[Reader-list] Kashmir's new Islamist movement

[Bipin Trivedi]

Yes, separatists planned this massive protest of course with Pak help since last few months and somehow succeeded due to lack of alertness of J&K government or may be J&K govt. knowingly keep mum.

So, now it is time for tit for tat and India should plan to throw separatists out by taking some firm and fruitful steps. In this act there might be bloodbath, so that way you can tell planned bloodbath. But, now it is really time to act with iron hand without listening to any international pressure, human rights commission.

Thanks
Bipin Trivedi


-----Original Message-----
From: reader-list-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:reader-list-bounces at sarai.net] On Behalf Of Sanjay Kak
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2010 11:13 AM
To: sarai list
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Kashmir's new Islamist movement

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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