THE VERSE OF THE ASSEMBLY DRAMA
45th ANNIVERSARY OF KASHMIR’S FIRST POETIC CARTOON
On 17 September 1979, the J&K Legislative Assembly had met in Srinagar on the first day of its autumn session. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the Chief Minister and the Leader of the House, was present when a symphony of power and dissent played out in the House. During the proceedings, MLA from Langate constituency, Abdul Gani Lone, who had won 1977 election on a Janata Party ticket, raised a point of order and accused the government of being indifferent to people’s plight. The masses, he alleged, felt helpless — individually and collectively — an accusation hurled like a gauntlet at the government’s doorstep. The Leader of the House, stern-faced and disapproving, objected to Lone’s audacity. Yet, the stubborn Member persisted — his words, belligerent and unyielding. The ruling National Conference members seethed. They swooped on Lone and beat him to the pulp. The Great Patriarch of the ruling party watched the theatrics unfolding. Amidst pandemonium, the Speaker, Malik Mohiuddin, adjourned the House, but when it met again, Lone rose again to criticize the government. He alleged that he was beaten up and demanded a discussion on the incident. The Speaker rejected his plea. Lone disregarded the Chair. The Sheikh was unhappy over Lone’s intransigence. He briskly stood up and moved a resolution seeking Lone’s suspension from the House for the rest of the session. The opposition members protested and asked for withdrawal of the resolution. The Sheikh relented.
In a House of 76, the National Conference had 47 MLAs, Janata Party 14, Indian National Congress 11, Jamat-e-Islami 1 and Independents 3. The National Conference had fought the 1977 elections — termed as the fairest till then — in the backdrop of serious ailment of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, generating a sympathy wave for the leader and his party. This was the first and the last time that Abdullah had fought an assembly election. Prior to it, he was elected as a member of the J&K Constituent Assembly in 1951.
The roughing up of Lone by the National Conference legislators made a major news and Srinagar’s newspapers prominently carried it on 18 September. I had joined the daily Aftab as a desk reporter two months back. Taking few moments out of my daily routine at the desk, I wrote on a piece of paper, the following quatrain — a poetic commentary — in Urdu on Lone’s plight in the Assembly:
Shuroo jab ho gayi qanoon saazi
Badi udham machayi membarun ne
Jinab-e-Sheikh bhi barham huey jab
Latada Lone ko kuch dilbarun ne
[When the legislative work [in the Assembly] began, tumult reigned. As the Honourable Sheikh lost his cool, his men trampled Lone].
I shared the quatrain with my senior colleague, Tahir Mohiuddin, a fan of Lone, who was sitting beside me. He grabbed the paper and rushed to the editor, Khawaja Sanaullah Bhat, who recognized the spark. Few minutes later, the editor sent for me. I entered his room. There he was, sitting on his chair and the quatrain placed on his table in front of him. Yusuf Jameel, his right-hand man, was seated, on his left, in a chair next to him. Khawaja Sahib expressed his liking for the verses and spoke some words of encouragement for me. “This is the real contribution”, he said, meaning that it was different from mundane news reporting. His encouragement — like the first blush of dawn — warmed a 25-year-old fledgling journalist’s heart. The quatrain was passed on to Shabir Ahmad Rizvi, an amazing calligrapher who wrote it with his golden hand. Next day, 19 September 1979, carrying my name, the quatrain found its way to the frontpage as a box-item titled ‘Assembly mai qanoon sazi’ (Lawmaking in the Assembly). And thus, the poetic cartoon — a commentary on currents and tides — was born on Jammu & Kashmir’s journalism landscape. I had woven verse into newsprint.
