Jamaat-i Islami in Kashmir: ‘Moderate’ Voices Seek to be Heard

Yoginder Sikand

On a recent trip to Doda, I had the opportunity of interacting with a group of activists and sympathizers of the Jamaat-i Islami of Jammu and Kashmir (JIJK), a leading Islamist movement and a key player in the politics of Kashmir. Contrary to what I had expected, the men, mostly middle-aged, lower-middle class and clearly having had limited access to formal education, were friendly and hospitable. I explained to them about the research project I was working on, dealing with inter-community relations in Doda and the impact of the last fifteen years of strife in the region. I asked them what they thought of how the armed conflict in Doda had transformed relations between Hindus and Muslims, who number roughly the same in the district.

‘The Constitution of the Jamaat-i Islami of Jammu and Kashmir clearly lays down that all humans, irrespective of religion and caste, are slaves of God’, one of the senior-most of the men, whom I shall call R, responded with alacrity. ‘So, we must all fear and believe in Him and follow His commandments that He has sent through the prophets. We need to recognize all humans as fellow creatures and brothers and respect their rights’, he said. ‘The Jamaat’s Constitution’, he went on, ‘clearly allows for only peaceful methods and forbids any violence that might lead to chaos ( fitna)’. 

That was all very well in theory, I interrupted, but what precisely had the JIJK done to improve Hindu-Muslim relations in Jammu and Kashmir, I asked. Was it true, I pointed out, that, as many have argued, the JIJK had floated the Hizbul Mujahidin (HM), one of the key players in the ongoing military conflict in Kashmir? How, I asked R, did that square with his claim of the JIJK being committed to only peaceful methods of activism? I raised the issue of the ongoing debate in JIJK circles between ‘moderates’, committed to peaceful dialogue as a means to resolve the Kashmir conflict, and ‘hardliners’, some of who are also known to have been instrumental in the creation of the HM.

‘Yes, it is true that some people in the Jamaat did support the HM’, R cryptically replied, ‘but the amir of the Jamaat has announced that we have nothing to do with it’. ‘The HM was set up at a time when militancy was a mass wave-like thing’, he added. ‘Young boys joined militant groups without their parents’ permission, and it may have been that children of some Jamaat activists, too, did the same. Many Jamaat leaders did not want their youths to take to militancy. They tried to stop them, because our Constitution says that we must oppose strife ( fasad).  The Jamaat does not want its workers to get involved in any form of controversy (gar-bar )’, he explained, suggesting that an influential section of the JIJK leadership was now realizing the futility of violent means of seeking to resolve the Kashmir conflict.

I asked R how he characterized the ongoing movement in Kashmir . Did he regard it a religious war, a jihad between Islam and ‘infidelity’ (kufr), as some hardliner Islamists describe it? Or was it a political issue, to do with Kashmiri nationalist or community aspirations?

R was emphatic that the ongoing conflict was not about religion as such. Rather, he said, it was simply a demand for the exercise of the right to political self-determination that Congress leaders, including Nehru, had promised the Kashmiris. It was, he argued, a jihad in the narrow sense of a struggle for Kashmiri self-determination, but it was not an Islamic or religious jihad. It was, therefore, he admitted, essentially a nationalist movement, a political, rather than a religious, issue. To call it a religious jihad that entailed violence in defence of the faith, he said, was erroneous. ‘Such a jihad can only be declared when Islam is in danger, when Muslims are forbidden to pray and build mosques and so on’. That, however, he acknowledged, had not been and was still not the case in Kashmir or in India as a whole. ‘There is no doubt that Muslims have religious freedom in India’, he added. ‘We are free to organize meetings and publish literature. We are doing our work of religious propagation without any restriction. We enjoy this freedom that we are given and even praise it’.  ‘Some people’, he went on, ‘are fed with the propaganda that Muslims are not allowed to pray in India, but when they come here they are surprised that this is not the case, seeing Muslims enjoying religious freedom’.

Yet, he explained, although the conflict over Kashmir was not religious, this did not mean that it was a non-issue. ‘The unresolved conflict is real enough. India must recognize that the problem has been lingering unresolved for the last half century or more. It can only be solved through dialogue, not violence, and must be satisfactory to all parties involved— India, Pakistan and the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir’.

