Kashmir Without History: Sheikh Abdullah, Jinnah and the Partition of India

Before 1947, Sheikh Abdullah, Kashmir’s leading thinker-politician and the arch-theorist of Indian federalism, produced a scalar conception of nationality which rested on a shared past. But the Partition of India required Abdullah to recalibrate his ideas for a new context. In a perverse acknowledgement of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s anti-historical triumph, Abdullah realised that South Asians, compulsorily freed from the protracted narrative of India’s common inheritance, had to arrange their multi-ethnic unions on civic lines. And since India and Pakistan were suddenly at war over his Kashmiri homeland, Abdullah provided an especially intense meditation on Jinnah’s new-found intellectual hegemony, which had profound implications for multiple strains of Indian political thought. Forced to move beyond nature and history, Abdullah’s politics adopted a presentist accent, like Jinnah’s had from the very beginning of his career. As Abdullah contemplated Kashmiri futures from within (and outside) the Indian Union, he relied on conceptions of secular citizenship, self-determination, wealth redistribution, and socialist development. Therefore, Abdullah’s engagement with Jinnah was not restricted to a conceptual death of history alone, or even to disagreements on the twinned questions of federation and religious representation. It included a more foundational dispute: between their conflicting progressive and conservative political orientations.