I had thought of the quatrain as a one-off thing and did not follow it up. A couple of days later, the editor called me to know why I had stopped writing poetic commentary and urged me to continue. From that day till my departure from the Aftab in mid-April 1980, the poetic cartoon stayed as a daily poetic commentary on current affairs published on the front page of the newspaper, and scripting in the ink of destiny a new chapter in the annals of journalism in the State. The rise of Aftab in 1958 proved a turning point in the development of vernacular journalism in Kashmir. The newspaper had its fingers on the pulse of the people and, over the years, its printer, publisher and editor, Sanaullah Bhat, introduced to Kashmir the latest offset printing technology, photojournalism and hiring national and international wire services. He had also the distinction of popularizing newspaper reading through hawking and home delivery. He hired bright people to work on the desk and as reporters. The introduction of poetic cartoon reflecting on current issues, was his yet another first.
On 20 October 1979, Chief Minister Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah inaugurated the newly constructed Amira Kadal. The peculiar thing about the bridge was its oblique construction with a hump in the middle. There was lot of criticism about its design. For quite some time, it remained the subject of an interesting debate among the public who attributed motives– sparing the property of an influential citizen from demolition– to its oblique construction. On the day of bridge’s inauguration, the quatrain encapsulated the public sentiment. The juxtaposition of tradition (the call for a straight path) with the unexpected (the tedha or oblique bridge) added a layer of irony:
Mubarak ab yeh rasm-e-runumayee
Badi mushkil se yeh rasta dikhaya
Hidayat hai ki seedhi raah chalye
Magar yeh kya ki pul tedha banaya?
(May the inauguration [of the bridge] be auspicious. It is after a long wait that it is thrown open. How come the bridge has been obliquely built when you have been sermonising us to walk on the straight path)?
Attempting at catching the pulse of the times, the topics of my poetic cartoons were varied. Politics — local, national and international — elections, social and economic issues, and development, nay absence of it. In 1979, the U. S. — Iran relations worsened after the storming of the American embassy in Tehran by Iranian students, who took more than 60 U. S. citizens hostage. Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran caused political headache for the Jimmy Carter-led U. S. government. This crisis had significant effects on domestic politics in the United States and strained U. S.- Iranian relations for decades. At the same time, the fighting Afghan Mujahideen were giving a real tough time to Brezhnev’s Soviet Union following the U. S. S. R.’s occupation of Afghanistan. Capturing the dilemma of the leaders of the two super powers, a quatrain went like this:
Roos America ki jang-e-sard se
Donoon mulkun mai bada heyjan hai
Tang hai Afghaniyun se Brezhnev
Carter ka dard-e-sar Iran hai
[Due to the U. S. — Russia cold war
Both countries are gripped by hysteria.
Brezhnev is weary of the Afhgans
Carter’s headache is Iran]
In those lines — a snapshot of global tensions, a poetic prism refracting the hues of the cold war — the world spins: Soviet Union and United States of America locked in their icy dance, their obsession consuming them. Brezhnev, weary of the Afghan quagmire, treads a treacherous path. And Carter? His brow furrows, burdened by the enigma of Iran — an ache that reverberates through the corridors of power.
Nearer home, the 1977 Parliamentary elections in India had ousted Indira Gandhi from power bringing in the Janata Party government. The same year, the Janata Party fought the state assembly elections in Jammu & Kashmir against Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s National Conference and threw its full weight into the election campaign. The enigmatic politician and scholar, Maulana Mohammad Sayyid Masoodi, came out of political retirement to lead the election campaign against Abdullah. However, the latter proved too strong from the Janata Party and its local leaders — won all but 3 assembly seats in Kashmir, and 47 out of total 76 in the State. After the massive defeat, the enigma of Maulana Mohammad Sayyid Masoodi — a figure who emerged from the shadows and stirred the political cauldron — vanished like mist over the Dal Lake. His story, shrouded in intrigue, echoed through the annals of Kashmir’s political history. I inked in a quatrain on the whispers of bazaars, the raised eyebrows in tea stalls, and the hushed conversations in the saloons of Srinagar. Where did Masoodi, the philosopher, vanish? Which path did he tread?
