Politicians must take on the Islamists’ deceitful politics of
death — or risk being swept away.
Early this month, Nigeena Awan was dragged out of her home at
Kellar, Kashmir, beaten up and executed with an assault weapon
from point blank range. Her father, Mohammad Sharif Awan, was
ordered to bury his daughter without ceremony; the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen,
which carried out the execution, also warned neighbours against
dignifying her death with last rites.
Hours after Awan’s death on June 3, People’s Democratic Party
leader Mehbooba Mufti visited Shopian to stage a protest against
the alleged rape and murder of two local women — one of them,
like Awan, a high school student. She said nothing about Awan’s
execution, though. Nor did Islamist cleric Tariq Ahmad, who has
emerged as the key leader of the Shopian protests, say anything;
nor, for that matter, did the local leadership of the National
Conference. No one has called for the men who killed Awan to be
found and prosecuted. No one even bothered to visit her family,
even though the hamlet of Pahlipora at Kellar is just a 10-km
drive from Shopian.
Ever since last month’s rape-murders, the urban heartlands of
Jammu and Kashmir’s Islamist movement have been torn apart by
violence: the consequence, some claim, of widespread popular rage
against the Indian state.
But violent death has visited the Shopian area often, for the
most part without drawing comment. In April, 60-year-old Reshma
Awan, like Nigeena Awan a member of the Gujjar pastoralist community,
was executed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba at Pahlipora. Her son, Mohammad
Aslam Awan, was shot and seriously injured while attempting to
protect his mother. Last month, Dachnoo resident Mohammad Saifuddin
was killed similarly. And a day after Nigeena Awan was murdered,
unidentified men shot dead shopkeeper Mohammad Abdullah Gela at
his Sangarwani home.
What, then, is it that has vested the Shopian deaths with special
significance? The silence that surrounded Awan’s death necessitates
an examination of the complex — and often deceitful — politics
of death in Jammu and Kashmir.
“Long live Pakistan, We want freedom,” chanted the mob of young
men who, armed with shovels and axes, gathered to demolish Sabina
Hamid Bulla’s home in downtown Srinagar on May 5. Back in 2006,
as Ms Bulla’s home was being brought down, few understood its
full import. The Islamist assault on Ms Bulla, a Srinagar madam
whose brothel is alleged to have serviced top politicians, businessmen
and bureaucrats, sparked off a series of fateful events.
Even the most obtuse among the ranks of Kashmir’s Islamists understood
by 2005 that their movement had failed. Much of the secessionist
leadership was preparing to make peace with India. Large swathes
of the Islamist vanguard, the Jamaat-e-Islami, had allied themselves
with the PDP; important elements of the Hizb were preparing to
accept defeat.
Kashmir’s Islamist patriarch, Syed Ali Shah Geelani — recently
described by Hizb ul-Mujahideen chief Mohammad Yusuf Shah as “the
name of our struggle”— set about crafting a response to the crisis.
Mr. Geelani’s followers began to make the wider case that the
secularisation of culture in Kashmir constituted a civilisational
threat. In an article published in May 2006, Islamist leader Asiya
Andrabi attacked “young Muslim girls who have lost their identity
of Islam and are presenting the look of a Bollywood actress but
not Fatima and Aisha (R.A.) [Prophet Muhammad’s daughter and wife].”
Later, Islamists leveraged the uncovering of Ms Bulla’s operations
to argue that India was engaged in a conspiracy to undermine Jammu
and Kashmir’s Islamic character. Kashmir University scholar Hameeda
Nayeem even made the extraordinary accusation that the scandal
pointed “unequivocally to a policy-based state patronage [of prostitution].”
In the summer of 2007, the rape-murder of a north Kashmir teenager
was used to initiate a xenophobic mobilisation. Addressing a June
24, 2007 rally at Langate town, Mr. Geelani said: “Hundreds of
thousands of non-state subjects had been pushed into Kashmir under
a long-term plan to crush the Kashmiris.” He called for them to
be “driven out of Kashmir in a civilised way [sic.].” By early
last year, campaigns like these had almost become routine. Islamists
mobilised against a career counsellor who, they claimed, had been
despatched to Srinagar schools to seduce students into a career
of vice. An Anantnag schoolteacher 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 the town.
