Inhuman sacrifices

Islamists have harvested the public outrage against the Srinagar sex scandal.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in Srinagar

"YOU must make you knife sharp and you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter," wrote Muhammad Atta to the men of the September 11, 2001 death squads that bombed New York and Washington D.C.

On July 3, the Lashkar-e-Taiba tried terrorist-turned-informer Tanzim Ahmad for treason. No accounts of the proceedings, which took place in the forests above the frontier town of Mendhar, are available. Medical examiners, however, have surmised on the punishment delivered: Ahmad's ears were cut off, his eyes gouged out and his testicles severed before someone was kind enough to slit his throat.

Since April, people across India have been transfixed by the unfolding prostitution racket in Srinagar. Two former Ministers, the Congress' Ghulam Ahmad Mir and independent Raman Mattoo, top bureaucrat Iqbal Khanday and K.S. Padhi, decorated Deputy Inspector-General of the Border Security Force, are among the 15 men and women so far arrested on charges that range from the rape of a minor to demanding sex in return for official favours.

But few paused to examine the prospect that what has been hailed - with good reason - as a triumph for justice might also mark the dawn of the Lashkar's civilisational vision for Jammu and Kashmir. Unnoticed, the fallout from the scandal has seen the Kashmir's High Court Bar Association (KBA) passed a resolution prohibiting its members from defending those arrested on charges of having had a role in the racket - an action almost without precedent in Indian legal history.

As a consequence of the controversial - and in the view of several jurists, illegal - KBA resolution, several of the accused have had no legal representation at successive bail hearings. On July 8, nine of the accused were even brought to the court of Srinagar Chief Judicial Magistrate M.Y. Akhoon in handcuffs, in contravention of the Supreme Court orders on the treatment of prisoners. It transpired that none had even been presented with copies of the charges against them.

Advocates who have chosen to defy the KBA resolution have faced unsubtle coercion. Maulvi Aijaz, a Srinagar advocate who represented one of the accused at the June 23 bail hearing, withdrew after he was abused and insulted by the supporters of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat an Islamist women's group, outside the court. Sunil Sethi, a Jammu-based lawyer who travelled to Srinagar to defend former Additional Advocate-General Anil Sethi, was threatened at gunpoint.

Since June 29, the Jammu Bar Association has responded to the threat against Sunil Sethi by going on strike, arguing that the prostitution-ring accused simply cannot receive a fair trial in Srinagar. Lawyers in other parts of Jammu province, including Mendhar and Samba, have joined them. Given the sometimes-fraught state of relations between Jammu and Kashmir's major regions, the lawyers' action holds out the possibility of causing a wider communal conflagration.

What about the Srinagar prostitution case - a scandal not dissimilar to outrages that have surfaced in Jammu and Dehradun - has brought about this extraordinary situation? And just why is it that we ought to be concerned about the rights of people charged with trafficking in women and rape? For answers, we must examine the ways in which the prostitution scandal has enabled Islamists to gain ground in Jammu and Kashmir - and the ugly world they hope to construct.

From as early as 2002, the Jammu and Kashmir Police began investigating Srinagar-based madam Sabina Bulla, concerned at the prospect that her high-profile clients might become vulnerable to blackmail. Later, in 2004, Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Saeed received warning from Jammu and Kashmir Police's intelligence chief Ashok Bhan that two television channels had been approached by a National Conference leader to conduct a sting targeting Ministers who were among Bulla's patrons.

Bulla was promptly arrested along with several of her associates, but the prosecution went nowhere. With the aid of her influential clients, and the fact that there was little real evidence of the charges the police had brought, Bulla was soon back in business. However, this March, a pornographic video-clip involving Y, a minor who worked at Bulla's brothel, began to circulate from cellphone to cellphone in Srinagar. Outraged city residents who recognised the teenager complained to the police.

Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad sensed an opportunity to demonstrate the credentials of the new government. His detractors charge that he also hoped to rid himself of Mir, a long-standing associate of Congress leader Satish Sharma who made no secret of his ambitions. The case was referred to the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI). Meanwhile, in response to a KBA petition alleging that a cover-up was under way, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court began direct supervision of the investigation.

If nothing else, the arrests that have followed demonstrate that the system does indeed work - at least sometimes. After all, an elected Chief Minister turned over investigations to a Central government agency that in turn demonstrated its professional resolve by arresting high-profile suspects. But Islamist groups in old-city Srinagar - a long-standing stronghold of the religious Right - sensed that the widespread outrage generated by the scandal contained within it political fruits ripe for the picking.

Under the patronage of Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Dukhtaran-e-Millat leader Asiya Andrabi unleashed street protests across Srinagar. KBA president Abdul Qayoom, who is affiliated to Geelani's hardline Hizb-ul-Mujahideen-backed Tehreek-i-Hurriyat, led a parallel battle in the courts. In the absence of other voices, Islamists and terrorist groups were able to reclaim centre-stage by representing themselves as the sole guardians of Kashmir's religious and cultural order.

