| Secondly,
Nehru effectively used the Kashmir issue to silence his critics. It
is truly remarkable that as India's position in the state became
precarious, necessitating the overthrow and imprisonment of the
Sheikh and maintenance,by New Delhi, in power in Srinagar of one
corrupt regime after another, the more successful was Nehru in using
the Kashmir card at home. Clearly, the Indian people acquiesced in
this self-deception. The psychology behind this acquiescence needs
to be explored. It has not been, to the best of my knowledge. It,
however, seems to me that our presence in Kashmir served as a
substitute for cultural self-assertion for Hindus, especially for
the Western-educated elite engaged, albeit unconsciously, in a
desperate search for an ersatz substitute. In plain terms, Nehru or
no Nehru, we have not been ready for a genuine cultural
self-affirmation.
Finally, once he had accepted,
whether of his own volition or under coercion, a constitutional
arrangement for Kashmir which would preserve the identify
of Kashmiri Muslims, above all a product of their relative isolation
from the rest of the country on account of geographical factors, he
had also acknowledged, even if only by implication that he could not
use the Kashmir experiment to promote a change in the
attitude of Muslims in the rest of the Indian nation. This brings me
to the point I made earlier regarding Nehru's lack of confidence in
his ability to persuade Muslims to get out of the psychological and
cultural ghetto of their own making and join the mainstream brought
forth, in his view, by the process if modernization. It does not
follow that Nehru's secularism was phony; but it does not follow
that it was lame. To borrow the Chinese phrase, it did not walk on
two legs. It wobbled on one, though Muslims provided him a crutch in
the shape of electoral support which facilitated his and the
Congress party's stay in power.
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