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National

Perched on Kashmir fault line, a village divided

Praveen Swami

Visions of the future compete in Chhatterhama village

Since 1993, no resident has joined the jihad but political Islam continues to influence young minds
Handloom industry is in crisis…. few people have the education or resources to face the world

SRINAGAR: “Boycott the elections,” shouted the gaggle of smiling young women who were marching down the main street of the village of Chhatterhama, “we want freedom.”

Mohammad Maqbool Beig was having none of it. “Tell that idiot daughter of yours to stop this nonsense and go make some tea,” he growled, turning to his wife, Shamima.

“It’s a plot,” Beig muttered darkly. “The National Conference people voted early in the morning,” he explained, “and now they’re egging these delinquents on so that our supporters can’t come out.”

Half-an-hour’s drive from Srinagar, Chhatterhama sits on Kashmir’s principal political fault line: the collision of the countryside, which has seen record voter turnout through the seven-phase elections to the State’s Assembly, with the secessionist movement’s urban heartland.

In June, even as Islamist-led rioters took on the police on the streets of Srinagar, Chhatterhama residents erected a shrine to two Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists from Pakistan who were killed fighting Indian troops — a gesture without precedent in Kashmir.

Hundreds of local residents had joined the summer’s protests against the grant of land-use rights to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board, and the Lashkar terrorists were celebrated by many as martyrs for their cause.

But on Tuesday, the people who chose to vote outnumbered the protesters two to one. A total of 498 of the area’s 1,893 registered voters had cast their vote before 11 a.m. — a figure that rose steadily as the day wore on.

For an Islamic state

Faded paper flowers still adorn the Lashkar shrine in Chhatterhama.

But just a few yards away, the paint has washed off the gravestone of Ali Mohammad Dar, a Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front operative killed in October 1991. Mohammad Shafi, killed two years later, also lies in an evidently neglected grave.

Since 1993, no Chhatterhama resident has joined the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir — but political Islam continues to exercise a deep influence on the minds of young people. “I’m not voting,” explains medical salesman Mehrajuddin Bhat, “because I want an Islamic state, not these corrupt politicians.”

Bhat proceeds to spell out his vision of an Islamic state. “We will live our life in accordance with the will of Allah,” he says.

He has no doubt what the will of god might be: “The boys who sneak away to drink and smoke ganja in Srinagar will be punished; men will wear a beard; the women will have to observe purdah.”

Bhat, though, doesn’t wear a beard — and none of the young women chanting pro-independence slogans on the street are veiled.

“We got the women to protest because the police won’t beat them,” he said, “but it’s wrong for them to be marching about the streets like this, without their burkhas. And the reason I shave is because I need to look modern, for my customers.” “Anyway,” he concludes, “the point is, in an Islamic state, the righteous will rule.”

Truck driver Abdul Hamid Rather agrees. “I’ve been to Delhi,” he says, “and seen all kinds of shamelessness on the streets. Kashmir will become like that, too, if we vote for these politicians.”

“Remember the sex scandal in Srinagar two years ago? That’s what India and its democracy have given us — filth and corruption.”

It isn’t hard to understand the rage that underpins these sentiments: modernity hasn’t been kind to Chhatterhama. Wages for the village’s principal occupation, shawl-weaving, stand at just Rs.50 a day, the consequence of the destruction of the handloom industry by cheap manufactures from Amritsar and Ludhiana. Few young people have either the education or resources to compete in the new world that has descended upon them.

The real issues

But political Islam isn’t the sole voice in Chhatterhama. “The real question here isn’t azaadi or India,” insists National Conference activist Ghulam Mohiuddin, “it’s why the roads are so awful, why the schools are so bad; why we don’t have a hospital.”

Sentiments like these are distant from the communal climate of the summer — but the voter turnout in Chhatterhama makes clear Islamists didn’t succeed in using the Shrine Board issue to expand their influence.

“What you saw this summer wasn’t an azaadi movement,” argues Beig, “it was a people’s movement. Even I participated in it, and I’m a Congress worker. Most of us withdrew when it became clear that secessionists were manipulating the movement to serve their ends.”

NC’s appeal

If Chhatterhama’s Islamists have a vision for the future, so does the National Conference’s Mohiuddin.

“Your MLA, Sheikh Ghulam Hassan, belongs to my party, but he’s a docile little calf,” he says.

“But now, if you support the National Conference, you will get a lion to fight for your rights — Farooq Abdullah himself.”

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