From these events, Islamists learnt that the conditions existed
for xenophobic politics to succeed.
Last summer, matters came to a head after the State government
granted temporary land use rights for facilitating the annual
pilgrimage to the Amarnath shrine in south Kashmir. Mr. Geelani
led the movement against the order, again claiming the existence
of a conspiracy to settle Hindus in the region. At a press conference,
he warned that the authorities were working “on an agenda of changing
the demography of the State.” “I caution my nation,” he warned,
“that if we don’t wake up in time, India and its stooges will
succeed and we will be displaced.” Mr. Geelani also held out dark
hints that a genocide of Kashmiri Muslims was being planned.
Mr. Geelani’s position stemmed from his long-standing belief that
Islam and Hinduism were locked in an irreducible civilisational
opposition. At an October 26 rally in Srinagar, he insisted that
“the people of the State should, as their religious duty, raise
their voice against India’s aggression” (emphasis added). This
duty stemmed from the fact that to “practise Islam completely
under the subjugation of India is impossible because human beings
in practice worship those whose rules they abide by.”
Mr. Geelani’s success needs to be read against the evidently inexorable
growth of the Jamaat-e-Islami from the 1950s. As scholar Yoginder
Sikand has pointed out, the Jamaat believed that “a carefully
planned Indian conspiracy was at work to destroy the Islamic identity
of the Kashmiris.” It was even alleged “that the government of
India had dispatched a team to Andalusia, headed by the Kashmiri
Pandit [politician] 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, too.”
By 1987, the social coalition drawn to this ideology had acquired
a political voice, the Muslim United Front. At a March 4, 1987
rally in Srinagar, MUF candidates, clad in the white robes of
the Muslim pious, declared variously that Islam could not survive
in India’s Hindu-majority landscape.
Now, the Shopian rape-murder — if that is what investigators eventually
determine the deaths to be — is being used as a tool to peddle
that proposition again.
Earlier this month, the pro-Islamist Kashmir High Court Bar Association
released a report claiming the “perpetrators belong to a particular
community, and had even vandalised the bodies of the victims.”
Its general secretary G.N. Shaheen added, in case anyone missed
the point, the rapes were carried out by “Hindu fascists.” Based
on dubious evidence — the HCBA report asserts that the “ill-fated
duo was raped even after their death,” a claim no pathologist
has so far felt confident of making — the report was clearly intended
to inflame.
Pro-Islamist media have been helping to ensure that the venom
spreads as far as possible. In a June 16 article, Riyaz Masoor,
editor, Rising Kashmir, suggested that the victims “represented
the nation Kashmir and the rapists represented the state of India;
it was the Hindu India raping the Muslim Kashmir.” Mr. Masroor
accused the Indian Army, which until now has not been alleged
to have played any role in the Shopian deaths, of going “on a
raping spree.” “Let them carry a poison pill with them,” he advised
the State’s women: “if, God forbid, they are caught, let them
swallow the poison and embrace death and defeat the evil military
man of the world’s largest democracy.”
The lies seem to be working. Even the United States-based MacArthur
Foundation’s Asia Security Initiative last week claimed that the
judicial commission investigating the Shopian deaths was questioning
Indian troops — a claim whose credibility must be read alongside
the bizarre assertions in the report that the Shopian victims
were sisters who grew up in an apple orchard.
Long before the Shopian tragedy presented itself as an opportunity,
Mr. Geelani had sought to provoke a confrontation on the Amarnath
Yatra. While welcoming pilgrims and tourists to Kashmir, he claimed
that a long-standing decision to allow pilgrims to visit the shrine
for more than a fortnight was “a nefarious decision of India.”
“It is destructive for our cultural fabric.”
Last year, Kashmir’s people decisively rejected Mr. Geelani’s
communal chauvinism and defeated his demand for a boycott of the
Assembly elections. The candidates they elected, though, have
so far shown little integrity or commitment to those they represent:
both the National Conference and the PDP have sought accommodation
with Islamist secessionists. They must summon up the courage to
take on Mr. Geelani — or risk being swept away by the rising tide
of hate.
