J&K:
Mapping Street Violence
Guest Writer: Praveen Swami
Associate Editor, The Hindu, New Delhi
On
June 11, 2010, a tear-gas shell arced over a crowded
street in Srinagar’s Rajouri Kadal area. It landed,
with surreal precision, on Tufail Mattoo, ripping apart
the seventeen year olds’ skull.
Since
then, Kashmir’s cities have seen a wave of murderous
clashes between Police and protestors, fuelled by a
new radical Islamism that has acquired ideological influence
among young people. Following particularly intense clashes
in early July, the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Government
asked Army troops to stand by to assist civilian authority
in Srinagar —the first time the Army had ever been called
on to do so. The Army did little, bar staging drive-by
patrols in some neighbourhoods, but the message that
has gone out is clear: India appears confused and panicked
by events on the streets.
For the
young men who have been battling Police, Mattoo was
a martyr for their cause. His loved ones don’t seem
to see it in quite the same way. Muhammad Husain Mattoo,
the accidental martyr’s father, gently argued with protestors
who wanted to march in procession with his son’s body
to Srinagar’s Mazhar-e-Shauhda, a graveyard where hundreds
of those killed in the separatist movement are buried.
Mattoo, he pointed out, wasn’t seeking martyrdom; just
trying to make his way home from school. Later, though,
the father gave in — but on national television made
clear he disapproved of the rioting that broke out after
his son’s death.
The parents
of at least some of the men who have died since seem
to feel the same way. Muhammad Rafiq Bangroo, shot dead
by the Police June 12, was buried at the Dana Mazhar
in Safakadal, as his family’s tradition mandates. Even
though Muzaffar Ahmad Bhat’s family were furious at
the Police, who chased their son into the stream where
he drowned on July 5, they rejected pleas from secessionist
leader Shakeel Bakshi to have their child buried at
the Mazhar-e-Shauhda. So did the family of Fayyaz Ahmad
Wani, who was killed a few hours later.
In these
stories lie important clues to the violence that has
torn Kashmir apart this summer. Polemicists have cast
this wave of unrest as a Kashmiri intifada against
Indian rule. The truth, however, is that the violence
has been concentrated in small urban pockets, not even
the entire Kashmir Valley. Nor is it a new problem:
similar clashes have claimed lives on a regular basis
since 2006; in some years, far greater violence has
taken place. J&K’s decision to call in the Army
was driven by fears that protestors might target an
ongoing Hindu pilgrimage, sparking off retaliatory attacks
on Muslims in Hindu-majority Jammu. The Army’s presence,
the State Government hoped, would persuade public opinion
in Jammu that it was taking all possible measures to
end the violence — and thus ward off this worst-case
outcome.
Few,
though, have paused to ask the important questions:
who are the protestors? What are their aims? Who are
their leaders? And what, if anything, can authorities
do about the problem?
Mapping
the violence in Kashmir helps understand who the protestors
are, as well as the reach of the urban Islamism that
has manifested itself in repeated clashes since 2006.
Parts of the city of Srinagar, Police data makes clear,
have accounted for a disproportionate share of the violence.
More than half of the 21 civilians killed in Police
action between January 1 and July 7, 2010, were Srinagar
residents. Thirty-two of 72 civilians injured in the
clashes also belonged to the city. [The Police add that
141 officers and 62 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF)
personnel were injured in these clashes — a third of
the 623 injured across Kashmir].
Between
these dates, the Police recorded 269 clashes involving
violent mobs across Kashmir. Just under 45 per cent
of those clashes took place in Srinagar city — and most
were concentrated in the five Police Stations of Rainawari,
Nowhatta, Maharajgunj, Khanyar and Safakadal. Small
urban pockets in northern Kashmir have accounted for
the bulk of violence outside of Srinagar. The north
Kashmir trading town of Baramulla, like Srinagar’s shahr-e-khaas,
a major trading centre before independence, accounted
for 46 clashes. Nearby Sopore, a major apple-trading
concentration, which has been an historic stronghold
of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), saw 21. Put together,
the three towns accounted for 69.5 percent of all violent
protests in Kashmir this summer.
