Baramulla quietly revolts against Islamist cleric
Praveen Swami
Leader of June street riots removed from powerful religious post
BARAMULLA: Late last month, one man’s words brought hundreds of young men out on the streets, battling police to avenge a woman’s honour.
Four died, and dozens were injured, before the fighting was done.
Last week, a committee that manages old-town Baramulla’s powerful Masjid Sharif Bait-ul-Mukarram sacked the man whose speech started the fighting: Aijaz Ahmad Peer. Mr. Peer, the mosque’s Imam, is key lieutenant of Islamist patriarch Syed Ali Shah Geelani.
Islamists in Jammu and Kashmir have profited from the summer’s violence, which they have cast as a consequence of widespread resentment against India. Mr. Peer’s sacking is a sign that the tide could be turning.
Mr. Peer’s removal from clerical office casts light on the string of battles between urban youth and police which have placed the National Conference-Congress government under siege all summer.
Late last month, police in Baramulla began investigating the alleged kidnapping of a teenage girl by a local resident. Ghulam Ahmed Ganai claimed that his daughter, Rehana Ganai, had been kidnapped by Mehraj Din Marazi and was being held prisoner in Srinagar. Police detained several of Mr. Marazi’s relatives including his uncle Mohammad Yusuf Bhat on charges of facilitating the kidnapping.
On June 28, Mr. Bhat’s wife, Haseena Butt, stormed out of Baramulla’s police station, and began standing on the streets demanding justice.
Ms. Butt claimed in a television interview that the police had asked for bribes in return for the release of her husband. In a second interview, given an hour later, Ms. Butt alleged that the Station House Officer had demanded sexual favours. Mr. Ganai, for his part, went on air to say that her allegations were to save the men who had kidnapped his daughter.
Baramulla stores and offices opened as normal on June 30, local residents say. But in the morning, Mr. Peer used the Masjid Sharif Bait-ul-Mukarram’s public address system to call on protesters to march on the Baramulla police station, alleging that Ms. Bhat’s honour had been violated.
In Baramulla, Mr. Peer’s voice counts. Born in Handwara’s Langate village, he obtained his clerical qualifications from the famous neoconservative Dar-ul-Uloom seminary at Deoband. In 2005, he was engaged as an Imam by the committee that manages the Bait-ul-Mukarram mosque, Baramulla’s most important religious institution.
His call to arms was heeded. Witnesses told The Hindu hundreds marched out of old-town Baramulla, and clashes broke out with police. Many were supporters of Mr. Geelani’s Tehreek-i-Hurriyat. Early in the afternoon, a group of men threw stones at a local temple and shouted communal abuse. Incensed, a Central Reserve Police Force officer opened fire.
More rioting and more killing followed.
Much of the media cast the violence as an expression of anti-India rage, linked to the unpopularity of the police and central police forces. This explanation is, at best, partial.
Notably, the violence in Baramulla involved just a part of the city: the 13 mohallas, or neighbourhoods, of the old-town and neighbouring Azadganj. There was no rioting in the city’s new quarters, home to its ever-growing class of government employees, contractors and professionals.
Old-town Baramulla has long been a bastion of the religious right-wing. Even as rural Jammu and Kashmir saw a record turnout in last year’s elections to the Assembly, just 56 of the estimated 50,000 voters in mohallas defied secessionists’ call to reject democracy.
Baramulla’s old town is one of the two pillars, along with Shopian, on which the Jamaat-e-Islami’s political position in Jammu and Kashmir rests.
Material conditions in areas like old-town Baramulla helped. Prior to 1947, the old town had played a central role in trade with Rawalpindi and Lahore, providing services and logistics to traders and travellers. But after 1947, the trade route was closed and the old town’s economic foundations were shattered.
Slowly, the old town became mired in backwardness. Even today, many homes in its winding lanes have no proper sewage system. Young people have education, the product of the dramatic reforms introduced by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah after independence, but little economic opportunity.
Denied access to the emerging capitalist paradise around them, many young people have been drawn to the paradise of the Islamist imagination. Mr. Geelani has emerged as the voice of their rage.
Why has this rage proved so abiding? For one, the National Conference has long ignored the development of Kashmir’s inner cities, caring little for the needs of those who were hostile to its rule.
Jammu and Kashmir’s government has also been reluctant to use the law against the religious right. Mr. Peer was arrested for his alleged role in fanning the communally charged Shrine Board riots that ripped Jammu and Kashmir apart last summer. Soon after it came to power, the National Conference-Congress government released him, along with other Islamists, in an effort to buy peace with Islamists.
Baramulla’s people, Mr. Peer’s removal shows, want a way out of the violence. In the coming months, it will become clear if the government is listening to their call.
