For fifty-two hours one summer in 1893, rain fell across Kashmir. A bear and a panther were found drowned side by side, their ancient hatred forgotten; ponies and cattle climbed into the verandahs of the elegant homes on the right bank of the Jhelum river. Faced with the wall of water, colonial civil servant Walter Roper Lawrence writes, the villagers of Tullamulla ripped the holy flags from their shrines and planted them along the flood plain to warn the waters away. Even nature, they reasoned, would not dare insult the ancient saints.
Everyone wasn’t pleased with this deep popular faith—or charlatanism, if one so wished to call it. Kashmir was entering a new period of religious ferment amid messianic claims that the flood had been retribution for the sins of its people, like the Flood of Nuh, which destroyed the idolaters.
Armed with ideas from Aligarh and Lahore, Mirwaiz Rasul Shah, the head of Srinagar’s Jamia mosque, set about eradicating bid’a, the syncretic folk practices woven through folk Islam. In 1889, Rasul Shah established a seminary, the Nusratul Islam, at Rajouri Kadal, the first formal school offering both secular and religious education to Kashmir’s Muslims. The seminary, today known as the Islamia School, flowered into an educational organisation, the Anjuman-i-Nusratul Islam.
“Islam is a sick child that needs its mother’s care and sympathy,” one student at the Islamia School declaimed. In his public speeches, Mirwaiz Rasul Shah left little doubt about what that was: The deification of saints and veneration of holy relics were Hindu practices which had corroded Islam from within.
Late in the 19th century, scholar Yoginder Sikand writes, the neo-conservative Ahl-e-Hadith began to preach an even more austere new faith based on the laws of Sharia. The kernels of an Islamist movement had been planted in Kashmir’s flood-ravaged soil.
This month, almost unnoticed outside Kashmir, the Union Home Ministry banned the Awami Action Committee, the political platform that emerged from the Anjuman-i-Nusratul Islam and a once-powerful element of the secessionist coalition, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. The Shia Jammu and Kashmir Ittihadul Muslimeen, too, was banned.
Ever since Kashmir lost its special constitutional status in 2019, the Awami Action Committee and the Ittihadul Muslimeen had escaped proscription, with New Delhi hoping its leaders would steer their followers toward democratic politics. To some in the Bharatiya Janata Party, sources in the Union Home Ministry told ThePrint, these groups seemed potential partners for weakening the influence of the National Conference.
Legal appeals against the ban are certain to be filed—but a critical road in Kashmir politics seems to have been permanently closed.
The priest who wanted to be king
Two decades ago, in the high noon of peace negotiations between then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan’s former president General Pervez Musharraf, it’s possible Mirwaiz Umar Farooq imagined himself as a king about to ascend his throne. “The agenda is pretty much set,” Mirwaiz Rasul’s Shah’s descendant told an interviewer. “It is September 2007 that India and Pakistan are looking at, in terms of announcing something on Kashmir”. “Let us come out of our delusions,” he asserted at a speech in Muzaffarabad in 2006, “our fight on the political, diplomatic and military fronts […has] not achieved anything other than creating more graveyards.”
As the chairperson of the Hurriyat, Mirwaiz had reason to hope the peace deal—which centred around an end to terrorism, open borders, and symmetrical autonomous regions on both sides of the Line of Control—would lead him to power in Srinagar. However, things didn’t work quite as planned.
Like much to do with colonial India, the rise of the Anjuman was a response to the challenge of modernity. Faced with the increasingly active presence of English missionaries, scholar Asif Ahmad Bhat writes, Mirwaiz Rasul Shah began to fear for his flock. The cleric’s anxieties about the English were shared by Maharaja Pratap Singh, who had been deposed in 1889 and then reinstated under the charge of a council.
The institution of the Mirwaiz, historian Mridu Rai records, represented a Kashmiri Muslim elite whose interests were profoundly entwined with the Dogra monarchy. The rise of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah and his All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference posed a significant political challenge to this order. Abdullah, for his part, allied with Srinagar’s second Mirwaiz, the head of the more traditionalist Khanqah-e-Muala, or Shah-i-Hamdan shrine.
