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Behind the silver lining, the storm clouds

Praveen Swami

As the peace process proceeds ahead, the unchecked growth of the religious Right raises disturbing questions about Jammu and Kashmir's future.

EARLY THIS month, three young couples were dragged out of a Srinagar restaurant and beaten in full public view. None, by the accounts of eyewitnesses, was doing anything more offensive to public morals than having a quiet lunch. According to reports in the Srinagar press, a mob began to gather after Friday prayers at the nearby Iqra Mosque incensed by reports that the restaurant was being used for "immoral activities." The police made no effort to intervene at this stage, or to rescue the couple. The restaurant itself was vandalised, after which the mob set a car on fire before finally proceeding to fight a pitched battle with riot police.

Focussed as New Delhi is on the silver lining in Jammu and Kashmir — the steady decline in terrorist violence and the sustained India-Pakistan dialogue — there is a real danger of losing sight of the massed storm clouds. Recent months have seen the steady rise of organisations seeking to impose reactionary moral codes on society — a struggle, as they see it, against the social corruption India and the west are together seeking to bring about in Jammu and Kashmir.

Weeks before the restaurant riot, members of Asiya Andrabi's organisations — the Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the Faith) and the Forum Against Social Evils (FASE) — staged demonstrations against Valentine's Day celebrations in Srinagar. "See, all the lights in the restaurant have been deliberately switched off for these couples," Ms. Andrabi was reported to have shouted at a restaurant in Lambert Lane, before proceeding to demand that couples there produce identification. Some, the Srinagar newspaper Greater Kashmir approvingly recorded, were given "a sound thrashing."

Set up in the wake of a 2006 sex scandal, FASE drew its early legitimacy from reports that top politicians and bureaucrats were involved in a brothel being run in Srinagar. However, detectives of the Central Bureau of Investigation have discovered that the evidence that led them — with some nudging by the Jammu and Kashmir High Court — to arrest several suspects is in fact less than compelling. At least one of those the CBI arrested, the former Kashmir Divisional Commissioner, Iqbal Khanday, has been reinstated in government service.

For Islamists, both the scandal and the unravelling of the much-hyped investigation have been a gift. Leaders of the religious Right have been candid from the outset that their `war against immorality' is, in fact, a political enterprise. At the June 4, 2006, rally at which FASE was founded, Ms. Andrabi charged that the Union Government had given orders for "its leaders to supply girls to them." "Our daughters," she said, "are being given sedatives and exploited. It is a part of the illegal occupation by India of Kashmir."

Mian Abdul Qayoom, head of the Kashmir Bar Association and a leading figure in FASE, was even more explicit. "Behind the scandal," he said of last year's prostitution furore, "there is government and armed forces. Everything is state sponsored. They have pushed our daughters into the scandal."

Mr. Qayoom argued that the "conspiracy was hatched so that we can't talk of azaadi [independence] and Islam. So it needs a political struggle and there has to be a political will to fight the conspiracy and save our daughters."

The Jammu and Kashmir government has shown little willingness to defend the law against the religious Right. In February 2005, for example, the State police proscribed distribution of the magazine India Today, after violent groups of demonstrators in downtown Srinagar protested against a graphical representation of vote-bank politics in India. Among other images, the graphic used a photograph of Makkah on a pack of cards intended to show competing `Aces' in the hands of political parties. Instead of using the legal process to determine whether the magazine contained inflammatory content, the police turned to religious scholars.

Hindu fundamentalist organisations in Jammu, although less well-armed and organised than their Islamist counterparts in Kashmir, have acquired a similar licence for vigilante activity. In June, Shiv Sena cadre attacked and disrupted a meeting organised by the Islamist leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani. While the police stepped in after fighting broke out, no effort appears to have been made to defend Mr. Geelani's right to speak his mind. Soon after, the Lashkar-e-Taiba executed a retaliatory grenade strike in Jammu, killing one person and injuring 31.

