Piety, paranoia, and Kashmir's politics of hate

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Why have so many people become willing to sacrifice their livesjust because pilgrims might be temporarily housed in land on anextent of four cricket stadia?
Back in 1912, Maqbool Shah Kraalwari published the Greeznama, anextended lament about the irreligious character of the Kashmiripeasantry:
They regard the mosque and the temple as equal,
seeing no difference between muddy puddles and the ocean,
They know not the sacred, honourable or the respectable.
Less than a century on, the landscape Kraalwari described hasdisappeared. For the past fortnight, Jammu and Kashmir has beenscorched by communal conflagration of a scale and intensity thathave taken many by surprise. Hundreds have been injured; fourpeople have died.
Although Islamist-led mob violence has often been seen in recentyears  the 2006 protests against a prostitution scandal and lastsummers attacks on couples in Srinagar are cases in point  thedispute over permission granted to Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board(SASB) to build temporary accommodation for pilgrims on 39.88hectares of forest land brought more people on to the streets thanat any point since the early years of Jammu and Kashmirs longjihad.
For the most part, commentators have cast the conflict as theoutcome of the former Governor S.K. Sinhas aggressive advocacy ofHindu chauvinist interests, the search of the secessionist for anemotive cause, and the opportunism of major political parties. Allthese explanations are correct. None of them, though, fullyexplains why so many have become willing to sacrifice their livesjust because pilgrims might temporarily be housed on land justlarge enough to accommodate four cricket stadia.
It is like worship, Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelanirecently said of the anti-India political campaign he leads, likethe recitation of the Kalima [profession of faith], like theoffering of namaz, like the paying of Zakat [charity], like theperformance of Haj.
For Mr. Geelani and his Tehreek-i-Hurriyat, the anti-Shrine Boardprotests are a crucible in which piety and xenophobic paranoia canbe forged into a programme of resistance to India. At a June 23meeting in Srinagar, Mr. Geelani explained the importance of theSASB issue. He charged General Sinha with working to alter thedemographic character of our State. I caution my nation that ifwe do not wake up now, India and its stooges will succeed and wewill lose our land forever.
Evidence of the threat, Mr. Geelani told a rally earlier on June20, was abundant. He pointed to recent cases of sexual violence andkidnapping of children. Such crimes were unheard of in the Valleybut the day the number of outsiders increased, the crime rate herealso went up. Moreover, Mr. Geelani said, outsiders werepromoting their own polytheistic culture in alliance with theIndian state. Asking Kashmir residents to neither employ norprovide accommodation to outsiders, he asked migrant workers toleave Kashmir peacefully.
Mr. Geelanis rantings  none of which would have been unfamiliarto Hindutva leaders in Maharashtra  were of a piece with KashmiriIslamists long-standing xenophobia. In the decades afterindependence, scholar Yoginder Sikand tells us, Jamaat-e-Islamileaders believed that an Indian conspiracy was at work to destroythe Islamic identity of the Kashmiris. It was alleged that thegovernment of India had dispatched a team to Andalusia, headed bythe Kashmiri Pandit [politician and State Home Minister] D.P. Dhar,to investigate how Islam was driven out of Spain and to suggestmeasures as to how ish experiment could be repeated in Kashmir.
Resistance to this imagined plot often exploded into violence. InMay 1973, an Anantnag college student discovered an encyclopaediacontaining a drawing of archangel Gabriel dictating the Koran toProphet Muhammed  an image that, in some readings of Islam, isblasphemous. Protesters demanded that the author be hanged: A vaindemand, Katherine Frank has wryly noted, since Arthur Mee haddied in England in 1943. India proscribed the sale of theout-of-print book, but four died in rioting.
Politicians often drank at these communal wellsprings. At a March4, 1987 rally in Srinagar, Muslim United Front candidates, clad inthe white robes of the pious, declared that Islam could not surviveunder the authority of a secular state. MUF leaders built theircampaign around protesting the sale of liquor and laws thatproscribed cow slaughter  represented as threats to the authenticMuslim character of Kashmir.
Fears of religious-ethnic annihilation have again surfaced. Writingin the Srinagar-based Rising Kashmir, Khalid Wasim Hassan assertedthat India is now openly following a policy aimed at changing thedemography of Kashmir. India hoped that settling non-Statesubjects is going to have its impact on the discourse of theself-determination movement and the end result of [an eventual]plebiscite [sic.]. Islamists arent the only ones advancing sucharguments. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Rasool Kar, writing in theUrdu-language Khidmat, claimed that the purpose of the landtransfer was to reduce the Muslim majority to a minority.