The JIJK, said G, who appeared the youngest of the men present, was committed to peaceful methods for resolving the Kashmir dispute, and even for the cause of establishing the ‘Islamic state’ that is so central to the Jamaat’s ideology and that of Islamist groups more generally. I pointed out to him the fate of revolutions in various countries that had collapsed because they had relied on force to seek to impose conformity and stifle dissent in the name of social justice—in Russia, China, Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere.

‘Yes’, G replied philosophically, ‘People soon get fed up if they are forced into submission. The Islamic state that we want to establish cannot come about by force or against people’s will. Those groups who are trying to do so in this way are bound to fail’, he explained. ‘We must seek to establish the Islamic system ( islami nizam) through peaceful propagation’, he argued, admitting the failure of attempts to do this through forceful imposition. ‘We don’t want people to conform to Islamic rule out of fear, but, rather, through genuine faith and commitment’.

But what about the sizeable non-Muslim population in Jammu and Kashmir , I asked. How would they reconcile themselves to the Islamic state that the JIJK was committed to establishing? If such a state were set up in Kashmir, would it not lead to a mass exodus of non-Muslims, as had happened in the parts of the state presently under Pakistani rule?

G mulled over my question for a while and then insisted, ‘Islam gives religious freedom to non-Muslims and protects their rights. If Islam had been spread by the sword, how would Hindus be still in a majority in India despite several centuries of rule by Muslims? In the Islamic state that we desire, the rights of minorities would be so protected that rather than fleeing, non-Muslims would flock here from elsewhere’. He went on to argue that Muslim rulers had treated their non-Muslim subjects well, presenting a version of history that was clearly one-sided and neatly sanitised. He seemed unshakably convinced that the rulers of the ‘Islamic state’ that he dreamed of would follow in the path of their predecessors, presenting them as models of virtue and justice.

‘Well’, I butted in to say, ‘that could only happen if the state you aspire to establish is led by really pious and just people. But the sad reality is that it is almost impossible to come by such people these days’.

‘It is such pious people whom we want to promote’, G interrupted me and said. ‘Till such people come forward we won’t talk of imposing the Islamic system’. And if such pious Muslims were not available, G admitted, the ‘Islamic system’ could never come into being.

The conversation veered once again to the question of Hindu-Muslim relations in Doda, the subject of my research project. I referred to certain hardliner Islamist groups, based in Pakistan and active in Jammu and Kashmir, who consider all Hindus as ‘enemies’ and present them as being allegedly collectively involved in what they describe as a ‘conspiracy’ against Islam. 

‘This approach has no sanction in Islam at all’, R responded. ‘Those who oppose the notion of Hindus and Muslims living together are really misinterpreting Islam’. ‘Such people’, he went on, ‘create hurdles in the path of establishing the Islamic system and also work against communal harmony’. One of the primary tasks of a Muslim, he explained, was to preach Islam to non-Muslims, and, he argued, this could only be possible through solidarity with and genuine concern for others, not through spreading hatred against them. ‘Those who attack innocent non-Muslims in the name of Islam are creating hatred in the hearts and minds of Hindus against our faith, and that defeats our fundamental duty of spreading Islam among non-Muslims. Islam was revealed to establish justice, not hatred’, he stressed. ‘We in the JIJK do not think of all Hindus or even most of them as inherently hostile to Islam. Those who hold that opinion are wrong’, he pleaded, ‘but we have no cure for them. We can impose our policies only on our members, not on other groups who might claim, however erroneously, to be Islamic’.

Outfits that claimed to speak for Islam but spread terror and hatred against Hindus as a community, he went on, were ‘ignorant’ ( jahil). They insisted that physical jihad, including killing innocents, must be waged even in countries where Muslims had religious freedom but were not ruled by Islamic law until they were brought under Islamic rule. This, R argued, was a gross misinterpretation, deliberately or otherwise, of Islamic precepts. Instead, in such a situation, he asserted, jihad, in the sense of striving in God’s path, must take peaceful means, such as persuading people, through conferences, public meetings and literature, about what he referred to as the ‘Islamic alternative’. And that, he insisted, was the official policy of the JIJK.

What, I asked R, did he think of the claim by a well-known Kashmiri Islamist ideologue who insists on the impossibility of Muslims living in a Hindu-dominated society and who likens this predicament to a fish in a desert, the argument being that in order to lead proper Islamic lives Muslims must live separately from others.

‘No, this again is not Islamic at all’, R replied. ‘After all, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, a great Muslim saint, settled in Rajasthan at a time when there were hardly any Muslims there. He so won the hearts of the Hindus there that even today they come to his grave to pray for the benefit of his soul’. It made little difference where one lived, in a Muslim country or as a minority in a Hindu-dominated country, he added, as long as Muslims were able to practice and preach their faith, for the principal task of a Muslim was to engage in dawat or inviting others to Islam.

