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CounterPunch
December
28, 2002
The Jihad International,
Kashmir and Secularization
by VIJAY PRASHAD
On the night of 19 December 2002, a group of men
entered the home of Mohammed Sadiq in Hast village, Rajouri district,
in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. They killed his twenty-year
old daughter Nosen Kousar. They then went down the road to Khalid
Ahmed's house and killed his twenty-two year old daughter Tahira
Parveen. After beheading her, they proceeded to Mohammed Rafiq's
home and killed Shehnaaz Akhtar, another young woman. Finally,
they went to the home of Jan Begam, a forty-three year old woman,
and beheaded her.
By most indications, the unidentified
men belong to an outfit called the Lashkar-e-Jabbar (the "Army
of the Great") because the LeJ had placed posters around
Rajouri demanding that Muslim women adhere to the Taliban's dress
code and that teachers at schools wear the formal sherwani. Accounts
from Hast indicate that these women did not adhere to the "rules"
and therefore faced "retribution" from the LeJ.
The LeJ made its debut in Kashmir in
August 2001. On 7 August, unidentified LeJ members doused two
schoolteachers in Srinagar with acid and on 8 August, an armed
LeJ member went into a Srinagar girls' school to demand that
all the students report to class dressed in accordance with "Islamic
tradition." The LeJ then issued a deadline in  September for the implementation of the
dress codes, that is the wearing of burqas by Muslim women, of
duppatas by Hindu women and "suitable" clothes by men.
The LeJ, a marginal outfit, had an enormous impact with these
acts of terror: the Kashmiri newspapers reported a jump in burqa
use among working-class women (from five percent a few years
ago to thirty percent as 2001 ended).
Little outrage is evoked for these acts
of terror against these women, mainly peasants or else from among
the dispossessed urban dwellers. The Indian government, run by
the Hindutva Right, concentrated on those victims of terror who
are mainly Hindu, so that it could run in the recent state elections
in Gujarat on an anti-Muslim ticket (and win, as it did). Chief
Minister Narendra Modi of Gujarat should give Trent Lott lessons
in coded language and in his aggressive ability to remain in
control despite his brazen anti-Muslim remarks. During his election
campaign, Modi asked his audience, "You decide whether there
should be a Diwali in Gujarat or whether firecrackers should
burst in Pakistan," intimating that the choice was between
the majority Hindu community or India's neighbor Pakistan, and
not between his right-wing BJP and the generally opportunistic
Congress Party. When what the late Pakistani intellectual Eqbal
Ahmed called, the "Jihad International" kills "its
own," there is silence from those who claim to be at the
forefront of the anti-terror campaign.
Mention a problem in Kashmir and people
roll their eyes. Behind those eyes lie thoughts, at worst, of
ageless conflict perhaps rooted in the inferior genetic inheritance
of the region or, at best, of the problems that came from its
disputed transition to India in the late 1940s. While the former
merits no response, to the latter one can say that history moves
on and while the transfer of power still plagues the rhetoric
on both sides of the Indo-Pak border, the more substantial issues
stem from the economic and political devastation visited upon
Jammu and Kashmir in the aftermath of the death of its popular
leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah on 8 September 1982. Abdullah's
death put into disarray the mild form of stability constituted
by his political skill, the relatively careful governance from
New Delhi and the inferiority of the Pakistani army. All this
was to change in the two decades since then, and it comes to
us in at least five phases:
1983-88, marked by the political venality
both of Indira Gandhi's Congress Party and the Sheikh's son,
Farooq Abdullah (who had taken charge of the National Conference,
the main political party in the state).
1988-91, characterized by the upsurge
of young Kashmiris for azaadi (independence) manifested in the
Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front.
1991-93, distinguished by Pakistan's
usurpation of the revolt through the offices of the Hizbul Mujahideen
and other pro-Pakistan organizations.
1993-2001, in which a proxy war took
place between Pakistani-trained and supported mehmeen mujahidin
(foreign, mainly Afghani Arab type mercenaries) and the Indian
forces whose interlude was the Kargil war of 1999.
2001-present, in which the Fifth Afghan
War put pressure on Pakistan to back-off from its support of
the mercenaries, in which a united front that supports a political
solution took power in Jammu and Kashmir after a reasonably fair
election to dismiss the Hindutva-supported government, and in
which the army and the secessionists face a barrage from the
Jihad International that has shifted its operations from southern
Afghanistan to Kashmir (as elsewhere).
LeJ is the symptom of the recent phase,
the detritus of the Fifth Afghan War. When they appeared from
the shadows in 2001, even the main militant, terrorist outfits
condemned them. The Lashkar-e-Tayeba and the Hizbul Mujahideen,
both famous for their ruthless acts of violence against civilians,
joined with the All Party Hurriyat Conference, the united political
front of the secessionists formed under US auspices in 1992-93,
to distance themselves from the acts of these Taliban-like outfits.
Islam, said the Hurriyat in its statement, does not enforce dress
codes (the Hurriyat's constituents include the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam
Kashmir and the Jamaat-e-Islami, both outfits that are aware
of at least most versions of the faith). These are not peaceful
organizations themselves. On 6 December 2002, the Indian Army's
general S. Padmanabhan said that infiltration across the India-Pakistan
border declined by "about 43-44 percent." The next
day, out of bravado, Abu Hamza of the Lashkar-e-Tayeba said,
"We have a lot of fidayeen [suicide squads] who will attack
army and other paramilitary installations in north Kashmir during
Ramzan." Nothing here on the Taliban-like acts of the LeJ,
even as the Lashkar-e-Tayeba took responsibility for the hits
on army posts, and as innocents died in an attack on a temple.
