From Sufi to Salafi
A report by Vedang Bhatt, Mass Communication Student, Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication. This research essay explores the role of Wahabi and Salafi school of Muslim thought behind rising violence in the Kashmir valley. The paper also looks at Pakistan’s double standards and how a political solution to the issue might never be possible.
“On Burhan Wani’s death anniversary, Zakir Musa declared Al-Qaeda’s Kashmir unit head”, read a First Post report on 28th July 2017. A video recently went viral and Indian Media was taken by a storm. Zakir Musa, the recently appointed chief of Al-Qaeda – Kashmir Wing, announced the terrorist group’s plans to bring the State of Kashmir under strict Sharia rule. Zakir Musa, in his video, also warned Separatist leaders to not generalize Kashmir’s fight for Independence as a political movement, since it is essentially a religious propaganda, and a struggle to impose “the rule of Allah” and create an Islamic State. The news is not as surprising as the Indian media finds it. A little research can lead one to notice the origin and increasing radicalization of the valley has been up in flames since the first Indo-Pak war in 1948.
Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old militant (or freedom fighter as some Kashmiris and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif refers to) was killed by the Indian Army on 8th July, 2016. However, right after his killing, approximately 50,000 people came out to mourn his death. Burhan Wani, in his active years from 2010-2016, had become the face of Kashmir’s freedom movement. Wani joined the militants and received combat training in the Pakistan Administered Kashmir at the age of 15 after having an alleged violent encounter with the security forces. What differentiated Burhan Wani from other militants was the acceptance of his choice. Wani was the first militant to reveal his face on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which he often used to communicate and instigate the youth to participate in their struggle. He often posted videos on YouTube, pursuing Kashmiris to take up arms, speaking about Khilafat. This was a major departure from the old practices of sending fax and encrypted messages. Burhan Wani’s video., remains the first and the only of its kind. When looked closely, the 22-year old’s viral video has an uncanny resemblance to the ones published by Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al-Qaeda and recently by the ISIS, all of which call for Khilafat and Muslim unity against ‘forceful Indian occupation’. The Khilafat finds itself at odds with the conservative stance of separatist Hurriyat Conference leaders of implementing United Nation’s resolution 47 of 1948. The young militants no more want a fair plebiscite, but complete ‘AZADI’. The Khilafat movement has often found “democratic and moral support” in Nawaz Sharif’s government, which never fails to snub its Indian counterpart at international forums on “human rights violation” in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The projection of Burhan Wani as Kashmir’s hero, freedom fighter and a martyr on social media sites has led to more and more militants being recruited from the local youth. A report by Hindustan Times read - “The ground reality in Kashmir is changing slowly but surely and it can be gauged even from plain statistics. If in 2013, 31 local youths joined militancy, the number for 2015 (till September-end) jumped to 66, according to police records.”
A striking resemblance can be found in rising Islamic agitation in Kashmir and Zakir Musa’s philosophy of converting Kashmir into an Islamic State. On more and more instances, the security forces found themselves rattled with stone-pelters raising ISIS flags along with Pakistan’s. This brings us to a couple important questions: Was the Indian government blind to the rising Islamic aggression and penetration of organizations like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Hizbul Mujahedeen? Was New Delhi unaware of Burhan Wani’s rise and increasingly popular Khilafat movement? How did Islamic extremism suddenly assume the centre stage in a 70-year-old conflict?
The answers are not simple and takes a lot more than the usual rhetoric by the country’s politicians and so-called journalists like Arnab Goswami, who ridicule every problem the valley faces, as a mere orchestration of our neighbouring state to destabilize the region. It is a known fact that neither India nor Pakistan is innocent. Pakistan claims human rights violation in Kashmir and citing apparent support in the Muslim majority state, declares allegiance and legitimacy of its stake. India, on the other hand, refuses Pakistan’s role and considers Kashmir ‘legally’ its own, and quite rightfully so. To put it all in perspective, both India and Pakistan are at fault here; India just a little less than Pakistan. Pakistan claims Indian occupation as illegal and accuses the Indian government of violating the United Nations’ resolution number 48, of 1948 which suggested a fair plebiscite in the valley. However, it fails to adhere to the pre-condition of demilitarizing the P.o.K region. The first and foremost precondition of the UN resolution states that Pakistan will remove its army from the said region, following which the Indian army would also withdraw, to hold a fair plebiscite. Islamabad did not follow the UN resolution, and yet accuses New Delhi of forceful occupation. On the other side of the story, India is not holding the state by anything but force. Jammu and Kashmir remains world’s highest militarized zone with 0.8 million Indian Army personnel which forms an equation that for every seven J&K local citizens, there is one armed soldier present. AFS-PA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) gives nearly unlimited and unaccountable power to the security forces in the guise of ‘protection and preventive measures’. The Indian Army is regarded as one of most disciplined armies of the world. However, since the armed rebellion of 1989, there have been numerous cases of disappearances and fake encounters, along with torture of innocents and other human rights violations. The APDP (Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons in Jammu and Kashmir) alleges that more than 10,000 people are missing in Jammu and Kashmir. The government has admitted that nearly 4,000 people are missing but claims that some of them may have crossed into Pakistan to join militant groups. Another Government report suggests the official death figure to be around 70,000. How startling are these figures for the biggest democracy in the world?
