Like the devil himself, the blasphemous image had been hiding in plain sight, radiating corruption from its lair on the dusty library shelf into the city of the faithful. Then, in May 1973, a student at a college in Islamabad—or Anantnag as it is also named, after the serpent of the God Vishnu—discovered an image of the Archangel Gabriel dictating the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. Local clerics, outraged, called for protests against The Book of Knowledge, a children’s encyclopaedia; violence followed, in which four people were killed.
The protestors demanded the hanging of the author of the book: “A vain demand,” historian Katherine Frank has wryly noted, “since Arthur Mee had died in England in 1943.”
For Kashmir, the riots would mark the first bend in a road that would lead into the long jihad that erupted a decade and a half later. Last week, the political formation that more than any other powered that journey, the banned Jamaat-e-Islami Jammu and Kashmir (JIJK), said it now wished to contest elections and work within the democratic system. “We believe in democracy,” Jamaat leader Ghulam Qadir Wani told journalists.
The Jamaat has been here before. Even though the Jamaat constitution of 1953 demands that societies “acknowledge only the Divine code, rejecting an not in consonance with His command,” and rejects “any mortal’s authority to be an absolute law-giver or legislator,” it has been pragmatic in its relationships with secular power.
In 1963, Jamaat-backed independent candidates fought in Panchayat elections; the patriarch of the party and Kashmir’s jihadist movement, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, was a three-time member of the legislative assembly.
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Kashmir pious bourgeoise
The story began with words, not pictures: Late in 1937, the young son of one of Kashmir’s storied Sufi families began reading the Islamist radical Abul Ala’ Maududi’s Musalman Aur Maujuda Siyasi Kashmakash, a critique of the Muslim League’s two-nation theory that advocated for multiple, semi-independent states instead. Then a teacher at the Anjuman Nusrat-ul Islam’s Islamiya High School in Srinagar, and among the few Kashmiri Muslims of his generation with a college degree, Saaduddin Tarabali began a correspondence with Maududi.
Late in the 19th century, Srinagar’s most powerful religious leader, the Mirwaiz Rasul Shah, had set up the Anjuman Nusrat-ul-Islam as a means to encourage modern education among Kashmir’s Muslims. Large numbers of Kashmiri Muslims also began to acquire degrees in the universities of British India. The historian Chitralekha Zutshi has shown this class used Islam as a language to assert entitlements and rights in the Dogra monarchy’s Hindu Rashtra.
Tarabali soon drew new recruits—most influential among them, the 1929-born son of a landless labourer from the north Kashmir village of Zurimanj—in 1929. The National Conference leader Muhammad Saeed Masoodi treated Geelani as a son, allowing him to obtain an education and serve as editor of the party newspaper.
Education was seen as key to the Islamist project by the Jamaat leadership.
The Jamaat’s 125 schools were, by 1975, serving an estimated 25,000 students. The Jamaat believed, writes scholar Yoginder Sikand, that these schools were the trenches against a cultural onslaught by India, which sought “to destroy the Islamic identity of the Kashmiris through Hinduising the school syllabus”.
To truly influence the polity, though, the Jamaat knew it needed power. In 1971, it fought the Lok Sabha election without success but won state-level representation the next year. Geelani served in the assembly in 1972, 1977 and 1987.
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Limits of influence
For Kashmiri Islamists, the period after 1971 was one of continuous reverses. In 1975, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah—long incarcerated for demanding a plebiscite on Kashmir’s future—signed an accord with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, dropping his demand for independence and agreeing to a dramatic expansion of central government authority. In return, Sheikh Abdullah was made chief minister. The agreement, political scientist Sten Widmalm has noted, reflected a wider breakdown of faith in Pakistan and its claims to represent Islam.
The Jamaat responded to this change with a campaign of religious agitprop, beginning with The Book of Knowledge riots. The historian Alistair Lamb notes that PM Indira became increasingly worried that Abdullah’s successor, Farooq Abdullah, was losing control. The PM feared the cricket-match protest was “the first phase of a general Islamic rebellion against the Hindu Domination of New Delhi”.