Last
year, too, the pattern was similar. J&K saw 290
incidents involving clashes between protestors and Police
in 2009; only 64 took place outside of Srinagar, Baramulla
and Sopore, and most of these were concentrated around
Shopian, where the alleged rape-murder of two women
had caused widespread rage (investigators later determined,
on the basis of forensic tests, that the women had died
of natural causes, and had not been raped and killed).
Notwithstanding
claims made both by Indian authorities and separatist
propagandists, there is little to show that the violence
is underpinned by a coherent political design. Much
of the rioting has taken place in Srinagar’s shahr-e-khaas,
neighbourhoods, which make up the city’s traditional
trading and artisanal hubs. The protestors consist,
in the main, of what might be described as a lumpenised
bourgeoisie: auto-rickshaw drivers; store-clerks; school
dropouts who haven’t found a job... The rioters are,
for the most part, were children of a once-powerful
social class that has been in decline for decades.
Indian
authorities have intercepted conversations, which suggest
local activists of Islamists groups have paid small
groups of agitators to initiate protests by throwing
stones at the Police. Investigators say funds for this
enterprise have come from Pakistan-based organisations
sympathetic to Islamists in Kashmir. But the sums of
money involved are small — and neither telephone intercepts
nor the actual character of the protests suggest that
any one organisation binds them together. Pakistan’s
Government has revelled in the opportunity to embarrass
India, and jihadist groups have backed the protestors.
On ground, though, neither has significant influence.
Instead, local political dynamics are key to understanding
what is going on.
In the
years after Independence (in 1947), the shahr-e-khaas
saw intense contestation between the traditionalist
cleric Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq and the National Conference
(NC). The struggle represented the conflict between
the old bourgeoisie, and an emerging new élite
of contractors and businessmen. In 1986, facing a common
threat from new alliances of the religious right, the
two parties allied. Mirwaiz Farooq refused to support
secessionism after jihadist violence broke out
three years later, and paid the price in May, 1990,
when he was assassinated. Both Mirwaiz Farooq and his
assassin, Abdullah Bangroo, were, ironically enough,
buried in Srinagar’s Mazhar-e-Shauhda — the graveyard
where some of those killed in the protests are being
buried.
Mirwaiz
Mohammad Farooq’s son and successor, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq,
reversed course — and emerged as the principal leader
of the secessionist All Parties Hurriyat Conference
(APHC).
The younger Mirwaiz’s decision to boycott successive
elections, made in line with the APHC’s demand for a
three-way dialogue between India, Pakistan and itself,
created a peculiar political situation in the shahr-e-khaas.
Mirwaiz Farooq, focussed on securing a dialogue with
India, which he hoped would lead to power, made little
effort to address the concerns of his constituency.
Problems like unemployment and drug use went unaddressed.
For their part, NC legislators elected from Srinagar
won in low-turnout elections that gave them little legitimacy
— and had little interest in working for constituents
who, in any case, did not vote.
Frustrated
by the failure of traditional politicians to deliver,
young people began lashing out at a political order
that had no space for their concerns. Their anger expressed
itself in hostility towards India and, increasingly,
in slogans supportive of the Islamist movement and jihadist
organisations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
Pro-Lashkar slogans began to be regularly heard in the
shahar-e-khaas from 2003, when protestors backing
the group disrupted a rally intended to commemorate
the assassination of pro-dialogue leader Abdul Gani
Lone the previous year. It is significant, however,
that these slogans — and others calling for an Islamic
state — have been largely confined to the sphere of
polemics. There is no evidence of large-scale recruitment
by jihadist groups from the shahar-e-khaas;
indeed, many of the protests have been made up of young
men dressed in western clothes, very different in their
aesthetic from the neo-fundamentalists that groups like
the Lashkar have historically attracted to their ranks.
