Like petals of light, the bright soprano notes descended through the summer sunshine over the elderly politician: “Sabz dastarus Khudah choie raazi,” the women’s traditional Wanvun song went, “Pakistanuk gazi aou.” The notes mingled with ecstatic cheers as Morarji Desai, just two weeks short of the 1977 elections that would see him defeat Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, crossed the small bridge that linked the old Srinagar neighbourhood of Rajouri Kadal to Mirwaiz Manzil, the home of the influential Islamic cleric, Mirwaiz Muhammad Yusuf Shah.
“The Almighty has faith in the green turban,” the Kashmiri lyrics meant, “Behold the holy warrior who has come from Pakistan.” The reaction of the devoutly Hindu Khadi-wearing Gandhian—and eccentric auto-urine therapy advocate—is, unfortunately, lost to history.
Five years after Kashmir’s special constitutional status was dismantled, its citizens have elected an alliance led by a family Prime Minister Narendra Modi blamed for destroying entire generations. To keep the National Conference-led coalition out, the central government had even engaged in a less-than-discreet flirtation with the Jamaat-e-Islami and secessionist-leaning politician ‘Engineer’ Abdul Rashid Sheikh.
As improbable an alliance between the Government of India and Kashmiri Islamists might seem, it’s one with durable historical credentials—and deeply damaging consequences. For Prime Minister Modi to demonstrate that he is indeed serious about building a new kind of Kashmir, he needs to resist the temptation to use the religious Right to undermine the new government, which will rule with a fragile majority.
Kashmir’s competitive chauvinism
The handkerchief fluttered discreetly in her hand, its meaning needing no words spoken: The People’s Democratic Party (PDP)’s then-president and to-be chief minister, Mehbooba Mufti, understood the power of images. Former prime minister Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah’s key lieutenant, Mirza Afzal Beg, had displayed a similar green handkerchief throughout the election of 1977. The handkerchief contained Pakistani rock salt, as opposed to Indian sea salt, signifying his commitment to secession.
From their bases in Pakistan, jihadists let it be known that the promise was an illusion—“A trap disguised in the colours of the earth,” one Hizbul Mujahideen spokesperson warned. The actual snare, though, had been laid by India for itself.
Led by former Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) chief Amarjit Singh Dulat, India’s intelligence services had worked for years to draw Kashmiri secessionists back into electoral politics. The PDP’s party logo, the inkpot-and-pen, was the very same logo used by the Hizbul Mujahideen’s Pakistan-based chief Mohammad Yusuf Shah, when he unsuccessfully contested elections in 1987 as a candidate of the Muslim United Front.
The PDP soon drew prominent secessionists into its ranks. Former Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front supreme council member Pir Mansoor Husain became Mehbooba Mufti’s political advisor; cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s trusted lieutenant, Mohammad Yakub Vakil joined the party; one-time Jamaat-e-Islami chief Ghulam Mohammad Bhat’s brother, Abdul Khaliq Bhat, became the party’s candidate from Sopore.
Even more important for New Delhi, the party had succeeded in developing a relationship with important figures in the Hizbul Mujahideen such as Ghulam Rasool Khan.
For the National Conference, though, the PDP’s rise proved an existential threat, and both parties soon found themselves locked in competitive chauvinist mobilisation. The contestation would culminate in 2008 in a communally charged mobilisation against the leasing of state land to the Amarnath temple. Even though Islamists catalysed the violent movement, politicians of both the PDP and the National Conference mobilised support, hoping to grow their legitimacy.
Local Congress leaders burned effigies of their coalition ally, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, in the south Kashmir village of Wandi-Valgam, while National Conference activists were the principal leaders of protests in Paibugh. National Conference cadre, killed in their hundreds by jihadists, even helped build a memorial to slain Pakistani jihadists shot dead near Ganderbal during the protests.
Fuelled by support from the major parties, Islamists began to mobilise. The former Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen terrorist, Masarat Alam Bhat, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat leader, Asiya Andrabi, and secessionist leader Mehrajuddin Kalwal spearheaded campaigns against migrant workers, prostitution, sexual freedoms and alcohol use, cast as Indian plots against Islam. Islamists attacked schools for displaying portraits of Mother Teresa and Bhagat Singh, kidnapped teachers for failing to enforce the veil, and even publicly tortured residents who were deemed insufficiently pious.
