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Piety, paranoia, and Kashmir’s politics of hate

Back in 1912, Maqbool Shah Kraalwari published the Greeznama, an extended lament about the irreligious character of the Kashmiri peasantry:

“They regard the mosque and the temple as equal,

seeing no difference between muddy puddles and the ocean,

They know not the sacred, honourable or the respectable.”

Less than a century on, the landscape Kraalwari described has disappeared. For the past fortnight, Jammu and Kashmir has been scorched by communal conflagration of a scale and intensity that have taken many by surprise. Hundreds have been injured; four people have died.

Although Islamist-led mob violence has often been seen in recent years — the 2006 protests against a prostitution scandal and last summer’s attacks on couples in Srinagar are cases in point — the dispute over permission granted to Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board (SASB) to build temporary accommodation for pilgrims on 39.88 hectares of forest land brought more people on to the streets than at any point since the early years of Jammu and Kashmir’s long jihad.

For the most part, commentators have cast the conflict as the outcome of the former Governor S.K. Sinha’s aggressive advocacy of Hindu chauvinist interests, the search of the secessionist for an emotive cause, and the opportunism of major political parties. All these explanations are correct. None of them, though, fully explains why so many have become willing to sacrifice their lives just because pilgrims might temporarily be housed on land just large enough to accommodate four cricket stadia.

“It is like worship,” Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani recently said of the anti-India political campaign he leads, “like the recitation of the Kalima [profession of faith], like the offering of namaz, like the paying of Zakat [charity], like the performance of Haj.”

For Mr. Geelani and his Tehreek-i-Hurriyat, the anti-Shrine Board protests are a crucible in which piety and xenophobic paranoia can be forged into a programme of resistance to India. At a June 23 meeting in Srinagar, Mr. Geelani explained the importance of the SASB issue. He charged General Sinha with working to “alter the demographic character of our State.” “I caution my nation that if we do not wake up now, India and its stooges will succeed and we will lose our land forever.”

Evidence of the threat, Mr. Geelani told a rally earlier on June 20, was abundant. He pointed to recent cases of sexual violence and kidnapping of children. “Such crimes were unheard of in the Valley but the day the number of outsiders increased, the crime rate here also went up.” Moreover, Mr. Geelani said, outsiders were “promoting their own polytheistic culture” in alliance with the Indian state. Asking Kashmir residents to neither employ nor provide accommodation to outsiders, he asked migrant workers to “leave Kashmir peacefully.”

Mr. Geelani’s rantings — none of which would have been unfamiliar to Hindutva leaders in Maharashtra — were of a piece with Kashmiri Islamists’ long-standing xenophobia. In the decades after independence, scholar Yoginder Sikand tells us, Jamaat-e-Islami 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 State Home Minister] D.P. Dhar, to investigate how Islam was driven out of Spain and to suggest measures as to how ish 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 archangel Gabriel dictating the Koran to Prophet Muhammed — an image that, in some readings of Islam, is blasphemous. Protesters 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 the sale of the out-of-print book, but four died in rioting.

Politicians often drank at these communal 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. MUF leaders built their campaign around protesting the sale of liquor and laws that proscribed cow slaughter — represented as threats to the authentic Muslim character of Kashmir.

Fears of religious-ethnic annihilation have again surfaced. Writing in the Srinagar-based Rising Kashmir, Khalid Wasim Hassan asserted that “India is now openly following a policy aimed at changing the demography of Kashmir.” India hoped that “settling non-State subjects is going to have its impact on the discourse of the self-determination movement and the end result of [an eventual] plebiscite [sic.]”. Islamists aren’t the only ones advancing such arguments. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Rasool Kar, writing in the Urdu-language Khidmat, claimed that the purpose of the land transfer was to reduce the Muslim majority to a minority.

Notably, the leadership for many of the mobs involved in the recent violence has come from local-level workers of pro-India parties, not Islamists. In Ganderbal and Anantnag, for example, the National Conference leveraged the issue to attack the People’s Democratic Party.

Few of the arguments against the land use rights granted to SASB stand on firm empirical foundations. No evidence exists, for one, to support the Islamist claim of large-scale settlement by non-State subjects. Nor is it clear just why putting up prefabricated restrooms for pilgrims will increase environmental threat.

The fact is large numbers of Kashmir residents see India as an existential threat. Part of the reason for these fears lies in a still-unfolding project to sharpen the ideological boundaries of Islam in Kashmir, which cast Hinduism as a predatory threat. In the first decades of the 20th century, Jammu and Kashmir saw the emergence of a new middle class that vied with traditional Muslim leaders for power. New forms of Islam, which privileged text over tradition, were used to legitimise their claims to speak for Kashmir’s Muslims.

One major development was the arrival in Kashmir of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, a religious order that was set up by the followers of Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly. Ahmad died at Balakote, now 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 new book Partisans of Allah, still fires the imagination of a number of Muslims in South Asia. Ahl-e-Hadith ideologues like clerics Siddiq Hasan Khan and Nazir Husain rejected the accommodation Islam in India had made with its environment.

Sayyed Hussain Shah Batku, a Delhi seminary student who carried the Ahl-e-Hadis message to Kashmir in 1925, denounced the key practices of mainstream Islam in the State such as worship of shrines and veneration of relics. Along with his followers, Anwar Shah Shopiani, Ghulam Nabi Mubaraki and Sabzar Khan, Batku attacked traditionalists for following practices tainted by their Hindu heritage like the recitation of litanies before namaz. 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 heterodox sects such as the Ahmadis 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-Hadis had enormous ideological influence. As 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.” While the reflexive media association of the Ahl-e-Hadis and terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba can be misleading — the head of the Srinagar unit of the crack counter-terrorist Special Operations Group is also an adherent — there is little doubt that the vision of Islam it propagated prepared the ground for the rise of the Jamaat-e-Islami and modern jihadists.

Hindutva helped the Islamist project along. Decades of pogroms — most recently in Gujarat — gave credence to claims that Muslims are not safe in India. Kashmiri Muslim students and businessmen often encounter discrimination, which has made them acutely conscious of the variance between the promise and practice of India’s secularism. Many of those fighting on Srinagar’s streets have been wearing jeans and sporting sunglasses: middle-class young people who venerate capitalism, but have found in Islamism a medium for their rage at being denied entry at the gates to the earthly paradise it promises.

On a visit to New Delhi soon after Independence, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah candidly underlined the relationship between politics in Kashmir and Indian communalism. “There isn’t a single Muslim in Kapurthala, Alwar or Bharatpur,” he said, noting that “some of these had been Muslim-majority States.” Kashmiri Muslims, he concluded, “are afraid that the same fate lies ahead for them as well.”

When Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Praveen Togadia threatens to cut off food supplies to Kashmir in reprisal for the Shrine Board agitation, it is this fear he feeds. In coming weeks, efforts to arrive at a political compromise on the Shrine Board issue may help still the violence. Whatever arrangement is arrived at, though, will do little to bridge the deepening fault-lines between Kashmir and India and between Hindus and Muslims. In and outside of Kashmir, this will serve communalists well. While Mr. Geelani and Mr. Togadia may be enemies, the fact is they are enemies with the same cause.

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