Put simply,
the rioting marks the death-throes of an old political
order — and the birth pangs of a new one which is still
to fully develop.
Kashmir’s
Islamist patriarch, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, lies at the
centre of that new order. There is evidence that leaders
of Geelani’s Tehreek-i-Hurriyat (TiH) have paid
local activists to initiate clashes with the Police.
The TiH, though, simply doesn’t have the political networks
needed to sustain a large-scale, coordinated movement.
Instead, young protestors appear to have acted locally
in response to media-broadcast calls made by mid-level
Islamist leaders like Massrat Alam and Shakeel Bakshi,
using everything from mosque public address systems
to mobile phone text messaging to prepare for marches
through their neighbourhoods.
Last
year, religious traditionalists began to understand
the threat these mobilisations posed to their own influence.
Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith President, Shaukat Ahmad Shah, declared
that the Prophet Mohammad himself had held stone-throwing
to be un-Islamic. Mirwaiz Farooq backed Shah. So, too,
did Kashmir’s Grand Mufti, Mohammad Bashiruddin.
But leaders
of the new Islamism hit back. Geelani said it was "natural
for youth to show anger by pelting stones". Islamic
Students League leader Shakeel Bakshi, in turn, described
the protests as "a Kashmiri version of the Palestinian
intifada". In an effort to legitimise his
position, Bakshi held a seminar where he displayed images
purporting to show the eminent Palestinian-American
scholar Edward Said throwing stones at Israeli soldiers
in the occupied territories.
"Osama
[bin-Laden]", Geelani rasped in a 2008 interview,
"has come only during the last few years. People
like me have been fighting for this all our lives".
The assertion wasn’t quite true: for decades, Geelani
had been a well-embedded member of J&K’s political
system, fighting and winning elections from the north
Kashmir town of Sopore on a Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) ticket.
He only reluctantly backed the jihadist war against
the Indian state, which began in 1989, and never appears
to have been tempted to join it himself. But ever since
2005, Geelani has succeeded in decisively displacing
the major secessionist coalition, the APHC.
In his
success lie important clues to the battles on Srinagar’s
streets.
Back
in 2004, when a jet operated by the Research and Analysis
Wing (R&AW) flew him to a hospital in Mumbai, Geelani’s
autumn seemed to be upon him. The Islamist leader had
been sidelined by realists in his own JeI; the following
year, the Mirwaiz Umar Farooq-led APHC opened negotiations
with New Delhi, breaking with its historic rejection
of a dialogue that did not include Pakistan.
Part
of the reason for the APHC’s desire to talk to New Delhi
lay in a successful campaign by the People’s Democratic
Party (PDP) to recruit secessionists to its cause. Former
Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) supreme council
member Pir Mansoor Husain, became party President Mehbooba
Mufti’s political advisor; former JeI chief Ghulam Mohammad
Bhat’s brother, Abdul Khaliq Bhat, was lined up to fight
for election from Sopore; Mirwaiz Farooq’s trusted lieutenant,
Mohammad Yakub Vakil, too, joined the PDP in search
of power.
This
was also a time when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and
Pakistan’s then President, General Pervez Musharraf,
were widely believed to be inching forward towards a
deal on J&K’s future that would have institutionalised
the status quo, with some modifications.
Mirwaiz
Farooq understood the writing on the wall. "Let
us come out of our delusions", the APHC chairman
said in one speech, "It may sound offensive, but
the fact of the matter is that sacrifices alone cannot
help us to reach our desired goal." Sajjad Gani
Lone also underlined the need to focus towards an "achievable
future". "In between ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’",
Lone declared, "the leadership has to consider
‘something’ as well". "Even holy cows",
APHC leader Abdul Gani Bhat said in response to critics
of the new realism, "have to shit".
