State of divide

Srinagar, August 22: The gathering at Idgah maidan for Friday prayers and a rally that was addressed by leaders of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference.-NISSAR AHMAD

Competing fundamentalisms use the Amarnath land issue to push Jammu and Kashmir to the edge.

VISIBLE only through the narrow slit in the hijab, Shehzada Batloos eyes were level and strong. If there had been tears there for the son she had lost to police bullets they had dried long ago. I think all mothers should feel proud if their sons are martyred, she said of her teenage son Samir Batloo, who was shot after the mob he stood with charged a police post in Srinagars Fateh Kadal area. I believe my son will vouch for me in the hereafter, she continued, and I will be rewarded with an abode in paradise.

Across the Pir Panjal mountains, in Jammu, Kuldip Kumar Dogra committed a dramatic public suicide at the end of a speech in which he demanded land for Hindu pilgrims at Amarnath. Hindutva leaders held out Dogras death as a model for emulation and their audiences responded. Hundreds of thousands of protesters in Jammu, just as in Kashmir, have proved willing not just to die but to kill.

Ever since the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board protests broke out in June, a cult of death has flourished in both Kashmir and Jammu, fuelled by Hindutva groups and Islamists engaged in what they represent as a war for civilisational survival. The soldiers of this war the increasingly influential religious right backed by mobs numbering tens of thousands have brought the secular state to its knees.

On the morning of August 15, police personnel hoisted the national flag on the clock tower at Srinagars historic Lal Chowk, a ritual that has continued uninterrupted on Independence Day through the long jehad.

Less than two hours after the tricolour went up, though, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel at Lal Chowk were told that an Islamist-led mob was marching there with the intention of hoisting Pakistans flag on the tower. With strict orders not to fire, the CRPF pulled down the Indian flag rather than allow it to be ripped apart by the protesters. Elsewhere in the city, Islamist leaders such as Asiya Andrabi were doing just that.

Ever since last months attempted march across the Line of Control (LoC) to Muzaffarabad and the subsequent street battles that claimed 20 lives, the Jammu and Kashmir government has for all practical pruposes ceded control to Islamists in Kashmir and Hindutva groups in Jammu. Large parts of Srinagar are in the de facto control of Islamist groups, with police and CRPF personnel holding a handful of fortified pickets at major street corners. In Jammu, the police have for the most part ceded control of major highways,

Perhaps the most spectacular demonstration of how far the state has retreated came on August 18, after the Jammu and Kashmir government allowed Islamists to stage a massive pro-Pakistan protest in the heart of Srinagar. Led by the Tehreek-i-Hurriyats Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the All Parties Hurriyat Conferences (APHC) Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, tens of thousands of protesters assembled at the Tourist Reception Centre in an unprecedented show of strength, even as the police were ordered off the streets to avoid a confrontation.

Srinagar District Commissioner K. Afsandyar Khan and Senior Superintendent of Police S.A. Mujitaba were earlier despatched to negotiate on the management of the scheduled protests with Geelani a de facto acknowledgment that the Islamist leader has emerged as an alternative source of administrative authority.

Since then, Islamist protesters have been able to stage demonstrations in support of Pakistan and even the Lashkar-e-Taiba without risk of police action or prosecution. In Jammu, Hindutva polemic, including express calls for violence against Muslims, has gone unpunished. Both in Kashmir and in Jammu, mainstream political parties have been pushed off the stage by the religious Right. Leaders of both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have faced attack in Jammu from mobs that charged them with betraying the struggle for Hindu religious claims. In Kashmir, too, the National Conference (N.C.) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), both of whom endorsed the shrine movement at its outset, have been marginalised by Islamists.

What is it that drives this anger? Is it resentment against India or something more primordial? For answers, we can turn usefully to history.

There is no Hindu or Muslim question in Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah said in 1948. We do not use such language. His words were, at best, a comforting fiction.

As Jammu and Kashmir moved towards independence, both Hindu and Islamic neo-fundamentalist movements acquired strength in the region. Communal skirmishes punctuated the course of the freedom movement. In 1931, Hindu-owned businesses and homes were targeted after Dogra troops killed 28 protesters in Srinagar. More communal violence broke out in September that year.

Partition entrenched the communalisation. In Kashmir, Muslims watched with fear the large-scale communal massacres in Jammu. Sheikh Abdullah later described how deeply the experience had scarred his constituents. There isnt a single Muslim in Kapurthala, Alwar or Bharatpur, Abdullah said, noting that some of these had been Muslim-majority States. Hindus in Kashmir had their own fears fears driven by Pakistani state support for tribes engaged in a campaign of cleansing.

