Sheikh Abdullah

Not even the National Conference lifted an eyebrow when Sheikh’s birth anniversary was removed from the list of 2020 holidays.

Over the years, security agencies have improvised on the counter-insurgency lexicon in the Kashmir valley

Someone, who might have been fond of inertia, invented this garment in praise of the laziness and handed it over to Kashmiris who are loving it.

May 27 was Nehru's 45th death anniversary. Inder Malhotra remembers the day in 1964 in the Indian Express:

Hafeez Jullundari — the nearest thing Pakistan had to the poet laureate as well as a sort of minister-in-waiting during the Sheikh’s stay — stalked up to our table and sat down. Wagging his finger, he told me: “Inder Malhotra, you people have had a long ride feeling superior to us because you were lucky to have Nehru. Our misfortune was that after the early deaths of Jinnah and Liaquat, all our leaders were useless. Now Nehru is about to go. You will be down to our level, and then we will see”....

...[Nehru] died at the precise moment when the Sheikh [Abdullah] set foot in Muzaffarabad. The thought uppermost in my mind was that the capital of Pakistan-held Kashmir was not the best place to to be in at the time of Nehru’s passing. But what followed stunned me.

The huge crowd that had assembled to welcome Sheikh Abdullah instantly turned into a mourning mass. Every man, woman and child, hands raised skywards, was praying for Nehru. Some of them were crying. No one touched the elaborate wazwan laid out. Suddenly, there was commotion at a short distance. A tall man was shouting my name, beating his head with both his hands and cursing his “black tongue”. It was Hafeez Jullundari. As he apologised to me profusely, Sheikh Sahib arrived to calm him. Instead, the two embraced each other and sobbed.

Read the full piece at the Indian Express

Martyrs' Day is observed in Jammu and Kashmir on July 13 every year in remembrance of people killed in firing by soldiers of Dogra ruler Maharaja Hari Singh on this day in 1931 during protests against his rule.

The slapping of Public Safety Act (PSA) against former Jammu and Kashmir CM Farooq Abdullah is ironical, to say the least. The Act was introduced in Jammu and Kashmir by Abdullah's father, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, on April 8, 1978, to deter timber smugglers.

What was the need to amend article 370 now, and do so in a way that showed brutal contempt not only for the Kashmiris but also for the Constitution of India?

Author Andrew Whitehead says If you take Stalin’s constitution on one hand and New Kashmir Manifesto on the other hand, we would call it cut and paste job. It is a quiet ahead of time document.