Geelani
claimed the realists were leading J&K’s people to
the slaughter — and set about proving it. In 2006, Islamists
leveraged the uncovering of a prostitution racket in
Srinagar to argue that secularism and modernity were
responsible for undermining, and were an Indian conspiracy
to undermine, J&K’s Islamic character. Pro-Islamist
scholar Hameeda Nayeem even claimed the scandal pointed
"unequivocally towards a policy-based state patronage
[of prostitution]". Significantly, the prostitution
protests saw the first large scale Islamist mob violence
that went unchecked by the state. Geelani’s supporters
were allowed to gather at the home of alleged Srinagar
prostitution-ring madam Sabina Bulla, and raze it to
the ground. Mobs also attacked the homes of politicians
charged with having used her services.
In the
summer of 2007, the rape-murder of north Kashmir teenager
Tabinda Gani was used to initiate a xenophobic campaign
against the presence of migrant workers in the State.
Addressing a June 24, 2007, rally at the town of Langate,
Geelani claimed that "hundreds of thousands of
non-state subjects had been pushed into Kashmir under
a long-term plan to crush the Kashmiris. He asserted,
further, that "the majority of these non-state
subjects are professional criminals and should be driven
out of Kashmir in a civilised way [sic]".
His political ally, Hilal War, claimed that migrant
workers’ slums were "centres of all kinds of illegal
business". Language like this inspired a series
of terrorist attacks on migrants, the last of which
was the bombing of a bus carrying workers from Srinagar,
just as the protests against the right of use of land
to the Amarnath shrine board began.
Even
on the eve of the shrine board protests, Islamists had
mobilised against a career counsellor who, they claimed,
had been despatched to Srinagar schools to seduce students
into a career of vice. An Anantnag school-teacher also
came under attack, after a video surfaced showing that
a group of his students had danced to pop film music
on a holiday in Goa.
Speaking
at a religious conference in Baramulla on May 26, 2008,
Geelani warned his audience that the stakes were too
high for the new realism. India, he said, was seeking
to change "the Muslim majority into a minority
by settling down troops along with their families here
permanently... After turning Kashmiri Muslims into a
minority, they will either massacre Muslims as they
did in Jammu in 1947, or carry out a genocide as was
done in Gujarat [in 2002]. " Later that summer,
the existential anxieties Geelani had been stoking since
2006 exploded, after the J&K Government granted
land-use rights to a board which administers an annual
pilgrimage of Hindus to Amarnath. Many in Kashmir saw
the decision as evidence that Geelani had been right.
Now,
the new Islamists were able to turn the tables on the
APHC. In a secret June 19 declaration, Mirwaiz Farooq
accepted Geelani’s long-standing assertion that bilateral
dialogue with New Delhi would be fruitless. He also
agreed not to initiate any unilateral moves excluding
Geelani.
That
agreement did not survive the end of the 2008 violence,
and an historic election where record turnouts were
registered in rural J&K despite a jihadist
fiat against participation. But while Mirwaiz Farooq
has since held multiple meetings with envoys form New
Delhi, as well as secret one-on-one talks with Indian
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, the peace agenda
hasn’t moved forward. The APHC knows it doesn’t have
the political capital to deliver on any agreement it
might arrive at with New Delhi, especially if the deal
doesn’t have Pakistan’s backing. Pakistan, for its part,
has lost interest in the plan President Musharraf was
pushing, believing that any concessions to New Delhi
would erode the state’s already waning credibility.
None
of this, however, explains just why the hurling of stones
has become so important in the constituencies of the
realists. For that, one has to examine broader ideological
trends in Jammu and Kashmir.
Paranoia
and piety have long fuelled Kashmir politics: in the
decades after independence, the scholar Yoginder Sikand
tells us, JeI leaders believed that an "Indian
conspiracy was at work to destroy the Islamic identity
of the Kashmiris." It was alleged that "the
Government of India had dispatched a team to Andalusia,
headed by the Kashmiri Pandit [politician and then State
Home Minister] D.P. Dhar, to investigate how Islam was
driven out of Spain and to suggest measures as to how
the Spanish experiment could be repeated in Kashmir."
Resistance
to this imagined plot often exploded into violence.
