Despite saturation coverage of the protests against a commercial sex racket in Srinagar, their political content has passed unexamined.
"Long live Pakistan," chanted the hundreds of young men who, armed with axes and crowbars, had gathered to demolish Sabina Hamid Bulla's home in downtown Srinagar on May 5. "We want freedom!"
Audiences across India have watched the angry protests that broke out after the exposure of Bulla's prostitution ring unfolded live on their screens this past month: sex, scandal and sleaze in high places are, after all, beloved elements of prime-time television, and few stories offer all of these at the same time. Yet, despite saturation coverage of the protests, one remains ill-informed on their political content. Who, for one, were the protestors? Why the violence and the anti-India polemic?
Last month, residents of Srinagar complained to the police about two 30-second pornographic video clips that had been circulating through mobile phones. A 16-year old girl was then detained, who said she had been recruited by a prostitution ring run by Bulla. In an unsigned statement to the police, the girl said Bulla, to whom she is related, supplied her with drugs and cash for having sex with two State Ministers, a Border Security Force officer, 10 policemen and several well-known businessmen.
Just who these men were is still unclear. Conflicting accounts have appeared in the media, as well as anonymous pamphlets. Two police officers named in some of these accounts have been removed from command, but no legal proceedings have so far been instituted against them. Media accounts have also named two senior Congress politicians who hold positions in the government. Without corroborative evidence, though, the publication of these names would be defamatory, legal experts told Frontline.
Even if it is premature to name names, there is some evidence that Bulla's patrons wielded considerable influence. In 2004, after Bulla was arrested on prostitution-related charges, investigators faced intense pressure to suppress testimony on her clients. In the event, the case against Bulla collapsed after prosecutors failed to produce either credible witnesses or independent corroborative evidence. Business as usual resumed at Bulla's home in downtown Srinagar, to the dismay of her neighbours.
As thing stand, though, the Central Bureau of Investigation - which was, notably, given charge of the case before the protests began - has an enormous mission before it. First, it will have to persuade the girl, who was married off in April with some financial assistance from Bulla, to make a formal statement before a magistrate. Then, corroboration will have to be found to back the charges she has made - no small task, given the influence of the men who now face charges of rape.
But the young men who brought down Bulla's home did not chant slogans against rape: for them, the outrage was a means, not an end. In their construction of the events, Bulla was the vanguard of the assault by the Indian state on womanhood in Kashmir. One articulation of this position, widely held on the right, has come from the scholar Hameeda Nayeem, who in a recent article made the extraordinary claim that the evidence points "unequivocally towards a policy-based state patronage [of prostitution]".
What underpins this paranoiac understanding of events? For an answer, one must turn to the class basis of anti-India mobilisation in Jammu and Kashmir. Old-city areas like Srinagar's Ban Mohalla or Batmaloo, the catchments for the May 5 mob, are home to the city's petty bourgeoisie - to the bazaar trading class which had neither the educational skills nor capital to benefit from Jammu and Kashmir's changing post-Independence economy. Many of the men who joined the ongoing jehad came from this social group.
Soon, this class found allies in the new elites thrown up by post-Independence development. Empowered by economic growth, groups like orchard owners, large traders and elements of the legal profession or bureaucracy gained wealth and influence. However, political power was denied to them because of the peasant foundations of Kashmir's politics. Islam and tradition became weapons through which the new class alliance asserted its right to speak for all of Kashmir.
Righteousness, religion and right-wing politics frequently intersected in the course of this class' struggle for power. The 1989 protests leading up to the proscription of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses - a book which, fittingly enough, interrogates our ideas of virtue - is perhaps the best known instance. One person was killed during the rioting, and at least five dozen injured. To understand the multiple struggles contained within the protests in Srinagar, though, one must reach further into the past.
In May 1973, a student in Anantnag was appalled by an image he saw while leafing though an old encyclopaedia in a local library. Arthur Mee's Book of Knowledge depicted the Archangel Gabriel dictating the text of the Koran to Mohammad, a violation of Islamic edicts prohibiting the representation of the Prophet through graven images. When clerics in Anantnag learned of the picture, it was denounced as blasphemous. College students in Anantnag went on strike, and the protests soon spread to Srinagar.
