Excelsior Political Correspondent
JAMMU, Aug 12: Death of a young Jamaat-e-Islami worker in Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s Assembly constituency of Ganderbal has brought the ruling National Conference (NC) in the eye of a storm from a many political quarters. Obviously, the most virulent reactions have come from Jamaat and its most important leader of the last 40 years, Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The octogenarian separatist icon, Geelani has severed his organizational relationship with Jamaat about a decade ago. He has been heading a separate right wing group, Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, that he floated after moving out of Jamaat and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq-led Hurriyat Conference in 2003.
As compared to Jamaat’s moderately drafted reaction, Geelani’s statement on the “pre-planned political murder” in Ganderbal has been brusque and hard-hitting. Much more than his alma mater Jamaat, it is Geelani who has referred to the aftermath of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s execution in April 1979 and reminded how then NC activists had carried out a reign of terror against the Jamaat supporters, particularly in south Kashmir. With a host of such references and insinuations, Geelani has made his point that NC, according to him, had always used muscle power and state might to crush its political and ideological opponents.
Both, Jamaat as well Geelani, have called the clash in Ganderbal as “political” (NC v/s Jamaat) and claimed that there was nothing sectarian in it. NC has not come out with a calibrated response to the two statements, containing a slew of accusations against it. Not only the top leadership of National Conference but also its official and unofficial spokespersons—Tanvir Sadiq and Dr Mustafa Kamaal—have chosen to be tightlipped. It appears that both, Government as well as the ruling party, have assigned much of the damage controlling task to Police. Yet, a cursory look on Kashmir’s recent political history makes it clear that intolerance has been a minimum common factor among most of the ideological groups and become a mark of identification for political parties like NC and Jamaat.
Geelani is required to explain it separately as to what he was doing under Maulana Masoodi’s patronage at NC’s headquarters of Mujahid Manzil in 1950s if he had found Sheikh’s party a band of marauders since 1938. But, here, one would like to have a look on all the black pots and kettles of Kashmir’s politics of intolerance.
NC’s founder, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah did never provoke his folks against his ideological rivals. But history of the second half of the last century is replete with public humiliation of leaders like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Mohammad Ali Jennah. Even after Sheikh’s death, this trail of ignominy passed through Indira Gandhi’s public rally at then Hazuri Bagh and now Iqbal Park where people made indecent demonstrations and gesticulations before Indira Gandhi.
Even before Geelani’s nightmarish 1979, NC cadres attacked and broke teeth of a philanthropist and Janata Party’s candidate from Habbakadal, Dr Jagat Mohini, in the Assembly elections of 1977. She was maimed to run her election campaign. When a little later, Sheikh’s alter ego, Mirza Afzal Beg, broke away from the party, NC’s cadres swooped on his Gole Bagh (now Legislative Complex) rally, vandalised canopies and thrashed his supporters.
In the decades-long Sher-Bakra clashes, Sheikh’s and Mirwaiz dynasty’s followers turned Srinagar in a battlefield and both sides made free use of their muscle power. Even in late 1980s, at least on one occasion Mirwaiz Farooq’s followers launched a violent attack and ransacked the office of popular Urdu daily, Aftaab. Later, the tradition of attacking newspaper offices and harassing journalists was bequeathed by a number of militant outfits claiming to be liberating Kashmir.
Even when Sheikh Abdullah was dethroned as ‘Wazeer-e-Azam’ and detained ‘Kashmir Conspiracy Case’ in 1953, intolerance did not shrivel completely. Successor ‘Wazeer-e-Azam’ Bakhshi Ghulam Mohammad grew phenomenally popular and became a legend of justice and humility but his influence and personality did not stop his kin Bakhshi Abdul Rashid’s musclemen from striking a reign of terror. They crushed the rebel group and NC’s first alternative, Democratic National Conference (DNC), with the maximum use of their might.
Coming back to 1979, NC’s cadres and Sheikh’s die-hard supporters declared war on Jamaat. They believed that Geelani’s ideological siblings in Pakistan (Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan) had encouraged Gen Zia-ul-Haq to execute Bhutto—Pakistan’s iconic politician and protagonist of “Islamic Bomb”.
