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

[Pawan Durani]

Hello Murtaza ,

Since you belong to the region where the 86 riots happened against Kashmiri
Hindus, i wonder how you have arrived at only "half a dozen " temples and
homes of Kashmiri Hindus being attacked.

You know the truth, which you seem to have conveniently fabricate.

Pawan


On 7/2/08, Kashmir Affairs <kashaffairs at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> 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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