Cloaks and daggers

Rajouri witnesses Taliban-type terror as the Islamic Right launches its burkha campaign.

in RajouriBeloved brothers of Hasiyot:

We have left our country to fight for your freedom. But still you people feel no sense of gratitude. We urge you to stop helping the Kafirs (unbelievers). After this, no one who does so will be spared. He who helps a Kafir is also a Kafir. If you still do not pay heed, Allah has give his soldiers enough strength to finish you as well as the Kafirs.

posted by the al-Badr Mujahideen, Hasiyot Mosque, Rajouri, December 17, 2002.

IN late November, the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami put up posters in the village of Darhal, demanding that women students and teachers start wearing the all-enveloping burkhas. Those who defied the ban, they warned, would have their noses cut off. Later that month, a second warning was issued, this time demanding in addition that men teaching at the school wear white salwar-kameez suits. While most people in the village were terrified, local school-uniform tailor Mohammad Rafiq believed he had been granted a god-given opportunity to prosper. Demand pushed up prices for basic versions of the five-metre dress from Rs.175 to almost Rs.1,000, while better quality imports from Jammu sold for twice as much. Then, the local Army unit stepped in, and told Rafiq to stop black-marketing burkhas. Today, Rafiq's business has collapsed: his customers, mostly poor farmers, just are not sure which choice of uniform to spend their meagre resources on.

Darhal's encounter with Taliban-style terror began with a local spat. When troops were first deployed in the area, they occupied part of the main higher secondary school building. In order to compensate students for the space, the Army put up tented accommodation, as well as a tin building. The school's laboratory facilities remained available to the students, but soldiers used the other half of the main building. Parents lobbied hard to get the whole building back, scared mainly of the consequences of a terrorist assault on the troops, a demand the Army accepted in rpincile but did not act on. Then, in early November, an apparently unrelated fracas broke out. A group of women students out on a picnic near Kotranka were, depending on who one chooses to believe, either harassed by teenage boys from Darhal, or seen dancing to film music with them. Their teachers, predictably enough, complained. The conservative rural community was scandalised, but sorted out the problem quietly by calling in the boys concerned for a telling-off.

A window of opportunity had, however, opened for the soldiers of the Islamic Right. They now claimed the affair was the result of the corrupting influence of immoral dress, combined with the close proximity of young Army soldiers. The local commander of the Harkat, Sajjad Afghani, is believed to have arrived in the area recently from Pakistan, and is thought to harbour far-Right views. After the first posters appeared in Darhal, the Army also dug its heels in. While they could not stop anyone from wearing a burkha if they chose, officers told the community, those who exercised the option would be stopped at the school gates and searched. Many villagers found the idea of such searches humiliating. At present, women are not even ordered off buses during routine inspections of buses by police personnel and troops.

Meanwhile, a second and third set of posters were put up starting December 2, each imposing a fresh deadline for adoption of the burkha, and warning of a variety of punishments ranging from mutilation to death.

No one in Darhal doubts that the Harkat's threats are credible. "Several families who continued to send their daughters to school," says village headman Hadi Noor, "received beatings from the terrorists. Their girls' uniforms and books were burned, and the terrorists warned that their noses and ears would be cut off if they continued to offend." For the most part, Darhal parents solved their dilemma by simply pulling 11th and 12th standard girl students out of the local government higher secondary school. The 80-odd girls who study there were not able sit for the recent examinations because of the threats, and no alternative arrangements have been made by the State government to enable them to write the examinations. Things are not quite as bad in Rajouri, but similar posters put up in the district's main town have worried parents. On December 13, the Harkat-ul-Jabbar, an unknown organisation until recently, put up warnings at the Bela Colony school and Hamdard Educational Mission threatening to shoot women who did not wear a veil. A few students have complied; others have taken advantage of the ongoing winter vacation to sit out the crisis.

