A convicted terrorist was given a hero’s chapter in Jammu and Kashmir’s official school library books. The man who died defending Kashmir’s accession to India wasn’t mentioned at all.
By Advocates Chander Mohan Sharma & Prakriiti Gupta
Kashmir has two men named Maqbool worth knowing about. One was hanged for waging secession against the country. The other died defending the region from an invading army. Ask which of them is called a martyr in a government-approved school book, and the answer says something uncomfortable about who controls the story of Jammu and Kashmir, and whose story gets left out.
Their lives never overlapped. One died in 1947, the year Kashmir’s fate as part of India was decided. The other died in 1984, decades into the insurgency that followed. But in the summer of 2026, their names collided again, in a set of school textbooks, of all places, and reopened an argument about memory, loyalty, and who gets to write history that Jammu and Kashmir has never fully settled.
■ The Nationalist
Maqbool Sherwani’s story begins in October 1947, weeks after independence and partition, when Pashtun tribal raiders backed by elements of the Pakistani state poured into Jammu and Kashmir, advancing on Srinagar while Maharaja Hari Singh had still not decided whether the state would join India or Pakistan.
Sherwani, a 19-year-old National Conference worker in Baramulla, is credited with deliberately misdirecting the raiders down the wrong roads, buying crucial time. Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession on October 26, 1947, and Indian troops landed at Srinagar just in time to push the invaders back.
When the raiders discovered what he had done, they tortured, nailed to a plank, and shot him. He is said to have died declaring loyalty to his homeland and to Sheikh Abdullah. Gandhi is said to have later paid tribute. Today Sherwani is buried in Baramulla, his grave quietly tended by the Indian Army.
■ The Terrorist
Maqbool Bhat, born in 1938 in Trehgam, became a founding figure of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). In 1966, he and an armed group kidnapped and shot CID inspector Amar Chand. Sentenced to death in 1968, he escaped custody, fled to Pakistan, infiltrated back, and was re-arrested in 1976 for a bank robbery and killing. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 1982.
In February 1984, JKLF operatives kidnapped and murdered Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in Birmingham after New Delhi refused to trade Bhat for his life. Within a week Bhat was hanged in Tihar Jail. To separatists he became “Shaheed-e-Azam,” the great martyr, with February 11 still marked as his anniversary.
Two men, same first name, opposite ends of the same conflict. Yet when two government-approved school library books went looking for Kashmiri figures worth celebrating in 2026, only one made the cut.
■ A Terrorist called a martyr
The books, Personalities and Legends of J&K and Great Personalities of Jammu and Kashmir, were procured under the Samagra Shiksha scheme and distributed to government school libraries. They gave Bhat an entire chapter, “Shaheed Maqbool Bhat,” alongside favorable profiles of other separatist figures and language echoing Pakistani state rhetoric. Sherwani’s name appears in neither.
Once this came to light, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha’s administration acted fast: eight officials suspended, a contract employee terminated, the authors and publishers blacklisted, all copies withdrawn, and an inquiry launched. Tellingly, it wasn’t Sherwani’s absence that triggered this, it was Bhat’s presence, dressed up as heroism and paid for with public money.
■ What was the purpose?
Was this sloppy oversight, or something more deliberate? Supporters of the crackdown argue a chapter honoring a convicted terrorist, published alongside total silence on the men who died keeping Kashmir part of India, looks less like an accident than a chosen narrative, one in which India’s defenders are written out and its historical opponents written up.
| “History must be recorded with honesty. The rule of law cannot exist alongside the glorification of those convicted through due process while the sacrifices of those who defended the nation are forgotten. |
■ A Legal Perspective
This is not the first time Maqbool Bhat’s memory has needed correcting by official order. In 1989, during a Doordarshan panel discussion broadcast nationally, a National Conference Member of Parliament and brother-in-law of Dr Farooq Abdullah called Bhat’s execution a “murder by the Government of India.”
| “I filed Contempt Petition No. 3/89 in 1989, through Advocate Purshotam Sharma before the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir, arguing that the remark unfairly reflected on the judiciary that had upheld Bhat’s death sentence through every level of appeal, including the Supreme Court. |
“When I approached the High Court in 1989, it was not merely about one televised remark. It was about protecting the dignity of the judiciary and ensuring that judicial decisions were not distorted in public perception.”
The case that followed had the shape of a genuine courtroom drama. The respondent MP, who claimed to be too unwell to appear in person, submitted a sworn affidavit insisting he had never intended any disrespect to the judiciary and had always understood Bhat’s case to have followed due process of law. Justice R. P. Sethi wasn’t content to take that on paper alone. He ordered the original video cassette of the broadcast produced in open court, had it played in front of both sides’ counsel, and compared it word for word against the written transcript that had been filed. The two didn’t fully align, portions of the disputed remarks weren’t clearly audible on the tape itself, and the judge extended the benefit of that doubt to the respondent. The contempt rule was discharged. But Justice Sethi didn’t let the matter go entirely: he directed Doordarshan to broadcast a public clarification, and cautioned the MP to exercise far greater care in future public remarks touching on the independence and impartiality of the judiciary.
That contempt case unfolded against a genuinely chilling backdrop. Sessions Judge Neelkanth Ganjoo, the very judge who had sentenced Bhat to death for Inspector Amar Chand’s murder back in 1968, was himself assassinated by militants in Srinagar in November 1989, the same year the remark that triggered this petition was made. For the courts hearing this matter, the line between judicial process and political violence was not an abstraction; it was measured in the lives of the very judges who had presided over these cases. Whether by accident or by design, Kashmir’s official record has, across nearly four decades now, repeatedly found room for one Maqbool while losing track of the other.
■ How long does this continue?
A book gets pulled, officials suspended, an inquiry promised, but the underlying imbalance rarely gets the same urgency as the scandal that exposed it. Sherwani’s story stays quiet in mainstream Valley discourse, while Bhat’s execution continues to fuel organized protest decades on. No state-funded push has yet emerged to ensure future textbooks correct this imbalance, rather than simply pulling the offending books and moving on.
Until that changes, the coincidence of the two Maqbools seems likely to repeat, with one man’s name consistently attached to “martyr,” and the other’s to nothing at all. Jammu and Kashmir has plenty of memory. What it hasn’t figured out is which parts belong on a school library shelf, and who gets to make that call.
(The authors are practising advocates. Views expressed are personal)