Kashmir’s rival Mirwaiz and its fledgling political parties often battled for power on the streets. Following Independence, they found themselves forced together as allies.
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The two Farooqs
Faced with the breakdown of his relationship with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953—the result of his renewed pursuit of independence—Sheikh Abdullah reached out to the Mirwaiz. After the disappearance of a revered religious relic from the Hazratbal shrine in 1963, the two sides joined to exert pressure on New Delhi. Even as mobs attacked properties owned by chief minister Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s family, political scientist Navnita Chadha Behera notes, the Mirwaiz and Abdullah ran “an unauthorised parallel administration, controlling traffic, prices and commerce.” This was the genesis of the Awami Action Party.
From his pulpit, Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq made thinly veiled pleas for Pakistani victory in the build-up to the war of 1965—backing up similar calls by radicals in Sheikh Abdullah’s Plebiscite Front. The members of the two also arranged for boycotts of marriages, funerals and religious ceremonies hosted by the families of Muslim Indian National Congress members.
Later, in 1983, former chief minister Farooq Abdullah allied with Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq in an election campaign marred by ugly communal invective. Though the alliance helped Abdullah beat off competition from Jamaat-e-Islami in Kashmir—while the Congress decimated the BJP in Jammu, the ethnic-religious faultlines in the state deepened significantly.
The consolidation of Kashmiri identity along communal lines was a key moment in the journey toward the long jihad. Even though CM Farooq drew back into the Congress fold in the 1987 elections, forces had been unleashed that neither political leader could control.
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A fearful peacemaker
Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq publicly condemned Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front terrorists for kidnapping former chief minister Mufti Muhammad Saeed’s daughter, Rubaiya Saeed. Later, scholar Balraj Puri revealed that he began reaching out to intermediaries in New Delhi, including former defence minister George Fernandes, to open a political dialogue. This effort was to lead to Mirwaiz Farooq’s assassination in the summer of 1990, a crime for which two alleged perpetrators are now being tried.
Four weeks after the assassination, the jihadist who killed him, Mohammad Abdullah Bangroo, was shot dead by police. A procession assembled again to take him to Srinagar’s so-called martyrs’ graveyard—the Mazar-e-Shuhada—and he was laid next to the Mirwaiz. For their supporters, both the assassin and his victims were martyrs—martyrs, moreover, for the same cause.
The new Mirwaiz, Umar Farooq, found himself leading the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. Like other Hurriyat constituents, the Awami Action Committee also spawned an armed group, Al-Umar, but it concerned itself mainly with keeping other jihadists out of the Mirwaiz’s heartlands in old-city Srinagar.
Following the 2006 peace talks, the Mirwaiz found himself confronted by an increasingly bitter Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the patriarch of Jammu and Kashmir’s Islamist movement. As violent street mobilisations against India began that year, the young new Mirwaiz’s mother, fearing for her son’s life, is believed to have counselled him to step back. To the frustration of his interlocutors in the government, Mirwaiz Umar declined to contest elections or join in direct dialogue with New Delhi.
The failure of one-time secessionists in Kashmir’s last Assembly elections—among them, Abdul Rashid Sheikh, or Engineer Rashid, and Sajjad Gani Lone—appears to have persuaded the Government of India that it will have to do business with mainstream parties like the National Conference and People’s Democratic Party. That might be painful for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has derided the leaders of both parties as corrupt dynasts. The decision, though, also holds out the prospect of finally removing the shadows Kashmir’s violent past casts over its political present.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
Kashmiris can smell the king’s party from a mile. Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad has sunk without a trace. And one feels relieved that the fantasy of giving the state its first Hindu CM did not come to pass. Five years later, perhaps it is time to do an honest review of the hits and misses of Abrogation. Make a better omelette with the eggs we have.