J&K's syncretic traditions have been increasingly marginalised. A neoconservative Islam shaped by west-Asian petro-dollars, often channelled through Pakistani agencies, has acquired primacy. Hindutva's helped the Islamist project along...
Last month’s violence and demonstrations in J&K -- a wave of Islamist-initiatedprotests against the grant of land to the Shrine Board to build temporaryprefabricated housing and restrooms for pilgrims on the Amarnath Yatra(pilgrimage), and a second phase of violent agitation by the Hindu right inJammu to protest its revocation by the state government -- have been describedas the largest mass movements in the state since 1990. While it is far fromclear if some of the claims made for the scale of protests are true -- Policevideotape shows no gathering in Srinagar larger than four to five thousand --there is no disputing their extraordinary scale and intensity. Indeed, theviolence unleashed in June proved adequate to precipitate a final break in thelong-troubled Congress-People’s Democratic Party (PDP) alliance, leading to ameltdown of the state government and imposition of Governor’s rule untilelections are held in October 2008.
Yet, there has been little serious effort to explain why the use of 39.88hectares of land -- just the size of five football fields -- should provoke suchan intense reaction. Even less effort has been made to understand that thestrains that drove the crisis will not be stilled by the coming elections.
On June 23, one day after the terrorists’ killing, Chhatterhama villagersmarched to the main crossroads at Batpora to express their outrage on the ShrineBoard issue. Work on the Lashkar shrine began the same afternoon. And thefollowing Friday, Chhatterhama observed the two terrorists’ Rasm-e-Chehlumdeath-rites alongside another protest march against the Shrine Board.
Worse, in Chatterhama, as elsewhere, mainstream pro-India political groupingshave been instrumental in legitimising the ideological claims of the Islamists-- and in giving the Shrine Board protests their scale and intensity. Baramullaoffers an interesting illustration of the mechanics of the protests. Islamistsset off the conflagration with, for example, a 600-strong June 27 peasantgathering at Watergam, led by Jamaat-e-Islami activist Nisar Ahmad Ganai.Elsewhere in Baramulla, however, pro-India parties drove the protests. On June30, a 5,000-strong gathering at Sheeri-Baramulla, for example, was led by localNC activist Abdul Qayoom and PDP dissident Ghulam Mohideen.
"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".
Liberal commentators are fond of pointing to J&K’s syncretictraditions. On point of fact, the landscape Kraalwari described has beenincreasingly marginalised over the past century. Instead, a neoconservativeIslam shaped by west-Asian petro-dollars, often channelled through Pakistaniagencies, has acquired primacy. The roots of Kashmir residents’ fears lie inthe central project of this new Islam: the sharpening of the ideologicalboundaries between faiths.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, J&K saw the emergence of anew middle class that vied with traditional Muslim leaders for power. New formsof Islam, which privileged text over tradition, were used to legitimise theirclaims to speak for Kashmir’s Muslims. One major development was the arrivalin Kashmir of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, a religious order that was set up byfollowers of Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly. Ahmad died at Balakote, now inPakistan-administered Kashmir, in 1831, while waging an unsuccessful jihadagainst Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom -- a campaign that, historian AyeshaJalal reminds us in her new book Partisans of Allah, still fires theimagination of Muslims in South Asia.
Ahl-e-Hadith ideologues, such as the clerics Siddiq Hasan Khan and Nazir Husain,also rejected the accommodation Islam in India had made with its environment.Sayyed Hussain Shah Batku, a Delhi seminary student who carried the Ahl-e-Hadismessage to Kashmir in 1925, denounced key practices of mainstream Islam in thestate, like the worship of shrines and veneration of relics. Along with hisfollowers Anwar Shah Shopiani, Ghulam Nabi Mubaraki and Sabzar Khan, Batkuattacked traditionalists for following practices tainted by their Hinduheritage, like the recitation of litanies before Namaaz. Not surprisingly, Batkucame under sustained attack from traditionalist clerics, who charged him withbeing an apostate, an infidel and even the Dajjal -- or devil incarnate. Hisresponse was to cast himself as a defender of the faith, railing against Hindurevivalists and Christian missionaries, as well as heterodox Muslim sects likethe Ahmadis and the Shia, all of whom he claimed were working to expel Islamfrom Kashmir.
Despite its limited popular reach, the Ahl-e-Hadith had enormous ideologicalinfluence. As historian Chitralekha Zutshi points out in her work on the makingof religious identity in the Kashmir valley, Languages of Belonging, the"influence of the Ahl-e-Hadith on the conflicts over Kashmiri identitiescannot be overemphasised". While the reflexive media association of theAhl-e-Hadith and terror groups like the LeT can be misleading -- the head of theSrinagar Police unit of the crack counter-terrorist Special Operations Group isalso an adherent -- there is little doubt that the vision of Islam it propagatedprepared the ground for the rise of the Jamaat-e-Islami and modern jihadis.