INCREDIBLY enough, few women have actually started wearing the burkha: a tribute both to their courage and to the ground realities of life in this poor mountain region. Women in Rajouri, as in Poonch, Doda or Udhampur, work hard in the fields and also herd cattle to nearby pastures. Carrying water up the hills takes up a major part of the day, as does foraging for firewood and fodder. The burkha simply does not allow for this kind of work. What the new ban has achieved, however, is to strip rural women of any shot at higher education. "I know of one schoolmaster from a nearby hamlet," says Darhal zonal educational officer M.A. Malik, "who was ordered to withdraw his daughter from the Government Degree College in Rajouri because it did not observe the burkha there." This, in turn, is part of a long-running campaign by the Islamic Right against women. In November 2001, 57-year-old school teacher Gulzar Lone was shot dead in front of his students at the Government Middle School in Alal near Thanamandi. His crime was having taught his daughter Jabeera Lone how to drive a two-wheeler.

On December 17, al-Badr terrorists shot dead three young women at a hamlet of Hasiyot near Thanamandi in Rajouri. An al-Badr hit squad walked into the home of a 12th standard student, Tahira Parveen, who was busy with her cousin's pre-wedding mehndi ritual, singled her out from among a group of women, and slit her throat with a hunting knife. The family of her friend Naureen Kaunser, who lived next door, died faster, shot dead at point-blank range. Sixteen-year-old Shehnaz Akhtar, a 10th -standard student but already married, was decapitated. The note found in the Hasiyot mosque makes clear that al-Badr believed the three were informants. On past occasions, the Army had raided Hasiyot shortly after terrorist groups passed through the hamlet. This, coupled with the fact that Parveen's father had been killed on suspicion of being an Army informer in 1997 and that Kaunser's father is a serving Border Security Force trooper, were evidently reason enough to execute them.

"The girls' real fault," says Kaunser's father Mohammad Sadiq, "is that they were educated and did not treat the terrorists with the respect that they thought they deserved."

Contrary to media speculation, the killings at Hasiyot had little to do with the burkha issue. They were, however, part of a string of killings of civilians, intended to make clear the terrorists' domination of civil society. Four days after the Hasiyot killings, Arfaz Ahmed, 4, Asid Mohammad, 7, and Nazarat Hussain, 12, were shot dead at Surankote. Their father, Munshi Khan, who was injured in the attack on his home along with a tenant, schoolteacher Gurmeet Kaur, was believed by terrorists to be passing on information to the State police's Special Operations Group.

Such killings are of a piece with similar assaults on anyone resisting the far-Right's fiat. On December 24, terrorists raided the home of Pawan Kumar at Bela Khwas, near Buddhal in Rajouri. Kumar was a key member of the local Village Defence Committee, a militia group set up to help defend the villages from communal attacks. The terrorists did not find Kumar, but beheaded his father, Thakur Dass and brother, Surinder Kumar, neither of whom was armed. Kumar's wife, Santosh Kumar, was critically injured.

Rajouri itself has been witnessing escalating levels of violence, further accentuating people's insecurity. Since November, the town has witnessed a series of lethal bomb explosions. The last took place on the same afternoon as the Bela Khwas killings, injuring 16 civilians. The Ashoka Green Bar and Restaurant is believed to have been targeted because it served alcohol in defiance of terrorist diktat. Eleven of the victims were, however, Muslim.

Hindu chauvinist groups in Rajouri have made dark suggestions of a state-sponsored conspiracy against the minority community in the wake of the arrest of Haji Farooq, the brother of Deputy Superintendent-rank police officer, and Zafar Iqbal, posted in the security detail of Rajouri's Legislative Council representative, Nazir Mir. The two are alleged to have played a key role in the recent attacks in Rajouri, including one that claimed the life of Mir's granddaughter. One grenade is believed to have been thrown by Iqbal from Mir's garden, but it is profoundly unlikely that the politician would have failed to ensure that his grandchild was not well out of harm's way had he any advance knowledge of the attack.

