The last time Zahoor Butt climbed into his older brother’s lap, he noticed the iron manacles that bound his hands and feet: “These are the ornaments of a man,” the 10-year-old child was told. Less than six months later, in February 1984, Muhammad Maqbool Butt was marched to the gallows inside Tihar jail. Thousands gathered at the family home in the village of Trehgam to join his funeral. The body, though, was wrapped in white muslin, sprinkled with rose water, and, for the first time in Indian history, buried inside the prison yard.
Eighteen years old, he would often tell visiting journalists, ‘Engineer’ Abdul Rashid Sheikh was among the thousands of young people who had marched to Trehgam after news of Butt’s execution broke, hoping to join the funeral procession that never took place.
From his own prison cell, where he awaits trial on terrorism-financing charges, Rashid succeeded this week in securing a historic victory against former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, as well as Bharatiya Janata Party’s frenemy Sajjad Lone. The new Member of Parliament’s victory demonstrates that Kashmiri secessionism, cowed and leaderless since 2019, is far from spent.
Like the life of his hero—described by the scholar and journalist Ajit Bhattacharjea as a “colourful double agent used both by India and Pakistan”—the story of Engineer Rashid is suffused with grey.
Emerging from inside the secessionist People’s Conference in 2004 to fight elections in the face of a jihadist boycott, Rashid was suspected of being one of several politicians funded by New Delhi. The enterprise, spearheaded by the Intelligence Bureau, aimed to undermine the National Conference’s monopoly of power and to sow division among secessionists.
As the government prepares to hold elections to Kashmir’s legislative assembly, it’ll be carefully studying Sheikh’s victory, to see if it offers a template to hold back a resurgent National Conference.
The unwilling martyr
Early in the autumn of 1966, shots rang out in the woods near the north Kashmir town of Handwara. Eight weeks after they returned home from years in Pakistan, where they were fighting for Kashmir’s freedom, Butt and his associate Mir Ahmad found themselves trapped in a police ambush. Even though the two fought their way out of the ambush, shooting dead police officer Amar Chand, they were hunted down in the hills and chose to surrender. In 1968, both men were sentenced to death.
Like many young people of his generation, Butt had participated in the anti-feudal movements that brought Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah and the National Conference to power at independence. The son of a tailor, though, was soon disillusioned.
Following the breakdown of his relationship with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Sheikh Abdullah was jailed in 1958, on charges of treason. Then a student at St. Joseph’s College in Baramulla—a part of the same institution where Pakistani irregulars had raped and murdered nuns during the war of 1947–1948—Butt fled to Rawalpindi.
Two years after their arrest, Butt and Mir succeeded in tunnelling their way out of Srinagar jail and escaping across the Line of Control. To their surprise, though, the two men were imprisoned. Field Intelligence Unit officer Major Naseer Gul deposed at their trial that the escape had been staged by India’s intelligence services and that they were, in fact, spies.
Evidence on the issue is hard to come by, but Butt seems to have supplied information on his Kashmiri nationalist friends to the Border Security Force’s intelligence wing, the G-Branch, before he escaped to Pakistan.
Freed by the courts, though, Butt founded the National Liberation Front, the vanguard of the Kashmiri secessionist movement. Toward the end of 1969, he recruited Hashim Qureshi, who would go on to hijack an Indian Airlines Fokker F27 turboprop on the Srinagar-Jammu route in 1971—among the major milestones on the path to the Bangladesh Liberation War.
Even though the hijackers were feted by Pakistan, scholar Hasan Abbas records, Pakistani intelligence was convinced that the “Indian intelligence [had] stage-managed the hijacking”. The NLF leadership again found itself in a Pakistani prison.
Faced with the termination of Pakistani support after the Bangladesh War, though, Butt returned to Kashmir in the summer of 1976. His first operation was a bank robbery to raise cash, in which a teller was shot dead. Weeks later, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for the second time. This time, there was no escape.
