[Reader-list] Kashmir's new Islamist movement

[Sanjay Kak]

Towards the end of his piece is Praveen Swami offering his readers a
prophecy, or a threat to the protesters in Kashmir?
Is a bloodbath being planned, I wonder, and are the trumpet bearers
alerting us in advance?
Best
Sanjay

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Aditya Raj Kaul
<kauladityaraj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kashmir's new Islamist movement*Praveen Swami, The Hindu
>
> Link* - http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article672980.ece
>
> Leaders of the protests see street violence as a crucible in which a new
> generation of jihadists is being forged.
>
> Last week, on the Monday before Eid, Mohammad Shafi Wani opened his grocery
> store in Srinagar's Karan Nagar neighbourhood. Each of his gestures —rolling
> up the shutter, dusting off the shelves, opening the long-locked cash till —
> was an act of defiance, perhaps even suicidal rashness.
>
> Kashmir's Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, the anti-India Islamist coalition spearheading
> the protests that have claimed more than 80 lives in clashes with police
> this year, had decreed that shops would remain shut until 2:00 pm; Wani had
> opened for business at mid-day. “Get lost,” a local resident recalls Wani
> saying to two young men who showed up to warn him, “I'm not having a bunch
> of kids telling me what I can do.” The boys left — but returned with
> reinforcements. Wani ended up in hospital; the police watched him being
> beaten but did nothing.
>
> Early this week, the Tehreek decreed that day would henceforth be night. It
> ordered that businesses and factories work through the hours of darkness to
> make up for the time spent protesting. Many fear that September 21, when the
> Tehreek-i-Hurriyat has called on volunteers to march on military outposts,
> will see horrific violence. That is precisely what the New Islamists seek:
> for them, Kashmir's streets are the crucible in which a new generation of
> jihadists, who will wage a this-time successful war for independence, are
> being forged.
>
> Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani's *Rudad-i-Qafas*, or ‘Records of
> Jail,' an 800-page, two-volume reflection on politics and life written while
> he was incarcerated at New Delhi, Jammu and Allahabad from 1990-1992, gives
> some insight into the ideological underpinning of the street rebellion.
>
> In a 2004 appraisal of the *Rudad-i-Qafas*, scholar Yoginder Sikand pointed
> to Mr. Geelani's concerns that the independence movement in Jammu and
> Kashmir had “actually gone out of the control of the political leadership
> and into the hands of militant youth who, though fired by a passionate sense
> of zeal, have little understanding of the problem as well as the uphill task
> of resolving it.” He argued that “the youth ought to have entered the
> movement under the leadership of a truly Islamic and honest political
> leadership.” Instead, Kashmir's young jihadists had acted “unfettered by any
> authority above them as if they have ‘sworn not to accept any political
> leadership at all'.”
>
> “They have,” he concluded, “apparently miscalculated the enormity of the
> demands of the struggle and the strength of the power they are fighting
> against, fondly imagining that their goal would be achieved in no time.”
>
> Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, in the years that followed the
> publication of the *Rudad-i-Qafas*, threw its resources behind the
> Hizb-ul-Mujahideen — led, in the main, by figures drawn from the
> Jamaat-e-Islami. But as the conflict dragged, the Jamaat sensed defeat — and
> drew back. In 1997, the then Jamaat chief G.M. Bhat called for an end to the
> “gun culture.” Three years later, dissident Hizb commander Abdul Majid Dar
> declared a unilateral ceasefire. Although the ceasefire fell apart, the
> Jamaat itself continued to marginalise Mr. Geelani. In May 2003, Jamaat
> moderates led by Bhat's successor, Syed Nasir Ahmad Kashani, retired Mr.
> Geelani as their political representative. In January 2004, the Jamaat's
> Majlis-e-Shoora, or central consultative council, went public with a
> commitment to a “democratic and constitutional struggle.”
>
> Mr. Geelani, cast out from the mainstream of the Jamaat, set about building
> a new political movement; the kind of political movement he believed had led
> to the failure of the jihad.
>
> Like others in the Jamaat-e-Islami, Mr. Geelani had long believed India
> posed an existential threat to Islam in Kashmir. In the *Rudad-e-Qafas*, he
> castigated India for its failure to hold a plebiscite on Jammu and Kashmir's
> future; its violations of the democratic process; and its use of the armed
> force after 1989-1990. But he underlined the growth of Hindu communalism
> from the mid-1980s, seeing it as an enterprise to erase Islam. Mr. Geelani
> even found evidence of this enterprise in prison: the ‘martyrdom' of Muslim
> prisoners' beards at the hands of jailers and their being refused permission
> to pray. “Cultural hegemony,” he concluded, “is a logical culmination of
> political supremacy.”
>
> From 2003, Mr. Geelani turned to a new group of lieutenants to fight India's
> growing “political supremacy”: among them lawyer Mian Abdul Qayoom,
> activists like Mehrajuddin Kalwal and Jamaat apparatchiks like Mohammad
> Ashraf Sehrai. It was Massrat Alam Bhat, however, who was to become the most
> important figure in the new Islamic coalition.
>