REASON, however, has very little to do with the ugly communal politics that provides the backdrop to violence in Rajouri. Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's own attitude has, sadly, received little notice. At a December 17 rally in Rajouri, he addressed the burkha showdown at Darhal, saying that Islam demands that women receive education. He did not, however, specifically condemn the terrorists' demand that the students wear burkha. "There is no big issue involved here," witnesses report the Chief Minister as having said, "it is a matter of religion. What is wrong if women wear a burkha? After all, parents are always happy when their daughters appear before them modestly dressed in one."

Similarly, at a rally after the Surankote killings, Sayeed said "the time has come when the people should also use their influence, whatever little they have, on the militants and make them leave the gun." On what he intended to do to secure justice for those who quite clearly have no influence with terrorists, the Chief Minister said nothing.

Sayeed's effort to poach political space from the Islamic far-Right is mirrored by other major political groups. Speaking to Frontline on December 28, during a visit by Union Minister of State for Defence Chaman Lal Gupta, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Rajinder Gupta of Rajouri claimed that efforts were being made "to force Hindus to leave this area". "We will fight these efforts to disposses us," he said. Ugly scenes were seen during the Defence Minister's meeting with the Rajouri party cadre. Several of them bitterly argued against efforts by community leaders to set up peace committees, which would include Muslim political representatives. Rajouri also now has a Bajrang Dal unit, which claims the BJP is not acting with adequate aggression to defend the Hindu interests in the area.

On December 6, the Bajrang Dal did its own bit to add fuel to the Islamic Right's burkha campaign by choosing to celebrate the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Such chauvinistic aggression is of considerable significance, since the first major communal massacre in Rajouri, at Sewari-Buddhal in 1997, was provoked by violent protests against the marriage of school teacher Manzoor Hussain with Rita Kumari.

However, no violence took place in the communally fragile town. In fact, more Muslim civilians have died in terrorist violence each year than Hindus, a fact both Hindu and Muslim communalists are reluctant to address. If Hindu chauvinists find the figures undermining their claims of being under assault, Muslim communalists are unwilling to condemn a religious war being fought in their name.

On Christmas day, a group of terrorists appeared at the home of schoolteacher Ghulam Shafi Wani at Gopalpora. Men and women present there were segregated, and then made to assemble in small groups. The terrorists then opened fire at the men with assault rifles, killing Wani and his sons Noor Mohammad and Jehangir Ahmad. There was little condemnation. Even Sayeed during his December 29 visit to the village only expressed his grief over the killing and did not specifically criticise those who carried it out.

A similar pattern has been evident in the Jammu zone. The terrorist massacre of 15 Muslims, including seven children, at Kot Charwal near Rajouri in February 2001, drew no protests from the same Hindu leaders so vociferous when their co-religionists are killed.

In response to the Gopalpora killings journalist Ahmed Ali Fayyaz authored an acid attack on the distinction the State's politicians make between the "red" blood of citizens who support them, and the "white", or worthless, blood of those who do not.

"All the prominent Hurriyat leaders, who claim to be the `real representatives' of the Kashmiri people, enjoyed their day in cosy bungalows and luxurious cars," he wrote. "The moment they learned that it was an act of militants, they adopted silence as their best policy. Nothing was heard today of the ebullient People's Democratic Party Member of the Legislative Assembly Javed Mustafa Mir, who attempted to become a hero on account of the death of a mason in police custody early December. Democratic Freedom Party chief Shabbir Ahmed Shah otherwise known for condemning everything around was also silent over the triple murder that occurred in the vicinity of his Rawalpora mansion. (The) High Court Bar Association, which takes pride in... organising seminars and protests over `human rights violations', was also unconcerned in the case of the Gopalpora family. So were the self-styled human rights activists, Mohammad Ahsan Untoo and Pervez Imroz, who have carved out a niche for themselves in Kashmir's lucrative politics of protests and condemnations over the last several years."

The article should have provoked a furore. It was met, instead, with resounding silence. Truth has not been the only victim of the 12-year war in Jammu and Kashmir: straight talk is high up on the fatality list.