[Reader-list] [Reader-List] Amarnath Yatra: an article from the Hindu

[Kashmir Affairs]

Praveen forgot to mention the 1986 'riots' that are widely believed to be engineered by Congress under the leadership fo Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. Half a dozen temples and homes of Pandits were attacked and property ransacked. This formed the reason for the Congress to call off support to the minority Gull Shah government and thus call for new elections under Rajiv-Farooq Accord.
Murtaza Shibli

--- On Tue, 1/7/08, TaraPrakash <taraprakash at gmail.com> wrote:
From: TaraPrakash <taraprakash at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] [Reader-List] Amarnath Yatra: an article from the Hindu
To: "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date: Tuesday, 1 July, 2008, 6:12 PM

The main culprits behind the crisis in J&K are the PDP and the congress 
party. The interest of Congress in polarizing the voters in to the herds 
listening to the shepherds like Togadias and Geelanis is understandable. It 
takes away the media's focus from economy to Kashmir.

Having said the obvious I am pasting an article from Hindu on the same 
issue.

Piety, paranoia, and Kashmir’s politics of hate

Praveen Swami

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why have so many people become willing to sacrifice their lives just because 
pilgrims might be temporarily housed in land on an extent of four cricket 
stadia?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

Competitive communalism

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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