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National

Chauvinism leveraged for political profit again

Praveen Swami

NC workers fanning the fires that secessionists might have set off

SRINAGAR: It’s been called an Intifada: a spontaneous expression of focussed rage against the Jammu and Kashmir government’s decision to allow Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board to use 39.88 hectares of land to house Hindu pilgrims.

Last week, without dispute, saw the largest popular mobilisation since the long jihad in the State began two decades ago. But while secessionists might have set off the ugly, chauvinist fires now raging across Jammu and Kashmir, National Conference(NC) workers control the tempo.

Both the scale and intensity of the protests are greater than the demonstrated capabilities of Islamist secessionist groups.

Till June 20, when the shrine board protests exploded, secessionist leaders like the Tehreek-i-Hurriyat’s Syed Ali Shah Geelani, typically had audiences fewer than 500 people. Islamist leader Asiya Andrabi’s Forum Against Social Evils, like a March assault on romantic couples at the Srinagar Botanical Park, rarely drew more than a few dozen cadres.

How have such large mobilisations suddenly occurred? Some clues lie in the fact that large crowds have come from Srinagar neighbourhoods where secessionists have no presence at all. Srinagar’s Shivpora area, around XV Corps Headquarters at Badami Bagh, is home to several important politicians and bureaucrats and has long been an NC stronghold. So too is Rajbagh, which saw large crowds come out on Friday.

Led by block and mohalla-level NC leaders, the crowds did not advertise their party affiliations but made their sympathies clear in other ways. No secessionist leader addressed the estimated 10,000-15,000 people who milled around Srinagar’s Lal Chowk on Friday. A meeting addressed by Mr. Geelani at his home drew fewer than a thousand people; second-rung Islamist leaders Masrat Alam and Shabbir Shah could attract just a few hundreds.

Elsewhere, the links between the NC and mobs have been even more obvious. On January 24, the party workers attacked the home of Forest Minister and People’s Democratic Party(PDP) leader Qazi Afzal, whose claims to fame include defeating the former Minister of State of External Affairs Omar Abdullah in 2002 and now ensuring the passage of the shrine board land grant. In Anantnag, PDP billboards were vandalised the same day.

Interestingly, the protests haven’t quite been the focussed assertions of anger on the shrine board issue as some commentators have claimed. Mobs which attacked the Punjab National Bank at Lal Chowk in Anantnag on Thursday, for example, were angered by a decision to hike interest rates on taxis. Protesters also attacked the Jammu and Kashmir Bank’s branch at Lal Chowk, after having tried to ransack HDFC Bank’s offices on the Khanabal-Pahalgam road a day earlier.

Often, the urban poor have used the cover provided by the cause for economic gain, a common feature of mob violence the world over. In Srinagar, groups of protesters detached themselves from a June 26 procession led by JKLF chairman Yasin Malik, and attempted to pillage an HDFC Bank ATM near Bud Shah Chowk. A grocery store near Dalgate was robbed of its stock of potato chips by teenage members of a mob, while the historic clock on the Ghanta Ghar was vandalised.

Elsewhere, mobs have sought to enforce what the religious right believes to be an appropriate social order. In Srinagar, crowds sought to destroy Highlander Bar in the Shivpora area, a facility first attacked by Islamists back in 1990, at the beginning of the long jihad. Protesters in Anantnag also destroyed the Pamposh Hotel, which caters for travellers on the Jammu-Srinagar highway. Its crime? Serving alcohol, the protesters claimed, to truck drivers.

This isn’t the first time chauvinism has been leveraged for political profit. Facing a serious challenge from the Jamaat-e-Islami and Janata Party alliance in 1977, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah argued that a vote for his opponents would help those whose hands were still red with the blood of Muslims. Potential voters were even administered oaths on the Koran. In the end, the NC won 47 of 75 seats in the Assembly.

Since then the NC has often adopted chauvinist positions to corral its flock. In 1999, the Report of the State Autonomy Committee advocated redistribution of Jammu and Kashmir into administrative blocs that would mirror its religious fault-lines reflecting Pakistan-backed proposals for a division of pre-Partition Jammu and Kashmir into the Muslim-majority areas to the north of the Chenab, and the Hindu-majority areas to it south.

Early this month, when the PDP threw its weight behind the shrine board protests, the party did so to ensure that Islamists did not erode its electoral base among Kashmiri Muslims. Now, the NC has shown that more than one can play the hate-politics game.

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