But for my father, J&K would have gone to Pakistan: Karan Singh

NEW DELHI: After a war of words broke out between senior Congress leaders Jairam Ramesh and Dr Karan Singh over the latter’s opinion piece on the accession of Jammu and Kashmir, the erstwhile royal of J&K said that the state would have gone to Pakistan had it not been for his father Maharaja Hari Singh.

Speaking to this newspaper, former Union minister slammed party spokesperson Jairam Ramesh saying that his remarks about Maharaja Hari Singh were uncalled for. “Jairam has no business going around bad-mouthing my father. Had it not been for my father, the state would have gone to Pakistan. Hope everyone realizes that. Maharaja’s birth date was made a public holiday due to public pressure. That shows how much he was loved by the people of the state. So many books have been written about Hari Singh,” said Singh.

Singh was referring to Ramesh’s remarks that “there’s not a single, scholarly and serious work on Jammu and Kashmir that portrays Maharaja Hari Singh in good light.” Ramesh had criticised Singh for not defending the country’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru in his opinion column on the circumstances that led to the accession of J&K. Singh’s column was in response to Union minister Kiran Rijiju’s article

“Five Nehruvian Blunders on Kashmir”, which severely attacked Nehru. Rijiju had also claimed that though Maharaja Hari Singh wanted to accede to India much before Independence, Nehru dithered on the plans. Singh said that he wrote the article in defence of his father, as there is no historical evidence that Hari Singh wanted to join India earlier. 

He also cited Maharaja Hari Singh’s letter to Lord Mountbatten on October 26, 1947, on the day he signed the instrument of accession. “Rijiju claimed that my father wanted to join India before 1947, but Nehru didn’t accept. He was attacking both my father and Nehru. So I made it clear that it’s a distortion of facts. I have quoted my father’s letter to Lord Mountbatten. If Hari Singh wanted to join earlier, he would have written it in the letter. He had no such intention,” said Singh. “It is possible that the then deputy PM of Jammu and Kashmir, Ram Lal Batra, may have spoken informally to someone in Delhi. That’s the only explanation I can give on this,” added Singh.

Taking exception to Ramesh’s barbs that Karan Singh has sidestepped Rijiju’s hit job on Nehru, Singh said that the spokesperson was trying to imply that he was against Nehru, whom he considers a mentor and guru.