As a religious leader, Maulana Showkat Ahmed Shah was a promoter of the purist Wahabi school of Islam in Kashmir over its indigenous liberal Sufism. As a political voice, he stood with the separatists. Within the limits of these categories, the cleric, who headed the religious group Jamiat Ahle Hadees, was a known moderate who was at pains to dissociate the Wahabism he preached from its violent and regressive avatar in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Although not part of the Hurriyat Conference, he was associated with the less hardline of the two factions and was vocal against violence and militancy. He was allied with the secular-minded Yasin Malik of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. Last spring, he opposed the stone-pelters, issuing a fatwa against the protest as un-Islamic. Earlier this year, the cleric defied a taboo in Kashmir by demanding a new inquiry into the killings of three separatist leaders — Mirwaiz Farooq, Abdul Gani Lone, and Qazi Nissar. This is possibly why Abdul Ghani Bhat, former chairman of the Hurriyat Conference, dared to declare that these leaders were killed by “our own people,” a cry later picked up by the Lone brothers, Sajjad and Bilal, about the killing of their father. Mr. Shah was also the only separatist leader to meet the government-appointed team of interlocutors. Tragically, but not surprisingly, the man who escaped attempts on his life in 2006 and 2008, finally fell victim to Kashmir's relentless violence. This time, the assassins left nothing to chance; they killed him with an improvised explosive planted on a bicycle as he entered a mosque in Srinagar to deliver the Friday sermon on April 8.
The killing has served to highlight the uncertainty in the Valley. The hope is that the tentative moves to break the 26/11 ice on the India-Pakistan engagement will lead to forward movement in Kashmir. The interlocutors are set to hold a round-table conference with all sections of Kashmiri opinion later this month, and have invited the separatists to participate. If the moderate Hurriyat faction led by Mirwaiz Omer Farooq was at all reconsidering its refusal to engage in the dialogue, the killing of Mr. Shah is likely to act as a deterrent. An unusually strong statement from the Pakistan government has condemned Mr. Shah's killing as “abominable,” and stressed that “violence against innocent persons cannot be justified on any grounds.” But it does not bode well that Hafiz Saeed, head of the Jamat-ud-dawa, who vows to take Kashmir by force, used the killing to resurface in Islamabad, reiterating his own agenda, and criticising last month's cricket diplomacy. All in all, complacency is the last thing Kashmir needs.
