Part II: Chapter 6

JAMMAAT-I-ISLAMI - AN OUTFIT OF PAROCHIALS

The Jammaat-i-Islami responsible for paving the way for inaugural of a destructive insurgency in 1988 inchoated in 1942 as a separate chapter from the Jammaat-i-Islami Hind and forging an open-ended affiliation with the Pakistani brand of the outfit doggedly pursued the secessionist agenda and worst form of communalism with its principal opposition to the core principles forming the cornerstone of Indian democratic polity. That it would broaden the sweep and range of its appeal to such an extent that it would emerge as a determining factor of Kashmir politics was practically beyond comprehension. The rigidities of its adherence to the basics of Islam and its practices were not in sync with the pervasive shrine tradition which the Kashmiri Muslims stuck to and could not abandon as an inherited religious practice and behaviour. As is abundantly known the Jammaat-i-Islami as an organisation was held in utter contempt for the abhorrence that it harboured against the shrine worship and the practices smacking of Hinduism. In the seminal stages of its growth and development its appeal and influence were confined to its committed cadres who did not form a spectacular number.

After the deposition of Sheikh Abdullah as the Chief Minister in 1953 the Jammaat-i-Islami as the rabid fundamentalist organization proliferated at an enormous rate under the patronage of politicals who manned the structures of political power in the state. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad in his efforts to combat Sheikh Abdullah hobnobbed with the rabid outfit and made resources to the ton of seventy-five thousand available for the expansion of its roots among the Kashmiri Muslims. Moneys were fed to the organization for establishing Islamic schools and teachers on staff of these seminaries of venom and hate were paid from the Muslim Auqaf (trust) which has been aiding the Islamisation processes quite generously. The Muslims with pro-Jammaat leanings and affiliations were granted out-of-turn promotions, lucrative postings and also appointments in government services. Bakshi persuaded and goaded a number of Muslims in government services to give up their jobs and devote themselves assiduously to the expansion of the organization at grass-root level. The accusation was made by G.M. Sadiq against Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad in 1957 on the floor of the House.

Jamaat-i-Islami upholding the secessionist agenda could not but forge links with the Plebiscite Front as an organisation pledged to the secessionist agenda. Many of its front-ranking leaders worked hand in glove with the Plebiscite Front which fact came to lime-light when they courted arrests along with the ardent supporters of the Plebiscite Front. That they were unflinching in their positions became manifest when the Jammaat-i-Islami representative attending the People's convention organised by Sheikh Abdullah vehemently opposed the move for dialogue and reconciliation with the central government. The jammaat rebids in their concerted bid to isolate Sheikh Abdullah and to impair his public image gave widest possible currency to the theme-song of his betrayal in 1947 for having opted for India to the detriment and demise of broad Muslim interests. The campaign had such vehemence that Sheikh Abdullah wilted and flinched against its vigorous pressure and resorted to numerous postures that smacked of parochialism and communalism much in conflict with his secular pretensions.

The Jamaat-i-Islami entrenched its roots deep in Muslim society and had its hey day during the notorious congress rule of Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq and Mir Qusim who showered concessions and privileges galore on the organisation and its sympathisers. The Islamic schools were patronised and financed to proliferate and expand without fear or fetter. Key slots in government apparatus were not only offered but specially reserved for the Jammaat-oriented Muslims. Government services were made available on priority basis in relaxation of rules and norms to the sons and daughters of Mullahs who owed allegiance to and had long associations with the outfit. The Backward Classes Association with Saif-ud Din Soz, now a central Minister, as its secretary was Jamaat-innovated and Jamaat-led and was patronised to scuttle the supreme court judgments which had pushed the Sadiq government into the vortex of a grim crisis. The schools run by government were allowed to be transformed into battle-fields to organise war on the senior-most Kashmiri Pandit teachers who had fought against religious discrimination and were pressing for implementation of Supreme Court judgments in view of the government fiddling & prevarication. To unleash Muslim bigotry and beat Kashmiri Pandits into submission clandestine pacts were forged with the Jammaat-i-Islami rebids who were in the vanguard of anti-Pandit demonstrations yelling out war-cries against them during Kashmiri Pandit Agitation of 1967. It was under the severe pressure of Jamaati-Islami politicals and government officers with pro-Jamaat tilt and tendency that Mir Qasim, the treacherous, rushed through the Land Reforms Bill of 1972 divesting the Kashmiri pandits of small chunks of land which were left in their possession after the tyrannical Land reforms Bill of 1952. The said-Bill replete with Communal poison and bias conveyed the signals that Pandits had to be pushed out through economic squeeze to meet the ends of ethnic cleansing. The political and religious clout and credibility of the Jammaat touched a crescendo when it won seven Assembly seats in perfidious collaboration with Sadiq and Qasim as the congress rulers.