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Avoiding martyrdom
Like his hero, Engineer Rashid became involved in secessionist politics as a teenager. From 1978, he joined the People’s Conference, founded that year by Abdul Gani Lone, one of Butt’s childhood friends. Lone had successfully stood for election in 1967, as a Congress candidate, but then founded the People’s Conference. Lone, political scientist Sten Widmalm writes, worked to forge a non-National Conference, non-Congress political front in Kashmir.
In 1987, these efforts would flower into the Muslim United Front, a party of the religious Right-wing. The rigging of elections that year, though, alienated young Kashmiris like Rashid. Many drifted toward jihadist groups.
Like many other politicians, Lone formed a loose coalition with terrorists of the Yasin Malik-led Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. The two factions soon splintered, with the JKLF at one point kidnapping Lone’s daughter, lawyer Shabnam Lone. Lone’s cadre set up a separate organisation, Al-Barq. Al-Barq would, in time, turn on Lone himself—by then guarded by police—claiming he had embezzled its assets.
Even though Rashid was arrested several times by the Jammu and Kashmir Police on suspicion of aiding terrorists, evidence never emerged to support the allegations. Rashid successfully earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Kashmir University in 1988, and an engineering diploma two years later. Later, he began working at a government-run Jammu and Kashmir Projects Construction Corporation.
Though others of his generation died in thousands fighting with jihadist groups, Rashid’s deep veneration for Butt seems to have left him unconvinced of the merits of becoming a martyr.
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The secessionist in the house
Elected from Langate in 2008, and then again in 2014, Engineer Rashid repeatedly demonstrated a talent for the theatrical: The MLA hailed jihadist Burhan Wani, slain in 2016, as a martyr. He campaigned for the return of the body of executed Parliament House attacker Afzal Guru to Kashmir and served beef kebabs on the lawns of the legislators’ hostel in Srinagar, to protest the state’s ban on beef, outlawed by the Dogra monarchy in 1862. He campaigned against wrongful arrests and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, often enraging the authorities.
To the stone-throwing young people who propelled Kashmir’s anti-India movement from 2008, it seemed he was their spokesman—even though he had decisively broken with the secessionists by fighting elections.
From 2002, People’s Conference leader Lone had begun a secret dialogue, brokered by the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), aimed at a political settlement in Kashmir. To his mind, it was necessary to reintroduce secessionist parties to electoral politics. Later that year, though, Lone was assassinated by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the panicked All Parties Hurriyat Conference leaders retreated.
The communally-charged violence that broke out in 2008 – after the state granted temporary land-use rights to the Amarnath shrine board for pilgrims – suggested they were right. Assembly elections held that year saw a huge turnout. Rashid, who had decided to stand for them, won power as an independent.
Langate, unlike much of Kashmir, saw little street violence during the Islamist street mobilisation of 2010. Two years earlier, mobs had attacked a temple and set fire to Hindu-owned homes. Rashid used his credibility with the youth to ensure violence did not erupt again. According to government sources, to powerful interlocutors, including now-National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Rashid argued that his provocations offered a necessary political tool to undermining violent secessionism.
After 2019, though, Sheikh found himself in the wilderness, and his supporters inside the intelligence services backed away. The politician was charged with having received payoffs through terrorism-linked businessman Zahoor Watali, and imprisoned.
The sympathy his incarceration generated likely contributed to his massive win—but that’s not the whole story.
Elections to Jammu and Kashmir’s legislature are again looming, and the wheel of fortune is again turning for Rashid. To a section of strategists in New Delhi, political Islam is a critical tool to rein in a resurgent National Conference. Kashmir’s hard-right Jamaat-e-Islami—Lone’s ally in 1987—has already made public its willingness to rejoin electoral politics. Other groups are also ready to bite—if New Delhi is willing.
The strategy comes with risks: Rashid’s victory, without doubt, will empower secessionists, and give Kashmir’s defeated Islamist movement a renewed sense of hope. Efforts to draw secessionism back into electoral politics led New Delhi to support the rise of the People’s Democratic Party, and its alliance with the BJP. That, however, ended up empowering violent secessionists, not mainstreaming them—a warning of the unpredictable outcomes of trying to manipulate politics.
For Delhi, a fateful moment of decision is again nearing. The fragile gains of 2019 could only too easily end up in ruins if the wrong choice is made.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)