[Reader-list] "Kashmir’s rising tide of hate" - Praveen Swami

[taraprakash]

Thanks for forwarding this Kshmendra. Also thanks for keeping alive an
alternative voice to all-subsuming platitudinous nails. I, too wonder why
the human rights activists have different standards for judging state and
non-state actors.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kshmendra Kaul" <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>
To: "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 10:35 AM
Subject: [Reader-list] "Kashmir’s rising tide of hate" - Praveen Swami


> "Kashmir’s rising tide of hate"
>
>
> Praveen Swami
>
> (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.
>
> http://www.hindu.com/2009/06/17/stories/2009061755040800.htm
>
>
>
>
>
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