Victims of the carnage took their revenge in 1990 when the first breed of Gen Zia’s guerrillas crippled the state systems with uprooting of the massive tree that the Sheikh had planted in 1931. Admittedly, it were the pro-Azadi JKLF guerrillas, not the Jamaat men, who gunned down the NC worker, Mohammad Yousuf Halwai, as well as BJP leader, Tika Lal Taploo, as the first political victims of a separatist movement in 1989. Most of the civilian killings, including political murders, from August 1989 to February 1990 went to the ‘credit’ of JKLF and its ‘student wing’, Jammu & Kashmir Students Liberation Front, which was soon christened as Ikhwanul Muslimeen.
But, within days of the high profile killings of Kashmir University Vice Chancellor, Prof Mushir-ul-Haq, and HMT’s General Manager, H L Khera, an Islamist guerrilla out surfaced by the title of Hizbul Mujahideen. Within a short span of time, it grabbed the status of Kashmir’s most powerful militant organisation. In addition to successful attacks on security forces, it disarmed and liquidated cadres of a number of ideologically opposite groups including those of the pioneering militant outfit JKLF.
Thousands of Jamaat members and supporters joined the group which witnessed Jamaat’s schoolteacher Master Ahsan Dar becoming its first “Supreme Commander” and a non-Jamaat separatist, Hilal Ahmad Mir alias Nasirul Islam, as the first Amir. Plush with its might and extensive support base, Master insisted Jamaat-e-Islami be declared as Hizb’s “political arm”. Nasirul Islam differed and, consequently, moved out to launch a separate group.
It was during this “golden period” of Kashmir militancy that Hizb took pride in calling itself as Jamaat’s “guerrilla arm” and Geelani’s Jamaat was thrilled to introduce itself as Hizb’s “political arm”. For months from 1990 to 1993, Master and his guerrillas wiped out NC’s cadres selectively merely on account of their old political affiliation to Sheikh Abdullah’s party that had persecuted Jamaat and banned its network of Madrasas. Most of the victims were kidnapped and mercilessly hanged to death. Because of deaths by hanging, Ahsan Dar came to be known as the ‘Master of Noose’ in Valley.
Jamaat lost no time to install one of its most active functionaries, namely Syed Yousuf Shah, as Hizbul Mujahideen’s “Supreme Commander” under the code-name of Syed Salah-ud-din when Master Ahsan Dar was arrested in Srinagar in 1993. Operating from Pakistan continuously since 1994, Salah-ud-din is continuing as Hizb’s ultimate authority. His patronage to Jamaat has never been a secret.
Beginning with an independent MLA, Mir Mustafa, Hizb’s killing spree spread to a host of former Ministers, MLAs, MLCs and besides other leaders and cadres of Sheikh’s party. NC’s modern headquarters of Nawai-e-Subah has a gallery of the party’s martyrs and they dominate the list of the 800 prominent mainstream political activists killed in J&K in the last 23 years. The number of ordinary cadres, most of whom were killed for their past affiliation to NC, is believed to be 4,000-plus. Even after NC came to power twice, killing of its cadre continues to be a routine feature. Party’s block president in Nattipora area of Srinagar is the latest to have fallen to the militants’ bullets as recently as in July 2012.
Valley’s ideological bloodletting took an unimagined turn when Hizb’s renegade Kukka Parray captured the scene of guerrilla warfare, allegedly with armed forces’ support. In just four years of operating as Kashmir’s counterinsurgency king, Kukka Parray is estimated to have killed not only hundreds of Hizb’s militants and commanders but also over a thousand civilians, mostly cadres and sympathizers of Jamaat-e-Islami. He nearly succeeded in wiping out Kashmir’s most formidable militant organization.
However, in a short span again, Hizb’s guerrilla’s gunned down Parray at his home town of Hajan. His death signaled a death knell for all hues of counterinsurgents in Kashmir. Conflict observers insist that the Valley’s 150-odd guerrilla groups fought one another more than the Indian armed forces. Kashmir’s martyrs’ graveyards are partly filled with scores and hundreds of militants and civilians killed in internecine clashes.
If Jamaat’s and Geelani’s averment of “political, not sectarian” is accepted, Ganderbal is clearly the beginning of a fresh era of political vendetta and revenge. However, keen observers of the situation say it isn’t. According to them, last week’s fighting in Sendhbal village was dramatic culmination of a routine clash over an Imam and the practice of operating a public address system. It’s being “pre-planned” is highly unlikely in view of the all-pervading fear of Jamaat’s friendly gunmen who have been establishing their existence day in and day out with a grenade attack, killing of an NC block president or a retired Dy SP. Geelani’s warning that much water had flown down the Jhelum and NC was no more in a position to repeat 1979, appears to be fully based on realism.
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