In May, 1973, an Anantnag college student discovered
an encyclopaedia containing a drawing of the archangel
Gabriel dictating the Quran to the Prophet Mohammad
— an image that, in some readings of Islam, is blasphemous.
Protestors demanded that the author be hanged: "a
vain demand," Katherine Frank has wryly noted,
"since Arthur Mee had died in England in 1943."
India proscribed sales of the out-of-print book, but
four died in rioting. Politicians often drank at these
wellsprings. At a March 4, 1987, rally in Srinagar,
Muslim United Front candidates, clad in the white robes
of the pious, declared that Islam could not survive
under the authority of a secular state.
The constituency
Geelani has built — welding together elements of the
pious petty bourgeoisie, and angry lumpenised young
people who feel disenfranchised — builds on this tradition,
but, in important ways, marks a break with it.
In the
first decades of the twentieth century, J&K saw
the emergence of a political project which rested on
sharpening the ideological boundaries of Islam: a project
spearheaded by the birth of a new middle class that
vied with traditional Muslim leaders for power. Key
was the arrival in Kashmir of the Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Hadis,
a religious order that was set up by followers of Sayyid
Ahmad of Rai Bareilly. Ahmad died at Balakote, in Pakistan-administered
Kashmir, in 1831, while waging an unsuccessful jihad
against Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom — a campaign
that, historian Ayesha Jalal reminds us in her book,
Partisans of Allah, still fires the imagination
of numbers of Muslims in south Asia. Ahl-e-Hadis
ideologues like the clerics Siddiq Hasan Khan and Nazir
Husain rejected the accommodation Islam in India had
achieved with its environment.
Sayyed
Hussain Shah Batku, a Delhi seminary student who carried
the Ahl-e-Hadis message to Kashmir in 1925, denounced
practices of mainstream Islam in the State, like the
worship of shrines and veneration of relics. Batku attacked
traditionalists for following practices tainted by their
Hindu heritage, like the recitation of litanies before
Namaaz. Not surprisingly, Batku came under sustained
attack from traditionalist clerics, who charged him
with being an apostate, an infidel and even the dajjal,
or devil incarnate. His response was to cast himself
as a defender of the Faith, railing against Muslim denominations
like the Ahmadi and the Shia, Hindu revivalists and
Christian missionaries, all of whom he claimed were
working to expel Islam from Kashmir.
Despite
its limited popular reach, the Ahl-e-Hadith had
enormous ideological influence. As the historian Chitralekha
Zutshi has pointed out in her work on the making of
religious identity in the Kashmir Valley, Languages
of Belonging, the "influence of the Ahl-e-Hadith
on the conflicts over Kashmiri identities cannot be
overemphasised."
Today,
the Ahl-e-Hadith has expanded dramatically in many areas
where traditionalist orders like that of the Mirwaiz
once exercised near-hegemony. Key leaders of the organisation,
as well as much of its rank and file, have opposed the
street clashes. There is no evidence that the Ahl-e-Hadith
is in any way institutionally complicit in the violence
— but the defection of growing numbers of young people
to the organisation points to a breakdown of traditional
religious authority in the neighbourhoods most hit by
violence now. Geelani has been the principal benefactor
of these conflicts — and of networks built up over decades
by the JeI.
Back
in 1945, in his inaugural speech to the then newly-founded
Jamaat’s cadre, Saaduddin Tarabali railed against "the
sad state of Islam in this land today." He bemoaned
the fact that Kashmir Muslims were "totally ignorant
of the true spirit of Islam." "Our state is
such that leave alone making an unbeliever a Muslim,"
Saaduddin said, "no true Muslim can be fully satisfied
with us." Only once personal reform was achieved,
in Saaduddin’s view, could the party of Islam place
before the world "a broad Islamic revolutionary
programme."
