Doru Shahabad, and a generation in a hurry

The small town of Doru Shahabad, set among the paddy fields and springs of Anantnag district in south Kashmir, has an old reputation for producing scholars and, in the twentieth century, politicians. Its most widely known son was born there in 1921 and grew up as Syed Mir Qasim, in a Kashmir still ruled by the Dogra maharajas, where the overwhelming majority of the population were peasants with no vote, no land title worth the name, and very little schooling. He would live to become the second Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, to hold office at the centre in New Delhi, and to be remembered chiefly for an act of political self-denial that has few parallels in Indian public life.

Qasim came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, the decades in which Kashmir's political awakening took shape. The demand of that generation was not initially about India or Pakistan at all; it was about ending autocratic rule, opening government service to Muslims, and giving the tiller a claim on the land he worked. Like most young men of his convictions he gravitated to the National Conference, then the dominant vehicle of popular politics in the state.

Quit Kashmir and the making of a politician

In 1946 the National Conference launched the Quit Kashmir agitation against Maharaja Hari Singh, and Qasim, still in his twenties, was among those who took part. The state's response was arrest and imprisonment, and he served time as a political prisoner. That experience gave him what a Kashmiri politician of his era most needed: a record earned before independence, in a movement directed against a princely ruler rather than for any communal cause.

After 1947 he moved into the work of constructing a state rather than agitating against one. He was involved in the deliberations that produced the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, the document that defined the state's internal governance and its relationship with the Indian Union. He proved to have an unusual head for administration, particularly for the technical and often tedious business of land revenue, and under the government of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad he rose to serve as Revenue Minister. In a state where land reform was the central social question of the age, that was not a minor portfolio.

Building the Congress in Kashmir

Qasim's other great institutional project was party political. He is generally credited with putting the Indian National Congress on a real organisational footing in Kashmir, giving national politics a genuine local structure in a state that had until then been dominated by a single regional formation. That work made him one of the small number of Kashmiri leaders whose authority rested on organisation rather than on personal charisma, and it drew him steadily into the wider currents of Indian politics, where he came to be counted among the seniormost figures from the state.

Chief Minister, and the resignation

On 12 December 1971 Qasim succeeded Ghulam Mohammed Sadiq as Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. He held the office for a little over three years. His approach was pragmatic and consciously conciliatory. He avoided the confrontational style that had characterised earlier phases of Kashmir's politics, worked to widen the space for normal political activity, and pressed for reconciliation with those who had been kept outside the system, above all Sheikh Abdullah, the state's most popular leader, who had spent long years in detention and political exile.

That effort produced the accord reached between Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Abdullah in 1975, which cleared the way for Abdullah's return to elected office. The arrangement required the chair Qasim was sitting in. He gave it up. On 25 February 1975 he resigned as Chief Minister, and Sheikh Abdullah took over the government. Whatever one makes of the accord's longer-term consequences, the decision itself was remarkable: a serving head of government stepping aside not because he had lost a vote, a majority or a court case, but because he had concluded that a political settlement mattered more than his tenure. Indian political history offers very few comparable examples, and it remains the act for which he is best remembered.

After office

Qasim did not retire from public life. He moved into national politics and served in the Union government, and for the rest of his life he acted as an interlocutor between New Delhi and the valley, arguing consistently that Kashmir's problems were political and had to be addressed by political means rather than administrative ones. Through the 1990s, as the state slid into insurgency and the space for that argument narrowed, he continued to make it.

In September 1992 he published his autobiography, My Life and Times. It is a first-hand account by a participant in nearly every major episode of Kashmiri politics from the 1940s onwards, written with access to both the personalities and the negotiations, and it remains one of the standard sources on the period for anyone trying to understand how the state's post-1947 politics actually worked from the inside.

Syed Mir Qasim died on 12 December 2004 in Delhi, aged eighty-five. In accordance with his wishes his body was taken back to Doru Shahabad, and he was buried in the town where he had been born, with thousands of people attending the funeral. In 2005 the Government of India conferred the Padma Bhushan on him posthumously, in the field of public affairs, an unusually direct acknowledgement of a career built on negotiation rather than confrontation. Doru Shahabad has since sent other figures into Kashmiri politics, but Qasim remains its most substantial contribution to Indian public life.