An emotionally turbulent fortnight

By David Devadas

It has been an emotionally turbulent fortnight in Kashmir. Shock and anguish at the massacre of 24 Kashmiri Pandits overwhelmed all other sentiments but, before that, Islamic passions were rising to fever pitch over the “shock and awe” strikes against Iraq. If pan-Islamic militant groups were trying to whip that Islamic sentiment farther by hitting at non-Muslims, they miscalculated terribly. Indeed, they could not have done greater damage to their cause.

There has rarely been a more complete protest strike in recent years than the one last week against this massacre. Kashmir’s leading Imam, Mirwaiz Umar, declared that whoever had done it had grievously injured Islam.

The conflation of emotions in Kashmiri minds and hearts is sometimes very difficult for others to comprehend. On the one hand, they are deeply devoted to Islam. On the other, they warmly cherish the fusion of cultures that they call Kashmiriyat. To understand this co-existence of sentiments, one must realise that most Kashmiris see no contradiction in the subtle absorption of Hindu traditions into their practice of Islam, although these seem heretical to AhIe-hadis puritans. In fact, the ambivalent complexity of the Kashmiri mind or perhaps it is the Kashmiri heart-has led to confusion about what the entire militant movement is about. Such killings naturally lead people to presume that it is basically a Hindu-Muslim problem. That is a very limited under standing.

One must remember that Pandits were killed largely in two phases. The first phase lasted mainly from February to August 1990 and targeted individual Pandits or males in twos and threes. The second phase of Pandit killings has concentrated on mowing down entire families in particular villages and can be dated from January 26, 1998, when a massacre similar to this one occurred at Wandhama near Ganderbal. The first series of killings, in which about 150 Hindus were slaughtered, was often revoltingly depraved. Such brutality can only be explained in the context of the mass hysteria I wrote about it in my last column. Its roots probably lie in the collective memory of Kashmiri Muslims of their gross repression over a century-and-a-half. If that is so, that season of vicious blood letting in 1990 served as a catharsis. The Kashmiri Muslim went back by autumn that year to rediscovering his composite culture. Of course, that rediscovery was facilitated by the economic spin-offs of the mass migration of Pandits that those murders caused. Muslim school teachers, university professors, consultants at the most prestigious hospitals, wannabe journalists and civil servants in every department suddenly had unexpected avenues for promotion. For, though Pandit domination of government jobs had been gradually declining for 40 years, their learning, diligence and kinship network still left them with a strong grip over several professions.

Since the Pandits who remained beyond the summer of 1990 were mainly poor peasants who lacked the tools to build a new life out side the valley, the community ceased to be economically competitive. So it was easy for Muslims to bask once more in the comforting glow of composite culture. Many Muslims continued to want independence but now wished for the remaining minorities to go with them.

By the late l990s, the militancy had been largely taken over by jehadi warriors from Pakistan, churned out from the sprawling Dawat-ul-Irshad campus at Muridke or madarsas affiliated to the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (which also spawned the Taliban) or to Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami. This type of warrior had no feel for Kashmir’s freedom struggle. They were steeped in doctrinaire sermons invoking Islamic resurgence on a global scale, before which national boundaries would crumble.

To these zealots, Kashmir was Islamic territory and putting its kafir Hindus to death would earn them a place in heaven beside the Ghazis of yore. They could not understand why Kashmiri Muslims got so upset at the deaths of their Hindu compatriots. It is ironic that these jihadi warriors killed Abdul Majid Dar, former Operational Commander of Hizb-ul Mujahideen, a day before they slaughtered Hindus just last week.

Source: The Tribune   

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