What
was this programme? According to the Jamaat’s constitution,
the organisation is committed to "establish the
true Faith" [iqamat-e-din]. Its members
are called on to "know the difference between Islam
and jahiliya [ignorance]," "abandon
all customs, practices and beliefs that are in conflict
with the Quran and the sunnah [theological tradition]"
and "not have any close social relations, apart
from ordinary human links, with morally corrupt people
and those who have forgotten Allah." It expressly
commits the Jamaat to "use democratic and constitutional
means while working for reform and righteous revolution,"
forbidding "ways and means against ethnics, truthfulness
and honesty, or which may contribute to strife on earth."
For decades
after independence, the Jamaat participated — first
through proxies and then up-front — in mainstream political
life. It endorsed candidates to the J&K legislature
who swore allegiance to India’s Constitution. Speaking
for the emerging Muslim middle-class — the petty bourgeoisie,
orchard owners and bureaucrat — the Jamaat insisted
that Indian rule in J&K was contested, but stayed
clear of successive violent movements intended to overthrow
it. In the mid-1970s, though, that began to change,
with fateful consequences.
In March,
1977, Indira Gandhi withdrew the Emergency and called
General Elections. She was defeated. Now wearing the
halo of political martyrdom, the Jamaat sought to capitalise
on the new situation. It allied itself with the Janata
Party both at the national level, and in J&K, where
elections were held that year.
Incendiary
communalism was used to take on the Jamaat. A vote for
the Jamaat, the National Conference (NC) claimed, was
a vote for the Jana Sangh, a Hindu-chauvinist constituent
of the Janata Party, whose "hands were still red
with the blood of Muslims." Islam, leaders of the
NC insisted, would be in danger if the Jamaat-Janata
alliance took power. Mirza Afzal Beg, Abdullah’s key
deputy, would often unpackage a green handkerchief with
Pakistani rock salt — as opposed to Indian sea salt
— contained in it, signalling support for that country.
National Conference cadre administered oaths on the
Quran to potential voters, while clerics were imported
from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to campaign in Muslim-majority
areas of Jammu.
It paid
off: the National Conference won 47 of 75 seats in the
J&K Assembly, a decisive majority. Moreover, the
NC secured over 46 per cent of the popular vote, an
exceptionally high proportion in Indian elections. By
contrast, the Jamaat-e-Islami could secure just one
of the 19 seats it contested, and received only 3.59
per cent of the state-wide vote. This was a poorer performance
than even the fledgling Janata Party, which picked up
13 seats from the Jammu region and secured 23.7 per
cent of the popular vote.
But Abdullah’s
victory came at a price. His aggressive use of Islamist
themes and images during the campaign had cost him support
in Jammu, particularly among Hindus. Just one of the
seven seats the NC picked up in Jammu, that of Ramban,
had a Hindu majority. In effect, the NC had abandoned
its historic project of building itself into a spokesperson
for the entire State, and had retreated, instead, to
its heartland in the Valley. More importantly, the party
had opened the gates for the large-scale use of religion
in mass politics, a weapon that others, in time, would
also learn to use. It was in the wake of these developments
that the Jamaat began its transfiguration into a platform
for the nascent jihad in J&K. The vehicle
for this transformation was its student wing, the Islami
Jamaat-e-Tulba (IJT). Formed in 1977, the IJT was to
develop transnational linkages with neoconservative
Islamist groups.
At the
outset, the IJT reached out to Saudi Arabia-based neoconservative
patronage networks for help. In 1979, the IJT was granted
membership of the World Organisation of Muslim Youth,
a controversial Saudi-funded body which financed many
Islamist groups that later turned to terrorism. The
next year, the IJT organised a conference in Srinagar,
which was attended by dignitaries from across west Asia,
including the Imam of the mosques of Mecca and Medina,
Abdullah bin-Sabil. By the end of the decade, the IJT
had formally committed itself to an armed struggle against
the Indian state. Its President, Sheikh Tajamul Husain
— now a mid-ranking leader of the secessionist movement
— told journalists in Srinagar that Kashmiris did not
consider themselves Indian, and that Forces stationed
there were an "army of occupation." Husain
also called for the establishment of an Islamic state.