As democratic political parties fought for the support of the Kashmiri Islamist constituency, the democratic system was slowly undermined. “This is politics,” the prominent National Conference politician Sakina Itoo said amid the rural uprising that broke out across southern Kashmir in 2016. “In 2008, after all, our workers joined in the protests to embarrass the PDP.”
A persistent fallacy
Leading up to the political crisis of 1984, when Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah’s dismissal from power opened the way for the long jihad in Kashmir, Indira Gandhi is said to have proclaimed: “I am not worried about the democratic norms. I am not going to kiss Kashmir away just because of them.” As she battled to crush Sheikh Abdullah’s movement for a plebiscite on Kashmir’s future, political scientist Navnita Chadha Behera has recorded in an authoritative work on the region’s politics that Indira had become increasingly disdainful of democracy.
Among Indira’s most consequential decisions was to enable the Jamaat-e-Islami to contest elections in 1972, even though it did not accept Kashmir’s accession to India—the very grounds on which Sheikh Abdullah’s Plebiscite Front was banned.
Even though the Jamaat-e-Islami won just five seats, it received political and constitutional legitimacy. The party was able to develop a network of schools and madrasas, build mosques, publish propaganda and place its cadre inside the government bureaucracy. For the Jamaat-e-Islami, as its leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani would later tell the journalist Aasha Khosa, electoral politics was merely a tool to build an Islamic state where “the creed of socialism and secularism should not touch our lives and we must be totally governed by the Koran.”
Following her triumph in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, Indira succeeded in wearing down Sheikh Abdullah and, four years later, compelled him to accept an agreement that all but ended Kashmir’s special constitutional status. Following the agreement, Indira made her first post-war visit to Kashmir, which included a boat procession that “propelled by turbaned oarsmen, was reminiscent of the visits of Mughal emperors”.
Even though it had abandoned its promise of a plebiscite, the National Conference fought hard to retain its position as Kashmir’s preeminent political party. The Jamaat-e-Islami was banned on Sheikh Abdullah’s watch, and its leaders were incarcerated. In 1977, after the Emergency, the Jamaat-e-Islami lined up alongside the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a predecessor of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The bizarre trip which saw Prime Minster Desai hailed as a Ghazi from Pakistan was an outcome of that alliance.
The National Conference fought back, also using religion. A vote for the Jamaat-e Islami, Sheikh Abdullah proclaimed, was a vote for the Partition-tainted Jana Sangh, whose “hands were still red with the blood of Muslims”. Islam, National Conference leaders insisted, would be in danger if a Jamaat-Janata alliance took power.
For her part, Behera notes, Indira relentlessly raised communal insecurities in the Hindu-majority regions of Jammu, warning that she alone could protect it from Islamism and secession. The elections of 1977 paid off for both the Congress and National Conference, with both consolidating their regional strongholds on the basis of communal identity. The template for the course of Kashmir politics had been laid, with tragic consequences.
Also read: Who has the right to be ‘angry’ in Kashmir? Certainly not its power elite
Troubling portents
Even though the 2024 elections have been cast as a critical step toward the restoration of democracy and Kashmir’s statehood, three elements of its outcome are less-than-roseate. First, even though Engineer Rashid and the Jamaat-e-Islami have been electorally crushed, their reintroduction to politics has given their ideas political space. Failure to deliver on the aspirations of young voters could lead, only too easily, to renewed disillusion with democratic politics. Second, the narrowness of the National Conference-Congress majority will provide the Government of India with opportunities and temptations to undermine the new government in Kashmir.
Third, and perhaps most important, Jammu and Kashmir are hopelessly fractured on communal lines, as they were in 1977 and 1983, on the cusp of the long jihad. The reopening of this fissure, driven by events from 2008 onwards, constitutes a long-term threat to stability across Kashmir, which secessionists will seek to exploit.
Late in 1963, as the Indian state’s authority disappeared across Kashmir—the first of a series of crises that have shaped the region’s destiny—the politician Ghulam Muhammad Sadiq wrote an acid letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, noting that his policies were driven “by a primordial fear of the people.” Election after election has seen Kashmir’s people demonstrate that, like other Indians, they seek a future shaped by democratic rights and norms.
The path to Kashmir becoming like any other part of India runs through treating it like any other part of India. This election verdict challenges Prime Minister Modi to do just that.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)