For four days and nights after a prison hangman extinguished Muhammad Maqbool Butt’s life, the streets of old-town Srinagar and Anantnag emptied, observing a rite of mourning through a curfew no one had ordered. Even though the terrorist had been buried in Tihar jail’s courtyard, wrapped in muslin scented with rose water, an empty grave was dug next to the shrine of Khwaja Bahauddin Naqshband, awaiting his return. Fearing that secessionists might dig up the grave of Chief Minister Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah at Hazratbal, police were stationed to guard the shrine.
Those two graves would compete to shape Kashmir’s political life for decades to come. And there was one single voice of dissent: “A person like him, burdened by the overwhelming force of passion, carries on without making any distinction between the bitterness and sweetness of life, losing the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong,” the official journal of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Azan, wrote in an obituary.
“His hanging has caused sorrow to the hearts of even those who do not accept destruction and extremism,” Azan accepted. The young people who supported Butt, though, were being seduced by violence, becoming “victims of their emotions, instead of facing the massive boulders in their path with determination and courage.”
For weeks now, the Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Abdul Hameed Ganie—also known by his nom-de-plume Hamid Fayaz—
has been working to restore and guide Kashmir’s jihadist movement back to those ideas. Led by Ghulam Qadir Wani, a Pulwama-based Jamaat-e-Islami leader, a party committee has been holding negotiations with government and intelligence officials, offering to become a democratic party in return for the ban imposed in 2019 being lifted.
To Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, looking ahead to elections for Kashmir’s assembly later this year, it seems a tempting deal. Together with populists like newly-elected Member of Parliament for Baramulla Sheikh Abdul Rashid, the Jamaat-e-Islami could help undercut the power of ethnic-Kashmiri regional formations like the National Conference and People’s Democratic Party. The Jamaat-e-Islami’s participation in elections would also underline the diminishing influence of Islamism and secessionism.
Kashmir has seen the Jamaat-e-Islami function as a government-owned public sector enterprise before, though—with outcomes tragic both for the region, and the country.
Indira and the Islamists
Founded in 1945, initially as a chapter of the all-India Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, the Jamaat-e-Islami started its life in a single room in Srinagar’s Naya Bazaar area. The party focussed on propagating the message of the Jamaat ideologue Abul Ala Maududi, and setting up a network of schools where religious education would be fused with secular learning. The schools were intended as a means to resist Hindu cultural and religious influences, which the Jamaat believed the Indian state was using to wipe out Kashmir’s ethnic-religious character.
The Jamaat, scholar Yoginder Sikand has written, appealed to young urban men, often the first members of their families to obtain a formal education. It was seeking a form of Islamic religious and political expression free of the syncretic practices of rural Kashmir.
Even though the constitution of the Jamaat demanded its members “acknowledge only the Divine code, rejecting a not in consonance with His Command and Guidance, and whose divinity has not been establish,” it permitted members to participate in local bodies elections in 1963 and 1969.
Then, in 1972, came the turning point. The Jamaat decided to participate in the Lok Sabha elections, though it considered Kashmir a disputed territory. The Jamaat had enjoyed a reasonable relationship with Sheikh Abdullah until 1968, the political scientists Ghulam Qadir Bhat and Khursheed Ahmad Wani have pointed out. In 1968, though, it broke with Abdullah on the question of secularism.
Events came to a head in the 1972 elections, which were held while Abdullah’s Plebiscite Front was still banned. According to the memoirs of the Congress leader and former chief minister Syed Mir Qasim, the Jamaat was recruited by the Congress to ensure that the political space vacated by the Plebiscite Front was filled in. And to make sure that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s party faced no significant challenge. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Jana Sangh party, Qasim wrote, was given patronage in the Jammu region for similar reasons.
Indira Gandhi’s policies, scholar Navnita Chadha Behera has argued, “made religion pre-eminent to a political process that had been carefully nurtured as a secular undertaking. It legitimised the religion’s politicisation for electoral ends, opening the floodgates for more conservative and rightist political parties.”