Obviously, I responded, the last fifteen years of strife in Jammu and Kashmir must have taken a heavy toll on the Jamaat’s dawat work. ‘Yes, that is true’, R rued. G then interrupted to tell me of the ban imposed by the Government of India on the JIJK, lifted only a few years ago, the killing of many of its workers and activists by the Indian armed forces as well as rival Kashmiri armed groups, and the mounting negative feelings about Islam and Muslims as a consequence of the misdeeds, including murder of innocents, of some of those who spoke in its name. ‘Naturally, in this situation of conflict and strife, our missionary work has been very badly affected’, G lamented. ‘We have tried to remedy the situation, but have not been able to do enough’, he confessed. ‘Two years ago we organized a public meeting, where we invited some retired Hindu government servants, where we told them about Islam. After listening to our speeches, they said that if this is what Islam is then we have no problem with it, it can play a crucial role in establishing peace. Last year, too, we organized a conference, to which we invited many Hindus but only one, a writer, attended’.

It was amply evident that the efforts of the JIJK activists to convince the Hindus of Doda of what they said were the intentions of their organisation had met with little success. Equally evident, too, was that their understanding of inter-community dialogue was inextricably linked to their concern to convince non-Muslims of the claim of the superiority of what they termed as the ‘Islamic alternative’. That, I thought to myself, was fair enough, for the followers of every religion think that theirs is the best. But what, I asked, about any practical steps that the JIJK might have taken to bring Hindus and Muslims closer, if that, as R had said, was one of the concerns of the organization. What about dialogue by focusing on practical efforts to do with issues of concern to both Hindus and Muslims, such as poverty, education, rampant consumerism and the massive environmental destruction that Doda has witnessed in the last two decades?

‘This form of dialogue is very necessary’, R replied. ‘We want to do this sort of work as well, though so far we have done little work in this regard’. ‘The challenge of the lure of Western culture among our youth, both Hindus and Muslims, is very real indeed. Hindu and Muslim leaders can unite to fight this menace, which is an even greater problem than Hindu-Muslim conflict’, he added.

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The call to prayer issued forth from the mosque nearby, and so I got up to leave. Outside, I met another Jamaat sympathiser, whom I shall call P, to whom I had been introduced to the day before. He asked me to wait till the prayer was over and then took me along to a restaurant for tea.

P appeared to me as being somewhat moderate in his views, reflecting a section of JIJK opinion that is drowned out by more hardliner elements in media portrayals. It struck me how critical he was of Pakistan’s role in the Kashmir conflict, in contrast to certain JIJK hardliners who have consistently supported the case for Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan.

‘As is the case with India , Pakistan, too is not interested in the people of Kashmir , but only in its territory and its resources’, P lamented. ‘Pakistan says that it supports jihad in Kashmir, but Pakistan is not an Islamic state. It is, for all purposes, a secular state. There is no social justice there, which is the hallmark of a genuine Islamic state. The founders of Pakistan were, for the most part, secularists and were not pious Muslims in their personal lives. They used the slogan of Islam to woo Muslims to create a separate state where they could rule. In this way they fooled the masses’. ‘That is why’, he elaborated, ‘Maulana Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-i Islami, opposed the creation of Pakistan. The rulers of Pakistan today are continuing in that tradition. They have become the slaves of America’. ‘Ignorance, inequalities and injustice are rampant in Pakistan . If Kashmir joins Pakistan , the Pakistanis are certainly not going to convert it into a golden bird’, he went on. Although he said it was not the official position of the JIJK, he personally believed that the best option for Kashmir was independence from both India and Pakistan.

                        *

Conversations with these and other JIJK activists in Doda suggest that the voices of the ‘‘moderates’ in the organization, long muffled by ‘hardliners’ as well as by state repression, now urgently seek to be heard. The JIJK has received a considerable setback in the years of conflict in Kashmir, in the form of the killing of many of its activists and sympathizers, close control by the state over its activities and the recent split in its ranks between the ‘moderates’, led by the present amir, and ‘hardliners’, represented by Sayyed Ali Gilani and his faction. What the struggle of the ‘moderates’ in the JIJK to assert themselves means for the future of the organization and for the politics of Islamist movements in Jammu and Kashmir remains to be seen.