A year later, in 1981, Husain called on his young followers
to "throw out" the Indian "occupation".
Since
1998, however, the mainstream JeI leadership has sought
to claw its way out of the political dead-end its association
with jihadist groups led it into. The decimation
of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) by Indian Forces meant
that, by 1996, the JeI was left facing extinction —
not the power the jihad had once promised. In
the 2008 elections, the Jamaat worked closely with the
PDP.
Geelani,
however, used past lessons — and elements of the Jamaat
organisational network — to further his cause. For long,
Geelani had argued that Hinduism and Islam were locked
in an irreducible civilizational opposition. At an October
26, 2007, rally in Srinagar, he demanded that "the
people of the State should, as their religious duty,
raise their voice against India’s aggression [emphasis
added]". This duty, he argued, stemmed from the
fact that to "practice Islam completely under the
subjugation of India is impossible because human beings
practically worship those whose rules they abide by."
In a 2008 interview to the New Delhi-based journalist
Aasha Khosa, he called for the creation of an Islamic
nizamiat, or state, in which the "creed
of socialism and secularism should not touch our lives
and we must be totally governed by the Koran
and the Sunnat [precedents from Prophet Mohammad’s
life]".
For those
familiar with the work of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian
Islamist whose ideas deeply inspired the global jihadist
movement in general and Osama bin-Laden in particular,
this argument will be familiar. Qutb argued for a radical
reorganisation of "relations between the Islamic
community and other camps, whether idolaters or people
of earlier revelations". He asserted that it had
proved "impossible to achieve coexistence between
two diametrically opposed ways of life". "We
have one way of life based entirely on submission of
all mankind to God who has no partners", Qutb proceeded,
"and another that makes people submit to other
people and false deities. The two are bound to be in
conflict at every step and in every aspect of life".
Geelani’s
rise marks the triumph of a vision of Kashmir which,
at its core, rejects its integration into the modern
world. His Islam articulates the concerns of social
classes angered by the inequity which has followed in
the wake of economic growth; for a social order threatened
by a pluralist, commodity-based culture; and, perhaps
ironically given his age, for the rage of young people
who stand at the gates of the earthly paradise that
a fast-growing India has promised them, only to find
they are denied entry.
India
has few options to deal with the problem. Politicians
in J&K — both pro-India and secessionist — have
little direct influence in the areas where the violence
is most intense. Pakistan, in the throes of profound
and potentially existence-threatening crises, has little
interest in making the kinds of concessions on J&K
that President Musharraf seemed prepared to do. That
means a grand peace deal is years away, if at all one
is possible. Mirwaiz Farooq simply does not have the
on-ground influence to bring peace, even if New Delhi
finds a means to persuade him to join in a dialogue.
The best New Delhi can do in the short term is to help
the J&K Government’s efforts to restore order —
for example, by improving Police capabilities for non-lethal
crowd control and financing interventions in the shahar-e-khaas
aimed at rebuilding its crisis-ravaged polity.
In the
longer term, political opportunities do exist. Older
people — schooled, unlike their children, in a system
of institutional politics — have been deeply uncomfortable
with the violent clashes. Politicians elected with substantial
mandates have, moreover, succeeded in resisting Islamist
radicalisation across large swathes of Kashmir. Langate,
perched between volatile Srinagar and Baramulla, has
seen no violence. Neither has Kupwara. Chief Minister
Omar Abdullah’s home district, Ganderbal, saw just six
clashes in which only one civilian was injured. In Kulgam,
Geelani’s supporters have, despite the backing of elements
of the PDP, failed to spark off any significant unrest.
For the
time being, though, there’s little doubt that the hurled
stone — and the bullet fired back in anger — will continue
to influence the vocabulary of political life for some
time to come. Kashmir’s politicians are struggling to
find a language with which to address the problem. "These
young people", said the state’s former Deputy Chief
Minister, Muzaffar Husain Beigh, last week, "they
listen to no-one".