Notably, the leadership for many of the mobs involved in the recentviolence has come from local-level workers of pro-India parties,not Islamists. In Ganderbal and Anantnag, for example, the NationalConference leveraged the issue to attack the Peoples DemocraticParty.
Competitive communalism
Few of the arguments against the land use rights granted to SASBstand on firm empirical foundations. No evidence exists, for one,to support the Islamist claim of large-scale settlement bynon-State subjects. Nor is it clear just why putting upprefabricated restrooms for pilgrims will increase environmentalthreat.
The fact is large numbers of Kashmir residents see India as anexistential threat. Part of the reason for these fears lies in astill-unfolding project to sharpen the ideological boundaries ofIslam in Kashmir, which cast Hinduism as a predatory threat. In thefirst decades of the 20th century, Jammu and Kashmir saw theemergence of a new middle class that vied with traditional Muslimleaders for power. New forms of Islam, which privileged text overtradition, were used to legitimise their claims to speak forKashmirs Muslims.
One major development was the arrival in Kashmir of the JamaatAhl-e-Hadis, a religious order that was set up by the followers ofSayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly. Ahmad died at Balakote, now inPakistan-administered Kashmir, in 1831 while waging an unsuccessfuljihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singhs kingdom  a campaign that,historian Ayesha Jalal reminds us in her new book Partisans ofAllah, still fires the imagination of a number of Muslims in SouthAsia. Ahl-e-Hadith ideologues like clerics Siddiq Hasan Khan andNazir Husain rejected the accommodation Islam in India had madewith its environment.
Sayyed Hussain Shah Batku, a Delhi seminary student who carried theAhl-e-Hadis message to Kashmir in 1925, denounced the key practicesof mainstream Islam in the State such as worship of shrines andveneration of relics. Along with his followers, Anwar ShahShopiani, Ghulam Nabi Mubaraki and Sabzar Khan, Batku attackedtraditionalists for following practices tainted by their Hinduheritage like the recitation of litanies before namaz. Notsurprisingly, Batku came under sustained attack from traditionalistclerics, who charged him with being an apostate, an infidel andeven the Dajjal  or devil incarnate. His response was to casthimself as a defender of the faith, railing against heterodox sectssuch as the Ahmadis and the Shia, Hindu revivalists and Christianmissionaries, all of whom he claimed were working to expel Islamfrom Kashmir.
Despite its limited popular reach, the Ahl-e-Hadis had enormousideological influence. As historian Chitralekha Zutshi has pointedout in her work on the making of religious identity in the KashmirValley, Languages of Belonging, the influence of the Ahl-e-Hadithon the conflicts over Kashmiri identities cannot beoveremphasised. While the reflexive media association of theAhl-e-Hadis and terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba can bemisleading  the head of the Srinagar unit of the crackcounter-terrorist Special Operations Group is also an adherent there is little doubt that the vision of Islam it propagatedprepared the ground for the rise of the Jamaat-e-Islami and modernjihadists.
Hindutva helped the Islamist project along. Decades of pogroms most recently in Gujarat  gave credence to claims that Muslims arenot safe in India. Kashmiri Muslim students and businessmen oftenencounter discrimination, which has made them acutely conscious ofthe variance between the promise and practice of Indiassecularism. Many of those fighting on Srinagars streets have beenwearing jeans and sporting sunglasses: middle-class young peoplewho venerate capitalism, but have found in Islamism a medium fortheir rage at being denied entry at the gates to the earthlyparadise it promises.
On a visit to New Delhi soon after Independence, Sheikh MohammadAbdullah candidly underlined the relationship between politics inKashmir and Indian communalism. There isnt a single Muslim inKapurthala, Alwar or Bharatpur, he said, noting that some ofthese had been Muslim-majority States. Kashmiri Muslims, heconcluded, are afraid that the same fate lies ahead for them aswell.
When Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Praveen Togadia threatens to cutoff food supplies to Kashmir in reprisal for the Shrine Boardagitation, it is this fear he feeds. In coming weeks, efforts toarrive at a political compromise on the Shrine Board issue may helpstill the violence. Whatever arrangement is arrived at, though,will do little to bridge the deepening fault-lines between Kashmirand India and between Hindus and Muslims. In and outside ofKashmir, this will serve communalists well. While Mr. Geelani andMr. Togadia may be enemies, the fact is they are enemies with thesame cause.