Freedom ought to have meant the birth of democratic institutions that could address these anxieties. Instead, the elites in both Kashmir and Jammu accelerated the communalisation process. Navnita Behera Chadha, a leading scholar of regional conflicts in Jammu and Kashmir, has noted that the States Constituent Assembly secured a clear concentration of powers in the valley through disproportionate representation.

Kashmiri elites used their new power to redress the historical grievances of their regions Muslims. However, they demonstrated little regard for competing claims from Ladakh and Jammu. For example, the National Conference worked to give Kashmiri Muslims greater representation in the States bureaucracy. However, they marginalised Hindu Dogras, Muslim Gujjars, and Ladakh residents of both religions.

Five years after Independence, the Jana Singh-linked Praja Parishad launched an agitation against Sheikh Abdullahs policies. Its leaders an alliance of landlords and business elites angered by the redistribution of their assets called for the abrogation of Article 370, the removal of Dogra imperial laws that allowed only state subjects to purchase land, and the full application of the Indian Constitution. Ek desh mein do vidhaan, do nishaan do pradhaan nahin chalengey, went the Praja Parishad slogan. (One nation cannot have two constitutions, two flags and two Prime Ministers.)

Sheikh Abdullah used the rise of the Praja Parishad to stoke communal fears in Kashmir. In one speech, he claimed the Praja Parishad was part of a project to convert India into a religious state wherein the interests of Muslims will be jeopardised. If the people of Jammu wanted a separate Dogra state, Sheikh Abdullah said, I would say with full authority on behalf of the Kashmiris that they would not at all mind this separation. Sheikh Abdullah had, tragically, transformed himself from a spokesman for all the States peoples into a representative of Kashmiri Muslims.

From 1977, the unresolved strains between Kashmir and Jammu became increasingly sharp. In order to fight off competition from the Jamaat-e-Islami, Sheikh Abdullah began to cast himself as a defender of the rights of Muslims. He attacked the Jamaats alliance with the Janata Party whose hands were still red with the blood of Muslims. The N.C. leaders administered oaths to their cadre on the Quran and a piece of rock salt, a popular symbol of Pakistan. Abdullahs lieutenant, Mirza Afzal Beg, promised voters that he would open the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road to traffic. It paid off: the N.C. was decimated in the Hindu-majority constituencies of Jammu but won all 42 seats in Kashmir.

Politicians had learned from this experience and employed similar tactics in the 1983 elections. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi conducted an incendiary campaign in Jammu, built around the claim that the discrimination the region faced was because it was part of Hindu India. Across the Pir Panjal, Farooq Abdullah and his new found ally, Maulvi Mohammad Farooq, Mirwaiz Umar Farooqs father, let it be known that they were defending Kashmirs Muslim identity.

Matters went from bad to worse. At a March 1987 rally in Srinagar, Muslim United Front (MUF) candidates, clad in the white robes of the pious, declared that Islam could not survive under the authority of a secular state. Leaders of the MUF built their campaign around issues such as the sale of liquor and laws that proscribed cow slaughter, which were cast as threats to the authentic Muslim character of Kashmir.

Jammu and Kashmirs two-decade-old Islamist war sharpened the pace of communal polarisation within the State. Although Muslims in Kashmir were the principal victims of a jehad fought in their name, few politicians in the region proved willing to confront the Islamists head-on. Hindutva groups in Jammu adroitly leveraged the situation to cast the conflict in the State as a Hindu-Muslim contestation.

In both Jammu and Ladakh, the shrine war has strengthened the forces that want the State divided on religious lines a dramatic reversal of the situation in 2002, when the Jammu State Morcha, which called for such a division, was decimated. Islamists in Kashmir, too, have made it clear that they see partition and the incorporation of the Muslim-majority areas north of the Chenab River into Pakistan as the only way out of the crisis.

Partition plans for Jammu and Kashmir are not new. In 1950, even as India and Pakistan were struggling to emerge from the communal holocaust that had claimed between half a million and one million lives, the United Nations-appointed mediator on Jammu and Kashmir, Owen Dixon, suggested that a solution to the conflict might lie in replicating the logic of partition.