Hua paida zameen-e-Kashmar mai
Kaha logun ne daana-e-dehar hai
Masoodi naam ka who falsafi ab
Kahan hai, kis tarf hai aur kidhar hai
Mirwaiz Molvi Mohammad Farooq was one of the leading figures in the campaign against the Kashmir’s tall leader. Throwing his weight with the Janata party, he had hosted its star campaigner and the Prime Minister of India, Morarji Desia, at his downtown ancestral abode, the Mirwaiz Manzil. However, the ballots fell like autumn leaves, and the Bulbul-e-Aatash Nawa (firebrand nightingale) found his song stifled, inspiring the following quatrain:
Waadi-e-Kashmir ke leader sabhi
In dinun be intiha purjosh hain
Haan magar who bulbul-e-aatash nawa
Molvi farooq kyon khamosh hain?
The last quatrain was published on 15 April 1980 — a day before my appointment order as Information Officer in the Department of Information was issued. Around that time, Chief Minister Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah had announced his intention of trimming his council of ministers, causing fluttering of hearts of junior ministers like startled birds, each one thinking that he would face the axe. But — oh, the twist! — as the appointed hour approached, he defied expectations. Instead of wielding the axe, he added another minister. A magician, conjuring an extra rabbit from an already crowded hat. The quatrain captured the moment thus:
Sheikh Sahib ke isharoon ko samajhna chahiye
Khahmakha chhotay wazir unke bayan se dar gaye
Kar rahe thay garchi who takhfeef-e-kaabina ki baat
Kartay kartay ik minister ka izafa kar gaye
[One ought to grasp the subtlety of Sheikh Sahib’s gestures
Junior ministers trembled needlessly.
Although he had spoken of trimming his cabinet,
He actually added another minister.]
My inspiration for doing poetic cartoons came from Waqar Ambalvi and Rayees Amrohi who did versified cartoons for Nawai-e-Waqt and Jung, the two leading Urdu dailies of Pakistan, respectively. Under an agreement between India and Pakistan, those days, newspapers were exchanged between the two countries. The two newspapers were received by post in the office of daily Aftab. Having flair for writing Urdu poetry, I was drawn to Ambalvi’s and Amrohi’s versified cartoons. There were other newspapers published from Calcutta, Patna, Hyderabad and Bombay, received in the office. On several occasions, I found some of these newspapers reproducing my poetic cartoons, especially the Azeemabad Express. On 18 September 1979, when the news of Lone being roughed up was a hot topic in the city, the verses naturally came to my mind and the rest is history. Years later, Zahid Mukhtar and Maqbool Veeray, the two young poets from south Kashmir, carried the tradition forward–the former more persistently.
While I was at Aftab, I wrote articles on various topics, did stories from reports received on tickers from Indian and international news gathering agencies, covered press conferences and did different news stories, but my real recognition came from my poetic cartoons. The readers’ feedback would come to me through various sources. The highest compliment I ever received, however, was delivered in person by an old lady who came walking with the help of a walking-stick to the office of the newspaper searching for me. I was busy with my routine when our Manager, Abdul Salam, informed that a lady was waiting for me in the office room. I had not anticipated any visitors, least of all a lady. Curiosity tugged at my senses as I stepped into the room, there she was: a frail figure, her face etched with wrinkles, dressed in qameez-shalwar, silver hair peeking from beneath a white duppata gracefully draped over her head. Her presence carried the weight of history — a connection to those Punjabi Muslim families who had settled in Kashmir before the tumultuous Partition.
We were introduced and she kissed my forehead — a gesture both intimate and maternal. Her blessings flowed freely, wrapping around me like a warm Pashmina shawl. I felt the tenderness of a thousand whispered prayers. Her angelic presence and touch overwhelmed me. Yet, my tongue faltered. I could not find the strength to ask her name or unravel the mystery of her origins. Instead, she continued to shower me with well-wishes, her voice weaving a protective cocoon. And as she prepared to leave, her parting advice echoed in my ears: “Bohat achha likhtay ho. Aise hi likhtay raho.” (You write very well. Keep it up.) Moments after she departed, I stood rooted, awash in the ocean of her warmth and benedictions. It was as if she had stepped out of time — a fleeting encounter that left an indelible mark on my soul. Her words continue to resonate within me, and my lips silently offer the prayer: “May you be the happiest and the most blessed at your current station.”