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A winter of transformation in Kashmir

“I think the agenda is pretty much set,” All Parties Hurriyat Conference chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq told an interviewer in April this year. “It is September 2007,” he went on, “that India and Pakistan are looking at in terms of announcing something on Kashmir.” Both countries “are moving towards a settlement of the Kashmir issue that might not be the first best choice for all the three parties but it could be the second best.”

Events have not quite worked out according to the Srinagar cleric’s script. Not six months ago, Jammu and Kashmir’s largest secessionist grouping hoped that it would soon be riding to power on the back of an India-Pakistan peace deal. Mirwaiz Farooq’s meetings with both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf had led the APHC to believe that both countries would vest in it the status of the principal representative of Jammu and Kashmir people.

Instead, at the onset of winter, the organisation finds itself with its back to the wall. Dr. Singh’s direct dialogue with the APHC fell apart after Mirwaiz Farooq failed to deliver on his promises to join the multiparty round-table dialogue. More important, the growing Islamist onslaught on the Pakistani state left Gen. Musharraf in no position to make the kind of political concessions the peace process demands.

Less than 12 months from now, the Jammu and Kashmir government will reach the end of its six-year term. Security considerations mean that the election will have to be held in several phases. So voting will most likely begin early in the summer, if not earlier. When spring sets in in March, political parties will set out to battle for the constituency the APHC hoped would spearhead its rise to power — the pro-secessionist and Islamist voters who have stayed away from every State election since 1987.

“The people in Kashmir are losing patience,” thundered the former Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, at an October 21 rally near Anantnag. “And if the killings of innocents continue, another 1990 rebellion cannot be ruled out.” For most part, Dr. Abdullah’s speech was indistinguishable from what secessionist leaders have often delivered. He lashed out at the continued human rights abuse in the State and at Prime Minister Singh for failing to deliver on his promise to end it. Dr. Abdullah also rubbished the empirically well-founded claim that the situation in Jammu and Kashmir was slowly improving. “Where is peace” he demanded to know. “When will the killings stop?” Behind Dr. Abdullah’s grim words lie grim realities — but not those his speech was built around.

In 2002, the National Conference floundered in the face of a successful insurgent campaign waged by the new People’s Democratic Party. The former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and his daughter, Mehbooba Mufti, reached out to the voters the National Conference had long ignored, such as the Jamaat-e-Islami’s petty bourgeois and orchard-owning supporters in southern Kashmir. Helped not a little by the Hizb ul-Mujahideen terror strikes directed at the National Conference cadre — 99 political activists were killed that year, one-third more than the casualties during even the violence-torn election of 1996 — the PDP strategy paid off.

From mid-2005, the National Conference has set about returning the favour. Its politicians have appropriated almost all the PDP’s key issues: negotiations with terrorists, dialogue with Pakistan, and the termination of human rights violations.

Startled, the PDP moved to protect its flanks. Drawing on Gen. Musharraf’s proposals, the party first called for self-rule in the State and then for its demilitarisation. On more than one occasion, the PDP threatened to pull out of the government if troops were not withdrawn.

Aware of the impact this concession would have on the Congress in both Hindu-majority Jammu and across India, Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad flatly rejected the demands. His rationale was simple: since the National Conference would ensure that the Congress-led coalition stayed in power, the PDP had nothing to gain from pulling out.

Earlier this month, Mr. Sayeed did as all wise generals must do in the face of certain defeat: he declared victory, and retreated. Speaking to party workers on October 28, the former Chief Minister said the Union Government’s decision to remove troops from the barracks located inside school and hospital buildings marked a triumph for the PDP’s calls for demilitarisation. “The mechanism put in place by the Prime Minister after our March 2007 discussions with him is an acknowledgment of the seriousness of this problem,” he said.

Still, there is little doubt that demilitarisation and self-rule will be the keystone of the PDP’s election platform next year. Will the tactic work?