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A blunt sword
For all its ideological influence, however, the Jamaat struggled to secure significant political success. In the 1972 Assembly elections, facing no opposition except the Congress, the Jamaat had secured over a quarter of the popular vote and won five seats. But in 1975 Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference reentered politics, after arriving at a political concord with Indira Gandhi. The Jamaat-e-Islami won no seats in by-elections held in 1975, and just one of its 19 candidates secured a seat in the 1977 Assembly elections. In 1983, all its 26 candidates were defeated.
The National Conference, meanwhile, decided to dismantle the infrastructure that held up the Jamaat. In 1975, after the Emergency was imposed, the offices and school system run by the Jamaat-e-Islami were shut down, and hundreds of state government employees linked to the organisation were sacked.
After the Emergency was lifted, the Jamaat tried to capitalise on the opening up of political space. Fuelled by petrodollars, a new student wing, the Islami Jama’at-e-Tulaba, launched an agitation seeking compulsory Islamic education in government schools. Tajamul Hassan, the student wing chief, described Indian forces in Kashmir as an army of occupation. The Islami Jama’at-e-Tulaba also allied with transnational Islamist organisations, like the Riyadh-based World Association of Muslim Youth. It organised high-profile conferences, which drew figures like the Imam of the holy shrines Makkah and Madinah, Sheikh Abdullah bin Sabil.
The 1956-born Abdul Hameed Ganie, interestingly, was among the radical Islamists who were drawn to the Islami Jamaat-e-Tulaba. Through his early years in the organisation, Ganie was closely linked to Ayub Thakur, a Jamaat-e-Islami leader who went on to head networks of Inter-Services Intelligence-run charities and organisations in the United Kingdom. Later, however, Ganie seems to have thrown his weight behind centrists in the organisation.
Leading up to the 1987 Assembly elections, the Jamaat joined with a new coalition of the right, which took on the Congress-National Conference alliance. The tone of the campaign was incendiary. At a rally held on 4 March 1987, in Srinagar, Behera writes, Muslim United Front candidates, clad in the white robes of the Muslim pious, declared that Islam could not survive under the authority of a secular state. For his part, former Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah was cast as an agent of Hindu imperialism.
The party was decimated, though. Facing the ethnic nationalism of the National Conference—and not a little electoral malpractice—the communal campaign of the Jamaat had turned out to be too blunt a sword.
Turning to war
Even though the Jamaat-e-Islami faced extinction, it didn’t immediately turn to jihad, which began in 1988. As late as August 1989, three-time legislator and Jamaat-e-Islami patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani attended a meeting called by the then Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah to consider responses to the growing violence. “I was the only participant in the meeting who suggested resolving issues through dialogue,” he later recalled. Later, Geelani would lament that young jihadists had miscalculated the enormity of the demands of the struggle and the strength of the power they are fighting against.
Through the 1990s, though, the Jamaat-e-Islami gleefully replaced its political sword with the jihadist gun. Geelani’s discourse radicalised, and in a 1992 interview, he called on Pakistanis “to stand up determinedly and assist their Kashmiri brethren in their action of jihad”. In a 1998 book, he suggested that Kashmir’s secession was essential for the survival of Islam. For Muslims to live among Hindus, Geelani argued, was as difficult as “for a fish to stay alive in a desert.”
Geelani was, however, out of step with his colleagues in the Jamaat-e-Islami, who faced the wrath of the Indian State because of their close ties to the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. In 1997, following a secret dialogue process led by Research and Analysis Wing chief Amarjit Dulat, then-Jamaat Amir Ghulam Muhammad Bhat called for an end to “gun culture”. In January 2004, the Jamaat Majlis-e-Shura, or central consultative council, went public with a commitment to a “democratic and constitutional struggle”. Later, Bhat’s successor, Sheikh Mohammad Hassan, broke with secessionist calls to boycott elections.
Exiled from the Jamaat, Geelani successfully turned to a new generation of Islamist leaders outside its fold, like Asiya Andrabi and Massrat Alam Bhat. This new coalition would spearhead the series of large-scale uprisings, which culminated with the revocation of Article 370 in 2019. The Jamaat-e-Islami ended up in a kind of political purgatory, losing its links to both the jihadists and the State.
Like it has done so often in the past, the Jamaat seems to be hoping that a tactical retreat will give it the space to rebuild and revive. Expedient as it might be, Prime Minister Modi’s government needs to beware of giving it that opportunity.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)