> Born in old-city Srinagar's Zaindar Mohalla in July 1971, Bhat studied in
> Srinagar's élite Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe school before joining the Sri
> Pratap college. He was first arrested by the Border Security Force in
> October 1990, on charges of serving as a lieutenant to the then-prominent
> jihadist Mushtaq Ahmad Bhat. He won a protracted legal battle in 1997 and
> began working at a cloth store owned by his grandfather, graduating the next
> year. From 1999, Bhat became increasingly active in the All-Parties Hurriyat
> Conference. He drew much of his core cadre from one-time jihadists who had
> been released — only to find they had neither prestige, power nor prospects.
>
> Bhat's Muslim League Jammu Kashmir's objective, its website explains,
> “besides fighting Indian aggression, is to propagate Islamic teachings to
> fight out socialism and secularism to remove *taguti* [false leaders;
> traitors] rule and to extirpate the western ideology.”
>
> Just two of the Muslim League's eight-point charter of objectives are, as
> such, concerned with the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. It seeks the
> “building up of public opinion about the issue of Jammu and Kashmir on [the]
> international front,” and promises to “organise rallies and congregations to
> achieve the right to self-determination.”
>
> But the bulk of the Muslim League's objectives centres around forging a new
> political culture. It promises to “inculcate [a] sense of religious duties,
> character building and make the youth politically conscious;” to “safeguard
> the youths against any anti-Islamic move;” “to make aware the Muslims about
> the policies and plans of the aggressors and ensure that they follow the
> path of the Quran and the Sunnah to become one entity; to resist
> “misinformation campaigns against [the] Islamic system on the part of
> various imperialistic forces;” and, more generally, “to work for the welfare
> of the people.”
>
> Now serving a life sentence for the assassination of human rights campaigner
> H.N. Wanchoo, imprisoned jihadist Muhammad Qasim Faktoo was key to shaping
> Bhat's ideological vision. Faktoo, who acquired a doctorate in Islamic
> studies while in prison, founded his religious beliefs on the teachings of
> the neo-fundamentalist Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith — not Mr. Geelani's
> Jamaat-e-Islami. Long an anti-India political activist, Faktoo was led into
> the Hizb by Mohammad Abdullah Bangroo who, many years later, presided over
> the assassination of the influential Srinagar cleric Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq
> — father of the current chairperson of the APHC, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. In
> 1990, Faktoo and Hilal Mir, better known by the code-name Nasir-ul-Islam,
> broke from the Hizb to form the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, upset with its
> linkages to the Jamaat-e-Islami.
>
> From jail, the Jammu and Kashmir Police allege, Faktoo mentored a new
> generation of jihadists. The police say he inspires two organisations — the
> al-Nasireen and the Farzandan-e-Millat — responsible for the killings of
> officers last August and September. The name al-Nasireen, a reference to the
> companions of Prophet Mohammad, is thought to draw on the *nom de guerre* of
> Faktoo's Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen co-founder. Farzandan-e-Millat, or sons of the
> nation, mirrors that of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, daughters of the nation, an
> organisation run by Faktoo's wife, Asiya Andrabi.
>
> Ms Andrabi is the youngest child of the prominent Srinagar doctor, Sayeed
> Shahabuddin Andrabi. The 1962-born Ms Andrabi has an undergraduate degree in
> biochemistry, and hoped to study further in Dalhousie. Forbidden from
> leaving home, she turned to religion. From 1982, she set up a network of
> religious schools and campaigned against obscenity in popular television
> programming.
>
> Both Bhat and Andrabi played a key role in organising protests against the
> grant of land-use rights to the Amarnath shrine board in 2008 — a
> communally-charged campaign that brought tens of thousands of people to the
> streets. The networks used then were patiently built over years, in the
> course of struggles against prostitution and alcohol-use; campaigns for the
> enforcement of social morality targeting western cultural practices; and
> human rights abuses by Indian security forces.
>
> In 1990, the *Time Magazine* carried an evocative account of the first
> uprising, the failure of which Mr. Geelani so evocatively wrote of: “‘Brave
> Kashmiris,' came the summons from loudspeakers in minarets throughout
> Srinagar, summer capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, ‘the time
> has come to lay down your lives. Come out and face the occupation forces as
> true soldiers of Islam.' By the thousands, Muslim separatists answered the
> call last week. Enraged by the detention of 400 locals accused of terrorism,
> they surged through the narrow alleys of the decrepit city, chanting ‘Indian
> dogs, go home!' and pelting the police and soldiers with stones. Security
> forces replied first with tear gas, then with rifle fire. By the week's end,
> at least 133 people had been killed, nearly doubling, to 279, the death
> count since the latest round of trouble in Kashmir began 18 months ago.”
>
> Those words could also be a prophecy of what lies ahead.
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