When Kashmir Reads Like Dostoevsky |
By Mirza Gazanfar Ali
There is a type of ruin that comes from believing your own good intentions are enough.
Dostoevsky spent an entire novel tracing that ruin through Raskolnikov, a young man who convinces himself that extraordinary purpose excuses an ordinary mistakes.
Kashmir’s political history holds a subtler but no less instructive version of the same story, and its central figure is Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the leader who staked an entire region’s future on the strength of his own conviction.
Raskolnikov’s theory was seductive in its simplicity. He believed certain men stand outside conventional morality when their purpose is large enough, and he tested that belief by murdering an old pawnbroker for money he told himself would serve a greater good.
The guilt that followed proved impossible to outrun.
His confession, delivered first to Sonya and later to the police, became the only route back to something like a livable conscience.
Abdullah’s decision held a different texture but a similar structure.
He threw his weight behind Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India in 1947, trusting his personal rapport with Jawaharlal Nehru and a shared belief in secular governance........