New Delhi, April 6 : Author and IANS Editor-in-Chief, MD and CEO Sandeep Bamzai’s book on the tumultuous political history of Jammu and Kashmir from 1931 to 1953 was released on Thursday in the presence of senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid, Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (eetd), IIC Director K.N. Shrivastava and J&K’s former Finance Minister Haseeb Drabu.
The slim yet insightful book titled “Gilded Cage: Years That Made and Unmade Kashmir” will be invaluable to any scholar or journalist trying to make sense of what is happening in Kashmir today. It offers a riveting account, drawing from previously unaccessed private papers, of what transpired in the Valley between the sunset years of the British Raj and the events leading up to the dismissal and imprisonment of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah on August 8, 1953.
Racily written and packed with new details, the book, which is the third part of the author’s Kashmir Trilogy, gives details of:
— how Sheikh Abdullah jettisoned Jinnah’s dream to grab Kashmir for Pakistan, a dream that Maharaja Hari Singh’s Prime Minister, Ram Chandra Kak, would have happily fulfilled;
— how the Kashmiri nationalist leader convinced Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to initiate military action against the Pakistani tribal raiders infiltrating into the Valley to annex it;
— and eventually, how the Sheikh boxed himself into his exclusivist vision of an independent Kashmir minus Jammu, completely at odds with Nehru’s expansive Idea of India, leading to Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the Sheikh’s deputy and Nehru’s eyes and ears in Kashmir, displacing him as leader of the National Conference.
Fleshing out this dramatic story of the “Years The Made and Unmade Kashmir”, Bamzai has dug deep into the hitherto unpublished papers of his grandfather, K.N. Bamzai, Delhi bureau chief of ‘The Blitz’, who later served as Sheikh Abdullah’s private secretary and OSD to Nehru, seeing the estrangement of the two political allies — “one of the most unfortunate happenings in the years that followed Independence” — from a privileged position.