There does not seem much of-pith and substance in the assessment that Sheikh Abdullah was a prime factor in thwarting and stone-walling the growth and expansion of the Jammaat-i-Islami in Kashmir. If his utterances are a credible guide, it can be said that he was never averse to and at war with the Jammaat-i-Islami and whatever opposition he demonstrated unto the outfit it did not flow from and was not rooted in his ideology and conviction. There were clear indications that he wanted the outfit to carry out his dictates & operate under the wings of his parsonage. When there were ample signals from the ground that the Jammaat was gaining a distinctive political personality of its own away from the pale of his person posing a threat to his crown and sceptre, he had no qualms to swoop on it through loot and plunder of its cadres only to give it a jolt but not a death-blow. And ultimately he made a truce with the rabid organisation and that was how the Jamaatists stuffed the innards of his organisation and cabinet. Saif-ud-Din Soz, Mohammad Shafi, Abdual Gani Lone, to name a few, with tremendous Jammaat-i-Islami back-ground and orientation were very close to the Sheikh and the latter two feathered his cabinet. It was Mohammad Shafi who is said to have stopped the Sheikh in his tracks when he was on the point of issuing orders to ban the organisation especially its Islamic Schools and it was Abdul Gani Lone who stuffed the educational institutions with Jammaat commandos and brain-washed Muslims. The Sheikh's fulminations against Jamaat were fake and meaningless. His tirades and innuendoes against it were hollow and pointless. In reality, he had lots of empathies and ideological affinities with the outfit as his secessionist proclivities found a new nourishment at the hands of the organisation which upheld and pursued the secessionist goals with much greater vigour and virulence.

The Jammaat-i-Islami subscribing to blatant communalism and militarised Islamic fundamentalism led to the absolute destruction of an ethos that was rooted in 5000 year old history of Kashmir. The fanatic pro-Pakistan cadres of the outfit wallowing in mental backwardness and religious bigotry not only preached and propagated secession with vehemence but fundamentalised the Muslim society and infrastructure of governance through a large-scale campaign of fundamentalism and indoctrination leaving a pernicious impact on the Muslim youth and nascent class of mediocre professionals. Parochial and destructive the Jammaat-i-Islami worked over-time to uproot and decimate the values of tolerance, non-violence and humanism as weaves of the fabric of Kashmiri society and hammered the Muslims out of the indigenous cultural model contemptuously labelled as un-Islamic and Brahmanical. The Islamisation campaign invested with a pointed thrust against catholicity of outlook, eclecticism and syncretism wreaked havoc on Kashmiri Muslim society which under absolute brutalization and dehumanization not only indulged in loot, arson and murder of the native Kashmiri Pandits as acts of piety in tune with religious injections, but failed to throw up even a solitary individual or a body of individuals who dared condemn it as retrogression and sheer savagery. The destructive war against the indigenous ethos of non-violence, tolerance and humanism was carried on without a relent by Jammaat-i-Islami net-work of 11,000 urdu and Arabic schools led by Mullahs as commandos and its nodal organizations like Islamic Students League, Islamic students organization, Jamaat-e-Tulaba et al. The Muslim killers leading various terrorist outfits straining every nerve to destruct the deep-rooted unique identity and authenticity of culture groups subscribing to a world view in sharp contrast to the value-less value structure planted on intolerance and religious myopia has had their grooming and churning in the Islamic schools as sanctuaries of rabid hate and prejudice. The Islamisation campaign unleashed with the fury of a hurricane and the state apparatus falling in line targeted and bruised the indigenous milieu embedded in the Vedic Age and the same was given a fillip by the extension of invitations to the religious Mullahs from inside and outside the country. The Jammaat as the pioneer of Islamisation campaign held an International Conference at Srinager in full knowledge of the powers that be and invited the Imam of Mecca to boost up its religious credibility with a view to mustering support for the launch of a frontal attack on the Indian presence in Kashmir.