The only organization that welcomed the
LeJ was the Dukhtaran-e-Millat, an all-woman group, formed in
1987 to demand the unity of Kashmir with Pakistan. In 1989, the
DeM joined the popular insurgency that erupted in the Kashmir
valley against the role of its venal political class and the
Indian army. But, it exceeded the general political line of then
secular groups like the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front with
its demand, in May 1993 that women take to the veil. In Al Safa,
the DeM took out a full-page advertisement that women observe
an "Islamic Code of Conduct," mainly the use of the
Iranian-style Makina and to abjure all forms of body decoration.
Led by a self-proclaimed orthodox Muslim
and a feminist, Ayesha Andrabi (who is now underground), the
DeM and the LeJ are linked to the Jihad International. The government
of India claims that the DeM is linked financially to the Jamait-ul-Mujahideen,
a group that was once called the Green Army (who killed the highly
respected Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq in 1990) and that is openly a
subsidiary of the Pakistan government's Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) unit (formed to facilitate US maneuvers in Afghanistan
during the 1980s). Andrabi's husband, Qasim Faktu, is a senior
Jamait-ul-Mujahideen operative. LeJ, the Indian government believes,
is linked to the Haqqania Madrassa, named for Jalaluddin Haqqania,
veteran of the Afghan wars and founder in 1993 of the Harkat-ul-Ansar
(a hard-core terrorist group that operates in Kashmir now as
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen). The Madrassa is based in Pakistan and
is funded by the oil money that sustains many such operations.
We are back to Afghanistan. As Eqbal
Ahmed wrote in 1988, "Afghanistan threatens to become a
metaphor for the future." More than a decade later, we should
change "metaphor" with "portent."
The LeJ emerged not only because of the
routine problem of Kashmir, but also because of the interventions
of the US and the Saudis in the region from the late 1970s onward.
It would be best to see them as one more of those members of
the Jihad International Inc. set up by the US and the Saudis
to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan as well as to contain
the spread of the Iranian revolution. The anti-Left pressure
in Afghanistan allowed the most virulently offensive forms of
Islamic reaction to take control of the Pashtun region, once
the home of a broad socialist movement led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan (the "Frontier Gandhi") and his Khudai Khidmatgars
("Soldiers of God"). When the Frontier Gandhi died
on 20 January 1988 at the age of ninety-eight, both the sides
in the Afghan War stopped their barrage so that his body could
be buried in Jalalabad. An honorable man had died whose Gandhian
visions had been erased by sectarianism and, toward the end of
his life, by the Cold War. The infusion of the Jihad International
into Afghanistan's south meant that first the brigand Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami and later the Taliban ran a series
of camps in the Khost region that trained the jihadis who went
to Kashmir in the early 1990s (particularly with the fall of
the Najibullah government in Kabul, 1992). By 1992-93, when the
US and the Saudis lost interest in Afghanistan, these camps,
according to journalist Manoj Joshi, became "privatized."
The Pakistani military, mainly the ISI, "left it to various
fanatical religious groups (instead of recruiting officers),
who would do a better job through their mix of religious propaganda
and monetary inducement. With some exceptions, the camps, too,
were privatized and run in areas of Afghanistan where there was
no state authority or which were under the control of factions
loyal to Pakistan." Jalaluddin Haqqani's Harkat took charge
of the Al Badr I and II camps at Yawar in Afganistan's Khost
province. The camps operated until August 1998, when they were
destroyed by the US cruise missile attack in reprisal against
the Kenya and Tanzania terrorist acts by al-Qai'da.
The LeJ is the progeny of this history
of barbarity whose originators include the Saudis, the CIA, the
Pakistani establishment (who underwent their own form of Islamization
under General Zia in the 1980s and then as recently as 1998 with
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's 15th Amendment or Shariat Bill),
and the Rightist Afghans (such as Hekmatyar, Badruddin Rabbani
and Ahmed Shah Masoud). The LeJ is not motivated entirely by
the Hindutva Right government in New Delhi, because its principle
victims are those within Islam who do not follow its view of
the world. Its Islam provides cover for the authoritarian regimes
of the Gulf (such as the House of Saud, but also the various
Gulf emirates) in much the same way that Hindutva provides a
pseudo-nationalist cover for the Indian ruling class' accommodation
with imperialism. The LeJ is the repellent face of contemporary
religious politics.
Liberals will tell us that there are
many Islams, just as there are many faces of Christianity (neither
Bernard Law nor Jerry Falwell speak for us, they say), or that
there are many Hindus (not just Narendra Modi), many Buddhists
(not just the Sinhala monks who egged on mobs to kill Tamils
in 1983). But this is an inadequate approach to these acts of
barbarity: we must continue to demand the secularization of society,
indeed demand that religion in the modern age must conform to
the basic norms of equality and democracy. In a strong book from
1997 (Furies of Indian Communalism, Verso), journalist Achin
Vanaik argued that religious systems must "learn their place
in the new dispensation" of the modern. Religions "have
no inherent dynamic leading them to endorse or practically reinforce
modern principles of pluralism and democracy. The world religions
are historically shaped entities bearing the marks of that shaping.
But this does not mean they are incompatible with these modern
principles." Quite the contrary, the secularist must engage
with religious systems, not to show their "inherently tolerant"
nature (which is an essentialist claim), but to fight to make
them democratic and pluralistic if they are to be relevant in
our modern future.
Anything less gives legitimacy to those
who speak of faith as they destroy the shallow trenches of human
progress. It is the voice of faith that killed the women of Hast.
Even as we raise our voices against that barbarity, we must renew
our call for the broader secularization of society.
Vijay Prashad
is an Associate Professor and Director of the International Studies
at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. This article is an excerpt
from his new book: Fat
Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism.
Prashad can be reached at: Vijay.Prashad@trincoll.edu
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