The militant insurgency of 1989 forced the Centre to use violence which resulted in thousands of causalities. The state has been in a sorry state of affairs and has suffered immensely for the past 25 years. To understand the problem better, one must dig deeper into the grass-root level situation; for every effect, there must be a cause; i.e. for the sudden rise in violence and Islamist radicalization in the valley, citing the rise of Burhan Wani’s Khilafat and increasing demand for an Islamic state.
Traditionally, the Kashmiri Muslims are Sufis, who believe in peace and religious tolerance. However, in recent years, the traditionally benign Sufi Islam is giving way for the ultra-radical and intolerant Wahabi and Salafi philosophy of Islam, which originated from and is still practiced largely in Saudi Arabia. The Salafi ideology is propagated by Saudi Arabia and is practiced by merely 3% of World’s Muslims. However Saudi based Salafi stakeholders are increasingly pushing the extremist idea around the world and the most potent example of the campaign is the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The Salafi-Wahabi school of Islamic thought moves towards religious extremism and is often seen as too rigid and detached from mainstream Islam. Salafists are evangelicals who wish to convert Muslims and others to their “purer” form of Islam — unpolluted, as they see it, by modernity. In this effort, they have been lavishly supported by the Saudi government, which has appointed emissaries to its embassies in Muslim countries who proselytize for Salafism. Similar structures have been found to be rapidly expanding in the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir. In the past two decades, approximately 700 Salafi-Wahabi Madrasas have been built across the state. These Madrasas have often been accused of promoting anti-India sentiment, often becoming planning centres for various terrorist activities in the state. The introduction of the Salafi school in Kashmir goes back nearly a century but such was the belief in the local traditions of Sufi Islam that the Puritans (read extremists) remained on the remote fringes of Kashmir’s religious and cultural life. That began to change as a struggle for a separate homeland featuring mass protests, acts of stone pelting, hit and run attacks against military units and Kashmiri Pandits was met with force.
Soon, hordes of Pakistan-trained jihadi groups hijacked the local sentiment for AZAADI transforming the struggle into a continuation of their holy war for an Islamic caliphate. Local Islamists and separatists helped, playing on the fears of the people on how the massive army presence was fast erasing Kashmir’s Muslim identity, and how their only hope lay in joining the holy war for establishing a universal community of believers. They found wide acceptance for this kind of radical Islam, unheard of before in Kashmir.
For decades now, Kashmiris have harboured this existential fear of becoming culturally homogenized into a larger India, a fear that stemmed from its lost political autonomy that successive governments in New Delhi undermined after it joined India at Partition. By 2002 militant Islam took root in the cultural landscape. All this was possible thanks to the petrodollars that Saudi Arabia, the home of Salafi Islam, was pouring into Kashmir while New Delhi invariably blamed Pakistan.
Today, as the valley burns in flames, the situation appears to be irreparable, at least by use of force. The Indian Government and the people of India must do everything in power to overturn the feeling of hostility it has created in the minds of Kashmiri youth. The majority Muslim population do not seek dialogue and a disturbed demographic scenario of the state makes a democratic solution impossible to turn in favour of New Delhi. The BJP government in power has done little to solve the issue if looked from the perspective of a common Kashmiri. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, essentially affiliated with the right-wing Hindu organization RSS – Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, seems to have a different plan in mind. The RSS has been working on the ground, to pursue the Kashmiri Pandits to return to their homeland as the government ensures security. The mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley created a sudden void, which left the demographics of the state permanently damaged. According to government reports, approximately 60,000 Kashmiri Pandit families are registered as refugees. It is critical to restore the balance in the state, to revive Sufi Islam and to relive the idea of Insaaniyat, Kashmiriyat and Jahmooriyat.
Sources:
United Nation’s 1948 resolution on Kashmir - http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/47(1948)
Kashmiri Dispatch - http://kashmirdispatch.com/2016/08/08/was-kashmirs-burhan-wani-an-al-qaeda-operative/145343/
New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opinion/isis-atrocities-started-with-saudi-support-for-salafi-hate.html
First Post on Zakir Musa news - http://www.firstpost.com/india/zakir-musa-floats-new-militant-outfit-former-hizbul-mujahideen-commander-supports-al-qaeda-in-video-3446602.html
Hindustan Times’ report on number of homegrown militants - http://www.hindustantimes.com/static/the-young-militants-of-kashmir/
Human Rights Watch on disappearances - https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/02/15/india-investigate-all-disappearances-kashmir
First Post on Wahhabism and Salafism preaching in Kashmir - http://www.firstpost.com/india/salafism-in-kashmir-why-is-media-silent-on-salafi-wahhabi-preachers-in-the-valley-3034022.html
Other sources –
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