Politicians such as Andrabi and Geelani contend that the prostitution scandal is enmeshed intimately with the secular Indian state's larger agenda in Jammu and Kashmir - the obliteration, the religious Right has argued from as early as the 1950s, of Islam itself. A press release issued by the KBA on June 25 said: "The sexual exploitation of Kashmiri girls is a conspiracy hatched by India and its collaborators in Kashmir to harm our moral values and ethos."

In this narrative, the prostitution scandal is just part of a long history of assaults on Kashmir's identity, vested in the bodies of women. Writing in the Srinagar-based Greater Kashmir, commentator Z.G. Muhammad argued that "the Kashmiri woman has [long] been a victim of lust and lasciviousness of the evil eyes of marauders". "History is replete with instances from the days of Mongol desperado Zulju," wrote Muhammad approvingly, "about [sic.] women drowning themselves in Jhelum to save their chastity and honour."

For Islamists, the prostitution scandal is in fact an opportunity to recover this culture of "honour". In a recent article, Srinagar-based columnist Nisar Patigaroo argued that prostitution was facilitated by the "leniency that the parents have given to their children, particularly females". This had, he claimed, led to "waywardness amongst boys and girls who throng the public parks, [use] the modern gadgets viz. mobile telephones, Internet and [watch] obscene scenes on TV".

Terrorist groups have long shared the same sentiments. Since 1990, there have been dozens of violent attacks on cable television operators, bars, movie theatres, beauty parlours, women who have rejected the veil or choose to wear trousers and Internet facilities. Now, armed with the fallout from the prostitution scandal, Islamist political groups have succeeded in vesting their long-standing rejection of modernity with moral legitimacy - without firing a single shot.

Part of the reason for the religious Right's triumph lies in the culture of silence that has enveloped secular mainstream parties. At least two prominent politicians - Deputy Chief Minister Muzaffar Beig and National Conference president Omar Abdullah - have expressed concern at the scandal's fallout, pointing to the need to respect the rights of both victims and the accused.

No major party, though, has proved willing to mobilise people around an ethical vision distinct from that of the Islamists.

It is not as if opportunities to critique the Islamist position on the prostitution scandal are wanting. The Islamist concern for women's honour does not, for example, appear to extend to condemning the July 8 grenade attack on Sakeena Itoo Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) representing Noorabad, in which five unarmed National Conference cadre were killed and 42 injured. Nor was Geelani evidently exercised by the February murder of 26-year-old Tasleen Akhtar for the crime of refusing to marry the local Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander.

Large-scale killings of Muslims, in whose name the jehad is being fought, continue with depressing regularity. Just in June, a seven-member Lashkar squad targeted the village of Nehoch-Dunga to punish hostile villagers. The terrorists beheaded 65-year-old Abdul Ahad, and then cut off the noses and ears of Roshan Din and Ghulam Rasool. Six other villagers, including Ahad's elderly wife, received a brutal beating that led to their hospitalisation.

However, politicians who had competed to express their outrage after the killings of 13 Hindus in the same area in April remained silent on this hideous violence, as did civil rights groups and much of the media. The Chief Minister, who chose not to attend the last rites of the nine Nepali labourers massacred by the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen at Kulgam in June, displayed similar indifference to the victims at Nehoch-Dunga. Tanzim Ahmad's family did not even merit a visit from district officials or their local MLA. Other silences, though, also need to be interrogated, most notably that of the KBA itself. None of its members, significantly, has ever called for the investigation of the killings of thousands of victims of terror to be fast-tracked, or for special courts to try the perpetrators. Nor has there been a single voice from its ranks expressing outrage at the well-documented killing, maiming and rape of several hundred women by Islamist terror groups since 1990.

What can be done now? Judicial authorities, for one, must intervene to bring law to order. Experts say the KBA's demolition of judicial due process could compel appellate courts to conduct the trials outside the State. Legal representation, after all, cannot be the privilege of only well-off defendants who can afford to fly in counsel from New Delhi or elsewhere. But transferring the cases will delight Islamists, who will claim that an outcome they precipitated is in fact a plot intended to protect the accused.

Politicians, too, need to wake up - and not just those who sit in Srinagar. Bharatiya Janata Party State president Nirmal Singh's public support of Andrabi demonstrates the organic unities of all religious fundamentalists, if indeed further proof was needed of this proposition.

Lawyers in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh, have denied legal counsel - to alleged terrorists, a mirror-image of events in Srinagar which makes clear that the religious Right has succeeded in bringing the rule of law under siege nationwide.

Finally, someone needs to speak out for Y. herself, the woman in whose name the Islamist campaign is being fought. Held in protective custody to prevent her testimony from being influenced, Y. has had no access to either professional psychological support or legal counsel - an appalling violation of both principle and common-sense practice.

Her life, like that of Ahmad, has been sacrificed to serve other people's ends; her rights slaughtered with a none-too-sharp knife.