Kashmir's politics of communal paranoia

Eighteen years ago, one sunny September afternoon, a football soared over the playing field of the Government Degree College in Rajouri, and slammed into a student standing on the far side. The student who was hit was a Muslim, the player a Hindu; perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, buildings began to burn inside the hour. Four people were killed before the rage stilled.

Indians have been struggling to make sense of the communal hatred that drove the savage rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Kathua, allegedly by Hindu nationalists seeking to scare her sheep-herding community off their pasture lands.

Liberals sometimes imagine Jammu and Kashmir as a kind of Islam-coloured Shangri-La: a place where Sufi mystics have melded faiths, and temple bells chime in time with the azaan. It isn’t: communal warfare is the state’s norm; the warp and weft everyday life is woven from.

Hailed by many as an historic reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims, the People’s Democratic Party-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance which took power in 2015 only institutionalised the communal carve-up of the state. Predictably, hardliners have been empowered — and are pushing for more.

For the past three years, communal tensions have been escalating steadily through the Jammu region — for the most part, around the motif of the cow. In 2015, ethnic-Kashmiri truck driver Zakir Bhat was burned alive by a Hindu nationalist mob, amidst claims he was smuggling cattle. In 2017, a Gujjar family was attacked in Reasi; several members suffered serious injuries. There have been dozens of smaller incidents.

Enraged: Indians have been struggling to make sense of the communal hatred that drove the savage rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Kathua

The communal skirmishing has been driven by Hindu nationalists, angered by the PDP-BJP alliance government’s decision not to push Gujjar and Bakkarwal herders, as well as Rohingya refugees, from the region — a long-standing demand.

In March, just two days before the Kathua murder, lawyer Ankur Sharma complained of a government-led “demographic assault on this region”. He is now representing the men accused of the Kathua child’s rape.

Like in all of India, mass mobilisations in the build-up to independence were scarred by ugly communal violence. In 1931, after Maharaja Hari Singh’s troops killed 28 protestors in Srinagar, Hindu-owned businesses and homes were targeted. More communal violence broke out that September. 

Kashmir’s Muslims watched the large-scale communal Partition massacres in Jammu with fear. “There isn’t a single Muslim in Kapurthala, Alwar or Bharatpur,” Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah said. Kashmiris, he recorded, “fear the same fate lies ahead for them”.

Hindus, south of the Pir Panjal mountains, looked through at events through a different prism—but imagined the same apocalypse ahead. In 1953, the Praja Parishad launched an agitation against Sheikh Abdullah's policies, demanding an end to Kashmir’s special Constitutional status. Sheikh Abdullah responded to the Jana Sangh-linked Praja Parishad by stoking communal fears in Kashmir. In one speech, he argued the Praja Parishad was part of project to convert India “into a religious state wherein the interests of Muslims will be jeopardised”.

From 1977, the unresolved strains between Kashmir and Jammu became increasingly sharp. In order to fight off growing competition from the Jamaat-e-Islami, Sheikh Abdullah attacked its alliance with the Janata Party “whose hands were still red with the blood of Muslims”.

Hatred paid off: the National Conference was decimated in the Hindu-majority constituencies of Jammu, but won all 42 seats in Kashmir.

In 1983, though, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi showed communalism could be a multi-player game. She conducted an incendiary campaign in Jammu, built around the claim that there was discrimination against the region because it was part of ‘Hindu India’. Across the Pir Panjal, Farooq Abdullah and his new found ally Maulvi Mohammad Farooq — secessionist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s father — let it be known that they were defending Kashmir’s Muslim identity. 

At a March 1987 rally in Srinagar, Muslim United Front candidates, clad in the white robes of the pious, declared that Islam could not survive under the authority of a secular state.

Low-grade communal skirmishing has become entrenched. The reasons are several: killings of Hindus by terrorists, the growth of Gujjar and Bakkarwal settlements in Jammu, conflict over access to education and jobs. Prosperity has deepened the schisms, with élites using communalism to fight for the spoils of big dam and road construction projects.

The tensions exploded in 2008, when both halves of the state exploded in violence, after Islamist-led protests against the grant of land-use rights to the Amarnath Shrine. Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani, using words near-identical to those Ankur Sharma has now invoked, warned the authorities were working “on an agenda of changing the demography of the State”.

How might all this end? In 1950, the United Nations-appointed mediator on Jammu and Kashmir, Owen Dixon, suggested that a solution to conflict in the state might lie in replicating the logic of Partition. 

Elements in Jammu and Kashmir’s polity — ranging from Hindu nationalist icon Shyama Prasad Mookerjee to Geelani — have since backed Partitioning the state along ethnic-religious fault lines.

In 1999, the National Conference itself issued a blueprint for Partition. Based on the proposals of a committee, the state government advocated the creation of six new provinces, sundering the Muslim majority parts of Jammu north of the Chenab river from the Hindu-majority south.

History teaches us that such an enterprise would end, inexorably, in slaughter — but each round of communal blood-letting brings it one step closer.

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