affiliations and interregional networks. The movement’s popular appeals invoked a sovereignty based in the region’s previous land-rights movements and protests.
The AJKMC and other regional political parties did not initially endorse the Quit Kashmir statement, and the National Conference provided the public leadership of the movement. However, the involvement of the state’s various parties became clear as prominent party leaders were arrested by the Maharaja’s government in 1946 and 1947. By the end of 1946, supporters of the National Conference and of the Muslim Conference were engaged in a violent struggle for control of the Quit Kashmir movement. This so-called Sher-Bakra conflict resulted in the exodus of the National Conference’s political opponents from the Princely State, either as direct exiles from Srinagar or as political exiles from the Maharaja’s detention centers.40 When the Maharaja, beset by internal revolt and external invasion, signed the Instrument of Accession to India in November 1947, the National Conference was the clearly dominant political party in Srinagar.
The Quit Kashmir movement began with a clearly articulated political ideology and organized, party-led protests. The armed Azad Kashmir movement coalesced around a tax protest in the Poonch Jagir, where the Maharaja’s government had been attempting to regularize and increase land-revenue assessments since 1940, when it had been integrated into the Princely State. In June 1947, the Kashmir State Dogra Army began to disarm Muslim peasants and redistribute the weapons to Hindu and Sikh landlords. Men from Poonch brought women and children to towns on the border of the Princely State and the NWFP, notably to the army cantonment towns of Murree and Abbottabad,
