Kashmir in a scholar’s book and a spy file

A vanished relic, secret intelligence documents, and a professor’s trail of evidence reveal how hunger and land created Kashmir’s modern destiny.

Kashmir remembers the years before 1947 as an age of polemics and protests, with voices rising against the monarchy in crowded public spaces.

But beneath that searing surface, a stronger force coursed through homes, fields, and workshops, where bread, land, and self-respect fuelled the real struggle for change.

Prof. Manzoor Fazili’s Socialist Ideas and Movements in Kashmir (1919-1947) highlights this deeper current, showing how a widespread push for economic justice ran through society as strongly as the fight for political rights, even as modern history often reduces it to a footnote.

Through Fazili’s close reading of records, strikes, and movements, Kashmir’s pre-1947 struggle emerges as a humanistic, socialist effort to restore value to those long trapped in poverty and exploitation, a movement that put fairness above flags.

That long arc begins among the shawl weavers of Zaldagar and stretches into the Cold War world captured in declassified CIA files, revealing a struggle focused on land, labour, and ownership.

The nineteenth century burned with unending fires that hung over the valley, and Fazili reads this period as a ledger of class conflict rather than royal succession, with Damaras holding power and peasants carrying the cost.

This conflict erupted on April 29, 1865, when Srinagar’s shawl weavers launched what stands as the region’s earliest industrial strike, long before socialist revolutions revamped Europe.

Crushed by the dag shawl tax and relentless extraction, those workers gathered at Zaldagar to demand relief. Governor Diwan Kripa Ram’s forces responded with violence, driving unarmed workers toward the narrow Haji Rather bridge, where panic sent twenty-eight weavers into the river to die as casualties of an economic battle.

Leaders Rasul Sheikh and Abli Pal faced torture and death, punished for demanding a livelihood rather than power.

That memory smouldered into the twentieth century and flared again in 1931, a year remembered for martyrdom but rooted deeply in economics.

Fazili links the uprising to the delayed blow of the Great Depression, which strangled trade with Central Asia and collapsed handicraft prices, pushing labourers long treated as mute into collective action.

The leap from reading rooms to streets happened with speed. Urban Kashmiris formed Narcho platoons in September 1931, carrying farm tools and improvised weapons that signalled the beginning of the end for princely authority.

Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah rose from this turbulence, described by Fazili as politically complex though guided by socialist belief, a leader whose faith identity mattered less than his commitment to economic equality.

By 1939, the Muslim Conference shed its earlier frame to become the National Conference, driven by the realisation that hunger cut through every divide.

This shift reached its clearest form in 1944 with the Naya Kashmir manifesto, believed to have been framed with the help of BPL Bedi and Freda Bedi. The blueprint laid out a planned economy and declared that land belonged to those who worked it.

After 1947, those ideas moved from paper to policy.

The Big Landed Estates Abolition Act of 1950 dismantled the jagirdari and chakdari systems by taking roughly 4.5 lakh acres from landlords and handing more than 2.31 lakh acres to landless tillers without compensation. This intervention, unmatched in non-communist Asia, fundamentally reformed social relations in the valley.

This bold path soon collided with Cold War lines that divided the world into rigid camps.

By 1953, Sheikh Abdullah’s insistence on autonomy had begun to unsettle New Delhi. Declassified CIA reports from April 1964 note his dismissal and arrest in August on charges of disruptionism and pursuing foreign contacts seen as a threat to the state.

In that climate, Indian left leaders such as Krishna Menon framed Abdullah’s position as opening space for American influence in the Himalayas, feeding suspicions that culminated in the Kashmir Conspiracy Case of 1958, which kept him imprisoned for much of a decade.

The political structure built after Abdullah’s removal revealed its weakness in the winter of 1963, when the Moi-e-Muqqadas vanished from Hazratbal Shrine and sent crowds into the streets.

The CIA observed the uprising as anti-Bakshi, and indirectly anti-government, exposing deep anger beneath official calm.

Public belief linked the crime to Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad’s family, damaging his authority and convincing many in New Delhi that his administration lacked control.

During the unrest, Abdullah’s supporters emerged as central actors, proving that long imprisonment had not loosened his hold on public feeling.

As tensions rose toward a point that threatened open force, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri chose risk over repression.

In April 1964, the conspiracy case fell away, and Sheikh Abdullah walked free, returning to a political stage that still revolved around him.

Much of this may seem like a new twist on an old tale, but scholarship and spy files make one thing clear: Kashmir’s story was never only about rulers or treaties.

From the drowned weavers of Zaldagar to farmers claiming their land, the valley has long been marked by a relentless pursuit of justice, a struggle that continues to define its future.