A deal of understanding was struck between Sheikh Abdullah and Jammaat-i-Islami through the good offices of the sister of the Saudi Arabian King when she paid a visit to Kashmir. In 1981-82 the Saudi Arabian intelligence chief came to Kashmir twice with a view to adding new stridency and strength to the secessionist movement which was in the processes of being fed by the Sheikh and Jamaati-Islami who were never at different points on the wavelength. Rector of Madina university also paid a visit to Kashmir to boost up the political fortune of the AntiHindu and anti-India forces in Kashmir. It has been of stated that the state power and Jammaat-i-Islami have worked in tandem to Islamise and indoctrinate the Kashmiri polity for the launch of Jehad against the infidels. Chasing the twin objectives of secession and Islamisation the Jammaat emerged as the magnetic pole that gravitated the secessionist forces to itself with the state power actively sharing the lead-role of the rabid outfit.

The Jammaat-i-Islami in Kashmir has launched a consistently virulent battle against the concept of secularism which envisages a society sane and rational, pluralistic and accommodative. Contributing to myopic communalism and fanaticism it upholds an Islamic society placed on the pedestal of Shariat, Islamic precept and tradition as the ultimate destination of Muslims. Essentially parochial and leagues away from modernity and rational democratic temper it has expressed its visceral hatred against a system that is pluralistic and liberal contributing to composite culture patterns. As Islam has always thrived and expanded under state patronage and protection the Jammaat does not subscribe to the separation of religion from state power and that is why it has made an inveterate misuse of mosques as vehicles of genocide, terror, scare and communal tension and mosques in Kashmir as is well known have proliferated in the post-1947 era with Arab moneys. The formidable net-work of 600 study centres, units, thousands of Islamic schools, libraries and mosque committees have sown arid scattered the seeds of bigotry and religious indoctrination with a view to destroying secularism as a wall of life and posing the Islamic society regulated by Islamic laws as an alternate model. The socio-political programmes as projected by the rabid outfit are deep-dyed in the Islamic colour and Jehad is posed as a weapon for the establishment of a socio-political destination as conceived in Nizam-e-Mustafa. The lone Jamaat M.L.A. in a press conference in 1980 said that secular and socialist forces were a severe threat to the Kashmir Muslims.

The Jammaat-i-Islami with its vast array of brainwashed and regimented cadres from all walks of life with urban and rural setting has acted as an arm of Pakistan on the soil of Kashmir. It has not only exported its cadres to the training camps in Pak-occupied Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iran for arms training but ensured Muslim intervention through Pakistan to add more doses of lethal violence to the Kashmiri Muslim ethos already soaked in violence and fanaticism. The Dukhtaran-i-Milat (Daughters of Muslim community) as the women's wing of the outfit has also exported thousands of Muslim girls to the same camps that are manned by Sudanese, Saudi Arabian and Afghan desperadoes. Drawing main sustenance from Pakistan in terms of fundings, strategies and political patronage, the Jammaat has been in thick contacts with the Islamic countries that are chasing the goals of fundamentalist Islam. The war though low in intensity was initially unleashed by the local Muslim terrorists affiliated to the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, but was in no time as a matter of strategy taken over under the instructions of mentors across the borders by the Hizbul Mujahidecn which is the fierce fundamentalist armed wing of the Jammaat-i-Islami butchers. On the plane of ideology the Jammaat is the votary of the Khomeini brand of revolution and poses the Islamic Republic of Pakistan though a tailed state as the model of Nizam-e-Mustafa. It owes ideological allegiance to and is directly a party to the crusading forces of militarised fundamentalist Islam that have been operating on twin fronts of Kashmir and Tajkistan with a view to overrunning India and Central Asia.

