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, and returned to Poonch with weapons that they smuggled across the Jhelum River into the Princely State.41 By late August, the tax protests had shifted to a full revolt against the Maharaja’s authority; armed fighting began between Kashmir State Dogra Army troops and protesters in Poonch who concurrently made demands for Azad Kashmir and ilhāq-e-pakistān (accession to Pakistan).42
Political leaders in Poonch declared in August 1947 that they had overthrown the Maharaja’s government, and in October, they announced the establishment of what they called the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Azad Kashmir: “Maharaja Hari Singh’s title to rule has come to an end from August 15, 1947 and he has no constitutional or moral right to rule over the people of Kashmir against their will. He is consequently deposed with effect from October 4, 1947. All the Ministers and officials of the State will henceforth be duty-bound to carry out the orders of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Anyone disobeying this duly constituted Government of the People of Kashmir or in any way abetting the Maharaja in his usurpation of the rule of Kashmir will be guilty of an act of high treason and will be dealt with accordingly.”43 The Revolutionary Government described itself as a war council. It formed an army it called the “Azad Forces,” with three zones of military command—one in Kashmir Province, one in Jammu Province, and one in the former Poonch Jagir.
Several weeks later, prominent AJKMC leaders reconstituted the Provisional Revolutionary Government as the “Azad Kashmir Government,” run by the Central Committee of the Muslim Conference. This committee included leaders from the Kashmir and Jammu Provinces of the Princely State—such as Sardar Mohammad Ibrahim Khan (a Praja Sabha representative from Poonch), Ghulam Abbass (who had been recently released from Jammu Jail), and Yusaf Shah (the Mirwaiz of Kashmir, who was in exile from Srinagar). On the matter of political rights, the Azad Kashmir Government addressed India and Pakistan, not the Maharaja, whom it considered already deposed: “The Azad Government hopes that both Dominions [India and Pakistan] will sympathize with the people of Jammu and Kashmir in their efforts to exercise their birthright of political freedom. . . . The question of accession of Jammu and Kashmir to either dominion can only be decided by the free vote of the people in the form of referendum. . . .”44 As Sardar Mohammad Ibrahim Khan, the president of the first Azad Kashmir Government, announced in November 1947: “Our Government is [a] Government of the people and has behind it a majority of the elected representatives in the Kashmir Assembly. Today the major portion of the State Territory is in our hands and we alone are the real government of Kashmir. . . . On the other hand, the despotic Maharaja has brought foreign aid [and] armies of occupation are pouring in from the Indian Union.”45
In late October 1947, loosely organized lashkars (militias) of Pathans from the Northwest Frontier Provinces (NWFP) of Pakistan entered the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir at Muzaffarabad, the frontier administrative outpost of the Kashmir Province, and advanced along the Jhelum River road toward the capital of Srinagar.46 Maharaja Hari Singh quickly signed an Instrument of Accession that conferred defense, foreign affairs, and communications to the Government of India. The accession agreement reserved all residual powers for the Princely State government, and the Maharaja ceded internal administration to the National Conference party.47 In Srinagar, Sheikh Abdullah declared the National Conference to be the state’s “Emergency Interim Government,”48 and he mobilized civil defense committees.49 Indian Army forces joined the Kashmir State Dogra Army in fighting on the Jhelum road at Baramullah and in the Poonch region of Jammu. The government of Pakistan did not accept the Maharaja’s accession and sent in its own army troops to prevent the capture of Jammu and Kashmir by India. Thus, by mid-November 1947, the armies of the newly independent nation-states of India and Pakistan were fighting their first war in Jammu and Kashmir, and two different internal governments claimed to be the government of the entirety of the former Princely State and its state subjects.
Local Authorities and Successor States
During the war of 1947–1949, both the “Emergency Interim Government” based in Srinagar and the “Azad Kashmir Government” based