My association with Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah began with a triple coincidence, almost 60 years ago. As soon as I completed my ma exams in March 1941, I went to meet Bill Bustin, editor of the Civil & Military Gazette of Lahore, to say that I wanted to join the newspaper. He first floored me with a quick "yes" and then, as though starting an interview, asked what I thought of the demand Sheikh Abdullah had made a few days earlier, that the Maharaja of Kashmir must make way for a popularly elected government. I said Nehru had already supported the demand, Jinnah was bound to oppose it, and this would soon become another divide in Indian politics. The government needed to worry more about that than about the demand itself.

A few days later, Bustin asked me to go to Jalandhar, to cover a speech Jinnah was to make at a Muslim League conference. I was less impressed by the speech than by the hold Jinnah displayed over a crowd bursting with the "Islam in danger" rhetoric. Half way through his speech the call to mid-day prayers came from a nearby minaret, and while the whole crowd genuflected Jinnah sat on, smoking a cigar. As soon as the prayer ended he stirred the pot again, rousing the crowd by holding forth on Pakistan as the shield of Islam and Jinnah as the sword.

The train back to Lahore was crowded with people returning from the same meeting and still breathing the same rhetoric. I began to recount the cameo of Jinnah and the cigar to some fellow journalists when some passengers became agitated. They thought I was defaming Jinnah and Islam. I started to explain myself but stopped when a passenger of impressive bearing stood up to his full height, challenged everyone else to a Quran-reading contest, denounced the League as the rich man's junta and Jinnah as someone who did not know what was good for Islam and the Muslims.

That was Sheikh Abdullah, as I learnt when a passenger introduced me to him. Our paths had never crossed till then, though we were contemporaries on the campus.

Sheikh Abdullah was full of faults -- impatience, arrogance, vanity, complexities which made him seem unpredictable, even unreliable. But he was always a man of consequence, the cause of events, not their byproduct. Always, except during the closing years of the dying lion.

Time and again, lesser people lured him into a compromise and then pulled the rug from under his feet. But never more so than in 1975, when he signed the Kashmir Accord. The story of Kashmir would have been very different if faith had been kept with him then. But it was not, and it was too late for him to do anything about it because life had begun to ebb away from him.

He had always been opposed to accession to Pakistan, and had vigorously fought and defeated those who favoured it. He was the principal reason why Jinnah retreated from Kashmir as an embittered man in the early 1940s, and later in the decade supported rule by the Maharaja, not by the people. It was Abdullah who persuaded Nehru to support Vallabhbhai Patel in sending troops to Kashmir, against the advice of Mountbatten, to beat back the invasion from Pakistan. His popularity was the reason why Pakistan shied off from a plebiscite, refusing to carry out the UN's conditions for holding it, while India agreed to its part of the bargain.

Suddenly his standing was undermined by a rumour that when Adlai Stevenson called on him in Srinagar in the summer of 1953, he had offered Kashmir as a base for American operations against the Soviet Union in exchange for recognition of Kashmir as an independent state. The rumour mongers forgot that even at the height of the suspicion against Abdullah, he stood by the limited accession he himself had accepted and opposed only, but openly, the creeping expansions of it which had been brought about by his successors. This he affirmed repeatedly to me.

Unfortunately conversations with him dwindled thereafter on account of the long years he was to spend in jail and my departure from Delhi. Otherwise I would have tried to understand more closely two episodes in his life: his talks with President Ayub in 1964, when he went to Pakistan with Nehru's blessings; and the Kashmir Accord. But such understanding as I could gather from him and others showed the former to be an insubstantial event, the latter to be disgraceful.

I was thrilled when news of the accord reached me. In substance, the news was that the government would consider any request by the Jammu & Kashmir Assembly to roll the accession back to the level Abdullah had accepted himself. I thought peace was at hand because the dispute was not about the fact but about the extent of the accession and some subsequent expansions. But no request came from the Assembly. The mystery was impenetrable from a distance. The pieces fell into place later.

The first piece was the accord itself. Its language was as ambiguous as the clever lawyers around the Sheikh and Indira Gandhi could make it. The second piece was the advice they gave him. It was so elliptical and convoluted that he could not cut any path through it. The third was Mrs Gandhi. Caught up in the problems of the Emergency, she went along with those who wanted to use the accord for burying the problem instead of solving it.

But the centre piece was Abdullah himself. When the time came to move the state assembly, he was no longer able to move himself. Heart, diabetes and other ailments had laid him low. He was still the chief minister when I met him again, but neither in mind nor in body was he the man he used to be. He had become the classic picture of an ailing Sultan manipulated by cunning courtiers.Those years were an unbefitting end to a life which till then had been so significant.

Former chief editor of The Statesman, Pran Chopra is political analyst, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.