![]() ![]() ![]() “The decision to shift Kashmir’s Lion to Kodaikanal was instant,” said the book. It was too much for the Central government to absorb. Seshan, who was the Madurai Collector during 1965-67, states that the leader’s “innocuous conversation with someone” in Udhagamandalam was splashed in a newspaper in England, which had published “the anguished cry” of the leader. Seshan: An Intimate Story (1994), a biography on former Chief Election Commissioner T.N. ![]() The Sheikh arrived at Kodaikanal, then part of the composite Madurai district, was under controversial circumstances. The Jammu and Kashmir leader’s passport was impounded and he was first taken to Udhagamandalam in the Nilgiris district where he was kept for two months. Lal Bahadur Shastri was the then Prime Minister. At Algiers, his “long meeting” with the then Chinese Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, was viewed negatively by Indian leaders in the context of the 1962 India-China war. But, in Kodaikanal, he was allowed to move about within the municipal limits but he could not move out of the house in Delhi, where he was kept for a few months later, “without special permission under special reasons,” said a report published by The Hindu on September 24, 1967.Īfter the leader’s pilgrimage to Mecca and visit to a number of countries, he was arrested on arrival at the Delhi airport in May 1965. The arrest took place in the light of his reported observations (on Jammu and Kashmir) abroad, which had “a perceptible anti-Indian tinge”, according to a monograph published by the Lok Sabha Secretariat on him in 1990. The Sheikh had been jailed several times and kept at different places. Nanda, “treated as a special person” at Kohinoor Bungalow, a government-owned circuit house. The leader was, to quote the country’s then Home Minister, G.L. Kodaikanal, a hill station about 120 km from Madurai, played “host” to the Sheikh, also known as Sher-e-Kashmir (The Lion of Kashmir), for nearly two years, from July 1965 to June 1967. There is a Tamil Nadu connection to one of the leading political players of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah (1905-82), who founded the National Conference and ruled Jammu and Kashmir (now a Union Territory) as Prime Minister (1948-53) and Chief Minister (1975-82). ![]() Jammu and Kashmir is back under the spotlight in the light of a controversy generated by the Hindi feature film The Kashmir Files. ![]()
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