With a view to ethnically cleansing Kashmir the rabid Jammaat-i-Islami through its armed wing of Hizbul Mujahideen has waged war on the native Pandits in close complicity with multiform Muslim terrorist formations pursuing the same end. The terrorists of the outfit with a terrific religious background and indoctrination have added bone-chilling and horrendous crimes to the despicable book of medieval savageries and brutalities. Before putting the Pandits to a barrage of bullets they in servile obedience to their religious training in the cesspools of Islamic schools inflicted torture and pain on them by way of chopping off their tongues and peeling off their skin, gouging out their eyes and ripping open their bellies. The infliction of pain and agony, death and destruction on the Kafirs reveals their new dynamics as fanatics, mad men, psycopaths and mentally abnormal. The merchants of crime stuffing the outfit have not been hired to assassinate the Pandits but they have been consciously and wilfully pursuing the path of extermination of Pandits to work out the Islamic goals of realising an exclusivist social and political order smacking of fascism. As was configurated by the Jammaat and its hateful leaders the willful assassins have barged into the houses of Pandits, committed rape and plunder and squirted bullets on them. It has been a plain murder of Pandits for the reason that they have refused to join the ranks of rebellious Muslims and have withstood the pressures exerted on them through the state power manned by Jammaat-oriented Muslims and men of their ilk. The killing of Pandits by the Muslim terrorist outfit of HM awash with Islamic bigotry and hate has not only destabilised the Pandit minority but has also symbolised a wanton onslaught on the historical identity of Kashmir founded on the plank of composite culture and syncretism.

The Jammant-Islami with its known linkages with the politicals and rabid fundamentalists of Pakistan and other Islamic countries has minced no words in repudiating and rejecting the accession of the J&K State to the Indian Union. Despite its participation in a number of elections as required under a democratic dispensation its fundamental stance has been that of stiff and uncompromising opposition to the State's accession to India. As is widely known the Indian Independence Act of 1947 had empowered the Maharaja of the state to exercise his options of acceding to either of the two dominions of India and Pakistan and the Maharaja exercised his options which subsequently were ratified by the constituent assembly of the J&K State constituted under due process of law. The Jammaat-i-Islami as a fundamentalist organisation has not swallowed the reason and logic of the whole historical reality and taking to the plank of two-nation theory it has been propagating for the state's accession to Pakistan on the basis of Muslim majority character of the state. With a view to hiving off the state from the Indian Union the Jamaat has launched not only a secessionist campaign through its Mullah-dominated mosque committees but has also sponsored a terrorist outfit of Hizbul Mujahidden which is armed to the teeth and has inflicted brutal violence and persecution with its comparable parallels to the history of Nazis on a segment of population that has reposed no faith in the absurd formulations of two-nation theory and Islamic society inspired by Islamic law and precept. Steeped in tribalism and narrow perspectives the Jammaat has been instrumental in propagating codes and fiats lacking in relevance to the contemporary techno-cultural and civilisational developments. In its sharp opposition to the clubs, video-parlours, cinema houses, pubs and bars, the organisation as a combination of stereo-typed Mullahs, ignorant, fanatic and backward, has made them as the basis of its political and religious opposition to India which has been a gargantuan culture and civilization with a deep streak of liberalism and Catholicism running through it.

In May, 1973 the hard-core Jammaat-i-Islami followers Ut1leashed massive religious frenzy in Srinagar and Anantnag against a volume titled as Book of Knowledge authored by a European. The book was already banned yet the Muslim fundamentalists accused Government of India of importing books replete with anti-Islamic materials. Tulba as the students wing of the organization launched a virile campaign against the university authorities to withdraw books from the university library which included outline of history by H.G. Wells, Divine Comedy by Dante, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Volumes 5 and 9 and all works on history by Toynbee.