A Radical Turn

ON AUGUST 22, the Jammu & Kashmir govern­ment said it was taking over the management of 215 schools run by the banned Islamist organisa­tion Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI). These schools, spread over Kashmir Valley’s 10 districts, have an enrol­ment of over 50,000 students and have about 4,000 people as staff, including teachers. These are run by the Falah-e-Aam trust, JeI’s educational wing. JeI was banned in Kashmir after the Pulwama suicide attack in 2019 but, strangely, its schools were kept out of the purview of the ban. The new government order says that the schools will be taken over by the concerned deputy magistrate or deputy collector till fresh managing committees are made; this decision has been taken after intelligence agencies submitted adverse reports about them.

Shortly afterwards, state Education Minister Sakina Itoo said that these schools will not be run by district administrative heads but by principals of government schools and that the exist­ing staff in the schools will remain the same. If that is true, one wonders whether the so-called adverse reports were for the walls of the schools. If the teaching staff have to remain unchanged, as Itoo claimed, then what change does the government foresee happening in these schools? And the bigger question is: If the schools allowed to run in the first place?

“The Jamaat’s role has been dubious,” said veteran commu­nist leader Mohamad Yousuf Tarigami who is also an MLA from South Kashmir’s Kulgam constituency. “The government is now saying that these schools will be run by fresh managing commit­tees, but how far will it help?”

Not long ago, many outside Kashmir had expressed joy over visuals of the Indian national flag being unfurled at a few Islamic seminaries in south Kashmir whose teachers have in the past been on police radar for radical preaching. These seminaries have produced many militants over the years. It is unlikely that there is any scrutiny even now of what is being taught inside the walls of these seminaries.

The fact is that in the last couple of years, there has been a silent rise in the activities of radical organisations in Kashmir Valley, especially JeI. In April, the organisation managed to construct a Darasgah (evening school) in Khee in Kulgam district, despite several concerned people bringing it to the government’s notice. Earlier, in February, JeI was allowed to hold a public meeting in a government guest house in Kulgam. The event was widely publicised. The organisation has been given a long rope since last year when it put up its proxy candidates to fight the Assem­bly elections. After the 2019 ban, it had been struggling with the problem of continuing its work—more than 70 of its bank accounts were sealed.

Last year, it was a common belief in Kashmir that the Jamaat and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government had reached some sort of agreement. This was believed to have been done with the aim of creating division in votes, especially in Jamaat strong­holds, which would be beneficial to BJP. BJP hoped to cut into the votes of Kashmir’s two main parties, the National Conference (NC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The Jamaat could not fight openly but it almost did by fielding its cadre as Indepen­dent candidates. Prominent among them was Sayar Reshi, who contested from Kulgam. In the north, from Langate, the party’s former general secretary Ghulam Qadir Lone put up his son, Kalimullah, as a candidate. During the campaigning, the proxy Jamaat candidates began to say things that, many felt, were against their grain. Reshi spoke about the return of Kashmiri Pandits while Kalimullah Lone defended the right of Kashmiri Muslim girls to marry outside their religion. As a party that had boycotted elections earlier, it was ironic to hear Reshi telling peo­ple that if anybody stopped them from casting their vote they should drag that person to the police station.

BUT THIS TIME it did not work as it did in the Lok Sabha elections when a jailed separatist leader managed to defeat—many believe with BJP’s tacit blessings—NC’s Omar Abdullah. In the Assembly elections, NC secured a majority but, at the same time, the Jamaat’s proxy candidates got a good number of votes. And ever since, sources reveal, it has started reorganising itself. “BJP has encouraged them,” said Tarigami.

There is no word yet on its frozen accounts but, according to sources, JeI has managed good funding from various sources, in­cluding public donation. That the Jamaat had no qualms about taking money even from sources it generally considers haram was evident several years ago at a rally in Kulgam where late Jamaat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani publicly said that it was all right to take donations from an individual who was allegedly involved in the business of alcohol.

With the new lease of life, the Jamaat has been able to moti­vate its cadre to start working again. According to sources, these include several hardline activists who have played a key role in mobilisation of stone-pelting mobs during the unrest of 2010 and during the chaos of 2016 in the aftermath of the killing of the terrorist Burhan Wani. Among those who have regrouped, say sources, is a man who led a mob of about 400 arsonists that attacked a police station in South Kashmir in July 2016 when a grenade lobbed from within the crowd resulted in the death of two policemen. Another man under the scanner is a longtime JeI member who has been to prison several times and has in the past led mobs that attacked local policemen’s houses.

The clout Jamaat leaders had in Kashmir can be gauged from an incident in July 2015 when a PDP Rajya Sabha member, Nazir Ahmad Laway, was attacked by angry protesters in Kulgam. Laway had come to take part in an official event at a school when the protests began. As his guards whisked him away, they arrested two stone pelters. In response, the protesters stormed the school building and held several government officials of the revenue and education departments hostage. The police sent Jamaat’s district chief Yousuf Rather to negotiate with them which fur­ther emboldened the protesters. It was only after several hours that the Army stormed the building, freeing the officials. Af­terwards, the mob burnt down the school. Later that year, in October, a top Pakistani terrorist, Abu Qasim, was killed in an encounter. His body was paraded through at least 50 villages in a procession organised by radical Islamists, which included a significant number of JeI cadre. It was attended by thousands of people. It is this impression that the state’s writ no longer ran that led to the events in post-Burhan Kashmir where several areas of South Kashmir came under the control of radical Islamists.

Gradually, in the past few months, radical elements who were supposed to have been suppressed after 2019 have be­come active again. In April, the government opened a new tulip garden in South Kashmir’s Kokernag area. A few days later, a mob led by a few preachers vandalised it because ac­cording to them such things were against the tenets of Islam. In several mosques, according to sources, sermons replete with sectarian bigotry and anti-education rants have gained momentum. On the side, the Jamaat’s frontal organisations like Dukhtaran-e-Millat have become active, organising radi­cal preaching programmes for young women. While its chief Asiya Andrabi is in prison, the organisation has put other key members to work. According to sources, this includes one of Andrabi’s trusted aides, active in the Anantnag-Kulgam belt. It is believed that she is involved in distributing radical literature among the young and also frequently visits the families of active (and dead) terrorists to support them. Other key figures include two women whose brothers were terrorists and were killed in encounters. They are particularly active in south Kashmir.

What is ironic is that, on the one hand, the government has recently issued a ban on several books, most of which may have a particular point of view but do not espouse ideas of radical Islam; and on the other, it has allowed the functioning of JeI schools that teach dangerous ideas through books written by radical Islamists, including those by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. One such book, translated by the Pakistani Jamaat ideologue Mohammed Inayatullah Subhani, is called ‘Mujhaid ki Azaan’. It says things like: “Pakistan is important for all those whose mission is jihad” and “real jihad is physical battle against the enemies of Islam and for establishing the supremacy of Is­lam.” A resident of South Kashmir, now a teacher, and who at­tended a JeI school in the 1990s, recalls how the school would celebrate the birthday of Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq who had an alliance with the Jamaat. “Not much has changed in these schools,” he said.

Dukhtaran-e-MillatFalah-e-Aam TrustJamaat-e-IslamiKashmirpoliticsradical groupsRise of Islamists forcesSrinagar