T H E I N F O R M A L WAR

Furthermore contact, direct and indirect, was maintained by the accused

with Pakistan agencies and intelligence officers; meetings were held with
Pakistani officers at Srinagar and other places in the state and outside;
weapons and explosives were obtained from Pakistan agencies; volunteers
were raised and organized under the name of Karkuns ; communal
feelings were inflamed amongst the Muslims, who were exhorted by
appeal to religion to work against the Government of the State and
in favour of Pakistan; false and malicious propaganda was published
against the Government of the State; enmity and hatred were attempted
to be created between different classes; hatred, contempt and disaffection
were sought to be spread towards the Governments of Jammu and
Kashmir and India.98
Indian intelligence operatives were in no doubt about the integrity of their evi
dence
against Sheikh Abdullah. When he went back to jail , Mullik smugly
wrote, we were quite satisfied that he had built up an unassailable case against
himself .99 Yet, the case itself dragged on interminably, with all concerned
blaming each other for the courtroom delays. For four years, the Kashmir
Conspiracy Case was stalled in a Magistrate s Court, before finally being
committed to a Court of Sessions in April 1962. Bureaucrat Y.D. Gundevia, at
Nehru s side during the time, has provided this account:
In the Sessions the case went even slower, so much so that the Intelligence
Bureau was put on the defensive. Nehru was again losing
his patience. Charges and counter-charges were made by the Intelligence
Bureau against the accused and the accused against the Intelligence
Bureau, on who was responsible for the delay in the proceedings
before the Sessions Judge. The furor became serious enough for the
Intelligence Bureau and the Home Ministry to bring out a pamphlet (for
free circulation, of course) to explain who was delaying the case.100
The problems in court were not, however, only procedural. One key complication
for the prosecution case was that Begum Akbar Jehan Abdullah, Sheikh
Abdullah s wife, was alleged to have issued receipts for funds received from
Pakistani diplomat S. Mohammad Raza to the agents who carried them.101 The
official examiner of the documents in question certified that the handwriting on
the receipts, bearing pseudonyms Zeenat-ul-Islam, Alif Din and Hamshera, was
indeed that of Begum Abdullah; three of these documents are appended to the
Report on Pakistani Organized Subversion, Sabotage and Infiltration in Jammu
and Kashmir. She was neither arrested nor charged. One would have thought ,
wrote a commentator otherwise sympathetic to both Nehru and Abdullah,
that she would be the principal accused, with hundreds of letters alleged
to be in the hands of the prosecution proving that she was the principal
go-between for the receipt of Pakistani funds. For this serious gap in the
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