Forgotten Kashmiri youth

During 2004 Lok Sabha polls, the Gujarat pogrom was heavy on the minds of the Muslim electorate. At many places, they voted en masse and en bloc to stop the march of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) spurning all its allurements. Though Indian Muslims lag behind in every sphere, they have used their electoral power to effectively punish their detractors. Their sense of political revenge could easily be described as exemplary. Muslims were instrumental in decimating the Congress in Bihar following the 1989 Bhagalpur communal riots and facilitating the emergence of Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar.

They made it almost non-existent in UP for its role in the Babri Masjid demolition. In the forthcoming elections they may want to punish the Samajwadi Party (SP) for its role in the Muzaffarnagar carnage.Ironically, while the Muslim electorate in India has helped the larger secular consolidation and taken political revenge, the violence in Kashmir devouring tens of thousands of Muslims, has hardly evoked a sense of empathy amongst Muslims in the rest of the country. Even the execution of Afzal Guru, which traumatised Kashmiri youth, has hardly evoked any empathy from Indian Muslims.

Consider the recent action of the Muslim vice chancellor of Swami Vivekanand Subharti University (SVSU) near Meerut. He has peremptorily expelled scores of Kashmiri students. Their offence: cheering the Pakistani team after it won the cricket match against India recently.Undoubtedly, the Kashmir crisis includes an inherent communal angle as its roots lie in the Partition. Indian Muslims have largely kept themselves aloof. Despite provocations from communal outfits inside and outside the mainstream, including the Hindutva camp, the Indian political system has not been communalised. So much so, the exodus of Kashmiri Pundits in 1990 did not end in a cataclysm, despite BJP hardliner LK Advani unleashing the Ram Mandir frenzy in North India around the same time.The method, though uncanny, seems to follow an unhappy pattern.

Omar Abdullah, now Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir told this writer, when in opposition benches, that various governments as well as the Indian civil society seem willing to "tolerate" a slightly heightened level of violence in Jammu and Kashmir. Militant attacks in the state — even of the worst kind — never stalled the India-Pakistan peace process. But the Mumbai attacks and blasts in Delhi in the recent past seem to have made the peace more fragile than ever before. It's not just the government — civil society too seems indifferent to the Kashmir violence. Killing five to six people daily doesn't make a big difference.

But a terror strike that kills 200-300 people in Mumbai in the span of a day creates a major impact; even though the number of people killed in Kashmir every year is much higher than that.Besides, there are deceptive layers of violence which remain unseen. Some would argue that killings of minorities hog more attention in J&K media than the killings of Muslims. The intelligence agencies claim that like small sections of the Sikhs during the Khalistani movement, some Indian Muslims too were always on the radar of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Since the early 1980s, the agency had tried to motivate sections of Muslim youths to cross the border for training. Till the demolition of Babri Masjid and Mumbai riots, such tactics could only convince four persons.

According to an intelligence source, two of them escaped when the group reached Delhi. But, disturbing reports emerged in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition. In 1993, around 80 Muslim youngsters were recruited for training in militant camps.

Surprisingly, the source added, the trend stopped soon after the Mumbai blasts. "Probably, these young men wanted to express their anger more intensely at the mosque demolition and the bloody Mumbai riots," he claimed.Lt General Arjun Ray, who served as Brigadier General Staff (BGS) at the Srinagar-based 15 Corps and later as corps commander in Ladakh, in his book Kashmir Diary: Psychology of Militancy (1997), based on interrogations of captured militants, says: "Contrary to popular belief, religion is not the primary motivational factor for Kashmiri militants. Kashmiri militancy is not a religious movement (yet)."

The military official, however, warned in 1997 that it might snowball into a religious movement.Islamic studies scholar, Yoginder Sikand, argues that it is not due to insensitivity but the fear of being accused as 'anti-national' that has compelled Indian Muslims to keep aloof from the Kashmir crisis. He says a large section of Indian Muslims do link resolution of the Kashmir dispute to their survival and progress. "The fear of continued conflict furthers the cause of Hindutva forces in their anti-Muslim campaign," he says. Surely, madrassas in India just can't be cast in a negative stereotype, nor is there any evidence to prove the allegations against them by predictable Muslim-bashers. Interestingly, even when 30,000 madrassas dotted India's landscape until a decade ago, J&K, a Muslim majority state, did not have a single one of them.

But over the years madrassas have started mushrooming in J&K, and almost all of these are associated with larger madrassas in India, particularly of the Deobandi, Barelvi and Ahl-i-Hadith schools of thought. A large number of teachers in these madrassas are from north India, mostly from Bihar, Haryana and eastern UP.This connection could be used positively to provide a valuable lead to creatively involve Indian Muslims in the Kashmir peace process. The Jama'at-e-Islami Hind, the Markaz-i Ahl -i-Hadith-i-Hind and the Darul Ulum madrassa at Deoband have peers on other side of the border. Organisations like the Jama'at-e-Islami Pakistan, the Jamaat-u-Dawa-wa-Rishad associated with the Ahl-i-Hadith, Pakistan, are key players in the Kashmir conflict.Their Indian counterparts, like Jama'at-e-Islami Hind and Ahl-i-Hadith and the Deobandi ulama, who do not approve the actions of their Pakistani counterparts, can be imaginatively 'used' to spread the process of inter-communal harmony and peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute.

A creative, cultural synthesis of secular unity, rational positions and shared values, as opposed to hatred and bigotry, could break the impasse. And why should it not, when it can defeat the forces of communal violence and xenophobia and send a message of hope in Kashmir, across the Indian spectrum, and even beyond the borders.

The author is with dna