Protestors demanded that the author of the encyclopaedia be hanged. It was "a vain demand," Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's biographer Katherine Frank wryly noted, "since Arthur Mee had died in England in 1943." The Government of India banned sales of the encyclopaedia, which was also a futile gesture since it was no longer in print. However, the protests continued, and the police eventually had to use fire to disperse the violent crowds, leading to four fatalities.
How does one account for the extraordinary outrage provoked by the Book of Knowledge? The protests need to be read against the slow but steady growth of the Jamaat-e-Islami from the 1950s onwards. As the scholar Yoginder Sikand has pointed out, the Jamaat-e-Islami had set up a wide network of schools to counteract what it believed was "an Indian onslaught in the cultural sphere" because of which "many young Kashmiris had begun to lose their Islamic moorings".
Sikand has recorded the Jamaat's belief that "a carefully planned Indian conspiracy was at work to destroy the Islamic identity of the Kashmiris, through Hinduising the school syllabus and spreading immorality and vice among the youth". It was even alleged that "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".
Then, as now, communal paranoia served a political project. Sikand cites one Jamaat-e-Islami insider as suggesting that its schools were "set up in order to lead a silent revolution, to keep alive the memory of Kashmiri independence and of India's brutal occupation of the State". To Islamists across Jammu and Kashmir, the protests against the Book of Knowledge would have signalled that, notwithstanding the defeat of Pakistan in 1971, the war against India would continue apace.
By 1987, the social coalition underpinning these mobilisations had acquired a political platform, the Muslim United Front (MUF). 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 under the authority of a secular state and that Farooq Abdullah was an agent of Hindu imperialism. MUF leaders had initiated their campaign by protesting against the sale of liquor, and laws that proscribed cow-slaughter.
Over the past several months, many mobilisations have drawn on this tradition. In February, protests broke out across much of the world over caricatures of the Prophet that were published in the Dutch newspaper Jyllands Posten. However, in Kashmir, the protests took a region-specific idiom. Protestors at the All Parties Hurriyet Conference leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq's demonstration against the cartoons, for example, chanted slogans in support of Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Writing a month before the ongoing protests in the Srinagar-based newspaper Greater Kashmir, the leader of the Islamist Dukhtaran-e-Millat, Asiya Andrabi, had wondered what would happen if "Mohammad (S.A.W.) will come to know that the Muslim youth of Kashmir are busy in vulgarity, obscenity, waywardness?" She 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.) [respectively, Mohammad's daughter and wife]."
The pious are now acting on Andrabi's call. On May 7, almost 200 seminary students, led by the cleric Mohammad Riyaz, marched in a procession demanding an end to "vulgarity, waywardness and immoral activities." The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen has issued a seven-day deadline demanding that restaurants dismantle private cabins meant for couples, while the al-Madina. Regiment, a terrorist consortium that has carried out several grenade attacks, has successfully ordered an end to cable television broadcasts.
In Jammu and Kashmir, the war against vice and the war against the Union of India have long gone together. Since 1988, Islamist terror groups have repeatedly attacked bars, stores stocking liquor, beauty parlours and movie theatres: even the supposedly-secular cadre of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front participated in these campaigns. Women have been ordered to abandon public performances, wear veils and sit apart from men on buses. Defiance has, on occasion, been punished with acid - and bullets.
Just like the rape of the 16-year old at the centre of the political storm in Srinagar, each of these stories constitutes a horrible tragedy. None of those who have protested this past week - not the men who ransacked Bulla's home, nor the erudite lawyers of the Kashmir Bar Association, which is a constituent of the Islamist faction of the APHC - has ever chosen to speak on these acts of violence. Neither, indeed, have they even once mobilised against the crimes women face each day in and outside their homes.
It is facile to attribute the protests to political opportunism or chauvinism - although both have informed the ongoing protests. Leaving aside their distinct anti-India idiom, the anxieties underpinning events in Srinagar are identical to those seen in recent controversies over sexual themes - disguised as debates over dress, culture or tradition - in States as disparate as Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh. In each of these, both the state and civil society have sought to defend womanhood from a predatory other.
"As a woman," wrote Dr. Nayeem, "I think there can be no greater disaster for a woman than to lose her chastity through coercion." Her words compel consideration of just why it is that societies from Kanyakumari to Kashmir conflate virginity with their collective honour, of which women's bodies are compelled to be repositories. What is happening in Srinagar is not at its core about vice: it is, instead, about our region's fraught relationship with modernity, and its sometimes merciless interrogation of what we hold to be sacred.
