The part of the problem with Jamaat is that it goes through leadership change time and again, religiously, which throws up a multitude of challenges
Unpacking Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) is tricky. There are too many layers to peel. For more than three decades, the banned outfit has been seen as the ideological fulcrum of anti-India Islamisation and a colouring agent of politics and insurgency in the Valley. Now, they are in the electoral fray, swearing by the constitution and its democratic values. But this is not their first time to flirt with elections.
Jamaat was founded in 1941 by Syed Abul Ala Modudi, an Islamic theologian, in Lahore of united India. Molana Saad ul din Tarabali launched the Jamaat unit in Kashmir 1946. With Kashmir becoming the bone of contention between the two newly formed countries in 1947, the Valley-based Jamaat members wished to part ways from the India chapter of the outfit.
According to Jamaat Kashmir leader late Molana Ahrar, the then Jamaat India president, Molana Abu La’eeth, told them: ‘Go, we set you free’. Thus, on November 2, 1953, an independent and autonomous Jamaat came into being in Jammu and Kashmir.
Since 1969, Jamaat has been contesting elections—first, panchayat elections and then parliamentary elections in 1971. In 1972, the outfit fought the state assembly elections and won five seats—Ali Mohammad Dar and Abdul Razzaq Mir from Anantnag, Qari Saif ul din and Ghulam Nabi Nowshehri from Srinagar and Syed Ali Geelani from Baramulla.
In the 1977 state assembly elections, only Geelani won from the Sopore constituency in Baramulla district of North Kashmir. Jamaat failed to register any win in the state assembly elections of 1983.
For years to come, Geelani led Jamaat’s political bureau. He would not miss any opportunity to launch a tirade against India, Sheikh Abdullah, Farooq Abdullah or calling Kashmir “a dispute”. Amid all this, he would also defend the outfit’s decision to take part in elections and swear by the Indian constitution. He would quote from Holy Quran’s Al Nahl, verse 106 to defend his party’s position that its participation in elections is ‘under duress’.
“Whoever disbelieves in Allah after their belief—not those who are forced while their hearts are firm in faith, but those who embrace disbelief wholeheartedly—they will be condemned by Allah and suffer a tremendous punishment.” (Al Quran)
As Jamaat continued with its socio-religious work like launching a school system and giving sermons etc, flashlights started to follow Geelani, the face of its political bureau which, at a later stage, would become a problem for them. According to Manoj Joshi’s book The Lost Rebellion: Kashmir in the Nineties, since the mid-70s, Jamaat’s dominant political leader has been Geelani, “who has made no bones about his support for the merger of the state with Pakistan’ and at ‘one time declared Amir e Jihad’ (leader of the holy war) against India.
Geelani was talking on behalf of Jamaat, and his rhetoric began to turn violent on December 27, 1983, when he said: “Kashmiri’s should continue their struggle even if we have to turn violent.” On February 6, 1985, while addressing a gathering in Iqbal Market in Sopore, North Kashmir, he said: “My party has decided to free this nation, and we will cross any line to achieve our objective.”
On March 23, 1987, the election held in Jammu and Kashmir are considered a watershed moment in history. The elections were reportedly rigged. It is widely agreed that the rigging in the 1987 elections played a part in “setting off the waves of militancy that flooded the state in the years that followed”.
The Muslim United Front (MUF) was a coalition of Islamic parties that had come together in 1987. Jamaat was the MUF’s key constituent. The MUF contested 43 seats but won only four. Among those elected was Geelani.
The 1987 fiasco changed the contours of Kashmir’s political life profoundly and also of those who participated in the elections.
Mohammad Yusuf Shah, the Jamat candidate who lost the race from Amira Kadal constituency in Srinagar, was later to become Syed Salahudin, the supreme commander of the Hizb-ul- Mujahideen. One of his counting agents, Mohammad Yasin Malik, went on to command the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). Another activist, Ejaz Dar, who was shot dead in late 1988 while attempting to gun down Kashmir Police officer A.M. Watali was also a counting agent for Salahudin.
Syed Ali Geelani: A profile by Jamaat’s political bureau credits Geelani of starting ‘a campaign for attracting the Muslim youth towards Jihad (holy war)’ and effectively leading the MUF within the legislative assembly. The elected MUF leaders would later resign “to join the public in support of the said (armed) resistance”.
Jamaat shed its skin of electoral politics and entered into a very slippery and dangerous territory now. This despite one of its leaders, Molana Sadudin, saying no to General Muhammad Zia- ul-Haq, the military president of Pakistan, to be a part of any armed adventure in Kashmir. “According to the Indian Intelligence reports, the Maulana made it clear that he was not prepared to let Kashmiris die for the sake of merging the state with Pakistan,” writes Joshi in his book.
The book Jihadis in Jammu and Kashmir by K Santhanam & others mentions that the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) took advantage of the existing Jamat network and apparatus to attract young minds in the Valley.
