Kashmir: Who are the Jihadis?

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

18 Aug 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com

Kashmir: Who are the Jihadis?

Prem Shankar Jha Posted online: Sunday, August 17, 2008   Tavleen Singh is a highly respected columnist. But her attempt to put the entire blame for the unfolding tragedy upon the failure of Kashmiri leaders like Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti and Yasin Malik to speak up against the jihadis who were claiming that an innocuous transfer of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board constituted an attempt to change the demographic composition of Kashmir, is both simplistic and unjust. (Tavleen Singh's column can be read below)   Barring a handful of zealots no one in Kashmir has ever opposed the Amarnath yatra. When the agitation against the transfer of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board stranded tens of thousands of pilgrims in Srinagar in June, Kashmiris took food and blankets to them and asked them into their homes. Yasin Malik, whom Tavleen has castigated, was in the forefront of this effort. And although feelings against the Government and against the former Governor Gen S K Sinha ran high, not a single pilgrim was attacked or injured.   The yatra has epitomised the syncretic traditions of Kashmiri Islam and, indeed of all the religions in the Valley, for 140 years. Till the 1980s the shrine was protected, and the yatra managed, by the Gurjjar community who, incidentally, are Muslims. In all that time it was a spontaneous, unorganised and private undertaking. It therefore had no political significance. But the nature of the yatra began to change when the Kashmiri insurgency-cum-proxy war began in 1990. The need to provide security to the pilgrims brought the state into its management. Instead of letting the pilgrims come whenever they wished to, the state Government asked them to come only during a specified 15-day period of time. During this period it kept Kashmiris out of the areas surrounding the two pilgrimage routes. Even the Gurjjars were kept out. The Kashmiris resented this, but understood the need for taking these precautions.   In the late nineties, as the middle class burgeoned in India and peace returned to the Valley, the number of pilgrims grew by leaps and bounds. This made the Farooq Abdullah government decide to increase the duration of the yatra to a month. The sheer numbers, their concentrated descent on Kashmir in a single month, and the fact that these pilgrims bore little resemblance to the traditional, conservative Hindus who used to make up the bulk of the yatris in the past, began to change Kashmiri perceptions of the yatra. To more and more of them the annual arrival of the pilgrims began to look like a cultural invasion. The militants tried to capitalise upon this and, beginning in 2000 AD, began to attack the yatris almost every year. This did not, however, go down well with the Kashmiris, who made no secret of their displeasure with the militants. As a result the attacks tapered off.   But the ever-growing number of pilgrims also created a serious environmental problem. The SASB was created by an Act of the Kashmir Assembly in 2000 to remedy this. This was where the governments of Kashmir and Delhi made their first mistake. For the 2000 Act did not only make the Governor — an appointee of the Central Government — the head of the board, but further stipulated that he could do so only if he was a Hindu. Farooq Abdullah's motives for inserting such a clause into the Kashmir Act remain a mystery, but when the Vajpayee-Advani government advised the President to give assent to the Bill, it violated the secularism principles of the Indian Constitution. The fact that the Act also made the Chief Minister the head of the Auqaf trust, provided he was a Muslim, only compounded the violation.   Matters would still not have come to a head if the Chief Minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, had not mooted an extension of the Amarnath pilgrimage season to two months. This was strongly endorsed by the then Governor, General S K Sinha. The extension therefore began to look less and less like a Kashmiri initiative to accommodate the rush of pilgrims and more and more like the joint initiative of an outsider Chief Minister who was intent upon influencing the outcome of the coming elections in Jammu, and a staunchly Hindu nationalist Governor.   Gen Sinha had created this impression through two other acts that had aroused deep misgivings in the Kashmiri intelligentsia: he had promoted a Kashmir Studies Circle that was intended to explore Kashmir's ancient, and therefore Hindu past and, as a seeming counterbalance, had met a delegation of fundamentalist Muslim leaders and clerics asking for permission to set up an Ahl-e-Hadis university in Kashmir. The effect this had on Kashmiri opinion was summed up by a Kashmir journalist who told me, "I am proud of our Hindu past, but I do not want someone to stuff it down my throat".   