Ladakh, for its part, has been allowed to degenerate into an enclave dominated by Buddhist chauvinist forces. Successive governments in Jammu and Kashmir have avoided posting Kashmiri Muslim police officers and bureaucrats in the area — a decision which, on the one hand, panders to the reluctance of civil servants to serve in the harsh region and, on the other, gives religious fanatics a veto over governance.

Put simply, the Statewide growth of the religious Right has demanded that the Jammu and Kashmir government make distinctions between respecting public desires and rejecting communal claims. It has failed.

Re-examining the problem

But why should the activities of fringe extremists like Ms. Andrabi worry us? After all, the actions of organisations like FASE are not new. Terrorists have shot women who refused to wear the veil, killed cable-television operators who broadcast music and Hindi films, and attacked liquor stores.

One important reason is the shifting religious-ideological landscape of the State — a long running process that could be reaching its climax. The syncretic Islam of Jammu and Kashmir — described by historian F.M. Hasnain as Rishut, the traditions of the Rishi saints — has been increasingly displaced by neoconservative belief systems.

Many scholarly and journalistic accounts suggest that Deobandi Islam, which sees traditional Kashmiri Muslim practices like the veneration of relics and worship at the mausoleums of saints as heresies, is now the dominant faith among people in towns and cities. Groups such as the Tablighi Jamaat and the Jamaat-e-Islami wield considerable influence in rural areas, particularly among the youth. Other neoconservative sects such as the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith, from which the Lashkar-e-Taiba draws its ideological beliefs, claim over a million adherents in Jammu and Kashmir.

In November 2006, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen terrorists bombed a religious gathering led by Abdul Rashid Dawoodi, a religious leader from the syncretic Barelvi sect. Dawoodi had taken on the Deoband order in southern Kashmir with considerable success, a fact that evidently attracted the Jamaat-e-Islami-affiliated terror group's wrath. Earlier, Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists attempted to assassinate the north Kashmir-based Sufi mystic, Ahad Ba'b Sopori. With such support from terrorist groups, organisations like the Dukhtaran-e-Millat and FASE could well emerge as the mainstream in the not-too-distant future.

Politicians in Jammu and Kashmir often refer to the need to reach out to a something that is variously described as the "Kashmiri sentiment" or "secessionist sentiment." Precisely what this sentiment comprises has never been spelt out, but it is variously claimed to consist of a deep sense of alienation from and resentment against India, anger over human rights abuse, religious anxieties, and economic frustration.

Whatever the truth, this somewhat ineffable construct has had a profound impact on Indian policy-making, both during the National Democratic Alliance government and now under United Progressive Alliance rule. Underlying policy-making has been the assumption that winning over the "secessionist sentiment" is integral to peacemaking — to the larger project of stripping Islamist terrorist groups of the ideological legitimacy they enjoy among the religious Right in the State.

Little dispute exists that this process of reaching out has shown results of real value. Under Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the PDP was able to adroitly appropriate the political-religious concerns and anxieties traditionally used by Islamist parties. As a result, it was able to win over some part of the support base of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and the Lashkar. Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, for his part, has sought to expand these gains by responding to public grievances through the state apparatus.

But this process of democratisation has come at a price: the growing legitimisation and influence of the religious Right. In the absence of a political voice with a coherent vision of a secular and progressive Jammu and Kashmir, what passes for public sentiment is for the most part the voice of communal politicians. Perhaps the problem is that Indian policy-making has ducked a core question: just what is the problem that the peace process is intended to solve?

For New Delhi, both improved counter-terrorism operations and the dialogue with Pakistan have been means to contain terrorism, perhaps the most damaging manifestation of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. While this is understandable, there has been little effort to engage with the larger crisis of culture and identity that Jammu and Kashmir, like the rest of India, has been grappling with since the late 19th century. As neoconservative Islam gathers strength in Kashmir, it will most likely find itself in direct conflict with similar tendencies among Hindus in Jammu and Buddhists in Leh.

Perhaps the time has come, as the peace process pushes forward, for politicians to move beyond the mechanics needed to bring about an end to violence and consider just what kind of Jammu and Kashmir they hope to construct.

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