Lion Loosed

For more than four years the most obvious flaw in the shining moral armor of India's Jawaharlal Nehru has been the case of Sheik Mohammed Abdullah, the strapping (6 ft. 2 in.) "Lion of Kashmir." Since August 1953 Abdullah has been held a prisoner without trial. His only crime: he pursued policies in Kashmir that were unacceptable to India's Prime Minister.

Once Nehru found use for the Lion. Then the Sheik was Nehru's honored comrade in the fight against the British, and the powerful leader who could bind largely Moslem Kashmir to the new Indian nation in 1947. Abdullah became the state of Kashmir's first Premier and symbolized the ability of Moslems and Hindus to believe in one another. But as Jawaharlal Nehru, in his hardening determination to hold strategic Kashmir for India, brushed off even U.N. demands for the Kashmir plebiscite he had promised in 1947, Abdullah began talking of making his state independent.

One Wept. The Lion felt Nehru's anger and knew that his disciple and Deputy Premier, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, was plotting to take power. "One day," he said, "I called a confidential meeting of the party and said that if they wanted a new leader in whom they could have unqualified trust I would be the first to welcome him. Bakshi said right away, 'Who is the man who wants to take over from you, Sheik Sahib?' and I said: 'You, Bakshi.' And Bakshi wept."

A short time later, after a visit to New Delhi, Bakshi arrested and supplanted his master as Kashmir's chief of government. Quite a few Kashmiris died rioting for their Lion and hero. Since then, Bakshi has built a powerful police force, New Delhi has poured in millions of dollars' worth of public works for the lovely, lake-jeweled Vale of Kashmir, and Kashmir's memory of the Lion has faded. Last fall Nehru confessed himself "pained and hurt" by his onetime friend's long imprisonment. Last week he judged it safe at last to allow the Lion's release.

At word that the Lion of Kashmir was loose again, India's top journalists turned their backs on Britain's Prime Minister Macmillan and other visiting notables and rushed for the Vale. But for the first three days, the canny Sheik stayed put in the village of Kud among the snow-capped mountains, waiting for his followers to stir up a lion's welcome among the chilled and hungry Moslems of Srinagar. Reporters found him commanding and ramrod-straight as ever. "I am the same Sheik Abdullah," he flashed, "but I must feel the pulse of the people before I know what to do."

He said Kashmir must decide its own future, but shied from saying whether he still favored independence. The man who had staked his career on his faith that Moslems could live as equals in Hindu India now charged that India had "smashed the confidence of the Kashmir people." He accused Nehru's government of discriminating against Kashmir's Moslem majority by denying them army promotions and postal jobs, of setting up a central intelligence bureau in Srinagar to bribe and corrupt his officials, of sabotaging his land-reform program. "I did not betray India," he roared. "It was India that betrayed me."

The Return. At week's end Sheik Abdullah, wearing a long funeral-black ach-kan over loose white pajamas, held on to the windshield of his jeep and waved to crowds lining the road and jamming the towns along the way as he rode to his old capital at the head of a 30-car caravan. Srinagar welcomed him with a frightening din. When the Sheik appeared on the balcony of a Moslem shrine, people prostrated themselves in a heap below, crying vows that they would lay down their lives for him.

From across the city Premier Bakshi warned that Kashmir's future was foreclosed, that his police would tolerate no challenge to law and order in "this border state of the Indian Union."

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