It was in this charged atmosphere that the Government transferred the forestland to the SASB on May 26. The surreptitious way in which it was done, and an SASB official's subsequent claim that the Governor did not have to answer questions put by MLAs in the Kashmir Assembly, as he was beyond their jurisdiction, sufficed to send the Kashmiris into the streets. Ms Singh is right when she says that Malik, the Mirwaiz, Geelani, and even Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti fanned the agitation by joining it. But had they not done so they would have written their own epitaphs in Kashmiri politics.   (Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author. He is the author of Kashmir 1947 — The Origins of a Dispute) View Source article: http://www.indianexpress.com/iep/sunday/story/349730.html       *****************************************   When moderates bowed before the Jihadis By Tavleen Singh Posted online: Sunday, August 10    Last week as Jammu and Kashmir boiled over and the Prime Minister called on all political parties to come together and help calm the fires of hatred and violence, I waited to hear one Kashmiri politician speak in a moderate voice. I listened to the speeches of the Abdullahs and the Muftis in the hope that one of them would say that the protests in Srinagar, that started the trouble, were wrong. I waited to hear one of them identify rumours spread by Kashmir's jihadi groups as the root of the problem. Rumours so absurd they talked of a plot to change the demography of Kashmir if Hindu pilgrims were allowed to stay in temporary houses in Amarnath during the yatra. If one 'moderate' Kashmiri politician had denounced the rumours as dangerous lies the fire may have gone out before it spread.   Nobody did.  And, last week at the Prime Minister's meeting they added more fuel to the fire. Farooq Abdullah reportedly said he would sit at his father's grave and ask if coming to India instead of Pakistan was a mistake for Kashmir. Mehmooda Mufti announced on every TV channel that if the road remained closed to Jammu then Kashmiris would look for other roads. Our painfully politically correct TV anchors did not dare ask her what she meant or whether it was not true that her party was part of the Kashmir Government when the land was allotted. The former governor of Jammu & Kashmir, Lt Gen (retd) S K Sinha, has taken every chance to point out that he cannot be blamed for a decision that was taken by the J&K Government, but nobody listened to him. It suited everyone to make him the villain of the story, to blame him for 'spreading Hindutva' by providing basic facilities to Hindu pilgrims.   We now have Hindu Jammu and Muslim Kashmir embroiled in a civil war and it is because we have not heard a moderate voice from Kashmiri politicians. Yasin Malik kidnapped Mehbooba Mufti's sister in 1989 and with that act started the violent movement for azadi. Are Mehbooba and her father not slightly ashamed to be batting on his side today? When he was taken to hospital in enfeebled state because of his fast unto death he told TV reporters that he was doing this because Muslims were being persecuted in Jammu and there was an economic blockade that was preventing 'milik' from reaching Muslim children in Kashmir.   It's hard to expect concern for non-Muslims from Yasin Malik, who admitted famously on television that he trained in Pakistan to fight India or Syed Ali Shah Geelani who wants Kashmir to be part of Pakistan. But, it would have been reassuring to hear from the Abdullahs and Muftis that there was no reason whatsoever for Kashmiris to have made such a huge fuss over the Amarnath land. It would have calmed passions if one of them had admitted that the land was not being given away and better still if one of them had reminded the Kashmiri people that Indian taxpayers pay hundreds of crore rupees a year to send them off on Haj and for Haj houses in our cities to make their pilgrimage easier.   The land in Amarnath was a non-issue. It became an issue because moderate politicians allowed themselves to become the B-team of the jihadis. Privately, many will admit that an ugly Islamism has changed not just the faith of Kashmir but destroyed the movement for azadi by sweeping it under the umbrella of the greater pan-Islamist goal. It is because they do not have the courage to publicly admit to what has happened that they could end up losing next month's election to those who have never hesitated to admit that they hate Hindus and India and like radical Islam.   Kashmir, Kashmiri culture and Kashmiri Islam have been destroyed by this new Islam because Kashmir's moderate politicians have been too cowardly to publicly fight the Islamists. As someone who witnessed the manner in which Islamist mobs violently closed hotels, cinemas, liquor shops and video libraries down in the nineties it saddens me to see Kashmir's supposedly moderate leaders bow before the jihadis once again. Last time it cost them their way of life. This time it could cost them the loss of Jammu. The protests in Jammu have been unacceptably violent and nobody can support violence.   But, it is important to remember that none of this would have happened if Kashmir's moderate leaders had not supported the protests in Srinagar's streets. All it needed was someone to speak up. One voice of reason, one Kashmiri leader who admitted that the protests against the allotment of land in Amarnath were wrong. We have not heard that voice. View Source article: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/346850.html