In a speech in the Lok Sabha on June 26, 1952, Nehru said, “It just does not matter what your Constitution says. If the people of Kashmir do not want it, it will not go there.” If the plebiscite went against India, he would accept the verdict “and we would change our Constitution about it”. This he tells his own people in the Lok Sabha.
However, India’s double face was revealed in Nehru’s Note of August 25, 1952. He made a startling revelation about his change of mind by the end of 1948. He wrote in a Note (Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru; volume 19, pages 322-330), “Towards the end of 1948…. it became clear to me then that we would never get the conditions which were necessary for a plebiscite… so I ruled out the plebiscite for all practical purposes.”
He was lying to his own people, he was lying to the Kashmiris and at the same time he was also lying to the United Nations as well as the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) in December 1948.
In his 1948 Note, Nehru also mentioned that, Kashmiris “are not what are called a virile people. They are soft and addicted to easy living”; “We are superior to Pakistan in military and industrial power”; the U.N. is impotent. “Doubts in the minds of leaders percolate to their followers and to the people generally… What is required is a firm and clear outlook, and no debate about basic issues.”
Lieutenant-General B.M. Kaul in his book The Untold Story (1967), states that, Sheikh Abdullah understood the games being played by Nehru and India and was so disgusted that he decided to declare independence of Kashmir from India in 1949. He says, Bakshi and Dhar knew well in advance that Sheikh Saheb was going there “in a few days’ time to meet certain ‘friends’ from across the border which was only seven miles away”. He would then arrest Bakshi, Dhar etc and declare Kashmir independent (page 143). Though many Indians do not agree with his version of events, but it makes one thing very very clear, the Indian double face became quite apparent even to Sheikh Abdullah.
What Nehru then and India even now, does not realize that it is the people who move and transform their leaders’ opinion and not the other way around. Sheikh Abdullah couldn’t go against the will of Kashmiris. Sheikh Abduallah remained a leader of Kashmiris as long as he voiced their feelings. Nehru expected that Sheikh Abdullah would be able to change the opinion of Kashmiri people, which he couldn’t. Sheikh Abdullah turned a Becket to Jawaharlal Nehru’s Henry II. He was thus arrested and put in jail for next 11 years.
In Nehru efforts to cheat the whole world, least did he realize that he was wrong and left a legacy, where we still stand at that moment in 1947, where Kashmir still remains unsolved even after 60 years of Indian efforts to retain it, even after the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and to what end!
The same kind of policy followed by Indians elsewhere in India and resultantly, North East India is also in flames, the Naxals have risen against their own government, the Dalits are still untouchables except a few who have become a bit powerful and minorities are killed with impunity to tell them as to who rules India – the majority Hindus. How many more will the Hindu rulers of India kill to keep India together as a so-called multi-ethnic/religious union of unity in diversity.