Large-scale communal violence broke out in 1986 after the Jamaat cadre protested against the opening of the Babri Masjid to Hindu worshippers. Local Jamaat activists, case records show, set fire to Kashmiri Pandit-owned homes and temples, casting it as vengeance for anti-Muslim violence elsewhere in India.
Following the end of the Emergency in 1977, when the Jamaat had been driving underground, the party hoped to capitalise on opening democratic space. The Jamaat fought the 1977 election in alliance with the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Jana Sangh, hoping to undermine the Congress-National Conference bloc. The party was, however, decimated in the election, political scientists Ghulam Qadir Bhat and Khursheed Ahmad Wani have written. The rigged elections of 1987 finally convinced young Jamaat radicals that there was no future in democratic politics.
Likely, the Jamaat political leadership understood what the jihadist turn of its cadre would lead to. Later, Geelani lamented in his diaries that the jihad had “actually gone out of the control of the political leadership and into the hands of militant youth”. “They have,” he concluded, “apparently miscalculated the enormity of the demands of the struggle and the strength of the power they are fighting against, fondly imagining that their goal would be achieved in no time.”
As late as August 1989, Geelani attended a meeting called by Farooq to consider responses to the growing violence. “I was the only participant in the meeting,” he said, “who suggested resolving issues through dialogue”.
A Prophet cast off
“Even if the wealth of the whole India is put in my pocket,” Geelani promised at a press conference in 2010, “I will not barter away the sacrifices of our martyrs.” The Islamist leader was, by then, cut off from his own party. The Jamaat’s rural leadership had been treated brutally through the 1990s by Indian security forces and pro-India militia. From 2002 onwards, the Indian government had begun backing former CM Mufti Muhammad Saeed’s People’s Democratic Party in an effort to create a counterweight to the National Conference.
Large numbers of Jamaat leaders saw an opportunity to reemerge from the shadows. In May 2003, Jamaat moderates, led by Syed Nasir Ahmad Kashani, retired Geelani as their political representative in the secessionist All Parties Hurriyat Conference coalition. Early the next year, the Jamaat Majlis-e-Shoora, or central consultative council, went public with a commitment to “democratic and constitutional struggle”.
The strains inside the Jamaat had long been crystallising.
In 1997, then-Jamaat chief Ghulam Muhammad Bhat called for an end to the “gun culture”—a statement later revealed as part of a secret dialogue process between India’s intelligence services and secessionists. The dialogue had the backing of some pro-dialogue figures in the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the Jamaat’s armed wing.
Geelani’s discourse, by contrast, radicalised. In a 1998 book, he suggested that Kashmir’s secession from India was essential for the survival of Islam in the region. For Muslims to live among Hindus, he argued, was as difficult as “for a fish to stay alive in a desert”.
Geelani turned to Islamists outside the Jamaat, like Nayeem Khan’s Kashmir Front and Shakeel Bakshi’s Islamic Students’ League, to build a movement that would give life to this vision. In the summer of 2008, matters came to a head after the State government granted temporary land use rights for facilitating the annual pilgrimage to the Amarnath shrine in southern Kashmir.
Geelani claimed this was a conspiracy to settle Hindus in the region: The authorities were working “on an agenda of changing the demography of the State”. “I caution my nation,” he warned, “that if we don’t wake up in time, India and its stooges will succeed and we will be displaced.”
For the next 10 years, until the end of Article 370, violent Islamist-led agitations rocked Kashmir as Geelani’s supporters made determined efforts to succeed where the Kalashnikovs of the jihadists had failed.
Like it did in 1969, and again in 2002, the Jamaat is seeking to deal itself back into the political game and use power to propel its ideological project. Though New Delhi has often sought to use the Jamaat to counter Kashmiri ethnic-nationalism, the results have been less than roseate. The rise of the People’s Democratic Party was meant to draw Islamists into the fold of politics. Instead, Islamists succeeded in hijacking the political system and unleashed forces that almost brought down the state itself.
Kashmir’s Jamaat-e-Islami has shown it can put pragmatism before principle in its pursuit of power. There’s no reason to believe, though, that it’s prepared to abandon its toxic, communal project.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)