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Journalism of Courage
Tavleen Singh is a highly respected columnist. But her attempt to put the entire blame for the unfolding tragedy upon the failure of Kashmiri leaders like Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti and Yasin Malik to speak up against the jihadis who were claiming that an innocuous transfer of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board constituted an attempt to change the demographic composition of Kashmir, is both simplistic and unjust.
Barring a handful of zealots no one in Kashmir has ever opposed the Amarnath yatra. When the agitation against the transfer of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board stranded tens of thousands of pilgrims in Srinagar in June, Kashmiris took food and blankets to them and asked them into their homes. Yasin Malik, whom Tavleen has castigated, was in the forefront of this effort. And although feelings against the Government and against the former Governor Gen S K Sinha ran high, not a single pilgrim was attacked or injured.
The yatra has epitomised the syncretic traditions of Kashmiri Islam and, indeed of all the religions in the Valley, for 140 years. Till the 1980s the shrine was protected, and the yatra managed, by the Gurjjar community who, incidentally, are Muslims. In all that time it was a spontaneous, unorganised and private undertaking. It therefore had no political significance. But the nature of the yatra began to change when the Kashmiri insurgency-cum-proxy war began in 1990. The need to provide security to the pilgrims brought the state into its management. Instead of letting the pilgrims come whenever they wished to, the state Government asked them to come only during a specified 15-day period of time. During this period it kept Kashmiris out of the areas surrounding the two pilgrimage routes. Even the Gurjjars were kept out. The Kashmiris resented this, but understood the need for taking these precautions.
In the late nineties, as the middle class burgeoned in India and peace returned to the Valley, the number of pilgrims grew by leaps and bounds. This made the Farooq Abdullah government decide to increase the duration of the yatra to a month. The sheer numbers, their concentrated descent on Kashmir in a single month, and the fact that these pilgrims bore little resemblance to the traditional, conservative Hindus who used to make up the bulk of the yatris in the past, began to change Kashmiri perceptions of the yatra. To more and more of them the annual arrival of the pilgrims began to look like a cultural invasion. The militants tried to capitalise upon this and, beginning in 2000 AD, began to attack the yatris almost every year. This did not, however, go down well with the Kashmiris, who made no secret of their displeasure with the militants. As a result the attacks tapered off.
But the ever-growing number of pilgrims also created a serious environmental problem. The SASB was created by an Act of the Kashmir Assembly in 2000 to remedy this. This was where the governments of Kashmir and Delhi made their first mistake. For the 2000 Act did not only make the Governor — an appointee of the Central Government — the head of the board, but further stipulated that he could do so only if he was a Hindu. Farooq Abdullah’s motives for inserting such a clause into the Kashmir Act remain a mystery, but when the Vajpayee-Advani government advised the President to give assent to the Bill, it violated the secularism principles of the Indian Constitution. The fact that the Act also made the Chief Minister the head of the Auqaf trust, provided he was a Muslim, only compounded the violation.
Matters would still not have come to a head if the Chief Minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, had not mooted an extension of the Amarnath pilgrimage season to two months. This was strongly endorsed by the then Governor, General S K Sinha. The extension therefore began to look less and less like a Kashmiri initiative to accommodate the rush of pilgrims and more and more like the joint initiative of an outsider Chief Minister who was intent upon influencing the outcome of the coming elections in Jammu, and a staunchly Hindu nationalist Governor.
Gen Sinha had created this impression through two other acts that had aroused deep misgivings in the Kashmiri intelligentsia: he had promoted a Kashmir Studies Circle that was intended to explore Kashmir’s ancient, and therefore Hindu past and, as a seeming counterbalance, had met a delegation of fundamentalist Muslim leaders and clerics asking for permission to set up an Ahl-e-Hadis university in Kashmir. The effect this had on Kashmiri opinion was summed up by a Kashmir journalist who told me, “I am proud of our Hindu past, but I do not want someone to stuff it down my throat”.
It was in this charged atmosphere that the Government transferred the forestland to the SASB on May 26. The surreptitious way in which it was done, and an SASB official’s subsequent claim that the Governor did not have to answer questions put by MLAs in the Kashmir Assembly, as he was beyond their jurisdiction, sufficed to send the Kashmiris into the streets. Ms Singh is right when she says that Malik, the Mirwaiz, Geelani, and even Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti fanned the agitation by joining it. But had they not done so they would have written their own epitaphs in Kashmiri politics.
(Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author. He is the author of Kashmir 1947
— The Origins of a Dispute)
