by Faiqa Masoodi
SRINAGAR: It is not every day that a piece of paper brings a quiet revolution to light. But when Naeem Akhter, former bureaucrat and minister, recently shared a decades-old will drafted by his adoptive father, the late journalist Jagannath (JN) Sathu, it stirred a silent grief and pride in Kashmir’s journalistic and humanist legacy. This was no ordinary will. One clause, radical in its honesty and tenderness, stood out like a monument in the snow: “After my death, my wife Bimla shall be persuaded to remarry a man of her choice who would take care of her and make her feel happy.”
This single line spoke volumes about the man Sathu was, an iconoclast, idealist, truth-seeker, and revealed an enduring love that rose above custom and caste, even beyond death.
JN Sathu was not just a journalist. He was a phenomenon. Born into a Kashmiri Pandit family, he dared to dissent, and the price he paid was high. Inspired by the radical humanist MN Roy, he walked a political path that left many bewildered – organising the Kissan Mazdoor Conference, later becoming vice-president of the pro-Pakistan Kashmir Democratic Union (KDU) alongside Pandit Prem Nath Bazaz. He openly challenged Sheikh Abdullah’s reign in the 1950s, a rare stance for a Pandit, and was exiled to Delhi for his bold convictions. His article on the Red Menace, criticising the ideological flip-flops of the communists, became widely cited in academic circles.
But he wasn’t just a rebel in politics. He was an ascetic in his personal life, incorruptible, uncompromising, and impossible to pigeonhole. Once jailed for refusing to temper a report, he had no interest in wealth, influence, or applause. And while his journalism made headlines, it was his home that bore the silent strength of his ideals, especially through his wife, Bimla Sathu.
The Sathu couple had no children of their own. But in the kind of gesture that marked their life, they informally adopted Naeem Akhter, a young man who would go on to become a top bureaucrat and minister in the Jammu and Kashmir government. To Akhter, they offered love and legacy; in return, he gave them loyalty and care that stretched well past their final days.
In a moving Facebook post, Akhter recently wrote of how, on the same day last year, he had to leave a family wedding and rush to Jammu. Bimla ji had passed away, quietly, alone, in an old-age home. Despite being childless, her husband had entrusted Akhter with her last rites. It was a promise Akhter kept.
“I tried to fill the gap in their childless life over decades,” he wrote. “She had suffered a lot because of ups and downs that had been Sathu saheb’s lot… But those who knew her are aware of the exceptional resilience and dignity she displayed.”
After Sathu died in 2005, Bimla lived in the shadows of a city that had once known her husband’s fire. Her own family had been uprooted during the Partition from the North-West Frontier Province, leaving her with little kin and few resources. For some time, she stayed in a room at the MLA Hostel in Jammu, a quiet nod from the establishment to her late husband’s stature. But after 2019, in the charged aftermath of Article 370’s abrogation, even that consideration was lost.
“I was in detention when my wife came to see me,” Akhter recalled. “She told me Bimla ji had been evicted from the MLA hostel… A bulldozer of ignorance had run over the poor widow of one of our most upright journalists.”
Eventually, Bimla ji moved to an old-age home, where she lived and died, surrounded by a few kind souls and nurses, not the society that once applauded her husband’s fierce pen. When Akhter arrived after a delayed flight, the staff had already prepared her body. A dozen people stood at her pyre. He lit the flames as quietly as the life she had led.
Among the belongings she left behind, the staff gave Akhter a set of papers, one of them was an older version of Sathu’s will. This document, drafted by Bashir Ahmad Khan (later Chief Justice), witnessed by journalist Mohammad Sayeed Malik and registrar Khaliq uz Zaman (later a District Judge), is more than a legal formality. It is a human document, shaped by fierce independence and tenderness.
He leaves his belongings to Bimla, his clothes to the Rotary Club, his books to Kashmir University, and Rs 2,000 each to his sister, a friend, and the Tuberculosis Association. But then comes the breath-taking clause, urging his widow to remarry, to seek peace and companionship.
“She has suffered a lot,” he writes. “It is my earnest wish that she should live in peace in the evening of her life.”
He even stipulates that if both die simultaneously, their property should be donated to an institution caring for the sick and physically handicapped. No religious rites are to mark his death, no rituals, no show. “Wrap my body in a cloth and cremate it,” he wrote.
Sathu’s will is more than a legal document. It is an ethical testament, of how love, liberty, and reason can coexist in a culture weighed down by tradition and silence. Senior journalist Mohammad Sayeed Malik, in response to Akhter’s post, called it a “poignant moment” and a privilege to have known the couple. “That was the extraordinary human material of which JN Sathu was made,” he wrote. “This post brought back a train of memories.”
In the end, there were no grand funerals, no glowing obituaries in state journals, no state honours. Just fire, ash, and memory, and the love of a man who lived with conviction, and a woman who bore it all with grace. And in the middle of it all, a son who was not their own, but who walked with them to the very end.
May they rest in the dignity they never asked for, but always deserved.
