ABSTRACT
This chapter looks into the context in which Sheikh Abdullah emerged as a symbol of political dissent and counter narrative to the exploitative, feudal, sectarian, and ruler-centered Dogra establishment. The argument begins with the causes and context of the foundation of a new political entity, called Jammu and Kashmir, in 1846 through the British colonial machinations. The Treaty of Amritsar, through which the British East India Company sold a population along with territory to a mischievous warlord, remained unchallenged because of the reign of terror unleashed by the Dogra rulers with the complicity of their colonial masters. It was again for the colonial compulsions that at the end of the nineteenth century a reluctant ‘reform’ project was introduced in Jammu and Kashmir which, in the absence of a modern/democratic state apparatus, created a fractured modernity, thus adding to the miseries of the disadvantaged on the one hand, and creating conditions for the emergence of an educated and politically conscious middle class on the other which, in the absence of a sufficient space to flourish, confronted the state and contested its legitimacy to rule.