Last year, in the course of bitterly fought by-elections, Ms Mufti found that appeals to Islamists were not always successful. She described terrorists as mujahideen, or holy warriors, and proudly noted that the PDP’s pen-and-inkpot symbol was the same logo used by the Muslim United Front in 1987 — the Islamist coalition the Hizb supremo, Mohammad Yusuf Shah, represented when he contested elections in 1987. And on one occasion, Ms Mufti provoked a furore, repeatedly waving at a party rally a green handkerchief, representing support for Pakistan.

Yet, the PDP was routed. Just why, then, are both the PDP and the National Conference so focussed on reaching out to the secessionist constituency? One answer lies in the decimation of the Hizb, the sole terror group with the cadre to enforce an election boycott in both north and south Kashmir. With the outfit silenced, tens of thousands of new voters could participate in the 2008 elections. Many of them, leaders of both the PDP and the National Conference believe, will be members of the long-dormant Jamaat-e-Islami.

All through the summer, the Jamaat leaders held a series of rallies in north and south Kashmir. Although the Jamaat is unlikely to participate in the elections, many believe that it — and the tens of thousands of cadre at its command — will back local candidates sympathetic to its vision of Islam.

Support from the Jamaat cadre and other new voters could reverse fortunes in several core constituencies: in Noorabad, for example, where repeated assassination attempts on the former National Conference Minister Sakeena Itoo terrorised her cadre into allowing the PDP’s Abdul Aziz Zargar to walk away with the elections; in central Kashmir areas such as Ganderbal and Tral, and in large swathes of rural north Kashmir.

Ever since 1999, when its chief Ghulam Mohammad Bhat distanced the organisation from the Hizb, the Jamaat has been in a slow process of metamorphosis. Syed Ali Shah Geelani, for long the political chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami, was expelled from the party soon after he founded the Tehreek-i-Hurriyat — the hardline secessionist coalition set up in protest against the APHC’s decision to hold negotiations with New Delhi.

In an April 2006 interview to the Srinagar-based Chattan newspaper, Jamaat chief Sheikh Ghulam Hassan called for “a sustained and meaningful dialogue” on Jammu and Kashmir, asserting that “violence was no solution to the problem.” While some Jamaat members might indeed have backed the Hizb, Mr. Hassan pointed out, members of other political parties had also done so. As an organisation, he insisted, “Jamaat-e-Islami has neither supported any form of violence nor favoured militancy.”

All of this points to the Jamaat-e-Islami in Kashmir increasingly distancing itself from its patron-counterpart in Pakistan, which has repeatedly lashed out at Gen. Musharraf for betraying the jihad.

In February, the secretary-general of the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami, Syed Munawar Hussain, claimed that Gen. Musharraf’s retreat allowed India’s Prime Minister to “dream of breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul.” “We would like to remind him that Mahmood Ghaznavi ate breakfast in Kabul, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Somnath,” Mr. Hussain said, referring to the 10th century conqueror who ransacked Sindh.

Some within Jammu and Kashmir have taken up these themes. At an October 26 rally, Mr. Geelani described the PDP and the National Conference leaders as “national criminals,” asserting that all Kashmiris had “a religious duty to raise their voice against Indian aggression.” “To practise Islam completely under the subjugation of India is impossible because human beings in practice worship those whose rules they abide by,” he said. Increasingly, though, it is clear that voters in Jammu and Kashmir are not working to the Islamists’ rules.

Last month, secessionist leaders joined hands against a children’s essay competition to commemorate Gandhi Jayanthi. Mr. Geelani claimed that the plan was designed to destroy Kashmir’s Islamic culture. In a similar vein, Dukhtaran-e-Millat chief Asiya Andrabi asserted that “when we have a role model in Prophet Mohammad, we need not follow the ideology of Mahatma Gandhi.” An APHC spokesperson too claimed that Gandhi’s philosophy posed a threat to “the religious and cultural identity of lakhs of Muslims of the State.”

In the event, tens of thousands of schoolchildren and their parents joined in the Gandhi Jayanthi events — evidence, if more was needed, that the power of Islamist polemic has faded with the decimation of the armies which spearheaded it.

Just how well politicians read the new mood, and respond to the opportunities it offers, could hold the key to their performance next year.

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