The influence of Jamaat did not restrict itself to HM. According to Jihadis in Jammu and Kashmir, five militant outfits—HM, Al Jihad Force, Tehrik ul Mujahideen, Harkat ul Ansar, and Al Umar Mujahideen—joined together to form an umbrella organisation, Shura e Jihad (SEJ), to provide a single nodal point for command and control of militant operations in J&K. Although S Hamid was the founding chairman of the SEJ, the organisation was actually controlled by the HUM and JEI J&K”. S Hamid was killed in April 1998.
A major turn of events happened. At a press conference in November 1998, the then chief of Jamaat, Ghulam Muhammad Bhat, publicly disavowed militancy, asserting that the group was “essentially a constitutional democratic organisation.”
Jamaat had shed its skin of militant Islam now. But it did not loosen its grip over pan-Islamism and political Islam with Syed Abul Ala Modudi as its ideological bulwark. But there were other fractures within the Jammat that threatened its structure.
There were two strands of thought within the Jamaat cadres—one that believed that the outfit should take upon itself the role of a vanguard movement of Kashmir issue; the other believed that the Kashmir issue is not Jamaat’s problem per se but a national question so the outfit will only be a part of the larger grouping and play its part. (Wular Kinare, vol 3, p.374). Geelani was the champion of the former opinion.
The thaw came to pass in 2004 and Jamaat, through an agreement, let go of Geelani. He launched his own party— Tehreek-e-Hurriyat—focusing on the Kashmir issue.
Geelani would issue poll boycott calls, calling participation in the process as a ‘betrayal to the cause’.
Jamaat shed its skin from Geelani’s hardline approach where Kashmir issue had become the centre of his universe and that was overshadowing the outfit’s overall programme of Islamisation. Again, while Jamaat let go of Geelani, its grip over the pan-Islamic thought remained intact.
Jamaat behaved liberal at the surface, hard at the core.
While Jamaat stayed away from actively participating in politics, it did, however, issue poll boycott calls to an extent that ‘anyone casting vote from its cadre were threatened to be thrown out of the party’. In the meanwhile, Jamaat did signal that it is not averse to entering the electoral fray.
Like in 2015, the then Jamaat chief, Mohammad Abdullah Wani, in an interview to Kashmir Life, said: “Jamaat-e-Islami needs peaceful environment to contest elections.”
Come February 28, 2019, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) declared Jamaat an unlawful organisation. Its leadership was arrested, property seized and raids on its affiliates ensued. In February 2024, the ban was extended for five more years.
In 2022, the banned Jamaat formed a panel to deal with its problems, including the ban. The Jamaat reportedly had secret talks with New Delhi and expressed its willingness to return to electoral politics if the ban is lifted.
Ghulam Qadir Wani from South Kashmir and Ghulam Qadir Lone from the North are the panel’s faces. Wani was the general secretary of Jamaat when Geelani was ousted from the party. For Lone, Geelani writes that Lone worked with him in Jamaat’s polit-bureau but ‘has a different set of ideas’. Giving undertones that Lone was among the group who did not want to jump the bandwagon of making Jamaat too much exposed to the Kashmir issue.
Jamaat fielded candidates as independents in the Assembly polls in the Valley being conducted after a decade since the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. Having no meta-narrative to galvanise and woo voters, Jamaat found a safe partner in Engineer Rashid, leader of the Awami Ittehad Party.
Rashid, since his release from Tihar Jail, is all guns blazing and keeps calling for ‘Kashmir ka masla hal karo’ (Resolve the Kashmir issue).
The part of the problem with Jamaat is that it goes through leadership change time and again, religiously. The leadership change can throw up a multitude of challenges. You never know, as the old guards fade away and new leadership emerges, will they stick to the decision or decide to shed skin for something new again. It’s tricky.
In Srinagar, a Jamaat leader, recently released from jail, sits on a chair in his room. Some of his Jamaat colleagues have come to check on him. “There are two ways to go from here. One is, let’s not do anything and we will be wiped out, thrown to history and people will remember that there used to be a party called Jamaat-e-Islami. The other way is to take a fresh look at our policies, and let’s live for the ideals we profess. This is the most mature way to go, if we need to take a fresh look at our policies, we should.”
Winston Churchill famously said about Russia that it ‘is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Jamaat is like Russia in Kashmir. So, you are not fully aware, which Jamaat are you actually negotiating with. Maybe that’s why Delhi-based observers are calling the government to be cautious and be wary of Jamaat.
Will Jamaat shed its skin once more or is the change of heart permanent? Only time will tell. For now, as is usually said in the Valley, Afghanistan might be the graveyard of empires; Kashmir is the graveyard of reputations.
Iqbal Kirmani is a Srinagar-based freelance journalist
(Views expressed are personal)