Dixons plan was, at the time, rejected in both India and Pakistan. However, the iniquitous structure of State politics gave it continued life. Former Sadr-i-Riyasat Karan Singh was among those who put out variants of the proposal; on one occasion advocating the merger of Jammu with Himachal Pradesh, and turning Kashmir into a separate Muslim-majority State. Secessionists such as Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Peoples Conference leader Sajjad Gani Lone, Hindutva groups and the Pakistani state have all propagated variants on this theme since.

In 1999, the N.C. issued a blueprint for a partition. On the basis of proposals made by a committee in which opposition groups, religious minorities and the Jammu region were unrepresented, the State government advocated the creation of six new provinces. The Muslim-majority districts of Rajouri and Poonch were to be carved out from the Jammu region and recast as a new Pir Panjal province. Udhampur districts only Muslim-majority tehsil, Mahore, was to form part of Chenab province, while the rest of the district was to be incorporated into Jammu. Even the single districts of Buddhist-majority Leh and Muslim-majority Kargil were to become separate provinces.

Later, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) threw its weight behind Hindu chauvinist groups in Jammu, which had revived the movement for the division of Jammu and Kashmir into three States on ethnic-religious lines.

Now, the project has ripened. In Kashmir, Islamists have argued that the violence in Jammu amplified by the publication of fictitious accounts of large-scale killings of Muslims and the destruction of mosques is the true face of India. Muslims, they claim, have no future.

Hindus in Jammu, for their part, have been told that the expulsion of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley is a precursor to their eventual fate at the hands of the States Muslim leadership. Faked statistics have been used to claim that the Muslim-dominated Jammu and Kashmir government denies Hindus representation.

Politicians in Kashmir and Jammu have done little to try and dam this rising tide of hate. Where Hindutva and Islamist groups have held dozens of protests, not one major political group has held peace rallies. No effort has been made, either, to build institutions that cut across social fissures. Kashmir and Jammu have separate bar associations, chambers of commerce, professional guilds of doctors and engineers, and even press associations. For all practical purposes, residents of the two regions are social strangers, tied to each other by nothing but business and hate. None of this ought to be a surprise. Islamists have long been working to undermine the legitimacy of the secular-nationalist project in Jammu and Kashmir and with it the keystones of the States incorporation into the Indian Union.

In 2006, Islamists leveraged the uncovering of a prostitution racket in Srinagar to argue that secularism and modernity were media through which the Islamic cultural climate of Jammu and Kashmir was being undermined.

Later, the rape-murder of teenager Tabinda Gani was used to initiate a xenophobic campaign against the presence of non-ethnic Kashmiri workers in the State. Just as the Shrine Board protests in Kashmir began in June this year, Geelani asserted that the State government, in collaboration with New Delhi, wants to settle outsiders permanently in Kashmir to turn the Muslim majority into a minority. Soon after, the Lashkar-e-Taiba bombed a bus carrying migrant workers a grim reminder of just what kind of nation Geelani hopes will emerge from the struggle now under way in Kashmir.

Jammu, too, has seen a significant chauvinist mobilisation, feeding off the Islamist campaign in the north. Soon after the PDP-Congress alliance government came to power, this new Hindutva leadership unleashed its first mass mobilisations. Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders claimed that former Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeeds calls for demilitarisation and self-rule were existential threats. Pointing to the expulsion of Pandits from Kashmir at the outset of the jehad, Hindutva leaders claimed that Sayeed was preparing the ground for the expulsion of Hindus and Hinduism from Jammu.

From 2003, Hindutva groups sought to forge these anxieties into a concrete political mobilisation around the issue of cattle slaughter. Hindutva cadre would often interdict trucks carrying cattle, and then use their capture to stage protests.

It was not as if the anti-cow slaughter movement had stumbled on a great secret. For decades, cow-owning farmers in the main Hindus themselves had sold livestock that no longer earned them an income to traders from Punjab and Rajasthan. In turn, the traders sold their herds at Indias eastern border to cattle traffickers who fed the demand for meat among the poor of Bangladesh. But Hindutva groups understood that the cow was a potent and politically profitable metaphor.

Violence followed. In December, 2007, for example, VHP and Bajrang Dal cadre organised large-scale protests against the reported sacrificial slaughter of cows at the villages of Bali Charna, in the Satwari area of Jammu, and Chilog, near Kathua districts Bani town. Riots had also taken place in the villages around Jammus Pargwal area in March 2005 after Hindutva activists made bizarre claims that a cow had been raped.

In 1947, Mahatma Gandhi had seen in Kashmir a ray of hope in the darkness. In the midst of this apparently permanent eclipse, Jammu and Kashmir desperately needs leaders who can point its people in a direction where they might see it.