The Hindu maharajas of Kashmir

Why does Kashmir hate the Hindus them so much?

During the recently concluded T20 cricket World Cup, the Pakistani captain Shahid Afridi’s public gratitude to the support of the Kashmiri spectators on the Indian grounds angered many Hindus, some of whom openly warned that he should have abstained from mixing cricket with politics. Why does Kashmir irk the Hindus so much? Why do their tantrums flare so intensely? It is because their occupation of Kashmir is illegitimate. Worse, when the Hindu maharajas ruled Kashmir under the tutelage of the British Raj for a century, their governance was oppressive and exploitative to the hilt.

The miseries of the ‘amorous’ Kashmir started with the death of its Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh in 1839 because by 1846 due to the lost wars with the East India Company, when Ranjit’s heirs failed to pay the war indemnity of £ one million pounds imposed by the Company, the British sold the entire princely state of Kashmir to Gulab Singh, the Raja of Jammu (who ran as an orderly by the side of Ranjit’s horse) for an amount of £500,000 and an annual token tribute of one horse, twelve goats (six male and six female) and six pairs of shawls because neither the British had the money to govern this state nor they had sufficient gunpowder to defend it. Ironically, the Kashmiris were sold in slavery to Gulab Singh by the same Englishmen who made “an outcry in England about the abolition of slavery whereas the British Government have in reality…given over an entire people to a slavery of the most oppressive description” in Kashmir. No one knows till today as to how Gulab Singh had amassed so much wealth when the richest men in England, the Duke of Devonshire and the Marquis of Westminster, had an annual income of £100,000 in 1840s because the comparative income of Gulab Singh was six times the income of the richest man in England. By today’s standard, the amount paid by him would be equal to £50 million.

In the span of a century, Kashmir was ruled by four Hindu maharajas, namely Gulab, Ranbir, Pratap and Hari and each was worse than the other. In a predominantly Muslim majority state, the Muslims were the worst victims of their high-handedness, in particular of the last Maharaja Hari Singh, who ruled for almost a quarter of a century.

Gulab Singh was the ‘paragon’ of misgovernment as the contemporary colonial accounts described him a “bad king, a miser, and a liar, and the dirtiest fellow in all India” whereas another colonial official recorded that “In no single thing that he does, can I detect ability” and if the Governor General visited Kashmir, he would find “the entire population… prostrating themselves at your Lordship’s feet to beg to be relieved from the Maharaja’s rule.”

Why did the Kashmiris want to be relieved from the clutches of Gulab Singh? Primarily because he was a greedy person whose greediness knew no bounds? He tried to satiate this greed by vicious taxation: 90 percent of the grain produced by the farmers and 50 percent of the sale price of manufactured goods were charged as taxes. Even the prostitutes were not spared as they were taxed Rs40, 20 and 10 per annum depending upon their levels of gratification. The people were thought to be no more than the “dumb, driven cattle,” thus “everything except air and water was under taxation,” according to a colonial civil servant Walter Lawrence.

In the span of a century, Kashmir was ruled by four Hindu maharajas, namely Gulab, Ranbir, Pratap and Hari and each was worse than the other. In a predominantly Muslim majority state, the Muslims were the worst victims of their high-handedness, in particular of the last Maharaja Hari Singh, who ruled for almost a quarter of a century. Immediately on becoming the maharaja, Hari Singh tried to allay the fears of the Muslims by declaring that he “had no religion, all religions are mine and my religion is justice.” It was not so because his policies proved that he was nothing more than a Hindu chauvinist. In government and economy, the Kashmiri Brahmins who “were the crème de la crème” of the Hindus had total control and not only the Muslims were purposely excluded from the armed forces but were also debarred from possessing any firearms. The Muslims were compelled to take up carpentry, masonry, pottery and shoe-making because the adoption of these professions by Hindus could defile their social status. The state was the biggest employer and in the state’s bureaucracy the representation of the Muslims was just 20 percent whereas they constituted 80 percent of the total population of Kashmir according to the census of 1931. Despite Hari’s tall claim of professing “no religion,” cow-killing was punished with a seven-year imprisonment throughout the 1930s and ’40s and there was a “special tax on the slaughter of goats and sheep.” Earlier on, Gulab Singh had the noses and ears cut off of all those who were accused of cow-killing. Hari’s predecessor, Maharaja Pratap Singh, who was an opium addict was so devout in the observance of Hindu practices that he never set foot out of India as the crossing of deep seas meant loss of caste and also “kept a dozen cows tethered in the garden outside his bedroom window so he would be sure to see the holy creatures when he woke each morning.”

However, Hari Singh was not bothered about such practices as he undertook pleasure trips to London and Paris in 1921 as the heir-apparent and got involved in a world famous scandal. While flirting with one Mrs Robinson in a Paris hotel, he was confronted by her husband Mr Robinson who accused him of ruining his marriage and threatened to implicate him in the divorce case. Had Hari been implicated in this scandalous court case, he was likely to be barred from becoming the ruler of Kashmir so his aide-de-camp Captain CW Arthur advised him to buy off the furious husband to which the terrified prince agreed by signing two cheques for £150,000 but when the truth came out it was found that there was no Mr Robinson in reality and the whole episode was a blackmail plot planned by Captain Arthur to become “rich quick.”

Gulab Singh was the ‘paragon’ of misgovernment as the contemporary colonial accounts described him a “bad king, a miser, and a liar, and the dirtiest fellow in all India” whereas another colonial official recorded that “In no single thing that he does, can I detect ability” and if the Governor General visited Kashmir, he would find “the entire population… prostrating themselves at your Lordship’s feet to beg to be relieved from the Maharaja’s rule”

The institution of kingship demands the king to act as a fatherly figure towards his subjects. Not so in the case of the maharajas of Kashmir. The ultimate test of Hari Singh’s leadership was the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Instead of leading the Kashmiris from the front, he left them in the lurch of a bloody civil war and the only things that he cared about on his shameful flight from Srinagar were jewels, carpets, furniture and two Purdey shotguns. What turned out to be most dear to the maharaja were not his people upon whom he and his forefathers had lorded over for a century but his personal assets which had been amassed by sucking the blood of the people. Those who wish to read more about the misrule of the Hindu Maharajas of Kashmir may refer to Kwasi Kwarteng’s maiden book.